The Baked Earth and Cinders of the Miocene Pampas. Man made or natural?

In my recent post on the Diprothomo platensis, I mentioned among the evidence put forward by Argentine archaeologist and paleontologist Florentino Ameghino, the presence of "eoliths" (crude stone tools with an Oldowan appearance), and also, baked earth, which he attributed to the activity of hominins in the Miocene Pampas.

Today's post will look into the baked earth and the different theories about its origin, following, and expanding the interesting work by Pasquali and Tonni, 1998.

Original images of baked earth. Podgorny, 2015

There is a discontinuity in the sedimentary cliffs along the coast of Buenos Aires province, where, as a layer in the Cenozoic terrain there are chunks of spongy-like, dark rock-like fragments 3 to 10 cm in size (2.2 to 4 in), they are called escorias or slag, very similar to volcanic cinder and, accompanying them there are brick-like rocks, in different shapes and sizes which were named tierras cocids or baked earth. They seem to have been formed by applying intense heat to the soil.

Hearths

Florentino Ameghino suggested in 1881 in his work The antiquity of man in the Plata (see p. 240) that they were the outcome of cooking clay in a hearth, man made artifacts, and took them as proof the ancient presence of humans in the age of the megafauna (remains of extinct glyptodonts are found in this layer).

Ameghino asks what do the fragments of baked earth "indicate? Are they the products of the first experiments in ceramic art, or are they simply the result of the action of fire from a hearth lit by humans in the time of the Glyptodon? We believe that the latter supposition is the most plausible, since the humans who inhabited Europe during the later Quaternary period did not know the art of pottery. It would therefore require more than just goodwill to admit the existence of a potter contemporary with the Glyptodon."

Prairie Fire

Later, in 1907 he explained the origin of the baked earth by assuming that human beings deliberately set the dry grasses of the Pampa prairies alight, to make hidden prey escape, and hunt them. The fire spread quickly and the grass turned into ashes fast but the roots, below the surface kept on burning for days, causing the clay in ths soil to acquire a brick-like appearance.

But, Ales Hrdlicka, 1912 who came to Argentina to validate (actually to criticize and erase) Ameghino's theory of the Tertiary man, originating in South America, also studied the baked earth. Read the conclusions of Hrdlicka in his Early man in South America, 1912 Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin which dedicates its Part. IV to the "Tierra Cocida, Scoriae" (p. 45-98).

Original caption reads: "fragments of 'baked earth' with Pampa grass slits (Cortaderia selloana) inside them. The handwritten label by Ameghino states "Lower Chapadmalense. Mouth of de las Brusquitas Creek. F. Ameghino, Septbr 5, 1908". (Ameghino Colection, MACN)". Source

A geologist in his team, Whitman Cross (p.47) conducted controlled burns and found no effect on the soil or subsoil. However, Bailey Willis, part of the same team, inspected a plot of land which had burned recently and found brick-like structures in the soil, and remarked (p. 48) that "There is nothing, however, to connect the burnt earths of the Pampean with man, so far as the occurrences were observed by the writer. Any fire whatever, whether originating in spontaneous combustion, in lightning, or in other natural conditions, independent of man, would have the effect of burning the earth under favorable conditions"

The samples were tested (see Part V, p. 88) and the results showed they had been subjected to temperatures ranging frmo 850°C to 1050°C. The cinders or escoria were found to be non-volcanic, these glassy particles were formed by the melting of certain minerals found in the loess of the Pampas at temperatures above 1050°C.

Much later, in 1971, Césear Cortalezzi proposed that the cinders were formed by chemical reactions in the soil, involving acidity and minerals in the loess.

Volcanic origin

Outes, Delachaux and Bücking had proposed in 1915 a volcanic origin: "General Conclusions. 1 The cellular-structured scoriaceous materials extracted from Monte Hermoso and other deposits are andesitic lava scoria. 2. The compact, red, brown, or grayish materials previously considered "fired earth" are mostly eruptive tuffs."

However, there are no volcanoes in the Pampas, the closest are in the Andes, in Neuquén and Mendoza and Neuquén provinces, over 860 km (530 mi.) west of Monte Hermoso (see the location of this site in Google maps).

The authors overcome this problem by citing Charles Darwin: "Numerous, small, well rounded pebbles of pumice lie scattered both on the plain and sand-hillocks: at Monte Hermoso, on the flat summit of a cliff, I found many of them at a height of 120 feet (angular measurement) above the level of the sea. These pumice pebbles, no doubt, were originally brought down from the Cordillera by the rivers which cross the continent, in the same way as the River Negro anciently brought down, and still brings down, pumice, and as the river Chupat brings down scoriæ: when once delivered at the mouth of a river, they would naturally have travelled along the coasts, and been cast up, during the elevation of the land, at different heights" (Source).

Meteor Impact

Another explanation published by Schulz et al., 1986, in Science (A 3.3-Ma Impact in Argentina and Possible Consequences) suggested an impact origin: a meteor hit the Earth around 3 million years ago. This team had previously studied the craters of a meteorite that struck the ground ~4000 years ago in Río Cuarto, Córdoba, Argentina and found the cinders similar to those found in the baked earths. They found a mineral formed by zircon dioxide which requires a temperature of 1700°C, which is far to high to be produced by burning grasses.

The dating of the cinders led Schulz to believe that a meteor struck the region close to Buenos Aires province 3.3 million years ago, and as there is no visible crater, they conjecture it impacted the now submerged continental shelf close to Miramar or Mar del Plata, in Buenos Aires province (see map below, from their paper). This event was catastrophic: "[the
age of the deposits coincide with a pulselike change in the deep-sea stable isotopic record, reflecting a sudden change in climate and ocean circulation. These coincidences suggest that the impact may have directly induced regional faunal extinctions or triggered broader environmental changes leading to ecosystem collapse in Argentina." If there were Tertiary humans in the area, they would have been wiped out.

Conclusion

Whether we believe or not in the Tertiary man proposed by Ameghino, or in an early peoping of America by non-Homo-sapiens people, the question of baked earth has puzzled scholars for over 140 years. The explanations are interesting, some more formal than others. My preference is the meteoric impact. I don't think that it has a volcanic origin, or that wildfires of prairie grasses caused the baked earth.

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

More on Bolas: Eskimo and African bolas

Continuing with my series on Bolas, I found an article written by H. S. Harrison, A bolas-and-hoop game in East Africa, (Man, Vol. XLVII, 170, Dec, 1947 p.153), in which the author wonders if a game played by children in East Africa, called namuziga a is a relict of the original bola used by the paleolithic humans. Recalling Leakey's discovery of stone balls in Kenya, Harrison mentions the game and asks if it is a "degenerate survivor" of the orignal throwing balls.

He includes an image of these bolas from the Horniman Museum and interestingly mentions the use of bolas by Eskimos to hunt birds. Below is the image.

The game is described as follows: "Two sides were chosen, and the object was to win over members of the opposing side, one by one, by dint of skill in throwing and aiming the bolas. This consisted simply of about a yard of string to each end of which was attached a small piece of wood or a dry maize cob-two weights only. The hoop was made of flexible creepers or cane twisted and bound together; this was flung by a boy of one side so as to roll along the ground, and as it rolled each boy of the opposing side, in turn, threw his bolas in an attempt to entangle the hoop and stop its progress. When this was achieved the thrower of the hoop passed from his own side to that of the successful thrower of the bolas, and so the game proceeded, each side taking its turn in rolling the hoop."

