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

New Paper: An early peopling of Australia

Update for my Oct. 5, 2025 post, Lake Mungo man revisited: maybe the Aboriginal people were not the first to reach Australia. A study published on Nov. 28, 2025 has uncovered interesting information on the date that humans reached Australia, and their interactions with archaic humans in Southeast Asia.

The paper is Francesca Gandini et al., (2025) Genomic evidence supports the “long chronology” for the peopling of Sahul. Sci. Adv. 11, eady9493 (2025).DOI:10.1126/sciadv.ady9493

The paper explores when modern numans settled in Sahul, a landmass that spanned Australia, Tasmania, Papua New Guinea, and smaller islands on the now submerged continental shelf (under the sea since ice melted at the end of the last Ice Age). It aimed at validating the "long chronology" with an arrival around 60 to 65,000 years ago, against the "short chronology" which proposed an arrival 47 to 51,000 years ago.

The authors analyzed DNA and used a genetic clock to time the arrival, which they place around 60,000 years ago. They also found that people arrived using two entry routes.

I have expressed my doubts about the accuracy of genetic clocks in several posts (See the useless genetic clocks), but let's look into this paper and its findings.

Near Oceania was peopled early

The authors found that " We also draw Oceania together with Sahul, finding that Near Oceania was first settled at around the same time as Sahul, followed by intense ongoing exchange." This is interesting as we find that people who used watercraft were already living in Near Oceania (New Guinea, Bismarck Archipelago, and the main Solomon Islands), 60,000 years ago. And would have had plenty of time to cross the Pacific Ocean and reach America!

The molecular clock

The time is set by the exit from Africa which this paper sets by defining the age of mtDNA haplogroup L3 "the African ancestor of all non-African mitogenomes" at 73 to 89,000 years old. This date "robustly precludes any contribution to the modern non-African mitochondrial pool from earlier dispersals before 90 ka, as proposed by some researchers." Which is a limitation. The ages could actually be older, humans left Africa in different waves over the past 200 ky.

The date for Y-chromosome haplogroups is similar; the paper states that "non-African lineages diverg[ed] from ~71 (63 to 81) ka."

The paper used ADMIXTURE tools to analyze genome-wide data (see my comment on this type of tool).

The authors admit the bias and the need to "define" initial parameters by hand: "The Bayesian approach has some problems that have received little attention. In practice, it gives extremely variable outputs, such that any given rate is hard to replicate. The outcome depends on precisely which samples are included in the calibration; even with similar sets of samples, the estimated rate can be very different, and biases appear toward the ages of the predominant samples used in the calibration. Moreover, in the cases of ages in the range 40 to 80 ka, there are few calibration points... In addition to age bias, there is also a profound geographical and phylogenetic bias: Only 2 out of 12 samples used were non-European, and only Tianyuan belongs to haplogroup N. Moreover, one sample (the Iceman) was inadvertently uncalibrated, reducing its age by >12%. Although subsequent calibration attempts have been made with more samples, these have exacerbated the biases."

In the "Materials and Methods" section the phylogenetic analyses and molecular clock dating assumptions and adjustments are explained, like: "We converted mutational distances (both ML and ρ) into years using the substitution rate of about one mutation every 3624 years for the entire mitogenome and correcting for purifying selection using the calculator provided by Soares et al."

The paper suggests a "Northern Route": from Borneo to Sulawesi (Celebes), Banda Archipelago and into Western Papua, and reaching Australia via the Cape York Peninsula in Queensland. The "Southern Route" went from Java, to Sumatra, Sunda, Flores, and Timor, reaching Australia through Arnhem Land and northern Western Australia.

It also mentions archaic admixtures: "The connection of Sahul populations to Aboriginal Philippine groups is reinforced by the presence of distinctively high levels of Denisovan-related archaic-related introgression in both, possibly relating to interbreeding with Homo luzonensis, in the Philippines, and Homo floresiensis, in Wallacea, or even within Sahul itself."

