Thursday, July 6, 2017

BLM considers offering Utah’s Recapture Canyon — rich in American Indian artifacts — for oil and gas leasing

By BRIAN MAFFLY | The Salt Lake Tribune

First Published Jul 05 2017 07:00AM • Last Updated Jul 05 2017 03:02 pmThe Bureau of Land Management is proposing to lease Racapture Canyon, east of Blanding, for oil and gas development, along with other culturally important spots in Utah’s San Juan County.

Environmental review » The feds want to assess 45 parcels that could be offered; critics worry about damage to archaeological sites.

Recapture Canyon is so rich in fragile Native American prehistory that it is closed to motorized use, yet the Bureau of Land Management is now proposing to lease the canyon east of Blanding for oil and gas development, along with other culturally important spots in Utah's San Juan County.

The land agency has initiated an environmental assessment of leasing 45 parcels covering 57,074 acres recently "nominated" by energy companies interested in tapping these areas for hydrocarbons. Under the Obama administration, the BLM would have "deferred" a leasing decision on most of these parcels, but President Donald Trump's strategy of American "energy dominance" requires federal land managers to ease impediments to drill,

Historic preservationists are concerned that the proposed leases could usher in drilling near numerous known sites occupied by Ancestral Puebloans, who left a rich record of their lives in area canyons and mesas.

"This is the second example [recently] of how the Trump administration's push for oil and gas development is running roughshod over Utah's federal public lands," said Steve Bloch, legal director for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance. "First, Utah BLM announced its intent to sell oil and gas leases in Utah's amazing San Rafael Swell and right next to Dinosaur National Monument and now this."

Most of land proposed for leasing is east of the new Bears Ears National Monument. Under the BLM's 2008 resource management plan, this area is open to oil and gas leasing without many special stipulations protecting cultural resources. But that doesn't mean the agency will automatically allow drilling, officials said.

"The BLM is aware there are sensitive resources here and will be carefully reviewing each parcel, consulting with tribes and cultural resource experts, and reaching out to the public as part of our environmental review process and responsibilities under the National Historic Preservation Act," said Robin Naeve, fluid minerals chief for the BLM's Utah state office.

The environmental review launched last week will determine whether these nominated parcels are appropriate for leasing.

"As part of public scoping, people are invited to come forward with knowledge or concerns about these parcels, so they can be addressed. A robust analysis is key to making well-reasoned decisions about whether it is appropriate to lease these parcels," BLM spokeswoman Lisa Bryant added.

The public has until July 27 to file comments that would be used to guide the environmental review.

This year's Canyon Country lease sale could be a replay of the 2015 sale, when the BLM proposed offering numerous parcels in the same archaeologically rich areas only to withdraw 36 of them after a public outcry. At the time, the agency said the "geographic area is known to possess [a] considerable degree of unique cultural resources."

Some parcels now proposed for sale cover the same areas around Montezuma Creek and Alkali Ridge, which feature the highest concentrations of archaeological sites in the nation. One covers Montezuma Canyon at the site of Three Kiva Pueblo, an accessible Anasazi ruin the BLM has restored and developed for public enjoyment.

Another proposed lease covers the site of a "great house," a massive sandstone masonry structure of great importance to a civilization centered around New Mexico's Chaco Canyon.

Josh Ewing, director of Friends of Cedar Mesa, believes this is the northernmost great house associated with Chacoan culture.

"This one would rival the largest buildings in San Juan County today," Ewing said. "It would have been the sort of thing people would have travel to from far away."

Locals are familiar with Recapture Canyon, long a sore point for ATV enthusiasts who would like to ride there. Three parcels eyed for leasing span this canyon, which became a flashpoint in the West's public land conflicts when protesters drove through three years ago.

San Juan County has unsuccessfully petitioned the BLM for years to grant a right-of-way along the perennial creek below Recapture Dam, which courses between scenic sandstone walls where cliff dwellings are still evident. The agency closed the canyon to motorized use in 2007 after discovering unauthorized trail construction had damaged numerous archaeological sites.

Impatient with what locals saw as BLM dithering, San Juan County Commissioner Phil Lyman organized the illegal ride to protest federal land management policies that complicate access and use of public lands, which comprise 92 percent of Utah's largest county. Lyman eventually was convicted of a misdemeanor and spent 10 days behind bars.

The proposed leases cover southern portions of the canyon, from Browns Canyon south to Perkins Road, which harbors Recapture's most vulnerable archaeological sites. The ATV protest ride passed through the northern portion and exited at Browns Canyon.

According to Bryant, 19 parcels are inside the stalled San Juan master leasing area, a region proposed for a special planning district that would ensure energy development doesn't overwhelm other resources.

Under Obama, the requests for leasing would have been put off until that plan was complete. Ewing believes it would be best for both industry and conservation if BLM stuck to that policy.

"Otherwise they will have protests and lawsuits every time they do something," he said. "You will be more energy dominant if your energy development system is not tied up in the courts."