So, in fact they are not made of stones, or round projectiles, they are "short cylindrical pieces of light wood, about 3¼ inches long by ¾inch diameter."

Inuit bolas

Regarding the Eskimos, he wrote that "the Eskimo, with their peaceful habits, have only a small bolas, used against flocks of birds."

The Inuit bolas are known as ka-lum-uk-toun, the one pictured in the image had bone and walrus ivory bolas, and dates to the Thule period 300 to 800 years ago.

Harrison concludes that as there are three varieties of bolas, one with two stones, another with three, and finally, the one-stone option (bola perdida), that , "These three types suggest a not too improbable way in which the bolas might have been evolved, possibly in more than one region of the world, if we prefer to think so."

Finally, he notes that "The bolas, like the boomerang, is ill adapted for use in densely wooded areas. Under the more favourable conditions provided by open country in parts of South America, it has been a favoured weapon of hunting peoples." Interestingly, bolas were used initially in the southern tip of South America, abandoned for several millennia, and readopted when the natives adopted the use of the horse for their hunting expeditions. A bola is easier to aim and fling at an escaping rhea (South American ostrich, or ñandú) or a guanaco (a wild relative of the llama), than using a bow and arrow (only the Mongols seem to have mastered the art of aiming straight and riding a horse).

In Patagonia

Compared to these Inuit and African "bolas", the South American ones were much more elaborate.

Alfredo Prieto, 2020 writes about southern Patagonian bolas and provides a timeline: they are first reported in sequences dated to 8500 years BP, and reached their peak in development by 4500 BP with different standard varieties (lemon-shaped, bi-conical, and bi-lobulated, with the typical spherical ones, with an equatorial groove being the most frequent ones).

The "biconical" bolas has finally settled a question I had about some "double cups" found in Patagonia, which I mentioned, and included some pictures of them, in a post back in 2013, where I reported an explanation for their use as symbolic artifacts, which I questioned. It is never to late to learn something new.

They were abandoned around 1500 years BP and bows and arrows were adopted at that time. This hiatus lasted for around 3200 years, until the 1700s, when they started riding horses.

They were made following a series of steps, Prieto provides a description and the following image showing how they were produced.

A granite stone was shaped by percussion and abrasion till it was almost perfectly rounded (upper left images: natural stone, preform) and then polished using a semi-spherical hole in a rock, a groove was then shaped along its midpoint (central top: finishing, grooving). Finally they tied a cord made from twined sinew to the groove. Some balls were painted red, with ochre to make it easier to find them on the ground. Others were polished so that they reflected light and could be seen and retrieved.

Later they were encased in a horse-hide seath as shown in the image a cord was tied around the groove and a seath was sewn around the stone (lower part of the image).

Regarding the Bola perdida it was used to kill opponents, and it was documented as being used to hunt sea lions on the Atlantic coast. The two ball bolas had a similar use, one ball was firmly held in the hand and the other used to pound the skull of the animal or human enemy.

If stones were not available, as in the vast Pampas prairies, the natives could use terracota, compacted clay placed in a seath, or bone.

Prieto notes that bolas were effective: the prey was entangled, immobilized and easy to kill and take back to camp. Using bow and arrow was more complicated: a wounded prey did not die instantly, it fled, had to be tracked, and then carried on foot for long distances back to camp. The Selk'nam (a Tehuelche group in Tierra del Fuego) used bow and arrow into the historic period, they never adopted the horse. Until the early 1900s they continued hunting with bow and arrow. But their environment was different from the dry steppe. They lived in grassy areas and open forests by the Andean foothills.

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

Bolas - stone balls around the World: Oldowan / Acheulean tools?

In my previous post I mentioned the stone balls, or "bolas" found in Miramar, Argentina, originally claimed to be 2 or even 3 million years old in the early 1900s, they are now believed to be either a hoax, or later, Paleoindian tools. However, genuinre and uncontroversial stone balls h ave been unearthed in the Old World, dating back to Oldowan and Acheulean times, meaning that they are around 1.5 million years old, and were made by Homo erectus or even older ancestral hominins.

Red Crag Stone from Bramford, England

Pictured below, (Red Crag stone. Source) this stone is not a sphere, instead it has an elongated shape, and unlike the other Old World finds, it has been quite controversial.

J. Reid Moir wrote an article about the stone three years after it was found by one of his assistants, by the name of John Baxter. It came from Pliocene sediments at Red Crag, Bramford, a site near Ipswich, in England, UK. The 1929 article titled "A Remarkable Object from Beneath the Red Crag". It was roughly egg shaped. Henri Breuil, who was a witness of the discovery wrote: "While I was staying in Ipswich with my friend J. Reid Moir, we were examining together a drawer of objects from the base of the Red Crag at Bramford, when J. Reid Moir showed me a singular egg-shaped object, which had been picked up on account of its unusual shape. Even at first sight it appeared to me to present artificial striations and facets, and I therefore examined it more closely with a mineralogist's lens. This examination showed me that." Rather than a South American bola, this ovoid was thought to be a sling stone like the ones used in "New Caledonia". TWhe Pleistocene to Eocene sediments at Bramfored are over 2 million years old.

However, Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews, 2011 warns that even thouth the age is correct, the setting may be wront: "the Red Crag deposits date from the Gelasian chrono-stratigraphic phase, 2,588,000 to 1,806,000 years ago during the earliest phase of the Lower Pleistocene, when this part of Britain was under a shallow sea, and it seems most likely that the “sling-stone” is a simple case of misidentification, its natural grooves being mistaken for human manufacture by an expert who was overtaken by his colleague’s enthusiasm for finding objects in the deposit in question."

Below is a Melanesian Sling stone , the resemblance is striking, yet this one is evidently manmade, and polished.

Sling stone from New Caledonia. Source

Olduvai stone balls, Tanzania

The Museum of Stone Tools shows the following image captioned as a quartzite spheroid from Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania, age: Early Pleistocene Oldowan-Acheulean 0.4 to 1.9 million years ago.

Another example can be seen here, online, at the British Museum, which in its description cautions, that although Louis Leakey suggested that these rounded stones were used as bolas, like the throwing stones from the Pampas, "experiments have shown that such pieces can be produced by repeatedly using the same quartz pebble as a knapping hammer"

The Oldowan tools, are crude, like struck pebbles, and believed to be the work of Homo habilis, manufacturing spheroidal stone balls seems to be beyond their cognitive abilities. Could primitive hominins like them fashion sinew cords or treat leather adequatly to be able to fasten them to stone balls like the bolas or boleadoras of the Pampas?

An excellent summary of the Olduvai spheroids can be found in Ignacio de la Torre & Rafael Mora, 2010, which I summarize below:

Clark reported them in 1955, and their deliberate manufacture by flaking and battering to shape the speroids. He suggested they were used as missiles, and also as hammerstones for stone tool manufacture and to crack nuts open.

Willoughby proposed in 1987 that they were the result of flaking that began with the typical choppers, and that ended up as speroids, or, altermtively that they were used as hammers, an unintentional outcome of their use was the shaping of rounded spheroids.

Texier and Roche (1995) consider them as deliberate objects that arose from a method of knapping flakes. A core is battered, through controlled reduction to produce flakes and this results in a polyhedron, or a spheroid.

