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The mammoth, the knife flake and the possible alternative to Clovis

By clock on August 10, 2006.

The find of a knife flake together with a mammoth dated at 16,000 yo, spurs new speculations about pre-Clovis humans in the Americas. This is the clearest description I ever found of a possible alternative hypothesis to Bering-Clovis.

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paleontology

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So much of the Pacific Rim has a fascinating (and unknown) history, from the Ainu to the Australian Aboriginies (sp?) to the Clovis to the Inuit to the Japanese to the Polynesians... So many interesting cultures with so many questions yet to be discovered. (At least, yet to be discovered by me... maybe more is known than I think...)

Essentially this is a Berkeley Vs. University of Arizona thing. The argument for earliest humans being on the coast, and moving inland has a long history here in California archaeology. Many human remains on the California coast dated to older ages than 13,000BP. These were found in the era around WWII building boom in Southern California, and their age is open to question. The primary problem is one of negative evidence, most of the likely habitation sites are probably inundated since they predate the current ocean elevation after the continental ice caps melted. One of the major difficulties with Hayne's argument is that the dissemination of Clovis culture is younger in time as the sites approach the ice sheets, and head out towards the east coast, completely opposite if the hunters emerged from Beringia.

Mike