Thursday, June 22, 2017

The journey of the 1,000-year-old canoe found in Red River

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Local couple cannot believe they were so lucky to find an incredible artifact. (Henrietta Wildsmith/The Times)

Robert Cornett and Jeanna Bradley thirst for knowledge about the Caddo American Indians who once inhabited the land along the Red River.
The Hosston residents often research the tribe's history and search for remnants of arrowheads and pottery on the land, in northern Caddo Parish. However, as they set out to peruse the river banks for more tokens from the past, they didn't expect to find one that would make themselves a part of history.
On June 7, the couple found a canoe on the river bank in Belcher believed to have been carved from a tree by members of the Caddo tribe more than 900 years ago.
"We were riding the river, just looking at the banks to see if we could see anything," Cornett said. "We found some pottery and little pieces of arrowhead and grindstone. (We) rode on down the river and coming back seen a log sticking out – it looked funny on the end. We kind of had an idea of what it was and went to digging and that's what it was."

The next day, they alerted state officials of their findings. Then began preparation to excavate the canoe and begin further research and preservation of the artifact.
The Caddos' canoe may have journeyed across many miles to arrive on the sandy banks and into the hands of the couple. And it has many more miles to go before finding its new permanent home – a journey that begins with tracking its origin through time.
The creation of a Caddo canoe
A team gathered Wednesday at the site to begin the excavation. Once seen in its entirety, a few details were determined about the canoe before sending it off to a safer location.
"It looks very similar to one that was found in 1983 that is now on exhibit at the Louisiana State Exhibit Museum and that one dated to about 800-1100, so this could be 900 years old or more," said Jeffery Girard, a retired archaeologist called out to the site.

The canoe was carved out of a tree trunk, believed to have been a Cypress, but further research will confirm the origin.

It's dimensions are 10.3 meters long (or about 33.5 feet), less than 2.5 feet wide and 2.5 feet deep, according to state archaeologist Chip McGimsey.
Currently, its weight is unknown, but it took heavy machinery, manpower and engineering prowess to carefully lift and pull the massive canoe out of the bank and onto a trailer for transport to its next destination.

"It's important because it's unique. It may be the largest prehistoric watercraft found anywhere in North America," McGimsey said. "It's very large, and you don't find these preserved very often. ... Anything with wood usually deteriorates."
The canoe is in "incredible condition," Girard said, and a bit larger than the canoe found in the area 34 years ago.
"We're going to ship it to Texas A&M University where it will be conserved," Girard said. "They'll remove the moisture from the wood and replace it with polyethylene glycol that will retain the cell structure of the wood so it doesn't deteriorate over time."
The university has a lab skilled in the restoration of historic artifacts, he said.
Because of its massive capacity and weight, McGimsey said, the canoe probably was built near the river to avoid having to be lifted.
"You can look at a dug-out canoe and know instantly what it is and what it was like to ride in it, to work in it, to go fishing in it and do your business," McGimsey said. "A lot of these things were probably used for traders going up and down the river carrying goods from one town to another."
The maiden voyage

How the canoe lay undiscovered for nearly a millennia is a myster. But Girard has a theory.
"It was sitting in very loose sand and we suspect that it probably washed in here, maybe in last spring's floods that did so much to the river," he said. "It may be that recent that it came here. It may have been lodged somewhere upstream and got loose and washed in here."

It's not the first artifact to be found in the area. A large archaeology site was discovered about eight miles away, which is believed to have been occupied by Caddos around 1100 A.D. The canoe may have be a part of the site, Girard said.
A team of archaeologists will return to the site next winter once crops have been cleared to determine if an American Indian camp or village is in the area.
In 1983, Vivian resident John Paul Hobbs discovered a smaller canoe about two miles south of the latest discovery site. He remembers the day vividly and it's still a proud point of his life.

"I was fishing and when I found it sticking out of the riverbank. It was quite the find," Hobbs said.
The canoe he found was donated to the Louisiana State Exhibit Museum, where it's currently on display.
When he found out about the latest discovery, he felt the excitement wash over him all over again and made sure he was at the excavation site to witness the moment.
"It's just amazing that they found another one and I'm really proud of them," Hobbs said.
The future of history's latest find

Bradley and Cornett's wish was for it to be donated to a museum.
“When we found it we were excited because we found a part of history and we wanted to make sure everybody got to see it," Cornett said.

After speaking with the landowners— who held rights to the artifacts— the couple found out it would be donated to the state for safe keeping.
“We want to be able to take our kids and our grandkids there to show them off and other people around the state can come to see it,” Bradley said.
It could take more than a year or two before the canoe is ready for public display. But once the restoration is complete, the canoe will return to Shreveport-Bossier City, said Girard. It's not yet decided where it will be displayed, but the Red River National Wildlife Refuge and the Louisiana State Exhibit Museum are a couple of options.
It's been a long journey for the wood, and its voyage now continues to the next stage.
"Finding one is very rare, especially one of this size," McGimsey said. "But its ability to tell a story about the past is really unparalleled because they represent something the average person can see and understand and really reach out and touch the past."

