Coolest Archaeological Discoveries of 2015

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Mysterious 14,000-year-old leg bone may belong to archaic human species

Scientists say a fossilized femur belongs to an ancient human species thought to be long extinct by the time this person walked the Earth. That leg bone could revolutionize current concepts of human evolution if they're right.

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  Courtesy of Peter Schouten

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  Courtesy of Darren Curnoe, Ji Xueping & Getty Images

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A 14,000-year-old thigh bone may upend human history.
Unearthed in southwest China, this femur resembles those of an ancient species of humans thought to be long extinct by the Late Pleistocene, scientists say. The scientists compare the leg bone to ancient and modern human femurs in a paper published Thursday in the journal PLOS ONE, arguing that this specimen represents a population of ancient humans that lived surprisingly recently.
If they're right, this could dramatically change the way we see human history.

Today, our species, Homo sapiens, are the only humans to walk the Earth. But it hasn't always been that way. 

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At times, ancient human species, like Neanderthals, Denisovans, H. erectus, and H. habilis, overlapped. Some even intermingled with our own species, as Denisovan genes show up in some modern humans living today.

Scientists thought that the last time there was more than one species of human on Earth was tens of thousands of years ago. One of our closest cousins, Neanderthals, for example, are thought to have died out about 40,000 years ago.

"Until now, it was thought that archaic humans on mainland Asia had survived no later than around 100,000 years ago," study author Darren Curnoe tells the Monitor in an email. "So, to find a human bone that resembles very ancient humans that is only around 14,000 years old is a real surprise."

"Now, it is only one bone, so we need to be a bit careful," Dr. Curnoe says. But if it does represent these ancient humans, "there must also have been overlap in time between archaic and modern humans for tens of thousands of years in Southwest China."

David Begun, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Toronto who is not affiliated with the study, tells the Monitor in an interview, "I'm not convinced."

"To me, it's just a Late Pleistocene, Early Holocene population that just looks a little bit different, that really doesn't have anything especially archaic about it," Dr. Begun says. "I certainly don't buy the argument that it is some kind of holdover from an Early Pleistocene, early Homo lineage, pre-Neanderthal or something like that. I'm not convinced by the evidence at all."

So what was Curnoe and his colleagues' evidence in the first place?

The scientists analyzed the femur by measuring and comparing physical features on the bone with both ancient and modern specimens.

Discovered among other fossils in Maludong, also known as Red Deer Cave, the femur "is very small; the shaft is narrow, with the outer layer of the shaft (or cortex) very thin; the walls of the shaft are reinforced (or buttressed) in areas of high strain; the femur neck is long; and the place of muscle attachment for the primary flexor muscle of the hip (the lesser trochanter) is very large and faces strongly backwards," Curnoe says.

By looking at measurements and traits of the bone, he says, "we found a clear association between the femur and the bones of the earliest members of the human genus Homo."

But Begun says the leg bone is too fragmentary to say all that. "It lacks most of what you would want to have in a femur to really say something about it," he says. "You'd want to have the head of the femur, the hip joint itself, and that's not here. It only preserves about a third of the length of the femur." 

The specimen also shows a lot of damage, Begun says. "Because of how fragmentary the specimen is and how damaged it is, I'm not convinced that the measurements really tell us much."

This isn't the first specimen from Maludong the team has described and named as a member of an ancient human species. In 2012, they published a paper on skulls found at the same site, suggesting the same thing – that these fossils represent a surprising population of ancient humans.

To survive so recently, this group of people would have likely been an isolated population. 

The region where the bones were found is unique, Curnoe explains. Tectonic uplift created the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau and the area is also quite tropical.

So, Curnoe says, "The Maludong femur might therefore represent a relic, tropically adapted, archaic population that survived relatively late in this biogeographically complex, highly diverse and largely isolated region."

The Maludong specimen isn't the first that scientists have claimed is more recent evidence of ancient humans. Homo florensiensis, nicknamed "Hobbit" for its short stature, was found to have lived on the Island of Flores in Indonesia as late as 17,000 years ago.

