Tid Bits and a Little Bit of Progress

I made a little bit of progress this past weekend on my Pleistocene research. It was a minor thing but it's still progress. I did a little bit of preliminary research on the mass extinction and I even took some notes - about two and a half pages worth - in a quad ruled notebook. I prefer to handwrite a lot of my stuff. It would help if I had a computer at home, but as it is, I like to take advantage of available resources when I can.



How exactly did I do this preliminary research? I merely did a basic google search on the web and read information from various sites on the topic. It looks like some other folks have been noticing the human migration and extinction pattern overlap. Though, key researchers still seem dumbfounded as to the cause of the extinctions. One site mentioned that such an extinction is not typically found during previous deglaciations. Other pertinent pieces of information relevant to my research is a general timeline of the beginnings of each region's extinctions with Africa, India, and Indonesia, Melanesia, and Polynesia being the oldest and the Americas among the most recent. This makes my point about it being a global mass extinction.



There was also a very interesting new piece to the American part of the puzzle. A newly discovered impact crater from a meteorite impact in the Bolivian Amazon area with evidence of human settlements being wiped out by the collision. Incidentally, this event occurred 30,000 years before present and the source of the discovery looks to be reasonably reliable since it was discovered by the Scientific Exploration Society. This puts a whole new light on initial colonization of the Americas. If geologists can determine the most reliable date of the crash and anthropologists have determined with reasonable certainty that one or more human settlements were indeed destroyed, then there is now even stronger evidence that there were humans here long before Clovis.



I never truly understood that argument from a logical standpoint anyway. So many scholars just assumed that the people who invented the Clovis points came here at the same time as they invented their new weapon of choice. It makes more logical sense to say that people arrived at some date prior to the invention of Clovis points. There is a long span of time between the evolution of humans and their invention of Clovis. They would most likely have arrived here closer to the Clovis time, but not necessarily just days or even a few years before. There is nothing about the Clovis points themselves that tells definitively when their inventors came to this continent - other than they arrived before creating their invention.



If I invent something in another country, say Greece, I would most certainly have to arrive there in Greece prior to my making said invention. However, I would not be obligated to invent it as soon as I got off the airplane that brought me there. I could design, build, and patent it over the course of fifty years if need be. So, why do we assume ancient peoples did any differently? Humans very well could have been here thousands or even tens of thousands of years before they invented Clovis points. It looks like the evidence speaks for itself.



The impact also may have contributed to the extinctions in the Americas. Another point my argument brings to mind is that humans would have had to colonize or inhabit in some way each subsequent region prior to the extinctions. It would make no sense for the extinctions to occur prior to human arrival to their environments.



I even came across that article about scientists finding evidence of extinctions due to human hunters in Australia. But I noted that the vast majority of the sites and studies were primarily focusing on the Americas. I do not fully understand why they seem to be ignorign the rest of the continents. Maybe because if they do they know damn well that they will happen upon the same pattern as I am attempting to illustrate. They love using the deglaciation as the primary cause - but this too occurred globally - not just here in the Americas. Also, South America would not have been impacted nearly as much by deglaciation. A Hyperdisease is biologically unlikely since diseases rarely if ever jump species. To assume such a process for a mass extinction as extensive as the Pleistocene's is to jump to very erroneous conclusions.

Just like the Bog People exhibit at the Carnegie Museum last year. Most, if not all, of the deaths were assumed to have been religious ritualistic in nature. However, if any person were found dead in a ditch along the side of a well traveled highway today, noone would assume it was religious or ritualistic at all. It would be deemed a homicide. People kill people everyday in this world! Why would our ancient ancestors have been any different?



Also of noteworthiness: the technical writing class I am currently taking is looking at the Helicobacter pylori epidemic that has been a human ailment as long as humans have been around. One article I critiqued for our online workbook was very interesting, even regarding my Pleistocene research. There are at least seven individual strains of the bacteria currently in operation, which in turn evolved from three ancestral strains. Interestingly, they are geographically traceable and can and are being used to determine the relative dates of colonization of various regions - e.g., continents. It would be very interesting to correlate the two series of evidence - the arrival of humans plotted against the beginnings of the extinctions in those regions. I might be able to run a preliminary chart or graph of this evidence. I might even correct for the timing of the Bolivian Bolide event.