What do you make of this?

[Old Troop]

When the crew of the Virginia scallop trawler Cinmar hauled a mastodon tusk onto the deck in 1970, another oddity dropped out of the net: a dark, tapered stone blade, nearly eight inches long and still sharp.

Forty years later, this rediscovered prehistoric slasher has reopened debate on a radical theory about who the first Americans were and when they got here.

Who were the first Americans?

Archaeologists have long held that North America remained unpopulated until about 15,000 years ago, when Siberian people walked or boated into Alaska and then moved down the West Coast.

But the mastodon relic found near the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay turned out to be 22,000 years old, suggesting that the blade was just as ancient.

Whoever fashioned that blade was not supposed to be here.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/radical-theory-of-first-americans-places-stone-age-europeans-in-delmarva-20000-years-ago/2012/02/28/gIQA4mriiR_story.html?hpid=z5

[Lint Head]

1. Native Americans were already here so where did they come from?

[FSogol]

2. I wondered where I left that stone blade.

Great post, btw, thanks for posting.

[Tikki]

3. North American Natives can't fashion dark, tapered stone blades?

Tikki

[warrior1]

4. found this

http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/journey/beringia2.html





by Stephen Oppenheimer

Between 11,000 and 25,000 years ago, sea-levels were so low that the Bering Strait was then a land bridge between Asia and North America. But Beringia was more than that: it was a huge continent in its own right, 1.3 million square kilometres (500,000 square miles) at its maximum extent. Not only was it ice-free, but its grassy tundra supported herds of herbivorous mammals. The summers were for sure cooler than today, but the winters were, paradoxically, milder. For most of the period in which the land bridge existed, the ice caps persisted farther south and, as we saw earlier, the ice corridor was closed between 15,000 and 22,000 years ago, pre-sumably preventing contact between the far north and the rest of America. The Siberian hinterland could hardly have been more inviting than North America, being an Arctic desert at this time, so Beringia and the western part of Alaska effectively became an ice-age refuge, cut off from both continents (click climate button on main map). With the Beringian refuge holding remnants of the original genetic founders of America, we can now see why the Na-Dene and Inuit-Aleut who, with their low diversity, seemed so different from the rest of the Americans, were yet linked to America through their A1/A2 group gene tree.

[warrior1]

5. this and this

http://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/permanent/humanorigins/history/symbolic.php

http://www.lascaux.culture.fr/#/en/00.xml

[grasswire]

6. why do they assume the mastodon bone and the blade are the same age...

....just because they came up in the net at the same time and place? That doesn't sound like a scientific assumption.

[saras]

8. They don't, of course. They tested it.

[Brother Buzz]

9. How is a stone tool tested?

[pkz]

7. u know what is scary as H*ll?

22,000 yrs. and we really haven't evolved sooooooo much

[Auntie Bush]

12. The Dems have...Crazy Republicans...not so much.

[RKP5637]

15. I was thinking similarly and then saw your post. Technological advancement doesn't

necessarily mean sociological advancement. And sadly technological advancement often means better war/killing machines.

[saras]

10. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence

"Archaeologists are always dating something to five thousand years ago and then saying that this must be the first time it occurred because they haven't found any earlier examples. And then, incredibly, they defend this idea to the death. It's logically indefensible." Clovis-first, he said, is "a classic example of arguing from silence. Even in archaeology, which isn't exactly rocket science" - he chuckled - "there's only so long that you can get away with it."

David Henige, quoted in "1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus", by Charles Mann.

[trof]

11. Simple: DNA test the blade for mastodon blood.

Next question?

[digonswine]

13. Why would mastodon blood still be on it?

[trof]

14. Because.

Mastodon blood NEVER fades.
You could look it up.

[digonswine]

16. F*@#ing mastodons!

KHAAAAAANNNN!