"Honestly, it's not the same kind of situation as we have in Flores," Begun says. "It's just not the same thing because the archaic signal, the primitive signal is just not very clearly developed."

"I could be wrong," Begun admits. "But frankly, I'm not convinced."

"Without the more diagnostic parts of the bone, like the head of the femur and a complete neck and more of the shaft," he says, "it's just very very difficult to say anything about a specimen like that."

But Curnoe is unfazed by such a reaction. "Our work is bound to receive a mixed reaction because for some of our colleagues the idea that archaic humans could have survived until the end of the Ice Age in East Asia will be difficult to accept," he says. "There is simply no convincing some, regardless of what we might have found."

Pointing it out: Siloam Springs museum displays local Indian artifacts

Pointing it out: Siloam Springs museum displays local Indian artifacts

Siloam Springs Museum displays local Indian artifacts

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Artifacts collected locally tell archaeologists the area of the Illinois River valley and today's Northwest Arkansas were used by Caddo Indians, says Don Warden, director of the Siloam Springs Museum. The first European contact with Caddoan people was recorded in south Arkansas, Louisiana and Texas, he says, but the collection of Roy Chesney (1886-1957) supports the Northwest Arkansas connection.
The museum is offering a temporary exhibit, "Prehistory of Arkansas," featuring the collection of Chesney. Chesney grew up on a farm in the Siloam Springs area and worked in insurance and real estate. But his hobby was collecting "points" -- which probably began more than 100 years ago, Warden says.

FAQ
‘Prehistory of Arkansas’
WHEN — 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday to Saturday
WHERE — Siloam Springs Museum, 112 N. Maxwell St.
COST — Free
INFO — 524-4011
BONUS — George Sabo, director of the Arkansas Archeological Survey, will speak about Arkansas Indians at 2 p.m. Saturday.

"Points" lumps together several common artifacts -- arrowhead points, spear points, darts -- "projectile points," Warden says. Research over the years enabled archaeologists to identify the type of the point, by its shape and base point, as well as when it was made and from what culture it came.
"Crossroads From the Past," a panel exhibit from the Arkansas Humanities Council, gives an overview of Arkansas Indians from prehistory to history. The panels will be on display through Dec. 19, Warden says.
Points from many different tribes have been found by many people throughout the valley of the Illinois River, which runs just a few miles east of Siloam Springs. The Caddo developed farmsteads in the valley. In the 18th century, Osage supposedly hunted the hills, Warden says. Cherokee migrated to the area beginning about 1800.
In addition to the exhibit, the museum presents George Sabo, director of the Arkansas Archeological Survey, speaking about Arkansas Indians at 2 p.m. Saturday. He also will identify points and other stone tools brought by visitors.

