The Hueyatlaco site in Mexico (map with location) has been controversial since it was first studied because the excavations conducted there back in the early 1960s (1962, 1964 and 1966) by C. Irwin-Williams and on occasions also Juan Armenta Camacho, found stone artifacts -later lost by the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH) located in Mexico City- that were set in extremely old soil layers.
These tools were dated to an age of several hundreds of thousands of years. Far too old to have been made by Homo sapiens.
A good detailed account of this site can be found here: Malde, Harold E., Steen-McIntyre, Virginia, Naeser, Charles W. and VanLandingham, Sam L. 2011. The stratigraphic debate at Hueyatlaco, Valsequillo, Mexico. Palaeontologia Electronica Vol. 14, Issue 3; 44A:26p; palaeo-electronica.org/2011_3/27_malde/index.html.
These early dates were unnaceptable because they contradicted orthodox findings. So they were rejected on the basis that Uranium had leached into the artifacts and altered their age as measured by the uranium series age technique.
An alternate measuring method was used (fission track dating), and the outcome was the same (Geologic Evidence for Age of Deposits at Hueyatlaco Archeological Site, Valsequillo, Mexico, Virginia Steen-McIntyre, Roald Fryxell and Harold E. Malde, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/0033-5894(81)90124-1. Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 January 2017, Quaternary Research, Volume 16, Issue 1July 1981 , pp. 1-17). Below is the Abstract of this paper:
"Abstract
Direct tracing of beds during excavation in May 1973, confirmed that the artifact-bearing layers at Hueyatlaco underlie 10 m of fine-grained, water-laid deposits that constitute part of the wide-spread Valsequillo gravels. Dissection of these deposits by the adjacent Río Atoyac has reached a depth of 50 m. The stratigraphic section at Hueyatlaco includes four distinctive tephra units. The oldest one occupies a small channel in a series of cut-and-fill stream deposits that have yielded bifacial tools. It lies more than a meter above flat-lying, fine-grained beds from which edge-retouched tools have been recovered. The three other tephra units occur higher in the section.
Fission-track ages on zircon phenocrysts from two of the younger tephra layers (370,000 ± 200,000 and 600,000 ± 340,000 yr, 2σ) agree with concordant uranium-series dates for a camel pelvis that was found associated with bifacial tools at Hueyatlaco (245,000 ± 40,000 yr by 230Th and > 180,000 yr by 231Pa). These dates are compatible with the depth of burial and subsequent dissection of the Hueyatlaco deposits, as well as with the degree of hydration of volcanic glass shards and with the extent of etching of heavy-mineral phenocrysts from within the tephra layers.
These findings suggest to us that further search for archaeological remains in deposits as old as those at Hueyatlaco would be warranted."
Silvia Gonzalez from the Liverpool John Moores University disputes these early dates, but has agreed to dates which are also older than those currently accepted by orthodox science: 40,000 years.
In The Late Pleistocene Human Occupation of Mexico Silvia Gonzalez and David Huddart (FUMDHAMentos VII pp 237-259) discuss the older ages proposed by Steen-McIntyre et al, but also mentions several sites in Mexico with ages of up to 40 kya. One of them is the Toluquilla footprint layer, which has both animal and human foot and paw prints in volcanic ash deposited at Lake Valsequilo. This ash erupted from the Tolquilla volcano roughly 40 Kya:
Gonzalez and Huddart write:
"The stratigraphic context and geochronological control for the Xalnene Ash is shown in Figs.11 and 12 and discussed in detail in Gonzalez et al. (2006a). The Toluquilla Footprint Layer has been dated to 38 ±8.57 Ka (sample number: TW04-10) using Optically Stimulated Luminescence dating of baked, silty xenoliths within the ash which were interpreted as being baked at the time of the eruption, which reset the time signal. The ash layer is older than the stratigraphically younger, fluvial sediments from the Valsequillo Gravels exposed in the Barranca Caulapan (Fig.12) where there are radiocarbon dates between 9.15 ±0.5 Ka (W1896) from the top of the sequence to 38.9 ±0.8 Ka (Oxa-14355) on a mollusc shell at its base, as well as an Electron Spin Resonance date on a mammoth molar and U-Series dates on bones. All of the dates obtained with different methods are in agreement."
See my post on these footprints
The only work to be published at a date more or less close to the time of the discoveries was written by Juan Armenta Camacho Vestigios de labor humana en huesos de animales extintos de Valsequillo, with his paper presented at the XXXV Congreso Internacional de Americanistas, Puebla, 1978. On its page 111, it mentions the controversial -and other not so controversial dates- for the animal bones with evidence of human activities on them (cuts, crushing, torsion breakage, perforations and even inscriptions).
The question seems to remain open: we have the very ancient dates, but we also have a firm refusal to accept them. Mainstream science simply ignores these findings which otherwise would undermine the neat construction built on the assumption that America was first peopled not more than 15-20,000 years ago.
Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2019 by Austin Whittall ©
No comments:
Post a Comment