[Aztlan] Speeding up the proof

[michael ruggeri]

Robert,

I am all for you on this one. Speeding up proof would allow many of  
us to still be alive when discoveries are proven or disproven. What  
that would take I am afraid is a lot more big grants to pay for  
archaeologists and their teams to afford to go to the far corners to  
verify. Right now, they have ships off the coast of California,  
Canada and Alaska sinking tubes into the ocean floor attempting to  
pull up Pre-Clovis artifacts that may now be underwater. But renting  
a ship and crew, buying the equipment and paying the team costs a lot  
and very few of these ships can be afforded very often.

I am sure Monte Verde could have been proven a lot earlier if there  
had been more money available for expeditions to Southern Chile.

But unfortunately, not a single claim of having found artifacts going  
back to 40,000-50,000 BC has ever panned out once studied by others.

We have a lot of linguistic elements that points to this kind of  
early peopling given the number of separate languages that existed in  
the Americas before White contact. We have some epidemiological and  
DNA studies that point to this possibility too but so far, no  
artifacts proven to be that old.

Given the linguistic and DNA hints and the known time anthropologists  
know ancient groups travel by canoe (the consensus there is you would  
not have human habitations in Southern Chile by way of canoe from  
Asia being there by 13,000 years ago without necessitating ancestral  
groups to the Monte Verde folks starting long, long before), it is my  
belief that the odds are in favor of a 40,000-50,000 BCE entry into  
the Americas.

But so far, that proof has not been established. I think someday it  
will but I could be wrong and I appreciate the idea that you have to  
have actual human artifacts or fossils dated by all to make claims  
stick. Otherwise we have the kinds of problems that popped up when  
some folks claimed Egyptian contact without any real proof or Irish  
contact etc. Without a cautious and scientifically minded  
archaeological profession, these fantasies would stand as fact.

So yes, I think we will find the proof of 40,000 BC entry but so far,  
all we have is that hope and strong theory but not verifiable artifacts.

Mike Ruggeri



Hey Mike, Its been over 15 years since Dr. Frank C. Hibben,  
archaeologist at the
University of New Mexico, had studied the
massive bone yards at Fairbanks. These collections of tens of  
thousands of frozen varieties of Pleistocene megafauna mixed with  
twisted trees and vegetation existed, fact- and as hard as we try to  
not believe something-Carlos Sagan's argument-'extraordinary claims  
require extraordinary evidence is not an answer to the problem of  
denial, a unique character attribute of many historical figures. As  
for Ten years, well I'd same we need to speed it up, how about 10  
months, as we all no how to stall and procrastinate to avoid the  
inevitable refutation of one's previous and infallible 'painstaking  
10 year studies', and
still who is to say that an archaeologists findings are always wrong  
the first time, and only the second and third studies can verify the  
first. It takes this long because scientists don't like to re-write  
thier slow and painstaking research on thier version of the same  
story. But it always happens when a new 10 year study validates the  
new findings. Monte Verde initial claims were right to begin with,  
you suggest. So for those who knew the truth immediately after the  
data came in,,,were way ahead of the game, hence not needing to waste  
Ten years, and could work forward on new data. Not spinnin  
wheels...but we all love to argue
our case and determine or speculate who is right and who is wrong.  
Lets speed it up a bit.