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".
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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