Mutation ratios and African admixture with archaics

In my previous post I mentioned the TCC→TTC mutation anomaly, which is higher among Europeans than Africans or East Asians.

Gao, Zhang, Przeworski, and Moorjani, 2022 reported that there were several other mutation discrepancies between these three popilations.

They also looked into mutation raties that differ in "old polymorphisms that predate the out-of-Africa migration" and suggest that this case is due to the different proportion that the ancient archaic ancestors contributed to modern African and non-African people. They also point out that age of reproduction (generation time) can't explain their observations and suggest that "other factors —genetic modifiers or environmental exposures— must have had a non-negligible impact on the human mutation landscape".

Aging fathers tend to pass on to their children more T→C mutations, and mothers contribute more C→G mutations.

They noticed different T→C/T→G mutations among archaic populations (over 28,800 generations ago) compared to more recent ones in all three populations. They were surprised by this difference: (YRI is Yoruba African, CEU is Caucasian and CHB is Chinese from Beijing):

"Unexpectedly, we detected significant differences between YRI and the other two populations, CEU and CHB, in the mutation spectra of polymorphisms that are estimated to long predate the OOA migration. Specifically, the T>C/T>G mutation ratio is elevated in the very old allele age bins compared to more recent bins for all populations, with a significantly higher ratio seen in YRI than in CEU and CHB. We showed that the inter-population differences cannot be explained by differential gene flow from sequenced archaic hominins —Neanderthals or Denisovans— into the ancestors of non-Africans and such introgression alone cannot explain the shift in the older bins in all modern human populations.
Instead, we found evidence that the signals come from extremely old variants that emerged prior to the split of modern humans and archaic hominins at least ∼550,000 years ago (Prüfer et al. 2014). This suggests that the observed differences between contemporary populations could have arisen from the complex demographic history of ancestral populations. Based on observed polymorphism patterns in contemporary African populations and using simulations, several recent studies have suggested that one or more ghost archaic populations may have introgressed into the ancestors of Africans and possibly into the common ancestors of all modern humans (Hammer et al. 2011; Ragsdale and Gravel 2019; Speidel et al. 2019; Durvasula and Sankararaman 2020). After the ancestors of non-Africans migrated out of Africa, the ghost archaic group(s) may have continued interbreeding with remaining populations in Africa, leading to higher ancestry in YRI. An alternative model is deep population structure in modern humans. Under this model, two or more long-lasting, weakly differentiated ancestral populations contributed differentially to contemporary human populations through continuous gene flow or multiple merger events (Ragsdale et al. 2022). In both models, a greater contribution from a group with a higher T>C/T>G ratio to the ancestors of African individuals would explain differences between YRI and non-African population samples as well as the elevated ratio in old variants for all three contemporary human populations. Our analysis further showed that the T>C/T>G signal comes from T>C mutations rather than T>G mutations, suggesting that one or more of the remote ancestral populations had a higher T>C mutation rate relative to their contemporaries as well as to modern humans."

Time and time again we have evidence of archaic introgression into Africans that has not been passed on to Eurasians. These contriuted to their heterozygosity, diversity, and different mutation rates. This renders many conclusions based on molecular clocks and differences in alleles obsolete. It makes the Africans look more divergent but in fact this may be the outcome of swapping bodily fluids after the OOA event.

---

Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2026 by Austin Whittall © 

Higher mutation accumulation in Europeans vs. Africans

Another paper mentioning different mutation rates in Africans and non-Africans!

The paper by Mallick, S., Li, H., Lipson, M. et al. The Simons Genome Diversity Project: 300 genomes from 142 diverse populations. Nature 538, 201–206 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature18964, reported that "Our analysis reveals key features of the landscape of human genome variation, including that the rate of accumulation of mutations has accelerated by about 5% in non-Africans compared to Africans since divergence."

The branch-length issue

This reminded me of a recent post I wrote about Short branch lengths in Africans for Y-chromosomes. Branch lengths are linked to accumulated mutations (the lenght of a branch is the number of mutations in it) so if we start from the fork where Africans and non-Africans split, the branch of Africans is shoreter because it has accumulated fewer mutations, while the non-African one is longer, as it has more accumulated mutations. In that post I asked "...but we are all the same age and equally distant from our common ancestor. So why do the Africans have fewer mutations? Do Eurasians accumulate more mutations?"

I also went back to reread a recent post Mutation rate is faster in Africa where I mentioned different studies suggesting that a higher diversity in Africans (measured by their heterozygosity) promoted a higher mutation rate or μ. But Mallick, Li and Lipson et al. in their 2016 paper suggest otherwise. I quote them below and highlight their findings, which seem to baffle them:

"More mutation accumulation in non-Africans than in Africans
The SGDP data provide an opportunity to compare the rates at which mutations have accumulated across populations. We restricted our analyses to samples for which our genotypes are likely to be most reliable ... We pooled samples by region to increase power, and for all pairs of regions, computed the expected number of positions where, if we picked a random chromosome from both, region A would mismatch chimpanzee and region B would be identical to chimpanzee (or vice versa). If the rate of accumulation of mutation has been the same since the two populations diverged, these numbers are expected to be equal. However, when we compute the ratio of mutations on one lineage or the other since separation, we find a subtle (average of 0.5%) but significant excess of mutations in nonAfricans relative to sub-Saharan Africans. Because any difference must reflect events since non-African / African population divergence which is a less than a tenth of average genetic divergence, this implies a greater difference in mutation accumulation rates since population divergence (~5%). We were concerned that these results might be biased by the fact that the human genome reference sequence is more closely related to non-Africans than to Africans, or by higher levels of heterozygosity in Africans, as both these issues could make detection of divergent sites in Africans more difficult. However, we replicated the findings after remapping to chimpanzee, which is equally distant to all present populations, and after restricting analyses to the X chromosome in males (males only have a single X chromosome, and so this procedure avoids bias due to different error rates in detecting heterozygous genotypes in populations with different rates of heterozygosity). These observations are most likely to be explained by acceleration in the rate of mutation accumulation in non-Africans, since the same signal appears in comparisons to sub-Saharan Africans related in different ways to non-Africans. It is known that the rate of CCT>CTT mutations differs across human populations. However, this particular mutation class was found to be enriched relative to Africans in Europeans but not in East Asians, and thus cannot explain our signal. One of several possible explanations for these findings is a decrease in the generation interval in non-Africans compared to Africans since separation..."

What is going on?

Mallick, S., Li, H., Lipson, M. et al. affirm that mutations accumulate at a higher rate in non-Africans than within Africa, this does not mean that mutation rates (μ) are different, it means that the mutations are fixed differently. It is also higher among Europeans than East Asians. To explain it they propse that non-Africans have a shorter "generation time": they are mating at a younger age than Africans so they accumulate more generations in a given span of time, and therefore more mutations than Africans in the same period.

Generation Time

I am surprised because other research has shown that longer generation times lead to more mutations because "each additional year of paternal age results in an average of 3.9 × 10⁻¹⁰ more mutations per base per generation (Source) and hunter-gatherer people nowadays have longer generation ages (32.3 years for fathers) than sedentary groups and because older fathers accumulate more mutations, if Africans are mating at an older age, there will be more mutations. There is something that isn't adding up here!

A similar viewpoint was reported by Wang and Obbard, 2023: "Our analysis also shows that mutation rates increase significantly with increasing generation time... The relationship we observe between generation time and per-generation mutation rate could therefore be a consequence of either a greater number of cell divisions or of accumulating damage over time." Which makes sense.

However, not all agree, research conducted by Lewin and Eyre-Walker, 2025 confirms that mutation rate (μ) and generation time are inversely correlated (longer generation time = lower mutation rate; and shorter generation time = higher mutation rate).

