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New Study Suggests Humans Lived In North America 130,000 Years Ago (npr.org)
An anonymous reader writes: In 1992, archaeologists working a highway construction site in San Diego County found the partial skeleton of a mastodon, an elephant-like animal now extinct. Mastodon skeletons aren't so unusual, but there was other strange stuff with it. "The remains were in association with a number of sharply broken rocks and broken bones," says Tom Demere, a paleontologist at the San Diego Natural History Museum. He says the rocks showed clear marks of having been used as hammers and an anvil. And some of the mastodon bones as well as a tooth showed fractures characteristic of being whacked, apparently with those stones. It looked like the work of humans. Yet there were no cut marks on the bones showing that the animal was butchered for meat. Demere thinks these people were after something else. "The suggestion is that this site is strictly for breaking bone," Demere says, "to produce blank material, raw material to make bone tools or to extract marrow." Marrow is a rich source of fatty calories. The scientists knew they'd uncovered something rare. But they didn't realize just how rare for years, until they got a reliable date on how old the bones were by using a uranium-thorium dating technology that didn't exist in the 1990s. The bones were 130,000 years old. That's a jaw-dropping date, as other evidence shows that the earliest humans got to the Americas about 15,000 to 20,000 years ago. The study has been published in the journal Nature.
the dating is all but certain... they didn't use carbon dating, they used many more accurate methods, that all came to the same conclusion.
the real question is when were the bones butchered? did the mastadon die 130,000 years ago, freeze whole in a glacier, and then found 100,000 years later during a warming cycle? what about an amateur archaeologist 30,000 years ago found it and wanted to take the bones apart the only way they know how?
what about jesus.
Totally interesting and I thank you. I'm off to read it now. Wouldn't this be a blow to what we assumed we knew, and what really happened. I often wondered if people weren't here before Columbus. Technically if per say, the earth was all connected at one time, and the cities of Amatrice and Rome in Italy have dated back to ancient times, why wouldn't the USA have ancient people as well? I'm sure we did. Just undocumented. Wow.
Cindy Fahnestock-Schafer
If human beings, or our earlier ancestors, were killing mastodons 130,000 year ago without eating the meat, then it seems awfully likely that human/hominid hunting was an important factor in the eventual extinction of mastodons and other North American megafauna. Killing a big mammal like that for the bones/marrow implies a very effective predation capability and possible big environmental impact.
Why is Snark Required?
There is no way humans were living in California 130,000 years ago without draconian intellectual property laws and copyright. They would never have survived.
This is near San Diego, California, and well south of the glaciers' maximum extent.
Furthermore, 130,000 years ago was around the beginning of the Eemian interglacial period, so they would not have been frozen around San Diego, and if it had been frozen sometime earlier, then it would have unfrozen 130,000 years ago.
Note: the starting dates of the Eemian vary depending upon who the author is, but in any case it happened around or after when these bones were broken.
We've always known that, and the accuracy can be derived a-priori from fundamental physics
No, for example for carbon dating the accuracy comes from careful examination of variations in C14/C12 ratios relative to other dating sources. If you just use first principles, you would be off by 20% easily. This accuracy has improved with time, so that now dating in many ranges with C14 can give you errors on the order of a couple percent, while other improvements in techniques can push the maximum date back by several times the halflife. The accuracy of other isotope dating methods have also improved, as often they depend on some knowledge of chemistry of the parent isotopes and daughter isotopes in different situations.
The GP is an idiot, as these errors are still relatively small. But it is still wrong to say the accuracy is the same as it has always been and derivable from fundamental physics.