Humans in America 25,000 Years Ago?

Ephboy writes "A researcher in South Carolina has found stones that appear to be man-made stone tools that date from 25,000 years ago, about twice as old as the best documented evidence of human settlement in North America."

Comments

You mean creationist claims #CC111?

[geekotourist]

While claims have been made about skeletons in older rock, or of human and dinosour interactions, these claims aren't corroborated- they are disproved.

Finding new skeletons in older rock can be easy. Finding fossilized skeletons- the same age as the rock- that would be interesting.

For more reading, check out the whole index of standard creationist claims, as well as their good set of FAQS, including How do we know the age of the earth?, and fossil hominids.

As to humans making it out to the New World that much earlier than previously known, I'm not surprised... we're a wandering species (and genus), going way back. Modern Homo sapiens was poking about in odd places by 100k years ago, so there isn't any inherent reason why we shouldn't have been there. However, generally when humans arrive in force we tend to leave evidence (like stone age habitats or megafauna extinctions), so these potential first North Americans were keeping fairly quiet, archeologically-wise.

Re:Where have they gone?

[Mattcelt]

I don't mean to be inflammatory - I'm part Native American myself - but AFAIK it wasn't the Europeans who invented scalping. Many (though certainly not all) of the Native American tribes were ruthless warriors who did all they could to eradicate each other. War was not unknown to this people; I hesitate to agree that it was their 'niceness' that failed them.

That's not to say that the Europeans (and later the U.S.) did not do some atrocious things. Some of what was done was unforgiveable. Thank goodness we as a society have come a long way since then.