Archaeology shocker: Study claims humans reached the Americas 130,000 years ago

WashingtonPost.com - Some 130,000 years ago, scientists say, a mysterious group of ancient people visited the coastline of what is now Southern California. More than 100,000 years before they were supposed to have arrived in the Americas, these unknown people used five heavy stones to break the bones of a mastodon. They cracked open femurs to suck out the marrow and, using the rocks as hammers, scored deep notches in the bone. When finished, they abandoned the materials in the soft, fine soil; one tusk planted upright in the ground like a single flag in the archaeological record. Then the people vanished.

This is the bold claim put forward by paleontologist Thomas Deméré and his colleagues in a paper published Wednesday in the journal Nature. The researchers say that the scratched-up mastodon fossils and large, chipped stones uncovered during excavation for a San Diego highway more than 20 years ago are evidence of an unknown hominin species, perhaps Homo erectus, Neanderthals, maybe even Homo sapiens.

If Deméré's analysis is accurate, it would set back the arrival date for hominins in the Americas and suggest that modern humans might not have been the first species to arrive. But the paper has raised skepticism among many researchers who study American prehistory. Several said this is a classic case of an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence — which they argue the Nature paper doesn’t provide.

“You can’t push human activity in the New World back 100,000 years based on evidence as inherently ambiguous as broken bones and nondescript stones,” said David Meltzer, an archaeologist at Southern Methodist University. “They need to do a better job showing nature could not be responsible for those bones and stones.”

For decades, discussion of early settlement of the Americas has focused on the tail end of the Ice Age. Most archaeologists agree that humans crossed a land bridge from Asia into Alaska sometime after 25,000 years ago, then either walked between ice sheets or took boats down the Pacific coastline to reach the wide open plains of Pleistocene America roughly 15,000 years before present. Though scientists debated the exact timing of this journey, their estimates differed by hundreds or a few thousand years, not tens of thousands. (ontinueReading