Due to these conflicting findings, until consensus is reached, for the time being I will leave generation times out of the matter and look for other plausible causes for the higher number of mutations in non-Africans vs. Africans.

Other causes explaining higher accumulation of mutations

Effective population size or Ne. Wang and Obbard, 2023, also notice that "populations with larger Ne tend to have a lower mutation rate even after accounting for their shorter generation times." Africans are said to have a larger initial Ne due to the bottleneck effect that affected those leaving Africa, a small subset of the large original population. The authors suggest that if "... species with small Ne tend to have a longer generation time, and a longer generation time causes higher mutation rates then a higher μ in species with low Ne could be driven by a mechanistic generation-time effect." Since Eurasians seem to have both factors (small Ne and low generation times) is seems logical that their mutation rate is higher.

Besides the effective population size and generation time, there are more possible explanations for the shorter branch in Africans and the longer one in Eurasians are: natural selection, that removes noxious mutations, so looking back from the present, the mutations never seem to have taked place because they were not fixed. Reduced DNA repair mechanisms, one group has a less efficient repair mechanism for mutations and these tend to accumulate in comparison to another group with a more efficient repair system.

The increased TCC→TTC mutation rate in Europeans

This factor is mentioned in Mallick, S., Li, H., Lipson, M. et al. as a possible explanation. But, what does it really mean? I will quote from Harris and Pritchard, 2017, who studied the matter.

Our DNA is made up of two backbones, the intertwined helixes linked by "steps" like a ladder, made from bases called Guanine (G), Cytosine (C), Thymine (T) and Adenine (A). Guanine always links to Adenine G—A, and Thymine with Cytosine (C—T) bonds. Looking at the steps of one side of the helix you will see a sequence like "ATCGATTGAGCTCTAG", and opposing it, on the other strand the complementary bases: "GCTAGCCAGATCTCGA".

Research has shown that "European people experience more mutations within certain DNA motifs (specifically, the DNA sequences ‘TCC’, ‘TCT’, ‘CCC’ and ‘ACC’) than Africans or East Asians do." Why?

Harris and Pritchard propose that "the rate of TCC→TTC mutations increased dramatically ∼15,000 years ago and decreased again ∼2000 years ago... [and] hypothesize that this mutation pulse may have been caused by a mutator allele that drifted up in frequency starting 15,000 years ago, but that is now rare or absent from present day populations." They go on to explain the cause: " At this time, we cannot exclude a role for nongenetic factors such as changes in life history or mutagen exposure in driving these signals. However, given the sheer diversity of the effects reported here, it seems parsimonious to us to propose that most of this variation is driven by the appearance and drift of genetic modifiers of mutation rate."

So it seems that it is due to a chance appearance of genes that regulate mutation rates.

A curious yet interesting fact is that the same effect of TCC→TTC mutation increase is observed in East Asian cattle! It appeared in two separate mammal groups, indicine cattle, derived from the Bos taurus indicus and humans but outside of Africa (Talenti, et al., 20216)

A challenge to the "stable" molecular clock

Harris, 2015 also looks into the TCC→TTC subject and says that explaining the cause is beyond the scope of the paper. However, Harris concludes that "Even if the overall European mutation rate increase was small, it adds to a growing body of evidence that molecular clock assumptions break down on a faster timescale than generally assumed during population genetic analysis. It was once assumed that the human lineage’s mutation rate had changed little since we shared a common ancestor with chimpanzees, but this assumption is losing credibility due to the conflict between direct mutation rate estimates and molecular-clock-based estimates. Although this conflict might have arisen from a gradual decrease in the rate of germline mitoses per year as our ancestors evolved longer generation times, the results of this paper indicate that another force may have come into play: change in the mutation rate per mitosis. If the mutagenic spectrum was able to change during the last 60,000 years of human history, it might have changed numerous times during great ape evolution and beforehand."

I agree, mutation rates are variable, and conclusions based on a constant rate will be wrong.

Notice how different papers find opposite effects (faster mutation rates in Africans, or in Europeans), and don't quite understand the reason!

---

Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2026 by Austin Whittall © 

The Davenport Tablets

In a recent post about the mounds and mound-builders of the United States, a culture that flourished in the Midwest and Eastern USA from ~3,500 BC to 1,500 AD, I mentioned the famous Davenport Tablets. Today's post will explore them and their significance.

The tablets can be seen online, in zoomable images at the Peabody Museum website. Below is the tablet that has the engraving of a "mammoth" (marked by the black arrow).

Davenport Tablet #2. Peabody Museum

Davenport Iowa and its Academy of Natural Sciences

Charles Edwin Putnam, lived in the town of Davenport, Iowa, on the Mississippi River. He was one of the town's most important citizens, a successful lawyer, president of the local bank, and wealthy. He established a local scientific academy, and with his family, supported it. Nowadays known as The Putnam Museum and Science Center, the institution was originally established on December 14, 1867, as the Davenport Academy of Natural Sciences. You can visit the museum, which houses the tablets, in Davenport: 1717 W. 12th St. Davenport, Iowa. Website.

The Academy published a journal with the discoveries of local and regional amateur scientists who reported their findings. Among them was Reverend Jacob Gass, a member of the Academy, who collected native artifacts and dug (with the unscientific methods of the 1870s) into the Indian Mounds looking for human burials and objects.

Gass had recovered two dark slate tablets covered with engravings from a site with several mounds very close to Davenport. One of them had what appeared to be "text" and the other had depictions of people and animals, including a large, stout one that looks like a mammoth or an elephant. The discovery was published in the Davenport Academy's journal and generated quite a controversy regarding the mound-builders and their advanced civilization, that was also ancient, because it co-existed with mammoths.

For most of the 19th century, scholars considered the contemporary Native Americans as inferior, lacking writing, and metal-working skills, they were considered a late arrival on the American scene. People that couldn't have created the sophisticated engineering works like the mounds. These were the work of an advanced civilization, and the tablets with symbols and text were proof that backed this notion.

The tablets were controversial, with many formal scholars considering them a hoax, while others, and the general population deeming them genuine. Nowadays we know that Native Americans built the mounds, and that the tablets are a forgery. It seems that some members of the Davenport Academy, unknown to Putnam and Gass, planted the tablets in a mound to pull a prank on the arrogant German reverend.

The Tablets

The Bureau of Ethnology, led by Cyrus Thomas, attacked the tablets, ridiculing the local amateur archaeologists and their Academy. Note that Thomas was part of a Federal funded institution, and as such was in a power struggle with local, state based competitors. In 1884 Henry Henshaw published hsi work, Animal Carvings from Mounds of the Mississippi Valley reached the Davenport Academy of Natural Sciences. Its author, Henry Henshaw, cast doubt on the authenticity of artifacts discovered by Gass, including the elephant pipes and questions them politely: "Bearing in mind the many attempts at archaeological frauds that recent years have brought to light, archaeologists have a right to demand that objects which afford a basis for such important deductions as the coeval life of the Mound-Builder and the mastodon, should be above the slightest suspicion not only in respect to their resemblances, but as regards the circumstances of discovery. If they are not above suspicion, the science of archaeology can better afford to wait for further and more certain evidence than to commit itself to theories which may prove stumbling-blocks to truth until that indefinite time when future investigations shall show their illusory nature."