Java stone balls made by H. erectus

Leaving Africa, and the Oldowan, stone balls were found in sites associated to Homo erectus, who has been in Eurasia for around two million years. Weidenreich, 1943 describes in Indonesia at the Homo erectus site in Solo: "The most interesting specimen illustrated by Oppenoorth is a stone ball from Ngandong. Similar stone balls have been found at several places in our excavations in the Solo Valley. They are made of andesite, are perfectly round, and are never polished. According to Oppenoorth, their diameters range from 67 to 92 mm... [2.6 - 3.6 in], and some may be even a little larger. They closely resemble primitive stone cannon balls as used in Java in medieval times for the old bronze cannons. They occur so regularly in the layers that they might actually represent "implements" used by Solo men." He attributes them a Mousterian, and therefore Neanderthal similarity, citing similar stones found in La Quina, France, Techik Tach, Russia. Adding that "Mousterio-Levalloisian of Florisbad, South Africa, Dreyer and Lyle mention "dozens of round balls" about 3 inches in diameter made mostly of dolorite, and also a few of blue shales." Weidenreich mentions that the oldest balls were Acheulean, from Kenya, reported by Leakey, who found them "in many cases in groups of three strongly indicating the use of the bolas, still used as a hunting weapon in South." Weidenreich suggests that although their purpose is unknown they were either sling stones or bolas.

According to Bartstra (1983), cited in van Heteren & de Vos, 2012 describes tools and remains found at the Ngebung site in Java, belonging to H. erectus there are three levels, the deepest (lowest) has tools that are absent in the upper ones of Upper Pleistocene age: "elongated choppers, spherical balls (so called sling stones or bolas) and crude axes, all made of andesite. The larger stone tools, like the bolas are considered to be Upper Pleistocene/Lower Holocene of age." No explanation given for assigning a more recent age to the bolas.

Acheulean bolas in Israel

My own research into these primitive bolas has revealed other sources, for instance, outside of Africa, made by Homo erectus in Ubeidiya, Israel, with an age of 1.4 million yearws, as reported by Muller et al., 2023 with a clear spherical shape. The paper suggests that they were deliberately fashioned that way, to resemble speheres and its title echoes that suggestion: The limestone spheroids of ‘Ubeidiya: intentionalimposition of symmetric geometry by early hominins? Some of the stone balls studied in this paper are pictured below:

This article points out that their shape has bewildered archaeologists, as they can't understand what was their use. Furthermore, they have been used for millions of years, starting with the crude Oldowan stones industry, and into the Acheulean, and Mousterian, their use in Southern South America persisted until the late 1800s. Their widespread geographic dispersion, from Africa, to Asia, Europe, and America is notable.

There are two schools of though about these balls: (1) that they were the byproduct of a flake producing technique that left spheroids as waste, a totally unintentional production of stone balls. (2) That the hominins that made them selected a nodule and then deliberately fashioned it into a polyhedron, and gradually into a spheroid or bola. The balls found in Israel, according to the authors , "are a complex formal technology that represent a manifestation of the complex cognitive and skilful capacities of Early Acheulean hominins. If similar intentional shaping can be demonstrated on Oldowan spheroids, this would likely represent the earliest evidence of hominins imposing a desired symmetrical geometry on their tools." In other words, Homo habilis and Homo erectus were much smarter than we imagined.

Ancient or Modern?

S. J. de Laet mentions stone balls in the History of Humanity Volume I (see p. 454) in line with what I have mentioned further, up, but he questions their antiquity in Indonesia, suggesting a modern Homo sapiens origin:

"round stone balls (resembling small stone cannon-balls) that are allegedly found in terrace sediments along the Solo. They are made of andesite, are not polished and measure on average 10 cm in diameter. They are associated with Homo soloensis(on account of their assumed stratigraphical position), and they are regarded as a primitive hunting weapon, which is why these stone balls are oftenreferred to as bolas or sling-stones. Von Koenigswald even saw in them evidence for theNeanderthal character of the Solo hominids: similar stone balls do occur at such famousNeanderthal sites as La Quina (France) and Teshik-Tash (Uzbekistan) (von Koenigswald,1951). In Sangiran too these stone balls are found (and they are displayed in the local museum); but around the hill of Ngebung it can be demonstrated that they certainly do not lie buried in high-terrace sediments. In Ngebung the stone balls can be associated with young, post-Pleistocene alluvial deposits (Bartstra, 1985). The question therefore ariseswhether the stone balls found along the Solo do not in fact originate also from recent sediments, and reflect the activities of Holocene hunters rather than those of ancient Homo soloensis"

Spheres with symbolic purposes

There are some intriguing rounded stone ballls that were discovered in a site known as El Guettar, in Tunisia, first explored by Gruet in 1954) (S. J. de Laet, see p. 352). The stones were found, accomodated in the shape of a cairn!

"El Guettar did yield the best evidence for symbolic behaviour in the constructed heap of stone balls (Gruet,1954, pp. 67–77). The site had some 7 m [23 ft.]of Middle Palaeolithic deposits around a spring, and the stone heap was found near the base of the sequence, built on a flat surface by the edge of the spring pool. The heap was conical, with a basal diameter of about 130 cm [4.2 ft] and a height of about 70 cm [2.3 ft.], and was built of about sixty balls, almost all of them oflimestone, which were graded from large (18 cm in diameter [3.1 in]), rather roughly shaped one sat the base to small (4.5 cm in diameter [1.8 in]), perfectly shaped ones at the top. The interior of the cone was filled with a mass of bones and flaked stone artefacts (approximately 2,000 ofthe latter, including a typical tanged point). The bones and artefacts seemed to have been simply gathered up from the surrounding surface (they do not differ overall from those found elsewhere in the excavation), but some care was taken to reserve the finest artefacts for the upper part of the fill. At the base of the interior of the heap were two thin plaques of a non-local limestone.The detectable method and consistency in the construction of the heap suggest that it was built on one occasion, rather than over a period of time. That the heap stood undisturbed thereafter until it became buried indicates that it was not just a convenient way of storing stone balls. The excavator believed that it represented an offering to the genius loci of the spring. Practical explanations have not been forthcoming and we too are brought to conclude that its purpose must have been symbolic."

I must add that Gruet believed the site was of people with a Mousterian culture, i.e. Neanderthals, however other scholars, like Clark, consider it to be later, belonging to the more recent Aterian culture, of modern Homo sapiens and about 40 ky old.

Below is a picture of the stone cairn at El Guettar

Cairn found at Guettar. Source

Hammers?

A recent article by Assaf, Preysler, and Bruner, 2023 analyzes the shape, size and flaking used to fashion them and concludes that "Based on the current data available, we link the development of SSBs [shaped stone balls] with an increased consumption and extraction of fat of large-medium sized herbivores in the Lower Paleolithic period. Indeed, SSBs may also have been used as percussion tools for processing vegetal material, perhaps similarly to handaxes, which were primarily used for butchering, but were occasionally used for woodworking. However, current functional and experimental data associate these items with marrow extraction activities, as well as some contextual data linking these items with faunal remains. We thus argue that these are designated tools shaped in a complex procedure—a technological solution invented during the LP in order to respond to the growing need for fat consumption."

