First Harvard, now Dartmouth: More independent evidence for Younger Dryas impact

In the Australian article, “Meteor link to dawn of civilisation”, there is this:

“Meanwhile thousands of miles away in the eastern Mediterranean, the first farmers started growing cereals. The invention of agriculture was a pivotal step in the development of large settled communities and civilisation.”

If a huge disaster hits the planet, wipes out at least all the megafauna in N.A., the mammoths in N. Siberia, and Clovis man, too – sending at least part of the world back to the Stone Age, and then soon after that dies down we find the evidence of the start of agriculture, why is everyone concluding that agriculture started then? Shouldn’t the question come into SOMEONE’S mind that maybe it is a RE-start?

The article ends with

“Environmental stresses may also have caused Natufians in the Near East to settle down for the first time and pursue agriculture.”

A: Why do they read THAT lot of “environmental stresses” to have caused someone to start agriculture? Why not the earlier ones indicated in the Pleistocene, in the D-O events in the ice cores? What would have been special about THAT one?

I know — That is what everyone from biologists to astronomers to climatologists have been noticing about the YD all along: That there WAS something different going on. And we are all in the middle of that forest and no one can really see the forest for the trees. That much is acknowledged. And this YDB hypothesis is an idea that seems to address so much of it in a single coherent, internally consistent manner. The YDB predicts that many of these things will be found. And – to its credit – they ARE being found.

One thing about me is that when Alvarez came out with the K-T meteor thing, I was super skeptical about that, even long after Chixculub was found. I came to it very grudgingly, and only after seeing the YDB evidence have I come around on Alvarez and the dinosaur killer.

But back to the Natufians and agriculture – it seems just as likely to me that agriculture had been begun before the YDB. That we have not found evidence may not be as convincing as we may initially think. It is clear from much evidence that humans did live on the coasts, even now-submerged ones. If the YDB was multiple impacts, then the Sumatran and Japanese tsunamis should begin to show us what kind of scouring of human activity – even MODERN activity – can occur with tsunamis. Those two were considerably under 50 feet high, even their run-ups.

By examining the Hills and Goda computer data we can figure out what would have happened if asteroid 1989 FC had struck the Atlantic Ocean 1000 kilometers from the coast of the United States. If it was an iron asteroid, the deep-water wave would have been 20 meters at the coast. The tsunami it would have produced would have been about 0.8 kilometer high. The notion of such a high wave breaking along the east coast of the United States is a stunning one.

Gerrit L. Verschuur. Impact!: The Threat of Comets and Asteroids (p. 154). Kindle Edition.

So, instead of a 12 meter tsunami, there could be an 800 meter tsunami. “Stunning” is not the word for it. We can’t even compreHEND an 800 meter tsunami. We aer talking about a wave the width of the Atlantic seabord and as HIGH as both Petronas Towers stacked on top of each other. And even with that we don’t comprehend an 800 meter tsunami. You don’t just get chevrons on the beach. You get chevrons all the way to Pittsburgh. NOTHING could be left of our society in range of such a mega-tsunami. No waves halfway up the Mannhattan skyline. The waves would be so far OVER the skyscrapers that even in the ujpper stories people would be the same as being at 1,000 feet deep. It would be BLACK, for the few seconds they survived. Them and every building would be shredded, scoured from the face of the Earth.

Now, supposing someone in some backwater place like Iraq (Sumeria) was lucky enough that the tsunami didn’t hit them. They’d remember how to farm, wouldn’t they, PDQ? And without imports they’d damned well BETTER remember how, because there aren’t going to be anymore beef shipments from Argentina – even if Argentinian ranches got spared . And no bibb lettuce from northern France, because France wouldn’t exist anymore. All surviving corners of the world would be isolated. If not immediately, then soon enough, when the nuclear plants and coal power plants give out. Scavenging will become the mining of choice, and then necessity. What the tsunami didn’t erase, the people would, within 20-50 years, maximum. That legendary western civilization? People would sit around cooking fires and wistfully talk about what used to be.

The operative term in the quoted passage is this: “thousands of miles away.”

From the Wu abstract:

Another study by Surovell et al. (27) was unable to replicate either the abundances or the chronostratigraphy of the magnetic spherules reported by Firestone et al. (10).That finding, however, has been contradicted by LeCompte et al.(26), who found magnetic spherules in three sites examined by Surovell et al. (27).

LeComte et al 2012 was not the first paper that pointed out that Surovell screwed up his sampling methodology and lab protocols. It seems rather odd that neither Surovell nor Holliday – or the Bos – have seen fit to attempt a rebuttal. One might assume that they would be working on that, to attempt to defend their good names.

George – any take on that?

OK, so this is a claim of a conspiracy with the editors of PNAS.

A: They should take it up with the PNAS, and produce some sort of evidence for their charges of malfeasance by certain editors.

B: THEY are the guys with the connections. They should just use those connections to try change things at PNAS. Without threats or extortion,of course.

C: It still comes down to the science. WHAT IN THE SCIENCE IS BEING DONE INCORRECTLY? After all, he is saying that INFERIOR SCIENCE IS BEING DONE. That should be easy to refute. If the work is done incorrectly, ALL THEY HAVE TO DO IS POINT AT WHICH EVIDENCE IS BEING HANDLED INCORRECTLY AND SHOW THE ERRORS. No one is stopping them.

SO what this is coming down to is a temper tantrum. They have looked at the papers by LeCompte and the recent ones and can’t find anything wrong with the science, so they are resorting to office politics.

