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HUMANS IN CALIFORNIA 130,000 YEARS AGO? GET THE FACTS
National Geographic- April 26, 2017
In an announcement sure to be polemic, researchers say they have found signs of ancient humans ∈California between 120,000 and 140,000 years ago—more than a hundred thousand years before humans were believed to exist anywhere ∈ the Americas.
''I realize that 130,000 years is a really old date and makes our site the oldest archaeological site ∈ the Americas,'' says study leader Tom Deméré, the paleontologist at the San Diego Natural History Museum, whose team describes their findings ∈ Nature. ''Of course, extraordinary claims like this require extraordinary evidence, and we believe the Cerutti mastodon site presents this evidence.''
To be clear, the team has not found human bones at the site. But as Deméré and their colleagues tell it, their evidence—a mastodon skeleton, mastodon bone flakes, and several large stones—shows that the area was a ''bone quarry,'' where an unknown hominine supposedly smashed fresh mastodon bones with stone hammers, perhaps to extract marrow or to mine the skeleton for raw materials.
However, many of the world‘s leading experts ∈American archaeology already have expressed some form of skepticism to the paper‘s claims. Some have rejected it completely.
''The earliest occupation of the Americas is a highly contentious subject,'' says University of Southampton archaeologist John McNabb. ''The date of the find at 130,000 years ago is a really big time difference for archaeologists who are used to talking about 12, 13, 14,000 years ago.
Disponível em: . Acesso em: 5 maio 2017. Adaptado.
Glossary: site: sítio (arqueológico); claim: afirmação; bone quarry: aglomeração de ossos; smashed: esmagados; hammers: martelos; marrow: medula óssea.
The material evidence that supposedly corroborated the findings of Tom Deméré´s team consisted of:
