"A park ranger wandering through a petrified forest in California has unearthed a trove of prehistoric fossils, including a stunningly preserved mastodon skull and the remains of a 400-pound (181 kilograms) monster salmon, SFGate reported." Source: Live Science.
"Paleontologists unearthed dozens of fossil species near the Mokelumne River watershed in the foothills of the Sierra mountains southeast of Sacramento. The fossil site, which dates back roughly 10 million years to the Miocene epoch, is one of the most significant such troves ever discovered in the Golden State."
Comment: It's hard to imagine, but these prehistoric animals lived at a time when there were no humans in the world. Assuming our current picture of evolution is correct, the apes had just started to appear in the Old World at the beginning of the Miocene and the first human ancestors only began to diverge from the ancestors of modern chimpanzees near the end of the epoch. According to researchers, the region where these fossils were discovered was "an oak forest fringed by an ancient ocean" in the Miocene. If you ask me, California would've been a better place to live back then than it is today.
"The Wendigo is a horrifying creature of Algonquian Native American legends that would devour human flesh to survive a harsh winter. But are they only myth, or are there really cannibalistic humanoids waiting in forests for their next victim?" Source: Ancient Origins.
"The Algonquians are some of the most extensive and numerous of the Native American groups in North America, and they once lived all along the Atlantic Coast and the Great Lakes Region. However, Wendigo-like creatures are also found in the legends of other Native American tribes, including the neighbors of the Algonquians, the Iroquois. Amongst these peoples, a creature known as the Stonecoat bears some similarities to the Wendigo.
"In some traditions, humans overpowered by greed could turn into wendigos; the myth thus served as a method of encouraging cooperation and moderation. Other sources say wendigos were created when a human resorted to cannibalism to survive. Humans could also turn into wendigos by being in contact with them for too long." (Wikipedia)
"Prior to European colonization ... the Caribbean was a mosaic of archaeologically distinct communities that were connected by networks of interaction since the first human occupations in Cuba, Hispaniola and Puerto Rico around 6,000 years ago. The pre-contact Caribbean is divided into three archaeological ages, which denote shifts in material cultural complexes. The Lithic and Archaic Ages are defined by distinct stone tool technologies, and the Ceramic Age — which began about 2,500–2,300 years ago — featured an agricultural economy and intensive pottery production. Technological and stylistic changes in material culture across these Ages reflect local developments by connected Caribbean people as well as migration from the American continents, although the geographical origins, trajectories and numbers of migratory waves remain under debate." Source: Nature (Dec. 2020).
This study looked at the "genome-wide" DNA data from "174 ancient individuals from The Bahamas, Haiti and the Dominican Republic (collectively, Hispaniola), Puerto Rico, Curaçao and Venezuela" together with the data from "89 previously published ancient individuals." One of the study's findings, reported in the NY Times (Dec. 2020), was that "the [pre-contact] population of Hispaniola was no more than a few tens of thousands of people. Almost all prior estimates have been at least tenfold too large." (Earlier estimates went as high as 750,000).
Comment: Columbus, of course, has been viciously attacked for his involvement in the slave trade, etc. etc., but I have to point out that the Caribbean tribes he contacted were also involved in slavery and, in some cases, cannibalism. The Arawaks, for instance, welcomed the Spanish at first, asking them for protection against the warlike Caribs (the Kalingo) who raided the other tribes for plunder and prisoners:
"According to the Spanish conquistadors, the Kalinago were cannibals who regularly ate roasted human flesh. There is evidence as to the taking of human trophies and the ritual cannibalism of war captives among both Carib and other Amerindian groups such as the Arawak and Tupinamba." (Wikipedia)
In their original logs, dispatches and letters, the Spaniards described how the Caribs would capture male infants and boys during their raids and take them home, where they would fatten up their slaves and then eat them, sometimes after a period of years. This is a part of history which never makes it into the classrooms and popular press.
"During the last ice age, when hunters and gatherers crossed the ancient Bering Land Bridge that connected Asia with North America, they carried something special with them in their genetic code: pieces of ancestral Australian DNA, a new study finds." Source: Live Science.
"Over the generations, these people and their descendants trekked southward, making their way to South America. Even now, more than 15,000 years after these people crossed the Bering Land Bridge, their descendants — who still carry ancestral Australian genetic signatures — can be found in parts of the South American Pacific coast and in the Amazon, the researchers found."
Comment: The theory here is that indigenous Australians migrated north through Asia, crossed over the Bering Land Bridge into what is now Alaska and then traveled down the coast to South America -- a very long and roundabout journey. That could very well be true, but it's also possible that the prehistoric seafarers of Oceania reached South America more directly by island hopping across the Pacific. This disputed theory is based on the discovery of very early human settlements in South America which -- assuming that the dating is correct -- seem to conflict with the orthodox story:
"Excavations of South American sites containing traces of ancient human activity have suggested that humans reached the southern region of the continent at least 14,500 years before present (BP) — remarkably quickly after first entering the Americas — and that they soon developed diverse technologies across different sites. But the picture yielded by these archaeological investigations is a patchwork, leaving open key questions, such as whether the first humans migrated south along the Pacific coast or by some other route. The history is further complicated by disputed claims (examples marked by red headers with asterisks) that certain sites reflect a much earlier occupation of the continent beginning more than 20,000 BP." Source: The Scientist (2020).
