The Cosmic Tusk

Tom Stafford was an expert among experts at the Fall Meeting.  I became aware of Tom Stafford when Redefining the Age of Clovis: Implications for the Peopling of America was published in Science in 2007.  He is the Former Director of the Laboratory of AMS Radicarbon Research at University of Colorado.  And for more than decade he has been President of Stafford Research Laboratories — the nation’s top private dating laboratory.  He is to be taken seriously when, among other things, he tells you how old something is.  I was looking forward to his presentation more than any other at the Fall Meeting.  I was not disappointed.

Tom — who has never previously published with the YD team — laid out a very, very, tight and narrow layer of evidence supporting the purported event.  In short, 151 centimeters below the surface at the pefectly stratified Hall’s Cave Paleo site in Texas was a 1 to 2 cm layer of dirt that was host to trillions of nanodiamonds and high levels of soot known as aciniform.  Not above — not below.

Background article on Texas Hill Cave studies:

The sediments in Hall’s Cave were deposited fairly continuously over at least the last 17,000 years. The cave contains the best sequence of latest Pleistocene through Holocene sediments and bone of any Texas cave, and it certainly ranks as one of the excellent sequences in the United States. The temporal control is unrivaled with over 100 radiocarbon determinations from the sequence (Stafford and Toomey, in prep)

Vertebrate Paleontology of Texas Caves by Rickard S. Toomey, III

Continue reading AGU Fall Meeting Re-Cap Part Two: Tom Stafford’s Texas Hill Country Paleo site littered with ET evidence at start of Younger Dryas