Wednesday, September 8, 2010

Monte Verde Chile



Wilford, J.N., Chilean Field Yields New Clues to Peopling of Americas, The New York Times, Aug 1998
People had lived here 12,500 years ago, about 1,300 years before the previously accepted date for earliest known Americans, derived from stone spear points found in the 1930's near Clovis, N.M.

On a recent visit to Monte Verde, east of this seaport in southern Chile, Dr. Mario Pino, a geologist at the Southern University of Chile in Valdivia, leaned into the north bank of the creek and stabbed the dark soil with the pick end of a geology hammer. He exposed more pieces of wood from the camp where prehistoric humans once lived.

But the wood held less interest to him than a green knoll several hundred feet away, south of the creek. Pointing with the hammer, Dr. Pino said that cursory excavations there had turned up possible remains of human habitation at Monte Verde 20,000 years earlier than the camp north of the creek. Should this prove true, it would revolutionize research into one of the most intractable mysteries in American archeology: Just when were the Americas first truly a New World, and how did people get here?

Dr. Pino and Dr. Tom D. Dillehay of the University of Kentucky in Lexington, the archeologist who has directed the Monte Verde explorations, are planning more extensive excavations of the knoll site in January 2001. They plan to strip away six feet of topsoil with a bulldozer, then begin fine-tooth digging in the lower layers where evidence of human activity has emerged.

''There's no doubt about the age -- it's 33,000 years old,'' Dr. Pino said of the sediment layers bearing the apparent artifacts under the knoll.
Dillehay, T.D., et. al., Monte Verde: Seaweed, Food, Medicine, and the Peopling of South America, Science, Volume 320, Number 5877, Pages 784-786, May 2008
The identification of human artifacts at the early archaeological site of Monte Verde in southern Chile has raised questions of when and how people reached the tip of South America without leaving much other evidence in the New World. Remains of nine species of marine algae were recovered from hearths and other features at Monte Verde II, an upper occupational layer, and were directly dated between 14,220 and 13,980 calendar years before the present (12,310 and 12,290 carbon-14 years ago). These findings support the archaeological interpretation of the site and indicate that the site's inhabitants used seaweed from distant beaches and estuarine environments for food and medicine. These data are consistent with the ideas that an early settlement of South America was along the Pacific coast and that seaweeds were important to the diet and health of early humans in the Americas.

10 comments:

Jeffery Keown said...

Monte Verde: Seaweed, Food, Medicine, and the Peopling of South America
Tom D. Dillehay,1* C. Ramírez,2 M. Pino,3 M. B. Collins,4 J. Rossen,5 J. D. Pino-Navarro6

"The identification of human artifacts at the early archaeological site of Monte Verde in southern Chile has raised questions of when and how people reached the tip of South America without leaving much other evidence in the New World. Remains of nine species of marine algae were recovered from hearths and other features at Monte Verde II, an upper occupational layer, and were directly dated between 14,220 and 13,980 calendar years before the present (12,310 and 12,290 carbon-14 years ago). These findings support the archaeological interpretation of the site and indicate that the site's inhabitants used seaweed from distant beaches and estuarine environments for food and medicine. These data are consistent with the ideas that an early settlement of South America was along the Pacific coast and that seaweeds were important to the diet and health of early humans in the Americas."

Science 320(5877):784-786.

You do not stop at 1998 when researching something. If you quit when the literature agrees with your preconception, then you aren't doing research, you're just stroking your ego.

Had you kept digging, you would have found that Dillehay and Pino seem to have set a new date for the Monte Verde site. One much more realistic than 33000BP. You like 33000BP because it supports your delusion that Chile was settled by Atlanteans.

Antarctica has been under that ice for 3 million years; your refusal to accept it, and only post evidence that tastes good is intellectually indulgent at best.

Jeffery Keown said...

I just noticed that my post is a bit... vague.

Its odd that you posted the Science 320 quote and then posted the 33000BP figure as if it was still relevant. Why post the older quote? He clearly took it back with the newer article.

OilIsMastery said...

Dearest Jeffery,

"You do not stop at 1998 when researching something. If you quit when the literature agrees with your preconception, then you aren't doing research, you're just stroking your ego."

I know I don't. That's why I provided a peer-reviewed link from Science magazine that dates to 2008.

"Had you kept digging, you would have found that Dillehay and Pino seem to have set a new date for the Monte Verde site. One much more realistic than 33000BP. You like 33000BP because it supports your delusion that Chile was settled by Atlanteans."

There is no single date for the Monte Verde site because there are two archaeological layers - one beneath the other. The higher site is dated to 12,000 B.C. which means the bottom layer must date to before that (33,000 B.C.). In fact, Chile was settled by Atlanteans from Antarctica.

"Antarctica has been under that ice for 3 million years; your refusal to accept it, and only post evidence that tastes good is intellectually indulgent at best."

I'm the one who taught you and Wikipedia that there was a temperate forest growing 400 miles from the South Pole 3 million years ago so you're welcome for that. However, you have no absolutely no evidence Antarctica has been covered in ice since that time. Just because you really really want to believe something doesn't make it true.

Jeffery Keown said...

In fact, Chile was settled by Atlanteans from Antarctica.

Smoke another one.