COME ON, DAULTON GANG! PUT UP A DECENT FIGHT. Are you all going down sniveling in back alleys, hoping to whisper in the ear of the regent in order to have your opponents dismissed?

What ever happened to you all – no stomach for science? For putting your facts out there versus someone else’s and letting the chips fall where they may?

We note the pathetic whining this email illustrates – crying amongst yourselves, because you can’t overturn the science. Is this what you’ve come to? Shame on your sorry conniving souls.

And blaming it on a BLOG that has maybe 200 visitors a day? Wow. You all must really be sad scientists – and REALLY insecure.

NOTE TO DAULTON ET AL:

Blogs can be biased if they want to be. What the HELL does that have to do with you and your ability to do science PROPERLY?

Answer the damned challenges to your work that LeCompte and others have laid down: They say your work was FLAWED. All you have to do is to go out and show that it wasn’t flawed. We at CosmicTusk are just kibitzers, dudes. Why do we even MATTER to you at all? Take it up with the YD Team and do your due diligence.

Picking on us little squirmies as if we are storming the bastions at PNAS – ARE YOU DAFT?

Yeah, like you said at the end:

YOU HAVE SOME SCIENCE TO DO.

.

.

.

We couldn’t have said it better.

@George Howard

I forwarded your suggestion to those who seem so concerned with the veracity of PNAS publications; the same dude who keeps saying:

“This Direct Submission had a pre-arranged editor.”

I suggested he take that up with PNAS as Steve Garcia logically recommended.

I am going to pick on that “beginning of civilization” article again (which seems to have been picked up all around the world):

Meanwhile thousands of miles away in the eastern Mediterranean, the first farmers started growing cereals. The invention of agriculture was a pivotal step in the development of large settled communities and civilisation.

and

[Sharma] “Environmental stresses may also have caused Natufians in the Near East to settle down for the first time and pursue agriculture.” [emphasis added]

There are no references to any of civilization, Natufians, or agriculture in the paper, as there shouldn’t be, given the nature of the paper itself. So this comment by Sharma is off-the-cuff and shouldn’t even be mentioned to journalists.

Yes, this paper is supportive of the YDB, and I am happy about that, but this is a quantum leap of logic that is unsupportable. There is zero line of evidence connecting the possible event in Canada and the Near East. Not only that, but the beginnings of agriculture are most commonly placed near the END of the YD, 1000 years or more in the future. This then is displacement in time, displacement in space, and the actual cause and effect are completely speculative.

It is not cool when scientists on EITHER side of the divide go off on speculations to the press. Such a speculation does the YDB argument no good at all. It just gives the other side fodder for saying the YDB team and the PNAS paper authors are out in la-la land.

If Sharma has something other than what is quoted, it wasn’t in the paper.

As to the Natufians, Wiki presents it this way:

First occupation
The village of Abu Hureyra had two separate periods of occupation: An Epipalaeolithic settlement, and a Neolithic settlement. The Epipaleolithic, or Natufian, settlement was established around 13,500 years ago.[1] During the first settlement, c. 13,000 BP, the village consisted of small round huts, cut into the soft sandstone of the terrace. The roofs were supported with wooden posts, and roofed with brushwood and reeds.[3] Huts contained underground storage areas for food. The population was small, housing a few hundred people at most.
The hunter-gatherers of Abu Hureyra obtained food by hunting, fishing, and gathering of wild plants. Gazelle was hunted primarily during the summer, when vast herds passed by the village during their annual migration.[4] Other prey included large wild animals such as onager, sheep, and cattle, and smaller animals such as hare, fox and birds, which were hunted throughout the year. Plant foods were harvested from “wild gardens,”[5] with species gathered including wild cereal grasses such as einkorn wheat, emmer wheat, and two varieties of rye.

Abandonment
The hunter-gatherers of the first occupation eventually abandoned Abu Hureyra, probably at the advent of the Younger Dryas, an intense and abrupt return to glacial climate conditions which lasted nearly 1,000 years.[5] The drought disrupted the migration of the gazelle, and decimated the forageable plant food sources. It is likely that the inhabitants had to give up sedentism and returned to life on the move.

Second occupation
Around 9,000 BC the people return, and a Neolithic settlement was established, perhaps ten times as large as the earlier settlement and one of the largest at that time in the Middle East. Mud-brick houses were constructed and a large mound was built up under the settlement mainly from the remains of old houses. An increasingly wide variety of plants was cultivated and examination of human skeletons has shown various deformities that have been associated with laborious agricultural work, particularly the grinding of grain.[6] Animals were also herded. Pottery was used from around 7,300 BP[6] and weaving some time before that. The village was abandoned around 7,000 BP.

But here is one of those times when you can’t trust Wikipedia, because it also says this:

Dating

Radiocarbon dating places this culture from the terminal Pleistocene to the very beginning of the Holocene, from 12,500 to 9500 BC.

The period is commonly split into two subperiods: Early Natufian (12,500–10,800 BC) and Late Natufian (10,800–9500 BC). The Late Natufian most likely occurred in tandem with the Younger Dryas (10,800 to 9500 BC). In the Levant, there are more than a hundred kinds of cereals, fruits, nuts and other edible parts of plants, and the flora of the Levant during the Natufian period was not the dry, barren, and thorny landscape of today, but parkland and woodland.

Notice the lack of matching of the dating. According to the first quoted part above, the two periods were separated by an abandonment period that lasted approximately from the YDB to 9500 BCE. In the second quoted part the second phase began AT the YDB.

If there is evidence for both assertions, then the Natufians are one of those things where dates are still very tenuous.

