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NYT Syndicate
Prehistoric humans ” perhaps Neanderthals or another lost species ” occupied what is now California some 130,000 years ago, a team of scientists reported recently.
The bold and fiercely disputed claim, published in the journal Nature, is based on a study of mastodon bones discovered near San Diego. If the scientists are right, they would significantly alter our understanding of how humans spread around the planet.
The earliest widely accepted evidence of people in the Americas is less than 15,000 years old. If humans actually were in North America more than 100,000 years earlier, they may not be related to any living group of people.
If California's first settlers were not modern, then they would have to have been Neanderthals or perhaps members of another extinct human lineage.
"It poses all sorts of questions," said Thomas A Dem`r`, a paleontologist at the San Diego Natural History Museum and a co-author of the new study."Who were these people? What species were they?"
Some experts were intrigued by the research, but many archaeologists strongly criticised it, saying the evidence did not come close to supporting such a profound conclusion.
"I was astonished, not because it is so good but because it is so bad," said Donald K Grayson, an archaeologist at the University of Washington, who faulted the new study for failing to rule out more mundane explanations.
In 1992, construction workers dug up the mastodon bones while clearing earth to build a sound barrier along Route 54 in San Diego County. The thick bones were broken and smashed, and near the animal were five large rounded stones. The researchers argued that these could not have been brought together by a violent current, and that people must have carried the rocks to the mastodon.
If early humans really did smash those mastodon bones 130,000 years ago, scientists will have to rethink how humans came to the Americas.
"Some people are just going to say it's impossible and turn away," Dem`r` acknowledged, adding that he hoped that other archaeologists would take a close look at the evidence for themselves.