Charles Putnam felt that his Academy was under attack and wrote a short book, published in 1885 "A vindication of the authenticity of the elephant pipes and inscribed tablets in the museum of the Davenport Academy of Natural Sciences, from the accusations of the Bureau of Ethnology, of the Smithsonian Institution" he describes the discovery of the tablets, and supports their authenticity as well as the integrity and honor of the local, amateur archaeologists:

"...the first two were found in what is known as Mound No. 3, on the Cook farm, adjoining the city of Davenport. The principal discoverer was Rev. Jacob Cass, a Lutheran clergyman, then settled over a congregation in Davenport. In this exploration Mr. Gass was assisted by L. H. Willrodt and H. S. Stoltzenau, with five other persons who were accidentally present during the opening of the mound. The discovery was made on January 10th, 1877
...
The third inscribed tablet was found on January 30th, 1878, in Mound No. 11, in the group of mounds on Cook’s farm, in the suburbs of Davenport, and in close proximity to the mound wherein the other tablets were discovered. That indefatigable explorer. Rev. J. Gass, was also present during these further researches, and had for his assistants John Hume and Charles E. Harrison, both members of the Academy, and well and favorably known in this community. The circumstances of this discovery, as narrated by Mr. Harrison, are published in the Proceedings of the No suspicions whatever attach to this discovery, and the well-attested facts connected therewith estab¬ lish beyond reasonable doubt, that, whether more or less ancient, the tablet was deposited at the making of the mound..."

Putnam was honestly defending his Academy and vouching for the integrity of its members.

Below is the layout of the Davenport site, mounds and an engraving of a tablet:

The Tablets

A good description of the Davenport Tablets can be found in the work of Stephen Peet, 1892, The Mound Builders: Their Works and Relics, where on page 45 he describes the tablets as follows:

"The large tablet is twelve inches long, from eight to ten inches wide, and was made of dark coal slate. Fig. 22. The smaller tablet was about square, seven inches in length, and had holes bored in the upper corners, and is called the calendar stone, as it contained twelve signs with three concentric circles, though the signs do not in the least resemble the Mexican or Maya cal endars. The larger tablet contained a picture on either side, one representing a cremation scene, the other a hunting scene. The cremation scene "suggests human sacrifices." A number of bodies are represented as lying upon the back, and the fire is burning upon the summit of the mound, while the so-called Mound-builders are gathered in a ring around the mound. Above the cremation scene is an arch formed by three crescent lines, representing the horizon, and in the crescent and above it are hieroglyphics, some of which resemble the common figures and numbers, and the various letters of the alphabet; there are nintyeight figures, twenty-four in one, twenty in the other, and fiftyfour above the lines. The peculiar features of this picture are these : A rude class of Mound-builders are practicing human sacrifice, while the images of the sun and moon are both in the sky, one containing a face, the other circles and rays. Above these is the arch of the heavens, with Roman numerals and Arabic figures scattered through and above it. The figure eight is repeated three times, the letter O repeated seven times. With these familiar characters are ethers which resemble letters of ancient alphabets, either Phoenician or Hebrew, and only a few characters such as the natives generally used. The hunting scene is the one which is supposed to contain the mastodon. In this picture there is a large tree which occupies the foreground, beneath the tree are animals, human beings and fishes scattered indiscriminately about, a few skeletons of trees in the back ground. One of the human figures has a hat on, which resembles a modern hat, for it has a rim. "Of the animal kingdom thirty individuals are represented, divided as follows, viz: Man, eight: bison, four; deer, four; birds, three; hares, three; big horn or Rocky Mountain goat, one; fish, one; prairie wolf, one; nondescript animals, three. Of these latter one defies recognition, but the other two, apparently of the same species, are the most interesting figures of the whole group. These animals are supposed by different critics to represent the moose, tapers or mastodons." The trunk and tusks are omitted from this animal, and even the shape hardly resembles the elephant, certainly not enough to prove that the Mound-builders were contemporaneous with the mastodon.* The third discovery is the one the most relied upon. This discovery was also made by the Rev. Mr. Gass, in the spring of 1880, several years after the discovery of the tablets.
* Another tablet was found by Mr. Charles Harrison in 1878, who is president of the society, in mound No. 11 of the some group. In the mound was a pile of stones two and one-half by three feet in size, which might be called an altar, about three feet below the surface; the slab fourteen inches square, and beneath the slab was a vault, and in the vault was the tablet, with four flint arrows on the tablet; a shell and a quartz crystal. The figures on this tablet were a circle which represented the sun, a it representing the moon, and a human figure astride the circle, colored bright ochre red, all of them very rudely drawn. The figure is supposed to represent the sun god. The figure eight and other hierooglyphics are upon this tablet. Above the hieroglyphics was a bird and an animal, and between them a copper axe. This tablet is as curious as the one discovered by Mr. Gass.

The third tablet described above is shown below (Source):

In an exchange published in the scientific journal Science, Cyrus Thomas lambasted the tablets (see The Davenport Tablets, Science vol.7, No. 160 (Feb. 26, 1886), pp. 189-190) as an example he cites other critics, like the Rev. J. P. MacLean who pointed out that the symbols were forgeries: "among the cabalistic characters, the word 'town' stands out in bold lines, and the figare '8' appears in rude shape among other marks. The picture of a face occurs in the sun, resembling the face of a European. The artist has overdone his work: it needs no further investigation."

Eventually Thomas prevailed and the tablets were classified as a forgery.

Marshall McKusick published his research in a book, Pipes and Tablets: The Davenport Conspiracy in 1970. He reports that some Academy members were suspicious and the rumor was that these objects were produced in the basement of the Academy building. They were made as a practical joke, a hoax, aimed at Rev. Gass. According to McKusick, Putnam, the Academy's persiden was unaware of this, and he, single handedly fought to protect the reputation of the institution. In a second publication in 1991 (Tge Davenport conspiracy Revisited), McKusick interviewed a member of the Academy, James Willis Bollinger who had said that "We had no respect for Reverend Gass because he was the biggest windjammer and liar and everyone knew he was. We wanted to shut him up once and for all." Among those involved were Edwin, the brother of Jacob Gass. Alfred Blumer, Jacob's brother-in-law was also part of it. The three of them also sold the artifacts they unearthed so there was a monetary reason for forging mound objects. One of the elephant-pipes is said to have been carved by John Gaham, the janitor of the Academy!

However, even as late as 1910, the locals defended the tablets. The History of Davenport and Scott County, Iowa by Harry E. Downer describes the controversy as a "round-the-world discussion of a quarter of a century ago" and goes on to describe the pipes and the "four inscribed tablets" housed in the Academy museum.

---

Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2026 by Austin Whittall © 

Cinmar site 22 kya (beneath the waves)

A scallop trawler ship called "Cinmar" dredged-up and recovered some prehistoric remains and an eight-inch stone blade (20 cm) back in 1970 while dredging in the Atlantic Ocean 47 miles (75 km) from the shores of Virginia, USA. They were sitting on the continental shelf 250 ft (76 m) below sea level. The mastodon tusk and stone blade were divided by the captain of the ship, Thurston Shawn, among its crew. Years later, in 2008, a geology student, Darrin Lowery, came across them in Gwynn's Island Museum, Virginia. They were dated as being at least 22,000 years old. (Source).

As with all old, pre-Clovis artifacts, it drewn fire from the Clovis first supporters. It was also used by those supporting the Solutrean migration (from Europe to America across the North Atlantic Ocean) during the Last Glacial Maximum.

An interesting analysis can be found in Stafford, Lowery, Bradley al., 2014 that describes the stone tool.

The Mastodon remains were carbon dated to 22,760 RCYBP so the stone tool was estimated to be of the same age. The tool itself is a bifacial rhyolite implement shaped like a laurel leaf (lanceolate) and this is why the Solutreans like it, because this shape is quite unusual. It shows that there were people hunting mammoths on the continental shelf during the Last Glacial Maximum, which was exposed at that time due to lower sea levels.