Scientist have discovered new clues about the earliest known Americans

Human groups foraged near the bottom of South America between at least 18,500 and 14,500 years ago, researchers say.
Their new discoveries challenge a popular view in archaeology that people entered South America no earlier than 15,000 years ago.
Excavations in southern Chile indicate that ancient human groups sporadically passed through that area over a 4,000-year stretch, say archaeologist Tom Dillehay of Vanderbilt University in Nashville and colleagues.
Discoveries near the previously explored Monte Verde site add to evidence that the earliest New World settlers were not members of the Clovis culture, the investigators report November 18 in PLOS ONE.
Clovis people hunted big game with distinctive spearpoints and camped at sites with large hearths. Clovis sites date to as early as 13,390 years ago in what is now the United States and Mexico .
Long before that, ancient foragers intermittently stopped at Monte Verde, Dillehay suspects. Work at Monte Verde in the 1970s and 1980s yielded stone tools and other remains of a campsite from around 14,500 years ago. New finds include 39 stone artifacts, nine dating to between at least 18,500 and 17,000 years ago. About one-third of these stones consist of rock found outside the Monte Verde vicinity, either near the Pacific coast or further inland. Early South Americans acquired various types of tool-appropriate rock as they trekked across the landscape and may have traded for some types of rock with other human groups, Dillehay proposes.
Dillehay/New Archaeological Evidence for an Early Human Presence at Monte Verde, ChileThe oldest evidence of humans at Monte Verde comes from stone artifacts dating to between at least 18,500 and 17,000 years ago, including this piece of rock with sharpened edges for scraping or cutting.
Most of these intentionally modified rocks were used for scraping and cutting, the researchers say. A few circular stones were possibly flung at prey with slings. Artifacts also included sharp fragments of stone produced as by-products of toolmaking.
Four stone artifacts were found in soil dating to at least 25,000 years ago. But more evidence is needed to confirm that humans visited Monte Verde and other South American sites before 20,000 years ago , the scientists say.
Dillehay’s team also identified 12 soil sections containing ash from small fires, bits of burned wood and nine partial animal bones, five of which were burned or showed signs of heating. The estimated ages for the Monte Verde discoveries come from radiocarbon measures of burned material and soil analyses that estimate when artifacts were buried.
Archaeologists searching for further pre-Clovis sites will need to keep an eye out for simple tools and remnants of small hearths or campfires, Dillehay adds. Remains of Clovis sites, which typically feature separate areas for cooking, toolmaking and other activities, are easier to spot.
The discoveries at Monte Verde “point to a new kind of site that needs much more study” to understand when people first reached the Americas, remarks archaeologist Daniel Sandweiss of the University of Maine in Orono

Preserving Native-American Art

Interest in collecting artifacts led enthusiasts to establish Gateway Indian Art Club

Todd Boehmer and his wife Carolynn at the Gateway Indian Art Club's annual Indian and Western Art Show and Sale held recently in St. Charles. Boehmer has been collecting Native-American art and artifacts since he was 9 years old. Ursula Ruhl.

November 12, 2015

 

Todd Boehmer has been collecting Native-American art and artifacts for most of his 89 years.

 

"When I was in school, kids would bring in arrowheads and we would find them on our property," he said, noting he was about 9 years old.

 

Boehmer attended Kirkwood High School, and served in the Navy during World War II. His childhood interest in Native-American culture stayed with him, however, and grew to include his wife of 53 years, Carolynn. Originally, they attended shows relating to archeology together.

 

"That was always his thing; I went to all the shows until I had two little ones, then he went with the guys," she said.

 

Then Todd Boehmer, along with Ben Thompson and Virgil Laux, conceived the idea of the Gateway Indian Art Club, and it grew from that core group.

 

For over 20 years, the Gateway Indian Art Club has hosted an annual event, The Indian and Western Art Show and Sale. This year's show was on Oct. 31 and Nov. 1 in St. Charles. Vendors come from around the United States to show their collections, sell art objects, and enjoy camaraderie with those who share their interests.

 

"The challenge is to keep a balance of materials, not all jewelry, not all baskets, but keep it interesting," Club President Lyle Anderson said. His interest in Native-American artifacts began when he was a Boy Scout, trying his hand at making his own arrows.

 

At last weekend's show, vendor David Williamson of Kirkwood displayed a wide variety of Native-American wares from his collection.

Northern Plains men's quilled shirt was on display at the show. Ursula Ruhl.

 

The club and the show are a great way for people interested in Native culture to find, and learn, from each other, Williamson said, noting he has met several kindred spirits who share his enthusiasm for intricate Native designs.

 

Some club members collect beadwork, others quillwork, still others baskets, but all admire the quality of work, use of color and pattern, and attention to detail.

 

"What fascinates me," said Carolynn Boehmer, "are the elaborate repeat patterns that the artists have in their heads, nothing on paper, for beadwork and quillwork."

 

Basket vendor Elaine Tucker, of Clayton, concurred. Primarily, her tables displayed pieces from the Pacific Northwest, such as the Nuu-Chah-Nulth (Nootka), Makah and Tlingit. The vessels dated from the late 1800s through about 1920, and were meticulously wrought from grasses.