I guess that allows someone to speculate about connections between Natufians and the YDB, but the connection can’t be anything more than speculation. And as I hear a lot elsewhere: “Correlation doesn’t equal causation.”

And that is only the time factor. There is still the space (distance) factor and the mind of man factor (which is mind-read a lot in various fields).

This begins to sound like “greedy reductionism,” in which too many effects begins to be connected to a possible cause – biting off more than they can chew, in a sense. Or like putting the cart ahead of the horse.

Yes, inside us we’d like to see the YDB be the magic wand that makes everything make sense. But it hasn’t even been established yet itself – as we all know full well.

The YDB Team – and independent research – needs to nail down a bit more, and each nail helps. It is premature to jump to such conclusions as Sharma expressed – In my own personal opinion.

George –

LOL – I am the opposite of the YDB instigating civilization. I think it ended civilization, and that we had to start all over again. Thus nthe appearance of “the beginning of agriculture” and the “beginning of civilization.” Just my opinion…

🙂

Interesting that it would fall near the natural heat anomaly of the Shiva (“the Destroyer” or “the Transformer”) proposed impact structure…

That place we’ve read about with the fractured lithosphere…. Oh man, that hurts!
(“Doctor, I fractured my lithosphere in this place!” “Well, don’t go to that place!”)

So maybe impact induced geology was the kernel of this recently found urban center, with all of the unique properties of heat and petrol seepage it has to offer.

TH

Steve; I think your are on the right track about YDB ending civilization. Starting at the begining we wore skins sometimes and wandered around looking for something to eat. In this process we learned waht would kill us and what wouldn’t. Along comes comet, BAM, back to the begining except the survivors had knowledge and could progress faster. each time we got our arse kicked we came back faster and better and this continues to this day. When you and I are flashed back to square one we will be back in half the time a the last round of civilization. Maybe by then we will figure a way to send these little snowballs back to whence they came. Jim

The effects of the YDB event on world populations depended of where you were at and what kind of society you lived in.
In the north America it devastated the native people, it drove the clovis out of their homelands, and the subsequent loss of prey due to habitat loss, forced them into new lifeway strategies. In California, when the clovis people settle at the Witt site, they take on a more generalized lifestyle, essentially taking the place of the people who were there before the event.
In the old world the event clearly sets the path for communal societies, and the advent of true agriculture.

Jim, as I under stand the published work, the clovis inhabit the site after a several hundred year hiatus of occupation by the previous people. But I do believe they assimilated into the existing culture in the area.
My reasoning is such, the Witt site is at the base of a pass across the cal coast range, that leads to both of the intra mountain valleys of the Salinas and san benito rivers, and then to vast expanses of beach that run from san simion all the way to Santa Barbara.
This is the core territory for the chumash, who are a language isolate, and in Malibu you have the 9000 year old farpoint site, that is directly below one of the earliest chumash sites.

At that time the great central valley of California would have been an easy place to make a living.
It was teaming with the large game that they hunted, the rivers draining the glaciated sierra turned huge portions of the valley into a vast wetland. The Witt site itself was on the western shore of the ancient Tulare lake.
It has been said that in north America, paleoindians come in two distinct”cultures”, the highly mobile spear hunting, moccasin wearing Clovis derived people, and the basket and mat weaving, sandal wearing , net and bow hunting people of the west.
The yokuts who lived in the area of the Witt site as far as I can tell are the only California Indians who wore hide moccosins. Is this a cultural hold over from the clovis? Maybe.
I think that California they slowly integrated into the exsisting peoples.
Native cal mythologies is one of my favorite reads, and some of the stories I believe relate directly to ydb event, there are several stories that tell of the day the earth burned and several distincly different flood stories. In some of the creation stories people arrive in the valley, weary of their wanderings cold and hungry and they steal fire from the people who were already here.

Here is an abstract of how the natufians of the Levant responded to the onset of the YD.

“Climatic forcing during the Younger Dryas (∼12.9–11.5 ky B.P.) event has become the theoretical basis to explain the origins of agricultural lifestyles in the Levant by suggesting a failure of foraging societies to adjust. This explanation however, does not fit the scarcity of data for predomestication cultivation in the Natufian Period. The resilience of Younger Dryas foragers is better illustrated by a concept of adaptive cycles within a theory of adaptive change (resilience theory). Such cycles consist of four phases: release/collapse (Ω); reorganization (α), when the system restructures itself after a catastrophic stimulus through innovation and social memory—a period of greater resilience and less vulnerability; exploitation (r); and conservation (K), representing an increasingly rigid system that loses flexibility to change. The Kebarans and Late Natufians had similar responses to cold and dry conditions vs. Early Natufians and the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A responses to warm and wet climates. Kebarans and Late Natufians (α-phase) shifted to a broader-based diet and increased their mobility. Early Natufian and Pre-Pottery Neolithic A populations (r- and K-phases) had a growing investment in more narrowly focused, high-yield plant resources, but they maintained the broad range of hunted animals because of increased sedentism. These human adaptive cycles interlocked with plant and animal cycles. Forest and grassland vegetation responded to late Pleistocene and early Holocene climatic fluctuations, but prey animal cycles reflected the impact of human hunting pressure. The combination of these three adaptive cycles results in a model of human adaptation, showing potential for great sustainability of Levantine foraging systems even under adverse climatic conditions.’

http://archaeology.about.com/gi/o.htm?zi=1/XJ&zTi=1&sdn=archaeology&cdn=education&tm=137&f=00&tt=13&bt=6&bts=0&zu=http%3A//dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1113931109

In north America the people of the eastern great basin responded similarly, by starting to utilize more seeds as food.
Grind stones, or metates show in California about the same time and were used to grind seeds and roots for food.

