The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #171928   Message #4196009
Posted By: Stilly River Sage
23-Jan-24 - 11:42 AM
Thread Name: Armchair Archaeologist (via Google Earth) pt 2
Subject: RE: Armchair Archaeologist (via Google Earth) pt 2
I played detective this morning to track down a sharable version of this story from 2020. Journals like Science and Nature have a hefty paywall, but sometimes you can get one or two articles free a month. Were humans living in a Mexican cave during the last ice age?
Startlingly early dates for stone tools could upend ideas about peopling of the Americas

It has to do with finding stone tools in a cave in Mexico, but since the cave doesn't also have a fire pit area (classic in human habitation) they can't be sure if the stones are tools or just naturally occurring fragments.
At first glance, Chiquihuite Cave in Mexico's Zacatecas state is an unlikely place to find signs of early humans, let alone evidence that might change the story of the peopling of the Americas. It sits a daunting 1000 meters above a valley, overlooking a desert landscape in the mountains north of Zacatecas. Getting there requires a 4- or 5-hour uphill scramble over a moonscape of jagged boulders.

But in the soil below the cave's floor, a team led by archaeologist Ciprian Ardelean of the Autonomous University of Zacatecas, University City Siglo XXI, dug up almost 2000 stone objects that researchers think are tools. By combining state-of-the-art dating methods, the team argues that humans were at the site at least 26,000 years ago—more than 10,000 years before any other known human occupation in the region. "Chiquihuite is a solitary dot" of human occupation, Ardelean says.

The dates place humans there during the height of the last ice age, when ice covered much of what is now Canada and sea levels were much lower. To have settled in Mexico by then, Ardelean says, people must have entered the Americas 32,000 years ago or more, before the ice reached its maximum extent.


That's a sample from the article, but if you can't open that, this via Google Scholar. It's just the abstract, but it has a lot of the author names you can use to track down other stuff along these lines.