Anthropic cut marks is the phrase used to describe evidence of butchery of armadillo-like creatures 21K y/a. This would be 30% older than previous finds, well before the prevailing theories of just a few years ago would allow.
At one level we might ask So what? Yes, all true knowledge has some value, but this would seem to be well down the list. If the were pre-Clovis humans in the New World, they didn't leave more than a fragment of genes and no culture. They are not us, not even proto-us.
Well, we have a current narrative of extinction of megafauna being primarily due to hunting by man, despite the somewhat desperate attempts of some to prove it was climate change. We see it in the New World, in Australia and nearby islands, on Madagascar - pretty much everywhere.
But here comes an example of the arrival of humans without mass extinctions. (Okay, they got this one and it is extinct now, but...generally.) So the story doesn't always have to play out that way. Why not in this case?
Actually, the current theory is that the megafauna and Clovis Indians were exterminated by a meteor strike on the Laurentide Ice Sheet. Evidence cited is a very widespread black mat, the alignment of the Carolina Bays (which occur over a very wide area in the US south and east), and the usual quartz, diamond, fullerene impact stuff.
ReplyDeleteThe impact theory is disputed, but then the KT impact theory (dinosaur killer) and Out of Africa are still disputed by some.
Planck: "Science progresses one funeral at a time."
I would guess that armadillos like alligators don't taste good enough to justify all the work in hunting and cleaning them. Some people do, yes, and there's an art to it that is known among those who do; but not so many of them as to overwhelm natural reproduction.
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