Convoluted human evolution: Ancient N. American visit? (Introduction)

by David Turell , Friday, April 28, 2017, 19:02 (2766 days ago) @ David Turell

The San Diego mastodon find from 130,000 years ago is disputed:

http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/49308/title/Paper-Suggesting-Majo...

" If this latest conclusion is valid, it would push the date of the peopling of the Americas back by 100 millennia. “If you are going to push human antiquity in the New World back more than 100,000 years in one fell swoop, you’ll have to do so with a far better archaeological case than this one,” David Meltzer, an archaeologist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, who—like Grayson—was not involved with the study, told Nature.

"Critics have argued that the authors failed to rule out damage caused to the bones by construction equipment or natural causes. But one coauthor, who helped excavate the site, said that the bones were too deep in the Earth to suffer damage from construction machinery rolling across the surface. The mastodon remains and the stones that the authors claimed could have been used as hammers were “deeply buried. . . . There was no equipment damage to the heart of the site,” Thomas Deméré, a paleontologist at the San Diego Natural History Museum, told Science.

"Vance Holliday, a University of Arizona archaeologist, agreed with other critics, saying that the Nature paper does not contain enough evidence to push back the timeline of hominins’ population of North America. “[The authors] present evidence that the broken stones and bones could have been broken by humans,” he told The New York Times. “But they don’t demonstrate that they could only be broken by humans.'”

Comment: If there were humans on the U.S west coast that long ago, there is no evidence they hung around.