Topper site is located in Allendale County, South Carolina, US (see it in Google Maps). It was named after a local who showed it to Albert C. Goodyear, as a chert quarry, and a good spot to look for paleo-Indian stone tools. Goodyear first excavated the site in 1986, and he recovered Clovis-style tools there in the 1990s.
Digging Deeper
Reflecting the mindset of that time (which still prevails), Goodyear said that after hitting the Clovis stone points roughly 3 feet (1 m) below the surface, the dig stopped. After all, there were no people in America before the Clovis arrived (How many times have I written that American archaeologists don't dig deep enough to find older evidence of people in America?)
Goodyear is quoted as saying: "Back then, I wasn’t particularly interested in, or even believed that there probably was any serious pre-Clovis in North America... You don’t look for what you don’t believe in, so I sort of stopped there. I wasn’t finding any artifacts, so to me that was the end of the dig." This is something I have mentioned in previous posts. Nobody digs deep enough to find anything older than 15 ky in America!
But, prodded by the pre-Clovis Monte Verde site in Chile, and the fact that chert of this site would have been a valuable asset for making stone tools to earlier people reaching the area, Goodyear dug deeper (4 meters or 13 feet below the Clovis layer). His efforts were rewarded, he found older tools that were different from the Clovis fluted point style. These tools were relatively simple. They were dated by OSL (luminescence) dating methods to 15.2 ky ago; definitively pre-Clovis.
During his initial explorations (see Goodyear, 2000) he reported that "this date would indicate that the preClovis artifacts, which are found predominantly in the lower half of this unit, are at least 16,000 years old and probably older."
Digging even deeper into older sediments Goodyear unearthed a chert stone, now known as "Big Red", that shows evidence of human flaking. Goodyear says is probably 50,000 years old Source.
In his 2018 research article (Goodyear, A., 2018. The Pre-Clovis Occupation of the Topper Site, Allendale County, South Carolina. Early Human Life on the Southeastern Coastal Plain), Goodyear states that "Below a substantial Clovis occupation lies a preClovis assemblage consisting of core and flake technologies associated with two Pleistocene alluvial deposits. The deepest occupation is buried in a meander phase terrace with radiocarbon dates in excess of 50,000 years. Indirectly associated radiocarbon dates of the upper alluvial zone indicates an age of 25,000 to 38,000 years ago. Topper is currently oldest radiocarbon dated preClovis site in the Western Hemisphere."
See also another paper published in 2018: Goodyear and Sain, 2018, The Pre-Clovis Occupation of the Topper Site, Allendale County, South Carolina🔒 (free access to the paper🔓). This paper clearly confirms the early dates for this site:
"In their appraisal of the dating of Topper, Waters et al. (2009:1309) reported that it dated diachronously, from minimally about 15,000 yrs B.P. to at least 50,000 or more years. e radiocarbon dating of the WPAS deposit with the cores farther up the terrace ranging from 25,330 B.P. to 28,810 B.P. is the probable minimal age of the upper pre-Clovis assemblage. at being the case, the beginning of the site as found in the Pleistocene ter-race would still be minimally about 50,000 yrs B.P. or more. A time span of 25,000 to 50,000 B.P. or longer is still a remarkable amount of time for a lithic technology to persist, at least by New World standards."
Clovis First Reaction
Of course, Clovis First supporters have had their say suggesting that the old tools are not man-made, but rocks shaped by natural processes, mere geofacts, the site's old ages are also doubted, and they suggest that animal burrows that disturbed the soil, causes younger tools to move downwards and appear deeper, and therefore older. See this article and this one. A 2009 paper politely recognizes the pre-Clovis tools but in a very conditional way, and casts doubts about them being man-made: "Hypothesized pre-Clovis artifacts derive from several stratigraphic units below the Clovis horizon at Topper. However, the anthropogenic origin of the “Topper assemblage” has yet to be adequately demonstrated and it may be natural in origin..."
The Younger Dryas Meteor
Even Surovell in 2009, the person who wrote the Clovis-strikes-back paper about Monte Verde analyzed the Topper Site to discredit a paper that proposed that a meteor impact led to the megafauna extinction and a period known as Younger Dryas (Firestone, 2009). If it was a meteor and not big-game Clovis hunters that killed the mammoths, it undermines the Clovis First theory. As expected from a Clovis-firster, Surovell didn't find proof of any meteor. However, a re-analysis of the site by LeCompte and Goodeayear, 2012 did.
The Younger Dryas event took place between 12.9 and 11.7 kya, and was a sudden cooling event that interrupted the warming period that followed the end of the last Ice Age. Temperatures dropped almost 10°C (18°F), affecting plants, anmilas and humans. The causes are under study. One theory suggests that the freshwater influx from glacial ice melt into the North Atlantic affected the circulation of the warm Gulf Stream current, another posits that a comet or meteor broke up in the upper atmosphere causing a "nuclear winter". But in the Southern Hemisphere, the effect was the opposite, it warmed up!
Personally, I don't have an opinion about the Younger Dryas meteor, but I will post about it in the near future.
The meteoric impact forms part of the conflict between Clovis-firsters and pre-Clovis supporters. Goodyear and LeCompte found more meteoric dust (microspherules) in the Clovis tools sediment layer at Topper and dusting the Clovis tools, but, after removing them, the soil beneatht them had 30 times less microspherules, proof that they fell during the Clovis time. This is rejected by Clovis First supporters, they believe that the Clovis people spread out and hunted the megafauna to extinction and dissipated into other cultures. The meteor with its environmental impact refutes both explanations.
Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2026 by Austin Whittall ©
No comments:
Post a Comment