This excellent
article makes the explicit argument that Homo Erectus surely entered North
America early on. In fact it is surely
safe to assume that he simply followed the elephants.
And that was
that. Like all others, he was a hunter –
gatherer without a larger social structure capable of producing a larger impact
outside of making hunting tools. So that
is what we largely find when evidence is acquired. In fact, the wealth of artifacts associated
with agricultural man has misled us in terms of predecessor populations whose
footprint outside of specific work sites is nearly zero.
It is thus
reasonable that mankind entered with the elephants. He may not have hunted the large animals but that
never affected the San nor the Australian Aboriginals. I also think that they exploited riverine
resources and coastal resources preferentially anyway.
Again we simply
have not either looked for the evidence or simply rejected and ignored what is
readily available.
The
Pleistocene’s most well-traveled creature
By Tom Baldwin
I just was reading where they sequenced the genes of
a 700,000-year-old horse. Seems they found it frozen in some permafrost in the
Yukon Territory of Canada. Prehistoric horses really got around. They were
found from Europe to North America. A lot of other large animals: saber toothed
cats, bison, buffalo, camels, wolves, mammoth, mastodon, and the list goes on,
managed to wander back and forth across the Bering Sea land bridge called
Beringia. They called both Asia and North America home.
Yet while these megafauna were wandering between
continents modern day dogmatists in the archaeological community tell us the
most widely traveled of the Pleistocene’s creatures failed to make that
crossing. Homo erectus (and/or a few of his contemporaries) managed to leave
his bones scattered from Europe to Indonesia, from China to South Africa, from
India to England, from Siberia to Spain.
As the continent of Australia has pushed north over
the last millions of years it has managed to maintain a separate ecology. This
is because - Challenging the tenets of mainstream scientific agendas - a
‘subduction zone’ formed (a large trench) where the Australian plate butted up
against the Asian continent and started to slide under it. Even at the peak of
the Ice Ages when sea levels dropped hundreds of feet, this trench was so deep
and wide that it stayed full of water. It formed a channel approximately 20
miles wide that was an obstacle to life crossing from Asia to Australia.
The first person to note that fresh water fish as
well as small land animals found on islands to either side of the barrier were
different was an Englishman named Alfred Russell Wallace. Since he was the
first to notice this, the dividing line has come to be called the Wallace Line
in his honor.
Only two large creatures managed to cross the
Wallace Line and live on either side of it. The first was elephants (Fig. 1),
and the second, Homo erectus. Both accomplished the feat about a half million
years ago. And we are not talking some unlucky individual washed out to sea on
a tree during a flood.
Sufficient number of Homo erectus crossed to form
viable groups or tribes. This took both daring and planning. Evidence is now
surfacing that Homo erectus also found his way to Crete in the Mediterranean,
an even greater trip by water.
It is a safe bet to say that Homo erectus—with his
hunger for new land—was the most well traveled creature of the Pleistocene.
Nothing else found its way into every corner of Asia, Africa, and Europe.
The animals mentioned in the first paragraph above,
as well as many others, were going back and forth between Alaska and Siberia—the
land bridge becoming a veritable megafauna superhighway—yet we are led to
believe by archaeological authorities that early man stopped and did not make
that same crossing, at least not until a relatively few thousand years ago when
the Paleo-Indians did. In other words, the Wallace Line (twenty miles of open
sea) couldn’t stop early man but Beringia did.
I find this difficult to understand and find myself
asking a big “WHY?” Then I realize it isn’t I who has to answer that question.
It is the Archaeological Powers That Be.
They are the naysayers. Therefore, they are the ones
who have to show us why the Pleistocene’s most well traveled creature, didn’t
do what animals by the thousands were doing. In fact, there is ample evidence
that Homo erectus did cross over. He left his tools at the Calico Early Man
Site in California’s Mojave Desert (and at the Caltrans mastodon kill site also
in California). He left them at Valsequillo in Mexico. He left them other
places too. This is as should be expected. If he was here we should find
evidence of that presence.
What should not be expected is to hear scientists
screaming “geofact” when presented with artifacts and tools from Calico, stones
that if found anywhere in Asia, Europe, or Africa would be quickly embraced as
man made. Yet they are forced to do just that because they already believe that
early man did not make the crossing and therefore could not ave made the things
that were found at Valsequillo—and are still being found in and around Calico.
They must turn a blind eye on items that nature could form only in a world
where monkeys on typewriters produce the works of Shakespeare. It may be an
apocryphal tale, but I’ve heard it told that one of Calico’s greatest critics, Vance
Haynes, was confronted with one beautiful black graver, obviously man made and
found about ten feet deep in one of the Master Pits at Calico. It was too
finely made to be a geofact.
He couldn’t admit the artifact was what it obviously
was and that it was found where it was because that would turn American
archaeology on its ear. Nor could he accuse a fellow archaeologist of Leakey’s
stature of fraud. What was he to do, he was trapped. So he came up with the
claim that the artifact must have been accidentally kicked into the pit. Kicked
into the pit! None are so blind as those who will not see.
Given Homo erectus’ wellknown penchant for travel
and the fact that Beringia was a major highway with all kinds of large animals
crossing back and forth regularly it is logical to assume that Homo erectus did
find his way to the Americas. Those who believe otherwise need to come up with
reasons why not. Oh, and those reasons should be better than artifacts being
kicked into pits.
TOM BALDWIN is an award-winning author, educator,
and amateur archaeologist living in Utah. He has also worked as a successful
newspaper columnist. Baldwin has been actively involved with the Friends of
Calico (maintaining the controversial Early Man Site in Barstow, California)
since the early days when famed anthropologist Louis Leakey was the site's
excavation Director (Calico is the only site in the Western Hemisphere which
was excavated by Leakey). Baldwin's recent book, The Evening and the Morning,
is an entertaining fictional story based on the true story of Calico. Apart
from being one of the core editors of Pleistocene Coalition News, Baldwin has
published five prior articles focusing on Calico and early man in the Americas.
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