The rhyolite rock used to make the blade has been analyzed and its source was traced to the South Mountain Catoctin rocks of Pennsylvania, spefcifically to a spot close to Tom's Creek Railroad Tressle. This is 320 km (200 mi) from the Cinmar spot and reveals that these people had been there long enough to trek inland from Chesapeake Bay to find the stone quarry.

An interesting conclusion found in this paper is that the scarcity of site dated between 23 and 15,000 years ago suggests that they may be submerged. The coastal habitat, now underwater would have supported a rich ecosystem that provided these first inhabitants with plenty of food. When it became submerged due to the ice melt of glacial ice at the end of the Last Ice Age, some 14,500 years ago, and with a growing human population, they spread inland into the interior of the continent, resulting in the more abundant Clovis sites.

Solutreans

Cinmar, Beringian and Solutrean routes. Source.

I have discussed the Solutrean people theory in previous posts (white supremacists like it, as it proves a first European settlment in America!) and mentioned that it is upheld by those who believe the X2 mtDNA haplogroup or the R haplogroup in the Y-chromosome found in America came from Europe; I don't support it. However, Stafford et al., are promote it:

"It is important to note that the manufacturing technology used to produce the Chesapeake Bay bifaces and the tool types themselves reflect the same technology as that used by the Solutrean people of southwestern Europe during the LGM (Stanford and Bradley 2012). Although more evidence is needed, it is not beyond the realm of possibility to hypothesize that this early settlement of the East Coast of North America resulted from a European Paleolithic maritime tradition."

The authors point out that the lanceolate shape of the point is unusual in this region, and they included the folowing image in the paper:

Differente lanceolate tools. Stafford et al.

I must point out that Dennis Stafford co-authored a book with Bruce Bradley, with a revealing title: Across Atlantic Ice: The Origin of America's Clovis Culture. So we know where they stand when it comes to the Solutrean hypothesis.

Since we only have the version given by the trawler's captain and crew about the finding, and can't confirm if the bones and tool came from the same spot, or even pinpoint its location exactly, there are some doubts about the finding. Metin I. Eren, Matthew T. Boulanger, and Michael J. O'Brien, 2015 are very skeptical and question the story of its discovery, the uncertainty of the site's location (it was dredged up from the sea) and conclude " the reported inconsistencies in the blade's history, there is no confirmable evidence currently available that demonstrates that it was even dredged up by the Cinmar. Thus, even in the event that the same, original underwater mastodon site is eventually empirically proven to be re-located at some point in the future, this re-discovery would not provide context for, or validate, the stone blade's association with it."

---

Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2026 by Austin Whittall © 

Elephants or Mammoths in Native American Art

Paleoindians coexisted with mammoths, and hunted them until (for reasons still unknown) these gigantic hairy elephant-looking creatures died out some 10,000 years ago. Mammoths managed to survive a bit longer in the Wrangel Island on the north coast of Northeastern Siberia, very close to Bering Strait (see map) until around 3,700 years ago (Source) 800 years after the great pyramid of Cheops was built in Egypt. And these Wrangel creatures are said to be the last mammoths on earht.

Ingram and "elephants" in the 1560s

In a previous post mentioned the account of David Ingram, who said he had seen elephants while he walked all the way from Mexico to Nova Scotia, Canada, as a marooned sailor in the 1560s, and wondered if what he saw was a group of surviving mammoths, creatures unknown to Ingram, but elephant-like.

What do we know about the interactions of humans and mammoths in the Americas? Could they have survived until the sixteenth century?

Mound-builder and Elephants or Mammoths

While reading about mounds and mound-builders, I came across some interesting images in old, late 1800s publications, depicting an elephant or mammoth-like creature. Below are two images from that period, depicting objects that were discovered inside mounds in North America.

The first report was published in 1883, in Animal Carvings from Mounds of the Mississippi Valley, by Henry W. Henshaw. It has some interesting text about a mound shaped like an elephant! See the image below.

Elephant Mound, Grand County, Wisconsin. Fig. 27 in Henshaw's book

The author is skeptical that the mound actually represents a mammoth, I will quote him in full:

"THE "ELEPHANT" MOUND.
By far the most important of the animal mounds, from the nature of the deductions it has given rise to, is the so-called "Elephant Mound," of Wisconsin.
By its discovery and description the interesting question was raised as to the contemporaneousness of the Mound-Builder and the mastodon, an interest which is likely to be further enhanced by the more recent bringing to light in Iowa of two pipes carved in the semblance of the same animal, as well as a tablet showing two figures asserted by some archæologists to have been intended for the same animal.
Although both the mound and pipes have been referred in turn to the peccary, the tapir, and the armadillo, it is safe to exclude these animals from consideration. It is indeed perhaps more likely that the ancient inhabitants of the Upper Mississippi Valley were autoptically acquainted with the mastodon than with either of the above-named animals, owing to their southern habitat.
Referring to the possibility that the mastodon was known to the Mound-Builders, it is impossible to fix with any degree of precision the time of its disappearance from among living animals. Mastodon bones have been exhumed from peat beds in this country at a depth which, so far as is proved by the rate of deposition, implies that the animal may have been alive within five hundred years. The extinction of the mastodon, geologically speaking, was certainly a very recent event, and, as an antiquity of upwards of a thousand or more years has been assigned to some of the mounds, it is entirely within the possibilities that this animal was living at the time these were thrown up, granting even that the time of their erection has been overestimated. It must be admitted, therefore, that there are no inherent absurdities in the belief that the Mound-Builders were acquainted with the mastodon. Granting that they may have been acquainted with the animal, the question arises, what proof is there that they actually were? The answer to this question made by certain archæologists is—the Elephant Mound, of Wisconsin.
Recalling the fact that among the animal mounds many nondescript shapes occur which cannot be identified at all, and as many others which have been called after the animals they appear to most nearly resemble, carry out their peculiarities only in the most vague and [Pg 154] general way, it is a little difficult to understand the confidence with which this effigy has been asserted to represent the mastodon; for the mound (a copy of which as figured in the Smithsonian Annual Report for 1872 is here given) can by no means be said to closely represent the shape, proportions, and peculiarities of the animal whose name it bears. In fact, it is true of this, as of so many other of the effigies, the identity of which must be guessed, that the resemblance is of the most vague and general kind, the figure simulating the elephant no more closely than any one of a score or more mounds in Wisconsin, except in one important particular, viz, the head has a prolongation or snout-like appendage, which is its chief, in fact its only real, elephantine character. If this appendage is too long for the snout of any other known animal, it is certainly too short for the trunk of a mastodon. Still, so far as this one character goes, it is doubtless true that it is more suggestive of the mastodon than of any other animal. No hint is afforded of tusks, ears, or tail, and were it not for the snout the animal effigy might readily be called a bear, it nearly resembling in its general make-up many of the so-called bear mounds figured by Squier and Davis from this same county in Wisconsin. The latter, too, are of the same gigantic size and proportions.
If it can safely be assumed that an animal effigy without tusks, without ears, and without a tail was really intended to represent a mastodon, it would be stretching imagination but a step farther to call all the large-bodied, heavy-limbed animal effigies hitherto named bears, mastodons, attributing the lack of trunks, as well as ears, tusks, and tails, to inattention to slight details on the part of the mound artist.
It is true that one bit of good, positive proof is worth many of a negative character. But here the one positive resemblance, the trunk of the supposed elephant, falls far short of an exact imitation, and, as the other features necessary to a good likeness of a mastodon are wholly wanting, is not this an instance where the negative proof should be held sufficient to largely outweigh the positive?"

The Elephant Pipes

The same author mentions "pipes": "As regards likeness to the mastodon, the pipes before alluded to, copies of which as given in Barber's articles on Mound Pipes in American Naturalist for April, 1882, Figs. 17 and 18, are here presented, while not entirely above criticism, are much nearer what they have been supposed to be than the mound just mentioned." See the image below.

