Press release on early occupation of the Amazon rain forest. Not pre-Clovis, but early, it is claimed.
A more controversial claim: pre-Clovis peoples in Virginia.
Kennewick Man. On a separate page: use the Back button to return.
Australians as the first Americans?!? Luzia, from Brazil, an early American who looks uncannily like someone from Australasia or Polynesia. Story from the New York Times, October 26, 1999. This is not a new claim (that was earlier in 1999), but this is the most comprehensive summary so far. There is no scientific paper yet. Luzia is named half-humorously after Lucy, the australopithecine who has been so important in redefining our concepts of the earliest hominids.
Europeans as the first Americans? Here is a news story from November 1999. Dennis Stanford of the Smithsonian and a colleague are suggesting that the first humans reached North America across the Atlantic from Western Europe. This doesn't fit with genetic information; the timing is wrong; and I have to say that Dr. Stanford has previously suggested rather off-the-wall theories. At the very least, this one is controversial, and will need a great deal more evidence before it becomes plausible.
Native Americans as ecological stewards of the land? You have probably got the message from my chapter that this is a self-serving though politically astute myth. See this 1999 book review in the New York Times of The Ecological Indian, by Shepard Krech, and the first chapter of the book, which describes the North American extinctions. Here also is a short essay by Professor Krech in New Scientist, October 1999.
Survivors
The most important local extinctions in the Old World took place in habitats that modern humans were invading in strength for the first time. The large mammals were hunted out of the optimum part of their range, and then the last survivors hung on in the inhospitable (usually northern) parts of their range until newly invading humans or climatic fluctuations killed them off. For example, woolly mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses, and giant deer , along with horses, elk, and reindeer, reinvaded Britain from Europe after the ice sheets began to retreat and birch woodland and parkland spread northward. Mammoths flourished in Britain until 12,800 BP at least, but then human artifacts appeared at 12,000 BP, and the largest animals of the tundra fauna quickly disappeared. The giant deer called the Irish elk survived on the island of Ireland after the main extinctions on the European mainland.
Buildings Made of Mammoth Bone
For reconstructions of a mammoth-bone dwelling on the plains of Eastern Europe, see these two pages:
And here's another gender-based take on prehistoric humans (and before)
And what about those "Venus figurines"? Were they sex objects made for the titillation of Gravettian males? A newer and well-argued suggestion is that they were charms used by pregnant women as magic to ward off difficult childbirth.
And if you liked these last few items, you will LOVE this one! From the New York Times, December 14, 1999.
Ice Age fashions. Press release, February 3, 2000.
Who is doing this research? One of the prominent scientists in the field is Olga Soffer. Here is a profile of the eclectic Olga Soffer, from Discovering Archaeology magazine. Don't you wish you could take one of her courses?
Links last checked January 19, 1999.
This page last updated March 9, 2000.
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