I always like to focus on the oddities, the things that authors point out as "remarkable"or, in this case, "notably", it is the following:

"We also included in this analysis our Iron Age sample from Sulawesi, which carries the Papuan mitochondrial Q1l lineage, alongside 17 further genomes from ancient Wallacea, including a pre-Neolithic sample from Sulawesi (41, 42) (fig. S8). Notably, despite its clear Papuan mtDNA ancestry, the Iron Age sample was the only archaeological sample from Wallacea to carry no discernible Oceanian autosomal ancestry. This result is confirmed by PCA (fig. S9). This indicates both that ancestry from New Guinea, while ancient (41), was not ubiquitous in prehistoric Wallacea, but possibly (at least, since the spread of the Neolithic) restricted to coastal regions, and that sufficient time had elapsed for the ancestry represented by the maternal lineage to have been “washed out” of the autosomal genome in this individual."

This means that the original, Papuan mtDNA was found in an Iron Age (1700 BP) person in Sulawesi, yet it lacked the autosomal (all the other chromosomes) that would mark it as an Oceanian, it carried the input of other non-Oceanian people that diluted its ancestral autosomal DNA. This seems quite obvious since the ancestors of modern Polynesians made their way across this region in recent times, on their way to the Pacific Islands.

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2025 by Austin Whittall © 

Neves and Pucciarelli's paper on affinities between Australians and Paleoindians

As promised, in this post I share a link to a paper by Neves and Pucciarelli (Neves, W.A. and Pucciarelli, H.M. (1991). Morphogical affinities of the first Americans: an exploratory analysis based on early South American human remains. J. Hum. Evol. 21: 261-273).

It tells how they compared the remains of three ancient South American remains (from Tequendama in Colombia, and Lagoa Santa in Brazil) with ancient and contemporary Eurasian and Australian remains. They used thirteen different cranial parameters in their analysis.

This was in the days before DNA was used to compare human groups. Neat and interesting. I thank Marcelo Bruyere for having shared the paper.

I have uploaded it to one of my websites: here.

The authors point out that "The comparison showed that early South Americans clustered very tightly with South Pacific populations, when size and shape were used as taxonomical criteria. When size was removed, the three series occupied an intermediate position".

And conclude that:

"the morphological affinities derived from our study can be perfectly matched to an Asian origin if we assume that Australians and Americans shared a common ancestor until just before they arrived at the New World. Accordingly, both branches, the one that migrated northwards and the one that migrated southwards, did not have a long, independent evolutionary history in northern and southern Asia prior to their settlement in the Americas and Australia. At least not enough to have changed their cranial morphology. If we accept the association detected in this study between Early South Americans, Early Australians and the Zhoukoudian Upper Cave people, Northern China can be suggested as the starting point of both migration branches."

So the remains from the upper Zhoukoudian Cave, which are between 20 and 30,000 years old would belong to a group which is the root of the first wave of Paleoindians and Australians.

It is possible, in my opinion, that this date could even be earlier, considering the date that humans reached Australia (some 50-70 ky ago).

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2025 by Austin Whittall © 

Australian Pygmies, fact and fiction

Australian pygmies are a source of controversy because mainstream science and the Aboriginal indigenous people oppose the notion that pygmies were the first humans to inhabit the continent.

Right wing supporters on the other hand believe that the pygmies came first and that the Aborigines took the continent from the pygmies.

Their argument goes as follows: Pygmies arrived first, the aboriginal people came later and drove the pygmies to extinction, the British were just another wave of migrants doing what the aboriginal people had done before. So why should invaders such as aboriginals have more rights over the land than the British. After all, the Aboriginals took it from the original Pygmie people.

A quick online search shows that there are not many references to pygmy people in Australia. I didn't manage to find anything recorded by the first European explorers or during the period of British exploration and occupation.

Most of the literature points back to an article published in Quadrant (Keith Windschuttle and Tim Gillin, The extinction of the Australian Pygmies, 2002).

Quadrant is a right-wing magazine (see what mediabiasfactcheck.com has to say about how far to the right they are), so Quadrant would have a reason to back the pygmy theory because it undermines the aboriginal people's claims of being the first people in Australia.

My Search for Pygmies in Australia

This is what I have found out about pygmies down under:

1. Pygmies are part of the Aboriginal people's mythology.

There is an Aboriginal myth, about the origin of the platypus (Source), which mentions the "small people" or "Dinderi". They hunted water snakes in the Brisbane River in what is now Queensland, but these managed to turn them into platypuses. But does this myth mean that there were a tribe of pygmies (the Dinderi)?

