Media Corner We caught the last half(-ish) of a Nova program (PBS) on the peopling of the Americas (originally broadcast back in November). What we saw was pretty good, and after looking at a transcript we found our initial impressions were correct (at least as far as we're concerned). They hit all the right themes and didn't really push one idea or the other overly hard. In a sense, it wasn't about the peopling of the Americas at all, but rather about the Clovis-first hypothesis. Consequently, we didn't hear a whole lot on the various hypotheses regarding migration routes from Asia, considerations of the ice-free corridor timing, possible maritime routes, etc. The main "hook" seemed to be the possible European connection pushed by Dennis Stanford, that is, that Clovis is derived from the Solutrean. The major new evidence presented here was some mtDNA work by Douglas Wallace who apparently found a fifth source of DNA in the Ojibwa:

When we studied the mitochondrial DNA of the Ojibwa we found, as we had anticipated, the four primary lineages—A, B, C and D—but there was about a quarter of the mitochondrial DNAs that was not A, B, C and D.

They also spent some time on the Gault site which contains thousands of Clovis-era artifacts, only a few of which have anything to do with typical Clovis points. This is probably the least-popularly known aspect of Clovis: there are numerous Clovis sites that have little to do with big game hunting. In these cases, Clovis people are seen as fairly typical hunter-gatherers utilizing a wide variety of resources, depending on their local conditions. This obviously calls into question the whole Overkill Model which the show didn't really go into, and we won't either (here). We liked this portion of the show since it lifted the veil somewhat on Clovis and showed the stereotypical big game hunter model to be not entirely accurate.

The other neat idea they presented was Clovis as a technological innovation that spread through an existing population rather than a strict equivalence between Clovis-as-artifact-type and Clovis-as-a-human-population. This is a very important decoupling, as it is usually (this goes beyond Clovis as well) assumed to be the case that people = artifact types.

Anyway, check out the transcript and especially the companion web site.

Ancient astronauts update Giant Figures in Peru Desert Pre-date Nazca Lines

A group of about 50 drawings of giant figures recently discovered in the hills of Peru’s southern coastal desert near the city of Palpa has been said to predate the famous Nazca lines nearby.

Mr. Johny Isla, director of the Andean Institute of Archaeological Studies, said the “geoglyph” figures appear to have been created by the Paracas communities between 500 and 400BC, whereas the Nazca culture developed after 50 BC. Mr. Isla and his partner Dr. Markus Reindel from the Dutch Institute of Archaeology discovered the Paracas figures using aerial photography and land-based surveys. The figures of humans, birds, monkeys and cats vary in size from 10m to 50m across, and are also grouped together in areas up to 60 m to 90 m across.

Man trying to sell skull must apologize

A man who tried to sell the 200-year-old skull of a native Hawaiian warrior on eBay was sentenced Monday to 600 hours of community service and ordered to publish an apology in several Hawaiian newspapers.

Jerry Hasson of Huntington Beach must also pay more than $13,000 and post the same apology on an eBay bulletin board dedicated to archaeological memorabilia.