Back in October, I commented on the fairly amazing find of human footprints at Lake Otero in New Mexico, which Bennett et al (2021) argue are 23k years old. As I said at the time, whether the footprints are 23k, or 15k, or 12k years old, it is still an amazing find. However, if they…
Oak Island archaeology update: Gun stones and rose gold
So far, season 9 of Curse of Oak Island (COOI) has focused on a couple of finds: Gold, sometimes described as flakes, that seems to show up as microscopic grains, or inclusions in two metallic objects, and small stone spheres, identified on the show as gun stones. According to the COOI team, the gold flakes…
30ky old archaeological material at Chiquihuite Cave, round 2: It still doesn’t matter how much some of the objects look like stone tools
Last year, Ardelean et al (2020) published a claim in Nature that they had recovered 30ky old archaeological material at Chiquihuite Cave in Mexico (I discussed the claim here). Now Chatters et al. (2021, the group includes my University of Alberta departmental colleague Margaret Spivey-Faulkner) have published a critique of the Adrelean et al. Nature…
October seasonal post: In praise of slow Baseball and its traditional boredom problem
On June 13th, 1973, my father took me to Jarry Park to see game two of a three game Expos home stand against the San Diego Padres. It was my first baseball game. I know the date, because one of the two things I remember from that game is a triple play, and my father…
Comment on Bennett et al.’s Evidence of humans in North America during the Last Glacial Maximum: Looking promising, and I have a couple of minor questions
There has been no shortage lately of claims of very early archaeological evidence from the Americas, from the stunningly early but very problematic Cerutti Mastodon at 130kya, to the slightly less stunning and still problematic Chiquihuite cave at 30kya, to the more sedately dated definite maybes at Cooper’s Ferry and the Gault site. The latest…
ArcheoThoughts 