Reading archaeology headlines: 0.7 million year old stone tools in Greece

It’s not unusual to see Greece featured in the archaeology headlines. Last weekend, a team of researchers released a claim about 700ky old archaeological remains near Megalopolis in the Peloponnese, which would nearly double the age of the oldest archaeology in the country, and which would be among the oldest archaeology in all of Europe.…

The Capuchins of Pedra Furada: Did non-human primates create the oldest known stone tool assemblages in Brazil?

For several decades now, Brazilian sites like Pedra Furada have claimed archaeological material dating back as far as 30ky ago. That would be about double the age of the oldest securely dated archaeological material in the Americas. I’ve commented on these sites before. My opinion so far is that the assemblages could very well have…

Evaluating the claim of 37ky old archaeological material at the Hartley Mammoth locality in New Mexico

Rowe et al. (2022) recently argue that the pattern of breakage and degradation of bone at the Hartley Mammoth locality in northern New Mexico is evidence of human activity 37ky ago. If true, this would make the Hartley locality the oldest solidly dated archaeological site in the Americas by a factor more than two. The…

Comment on Waters et al’s (2020) The Age of Clovis

The Age of Clovis (Waters et al. 2020) does a very good job of showing when some particular sites were used by people who also used Clovis points. It doesn’t really tell us all that much about the Age of Clovis, but it is a solid paper. Rather than the more ambitious and expansive “The…

Review of Becerra-Valdivia and Higham’s (2020) “The timing and effect of the earliest human arrivals in North America”

In their recent Bayesian survey of early archaeological dates from North America in Nature, Becerra-Valdivia and Higham (2020) conclude that “The data obtained show that humans were probably present before, during and immediately after the Last Glacial Maximum (about 26.5–19 thousand years ago), but that more widespread occupation began during a period of abrupt warming,…