Spread out across the Midwest, Eastern and Southeastern United States, the Mississippian Culture (app. 800 - 1600 AD) was a sprawling collection of "urban settlements and satellite villages (suburbs) linked together by loose trading networks." (Wikipedia). "The largest city was Cahokia, believed to be a major religious center located in what is present-day southern Illinois."
I'm not sure if the Mississippian Culture qualifies as a "civilization" as such, but the people living in its scattered settlements and villages did share a common culture in many regards. They were all mound builders, for instance. They were maize agriculturalists, made shell-tempered pottery, created hierarchical chiefdoms with centralized political and religious control, and developed systems of "institutionalized social inequality," according to Wikipedia.
The Angel Mounds village covered around 103 acres, according to the Indiana State Museum. An "important religious, political and trade center for people living within a 75-mile radius," the village is thought to have been home to around 1000 people at its height. The site had "six large platform mounds (Mounds A through F), five smaller mounds (Mounds H through L), and at least one large plaza." Cahokia, by contrast, was much larger. "At its apex around 1100 CE, the city [Cahokia] covered about 6 square miles ... and included about 120 manmade earthen mounds in a wide range of sizes, shapes, and functions. At the apex of its population, Cahokia may have briefly exceeded contemporaneous London, which at that time was approximately 14,000–18,000." (Wikipedia)
There isn't much left of the Angel Mounds village except for its mounds, but the site has been a rich source of artifacts. "From 1939 to 1942, the Works Progress Administration employed more than 250 workers to excavate 120,000 square feet ... of the site, which resulted in the recording and processing of 2.3 million archaeological items." Though small compared to Cahokia, the Angel Mounds settlement was an important site connected to what appears to have been a very large and active culturally-interrelated complex that extended at various times from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico.
"Mississippian culture was not a single 'tribe,' but many societies sharing a similar way of life or tradition." (Encyclopedia of Alabama) Whatever you call it, though, it definitely wasn't a unified civilization of egalitarian traders and farmers living together in peace and harmony. Fortifications were common in Mississippian settlements. The remains of a stockade and defensive palisade at Angel Mounds, for instance, provide clear evidence that the people there had reason to be worried about attacks. Warfare was fairly common in the southeast during this time:
According to the New Georgia Encyclopedia, "Significant warfare first began to develop among Georgia Indians in the Mississippian Period (A.D. 800-1600), a time when relatively large societies called chiefdoms evolved throughout southeastern North America. During this period defensive fortifications were first built around some towns.
"These included log palisades that completely encircled large towns such as the one at the Etowah Mounds in north Georgia. Palisades were often plastered with clay to keep them from being ignited by burning arrows. Sometimes they incorporated defensive towers (bastions) that allowed archers to shoot at enemies who got close to the wall. Ditches similar to moats were also dug around some palisades and were part of the fortifications of both the Etowah site and the Ocmulgee site at Macon."
"Corn cultivation spread from Mesoamerica to what is now the American Southwest by about 4000 B.C., but how and when the crop made it to other parts of North America is still debated. In a new study, scientists report that corn was not grown in the ancient metropolis of Cahokia until sometime between A.D. 900 and 1000, a relatively late date that corresponds to the start of the city's rapid expansion." Source: Science Daily (2020).
Note: "Cahokia was the largest and most influential urban settlement of the Mississippian culture, which developed advanced societies across much of what is now the central and southeastern United States, beginning more than 1,000 years before European contact." (Wikipedia)
Maize (corn) is thought to have been domesticated in southern Mexico around 10,000 years ago. If the dates are correct, it took around 6,000 years for the cultivation of maize to spread to the American southwest and another 3,000 years for the crop to reach Cahokia in the midwest. This very slow spread can be explained, at least partly, by the fact that it took time for maize to adapt to northern climates, but it also suggests that the indigenous peoples of the ancient Americas were fairly static, spending most of their time in their traditional territories.
When maize reached Cahokia it was just a small village, but around a century later (or less) the settlement began to expand dramatically:
"Beginning in about 1050, Cahokia grew from 'a little village of a few hundred people to part of a city with 5,000 to 10,000 people in an archaeological instant' ... The population eventually expanded to at least 40,000. This early experiment in urban living was short-lived, however. By 1350, after a period of drought and civil strife, most of the city's population had dispersed." (Science Daily)
"Woolly mammoths may have walked the landscape at the same time as the earliest humans in what is now New England, according to a new study. Through the radiocarbon dating of a rib fragment from the Mount Holly mammoth from Mount Holly, Vt., the researchers learned that this mammoth existed approximately 12,800 years ago. This date may overlap with the arrival of the first humans in the Northeast, who are thought to have arrived around the same time." Source: Science Daily.