Closing Comments

The use of stone balls is ancient, dating back to the first stone tools used by our ancestors in Africa. They survived across species (H. erectus, Neanderthals, and modern humans), and vast distances. They ended up in America where they were used for tens of thousands of years in the Pampas and Patagonia.

Were they introduced into the New World by H. erectus? and if so, is their great antiquity (as suggested by Ameghino at Miramar) could be an indication of that origin.

Finally, the Patagonian myth of Tachwull, them proto-human maker of bolas may be a memory of the presence of erectus in America.

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

The controversial "bolas" from Miramar: 2 to 3 million years old

Florentino Ameghino, had, during the late 1800s found crude stone tools (eoliths), and remains of baked clay in deep, ancient sedimentary layers along the steep banks of some rivers, and the coastline, in Buenos Aires province, Argentina. He attributed them to a locally evolved, Pampean hominin from the Tertiary period, that evolved into modern humans and then peopled the World (see this post about it). This was controversial and attacked by U.S. scholars who supported a later peopling of America ~3,000 years BP and, surely not older than 10,000 years ago. They attributed the tools, and bones found by Ameghino to Holocene Native Americans, and the baked earth to volcanic activity (the earth had been cooked at temperatures of around 1,000 °C (1,850°F).

In a recent post I mentioned that the Pampas in Argentina was an ideal spot to look for Denisovans or Homo erectus in America. One year ago I mentioned relatively old human footsteps on the Atlantic coastline of Buenos Aires, at Claromecó, 30,000 years old.

Miramar Bolas

When Florentino Ameghino died in 1911, his brother Carlos, who had always worked on the field, searching for fossils and ancient tools for Florentino, continued the work of his brother and visited some sites along the coast of Buenos Aires. He was sponsored by the museums of La Plata, and Natural History of Buenos Aires, finding tools in sediments belonging to the Chapadmalense layer, a Pliocene formation roughly 2 or 3 million years old. Named after a coastal area between Miramar and Mar del Plata, on the seabord of Buenos Aires.

Among the tools reported by Carlos Ameghino, were some spherical "bolas" (balls) on the seaside cliffs in Miramar, province of Buenos Aires, Argentina (Google map), which were of a Late Miocene age! Pictured below, they were made from bone (Source).

Below is an image with some of the tools recovered in Miramar by Carlos Ameghino (Bonomo, 2022):

Figure 7. Pre-Ensenadean and Pre-Belgranean materials from Punta Hermengo, Miramar: lithic artifacts on quartzite (a-b), bone bolas point and ball (c-d) and stone bolas (e-f)

Bolas

Bolas (also known as "Boleadoras") were used by historic Natives in the pampas to hunt animals, and kill their enemies. There were different types of bolas, but the principle was the same. They were stones balls sheathed with leather and attached to strong tendon straps that were whirled above the head to gain momentum and then thrown so as to entangle around the hunted animal’s legs. Bolas could have one ball (bola perdida or "lost Ball"), something like a single sling shot that goes off, stone and sling. Or two or more balls tied with individual cords to a knot. These were used to hung rheas (South American ostriches), deer, guanacos (a wild relative of the llama), and other smaller animals. They were deadly. Ancient bolas were carefully crafted in hard stone, and grooved along their midline to attach the sinew there. Later historical natives were not as skilful as their paleoindian ancestors and made them from softer soapstone. Below is an image from Musters journey (1869-70) in Patagonia, showing a Tehuelche native using bolas on horseback.

Patagonian hunting, notice the boleadoras in his hand and slung on his waist.

Controversy and Rejection

The Miramar findings were disputed by Antonio Romero, 1918: "the artifacts, similar to classic Neolithic types, found at Brusquitas and attributed to a human being already existing in the Miocene period, are a fallacious supposition, whose audacity surpasses even the famous discovery of the California skull by Blake and Widney. The being that made fire and cracked pebbles in a crude and rudimentary way at the end of the Late Miocene (Puelche and Chapalmal), according to F. Ameghino, was not a human being but a remotely distant precursor of humankind."

Romero claimed that the tools were recent and the work of historic "Indians" which were dragged or moved into older sediments due to erosion on the cliff. Adding that ancient fossils were removed by the sea, eroded from older layers and redeposited in more recent ones. The cliff wasn't made of ancient Chapadmalal sediments, but more recent ones. That the baked earth (which Ameghino attributed to coarse ceramics made by ancient hominins) were the outcome of natural fires that burned the dry grasslands and cooked the clay in the soil.

Vignatti, 1919, on the other hand, defended Ameghino, and cited the conclusions reached by the auditing committee sent to inspect the site in 1915, composed of experts (Santiago Roth, Walther Schiller, Lutz Witte, M. Kantor, L. M. Torres, and Carlos Ameghino, the brother of Florentino). Their affidavit says that "the visual inspection of the site where the aforementioned artifacts were found has not given cause to suppose that they were buried under one circumstance or another at a time subsequent to the formation of the layer; that they were in their original position and that, therefore, they should be considered as objects of human manufacture, contemporary to the geological floor in which they were found deposited." This means that they were of the same age as the sediments in which they were found, from the Chapadmalense, and didn't slip down into it from more recent layers. Furthermore, the committee (Source) saw a bola-shaped stone unearthed in their presence, from the cliff, in the same layer that other bolas had been found. A flint knife was also retrieved as well as a flat stone like the ones used by the historic natives to make fire. Finally, fossil remains of a ground sloth (Gravigradae) were discovered, associated to a round stone.

However, a renown geologist Frenguelli in 1920 revised the stratigraphy and dating of the cliff, and assigned an Early Pleistocene age to the layers that Ameghino had thought were Miocene (source).

In 1924, Frenguelli and Outes dig in Miramar and ratify that the sediments are not Tertiary, but from the Quaternary. They found a bola with an equatorial groove, roughly 6.5 cm (2.5") diameter made of white quartzite weighing 340 g (0.75 lbs). They attribute it to a "Mousterian" appearance and add that the bola was firmly buried in the soil. Both authors conclude that: "The polished projectiles ("balls"), clearly defined, coexisted with industrial artifacts that morphologically represent all periods of the Early and Middle Pleistocene. They point out, then, that the discovery of "balls" in ancient sediments should not surprise any specialist, since their presence had already been noted in Europe by one of the most distinguished forerunners of archaeology, Boucher de Perthes, who recalled that "European Pleistocene balls" appeared mostly in Mousterian sites."

Hoax?

Some authors even suggested that Lorenzo Parodi, a local amateur archaeologist who helped Carlos Ameghino in collecting and finding fossils, was the author of a hoax. He placed recent objects in ancient sediments and then "discovered" them by "chance" (see Tonni, 2016). Below is a photograph of a bola in Tertiary sediments in Miramar, from that same source:

Too polished and well finished to be so old

Vignatti, 1941 included an image of polished stone bolas from the Chapadmalense sediments. As you can see in the image below, they are neat, polished, and quite different from the coarse knapped flint knives found close to them. He states that these supposedly ancient bolas are hard to tell apart from those used by contemporary Pampas gauchos (local "cowboys") and historic Indians. Yet he did not dispute their antiquity.

