Old American theory is 'speared'

[scandal 951]

yielded dates 13,800 years ago, plus or minus 20 years cool!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15391388

Old American theory is 'speared'

Jonathan Amos By Jonathan Amos Science correspondent, BBC News

An ancient bone with a projectile point lodged within it appears to up-end - once and for all - a long-held idea of how the Americas were first populated.

The rib, from a tusked beast known as a mastodon, has been dated precisely to 13,800 years ago.

This places it before the so-called Clovis hunters, who many academics had argued were the North American continent's original inhabitants.

News of the dating results is reported in Science magazine.

In truth, the "Clovis first" model, which holds to the idea that America's original human population swept across a land-bridge from Siberia some 13,000 years ago, has looked untenable for some time.

A succession of archaeological finds right across the United States and northern Mexico have indicated there was human activity much earlier than this - perhaps as early as 15-16,000 years ago.

The mastodon rib, however, really leaves the once cherished model with nowhere to go.

The specimen has actually been known about for more than 30 years. It is plainly from an old male animal that had been attacked with some kind of weaponry.

It was found in the late 1970s at the Manis site near Sequim, just north of Seattle, in Washington State.

Although scientists at the time correctly identified the specimen's antiquity, adherents to the Clovis-first model questioned the dating and interpretation of the site.

To try to settle any lingering uncertainty, Prof Michael Waters of Texas A&M University and colleagues called upon a range of up-to-date analytical tools and revisited the specimen.

These investigations included new radio carbon tests using atomic accelerators.

"The beauty of atomic accelerators is that you can date very small samples and also very chemically pure samples," Prof Waters told BBC News.

"We extracted specific amino acids from the collagen in the bone and dated those, and yielded dates 13,800 years ago, plus or minus 20 years. That's very precise." It is 800 years or so before Clovis evidence is seen in the historical record.

Computed tomography, which creates exquisite 3D X-ray images of objects, was used to study the embedded point. The visualisation reveals how the projectile end had been deliberately sharpened to give a needle-like quality. And it also enabled the scientists to estimate the projectile end's likely original size - at least 27cm long, they believe.

"The other thing that's really interesting is that as it went in, the very tip broke and rotated off to the side," said the Texas A&M researcher.

Bone The CT imagery reveals the extent of the wound and the shape of the buried point's end

"That's a very common breakage pattern when any kind of projectile hits bone. You see it even in stone projectiles that are embedded in, say, bison bones."

DNA investigation also threw up a remarkable irony - the point itself was made from mastodon bone, proving that the people who fashioned it were systematically hunting or scavenging animal bones to make their tools.

The timing of humanity's presence in North America is important because it plays into the debate over why so many great beasts from the end of the last Ice Age in that quarter of the globe went extinct.

Not just mastodons, but woolly mammoths, sabre-toothed cats, giant sloths, camels, and teratorns (predatory birds with a nearly four-metre wingspan) - all disappeared in short order a little over 12,700 years ago.

A rapidly changing climate in North America is assumed to have played a key role - as is the sophisticated stone-tool weaponry used by the Clovis hunters. But the fact that there are also humans with effective bone and antler killing technologies present in North America deeper in time suggests the hunting pressure on these animals may have been even greater than previously thought.

"Humans clearly had a role in these extinctions and by the time the Clovis technology turns up at 13,000 years ago - that's the end. They finished them off," said Prof Waters.

"You know, the Clovis-first model has been dying for some time," he finished. "But there's nothing harder to change than a paradigm, than long-standing thinking. When Clovis-First was first proposed, it was a very elegant model but it's time to move on, and most of the archaeological community is doing just that."

[bigdog 376]

Who has time to do this?

[Saddle Bronc 124]

Reported--for move to plain-jane OT.

[Usui Takumi 1,562]

Reported--for move to plain-jane OT.

No so fast, all I need to do is make this political or religious.

Lets see....

I know, the earth is only 6,000 years old according to the bible so this is clearly a ploy by scientists. Probably the same ones who said the earth is cooling. I mean warming. I mean then it was cooling, and now it is warming.

[scandal 951]

No so fast, all I need to do is make this political or religious.

Lets see....