Elephant pipes from Iowa. Figs. 28 & 29 in Henshaw's book

Henshaw points out that neither pipe has tusks, and ivory tusks of mammoths would have been noticed by the natives, who used it for many different purposes. They also lack tails. He also notes that the origin of the pipes is suspicious:

"As the manner of discovery of such relics always forms an important part of their history, the following account of the pipes as communicated to Mr. Barber by Mr. W. H. Pratt, president of the Davenport Academy (American Naturalist for April, 1882, pp. 275, 276), is here subjoined:

The first elephant pipe, which we obtained (Fig. 17) a little more than a year ago, was found some six years before by an illiterate German farmer named Peter Mare, while planting corn on a farm in the mound region, Louisa County, Iowa. He did not care whether it was elephant or kangaroo; to him it was a curious 'Indian stone,' and nothing more, and he kept it and smoked it. In 1878 he removed to Kansas, and when he left he gave the pipe to his brother-in-law, a farm laborer, who also smoked it. Mr. Gass happened to hear of it, as he is always inquiring about such things, hunted up the man and borrowed the pipe to take photographs and casts from it. He could not buy it. The man said his brother-in-law gave it to him and as it was a curious thing—he wanted to keep it. We were, however, unfortunate, or fortunate, [Pg 157]enough to break it; that spoiled it for him and that was his chance to make some money out of it. He could have claimed any amount, and we would, as in duty bound, have raised it for him, but he was satisfied with three or four dollars. During the first week in April, this month, Rev. Ad. Blumer, another German Lutheran minister, now of Genesee, Illinois, having formerly resided in Louisa County, went down there in company with Mr. Gass to open a few mounds, Mr. Blumer being well acquainted there. They carefully explored ten of them, and found nothing but ashes and decayed bones in any, except one. In that one was a layer of red, hard-burned clay, about five feet across and thirteen inches in thickness at the center, which rested upon a bed of ashes one foot in depth in the middle, the ashes resting upon the natural undisturbed clay. In the ashes, near the bottom of the layer, they found a part of a broken carved stone pipe, representing some bird; a very small beautifully formed copper 'axe,' and this last elephant pipe (Fig. 18). This pipe was first discovered by Mr. Blumer, and by him, at our earnest solicitation, turned over to the Academy.

It will be seen from the above that the same gentleman was instrumental in bringing to light the two specimens constituting the present supply of elephant pipes."

Another Account about the Elephant Pipes

The book "The mound builders; their work and relics" by Stephen D. Peet, published in 1892 shows another image of the "elephant" pipe of Fig. 29, it can be seen as Fig. 15 on page 13. and the story of its discovery is given, as follows; notice that Peed does not doubt that the pipes are genuine: "In the Davenport Academy there are two pipes made in imitation of the elephant or mastodon. One of these pipes is said to have been taken out from the depths of a mound in Louisa County, Iowa. A German clergyman, Rev. A. Blumer, having first discovered it, handed it to Rev. J. E. Gass, his companion in exploration. It is unreasonable to doubt the genuineness of this find, even if the re markable discoveries which were made by the latter gentleman have been discredited. A second elephant pipe (Fig. 13), which had been discovered in a corn-field by a German farmer by the name of Myers, after wards came into the hands of Mr. Gass."

On page 46 he provides more information: (highlight is mine):

"The third discovery is the one the most relied upon. This discovery was also made by the Rev. Mr. Gass, in the spring of 1880, several years after the discovery of the tablets [more on the tablets below]. Mr. Gass was accompanied by Rev. Mr. Blcomer. A group of ten mounds, arranged in irregular rows, was situated along the bluffs overlooking the Mississippi bottoms west of Muscatine Slough [in Iowa, see Google map]. The first mound opened proved to be a sacrificial or cremation mound, situated on the extreme edge of a prominent bluff, having ravines on both sides. It was a flat cone, thirty feet in diameter, elevation three feet. Near the surface was a layer of hard clay, eighteen inches thick; below this a layer of burned red clay, as hard as brick, one foot thick; under this a bed of ashes, thirteen inches deep. In the ashes were found a portion of a carved stone pipe, bird form, by Mr. H. Haas; a very small copper axe by Mr. Gass ; a carved stone pipe, entire, representing an elephant, which, Mr, Bloomer says, "was first discovered by myself." The other mounds of the group were explored, and contained ashes and bones, but no relics. Mr. Gass makes no report of finding the elephant pipe, but leaves that to Mr. Bloomer. During the same year he discovered, in the mounds in Mercer County, Illinois, several Mound-builders pipes one representing a lizard, one a turtle, another a snake coiled around an upright cylinder and covered with some very thin metallic coating. Mounds on the Illlinois side, near Moline, and Copper Creek and Pine Creek, had previously yielded to Mr. Gass carved stone pipes, one of them representing a porcupine, anothera howling wolf. The pipes were composed of some dark-colored slate or variety of talc, thus showing that the Mound-builders of the region were in the habit of imitating the animals which they saw, making effigies of them on their pipes."

The pipe shown in Henshaw's Fig. 28 is reproduced here too, as Fig. 17 on page 41, it is the one discovered by Myers in a corn field. Peet points out (p. 47) that the pipes lack tusks because they would be difficult to carve, and if carved, they would have broken off easily.

Peet and the Elephant Mound

Peet also mentions the elephant mound in Chapter III, with the same image posted further up. He escribes how the "Elephant Mound" was discovered, and surveyed by Jared Warner in 1874, accompanied by J.C. Orr and J.C. Scott. It was located near Wyalusing, close to the Mississippi River. It was Warner who drew the image shown further up. Peet was not convinced that it was actually an elephant, probably a bear (see page 42): "'The head is large, and the proportion of the whole so symmetrical that the mound well deserves the name. The mound was in a shallow valley between two sandy ridges, and was only about eight feet above high water.' There are many mounds in this section of country in the shape of birds, bears, deer and foxes. We would say that the effigy of the bear, which is very common here, and which was the totem of the clan formerly dwelling here, has exactly the same shape as the so-called elephant, but is not so large and lacks the proboscis. The projection at the nose called the proboscis is not really one, but is the result of the washing of the soil. It was a mere prolongation of the head, had no curve, did not even reach so far as the feet, and can be called a proboscis only by a stretch of imagination."

The Davenport Tablets

Interestingly, Peet mentions that Gass also unearthed tablets with inscriptions on them, dug from mounds! These, Peet deems to be fake, and I agree with him. See the images below (p. 44-45), which transcribe the "text" found on the tablets:

Rev. Gass explored some mounds near the city of Davenport, Iowa (map), on the bank of the Mississippi River in 1874. In Mound number three, he discovered the tablets. The mound contained two graves, and was excavated in 1877. Gass, accompanied by seven men, two of which were students dug and close to the bottom, they found two tablets, with inscriptions.

This finding is surely a fraud, not one committed by Gass, but by another person (or more than one person), who planted them in the mound for him to find. The tablets deserve their own post, which I have published here on April 23rd, 2026).

Mammoths and Paleoindian Rock Art

We do know now that mammoths were depicted in rock art, and they have been discovered in different parts of America by serious researchers. For instance, in Bluff, Utah, US, according to Malotki and Wallace, 2011, there are mammoth images that are ~11 to 13,000 years old.