In case someone pulls out the Manhattan Project as an example of technology advancing by a group, I’ve read quite a bit on the Project, and there were many small victories and many small defeats.

I would point out that the Manhattan was a series of developments, begun before the Porject itself, and continuing within the aegis of the Proeject, but I will argue that from what I know the specific steps toward the Bomb were each the revelation of one man – such as how to trigger the bomb, how to arrange the internals for implosion, the constituents, etc.

There was no Kum-bay-yah hand-holding in Los Alamos. Three was a division of labor into teams, and each step forward for each group was either one man’s insights or one man’s sweat.

Simply put: Nothing gets done by committee.

Steve; Did you get the pics I e-mailed to you last week? I still haven’t been able to get my #[email protected]^&*%*&!#$??^% home pc to give up the rest, but I will persevere! Jim C

you are so right! If you get any free time and want to stop my way let me know. either here or at my home e-mail. Should have come with the pics.

Dennis; I was afraid you were going to say that. So most YDB lines are just shear luck of the draw.

Thanks Dennis; This gives me some idea of where to go. Han has recomended searching local sand pits for signs of strata changes. I also have a crek nearby that has eroded the bank down into the dolomite bedrock with at least 3 soil layers showing. The farmer that owns the site has pulled in his cattle from the pasture so I need not worry about having to argue with his bull about whose water hole it is.

Mr Grondine; I gather you do a lot of your work with native american stories and such. Do you know anything about native artifacts or anyone in your area that does. I don’t live very far from you and I have a stone piece that could be a grinding tool. I saw similar tools at an arch site in Marble falls TX but they were made out of granite this one is soft limestone. I would like to find out if this is indeed a tool or just a yellow cool shaped rock.

E.P.G.
I would have to argue against the idea that Clovis was only technology and not a people. I will agree that after a period of time and within certain contexts it was a trade technology, but at it’s beginnings it was a cultural entity.
The basic cultural package was spread by homogeneous culture. There are too many hallmarks that are shared a across a large area, for it to be disparate groups, the method of manufacturing points, is one , the ubiquitous presence of the “hummpie” scraper in Clovis assemblages is another.
Also the fact that in th Clovis “core area” they seem to have not gathered shell fish or fished even though they inhabited river valley’s.
The geographic distribution and temporal distribution also indicate that the southeast and eastern seaboard were their home range, before spreading west and north.
I do agree that at some point it became a trade object, and this can be seen in the drift of the technique, as it spreads into new areas, namely the extreme north west and central America.
I feel that up to the ydb Clovis was a homogenous culture, after that it became a trade item, with the exception of the survivors, who migrated away from their devastated home range.
I think the most “Clovis” group was the group that made it to California, as the whole Clovis cultural package shows up in central cal after the ydb event.
But once they settled here in the central valley they mixed with the people of the western stemmed tradition, or the basket makers.
The decrease in point quality in ,cal,show this. The points found at the Witt site are top quality and are made from stones chosen for their aesthetic quality, whereas later points in cal drift somewhat from the basic pattern and show a loss of quality over time, culminating in the farpoint point, from Malibu.
Although I believe that , initially, Clovis was a culture, it was not a mutually friendly culture. I believe that even though separate groups traded and made use of common hunting grounds and material resource sites, there was a great deal of competition for resources, resulting in physical conflict for said resources. This is why they always had small social group size and cached much of their material, to keep it safe from raiding groups.

Mr. Grondine; Thanks for the input and lead to the lectures.

Hi Cevin –

I suppose I better go into this in more depth here and now. Of course, since we’re both working with ancient materials, both of us have most likely made mistakes. That said, here goes:

It appears that Solutrean overstrike technology was brought from the Sahara coastal region to South America by a very distinct haplogroup. (This haplogroup was nearly extincted by later impact events, with Yuchi and Ocanachee descendants being the only fragments left.)

Fluting appears to have been developed in South America and brought north across the Gulf of Mexico, and the technology then spread from there, which explains Clovis’s distribution.

Several peoples remembered the Holocene Start Impact Event, and where they survived it. They are of distinct mt DNA haplogroups. There are a few examples posted here; there are others which have been privately circulated, two of which point to a western “crypto-explosive” structure.

Based solely on one Siouxian account, Firestone et al. have been looking for multiple air-bursts, but IMO they have been looking in the wrong location for those, as they do not know where that one particular Siouxian people were at the HSIE.

If explosive lensing occurred at the crypto-explosive structure I have located, then besides other impactites, the possibility exists that larger comet fragments may be found there, as were found in Libya.

Everyone has a regional view, myself included. Yours is in the west; my current research focus is in Ohio, extending back to pre-Clovis C mt DNA.

Hi Cevin –

PS2

Halliday conducting as discussion of what he calls the YDB event. The poor bastard is so confused he can not even get his paleo-climatology straight: its the Holoccene Start Impact Event.

It is too bad the Conference organizers did not deign to provide this “amateur” with a speaking fee. I could have assembled a powerpoint that would have set their mouths open: “Impact and Human Evolution” – and conducted small “seminars” at the smoking/bar area.

You can find more of my comments on this particular topic over at the archive of Jacque’s Paleoanthropology Forum archive.

PS.

As above you yourself admonished Cevin:

“There was no ONE clovis people. — There was clovis technology, which was adopted by many different peoples.”

Hi Hermann –

I am having trouble following your point.

