[meteorite-list] Europeans in East North America 19 -- 26 Ka BP, leaving stone tools, Dennis Stanford, Bruce Bradley: Bob Yirka, PhysOrg.com: Rich Murray 2012.02.29

From: Rich Murray <rmforall_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Wed, 29 Feb 2012 18:48:38 -0800
Message-ID: <CAHqJ8pbDi+b5tJ33Hwo75Hs12TqawdeGiNd9CJ5xJFM68UTfSQ_at_mail.gmail.com>

Europeans in East North America 19 -- 26 Ka BP, leaving stone tools,
Dennis Stanford, Bruce Bradley: Bob Yirka, PhysOrg.com: Rich Murray
2012.02.29

http://www.physorg.com/news/2012-02-european-style-stone-tools-age.html

European style stone tools suggest Stone Age people actually discovered America
February 29, 2012 by Bob Yirka

(PhysOrg.com) -- Archeologists and historians have long known that it
wasn?t really Christopher Columbus who discovered America. Native
Americans had been living all over North, Central and South America
long before he arrived. And Native Americans came from Asia across the
frozen-over Bering Sea in the west. But now, it appears Europeans
might have been first to arrive on the scene after all. Stone tools
found recently in Delaware, Maryland and Virginia in the eastern
United States, all appear to bear a striking resemblance to tools used
by Stone Age peoples in early Europe, and have been dated to a time
between 19,000 and 26,000 years ago, a period during which Stone Age
people were making such tools, and long before the early Asians
arrived.

It?s not an implausible theory, suggests Dennis Stanford, of the
Smithsonian Institution and Bruce Bradley of the University of Exeter,
because Stone Age people could have come from Europe by traveling
across the ice-bound North Atlantic during the Ice Age. The evidence
is further bolstered by the recent discovery that an ancient knife
found in Virginia in 1971 was made of flint that originated from
France. They two have coauthored a book on the subject, Across
Atlantic Ice.

Stanford and Bradley also point out the lack of evidence of any human
activity in the north-east part of Siberia or in Alaska any earlier
than 15,500 years ago. And the reason early Asians won out, evolving
into the people now called Native Americans, was because their window
of opportunity was much wider, 15,000 years versus just 4500 for the
early Europeans. Thus the original Native Americans were either
assimilated or killed by the large numbers of migrating Asians.
Evidence that it was likely the former has been found in the DNA of
skeletons of North American Native American people. Also, the language
of several Native American tribes doesn?t seem to have originated from
Asia.

The two also say that it?s conceivable that Stone Age people could
have traveled such a long way over ice from Europe to America because
there would have been more than enough food to be had from the ocean.
It all adds up the two say, to a compelling case for Stone Age
travelers being titled as the people who truly did discover America.
? 2011 PhysOrg.com
Received on Wed 29 Feb 2012 09:48:38 PM PST