[meteorite-list] Age of Man

From: Sterling K. Webb <sterling_k_webb_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Fri, 19 Jun 2009 15:13:30 -0500
Message-ID: <E71861D579264B51ADE0431E03B6AEA0_at_ATARIENGINE2>

Hi, and here we go...

    Yes, the video is a whacko video; the authors
of Forbidden Archaeology are whackoes, everything
Darren said. But this is a case, all too common in
the internet/media age, of whackoes exploiting a
genuine issue for their own whacko enrichment.

    Forgetting for a moment about UFO's, Atlantis,
and Charlton Heston with Alzheimer's (so sad),
look at the evidence. Apart from the whacko Whitney
relics, almost all the video was about the Hueyatlaco
site and Steen-McIntyre.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hueyatlaco
    The Heyatlaco site is not Steen-McIntyre's dig.
Work was done there by many archaeologists and
geologists; she was called in as a geologist whose
specialty is dating. The others involved with the site
have published quietly (but without dates) and no
(big) problems. Steen-McIntyre, the dater, was left
to defend her work, which she does. Who wouldn't?

    You can find her academic background and
resume at the website about a related "old" site:
http://www.valsequilloclassic.net/

    The dating has been done over by "outside" experts
with no archeological axes to grind, from NASA:
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2007AGUFMGP43A0925R
They get the same dates she does...

    The dating has been done over by her opponents,
who DO have archeological axes to grind, and they
find the site to be "only" 80,000 to 220,000 years old,
based on diatoms unque to the Sangamon Interglacial,
instead of the 225,000 to 255,000 that Steen-McIntyre
does! This is not a result they trumpet much, since they
are all of the "nothing-older-than-22,000-years" school
of thought. Fortunately for their equilibrium, evidence
does not disturb them, it seems.

    All of these arguments about the age of human sites
are about sites in The Americas. Apart from the usual
egocentric exaggerations of paleoarchaologists, no one
gives a big flip about such dates in Europe, Asia, Africa.
Hand any of these 250,000-year-old flint tools to a European
archaeologist (without telling them where it came from)
and tell them it's 250,000 years old, and they would just
shrug. They've seen lots just like it. "So what's the big
deal?" they would ask.

    No, it's only in the Americas? Why is that?

    Well, it's simple. A few hundred years ago, Europeans
flooded into the Americas, killing 90% of the locals by
giving them unfamiliar European diseases, slaughtered
and enslaved half the survivors, and drove the other half
into isolated pockets and took over their continent. After
it was safely done and a generation or two passed, they
got sentimental, and then they felt really bad about it.

    First, in the nineteenth century, they decided the
"natives" were recent European immigrants that degenerated
into "savagery" or not (like the Mound Builders), descended
from Prince Madoc's Welshmen or Vikings or whatever.
Late in the nineteenth century it became obvious that
the "locals" had come from Asia.

    That theory was the product of a man who would come
to dominate the field for 40 years, Hrdlicka at Harvard. He
maintained that the locals were very recent immigrants,
having (mostly) arrived in the last 1500 years, starting
about 500 AD, Yes, some small number might have gotten
here around 500-1000 BC, but mostly in the last 1000 years
before Europeans arrived. This took most of the sting out
of the guilt of genocide. Peopling of the Americas became
a close foot-and-boat-race, a draw almost, between some
Asian savages and civilized Europeans, and naturally, the
best race won (they thought like that).

    So for almost a half century, no site in the Americas was
more than a few thousand years old. The problem was, this
just wasn't true. People kept finding sites that were 6000
years, 8000 years, 10,000 years, 12,000 years old. Denounced
as whackoes, of course, they held on until Hrdlika and all
the old professors retired or died. Then, suddenly they were
the "authorities."

    Human nature being what it is, they immediately set
up shop running a "nothing-older-than-12,000-years"
orthodoxy-and-inquisition business for the next 50 years.
The problem was: this just wasn't true either. Then, they
started to soften. An occasional "13,600 years" began to
creep into the literature, then a slightly older date, and so
forth. By now, the orthodox "nothing-older-than-12,000-
years" school has turned into a "nothing-older-than-
22,000-years" school.

    Site-dating in the Americas is a psychological issue,
not a strictly scientific one. It's complicated by social
factors, emotional factors, political factors. It's complicated
to the point of being a complete mess.

    And still, with heels dug into the dirt as science is slowly
dragged backwards (which in this case, paradoxically, is
progress), it goes on. The conflict is particularly sharp right
now. Accepting "human" sites older than 40,000 years or so
is a big problem, because if they are older than that, they
are not the artifacts of "modern" humans, but "primitive"
hominids.

    Now, if the prospect of really old humans is unsettling
to American anthropologists, the thought of "pre-human"
Americans is enough to drive them screeeaming up the
nearest tree like panicked gibbons. So, we are back to the
"wait-for-them-to-all-retire-or die" scenario.

    But, we have worked our way up to arguing about sites
that are 65,000 to 80,000 years old. The arguments
about the nature of 250,000-year-old sites are still some
decades into the future (there are more than just this
one). I won't live to see (or hear) it.

    Can you imagine the fuss when someone finds a site
with dates that contain seven digits? I personally have
no doubt they will turn up. There are a number of sites
in eastern Yakutia (that's Siberia to us) that date back
to 1.8 million to 2.1 million years. From there it's just
a short 500-year wander to America. Hominids are
ubiquitous over the entire planet Earth for the last two
million years. Last time I looked, the Americas were on
the Earth. For most of that two million years, the land
connection of Beringeria was up to 1000 miles wide,
no hills or other obstacles at all, all plains and grassland,
us hominids' favorite walking country.

    QED. As we say in physics, it is "intuitively obvious."
Finding any evidence is another matter. Strata that age
has few exposures anywhere. If you don't have a big
"cake-slice" like Africa's Rift Valley, you have to be lucky
and find just The Right Spot, much harder to do. They
did in Dmasi, Georgia, for example

    Not My Job.

    OK, this was massively Off-List, so please make your
comments, criticism, evaluation of my naivite and idiocy,
etc., off-list if you want. No, wait, I just looked and the
List is already clogged with this topic. Never mind.


Sterling K. Webb
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
----- Original Message -----
From: "Darren Garrison" <cynapse at charter.net>
To: <meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com>
Sent: Friday, June 19, 2009 1:06 PM
Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Age of Man


> On Fri, 19 Jun 2009 12:12:03 -0400, you wrote:
>
>>Could this possibly be true
>
> Complete, utter, undiluted, unequivocated, barking at the moon
> bullshit.
> Insane, idiotic, paranoid woo. Incompetent, irrational nutbaggery.
> Need I
> break out a thesaurus and go on?
>
>>does this sort of thing happen in meteoritic's
>
> Do people come up with weird, woo-filled conspiracy theories and then
> have their
> paranoia reinforced by nobody with serious knowledge take them
> seriously? Yes,
> all the time.
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Received on Fri 19 Jun 2009 04:13:30 PM PDT