 

"The weavers used the botanical materials where they lived; the Aleutians used ryegrass, in northern California you might see bear-grass," she continued. "It might take three to six weeks to prepare the materials for a basket, and she would weave it with no written pattern, all in her head."

 

Other displays featured dolls; Zuni and Navajo jewelry; Kentucky rifles; pottery, both modern and ancient; even a King George II peace medal that was de-accessioned from a small museum.

 

Bud Clark, formerly of Glendale, exhibited his collection of pre-1900 Western Americana. A descendant of explorer William Clark, he is part of the Discovery Expedition of St. Charles Living History group, reenacting his famous ancestor's adventures and promoting history education. Even though he has moved away from the St. Louis area, Clark looks forward to attending the Gateway Indian Art Club show.

 

"I always have the desire to visit; I have strong roots here," he said. "So I have an additional reason to be here. I love the show – two for the price of one!"

 

Lemay resident Charlie Silverhorn, a Kiowa, displayed and sold his beadwork. He gave his niece, renowned artist Kathy Dickerson, credit for carrying on family artistic traditions that go back generations.

 

"Most of the artists are gone now, but my niece keeps up the traditional arts. She smokes the hides, does beadwork and silver. My grandfather, Silverhorn, was a famous Kiowa artist," he said. His display included a copy of Smithsonian anthropologist Candace Greene's book, "Silver Horn: Master Illustrator of the Kiowa."

 

Todd Boehmer has tried his hand at traditional deer-hide tanning. The hide must be scraped to remove hair and tissue, then soaked in a mixture of water and animal brains, then stretched and smoked to create traditional deer buckskin.

 

"You have to brain tan them. We tanned them in the backyard when we lived in Crestwood; you have to pull them, stretch them thin, to make them usable," he explained.

 

The most significant object in Boehmer's collection nearly eluded him. He was walking along a creek with his oldest son, when the teenager spotted something and picked it up.

 

"I walked right by it, and my son found it," he said. "It was a paleo point, a Clovis point."

 

Clovis points are ancient; Clovis culture produced relatively large, distinctive points, although whether they were spearheads or knives is still subject to debate, roughly 13,500 years ago.

 

"So many people in St. Louis are interested in Native-American cultures," said Carolynn Boehmer. "It's part of St. Louis history. We used to be the Mound City, but the mounds are all gone now, except for Sugar Loaf mound in South City.

 

"The club has worked so hard to perpetuate the Native-American culture that is here in St. Louis, so much that is interesting, and that's why we enjoy the club."

East Texas town famous for controversial artifact

East Texas town famous for controversial artifact

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Workers uncovered the Malakoff Man while digging in a pit for gravel to make concrete for this concrete and brick home in Malakoff.

MALAKOFF - My friend Jim Bankston is a Malakoff man, having grown up in this Henderson County town east of Dallas. His dad was the Ford dealer, and his boyhood on the nearby banks of the Trinity resembled an East Texas Tom Sawyer's. But the retired senior minister of St. Paul's United Methodist Church in the Museum District is not THE Malakoff Man, as he reminded me over lunch last Sunday.