The coarse vs. polished finish had been brought up in 1924, questioning the bolas and tools unearthed by Frenguelli and Outes: "many specialists harbor suspicions. This suspicion arises from the coexistence, at such ancient levels, of carved stone objects with polished ones characteristic of more recent cultures. Outes and Frenguelli state that they do not share these scruples, as the Stone Age in Argentina has not yet been systematically studied, primarily from stratigraphic and technological perspectives. The authors believe that, to date, it can only be stated, and even then only relatively, that "the peoples most closely linked to the matter under discussion manufactured a large number of Paleolithic stone tools and weapons, and, exceptionally, a limited group of polished stone tools.""

As I will discuss in my next post, stone balls were common around the Old World, and found in very ancient sites, together with Oldowan tools, the oldest tool-making technology used by our hominin ancestors. Though coarse, the African and Eurasian stone balls are the work of H. erectus, and possibly Neanderthals. They are uncommon in more recent humans, and were only used as boleadoras in South-central Argentina by historic natives, and their ancestors, the paleoindians. Could they have been brought here by Old World hominins, to the cul-de-sac at the end of the Americas, the point that is furthest from Africa, where it was adopted by the later waves of modern humans?

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

Black's Fork River Wyoming Site

Continuing with this series on ancient pre Clovis sites in America, this post will cover the Black's Fork River site, located in Wyoming, USA, which I didn't know existed until I read about it in Hidden History of the Human Race by Michael Cremo and Richard Thompson, 1993.

Discovered in the 1930s

The site was discovered by Harold Marion Dunning (1891-1973) a local historian, businessman, and amateur archaeologist. He founded the Loveland Museum in Loveland Colorado and established the local Stone Age Fair.

Dunning, accompanied by his friend and former student, Edison P. Lohr, who also lived in Loveland, found some unusual stone tools, artifacts that were different from the usual Indian arrow points. They came from the terraces along the Black's Fork River.

The river has its sources in the Uinta mountain range in Utah, and is an affluent of the Green River. It heads east across Utah, into Wyoming and then curves south into Colorado, to join the Green River and eventually flow into the Colorado River.

The Black's Fork River has eroded a plateau that has slowly been rising over millennia, and formed terraces. The region was not glaciated, and although it is arid nowadays, in the past it harbored grasslands and open forests.

The two men showed these stone implements to Etienne Bernardeu Renaud (1880-1973), a Frenchman, who was a professor of anthropology at the University of Denver. Renaud was immediately interested, as he had been trained in France, and recognized them as Early Paleolithic tools. Renaud set up an excavation in 1933, finding and collecting more tools along the Black's Fork River between Lyman and Granger, Wyoming (see approx. location in Google Maps).

Ruth Simpson, 1961, see p.32 describes the sites along the river citing three publications by Renaud (the 1936, 1938, and 1940 articles titled "The Archaeological Survey of the High Western Plains", seventh, tenth, and twelfth reports, respectively, University of Denver, Department of Anthropology).

The tools have a definite Lower-Paleolithic appearance, and were foiund in over forty surface sites. There were different types of artifacts grouped into three categories. The "Peripheral" kind, which were small tools, the "Sand Dune" material, which are more recent, and then came the "Typical" artifacts, the hallmarks of "Black's Fork Culture" or "Black's Fork Industry", the Lower-Paleoloithic tools.

These are made of chert and are the oldest of the three. They are mostly large-sized, heavy choppers accompanied by "large scrapers and many coup de poing-like implements", shown in the image below. The assemblies also include crude quartzite pebbles that have been shaped into flaked stone implements, with a dark patina covering their sufaces, which are "strikingly similar to the Pebble Industry placed at the base of the Lower Paleolithic culture sequence on other continents".

Black's Fork River, stone tools. Source, p. 33

Rejected by the Establishment

Renaud described them as "early and late Chellean, and early Acheulian coups-de-poing together with early Clactonian flakes is perfectly consistent and would suggest a cultural complex in America similar to that in Europe" (Source, p.86). These tools, in Europe are the mark of H. erectus.

As expected, the mainstream archaeologists, who had for decades stood beside the theory of a late peopling of America (championed by Ales Hrdlicka), and were now slowly embracing the Clovis First theory which was characterized by Neolithic tools, modern, delicate, and crafted by modern men, with an older arrival date in the Americas (~10 to 13 kya), but definitely not Paleolithic.

During the 1930s, E.B. Renaud explored and excavated the area finding more of these crude stone tools.

Despite Simpson's 1961 commentary quoted further up, the orthodox archaeologists refused to acknowledge these implements as real man-made tools. Renaud was surprised by these rebuttals and wrote in 1938 that his findings were "...harshly criticized by one of the irreconcilable opponents of the antiquity of man in America, who had seen neither the sites nor the specimens. After such subjective and unfair criticism, the best course to pursue was to do more extensive exploration, to collect more numerous specimens, to study them more closely, and to compare them directly with Old World artifacts of well-authenticated origin and established age and culture, and to obtain the expert opinions of qualified scientists not prejudiced on the subject of the antiquity of man in the New World." Source, p.87)

An amateur archaeologist, and art professor, Herbert L. Minshall (1912-1991), supported an early peopling of America, and in his book Buchanan Canyon: Ancient Human Presence in the Americas (1989) mentions the Black's Fork site. Below is an image showing one of the Black's Fork River tools, from his book.

Minshall says that a professor at the Colorado School of Mines, Dr. E. H. Stephens, in 1938, assigned an age of 125,000 to 190,000 years BP, or even earlier. However, by 1940 he had recanted.

The critics gave all tools found along the river a rectn age even though the tools from the older upper terraces are covered with desert varnish (an indication of great age) are have shapes similar to H. erectus crafted tools from the Old World and those from the recent lower terraces resemble Paleoindian tools or Upper Paleolithic, with no desert patina.

Renaud retired in 1948. The matter was ignored, Clovis First had prevailed.

Renaud had visite sites in France during his trips to Europe, including the key sites that gave their name to stone industries: Solutrewan, from Le Solutré, and Mousterian from Le Mostier, just to name two of them. He had seen Neanderthal and early Modern Human tools spanning over 250,000 years.

Yet, even in 1968, an article by Whitthoft and Eyman entioned Renaud's Black's Fork Culture, as "a controversial complex. Great antiquity has been claimed for it. It consists of crude massive tools of quartzite and flint, notable for their primitive character and large size. They have been compared with the most ancient stone tools from Eurasia and Africa" but, added that their survey considered the most recent artifacts that had a crude Clactonian appearance as the work of Shoshone natives while the oldest tools they found "are less than eight thousand years old on geological evidence."

Yet the geological evidence is incomplete because the tools are not embedded in deep stratigraphic layers that could be dated, they are superficial, and, as Minshall affirms "... weathering over long periods in a variety of environments can remove original surfaces by undeterminable amounts, particularly by blowing sand or dust, so that surface finds are usually subject only to personal interpretations based on geological provenience, typology, technological aspects, individual familiarity with similar industries elsewhere, and what might be called a "consensus" or current doctrine, whatever that might be... With the soils reduced by the actions of wind and rain and melting snow, the stone materials had been slowly concentrated into a desert pavement, a mosaic-like surface into which the artifacts had been incorporated as solidly as paveing stones." Minshall, 1989, p.88 & 90.

Schroedl, 1985 (see p. 16) states that "Even Renaud (1940:91) recognized some serious flaws with his chronology of the region. All of the artifacts of the Typical and Peripheral cultures were surface finds; Renaud was unable to locate any buried components from these occupations, components which he expected to produce Pleistocene fauna" (Typical and Peripheral were the oldest elements) and argue that they are in fact recen tools "(Sharrock 1966) has demonstrated that the bulk of the flaked artifacts from these reputed early cultures do not represent crude hand axes and flake implements, but are more parsimoniously interpreted as remnants of lithic reduction stages, e.g., cores, blanks and preforms, instead of paleolithic tools."

