| T O P I C R E V I E W |
| Jacy |
Posted - September 16 2004 : 03:43:03 AM
Research challenges American origins
A 'lost tribe' that reached America from Australia may have been the first Native Americans, according to research by Dr Silvia Gonzales (pictured opposite).
If proved by DNA evidence, the research, presented at the British Association for the Advancement of Science Festival, will shatter long-established beliefs about the southerly migration of people believed to have entered America across the Bering Strait.
Dr Gonzales, based in JMU's School of Biological and Earth Sciences, analysed skeletons from the Baja California Peninsula of Mexico. She found that they had long and narrow heads that are quite different from the short, broad skulls of today's Native Amercians. These narrow-skulled people have more in common with southern Asians, Aboriginal Australians and people of the Pacific Rim.
The bones, stored at the National Museum of Anthropology, Mexico City, have been carbon-dated. One well-preserved skull of a long-headed female, who has been dubbed Penon Woman, was found to be 12,700 years old, placing it several thousand years before the arrival of people from the North.
"We think there were several migration waves into the Americas at different times by different human groups," says Dr Gonzales. "The time, route and point of origin of the first colonisation of the Americas remains a most contentious topic in human evolution."
A team of Mexican and British scientists, backed by the Natural Environment Research Council, have attempted to extract DNA from the bones. These results are currently being checked, though Dr Gonzales has indicated that they are consistent with an Australian origin.
Dr Gonzales believes that the 'lost tribe' arrived by boat from Australia via Japan and Polynesia before settling along the Pacific coast of America. A population of the long-headed individuals - known as the Pericues - appears to have survived until the 18th century when they died out because of disease.
http://cwis.livjm.ac.uk/JMUWorld/default_39506.asp
Just thought it might interest you 
Jacy 
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| 1 L A T E S T R E P L I E S (Newest First) |
| Fitz Williams |
Posted - September 16 2004 : 09:59:10 AM
Also about a group that I dig with every May.
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Story last updated at 8:41 a.m. Friday, July 23, 2004
Digging up clues, controversy
Topper Site may shatter beliefs about oldest Americans
BY DANIEL CONOVER
Of The Post and Courier staff
MARTIN--One of the oldest archeological sites in the New World got considerably older last month when scientists and volunteers at the Topper Site near the Savannah River discovered human artifacts far below depths once considered possible.
Al Goodyear, the University of South Carolina archaeologist whose Topper digs first upset scientific orthodoxy in 1998, led the excavation of a new trench at the site this spring. The result: stone tools buried 12 feet below the surface, and six feet beneath a 16,000-year-old level of the site.
GRACE BEAHM/STAFF
Mike Waters, associate director of the Texas-based Center for the Study of the First Americans, studies a soil sample with a magnifier Thursday at the Topper Site in Allendale County.
"That's big news right there because it means the site is much older than it was before," Goodyear said.
Of course, the really big news came six years ago when Goodyear announced he had found stone tools beneath the "Clovis culture" level that anthropologists long believed to represent the extreme edge of human habitation in the Americas.
The Clovis boundary, which hovers somewhere between 12,000 and 13,000 years ago, represented a dividing line between heretical and orthodox science.
Crossing it put Goodyear in the spotlight, attracting both media attention and skeptical resentment from some of his colleagues. "Pre-Clovis archaeology is not for sissies," Goodyear said of the reaction.
But times change. Because of similar finds in Virginia, Pennsylvania and Chile, believers in the old Clovis timetable are now more likely to at least consider the possibility that humans arrived in the Americas earlier -- and perhaps from multiple directions.
"Is Topper orthodox yet? No way," said Pegi Jodry, field director of the Paleoindian Program at the Smithsonian Institution. "But you begin to get more than one of these occurrences ... and they lend each other credence."
Mike Waters, a Texas A&M specialist in analyzing the geology of dig sites, said attitudes toward pre-Clovis findings began changing not long after the first results came out of Topper, located in Allendale County.
"I think there has been a big shift in the last five years," Waters said. "It's an exciting time for archaeology because there are so many possibilities."
Goodyear said he was "100 percent sure" he has found stone tools in this summer's deep-trench excavation, but the season's most exciting find was undoubtedly the dark patch of dirt scientists call "the charcoal feature."
Dating Topper's levels always has been the project's most significant technical problem. The area's acidic soil tends to destroy the organic material needed for carbon isotope dating, and the alternate method (which measures the decaying luminescence of quartz) is too unreliable when used on this type of site.
That's why the charcoal feature -- which Goodyear and others think might have been a small hearth -- is so important. If it contains enough carbon material to produce a good sample, lab workers in California should be able to date it to within 250 years of its creation, said Tom Stafford, the geochemist whose Colorado lab will prepare the sample.
Prospects for getting a clean radiocarbon date on the charcoal feature are good, said Stafford, who hopes to have results back before September.
While Stafford wouldn't hazard a guess at the age of the layer, Goodyear said its depth and geologic context suggest it could be 20,000 to 25,000 years old.
The potential significance of the find prompted Goodyear to extend the six-week summer field season into July, with volunteers on hand to protect the remote site around the clock.
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