There is no mixing. There is no fascism.
Just a statement of fact about early human population groups and their technologies.

E.P.G.,

We agree on many points, such as an extremely early entrance into the new world. I can buy your assertion that Mt DNA Hg C is very ancient and could represent the first modern humans to come overland to the new world. One thing to note is that all Asian versions of Hg C are derived and are not basal to native American Hg C, they represent a terminal Pleistocene/Holocene back migration into Asia by NA-Dene speakers.
Please, tell me how you are connecting Africa/SA/and the solutreans, I would enjoy reading any such literature.
I belive that Stanford’s solutrean hypothesis is flawed, in the fact that the direction of migration is wrong, it wasn’t Europeans that came to the new world, it was Americans that went to Europe.
If you look at the solutrean timeline, the classic laurel and willow leaf blade patterns show up fairly late. And if Stanford’s dating of the Cinmar bipoint is correct then it predates the appearance of such a blade patterns among the solutreans by almost a thousand years. Also the academics studying the solutreans hold the opinion they represented a new population unrelated to previous people in the area.
Also at the time of the ydb event, there are two distinct types of people in north America, there are the basket making, sandal wearing,semi sedentary waterside foragers of the western stemmed tradition, and the hide bag using, hide moccasin wearing highly mobile big game hunters of the plains and east coast.

EPG,

Is this roughly in the area of anthropology you and Celvin are discussing?

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/11/041118104010.htm

New Evidence Puts Man In North America 50,000 Years Ago
Nov. 18, 2004 — Radiocarbon tests of carbonized plant remains where artifacts were unearthed last May along the Savannah River in Allendale County by University of South Carolina archaeologist Dr. Albert Goodyear indicate that the sediments containing these artifacts are at least 50,000 years old, meaning that humans inhabited North American long before the last ice age.

Hi Trent –

Yes, but there is a lot more to our discussion here than that.

what #%*$! is mt dna hg c, you may ask as did i? there is s tiny bit of useful info elsewhere but you have to to do the google search step.

okay step 1 is that hg stands for haplogroup, whew!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_C_%28mtDNA%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_M_%28mtDNA%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_L3_%28mtDNA%29

Hi Hermann –

I hope you will excuse Cevin and myself from providing you with an introduction to human genetic studies in a post here. May I suggest pulling out your copy of “Man and Impact in the Americas” and looking at the Cambridge University world haplogroup mappings cited in the footnotes?

There are two different C haplogroups, one for Y DNA and another for mt DNA.

(PS – I wonder what happened to my old friend Steve Fernandez, who worked on the development of recombinant DNA multiplication back at Berkeley in the early 1970’s?)

(PS2 – I have to rely on others for lithics, knapping, and chert typing, and on some of those for field surface searches. I have been attending the Flint Ridge Knap-Ins, and rely on its participants for knowledge and abilities in those areas.)

Hi Cevin –

PS3 – I think I also need to add at at this point that we’re talking about the Holocene Start Impact Event, and that the Younger Dryas glacial melt drainages appear to occur 1,000 years after that.

Otherwise the phytolith and impactite strata do not line up. As well as the cultural strata from the responses to environmental changes.

Hi Hermann –

Just to clear this up, the appearance of X mt DNA in the Americas is definitively tied to Canadian Maritime Archaic culture, which appears many thousands of years after Clovis technology.

In other words, the arrival of X mt DNA in the Americas is not tied to Clovis technology.

Ed –

Are you SERIOUSLY saying that in order for you to give us anything more than assertions we need to PAY you???!!!

No matter how poor you may be, the hubris is mind-boggling.

Ed –

All good stuff you talk about to Cevin. “In summary, I propose that impact is an extremely useful tool for anthropological research. In fact, since impact is a part of the natural environment, any work done without acknowledging impact will be flawed.”

No duh.

That is one big point with me – as long as they keep to their gradualist memes, they cannot possibly get any of it correct. We basically need to ignore gradualist conclusions, while gleaning what we can from their actual data. THEY may try to ignore impacts, but at the risk of being SO wrong down the road. We can ignore them, but they ignore us at their own peril.

Actually, Trent, Ed is wrong. Atlantis is NOT an inappropriate comparison to pre-Clovis 20 years go. 20 years ago either none would get your butt tossed out of any archaeology department in the USA.

Also, the ONLY people who don’t accept the POSSIBILITY of Atlantis are (most) archaeologists and geologists.

If you don’t toe their line, then on both, and now on Atlantis, you are considered a pariah. Yet, Ed notwithstanding, SOME arkies around the world DO entertain the possibility of Atlantis now – just like back in 1990 SOME arkies considered pre-Clovis a possibility.

Ed has to try to suck up to his sources, or they will clam up on him. Whether he puts down Atlantis becuase of them or because he sincerely doesn’t believe it, I don’t know. But I will bet he has never looked into it, either – in spite of the fact that his work is right on the edge of Atlantis research.

Ed happens to live in a VERY small town with the top Atlantis “expert” in the world, and the two of them are enemies for other reasons – so he is not an unbiased commenter… LOL

Hermann –

NO ONE knows anything at all solid about the entry of X into ANYWHERE. It shows up in the Levant, and in the Altai Mountains around the Gobi Desert, and in (mostly) NE populations in N AMerica, plus in the Basque region.

They can tell you where X IS, but – because all of the X locations are separated by several thousand miles, with no discernible trace of it in between – all ideas about HOW it got anywhere are just guesses without serious foundation.