Closing Comments

This site is indeed controversial. Assigning an age is complicated, and the orthodox viewpoint has prevailed, assigning a recent, paleoindian origin to these crude Early Paleolithic-like tools. I am open to a Paleolithic peopling of America, but it can only be proven irrefutably with stratigraphic evidence, datable bones of animals and humans. Until then, the question remains open.

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

Brazil, ancient sites and Homo erectus in America, a 1992 paper

An old article published in 1992, by Spanish archaeologist Gabriela Martin Avila, La antiguedad del hombre en el Nordeste de Brasil (The antiquity of Man in the northeast of Brazil, Rev. do Museu de Arqueologia e Etnologia, S. Paulo, 2:7-12, 1992), explores the possibilities, not only of pre-Clovis sites in America, but also even older dates.

Martin mentions that "...the most advanced theories even suggest the possibility that Homo erectus arrived in America 200,000 or 300,000 years ago." To support this statement, she cites Argentine archaeologist Juan Schobinger, and his 1988 essay "200.000 años del hombre en América: ¿Que pensar?" (200,000 years of man in America: What to think?). Schobinger, according to Martin analyzed several sites in North America, and suggested that there were "chances that Homo erectus had reached the American continent thousands of years before the Homo sapiens sapiens."

The sites are the following: Old Crow in the Canadian Yukon, excavated William Nathaniel Irving; Texas Street in San Diego (see my post on it), the Calico Site in California (I posted on it back in 2011), and Valsequillo (see my post), and Toca da Esperanca site in Brazil (more on this site below).

Pedra Furada Site

Gabriela Martin then mentions some more recent sites, equally controversial, dated to around 50 kya, like Piedra Furada in Brazil, and other more recent ones of pre-Clovis age, and concludes that:

"It is necessary to await for new evidence, always with an open mind to any new theory that may be confirmed. It is also valid to ask, "Why not?" If we know today that descendants of the Chou-Ku-Tien man, or those related to the Sinanthropus [here she refers to the H. erectus from China, the Peking man] adapted to extremely cold Siberian climates, nothing prevents them from crossing Beringia before the last interglacial period if they knew how to make fire. The case of the Australians who sailed great distances is also frequently cited when arguing for the possibility of reaching America via oceanic routes during the Pleistocene era.
An interesting theory, though still in the realm of conjecture, would be that if the [erectus] ancestors of Homo sapiens managed to reach America, they may have been small groups that became extinct, giving rise to the long gap that preceded the arrival of other waves around 50,000 years ago. These new groups, dispersed across different regions of the continent, may also have become extinct, which would explain the long periods of unoccupied sites observed at some sites that we could call strategic, indicating gaps of 10,000 to 20,000 years. This would be the case of Boqueirão da Pedra Furada, in southeastern Piauí, to cite the most important archaeological site in northeastern Brazil, in terms of chronological sequence.
Based on the data known today, it cannot be denied that northeastern Brazil was populated by humans at least 50,000 years ago. These people, without specialized projectile points, used crude stone tools, wooden points, and traps to hunt mastodons, giant sloths, horses, llamas, and other smaller animals, including a large number of rodents and birds. Further evidence of their presence is only a matter of time."

An interesting combination that proposes not only an Homo erectus migration into America or even a transpacific voyage from Australia, but also that the erectus became extinct before modern humans reached America much more recently.

Toca da Esperanca Site

Another research paper from that period gives a thorough review, country by country of the alleged pre-Clovis sites in South America. (Lynch, T. F. (1990). El hombre de la edad glacial en suramérica: una perspectiva europea. Revista de Arquelogía Americana, 141-185). In the case of Brazil, it mentions the Toca da Esperanca site:

"...now that it has been reported in South America [about] an association of primitive quartzite tools with Pleistocene fauna, dated between 204,000 and 295,000 years ago (Beltráo and Danon 1987; de Lumley et al., 1988; Weber 1989). The Esperança Cave was first explored and appropriately named by Beltráo in 1982 and has been excavated since 1985. The preliminary results were presented at conferences in Rio de Janeiro, Turin, and Mainz in 1987 and quickly published in France, as well as in Brazil. The depth of the deposit is given as only 1.0 to 1.5 m [3 to 5 ft], but it yielded dates ranging from 2020 ± 130 BP. (radiocarbon at the highest Level 1) to 295,000 years (by the uranium-thorium method, at the lowest level)...
The Franco-Brazilian team identifies two pebble tools and a chopper from Level IV, as well as a hammer and several fáo and Danon (1987) state that at least one is specifically Clactonian in type. They also mention molds of human teeth (?), bone tools, hearth structures, and charcoal at all levels, but do not mention these in the subsequent French publication. More significantly, both reports specify that the quartz and quartzite artifacts are from rocks found only within 10 km of the cave.
The deposit is thin and the artifacts are simple, but at first glance, there seems to be no good reason not to accept this discovery of Middle Pleistocene man in America (Homo erectus?).
According to these researchers, "It is therefore not surprising that the Homo erectus who occupied the Chinese continent at least 700,000 years ago... and who domesticated fire 400,000 years ago (Chou-Kou-Tien), crossed the Bering Strait repeatedly" (de Lumley et al., 1988:245). However, it is necessary to mention that there is a serious dispute about whether Middle Pleistocene man (and specifically Peking Man) was in systematic possession of the use of fire, which is thought to have been present at Cueva Esperança, and whether it was necessarily the man who had to cross the Bering Strait (Binford and Ho 1985; Binford and Stone 1986; James 1989). Thus, the discovery at Esperanca should have implications for the archaeology of the Old World, as well as for that of the New World."

There seems to be some hesitation in the text: charcoal and hearths which were reported but then omitted in the French language paper, or the fact that we aren't sure if H. erectus mastered the art of fire making. But the dates 204 to 205 ky for the lowest levels, with "Clactonian" tools, which some belive were made by H. erectus while others support the notion that they were made by H. heidelbergensis. The age of this industry is 420 to 380 kya, and it predates modern humans.

Schobinger in his work also expresses his doubts about this site: "Let's admit it's difficult to accept an age of almost 300,000 years for materials found at a depth of only about 1.30 m [4.3 ft]. It's true that they are sealed by a carbonaceous-calcareous layer (and in that sense, it's in situ material), but we are told that this layer formed not much more than 20,000 years ago (Lumley et al., 1987: 929). What happened before then? Is the association of the very few quartzite stone fragments with the bones on which the U/To dating was performed reliable? Is this method entirely dependable?"

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

Eoliths: Siberia. 1.5 - 2.5 million year old stone tools

Continuing with my series on primitive paleolithic tools, ones that resemble Oldowan cobble pebbles, following yesterday's post on the 100 ky Texas Street, San Diego, California site excavated by George Carter (1940s-1970s), I will go back to Siberia.

Recently I posted about two sites there, Diring Yuirakh and Karama, today I will mention another one, on Ulalinka River dated to over 1.5 million years ago.

