EAST TEXAS INDIAN ARTIFACTS: 2016

Friday, October 28, 2016

BISON TOOTH

FOUND BISON TOOTH TODAY AFTER RAIN FINISHED WASHING OUT HILLSIDE, see the stile, 2 scrapers also,1 flint 1 petrified wood

Monday, September 5, 2016

Violence erupts as Native Americans resist oil pipeline

U.S. Nova Safo,AFP 9 hours ago

Cannon Ball (United States) (AFP) - Protesters camping near Native American lands in North Dakota to protest the construction of an oil pipeline clashed late Saturday with construction company workers they blamed for destroying ancient sites.
Hundreds of protesters confronted a bulldozer crew in an area known as Cannon Ball, amid the vast grasslands of the northern US state.
The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe claims the crew dug up and destroyed sacred burial grounds, places of prayer and other cultural artefacts -- even after the pipeline developer had voluntarily paused construction in the disputed area less than a mile (1.6 kilometer) from the tribe's reservation.
Angry protesters broke through a fence and fought with private security guards, who employed dogs and pepper spray.
"They tried to push us back with their trucks and their bulldozers, but we just kept on coming," Seeyouma Nashcid, a protester from Arizona, told AFP.
Some protesters were left bloodied, and displayed signs of dog bites. The Morton County Sherriff's department said three private security guards were injured after being struck with fence posts and flag poles.
The tribe, whose reservation is located just south of where the 1,200-mile (1,900-kilometer) pipeline would cross the Missouri River, has been locked in a court battle to stop the project, which it says would endanger its drinking water and destroy historic sites.
Members of American Indian tribes from across the United States have rallied in support, gathering for months in a makeshift camp near the reservation.
On Saturday, protesters were suddenly alerted to renewed digging, a day after the tribe filed evidence in court of dozens of newly discovered artefacts, grave markers and sacred sites.
The tribe said in a statement that a two-mile stretch was destroyed before the bulldozer crew was confronted and stopped.
"This demolition is devastating," Standing Rock Sioux Tribe chairman David Archambault said in a statement. "These grounds are the resting places of our ancestors. The ancient cairns and stone prayer rings there cannot be replaced."
Witnesses said law enforcement officers were nearby during Saturday's clashes but did not immediately intervene. But sheriff's spokeswoman Donnell Preskey said deputies "were not on the scene when the conflict initially occurred," and arrived later.
The sheriff's office was notified of the situation by an emergency call from a private security officer.
Citing the safety and security of law enforcement, Morton County Sheriff Kyle Kirchmeier said that the number of protesters made it "unsafe for officers to directly respond until further officers were able to respond."
A federal judge is expected to decide by September 9 whether to grant a temporary injunction to stop the pipeline construction under the river, as the tribe pursues its lawsuit.

The pipeline's US developer Energy Transfer Partners did not return a call for comment placed during a holiday weekend.

Thursday, August 11, 2016

Time to rethink how humans populated America

(Mikkel Winther Pedersen, Natural History Museum of Denmark)

A new study challenges the theory that humans populated the Americas using a corridor between ice sheets more than 12,600 years ago.

After humans arrived from Siberia to Alaska via a land bridge, the route south from there was blocked by two huge ice sheets in what is now Canada, called the Cordilleran and the Laurentide. As those ice sheets melted, a corridor opened between them, estimated to be about 930 miles long.
But the study released Wednesday uses an interesting method to demonstrate that that corridor couldn’t have supported human traffic until about 12,600 years ago, even if it was physically open before that. And as such, the researchers argue that people who arrived before then must have traveled down the Pacific coast by boat.
Scientists took samples from the materials beneath two modern bodies of water— Charlie Lake and Spring Lake in Canada— standing on the ice during the winter and drilling down. The point they chose to analyze was key, because it represents one of the last parts of the corridor to actually open, and was what the study refers to as a “bottleneck.”
Then, they analyzed the ancient DNA they found, and that told them a story about how the once-glaciated landscape became colonized. The researchers found evidence, starting about 12,600 to 12,500 years ago, of mammoth and bison; then voles and jackrabbits; and after that, bald eagles, elk, and moose roamed the landscape, their data demonstrated.
In short, while the corridor they studied was open beforehand, it wasn’t until about 12,600 years ago that enough plants and animals lived there to support humans on their journey. The study is published in the journal Nature.
Because of this, the researchers hypothesize that ancient people who journeyed south before that had to come down the Pacific coast.

“The bottom line is that even though the physical corridor was open by 13,000 years ago, it was several hundred years before it was possible to use it,” Eske Willerslev, a professor at St. John’s College, Univeristy of Cambridge, and the lead researcher on the study, said in a statement. “That means that the first people entering what is now the US, Central and South America must have taken a different route.”
After the corridor did open, people used it to go south, or even travel north, according to the study.
Tom Dalton Dillehay, a professor of anthropology, religion, and culture at Vanderbilt University, and author of book The Settlement of the Americas: A New Prehistory, said a study like this one had been needed for a while, but that it was just a start.
“It is a well documented interdisciplinary work that attempts to resolve the early corridor route beyond standard archeology and geology,” Dillehay wrote in an email to FoxNews.com. “I would like to see more studies of this nature done in other areas of the corridor to confirm this hypothesis, especially at the entrance and exits points of the corridor.”