Timing? http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9837837 (1998 paper) says ” Time estimates for the arrival of X in North America are 12,000-36,000 years ago, depending on the number of assumed founders, thus supporting the conclusion that the peoples harboring haplogroup X were among the original founders of Native American populations.”

It continues, “To date, haplogroup X has not been unambiguously identified in Asia, raising the possibility that some Native American founders were of Caucasian ancestry.”

That latter has probably been updated several times.

From http://www.cwu.edu/anthropology/sites/cts.cwu.edu.anthropology/files/Mahli%20et%20al.%202004.pdf, (2013) “…Algonquian populations in northeastern North Americaall share high frequencies of haplogroups A and C and lower frequencies of haplogroup X. Some Algonquian groups, however, differ significantly in their haplogroup frequency distributions. Because these differences do not correlate with geographic distance, genetic drift or sampling error is probably a major component of these differences.”

See? Even in 2013, they throw in these total bull “explanations” (guesses) that have no foundation whatsoever, but which make them feel good. But their guesses have not improved since X was discovered. The “geographic frequency distributions” of X are incomprehensible to them.

Their meme is this: For a haplogroup to exist in two locations, there must have been migration between them, and the migration should have taken enough time for the haplogroup to be left behind all the way along the route.

That works for all other haplogroups, so they try to apply it to X – and they are utterly stumped. They simply DO NOT KNOW.

That paper, in its defense, drags out a 12-year-old study of the Micmacs Nove Scotia and Cape Breton Island areas) that only took 7 samples – with 4 being X. Rather than swab the cheeks of more Micmacs, now they will be able to claim forever that X frequency distribution as measured is due to insufficient sampling. A nice cheap cop-out. How much do 100 swabs cost?

Hahaha – That paper shows a coefficient of correlations for X in the Pacific NW as being (-0.169) and (-0.235). Perfect correlation is +1.0 or -1.0/ Anything close to 0.000 means that there is NO correlation at all. Apparently they haven’t gotten anywhere yet.

More:

At http://preclovis.blogspot.mx/2012/05/notes-on-mtdna-hg-x.html, which is a blog, so take it with a grain of sand if you want. It quotes papers but doesn’t always reference them. Here are quotes:

“…These findings leave unanswered the question of the geographic source of Native American X2a in the Old World, although our analysis provides new clues about the time of the arrival of haplogroup X in the Americas. Indeed, if we assume that the two complete Native
American X sequences (from one Navajo and one Ojibwa) began to diverge while their common ancestor was already in the Americas, we obtain a coalescence time of 18,000 +/- 6,800 YBP…”

“…X2 is spread widely throughout West Eurasia. Second, it is apparent that the Native American haplogroup X mtDNAs derive from X2 by a unique combination of five mutations. Third, the few Altaian (Derenko et al. 2001) and Siberian haplogroup X lineages are not related to the Native American cluster, and they are more likely explained by recent gene flow from Europe or from West Asia…”

Well, if the Clovis Barrier wasn’t blown away by Monte Verde, the geneticists would have done so! Not only 18,000 ya, but also X did NOT come to America via Siberia.

They are still FLOUNDERING about X. Don’t take ANYBODY’s word for it. It didn’t get here recently, but how early and from where, nobody knows jack.

Hi Steve –

“Are you SERIOUSLY saying that in order for you to give us anything more than assertions we need to PAY you???!!!”

No. In some cases I will work for food or sex.
Or other things.

“Ed happens to live in a VERY small town with the top Atlantis “expert” in the world, and the two of them are enemies for other reasons – so he is not an unbiased commenter… LOL”

Just to clarify to others here, I decided in 2003 to use David Hatcher Childress’s channels of distribution for my PR campaign. After my stroke he offered to buy all the foreign and domesticate rights to my work, and I turned him down.

My stroke interfered with the production of my (first) book, (there were going to be 3 of them) as I was not able to give it a final polish nor format it correctly with big type and lots of pictures.

My strategy was correct, as once my tongue became unglued from my teeth, I reached more people via late night radio than any other space journalist.

more…

Hi

it is for we see EP as we still know so little about our history of civilization. Certainly urbanity is an invention Pleistocene. I think that science still has much to discover about the intellectual ability of prehistoric man or primitive man. I had already put this topic on my page. Very good indeed.

pierson

In a similar way, contra our usual tradition that Olduvai = most ancient tool kit ~ 500 Ka, we have the Flores Island lithology discovered by Mike Morwood et al, by now as old as 1 Ma & looking more like Upper Paleolithic artifacts. These folk had to smart because they crossed over deep water to reach Flores Island. Perhaps they populated Australia at that time? What would have kept them? Their relatives on the SE Asian continent would be wiped out by the Australasian tektite impact 780 Ka. — The famous Flores Island Hobbit people were much later, and Morwood is now looking to find skeletal remains of 1 Ma age.

Hi Steve –

“Ed happens to live in a VERY small town with the top Atlantis “expert” in the world, and the two of them are enemies for other reasons – so he is not an unbiased commenter… LOL”

Steve, you need to fess up that I met you in that very small town – and about the even smaller town next door, Stelle, Illinois.

Stelle was founded by cult leader Richard Kieninger, who stole the Lemurian Fellowship’s Theosophist religion and inserted himself as Messiah in it.

Steve’s “Atlantis Expert” is David Hatcher Childress, who was Richard Kieninger’s follower and business associate. When Richard was kicked out of town for seducing his followers’ wives and daughters, David used his mailing list to build the world’s largest distributorship of “fringe” literature. David has now expanded to television, turning himself into an expert on “Ancient Aliens”, while leaving the “sacred science” of Theosophist Cult Archaeology to Scott Wolters.