Ulalinka River site

Michael Cremo and Richard Thompson, in their 1993 work Hidden History of the Human Race mention the Ulalinka River site as follows: "In 1961, hundreds of crude pebble tools were found near Gorno-Altaisk, on the Ulalinka river in Siberia. According to a 1984 report by Russian scientists A. P. Okladinov and L. A. Ragozin, the tools were found in layers 1.5-2.5 million years old."

Little has been written about it in Western journals. The second source I encountered about it, is a travel agent based in Krasnoyarsk, Russia, that mentions the attractions in Gorno-Altaisk, and casually refers to the site on their website:

"Ulalinskaya Paleolithic site
Ulalinskaya Paleolithic site is one of the main sights in Gorno-Altaysk. It is situated on the bank of the Ulalushka River, after which the site took its name.
The site constantly attracts attention of archeologists. It was found during the excavations of 1960-1970s under the guidance of academician Alexey Okladnikov. Exactly that time more than 600 stone tools were found, referring to the age of Paleolith. It proves the fact that the territory was made habitable more than 1,5 million years ago. Although the views of geologists about this subject are still not common. Some experts determine the age of the site in the range of 100 - 350 thousand years; others indicate the date from 690 thousand to half a million years.
Unfortunately, only primitive tools, no other traces of sites of ancient people were found during excavations.
This sensational archeological find became the city’s pride. No wonder that exactly these tools are depicted in the coat of arms since 1996.
The debates over this discovery are conducted to this day - many scientists believe, it would a grand hoax of the 20th century."

Gorno-Altaysk means "Mountainous Altai" in Russian, note that (1) this article calls the river Ulaluska, and the site Ulalinskaya. (2) It suggests it may be a hoax. (3) And that the city adopted the tools in its coat of arms (pictured).

Details

The site is located in the twon of Gorno-Altaysk itself — 51°°57'20.7"N 85°58'25.5"E (see it in Google maps) which is 110 km (68 mi.) as the crow flies, from the famous Denisova Cave.

The megalithic.co.uk website has some pictures of the site.

There is an English language publication A. P. Okladnikov and G. A. Pospelova, 1982 (Ulalinka, the Oldest Palaeolithic Site in Siberia p. 710–712, Current Anthropology Vol 23, No 6 (🔒 paywalled, but you can read the first page of the paper). Which says that it was discovered in 1961 on the Maima River, at its confluence with the Ulalinka River by the cemetery of Gorno-Altaysk. It describes the sedimentary layers in the dig, which produced neolithic tools from its upper layer (younger than 25,000 years - 25 ky), and then, the one with the primitive eoliths:

"The main cultural level of this section, associated with the boulder-pebble horizon, differs from the upper one and from all other known Palaeolithic sites in Siberia principally in the strikingly archaic shapes of the tools and their primitive technology. The tools were made almost entirely from pebbles of yellowish-white quartzite, whole or split in half, and sometimes from pebbles of obsidian and quartzite fragments.
The finds include choppers, chopping tools, scrapers, a peculiar pebble core and tools with a spoutlike curved projection that might have served as cutting instruments. All these tools are nearly untreated pebbles, only slightly retouched (fig 1) [see it below]. All the artifacts are amorphous. They may sometimes have served as cutting tools, sometimes as scrapers, sometimes both functions at once. Their primitive diversity seems to reflect the pursuit of a useful and stable shape. The stone inventory and the techniques of manufacture are so primitive and peculiar that they cannot be classified in the framework of the classic Lower Palaeolithic typology. The nomenclature of the Western European schemes cannot be applied to them."

Below is Fig. 1 from this paper, showing these tools. The article adds that the "archaeological data alone were insufficient to estimate the age of these tools", and that they used other, geological, paleogeographical, and paleontological techniques. There were different opinions among the scholars, with some dating it at no more than 40 ky, while others, including the author of the paper in two articles published in 1964 and 1972, Gaiduk, 1968, and Ceitlin, 1979 placed it in the Lower Pleistocene.

The articles, in Russian, are:
Okladnikov, A.P., 1964. Ulalinka–the earliest Palaeolithic occupation in Siberia. Investiya AN SSSR 1/1, 131–133.
Okladnikov, A.P. 1972, Ulalinka – drevnepaleoliticheskiy pamyatnik Sibiri. In Paleolit i neolit SSSR, vol. 7. Moscow: Nauka, pp. 7–19. (MIA; No. 185).
Gaiduk, I. M. 1968. Kamenny vek basseina Verhnei i Srednei Obi. (paleolit, neolit). Avtoreferat dissertatsii, Novosibirsk.
Zeitlin (or Ceitlin S.M. 1979. Geology of the Paleolithic of Northern Asia. Moscow: Nauka. Yamskikh

Ulalinka is cited by Dennell, Rendell and Hailwood, 1988 "... the artefacts from the site of Ulalinka in Soviet Central Asia, that were dated to the Olduvai Event (Okladinov & Pospelova, 1982), but need not be older than the Brunhes- Matuyama boundary at c. 0.7 My."

Shunkov, 2005 gives it an old, yet more recent age "The available palaeomagnetic and radiothermoluminescence (RTL) dates suggest attribution of the lowermost layers at Ulalinka to a wide chronological range of c. 300 - 400 ka to 1.5 mya (Okladnikov et al. 1985). The lower chronological boundary seems doubtful, whereas the upper boundary is reliable, supporting the age estimates of the Ulalinka site as older than 300 ka."

However, an older dating is provided by UNESCO in History of civilizations of Central Asia, v. 1: The Dawn of civilization, earliest times to 700 B.C., 1992 (see p. 54), though with some reservations; highlights are mine:

"The site of Ulalinka, within the town of Gornoaltaisk in the northern Altai, gives rise to considerable controversy among specialists. Discovered in 1961, it was excavated overseveral seasons by A. P. Okladnikov. Beneath a four-metre layer of alluvial loam lies a stratum of multicoloured clays resting on boulder deposits. In the lower part of the clay, which geologists ascribe to the Kochorka Eneopleistocene suite, a series of hand-worked pebbles is to be found in a seam of yellow-ochre-coloured clay, containing quartzite boulders and pebbles. Palaeomagnetic analysis suggests that the yellow-ochre is in the Matayama zone of negative magnetization. The thermoluminescent date of the layer that contains the tools is 1.48 million years. [Note: Matayama reversal, or negative magnetization took place between 2.58 and 0.78 million years ago]
The archaeological material is restricted to quartzite tools scattered among the pebbles in the clay. Okladnikov identifies several groups: crude pebble ‘proto-axes’, ‘tools with anextended nose’, crudely made choppers and crude scrapers. Particular attention was paid to laterally split quartzite pebbles with dressed edges and tips. Although these artefacts are comparable in period with the Olduvan industry, their general appearance does not allow direct analogies to be drawn with that site or its typological series. The reason is that Ulalinka lacks both stable designs and, most importantly, the usual signs of deliberate working – the struck crest, surface cutting, precise spalling facets and so on. Okladnik overcomes this difficulty by explaining that the Ulalinka finds are unusual in that the pebbles were split not by striking but by being heated in a fire and then dropped in water. Analysing the formation about this site, it should be noted that until more convincing evidence is available, Okladnikov’s conclusions cannot be unreservedly accepted."