To get to know the Malakoff Man, I made the three-hour drive up Interstate 45 to Corsicana and then turned right on state Highway 31. In Malakoff, nine miles west of Athens, I also got reacquainted with another favorite son, one who shares with the Malakoff Man a connection to the timeless yearnings and mysterious impulses of artistic expression.
Malakoff, along with Moscow, Odessa and Sebastopol, is one of four Texas towns named after places in the former Imperial Russia. Early settlers preferred either Mitcham or Purdon, but U.S. postal authorities told them those names were already taken. They suggested naming it after a Russian fort that had recently been captured by the British during the Crimean War. That was fine with the East Texans, despite having no ties to Crimea or the 1855 Battle of Malakoff.
Lignite coal was discovered in the area in 1912, and for the next three decades as many as 800 miners worked the veins beneath the red clay soil. Meanwhile, brick-makers took advantage of the clay itself. The mines played out in the mid-1940s, but brick production remains Malakoff's major industry.
In 1904, Thomas A. Bartlett, owner of the Malakoff Pressed Brick Co., discovered a means of producing white brick, a discovery that won him a blue ribbon at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair. When he decided in the late 1920s to build an elegant home for his family just outside the plant, he realized the structure would have to withstand the shock waves from dynamite used to blast out the clay. He would build the home out of his trademark pale brick and concrete reinforced with steel rebar.
On Nov. 2, 1929, quarry workers in the Trinity River bottoms about five miles west of Malakoff were mining pea gravel for the concrete to be used in the house. Their shovels clanged against something hard and substantial, and when they pushed away the gravel, they found themselves staring at a large stone head. With crudely carved ears, nose, mouth, teeth and eyes, the egg-shaped head seemed to be staring back. (Diggers found a second head in 1935 and a third in 1939.)
As the story goes, the workers left the 98-pound head on the front steps of the Bartlett house-to-be, outfitted with a hat. Was it a hoax someone had carved with modern metal tools, or was it an unbroken Humpty Dumpty sculpted by an ancient artist and cosseted for thousands of years in its pea-gravel container? If authentic, who carved it? And when?
Bartlett contacted a University of Texas archaeologist, who concluded that the head, dubbed the Malakoff Man, was the work of early Paleo-Indians and might be at least 50,000 years old. That was thousands of years before any known humans were in the area. Other experts would date the three heads as 3,000 to 4,000 years old, largely because they resemble the so-called Colossal Heads from the Veracruz area made by craftsmen of the Olmec civilization. And some suggested that at least one of the heads, the one discovered in 1939, may be a "geological peculiarity," carved by erosion or other natural forces, not by a prehistoric sculptor. The site where the heads were uncovered is now at the bottom of Cedar Creek Lake.
Authenticity debated
UT-Tyler anthropology professor Tom Guderjan insists they're frauds and that somebody used a screwdriver to carve the second and third heads. He told the Tyler Morning Telegraph a couple of years ago: "I have people bring rocks to me all the time saying, 'Does this look like a face?' and I say, 'Maybe after a bottle of wine.'"
The Malakoff Man and one of his pals reside today at the University of Texas Archeological Research Laboratory in Austin; the other is at the Navarro College Library in Corsicana. Pat Isaacson, former Malakoff mayor, now director of the Malakoff Chamber of Commerce and also president of the Malakoff Historical Society and Museum, showed me castings from the original heads that she has on display in a small glass case at the museum. She's pretty sure Malakoff Man and friends are authentic.
"I like to think they're real, and archaeologists came so close to proving it," she told me as she readied the cluttered little museum for its holiday display. "They did carbon dating and everything else, but the museum people decided that 10 years was enough time to work on it, so they pulled the archaeologists off. "
A visionary theory
My Malakoff tour guide, Lyn Dunsavage Young, knows about preserving history. She's credited with preserving the historical integrity of Dallas' Swiss Avenue neighborhood before she and her husband moved to a farm near Malakoff in 1981. Relying on an early assessment by E.H. Sellards, head of the Texas Archaeological Memorial Museum at the time Malakoff Man was discovered, she believes the heads were images carved by a people who propped them on wooden stakes beside the Trinity as a signal of their presence. Their village, she believes, overlooked plains inhabited by giant sloths, camels and mastodons; fossilized bones were found in the same excavated area. She's drawn to the notion that long before recorded history mankind was attempting to find meaning to life, to signify existence. The arc of that artistic impulse extends to the present.
"Everybody knew about the heads, growing up," Malakoff native James Surls told me by phone from his home in Carbondale, Colo. "They were absolutely believable as a child, although I can't say how believable they are as an adult. But they were a big deal."
Surls, of course, is the renowned sculptor who makes sublime art, he told Garden & Gun Magazine recently, "from green grass, trees, sticks, rivers and rocks."
Houstonians know him as a UH art professor in the 1970s and as founder of the ground-breaking Lawndale Art Center.
He and his wife, the artist Charmaine Locke, worked out of a 10,000-square-foot studio in the piney woods outside Splendora. They still own the studio, and, as Surls told me a couple of days ago, "are renegotiating our psychological intent in Splendora."
"I can't say that Malakoff Man influenced me," he said by phone, "except on a subliminal level. I had an over, above and beyond interest in anthropological stuff, and when I went off to San Diego State, I was an anthropology major, not an art major."
Authentic or not, Malakoff Man intrigues this son of a Malakoff carpenter. "Seeing a face is probably the oldest conjured image in human history," he said. "It goes back to our oldest ability to see, to be cognisant. I don't think it's a stretch to see faces in a rock."