Anyone interested in the Great Atlantic Impact Megatsunami rather than cult archaeology can read about it in “Man and Impact in the Americas”.

Hi Pierson –

I think you will enjoy my worknote from 2002:

http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/ccc/cc041702.html

Genetic studies confiming my conjecture there have just been published.

Trent –

As to the pre-Clovis = Atlantis thing… where I said Ed was wrong

“Actually, Trent, Ed is wrong. Atlantis is NOT an inappropriate comparison to pre-Clovis 20 years go. 20 years ago either none would get your butt tossed out of any archaeology department in the USA.”

In looking up something else entirely, I found a 2003 paper by Grayson and Meltzer entitled “A requiem for North American overkill” (http://faculty.washington.edu/grayson/jas30req.pdf)
and in it the authors wrote:

In fact, Martin’s [Paul Martin, the father of the Overkill hypothesis] recent writings suggest to us that he is no longer trying to approach this issue within a scientific framework. As we have noted, he explicitly maintains that the North American overkill position does not require supporting evidence. He is unconcerned that archaeologists ‘wash their hands’ of his ideas. He criticizes the search for pre-Clovis sites in the New World as “something less than serious science, akin to the ever popular search for ‘Big Foot’ or the ‘Loch Ness Monster’” [58, p. 278]. As one of us has observed elsewhere, Martin’s position has become a faith-based policy statement rather than a scientific statement about the past, an overkill credo rather than an overkill hypothesis [36,37].

“…the search for Pre-Clovis sites in the New World = “something less than serious science…”

Pre-Clovis = Bigfoot

Pre-Clovis = Loch Ness Monster

How are those different from Pre-Clovis = Atlantis?

The Monte Verde pre-Clovis site was vetted in 1997. And when did Paul Martin say that about Pre-Clovis and Bigfoot?

That footnote was [58] P.S. Martin, Deep history and a wilder west, in: R.H. Robichaux (Ed.), Ecology of Sonoran Desert Plants, University of Arizona
Press, Tucson, 1999, pp. 256–290.

TWO YEARS after Pre-Clovis was proved to all the archeological world, and Martin was STILL calling Pre-Clovis sites “less than serious science.”

So, let’s not delude ourselves. Pre-Clovis WAS DEFINITELY considered on a par with Atlantis and bigfoot and Nessie.

You pegged it correctly, Trent.

Ed and all –

I have not hidden my connections with Kempton. I’ve said I consider it very likely there was a pre-YDB high-tech civilization, whether named Atlantis or Islandia or whatever.

I consider David Hather Childress to be a good and wonderful friend. And he is an “Atlantis expert”, and if there is anyone in the world more knowledgeable, point me to him.

At the same time, I FULLY acknowledge that there is insufficient scientifically accepted evidence at this time for the existence of such a technology. I would point to the work of engineer and master machinist Christopher Dunn who shows MUCH evidence that high-precision machining was done in the early stages of the Egyptian dynasties – higher precision than was possible in the modern world until the last 50 years or so – some of it only barely possible now. This very solid evidence in stone argues that people of the past had much more capabilities than we give them credit for.

What it means and where such evidence can lead us, we will not know for a long time, because archaeologists refuse to address the evidence. The arkies still argue that diorite and granite were cut with copper chisels, which is a physical impossibility.

So in a context where granite was machined to tolerances that as an engineer I would be proud to be part of, getting a few humans across the Atlantic before the “ice-free corridor” opened, that seems like a walk in the park, technology-wise.

I am not interestd in Atlantis (or whatever you want to call it) because it is a fantastical idea, but because I recognize some evidence that others ignore. Do I have enough to prove it to be true? Of course not.

But 20 years ago there was not enough proof about Pre-Clovis in North America, either.

>>The arkies still argue that diorite and granite were cut with
>>copper chisels, which is a physical impossibility.

What!?!

Copper is soft.

The Incas got precision, but they used stone on stone, not copper.

Human stone working is one of the most misunderstood of the ancient technologies, and that is from a simple surface skimming of the subject.

Hi Trent –

You have to understand Steve’s background in archaeology, and David. What David does is use megalithic structures to force a suspension of disbelief. After that, he can propose different hypothetical what-ifs as though they were fact; whether that is Theosophist racist nonsense or Ancient Aliens nonsense, it does not matter, as long as it is entertaining and $ell$.

David does have a great collection of materials on Pacific megalithic cultures, and other arcane data. There is also a question as to what Mayan materials Augustus LePlongeon had in hand, and what happened to them.

Trent –

Ask an Egyptologist anytime, how the ancient Egyptians cut stone. They will tell you that much of it was done by dropping ~6″granite balls to chip the limestone, and that for finer work they used copper chisels.

Will copper chisels cut limestone or granite? Of course not. Does that stop them from asserting that? No.

The thing is: Outside that, they got nothin’. So, all they’ve got is a repeated error and nothing.

Steve,
As far as gobleki tepe goes, there seems to be some confusion as to what constitutes hunter/gathers among the anthropological/ archeological communities. There seems to be a trend to lump non agricultural/urban societies into the H/G category, when clearly most are not.
A perfect example is the jomon of Japan, while they did not practice agriculture they did practice horticulture, tending and nurturing “wild”plants, while living sedintary live in villages. Certain tribes of native Californians lived the same way.
At the tribal level, I draw a distinction between H/G’s and generalized foragers. Classic H/G’s will travel fairly far in order to obtain the resources they needed, while GF’s settle in an area that provided most everything they need. Sure there are some resources that have limited distributions, such as tool stones and salt, that people will travel great distances to obtain.
The miwok and yokuts are a good example, they would make the trek across the crest of the sierra to the Owens valley to obtain obsidian and salt, and traded acorns from their tended groves of oaks for these items.
The people of GT were likely very similar in lifestyle, they lived in an area that provided much of what they needed fairly nearby, such as cereal grain, nuts and small game, with the occasional antelope or auroch taken.
I also think that the domestication of livestock, and cereal grains are intimately connected.

