[Aztlan] South American pre-Clovis

[John Greer]

Much more has been published on this tooth, mostly in French (especially by the specialist who studied and described it) and most recently in Italian by Fabio Parenti -- who also gave a synthesis talk on this in Portugal at the UISPP conference in 2006. The cave is small, isolated, and deep (long); and the date and associations appear to be good (it is, after all, a dated human tooth). The implication is that there were resident populations in northeastern Brazil well before this time. I have not checked Dito's website for the most recent references, but he probably has them.

Google search will produce lists of Parenti articles, and even others evaluating his excellent work. 
But be aware that some uncritical work (such as by Paul Bahn, example http://www.waspress.co.uk/journals/beforefarming////journal_20031/news/20031_14.pdf) quotes wildly erratic dates with no possibility of being related to humans -- such as some of the earliest Furada dates from the pre-cultural levels (over 50,000 yrs), or the highly erroneous initial date on pictographs from the Bastiana shelter, which date only about 3500 yrs, not 36,000 (the extremely early petroglyphs here have not been dated). 

Also, for those interested in pre-Clovis sequences in the Americas, see some of the work being done in Panama. 

John Greer


----- Original Message ----- 
From: Dito Morales 
To: aztlan at lists.famsi.org 
Sent: Sunday, February 18, 2007 6:16 PM
Subject: [Aztlan] South American pre-Clovis


More recently (2000), Guidon published the dates for a human tooth found at 
the site of Toca do Garincho (also in Piaui) as 12,210 +/- 40 (Beta 136204). 
This seems a more conservative contribution the pre-Clovis peopling 
argument.