Head of a mastadon composite cast (Mammut americanum) at the San Diego Natural History Museum.WIKIMEDIA, RHODODENDRITESAn April Nature paper reporting the discovery of shattered mastodon bones near San Diego and claiming that the find means human ancestors were in the area some 130,000 ago, is making waves in the scientific community. Critics contend that the fractures in the mastodon bones—which the paper’s authors have suggested were the result of ancient humans hammering on the bones to get at the nutrient-rich marrow—could have been caused by the earth-moving equipment used to excavate the fossils in the 1990s.
Highway crews in California inadvertently dug up the mastodon bones along with large stones in 1992, while operating a road-grading machine to build a stretch of State Route 54 near San Diego.
“I have read that paper, and I was astonished by it,” University of Washington archaeologist Donald Grayson told BuzzFeed. “I was astonished not because it is so good, but because it is so bad.”
The majority of archaeologists and anthropologists agree that humans migrated to North America via the Bering Land Bridge some 20,000 years ago and reached the southern tip of South America by around 15,000 years ago. If this latest conclusion is valid, it would push the date of the peopling of the Americas back by 100 millennia. “If you are ...