Purdy et al., 2009 reported an engraving depicting a mammoth, on mammoth ivory, 13 kya, found at Vero Beach, Florida. This is the first, and only one found in America (in Europe, there are plenty of them), and the oldest artistic object in America. It is pictured below (Source)

Further afield, in the Amazon region of Serranía de la Lindosa, Colombia, in South America, Iriarte et al., 2022 have identified rock paintings that depict megafaunal animals, including proboscideans (Gomphotheriidae) and dated to 12.6 kya. See it below:

(a) Gomphothere painting at La Lindosa: 1. proboscis; 2. fingers; 3. flared ears?; 4. moderately domed head. (b) Artistic reconstruction (Mike Keesey). Fig. 4 in Iriarte et al., 2022

Holly Oak Mammoth Pendant: Far too recent

This controversial object was discovered in 1864 by Hilborne T. Cresson, who worked at Harvard's Peabody Museum as an assistant in the archaeology section and W.L. Suralt. Cresson came forward in 1889 announcing that he found it near Holly Oak railway depot in Delaware, US, in a layer of peat. It is incised on the shell of a marine snail (Busycon sinistrum), and depicts a woolly mammoth.

It was considered to be a fake, as it looked very similar to an engraving discovered in France a few years earlier. However, it was reassesed in 1976 in an article published in Science (making its cover, see image below) authored by John C. Kraft and Ronald A. Thomas, they found that the "carvings appear to be aged in asimilar manner to the remainder of the shell."

This meant that it wasn't an old shell recently incised as a hoax! The authors even suggested it could be as old as 40,000 years based on the age of the sediments at Holly Oak.

But the controversy lingers on. A few years later, Griffin et al., 1988 dated the shell to 1,500 years BP, and discarded it as a hoax because the authors stated that there were no mammoths alive in America at that time.

Contemporary Mammoths

This leads me to ask: Isn't the 1500-year-old pendant proof that someone saw and depicted a mammoth at that time? And is proof of its existence? Isn't science built on evidence like this? or, is it based on preconceptions like "mammoths died 4000 years ago and that is final".

This brings me back to David Ingram, who claimed seeing "elephants" in the 1560s. So, why couldn't there have been a pocket of extant mammoths in Delaware in 500 AD? They were seen and depicted as an incised image on a shell.

There are some Native American myths about mammoth-like creatures (Jandác̃ek, 2018) like the "Stiff-Legged Bear - Katci-to-wαck'w... it has skin, which is Pachyderm, resistant to arrows. It is believed by many experts, e.g. Strong (1934:81) to be based on the mammoth and the mastodon" Citing: Strong, W. D. (1934). North American traditions suggesting a knowledge of a mammoth. American Anthropologist, 36, 81. https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1934.36.1.02a00060 🔒

I found another source quoting Strong "Naskapi, an Algonquin tribe living in Labrador at the time, speaks of a monster with large, round footprints, "a big head, large ears and teeth, and a long nose" and was very large overall. These characteristics could not be solely observed from fossilized remains, indicating that a prehistoric memory persists and is contained in this oral narrative - making it a myth of historical traditions" (the natives actually saw the mammoths!)

Other sources mention that the Salish of British Columbia have a mammoth song and a mammoth dance. The Osage people describe sloths, giant bears, dire wolves and mammoths battling each other (See: O'Donnell, J. (2024). Fountain Creek: Big Lessons from a Little River. United States: Torrey House Press). However, authors like Mayor, 2007 while mentioning mammoth myths among Delaware and Shawnee natives considers these, and the Osage "monster battle" myth as constructions built when the natives came across fossil bones of megafaunal animals. They were not contemporaries, they just happened to find fossil bones.

Less serious sources like this creationist one Mammoth Trapping in the Yukon: A review of Northern Tutchone oral history evidence supporting the survival of Woolly Mammoths in the Yukon Territory within the past 1,000 years by Johnson, 2019, published with the intention of promoting the Creationist pseudoscientific viewpoint, offer an insight into other native myths (leaving aside creationism), and the recent survival of mammoths in northern North America.

---

Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2026 by Austin Whittall © 

30 ky old bone tool from Tule Springs (a cover-up?)

In my recent post about Clovis First, I mentioned that Vance Haynes had assumed the role of publication gatekeeper and watchdogs to prevent anti-Clovis-First scholars from publishing research that could undermine that theory. I have found some threads in X (twitter) and in forums mentioning conspiracy theories about scientists damaging proof of pre-Clovis sites, but I am not convinced yet, that those allegations are true. What I do know for certain is that Vance Haynes did not believe in an early peopling of America. Today's post looks into a finding that he seems to have ignored due to its old age, because he discarded it, considering it far too old to fit into his neat Clovis First hypothesis!

Below is the quote from the following source: National Park Service (NPS) History Collection, NPS Paleontology Program Records (HFCA 2465). Vincent Santucci’s NPS Oral History Project, 2016-2024. Vance Haynes. May 10, 2016. Interview conducted by Vincent Santucci et al. page 32. Accessed April 10, 2026. (VH is Vance Haynes, and KS is the interviewer):

Quote begins.

VH: To Dick's dying day there were a couple of bone things that were tools.
KS: Mhmm.
VH: In fact, he illustrates them. And because they were –they were polished they were spirally fractured and polished. But I, you know one of the things I pointed out was that if they get into the spring conduit—
KS: Right.
VH: —that's exactly what's going to happen to them
KS: Right.
VH: And it's also about this time that I got to know Hibberd who was this—
KS: Right.
VH: —famous paleontologist from Michigan.
KS: Right, right
VH: And Hibbard was working on these springs in Kansas and one of his springs was, this was a Pliocene spring you know.
KS: Mhmm.
VH: And it's just identical to what we were finding out here. And there were even some stone fragments in that thing that were polished. And they're not artifacts, they're Pliocene. So, it's a springs, it's very interesting what springs can do to make things look like artifacts. There's one I didn't put it in the report, because I always going to, write a little separate thing about it. Potential pre-Clovis artifacts from the spring conduit of Tule Springs. There is a, it's a part of a camel bone. I've forgotten which end of it is, but it's broken in such a way that it forms a perfect point. And exposed the inside.
KS: Mhmm.
VH: And it's beautifully braided on all sides, so it looks like a tool. But it came out of a 30,000- year-old conduit. So, there’s just. You can go through the art assemblages from there and pick but these assemblages that do look like tools."

Quote ends.

Context

Vance Haynes had taken part of the Big Dig at Tule Springs, near Las Vegas, Nevada, a National Monument (visit its official website). He unearthed many bones of extinct and extant animals, and of course, Clovis tools starting around 12 kya. Nothing earlier. This led Haynes to believe that the Clovis people were the first to reach the area. Earlier stuff was not even considered.

He seems to argue that Claude W. Hibbard (1905–1973) had found smilar artifacts in his studies in Kansas (maybe in Meade County). Dick, is Richard Shutler (1921-2007), and Vance implies that Dick believed the polished bones were indeed man made!

But Vance is terminant: "it looks like a tool. But it came out of a 30,000- year-old conduit", and added that "they're not artifacts, they're Pliocene" Their age, in his opinion did not allow him to consider them as tools!

Vance decided to defend the Clovis-First theory and published an article in which he states that the polished bones could be either 12-13 ky or 40 ky old, and guess what? He proves they were young, and fitted them into the Clovis theory: "Two bone objects from the Tule Springs site, possibly tools, occurred in ancient sedimentary fill of a small spring outlet-channel remnant. The ancient spring was active more than 40,000 years ago and again 12,000 to 13,000 years ago. The fill and the bone contained therein could be of either age. Chemical and X-ray analysis on bone of the known ages and bone from the fill showed no significant or systematic differences in fluorine, uranium, nitrogen, or phosphate content. On geological grounds, it is concluded that the bone objects are 12,000 to 13,000 years old." Case Closed, Clovis-First saved.

