Amazing Find in Volcanic Ash The fossils of human footprints preserved in volcanic ash may do nothing short of rewriting history.
Found in an abandoned quarry near Puebla, Mexico about 80 miles southeast of Mexico City, the footprints--definitively shown to be human--number in the hundreds. A third of them were made by children. Using radiocarbon testing, optically stimulated luminescence and several other testing methods, an international team led by researchers at Liverpool's John Moores University has shown that the footprints are about 38,000 years old.
In what is sure to be a controversial conclusion, the scientists have determined that human settlers arrived in the Americas some 30,000 years earlier than previously thought, report the BBC News and New Scientist. What's more, they arrived by sea and not by foot. "It's going to be an archaeological bomb, and we're up for a fight," lead researcher and geoarchaeologist Dr. Silvia Gonzalez told the BBC News. It's currently believed that the first settlers arrived about 11,000 years ago by crossing a land bridge between Siberia and Alaska. This is called the Clovis First model.
Preserved as trace fossils in volcanic ash along what was once the shoreline of a volcanic lake, the footprints became as solid as concrete since they were covered in ash and lake sediments and then buried under water. Gonzalez is convinced the prints are 38,000 years old based on dating of the footprint layer, as well as the layers below and on top of the prints. "Some lake sediments were incorporated into the ash and were baked. They look like small fragments of brick and these were the ones we dated in the footprint layer. They gave us a result of 38,000 years," Gonzalez explained to the BBC News.
Co-investigator David Huddart says the existence of these footprints means the Clovis First model is no longer the first evidence of human beings in North America. Not everyone is convinced. Dr. Michael Faught, an expert in early American archaeology, told the BBC, "It would be significant if it were demonstrated, but usually those (early) sites don't hold up well."
One mystery still to be solved: From where did these Mexican settlers come? They may have come from southeast Asia or even Australia. Gonzalez thinks they arrived on the west coast in boats. She believes this group of early settlers, who were likely highly mobile hunters living in small groups, eventually became extinct and left no genetic legacy.
"If true, this would completely change our view of how and when the Americas were first colonized," Chris Stringer, head of human origins at the Natural History Museum in London, told New Scientist.
The study findings will be published in the Quaternary Science Review.
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Poster Comment:
as I have said, history is completely been rewritten to fit the desires of those who seek to maintain control.
the ironic thing is that both creationists and evolutionists believe man came from slime, somehow.
try genetic engineering