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mastodon

Conventional wisdom holds that the first humans arrived in Northward America at nearly 25,000 years ago. What if the real appointment is much before? A team of researchers suggests that humans of some sort existed in North America some 130,000 years ago. This claim is based on a reexamination of purported stone tools and broken mastodon bones that were uncovered in the early 1990s. Even so, not all researchers who have seen the research agree with the findings.

Our tale begins in 1992, when the state of California was edifice a new highway. Workers uncovered what appeared to be the remains of a large beast, which turned out to be a mastodon. Experts from the San Diego Natural History Museum were dispatched to investigate and exhume whatever artifacts. What they constitute at the Cerutti Mastodon site was a collection of mastodon bones and what might be stone tools. The dubiety over these artifacts is what leads to the controversy regarding the new findings.

In reexamining the materials from the Cerutti Mastodon site, Steven Holen and his colleagues believe they constitute evidence of human action. That wouldn't and then unusual as mastodon remains are often found in close proximity to human artifacts. Still, the team dated this site to more than than 100,000 years earlier humans are believed to have arrived in the Americas.

The squad was unable to date the remains with radiocarbon dating, so they resorted to uranium-thorium dating of multiple bone fragments. This technique is normally used on inorganic samples like cavern carbonates and coral, which blot uranium from seawater. However, organic material similar bone can besides blot enough uranium from footing water to be dated.

A rock that could accept been used as a hammer, according to researchers.

It'southward the conclusions fatigued from the artifacts that gives experts suspension. The researchers behind the new analysis claim that screw fracture patterns in the mastodon bones indicate they were broken while fresh, and these breaks are consistent with tool apply by humans. They point to several stones that could accept been used as hammers and anvils to intermission the bones, possibly to use pieces of the bones for constructing other tools.

The scientific customs seems pleased with the dating methodology, but the presence of humans at the site is a tougher sell. A natural process could have caused damage to the bones, and the alleged tools don't show undeniable evidence of human use. This is all far from certain, merely interesting nonetheless. If this turned out to exist authentic, it could mean that Homo sapiens was not the showtime human species in America. The Denisovans or Neanderthals might have beaten us to the new world.