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Natural Science Forum / Biology / Paleontology / April 2006Article: The very first Americans
The very first Americans 08 April 2006 Robert Adler Magazine issue 2546 Who were they and where did they come from? Footprints found in a Mexican quarry promise to change everything we thought we knew IN THE high desert south-east of Puebla, Mexico, lies a sloping apron of pockmarked volcanic rock. It's a silent and sun-drenched landscape, close enough to Mexico City for the volcano Popocatépetl to be visible in the distance. The site - an abandoned quarry - doesn't look like a battlefield, but that's what it has become. If a team of geoarchaeologists from Liverpool John Moores University in the UK are right, about 160 of the pockmarks on the quarry floor are human footprints - footprints some 30,000 years older than they ought to be. The footprints are the new front line of a long-running battle over the peopling of the Americas, the last great land mass to be occupied by humans. Until recently most archaeologists believed the first arrivals - and the ancestors of today's Native Americans - were big-game hunters from north-east Asia who crossed the Bering land bridge linking ... Full Text at NewScientist (Requires Subscription) http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19025461.400?DCMP=NLC-ezine&nsref=mg190254 61.400  SignaturePosted by Robert Karl Stonjek <snip> > Footprints found in a Mexican quarry promise to change everything we thought we knew Robert: That promise was made too hastily. It was not fulfilled. > If a team of geoarchaeologists from Liverpool John Moores University in the UK are right, > about 160 of the pockmarks on the quarry floor are human footprints - > footprints some 30,000 years older than they ought to be. <snip> If they were right, then those "human foorprints" are older than the first human beings. But they were wrong. They dated material from above the "footprints", material which is much younger than the volcanic ash in which they were "found". http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20051128/footprints_arc_01.html "Ancient American Footprints Disputed" Re: samples of volcanic ash in which the supposed "footprints" were found: " All samples produced ages ranging from 1.26 to 1,47 million years, indicating that the basaltic tuff on which the purported footprints were found is in fact very much older than Gonzalez and colleagues claim. At about 1.3 million years old, the footprints would predate the first known appearance of Homo sapiens in Africa by more than a million years. Renne and colleagues called the possibility that the footprints were made by a hominid that existed before H. sapiens "extremely remote" and concluded that the impressions were not hominid footprints at all. " The "footprints" are most likely marks made by modern quarrymen just before they were "found". The "find" was never more than hype. Discussing these tool marks is a waste of time. - Daryl Krupa It can be a waste of time to discuss anything based on incomplete data. If you read the complete New Scientist article, it is suggested there that the one component of the tuff dated by Renne could plausibly have been reworked from older lake deposits by an underwater eruption. Other components of the tuff dated by other methods are much younger, making Renne's dates irrelevant. Definitely worth waiting for more info on stratigraphy, dating and trackway analysis before making your mind up. |
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