Large Comet Impact May Have Wiped Out Early Human Culture in North America

We have speculated here that seafarers from North America -- either Homo Neanderthal or Homo Sapiens -- arrived in eastern North America well before immigrants from Asia. But what happened to these early American settlers and their culture?

There is archaeological evidence that other cultures, possessing cruder tool technologies than the Clovis people, were present in North America before the earliest Clovis dates.

Is it possible that the culture of these "first Americans" was obliterated by a cosmic impact which led the the Younger Dryas cooling period?

A 16-member international team of researchers that includes James Kennett, professor of Earth science at UC Santa Barbara, has identified a nearly 13,000-year-old layer of thin, dark sediment buried in the floor of Lake Cuitzeo in central Mexico. The sediment layer contains an exotic assemblage of materials, including nanodiamonds, impact spherules, and more, which, according to the researchers, are the result of a cosmic body impacting Earth.

These new data are the latest to strongly support of a controversial hypothesis proposing that a major cosmic impact with Earth occurred 12,900 years ago at the onset of an unusual cold climatic period called the Younger Dryas. The researchers’ findings appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. _Astrobio_via_GlobalWarmingPolicyFoundation

AstrobioThe evidence is new, and supports an older theory that the Younger Dryas cold period was caused by a cosmic impact. It may also help explain what happened to the earliest North American cultures. More on this theory from back in 2007:

The Clovis people of North America, flourishing some 13,000 years ago, had a mastery of stone weaponry that stood them in good stead against the constant threat of large carnivores, such as American lions and giant short-faced bears. It's unlikely, however, that they thought death would come from the sky.

According to results presented by a team of 25 researchers this week at the American Geophysical Union meeting in Acapulco, Mexico, that's where the Clovis people's doom came from. Citing several lines of evidence, the team suggests that a wayward comet hurtled into Earth's atmosphere around 12,900 years ago, fractured into pieces and exploded in giant fireballs. Debris seems to have settled as far afield as Europe.

Jim Kennett, an oceanographer at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and one of the team's three principal investigators, claims immense wildfires scorched North America in the aftermath, killing large populations of mammals and bringing an abrupt end to the Clovis culture. "The entire continent was on fire," he says. _NewScientist

More from an earlier Al Fin article

More from an even earlier Donald Sensing article

The identity of "the first Americans" is shrouded in mystery. There is evidence that seafarers from Eastern Asia survived an early harrowing trans-Pacific voyage to settle on the Pacific Coast of North America. There is also evidence for early settlement of the South American Pacific coast from Polynesia. Evidence for early migration from Europe is also present, as noted here earlier.

But something seems to have disrupted the pattern of settlement for most of these immigrants. The pre-Clovis people disappeared mysteriously. The Clovis people disappeared mysteriously. The surviving descendants of the early people of North America do not have records of what happened to their ancestors, although some verbal accounts are suggestive of a cosmic catastrophe.

Scientists are slow to adopt new explanations for mysteries which their old theories do not admit to. But humans who are not attached to any particular theory, will often tug and pull at the threads of a mystery until it reveals itself.

Could Neandertals Have Discovered America First?

Anthropologists now believe that Neandertals may have become a seafaring people long before modern humans took to the seas for purposes of migration.

Neanderthals were seafaring long before modern humans, in the Mediterranean at least. He thinks early hominins made much more use of the sea than anyone suspects, and may have used the seas as a highway, rather than seeing them as a barrier. But the details remain lost in history. Any craft were presumably made from wood, so rotted away long ago. The oldest known Mediterranean boat, a dugout canoe from Lake Bracciano in Italy, is just 7000 years old. Ferentinos speculates that Neanderthals may have made something similar.

_NewScientist

Solutrean HypothesisSmithsonian Institute anthropologist Dennis Stanford thinks that the first North Americans may well have paddled along the northern Atlantic ice shelves from Europe, over 20,000 years ago. Stanford believes that the first Europeans to go to North America were anatomically modern humans, rather than neandertals (see below). But there may be reasons to believe that Neandertals -- who likely became seafarers tens of thousands of years before modern humans -- were driven westward by population pressure from migrating sapiens.

National GeographicSome anthropologists believe the Neandertal were driven into the mountains by population pressures. And some believe they were driven into the far north, into whatever ice-free redoubts to be found. But if Neandertals were truly sea-capable travelers, what about the third possibility?

National Geographic
New evidence from the study of the Neandertal genome suggests that all modern people except sub-Saharan Africans, have portions of their genetic complement in common with the ancient Neandertal. In other words, modern humans and neandertals probably interbred at some point before the Neandertal faded away.

The time in history when neandertals slowly disappeard and modern humans became the sole representative of homo, is quite fuzzy and poorly defined. When actual bone fossils can be found, distinguishing between neandertal finds and sapiens finds is relatively easy. But most other evidence of settlement and migration is lost to history.

Stone tools can help to distinguish between different tool-making cultures, but even stone chips and blades do not necessarily provide foolproof distinctions between groups, if they are undergoing critical transitions.

One thing is for certain, scholarship on the origins of the first North American human cultures is in a state of turmoil:

Since the 1930s, archaeologists have favored a single migration from Siberia to Alaska as the epic event that peopled the Americas about 13,000 years ago. Stone tools found at Clovis, N.M., and elsewhere, suggested that a single culture spread across much of the continent. This “Clovis first” idea became entrenched.

But starting in the 1990s, archaeologists dated sites in Texas, Chile and the mid-Atlantic region to pre-Clovis times. Few archaeologists accepted those dates at first, said Michael Collins, an archaeologist at Texas State.

“People learned it in college and built careers on ‘Clovis first,’ ” Collins said. “They’re unwilling to turn it loose.”

But now they might have to adopt Stanford’s Europe-first slogan: “Iberia, not Siberia.” _WaPo

Unless someone invents a time machine allowing us to observe pre-historical migrations first-hand, we may never know.

Neandertal Sites

Hominid Family History

The Neandertal Genome

Sexy Archaeology Neandertals

How the Neandertal Became the Basque