Pre Clovis Culture In The Americas

Clocking the First Americans

What sort of evidence (or quality of evidence) will be necessary to establish firmly the presence of a pre-Clovis culture in the Americas?

As stated by Meltzer in the article, Clocking the First Americans, it is universally agreed that the first Americans were in North and South America by Clovis times, approximately 11,200 years ago. The question that is hotly debated however, is whether or not there were people present prior to this Clovis time. This has been a certainly polarizing topic amongst archaeologists, to say the least. There are those who don’t believe such a Pre-Clovis culture ever existed and those who do, promptly called good and bad archaeologists respectively. The evidence supporting the latter

Questions have been raised in the current “Clovis-First Model”, due to genetic and linguistic evidence that suggests that people might have pre-dated said model. To unambiguously knock that ball out of the park, so to speak, we’d need to present clear cut evidence that not only proves a Pre-Clovis entry, but also fills in all the proverbial blanks. One of the most promising methods of doing such a thing is archaeological digs, primarily in the Monte Verde site. Following that, genetic testing and carbon dating is also a viable candidate for proving that a Pre-Clovis culture did exist. These tests confirm that humans, as well as their tools, were present in caves prior to Clovis times. Bones and butchered remains of a variety of animals have also been found, well away from their ecological niches at the time, suggesting that humans hunted them and took them back to their homes to be eaten. With all this evidence, it’s surprising that the idea of a Pre-Clovis society isn’t

Simple. He doesn’t believe they were man-made. He believes that the evidence found is actually geofacts, artifacts that were made naturally through geological processes. He indicates that all sorts of evidence can be gathered postulating that the geofacts are actually artifacts (man-made), but the burden of truth rests of proving why they could not be natural, i.e., why is this specific evidence is man-made? You can easily explain that hunting tools are man-made, proving that they are undeniably artifacts, but you can’t prove without a fact that the charcoal found was man made. Meltzer also stipulates that the tools found could have been formed by some sort of cave-in in which debris fell (about 100m) to the floor breaking up, with a result that looks similar to tools. He came up with this theory based on the fact that the tools never looked as defined as what you’d expect them to be from man-made tools of that era, i.e., edge angles less than 90o or a logic and pattern to the