You can also read about Short people in Cape York Peninsula, Northern Queensland, Australia.

2. Short stature people lived in Queensland recently.

An article titled Pygmy elder faces eviction, published in 2007 (Queensland CourierMail August 25, 2007), reported that Lizzy Woods, 105 years old, was the "... oldest surviving matriarch of the Jirrbal rainforest people. ... the sole surviving link to the pygmy 'white cockatoo' tribe – most of whom stood less than 122cm (4ft) tall – of the Misty Mountain region near Tully.
... the 110cm-tall [3.6 ft] elder [said] 'I was born in the rainforest. I grew up chasing kangaroo and picking berries off the trees. I belong here. This is my land. The pygmy tribe – that is my mob'."

3. An anthropologist also reported the Dinderi myth.

Lindsay Winterbotham interviewed an Aboriginal man born in 1887, Gaiarbaus and wrote (1957) the book "Gaiarbaus story of the Jinibara tribe of south east Queensland (and its neighbours)", it was never published, but the book exists and you can read its index online, and this index mentions: "Pygmies (Dinderi), beliefs in south east Queensland tribes".

Winterbotham was advised by Norman Tindale during his interviews, and it is Tindale who is quoted in the article published by Quadrant.

3. Tindale and the Trihybrid theory

Tindale and American anthropologist Joseph Birdsell, worked together for over 50 years, starting in 1938. They put forward the theory that: The pygmoid and negrito people(the word negrito is Spanish, and means "small black people") living in the rainforests in Northern Queensland in the 1930s were the remnants of the first wave of humans to reach the vast Australian continent. These tiny people were later pushed in to the island of Tasmania (hence the name of "Tasmanoids" that Tindale and Birdsell gave them) and the deep rainforests by two later waves of humans invading Australia.

The two scientists later renamed them "Barrinean" after Lake Barrine. Yoy can read this theory in this 1953 newspaper article.

This "Trihybrid" theory included a second wave of pale skinned "Murrayians" which were supposed to be linked to the Ainu people of Japan, and the third wave of robust dark skinned "Carpentarians" possibly linked to primitive Indian tribes.

This website has some photos of these three "types" of humans proposed by Birdsell and Tindale as the successive waves that peopled Australia.

This theory has been discredited by later research (see this paper for example), but it was not invented by Tindale, I found an earlier publication suggesting the same idea:

In Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of South Australia, 1922, an article (Cylindro-Conical and cornute stones from the Darling River and Cooper Creek, Robert Pulleine. pp.304-308) mentions Albert Churchward:

"If we accept the views of Churchward, now gaining the attention of anthropologists, that mankind originated in the great lake districts of Africa, we find opened up a path which leads to an understanding of the origin of our aborigines and their beliefs. In his two books, "Signs and Symbols of - Primordial Man" and "The Origin and Evolution of Mankind," he pictures the Pygmy exodus throughout the world and their displacement and annihilation by the people of the second Nilotic exodus to which our aborigines, accord- ing to him, belong. He states that the Pygmies of the first Nilotic invasion were displaced in Australia and eventually only remained in Tasmania. "

Churchward had been writing about pygmies since the early 1900s, so he surely influenced Tindale.

4. There are "pygmies" in New Guinea

New Guinea has small people too, reported as early as 1910 (paper in Nature), as recently as 2013, and in between too (see this paper from 1961 (it mentions the trihybrid theory and Tindale).

Closing Comments

Probably different waves of humans colonized Australia, starting with Homo erectus and ending with the British. The Aboriginal people are without any doubt, the rightful original people of Australia, the first people to successfuly colonize the continent and live there for over 50,000 years. However it is also likely that other groups, linked to the Negrito people of Southeastern Asia and New Guinea also settled in Australia, whether it took place before, during or after the arrival of the Aboriginals is a trivial point.

But what if the Aboriginal myths aren't about the Negrito people, and instead refer to "small people" like the "Hobbits" of Indonesia? A distant relative of us humans.

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2019 by Austin Whittall © 

Humans but not AMH in Australia 125,000 years ago?