Note: The consensus (up until now, at least) was that the woolly mammoths and other Ice Age megafauna had gone extinct by the time the first people arrived on the east coast of North America. Even if this new research is accurate, however, it sounds like people were starting to arrive in what is now New England around the same time that the mammoths were on the way out:
According to the researchers, "'The Mount Holly mammoth was one of the last known occurring mammoths in the Northeast ... While our findings show that there was a temporal overlap between mammoths and humans, this doesn't necessarily mean that people saw these animals or had anything to do with their death but it raises the possibility now that maybe they did."
"The skeletal remains of a 'wild' female horse found buried in a big ancient lake in Utah and thought to date back 16,000 years to the last ice age are actually no older than 340 years old, a new study finds." Source: Live Science.
"The bones, unearthed by landscapers in a Lehi, Utah backyard in 2018, were initially dated to a period that ended roughly 11,700 years ago. But after analyzing the horse's remains, scientists realized that the hoofed beast was actually a domestic horse that lived much more recently."
Follow-up report from 2021. Closed-captions useful.
Comment:This is yet another example of why you shouldn't automatically take archaeology news stories at face value. Note how it took at least two years for the truth to come out. Who knows how many other discoveries won't live up to their initial headlines when somebody finally gets around to looking into them more closely?
"As one of the most experienced archaeologists studying California's Native Americans, Lynn Gamble knew the Chumash Indians had been using shell beads as money for at least 800 years ... But an exhaustive review of some of the shell bead record led the UC Santa Barbara professor emerita of anthropology to an astonishing conclusion: The hunter-gatherers centered on the South-central Coast of Santa Barbara were using highly worked shells as currency as long as 2,000 years ago." Source: Science Daily.
Note: "The Santa Barbara County area, including the Northern Channel Islands, was first settled by Native Americans at least 13,000 years ago. Evidence for a Paleoindian presence has been found in the form of a fluted Clovis-like point found in the 1980s along the western Santa Barbara Coast, as well as the remains of Arlington Springs Man found on Santa Rosa Island in the 1960s. For thousands of years, the area was home to the Chumash tribe of Native Americans, complex hunter-gatherers who lived along the coast and in interior valleys leaving rock art in many locations, including Painted Cave." (Wikipedia)
Painted Cave rock art.
Indians across the continent used shell beads, also known as wampum in some cases, for a variety of purposes. The next video, for instance, shows some examples of the different ways they were used by the Lenape Nation on the east coast. These are fairly recent examples, I think.
According to Science Daily, "...shell beads have been used for over 10,000 years in California, and there is extensive evidence for the production of some of these beads, especially those common in the last 3,000 to 4,000 years, on the northern Channel Islands. The evidence includes shell bead-making tools, such as drills, and massive amounts of shell bits -- detritus -- that littered the surface of archaeological sites on the islands."
"The publisher of an archaeology book decried by some academics as 'racist' has committed to continue publishing the book, despite calls for the text to be discontinued." Source: The College Fix.
"The book Repatriation and Erasing the Past continues to be in publication,' University Press of Florida Director Romi Gutierrez told The College Fix via email. Guttierez also indicated that despite social media pressure from a number of professors, there have been 'no changes to our marketing approach' for the book."
Comment: This is one of those ridiculously overpriced university press books which are too expensive for anyone to buy and will probably only sell a few hundred copies to university libraries. But never mind that. Various "Native American" activists have worked themselves into such a lather about the book that you'd think somebody was actually going to read it.
According to the Amazon book description, "Repatriation and Erasing the Past takes a critical look at laws that mandate the return of human remains from museums and laboratories to ancestral burial grounds." The authors criticize these laws and "support the view that anthropologists should prioritize scientific research over other perspectives."
This is blasphemy, of course, and activists has been attacking the authors viciously ever since the book came out. Most of this has been taking place on social media, I think. There are only two reviews on Amazon, both one-star smears. One of the authors' biggest sins, it appears, is their commitment to such fascist ideologies as scientific objectivity. This controversy is a typical example of the scholarship vs racial identity battle which has infected the study of ancient North America.
Last month (Jan. 25, 2021), the authors published an article explaining their position:
"We recently published a book titled Repatriation and Erasing the Past (University Press of Florida, 2020), its reception on social media reflects the emotional and dogmatic thinking that has infected so much academic work in the United States and abroad. In our book, we are critical of repatriationism, which we define as any law, practice, or ideology that seeks to give Native Americans or their presumed spokesmen the power to censor anthropological research by controlling access to archaeological remains or by limiting topics of research and publication on those remains."
These Native American activists argue that archaeology is no different than grave-robbing. I don't buy that myself -- there's a big difference between an archaeologist and somebody like Herbert West, for instance -- but the argument is understandable, at least. I can see why someone would believe that. But when they try to cancel books and shut down academics who disagree with them, it makes me suspect that they're worried about what archaeology might reveal about their own origins. If they get their way they will end up erasing their own past because nobody will be able to study it without being condemned for "racism."
Anyway, I'm glad that the University Press of Florida is standing up to this pressure. Hopefully they'll stick to their decision.