Hey Ed,
before you sign off let me thank you for so much insight, I mention just one tidbit from you on September 22, 2013 at 8:24 am:

One of the general principles I’ve observed through the years is the tendency for researchers to lump different impacts together – they can not believe that the Earth has gotten hit that many times separately.

This is what I like to call the PROPS, “Prime Rule Of Planetary Science:”

THE TROUBLE WITH IMPACT RESEARCH IS THAT THERE ARE SO MANY OF THEM.

As an example, who would believe that the New Madrid quake of Dec 16 1811 was really an antipodal cosmic body impact, and who would believe the Lisbon quake and tsunami of Nov 1 1755 was likewise? Both had sand volcanoes or -fountains, and the Cajun fleet of deportation that had sailed on Oct 29 1755 from Nova Scotia ran into a violent storm that day & the earth quaked in the American Colonies. Few years later, Captain Cook landed in Australia & the Aborigines told of a comet impact a short time earlier (Ted Bryant).

Cevin and Trent –

It sounds like we are all on more or less the same page on hunter-gatherers. It would be odd if the development toward ag and domestication of animals didn’t happen gradually, so it seems there would have been a (possibly long) transition away from being nomadic hunter-gatherers.

And by long, I mean as short of a time as 1,000-5,000 years. I see people compressing such time periods as if they were overnight changes, and that isn’t the case at all. After all, we are less than 5,000 years from Stonehenge to iPhones and 3D printers – if you accept their dates for Stonehenge of ~2500BCE.

Is changing to settled communities that big of a deal? I would think all nomadic h-gs had preferred regions, ones where they had found nice caves or stream beds, and that they would have tended to stay in those locations somewhat longer. If life was hard on the move, it is fairly human to linger in the places in which life was nominally easier.

A possible example:

The Dordogne valley in southern France, with its cliff caves would have afforded increased security, due to the natural lookout capabilities all over the cliffs.

Not all locations were equal, and it would seem that locations would – for the women especially – be preferred to life “on the road.” IMHO, women are – and I assume always have been – the settlers. Also IMHO, it is almost certain that the women were also the weavers of the cloth that those twisted fibers came from.

Hmmm…

Actually there is only one “trapdoor volcano” on this world. It’s at a place called Manuel Benavedes. And it’s just south of the Mexican border, and right across from Big Bend Ranch State Park in southwest Texas. And it was an American geologist named F. W. McDowell who proclaimed that we are looking at a giant 17 mile “trapdoor”, not a Mexican. And he makes this assumption without any consideration whatsoever for the crazy mantle physics required to produce a 17 mile wide, perfectly semi-circular trapdoor vent; much less any consideration of the structural integrity that would have to exist in the rock of that “trapdoor” in order for the thing to have opened, and closed repeatedly without breaking.

See:

McDowell, F. W., 2010, Geologic Map of Manuel Benavides area, Chihuahua, Mexico. Map and Chart no. 99. Geological Society of America, Boulder, Colorado.

Abstract:

This map and text cover an area of eastern Chihuahua state adjacent to the Rio Grande and the Big Bend of Texas. The area contains an 1100-m-thick volcanic section very similar in lithology and age (by Ar-Ar dating) to that exposed in both Big Bend National and State Parks. This includes, from older to younger, a heterogeneous sequence very much like to the Chisos Formation, a thick locally derived rhyolitic flow complex comparable to the Tule Mountain trachyandesite, distal thin ignimbrites similar in age to the Mitchell Mesa ash-flow tuff (the largest unit in the Trans-Pecos volcanic field), and a caldera source for both the 31 Ma San Carlos tuff and the 28 Ma Santana tuff. The caldera is an unusual trap-door type with a hinge zone on the southwest and two separate collapse and eruption margins around the north and east. Its outer diameter is approximately 25 km, which is unusually large for the tuffs that erupted from it, suggestive of a shallow collapse. Inflation or tumescence prior to the eruptions modified a preexisting Laramide fold by bowing it outward toward the north and east; a 31.5 Ma granitoid was intruded into the fold axis, resulting in the formation of skarn deposits in the surrounding limestones of the fold.

The map itself consists of two crude hand drawn maps with all the data resolution of a comic book page, and done by a couple of graduate students back in the eighties. In 2010 Mr McDowell simply kludged the two together into a single map. That map has almost no correlation whatsoever to actual geologic features clearly visible in modern hi resolution satellite imagery, and verifiable from the ground. And McDowell completely disregards that modern satellite data because it just isn’t supportive of his too many unsupported assumptions, and suppositions to count.

There is no question that something different, and inconceivably violent happened there. But as for me, I prefer to think of it as a “pseudo explosion” structure not a volcano; leaving the door open for further study to determine what really happened there without all the unquestioned, gradualist-assumptive reasoning.

Hi Steve,

That thing is behind a GSA paywall anyway so even if that old link worked all you’d get without paying is the abstract. But I have a copy that I can share. I’ll send you an email telling you how.

If it is a crpto explosive structure, Dennis, then it dates from millions of years ago.
You probably want to check both the magentic maps and gravity maps as well.