Two years ago, Bennet et al. (2021) made a lot of headlines with a claim of (quite amazing) 23 000 year old human footprints on the margin of paleolake Otero, at White Sands National Park in New Mexico. If this was true, it would be the oldest securely dated archaeological site in the Americas by…
Evaluating the claim of 27ky old human-modified giant sloth bones from Santa Elina in central Brazil
Pansani et al. (2023) recently published an interesting update on some giant ground sloth osteoderms possibly modified by humans about 27ky ago at the Santa Elina site in central Brazil. If these osteoderms really were perforated and used as pendants by humans at Santa Elina twenty seven thousand years ago, it would make them the…
Rimrock Draw Rockshelter: Do we now have a solid 18ky old archaeological site in the Americas?
In my view, the oldest securely dated archaeological material in the Americas so far is about fifteen thousand years old, which places it squarely after the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM). But while some of the poorly supported claims coming out of the Cave of Bones have been monopolizing media attention and getting a Netflix special,…
The problem with the naledi burial saga is not that it involves preprints
The claim that Homo naledi buried their dead and created art on cave walls recently made a lot of noise in the media. The claims appeared in the form of preprints, one detailing the claimed burials, one examining the proposed engravings, and one discussing the evolutionary implications of all this if true. The papers were…
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.…