My previous post mentioned the currently accepted window for the entry of humans into America, roughly some 15,000 years ago. A similar situation occurs with Australia: the peopling of the vast southern continent-island is tied to the purported "Out of Africa" dates meaning that nobody accepts an earlier entry date than roughly 50,000 years ago.

But there seems to be some evidence of early human activity in Australia. I will mention two of them.

Charcoal 120,000 years old at Moyjil

Fire is a good indication of human activity. Of course, natural events can also start fires. A paper published in 2018 (Ian J. McNiven et al., The Moyjil site, South-West Victoria, Australia: Excavation of a last Interglacial charcoal and burnt stone feature - Is it a Hearth?, Proceedings of the Royal Society of Victoria 130(2):94, January 2018, DOI: 10.1071/RS18008), looks into the charcoal found at a site in NSW, Australia.

I will highlight the paper's main points: "The oldest dates for human occupation of Sahul (Australia and New Guinea) based on radiocarbon dating are a little under 50 ka...
we present excavation results for a small deposit containing charcoal and darkened stones (some clearly burnt) at Moyjil...
The potential for Moyjil to re-write the early human history of Australia is not new, as claims have already been made that a marine shell deposit at the site dating to at least 60‒80,000 years ago (since redated to 120‒125,000 years old — see Sherwood et al. 2018a) could be cultural in origin (Sherwood et al. 1994; Nair & Sherwood 2007)...
On balance, the broad range of discrimination criteria marginally point more towards CBS1 representing a cultural hearth and not exclusively a naturally burnt feature. As such, some evidence exists for CBS1 representing a ~120,000 year old hearth. However, the evidence for CBS1 as a hearth must be definitive and irrefutable for such a substantial claim to be considered credible, given the significant implications that this would have for world history. At this juncture, CBS1 does not meet this high level evidential threshold.".

So the evidence exists but as it isn't "irrefutable", for the time being it will not be considered as being the result of human activity.

For those interested on the shell midden deposit dated to 120-125 kya, the full text paper is here.

Lake Eyre Skull Fragment

The book The First Boat People by Steve Webb, Cambridge University Press, 2006, addresses the issue of an early peopling of Australia (you can read it online following the link above).

Webb provides plenty of evidence to back his ideas. I will just mention the skull fragment found at Lake Eyre, (pages 161 to 172) which was dated to an age of 121 - 162 kya via fluorine analysis and to 132 kya by uranium series method.

Webb states that these dates... "strongly suggests it lies well within the last interglacial, probably towards the middle (?80–100 ky). These results are, therefore,taken to indicate that humans were certainly in this region during the lastinterglacial and well before the onset of the last glaciation."

Which is what we mentioned in our post, yesterday. Dates of initial peopling of America could be from the Interglacial. And Webb finds that feasible for Australia too.

Webb summarizes the situation as follows: "Finally, we cannot ignore the fact that humans lived next door to Australia for nearly two million years before they arrived here. The fossil evidenceindicates that they constituted a viable population living at the edge of theinhabited world, in Java and China. Their viability stretches beyond theirfossil remains and into the realm of exploration as they explored beyond Java to Flores Island almost one million years ago, and that required a capability to cross at least two 22 km water gaps. The idea that this was an aberrant group and one that does not count in any assessment of regional human evolution is difficult to accept and, indeed, it does not take into consideration the will and determination of this erstwhile group of humans. Consider, if they made that inter-island crossing so long ago, what would have stopped them from continuing to the end of the archipelago and even further during the next 700 ky? These people or their descendants were the most obvious to be the first Australians, long before the 'advent' of anything called anatomically modern human. Why should we invoke a people from half way round the world to reach here first when this successful population thrived and explored their archipelago only a few hundred kilometres away from our continental shelf or little more than a hundred kilometres away during low sea levels? It isnot possible that this persistent and successful group did not attempt to enter Australia and eventually succeed in doing so. They may have done this out of pure curiosity, probably tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of years before anybody else came anywhere near their new homeland. For me, the question is not did they arrive here, it is when did they arrive here."

I fully agree with Dr. Webb.

The map below shows current continental shores (gray line), the ice age coastline (gray shade), the Homo erectus would have had to cross the same open stretches of water our Homo sapiens ancestors crossed, from Flores Island to Sahul:

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2019 by Austin Whittall ©