I am just back from a short but well deserved vacation with our children, their partners, and our grandchildren. Sharing quality time with the family is, in my opinion, one of the best things one can do. It is a pity that life is so short!
But, getting down to the subject of my blog, I'd like to share a paper🞿 published in 2021, that reported ancient pre-Clovis dates of more than 30,000 years ago, for a site in Mexico.
🞿 This is the paper: Somerville AD, Casar I, Arroyo-Cabrales J. New AMS Radiocarbon Ages from the Preceramic Levels of Coxcatlan Cave, Puebla, Mexico: A Pleistocene Occupation of the Tehuacan Valley? Latin American Antiquity. 2021;32(3):612-626. doi:10.1017/laq.2021.26
The site is known as Coxcatlan Cave, and it is located in the state of Puebla, in Mexico (Google map), roughly 320 km (200 mi.) southeast of Mexico City. It was discovered in the 1960s by the American archaeologist Richard Stockton MacNeish (1918-2001). MacNeish found remains of a plant known as teosintle (or teocintle), Zea perennis, a wild variety that is an ancient ancestor of maize, that later domesticated, producing modern maize. These remains were between 7,000 and 8,700 years old.
The cave is set in Tehuacan Valley, and was occupied by humans over a period spanning more than ten thousand years. The most recent groups, in the cave's upper sediment layers, were the nomads who gathered teosinte, that later became farmers.
But, what is really interesting is found in the oldest, deepest layers of the cave. These were analyzed by Somerville et al and dated using accelerated mass spectrometry radiocarbon dating techniques. They were expecting them to be not older than 12,000 yers BP, but instead, they were much older: "[the] bones from the Ajuereado phase zones at the base of the cave yielded surprisingly old ages that range from 33,448 to 28,279 cal BP, a time prior to the Last Glacial Maximum. Because these early ages are many thousands of years older than current models estimate for the peopling of the Americas, they require reassessments of the artifacts and ecofacts excavated from these early zones." A conflict with the orthodox viewpoint of a recent peopling of America!
The oldest layers are known as the Ajuereado level, which has two phases, "Early" and "Later", each of them is composed of different "Zones".
The oldest zone of the Early phase contained crude stone tools: "Minimally worked blades, end-scrapers, and choppers are present" as well as "Pleistocene fauna" while the more recent 10,000 to 14,500 year-old layers of the "Later" Ajuereado phase had more advanced stone tools ("bifacial projectile points; that is, Lerma and Abasolo points" and modern animal remains.
Old Dates
The authors measured dates of bones from the Early Ajuereado phase zones. And found them to be "much older than anticipated", they were 33,228 to 28,279 cal BP years old.
The Early phase produced a lot of lepus (rabbit species, like the jackrabbit) bones, that had been cracked open by humans, they show cut marks, and had also been cooked: There was charcoal and also "crude" stone tools and flakes.
The tools were manmade, as they were composed of flint, which is not found in the rocks of the cave, implying that the stone was brought to the cave from an external quarry. The authors point out that " ... a material external to the cave, makes it difficult to dismiss them as cultural artifacts."
This is at odds with the accepted dates for the peopling of America, but the tools, bones, and fire clearly indicate an early date for the presence of humans at Coxcatlán:
"Because many of the stone tools associated with these early levels are only minimally worked and the antiquity of the ages places these stratigraphic layers many thousands of years before traditional hypotheses posit the arrival of humans in North America, the identity of these objects as tools remains questionable. Nevertheless, the observations that the faunal remains appear to have been processed by humans, that the stone tools are made from flint, and that several stone tools exhibit retouching provide support for the notion of a pre-LGM occupation of Coxcatlan Cave during the Early Ajuereado phase. The radiocarbon ages produced from this study mandate a careful reconsideration of the materials recovered from these zones, including a close inspection of the chipped-stone tools and an analysis of faunal material to document breakage patterns, cut marks, and thermal alterations. The results of this study and those of future reanalyses have important implications for our understanding of several important issues in the archaeology of the New World, including the peopling of the Americas, the timing and causes of the megafaunal extinctions, and the origins of agriculture."
In support for an early presence of humans in this region, the paper cites Mirambell, Lorena, 1994 Los primeros pobladores del actual territorio mexicano. In Historia antigua de México, edited by Manzanilla, Linda R. and Luján, Leonardo López, pp. 177–208. Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Mexico City. Mirambell mentioned the site at Rancho La Amapola with dates ranging from 45,000 to 25,000 cal. radiocarbon years BP, which produced "a chipped-stone discoidal scraper and Pleistocene faunal bones, including a broken and utilized horse tibia."
Comments
This is an extremely old date. At least 15,000 years older than any site in America. In my opinion, the crude tools of the Early Ajuereado phase are evidence of a more primitive group of humans in the area. These humans mastered fire, made stone tools, and coexisted with the megafauna. The Later Ajuereado phase is 10,000 to 14,500 years old, and represents a more sophisticated group of humans (different tools).
Could this indicate an original group of humans (Denisovans or Neanderthals?) in America 30,000 years ago, replaced by a more recent wave of migrants (Homo sapiens) some 15,000 years ago?
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