After writing my previous post on 2.4 Million-year-old tools found in Jordan I pondered about the difficulties faced by those who propose paradigm shifts (such as Neves and his team, who propose an earlier Homo habilis migration out of Africa).
Another finding of old tools back in 1977 (Some Paleolithic Tools from Northeast North America, B. E. Raemsch; W. W. Vernon Current Anthropology, Vol. 18, No. 1. Mar., 1977, pp. 97-99.) led to a very heated debate.
Vernon and Raemsch reported finding stone tools that were 70,000 years old, at the Timlin site in the Catskills in New York state, USA.
Yes, 70 Ky ago is not that old, but when it deals with a site located in America it is much older than the currently accepted date for the peopling of America. And back in the late 1970s, the date was even more recent (some 13,000 years max.).
The tools discovered by Raemsch and Vernon were dug out of the soil which was buried under glacial rocks belonging to the early Wisconsin (or Würm) age, roughly 70,000 years ago.
They described these rock tools as follows: "The oldest of the artifacts closely resemble flake tools commonly referred to in Europe and Africa as Upper Acheulean, and they include cordiform points (fig. I), type side- and end-scrapers resembling those of Mousterian assemblages ".
And this is very interesting because the Mousterian lithic tools were associated with the Neanderthals! and the older Acheulean tools date back to Homo erectus.
Of course critics attacked these findings considering them as geofacts (natural origin) instead of man made, and also questioning their age. Vernon and Raemsch responded to these criticisms quite clearly (See their reply in On Criticisms of "Some Paleolithic Tools From Northeast North America - with some images too!) and added "Funk has resisted accepting even the possibility of the great antiquity of man in the New World for years. This bias places him with the early 20th-century skeptics..."
We have posted on Mousterian and Acheoulean tools in America several times so we do believe that further findings (if only someone was looking for this type of tools in America) would settle the issue for good.
Below are some images from these papers, with their captions:
Below is yet another image, captioned "FIG.2. Handaxe approximating position in which it was found in situ, lodged in the radius of a bovid. Deep pits in the bone accommodated the handaxe tip, which was broken as it was driven into the bone":
Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2019 by Austin Whittall ©
Fascinating Austin,
ReplyDeleteThose tools look very similar to examples from California.
There is a little antique/curio shop in a small town in Pennsylvania that has a dusty old collection of point collections.
They are collections of points/tools that people had found in the area in the past, most collected in the late 19th and early 20th century.
From how well the indivudal collections were curated, I would think that collecting was somewhat of a faddish hobby in the region. Many had the date and location of where the object was found and the context of how it was found written down, like "Mr Smith found while plowing his field or "found while digging a bridge footing on Cross Creek".
Most of the stuff was recent some very old and one set of boxes was filled with what sure appeared to be Auchelean hand axes.
I had been spending the week purusing the Museum of Natural History DC and those objects in that shop could have been interchanged with the museum pieces and nobody would be the wiser.
I collect artifacts from my field from time to time. Over the past 3 decades, I have found two hand axes very alike made of different charts but exhibiting crude flaking. Many unifacial stone tools have also been found.
ReplyDeleteThe photo of the New York hand axe is very similar to those found here in Southeast Alabama.
YES, WE HAVE THE SAME IN NORTHEASTERN OHIO,AROUND END MORAINES OF Wisconsin and Illinois age glacial deposits WE ALSO HAVE ONE UNRESEARCHED DOCUMENTED MOUND, AND A DOZEN UNDOCUMENTED ANCIENT MOUNDS AND CITIES https://www.facebook.com/dennis.wallace.353250/photos_albums
ReplyDelete