It is relevant to point out that a pre-Clovis age had been assigned to Tule Springs (Richard Shutler, 1965), but this was dismissed by Vance. Shutler had written that Pleistocene animals, burned earth, stone and bone tools had been radiocarbon dated to 23-28 kya at the site (Harrington and Simpson, 1961).

In The archaeology of archaeologists: "Camp Harrington" and the "Big Dig", Tule Springs, Nevada, 1962-1963, Swope, Murrell, and Aldi, report that "A small unifacial scraper was uncovered in a deposit containing camel bone fragments and organic deposits thought to be charcoal, and a sample from the deposit produced a date in excess of 28,000 BP (Fergusson and Libby 1964; Shutler 1967b). The results of Harrington’s subsequent excavations yielded but a single stone tool definitively linked to human activity and the radiocarbon date."

I wonder what happened to the "bone tools" are they in some box in a university?

---

Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2026 by Austin Whittall © 

Pseudo-science Hancock and America's ancient "Lost Civilization"

I recently mentioned the Younger Dryas event that followed the end of the Last Ice Age, that had some significant impacts on the global environment causing cooling in the Northern Hemisphere, and warming in the Southern. It coincided with a critical moment some 12,000 years (12 kya) ago when humans were expanding across America, and filling in the final voids across Eurasia and Oceania. A few millennia later, agriculture would be discovered, and the shift from nomad hunter-gatherers to sedentary farmers would take place, and shape the course of our history. Villages, writing, civilization would soon appear.

There have been different theories trying to explain the cause of the Younger Dryas event. I mentioned them in my post, the impact theory, though criticized, sounds interesting. Catastrophism is rejected by mainstream science due to philosophical reasons. Catastrophic events are unpredictable and cannot be explained by the deterministic methods of hard science. But sometimes a catastrophe takes place: One wiped out dinosaurs 65 million years ago (Mya). The Toba volcano's eruption 50-100 kya is another example. The Deccan Traps lava sheets 65 Mya are just some examples of them.

Hancock and the ancient pre-Dryas Civilization

But, when a wild hypothesis uses one of these events to justify a weird idea, that idea becomes pseudo-scientific. This is precisely what happens in Graham Hancock's book about a pre-Younger Dryas advanced civilization that spanned the world, and thrived tens of thousands of years ago. Hancock proposes that was exterminated by the meteor that provoked the Younger Dryas. (America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization).

In his previous works Hancock describes this civilization as advanced, and its survivors taught primitive people the basics of civilization after the catastrophe.

These advanced people were "Caucasians" and they inspired the "bearded whit men" effigies found in South America (See his Fingerprints of the Gods), which smacks of racism. They also used their mental power to move objects and read minds (telekinesis and telepathy)!! This is almost like Erich von Däniken's Chariots of the Gods from the late 1960s rebooted but using human instead of alien agencies! I have posted critically about "White Indians" and "Bearded men", finding them baseless theories with a hint of racial discrimination.

American native people were smart human beings. They built mounds and mounuments, they discovered agriculture and domesticated animals by themselves, they used script for records, and developed religions, and astronomy (for practical purposes like all civilizations). They developed artistic skills, worked metals and built water craft. We don't need to imagine any advanced civilization teaching them anything. There were no extinct ancient superhumans behind the mound-builders in the U.S. or the Amazonian natives, or common beliefs from these ancients that shaped religions. After all, the human mind is a common factor linking all cultures globally, and its repertoire is rather limited when it comes to religions —sun, moon, lighting, life after death, etc.

But piling speculation upon genuine facts, Hancock's book suggests that: "Recent scientific discoveries show that North America was first peopled at least 130,000 years ago... they are unexplained connections between the spiritual beliefs of the ancient Egyptians and the spiritual beliefs of the mound-builder cultures of North America's Mississippi Valley... The remains of hundreds of gigantic geometrical earthworks have recently been found in the Amazon jungle. They have unexplained resemblances to the equally grand and mysterious earthworks of Ohio, such as the Serpent Mound, and the Newark and High Bank Works, and to other geometrical and astronomical monuments as far afield as Stonhenge in England and Angkor in Cambodia"

Objections

I am no expert, and my blog has plenty of speculation, but I try to be realistic and base my speculation of facts and sound science. But in Hancok's book this is not the case.

Bringing together Stonehenge built 5,000 years ago, and Angkor Wat built 900 years ago, is ridiculous. They are two unrelated structures, one, is a roughly hewn megalithic set of stone circles with a few hundred gigantic rocks built during the Neolithic, the other a temple-citadel with galleries steeples, bass-reliefs and millions of sandstone blocks, by a modern nation contemporary with the Crusades in Europe. They could not be more different.

Regarding Egyptian and mound-builder religions and their similarities. We can only conjecture about the latter. The Egyptions left documents in writing, the mounds lack written evidence. We can only speculate about mounds and alignments pointing at stars, solstices and equinoxes. We know the Mayas had an advanced astronomy, so did the Chinese, does that make them similar to the Egyptians?

Mounds and Mound-builders

The Amazon earthworks are impressive (Watling et al., 2017):

"With ditches up to 11 m wide, 4 m deep, and 100–300 m in diameter, and with some sites having up to six enclosures, the geoglyphs of western Amazonia rival the most impressive examples of pre-Columbian monumental architecture anywhere in the Americas. Excavations of the geoglyphs have shown that they were built and used sporadically as ceremonial and public gathering sites between 2000 and 650 calibrated years before present (BP), but that some may have been constructed as early as 3500–3000 BP. Evidence for their ceremonial function is based on an almost complete absence of cultural material found within the enclosed areas, which suggests they were kept ritually “clean,” alongside their highly formalized architectural forms (mainly circles and squares)—features that distinguish the geoglyphs from similar ditched enclosures in northeast Bolivia. Surprisingly, little is known about who the geoglyph builders were and how and where they lived, as contemporary settlement sites have not yet been found in the region. It is thought that the geoglyph builders were a complex network of local, relatively autonomous groups connected by a shared and highly developed ideological system. Although some have proposed a connection between the geoglyphs and Arawak-speaking societies, the ceramics uncovered from these sites defy a close connection with Saladoid–Barrancoid styles normally associated with this language family, and instead present a complex mixture of distinct local traditions. Furthermore, it is likely that the geoglyphs were used and reused by different culture groups throughout their life spans."

They are a local, regional, trans-cultural phenomenon, unrelated to North American mounds of the U.S.

Serpent Mound was built ~1120 AD (Source) by a local Fort Ancient Culture, and the High Bank Earthworks, built by the local Hopewell Culture 1600 to 2000 years ago (AD 400-1000).

The Amazonian mounds of Colombia are far older. But, there are also more recent mounds, ditches, canals and causeways built between AD 400 and 1400 in the Bolivian savannah of Moxos (Prümers, et al., 2022). It is an area subject to seasonal flooding so the locals built ridges (camellones) to grow crops above the flood level, and channels to drain them. Semiurban, farmland not mounds with religious functionality. Then are the Ecuadorian Amazonian mounds (Rostain et al., 2024) are part of an agricultural society that flourished between 500 BC and 300 to 600 AD, with a road system dozens of kilometers long linking villages, and drainage systems; it was a local (endogenous) development. Finally the Brazilian mounds (Peripato et al., 2023) and earthworks, which may number 10 to 24 thousand in the Amazon region. They are many different types: fortified plaza-villages, roads, drainage systems, geoglyphs, defensive and ceremonial walls, dated to 500 to 1500 AD.

A theory from the 1800s

Hancock's work echoes the publications of the late 1800s, when American scientists studied the earth mounds of East-Central USA and attributed them to an advanced race. They considered the Native Americans lacked the ability and civilization to have built them.