I know, the earth is only 6,000 years old according to the bible so this is clearly a ploy by scientists. Probably the same ones who said the earth is cooling. I mean warming. I mean then it was cooling, and now it is warming.

Not only that. This is clear evidence that 'brown' people got here before 'white' people and were a highly advanced society with expert toolmaking abilities, and managed to wipe out multiple large animal species......

[Dan and Judy 614]

I think it proves the Republican Clovis hunters wiped out all the mastodons

Now they are extinguished

[Brother Hesekiel 2,236]

For me the most important part of this is that people who believe a single word that's in the Bible are plain stupid by placing superstition and a storybook over scientific facts. How many stupid people do we have in this country alone?

[scandal 951]

I think it proves the Republican Clovis hunters wiped out all the mastodons

Now they are extinguished

Are mastodons Democrats? Are socialists? That would explain a lot.

[웃 910]

Neat animal. RIP!

Evolved: 3.75 million years ago.

Extinct: 13,000 years ago.

[scandal 951]

Neat animal. RIP!

Evolved: 3.75 million years ago.

Extinct: 13,000 years ago.

Gooooooooooooooooo ** sapiens!!

[spookyturtle 9,466]

For me the most important part of this is that people who believe a single word that's in the Bible are plain stupid by placing superstition and a storybook over scientific facts. How many stupid people do we have in this country alone?

At least one.

[웃 910]

At least one.

Try about 45% of Americans (about 140 million people). Luckily, that number will be declining as it becomes more and more absurd a superstition to believe in.

[spookyturtle 9,466]

Try about 45% of Americans (about 140 million people). Luckily, that number will be declining as it becomes more and more absurd a superstition to believe in.

Keep telling yourself that. That fire is really hot and being skewered on the rotisserie hurts too.

[웃 910]

Keep telling yourself that. That fire is really hot and being skewered on the rotisserie hurts too.

You think Allah personally burns people for eternity? She couldn't be that ruthless!

We evolved from apes. We are pretty much just really smart apes. Thanks to millions and millions of years of evolution (hard to understand when we are only around for a few generations).

Do apes have religion? No.

We evolved from them. And we created religion. Now if apes had religion then I might believe in the fairy tales, goblins, demons, angels, elves, superstitions, draculas, witches, and wardrobes.

But as far as I know our ancestors, the apes, don't believe in boogie men, vampires, dragons, and loch ness monsters. These are all human creations. Mostly invented from thin air in the past 5,000 years when cellular life began billions of years ago!

Edited October 22, 2011 by Lord Infamous

[웃 910]

If you went back 400,000 years ago when the first modern humans (** sapiens) were around. Scratch that. They were too RETARDED to even communicate with. Could you imagine if "it" just popped up today? Let's go a little bit more modern. Go back 5,000 years ago when the stupid people were creating myths and campfire stories. Imagine this piece of paper (below) is found. Guess what? It means nothing! They throw it away and continue sharing campfire stories! Or Newton's Principia (WORTHLESS TO THESE PREHISTORIC KNUCKLEHEADS!):

Single origin for life on Earth

Four billion years ago, there may have been many early “experiments” in the formation of organic molecules, proto-cells, and even fully functioning cells. All organisms today, from the smallest microbes to the largest trees and vertebrates, contain a number of biochemical features in common—which supports the idea that all these forms have a common ancestor. Some of these common features are:

• A common set of 20 left-handed amino acids;
• DNA and RNA as the basis of information transfer from generation to generation;
• ATP as the universal currency of energy;
• Fermentation as the first step of carbohydrate metabolism.

Genetic analyses of extant organisms (fig. 6) indicate that life consists of three major branches—the Eubacteria, the Archea, and the Eucarya. Eubacteria and Archae are prokaryotes and Eucarya are eukaryotes. The prokaryotes are the great element cyclers of the earth’s surface, and are fundamental to many ecosystem services. They exhibit astounding metabolic diversity—that is, different kinds can use many different substrates for synthesis and metabolism. Eukaryotes have quite limited metabolic pathways but include all multicellular organisms, span six orders of magnitude of body size, and show great morphological diversity.

Figure 6. The three domains of life as revealed by genetic analyses.

Edited October 22, 2011 by Lord Infamous