Tom Dillehay

This serpentine rock, the size of a large plum, bears scars made when a human struck it to produce stone tools in Chile 17,000 to 19,000 years ago.

Oldest stone tools in the Americas claimed in Chile

Archaeologist Tom Dillehay didn’t want to return to Monte Verde. Decades ago, his discoveries at the famous site in southern Chile showed that humans occupied South America by 14,500 years ago, thousands of years earlier than thought, stirring a long and exhausting controversy. Now, Dillehay, of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, has been lured back—and he is preparing for renewed debate. He reports in PLOS ONE today that people at Monte Verde built fires, cooked plants and meat, and used tools 18,500 years ago, which would push back the peopling of the Americas by another 4000 years.
If his team is correct, the discovery will “shake up both the archaeology and genomics of the peopling of the Americas,” says archaeologist Jon 
Erlandson of the University of Oregon in Eugene. Genetic studies suggest that the ancestors of Paleoindians first left Siberia no earlier than 23,000 years ago (Science, 21 August, p. 841), so Dillehay’s new dates suggest they wasted little time in reaching the southern tip of the Americas. And the find raises questions about the North American record, where no one has found widely accepted evidence of occupation before 14,300 years ago. “Where the hell were the people in North America at that hour?” wonders archaeologist David Meltzer of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas.
When Dillehay began his work at Monte Verde in the 1970s, most researchers thought the Clovis people, who hunted big game in North America starting about 13,000 years ago (using calibrated radiocarbon dates), were the first Americans. When Dillehay reported traces of huts, hearths, human footprints, and artifacts that were thousands of years older, he was forced to defend every detail of his dig to skeptical colleagues. By now, though, most archaeologists accept the older occupation at Monte Verde and a few other sites.
When the Chilean government invited Dillehay to survey the full extent of Monte Verde, he at first refused. “I was tired of it,” he says. But in 2013, fearing another team’s survey might damage the site, he returned, hoping to spend a few weeks collecting new evidence of ancient plants and climate by digging 50 small test trenches across a 20,000-square-meter area. But the dig turned up 39 stone artifacts, including flakes, a “chopper,” and cores, embedded near plants or animal bones that had been burned in small fires at 12 areas. This suggests a “spotty, ephemeral presence,” he says.
His team radiocarbon dated the plants and animal bone to between 14,500 and 18,500 years ago, and perhaps as early as 19,000 years ago. The last ice age was only just starting to wane at that time, leaving a cool temperate rain forest at Monte Verde, about 60 kilometers from the Pacific Ocean. Dillehay speculates that early Paleoindians moved along deglaciated corridors between the coast and the Andes, hunting paleo llamas and elephantlike gomphotheres.
Not everyone is 
convinced. Archaeologist Michael Waters of Texas A&M University in College Station questions whether the stone artifacts were actually humanmade, and says that the team hasn’t eliminated the possibility that the fires were natural.
Dillehay concedes that his team found few unequivocal stone tools, which are the strongest evidence of a human presence. But he notes that about one-third of the tools were made from exotic materials such as limestone and white quartz from outside the area, suggesting that people transported the stone. Meltzer finds this compelling. “The specimens don’t scream out ‘made by human hands,’” he agrees, “but Dillehay’s group has made a careful assessment of their form and raw material … It’s evidence we cannot ignore.”
Much is at stake, which suggests that the onus is on Dillehay once again to prove his case. “I guess that part of my destiny is that this damn site simply will not let go of us,” he says.