Below is an imaginary scene of "An American Battle Mound" from "Traditions of De-coo-dah..." by William Pidgeon (1858), which, by the way, in its Chapter XXXV mentions "The extinction of the Mound Builders" in which the author discusses geologic factors (the Noachian Flood) that wiped out the antediluvian civilization of mound-builders!!

1800s Ancient American Battle Mound. Frontpiece of the book

Another example of that mindset is the following quote from "Extinct races of America — the mound builders by Charles Morris, 1870: "Abundant evidence has been found of the previous existence throughout a great portion of the territory of the United States, of a race of people much more civilized than the Indians, and differing widely from them in character. This race has left monuments of its existence upon our soil in an intricate system of earthworks, designed for defence, worship, sepulchre, and other unknown purposes..."

Summarizing, Hancock rehashed obsolete ideas from the 1800s about ancient civilizations, barbarian Amerindians, and Noachian Floods, tying them together with Egypt, Tihuanaco, and Asian civilizations. Good material for a gullible public, with a thirst for this type of entertainment.

---

Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2026 by Austin Whittall © 

Another paper on Introgressions (April 2026)

Continuing with the wide variety of introgression / admixture papers published over the past few years, today I add a new preprint (in Biorxiv, and therefore not peer-reviewed) published a few days ago, on April 12, 2026: Inferring hominin history with recurrent gene flow from single unphased genomes and a two-locus statistic. Nicholas W Collier, Simon Gravel, Aaron P Ragsdale. bioRxiv 2026.04.11.717825; doi: https://doi.org/10.64898/2026.04.11.717825

Through the use of a very particular statistical model (described at the beginning of the paper, and well over my statistical abilities to understand), and genetic analysis of the autosomal DNA, the authors suggest a population structure and admixture, and population sizes for modern humans, Neanderthals, Denisovans, and super-archaics that mix to and fro over the past million years. The paper assumes "a fixed mutation rate of 1.3 × 10−8 per bp per generation and a generation time of 29 years" (I have previously posted about mutation rate, its variability, and generation times and the combined effect of them on calculating timelines.

The paper reports the following events and dates:

• Neandertal-Denisovan Common ancestor or ND lived from 779 to 726 kya and lasted for ~50.000 years.
• Ancestral Neanderthals or AN that around 123 kya split into Altai people in Siberia - who later became extinct, and the Western Neandrthals or WN
• Anatomically Modern Humans or AMH introgressed into AN 250 kya ago, and 110 kya into the western Neanderthal (WN) group, which later evolved into the Croatian Vindija and Chagyrskaya (Siberia) lineages.
• Denisovans received gene flow from a ghost lineage, a "Superarchaic" S that may be Homo erectus, it had split from our ancestors 2 million years ago.
• They reckon that the Ust’Ishim people from East Central Siberia dated to around 45 ky were the first humans in Eurasia to split from the other branches after the Out of Africa Event.

The arrows in the chart show the introgression: "broken one-headed arrows denote instantaneous gene flow events; solid double-headed arrows denote continuous gene flow." The percentages, and population sizes (N_e) are also represented:

Figure 6: Early hominin history in Eurasia with recurrent gene flow. From Nicholas W Collier, Simon Gravel, Aaron P Ragsdale, 2026.

The timeline is the following:

TND→AMH (ky) AMH–ND split time 798 CI: 748 – 827
TAN→Den (ky) AN–Denisova split time 688 CI: 639 – 734
TWN→Alt (ky) WN–Altai split time 123 CI: 117 – 137
TCha→Vin (ky) Chagyrskaya–Vindija split time 60.5 CI: 57.3 – 67.7
TYor→OOA (ky) Yoruba–OOA split time 56.9 CI: 53.6 – 60
TOOA→BE (ky) OOA–BE split time 54.7 CI: 49.7 – 57.6
TLos→Stu (ky) Loschbour→Stuttgart admixture time 29.4 CI: 13.2 – 35.9

The authors conclude that "Using these advances, we inferred a demographic model that broadly explained observed H2 patterns and integrated major supported features in hominin evolution, including recurrent interbreeding between Neanderthals and AMH, introgression from a distantly-related, unsampled lineage to Denisovans, and population structure in western Eurasian AMH."

There is no Denisovan to AMH admixture in this model, it seems to only focus on Northern and Western Eurasians, and does not consider Eastern, Southern or Southeastern Asians and Oceanians.

Effective Populations

I found the Effective population sizes to be of interest (the N_e). As you can see, the Ancient basal root at the top of the image (A) has a large population from which the Superarchaics (S), the modern humans (AMH) split from and conserve a large population size, the ancestor of Neanderthals and Denisovans (ND) has a tiny population and remain that size, so do the N, Denisovans, and the original Out of Africa migration group (bottleneck). The Yoruba people retain a large population.

The paper says that the original Ancestral population had an N_e of 16500 individuals (CI: 15900 – 17300) and then it says "We fixed the effective size of the Superarchaic lineage (S) to 20,000" So the superarchaics splitting from the Ancestral line into Eurasia didn't suffer a bottleneck? Why?

Yet the other groups splitting from the Ancestral group did! The authors explain this large Superarchaic population size as follows: "We justified fixing the population size of S with the observation that changing the effective size of a ghost lineage which makes a small ancestry contribution to a sampled lineage has a negligible effect on E[H2]." So, their model and formulation allows these unrealistic assumptions.

The upper part of the image further down, shows how the Superarchaic introgression into Denisovans affects the population sizes and dates, their model calculates an outcome with a minor impact on effective populations or the timelines.

Interestingly, they note that small effective population sizes may be an artifact, because they can be "plausibly explained by geographic population structure. With spatial structure, recent ancestors are expected to live in closer proximity, and to therefore have a higher probability of sharing parents, than ancient ancestors. Strong structure therefore causes recent coalescence rates to be larger than ancient ones,a pattern which is interpreted as a small recent effective size in a panmictic model."

The paper also notes that "using a lower mutation rate inflated effective size and time parameters, while a higher rate diminished them." They show tables with the effects of different mutation rates as can be seen in the lower part of the image below. The image shows the effects of Superarchaic introgression into Denisovans and the effect of different mutation rates on Ages and N_e of the hominin clades. The original can be seen in tables S8 and S9 in the Supplementary Information of this paper:

The impact of a slower mutation rate can be seen in the older split between ND and our lineage and an older ND split into Denisovans and Neanderthals, but does not affect on more recent events. The impact of mutation rates on the effective population size (N_e) is also variable, some populations have a bigger effective population (A, AMH, Altai, Vindija, Chagyrskaya, Denisovan) while others smaller (ND, Yoruba).

I have already posted about mutation rates and how it impacts on N_e and heterozygosity, and mentioned the same effect reported by the authors of this paper: For a given heterozygosity, lower mutation rates increase effective population size. I also posted about the effect of mutation rates on dating splits, lower rates lead to deeper (older) split dates.

However, this paper does not explain why the same mutation rate affects N_e in opposite ways (there is a complex explanation about their model in the Appendix that mentions some effects on the Effective Population size). It does admit that the model, like all models is a simplification of reality: "... we made many approximations to simplify our models. We treated populations as discrete entities, with random mating, piecewise-constant sizes, and instantaneous divergence. Some of these assumptions allow us to model the evolution of HR statistics, while others are useful for formally testing tractable demographic models. Of course, the true evolutionary history includes unmodeled populations, continuously fluctuating population sizes, population structure induced by the spatial distribution of individuals, and variable migration rates... We also made a number of simplifying biological assumptions. We assumed that the genome-wide average germline mutation rate was constant across all lineages throughout the modeled period... We also assumed a constant generation time for all lineages throughout the studied period."

Interesting work.

Introgression Index

Visit my index post, with all the introgression posts in one single place.

---

Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2026 by Austin Whittall ©