The higher site is dated to 12,000 B.C. which means the bottom layer must date to before that (33,000 B.C.).

The newer paper supercedes the old one. There is no mention of the older, erroneous date. You are not just mistaken, you are delusional, as has been established.

As for you being the one who found the Antarctic forests, you are quite mistaken. Plate tectonics supplied a prediction about the ancient life that would be found there and evidence for it was uncovered in 1986.

Finally, nationalism is well known in some sciences. Anthropology is rife with it. Pino's first dating estimate is no better an indicator than Nebraska Man's teeth, or Cremo's Permian humans. It's almost right up there with Lysenko and Deloria's very localized nonsense. I might even say he wasn't actually trying to pua fast one, maybe he was just very happy to have found that date and let his mouth run off in that much publicized interview.

Pino wanted it to be old, and Dillehay wasn't at all convinced. The later paper was not as widely covered in the press as the earlier, poorly researched one with the controversial announcement that we had people (in his home country) at such an early age.

Science does not "localize" effects based on politics. If a primitive human is uncovered in Africa, you won't find anyone claiming he walked there from Cleveland.

In a similar vien, you want Atlantis to have existed so badly, you can't see evidence to the contrary. It simply isn't evidence, rather it is a distortion based on bad memes, poor training and fundamentalist attitudes toward something you call the Truth. Evidence and reason bounce right off of you.

You are a dogmatic denialist when it comes to your pet theories.

OilIsMastery said...

LOL.

Jeffery, you are the poster boy for surreal dogmatism and orthodoxy that denies the existence of all disconfirming evidence no matter what. No wonder you don't believe in Atlantis or myths in general -- they are too obvious for someone such as yourself to comprehend on account of ignorance and a lack of education.

Here are the facts since you didn't read the articles.

Upper occupational layer Monte Verde II was dated to 12,000 B.C. That means the lower occupational layer Monte Verde I was dated to earlier than that -- namely 31,000 B.C. Do you claim that the lower occupational layer is younger than the higher occupational layer?

As far as the predictions of Plate Tectonics are concerned, they are no better than the fairy tale predictions of children.

Jeffery Keown said...

Upper occupational layer Monte Verde II was dated to 12,000 B.C. That means the lower occupational layer Monte Verde I was dated to earlier than that -- namely 31,000 B.C. Do you claim that the lower occupational layer is younger than the higher occupational layer?

The erroneous date is just that. Wrong. It was taken at a fire pit. The matrix was dated at 33000BP, not the artifacts themselves.

Dillehay himself said it in a chat in 2001. Do you want a quote?

OilIsMastery said...

I want a peer-reviewed source for the dating of Monte Verde 1 that contradicts Nature magazine.

Jeffery Keown said...

I was entreated by an extremely wise person to consider what my goal might be when I engage irrational people, or fringe-science types like yourself.

I do not know. I do seem to lack the ability to counter your use of manstream science to prove mainstream science wrong. I cannot dislodge, or wrap my head around, your personal vocabulary that makes Jesus an alien and Juptier both a god and a planet.

Your twisted usage involves atheists who beleive in planets to be god-fearers, and Young Earth Creationists become "Young Earth Atheists" because you cannot abide even the accepted terms for such things, they are atheists because they do not worship as you do.

For 18 months, I've often enjoyed your nonsense, but now, you've asked for a peer-reviewed paper published in 1998 to be overturned by other peer-reviewed papers, after citing two that do just that. This while we all know your lack of respect for peer-review, is absurd.

My goal was apparently to be right. And I was, many times. However, only once was my correctness acknowledged, this during the incident involving disproving red-shift via supercooled regions of space. You were very wrong and admitted such. Impressive, that.

Yours is the way of the troll, the comfortably anonymous internet argument starter who, once his victims are aflame with the heat of intellectual combat, retreats to safer climes of a guest login. If not that, then you stop posting, stop replying and let the flames rage whilst you chuckle, or laugh aloud at the kerfluffle you've instigated.

I once thought that perhaps you did this as a person wanting to open eyes, all the while keeping yours as screwed shut as possible, lest some learning or tolerance creep in. It couldn't be that you actually beleived this crap you spew, even as carefully researched an backed up by quotes and citations. A well-read troll is still just a troll.

Now, however, I'm convinced that you really do buy into Expanding Earth, Intelligent Design, Plasma Cosmology and Atlantis. That can't be healthy, what with reality constantly showing you to be sorely mistaken at every turn.

That said, you can keep your pet, long-disproved hypotheses, your misuse of the peer-reviewed process, and your hero-worship of discredited researchers. I'm off to places farther afield. It will, I admit, be difficult. Arguing with you was a guilty pleasure, like going to action movies that do not challenge or engage, merely blowing shit up for an afternoon.

Later.

OilIsMastery said...

Jeffery,

I hope you are feeling ok.

If you ever want a healthy and enlightening dose of ontological reality you know where to find me...=)

Parag said...

Monte Verde was first discovered in 1976 which is about 500 miles to the south of Santiago. Its a very interesting archaeological site in the fact that it has yielded artifacts of 20 to 30 people living in handful of huts. The site also indicates that the people here survived on extinct species of llama, gomphotheres, shellfish, vegetables and nuts.