Forbidden Archeology_ The Full Unabridged Edition - Michael A. Cremo [147]
3.8 Recent Examples of Eolithic Implements from the Americas
Several anomalously old crude stone tool industries of Eolithic type have been discovered in the Americas. A careful study of the debates about these industries will add to our understanding of why and how the stone tools from Pliocene and Miocene sites in Europe have largely disappeared from view, as far as modern science is concerned.
3.8.1 Standard Views on the Entry of Humans Into North America
The debates about various anomalous stone tool industries discovered in the Americas takes place in the context of the standard theory of the entry of humans into the New World. According to this theory, Siberian hunters crossed over the Bering Strait into Alaska on a land bridge that existed when the last glaciation lowered sea levels. During this glacial period, the Canadian ice sheet blocked southward migration until about 12,000 years ago, when the first American immigrants followed an ice free passage to what is now the United States. These people were the so-called Clovis hunters, famous for their characteristic doubly fluted spearpoints. These would correspond to the highly evolved stone implements of the later Paleolithic in Europe.
According to Jared Diamond (1987), these Clovis hunters quickly multiplied and peopled the entire habitable region of North and South America. Because a site in Patagonia, in the southernmost part of South America, is now dated at 10,500 years, the immigrants must have gone from the arctic, to the tropics, and on to the near antarctic regions of South America in little more than a thousand years. In their long march, these Clovis hunters exterminated over 70 percent of the large mammalian genera of the New World in an orgy of rapacious exploitation rivaled only by the European heirs of the territory they conquered (Diamond 1987, pp. 82–88).
The following arguments in favor of this theory were published in the popular science magazine, Discover, in June of 1987: “at excavated Clovis sites, conclusive evidence for artifacts made by other peoples has been found above but not below the level with Clovis tools; and there are no irrefutable human remains with irrefutable pre-Clovis dates anywhere in the New World south of the former Canadian ice sheet. Mind you, there are dozens of claims of sites with pre-Clovis human evidence, but all are marred by serious questions about whether the material used for radiocarbon dating was contaminated by older carbon, or whether the dated material was really associated with human remains, or whether the tools supposedly made by hand were just naturally shaped rocks. In contrast, the evidence for Clovis is undeniable, widely distributed, and accepted by archaeologists” (Diamond 1987, pp. 84, 86).
To put this theory into perspective, we should note that before World War II, anthropological authorities insisted that human beings first entered America just 4,000 years ago. Their initial reaction to the Clovis hunter theory was summed up by the anthropologist John Alsoszatai-Petheo (1986, pp. 18–19): “For . . . decades, American archaeologists would labor under the view of man’s relative recency in the New World, while the mere mention of the possibility of greater antiquity was tantamount to professional suicide. Given this orientation, it is not surprising that when the evidence of the antiquity of man in America was finally reported from Folsom, Clovis, and other High Plains sites, it was rejected out of hand by established authorities despite the clear nature of the evidence at multiple locations, uncovered by different researchers, and seen and attested to by a large variety of professional visitor/observers.