Another online reference (Novosibirsk State University (NSU) in Russia, in english) states that "Ulalinka which lies within the limits of today's Gorno-Altaisk, is the most ancient settlement of primitive man. During the excavation of the Ulalinka site some primitive stone tools were found. The fire technique, that is the heating and quick cooling of stones, was used when making the tools. Ulalinka's finds are dated within the limits of the lower Palaeolithic period - from 150000 BC to 1.5 million years."

The final reference is Zwyns, 2012: "The Ulalinka site was discovered in 1961 by Okladnikov and was intensively investigated starting in 1969. The dating of human occupation at theses sites varies depending of the authors (Maloletko, 1972; Okladnikov, 1972; Gayduk, 1973; Okladnikov and Pospelova, 1982; Ragozin and Shliukov, 1984; Tseitlin, 1986) and doubts have been raised regarding the authenticity of the lithic assemblage (Mochanov, 1976; Medvedev, 1983 quoted after Derevianko et al., 2001). Okladnikov admitted that evidence of percussion is not clear (Okladnikov, 1972) but other scholars observed and described nearly a hundred artifacts (Abramova, 1989)."

Conclusions

The site at Ulalinka is controversial, deemed very old by some, recent by others, or even a hoax. It is part of a trend that reveals several sites in Siberia, far older than accepted in the West, described in papers written in Russian, and therefore, ignored and not cited by Western archaeologists.

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

Eolithic stone tools: Carter and Texas Street, 100 kya site in San Diego

In a recent post, Imentioned the primitive eoliths, cobble-like eolithic tools described by Florentino Ameghino in the late 1800s, and early 1900s, in deep sediments of the Pampas in Buenos Aires province, Argentina. They are paleolithic, but don't resemble the typical Acheulean tools found in the Old World, and used by Homo erectus.

In this post I will look into the eolithic tools in the San Diego area in USA.

Michael Cremo and Richard Thompson, in their 1993 work Hidden History of the Human Race discuss these early stone tools and mentions other sites besides the ones described by Ameghino. Below I will follow them, and add more references and expand on their comments.

Texas Street Site, San Diego

Eoliths were reported by George Francis Carter (1912-2004) department chair and professor of geography at Johns Hopkins University, who worked at this site when he returned to California after WWII. In 1947 he discovered a large pit on Texas Street in Mission Valley, San Diego, California, USA, and found coarse stone tools and the charred remains of ancient hearths buried under 50 feet (15 m) of alluvial sediments. The areas whith the hearths had stones that had been worked by percussion. Carter said they were cores and choppers, and these areas were identified as workshops.

Based on the geology of the area he realized they were very old. Finally, he published his investigations in 1957/58. The site produced crude cobble-like tools dating back to the interglacial period, and around 80,000 to 100,000 (80-100 ky) old.

He was attacked by critics who attributed natural causes to the formation of these stone tools: natural fires that cracked the stones, stones broken by the action of strong currents in streams, or fractures caused by geologic faults. Some called them "Carterfacts". Carter followed up with his book Earlier Than You Think: A Personal View of Man in America, 1980. And in his his Early Man at San Diego: A Geomorphic-Archaeological View, 1996, refutes these arguments, and adds that "Some have suggested that it could be older than my estimate of 100,000 years... Its history may be more complex than I thought, and if so. it is somewhat older." Carter describes the tools main features as "a cobble with either a natural or prepared platform from which long parallel sided flakes, technically blades. have been struck. There are other artifacts, notably cleaver-like heavy items. resembling a tool called a skreblo in Siberian archaeology, a resemblance noted by Herb Minshall (1974. 1975, 1976, 1986). And there is much use of sharp-edged flakes and cores. There is a total absence of manos and metates, bifacially flaked points, or any other tool typical of any of the later people."

Siberian Skreblos, large scrapers. Gunchinsuren, 2013

Carter and Homo erectus reaching America first

Carter also mentions the Siberian sites which are 1 million years old (see my post on them) and agrees that they can only be the work of Homo erectus, well adapted to the extreme climate of that region, with fire, clothes, and shelter: "We have never dreamed that Homo erectus had equipment such as I have noted above. But I am told that more such data is emerging in northwestern Europe on something like a 500,000 year time level. In southern California we have the as yet untested claim of the killing and dismembering of a mammoth in the Borrego paleontological beds at the seemingly incredible date of 400,000 years (L'Hommediu 1988)... The possibility of Homo erectus reaching America is very real, if these recent reports stand up. The absence of any Homo erectus skeletal finds is simply negative evidence, and given the American archaeologists' aversion to looking in early formations, weak evidence indeed."

He cited Helena L'Hommedieu, 1988, Evidence Indicates Man Was in Area 500,000 Years B.P. Borrego Sun 37(13):3-4. But this was a newspaper article in a New Mexico media, not in a scholarly journal. However, there is a peer-reviewed article on them: Miller, G. J., Remeika, P., Parks, J. D., Stout, B., & Waters, V. (1991). A preliminary report on half-a-million year-old cutmarks on mammoth bones from the Anza-Borrego Desert Irvingtonian. Imperial Valley College Museum Society, Occasional Paper No. 8. Which suggests the cuts on the bones were made by animals and not by human stone tools. Sounds similar to the Cerutti site (130 ky) where mammoths seem to have been butchered by humans 130 kya.

Reivindication

More recently, Curtis Runnels, 2014 wrote that he had read about Carterfacts, and seen poor photographs of them, and had the opportunity to examine the artifacts discovered by Carter:

"I examined two boxes of materials, a total of about 100 objects, and found that the majority were indeed artifacts of undoubted human workmanship" adding that one particular artifact called his attention: "This piece, which might be described as a proto- or atypical biface or chopping tool would not be out of place in an Old World Palaeolithic assemblage, and the same could be said for the rest of the materials from Texas Street and Buchanan Canyon.
What does this mean? My brief inspection is not enough. Although I am convinced that George Carter and his colleagues found artifacts, it is necessary to re-evaluate their contexts and to subject Carter’s sites and assemblages to more detailed study, preferably backed with radiometric estimates of age using techniques that were unavailable in Carter’s day. Did Carter find unequivocal evidence of humans in the San Diego region as early if not earlier than the last interglacial? It is still too early to tell, but this experience has convinced me that we ignore or discard the early work of the Pre-Clovis proponents only at our peril, and that a full re-consideration of the peopling of the New World must include an objective, unbiased, fresh, interdisciplinary review."

Clovis First suppression efforts

Interestingly, Cremo and Thompson write that Carter was asked to "submit an article about early humans in America. Carter did so, but when the editor sent the article out to two scholars for review, they rejected it. Upon being informed of this by the editor, Carter replied in a letter, dated February 2, 1960: "... I have another anonymous correspondent who as a graduate student found evidence that would tend to prove me right. He and his fellow student buried the evidence. They were certain that to bring it in would cost them their chance for their Ph.D.s. ... At another meeting, a young man sidled up to say, 'In dig X they found core tools like yours at the bottom but just didn't publish them.'""

This is in line with what I have mentioned in a previous post, a cover up to uphold the Clovis-First theory and supress anything related to older sites.

Carter was a pioneer in pointing out the obvious, that there is the possibility that humans, and not necessarily modern ones, reached America and lit fires, and fashioned paleolithic (eoliths) tools. They could have been Homo erectus. The established, formal, archaeologists don't look for these sites, they ignore them even if they spot them. He was an outspoken man who promoted controversial ideas in the days when pre Clovis sites were anathema.

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