Prehistoric Indian canoe unearthed along Red River

Indian canoe unearthed along Red River

BELCHER, LA -- Excavation efforts have unearthed a large, prehistoric Indian canoe along the Red River in north Caddo Parish.
One archaeologist said the almost 34-foot-long dugout canoe, described it in very good condition even though one side is missing. The canoe, weighing an estimated 1,000 pounds, could be the largest ever found intact in North America.
Excavation, which was conducted near the town of Belcher, was completed this morning and crews then began the process of bringing the canoe up the river embankment.
The dugout canoe will be taken to Texas A&M University, where preservation efforts could take one to two years. Once that is done, the boat will be on display.
The canoe is believed to be 800 to 1,000 years old, an archaeologist at the site said. It was believed used by Caddo Indians who settled along the Red River and its tributaries.
It was found earlier this spring by a woman looking for artifacts along the banks of the river. She was among those at the site on Wednesday.
A Caddo Indian dugout canoe, which is smaller than the one excavated on Wednesday, was found along the Red River in the 1980s. That cypress dugout, which is believed to have been crafted between 1005 and 1065, was preserved and is on exhibit at the Louisiana State Exhibit Museum in Shreveport.

Thursday, May 25, 2017

7-million-year-old fossils widen divide between humans and | Cosmos

7-million-year-old fossils widen divide between humans and chimps

A new study on human evolution sparks struggle of Darwinian proportions. Cheryl Jones reports.

This is a 7.24 million year old upper premolar of a *Graecopithecus* from Azmaka, Bulgaria.
WOLFGANG GERBER, UNIVERSITY OF TÜBINGEN

A row has erupted over claims the human and chimpanzee lineages might have split hundreds of thousands of years earlier than previously thought.

Research based on a study of the ancient skeletal remains of the species Graecopithecus freybergi, from the eastern Mediterranean, is published in two papers in the journal PLoS One.

A big international team of researchers co-led by Madelaine Boehme, of the University of Tubingen, Germany, says that G. freybergi might be the common ancestor of members of the genus Homo and of chimps.

The research team contends the split might have occurred in the eastern Mediterranean.

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The study of prehistory is confounded by a sparse fossil record that has nevertheless generated a dizzying number of possible family trees. It is exacerbated by problems in the dating of material from archaeological sites that have been disturbed.

The team did CT scans of a lower jawbone from Greece and an upper premolar tooth from Bulgaria dated to between 7.18 million and 7.27 million years old. But it drew anatomical data on other species, including gorillas, and chimps, from the scientific literature or casts of the remains.

Debbie Argue, an evolutionary biologist at the Australian National University, in Canberra, says more fossil evidence is needed to confirm the taxonomic status of G. freybergi.

Argue’s colleague Colin Groves says more comparisons should have been made with the genus Ouranopithecus, also from Europe, as candidates for the common ancestor.

“In the past, the two genera have been thought of as the same,” he says.

But Boehme says the database of fossil material “is not so bad”. “The conclusion may sound extravagant to some experts, but these two papers are just the beginning,” she says. “The forthcoming years will see a revolution in our ideas of human evolution.”

New Fossils Discovered Suggest That Humans Started Off in Greece, Not Africa | GreekReporter.com

New Fossils Discovered Suggest That Humans Started Off in Greece, Not Africa

New evidence of fossils unveiled by archaeologist Nikolai Spassov suggests that the human species is likely to have had its origins in Greece, not Africa, an article in New Scientist says.

Nikolai Spassov and his team from the National Museum of Natural History in Bulgaria recently discovered fossils in both Greece and neighboring Bulgaria — including a jawbone believed to be from an ape called Graecopithecus which dates back more than 7 million years. This discovery seems to disprove that Africa is the birthplace for humans, as the Graecopithecus’ remains to predate the Sahelanthropus hominin found in Africa.

Graecopithecus are thought to have roamed Eastern Europe long after the other apes had vanished from the continent and after examining the jaw with CT-scans, it was concluded that the way in which the roots of the premolars are fused as well as the small canines on the jawbone, the jaw belongs to a hominin not a chimp.

- See more at: http://greece.greekreporter.com/2017/05/25/new-fossils-discovered-suggest-that-humans-started-off-in-greece-not-africa/#sthash.Vq9g5e3J.dpuf

New Evidence Suggests Humans Arrived In The Americas Far Earlier Than Thought : The Two-Way : NPR

New Evidence Suggests Humans Arrived In The Americas Far Earlier Than Thought

New Evidence Suggests Humans Arrived In The Americas Far Earlier Than ThoughtListen·3:3

April 26, 20171:00 PM ET

CHRISTOPHER JOYCE

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(Left) A close-up view of a spirally fractured mastodon femur. (Right) A boulder discovered at the Cerutti Mastodon site in San Diego County thought to have been used by early humans as a hammerstone.

Tom Démeré/San Diego Natural History Museum

Researchers in Southern California say they've uncovered evidence that humans lived there 130,000 years ago.

If it's true, it would be the oldest sign of humans in the Americas ever — predating the best evidence up to now by about 115,000 years. And the claim has scientists wondering whether to believe it.

In 1992, archaeologists working a highway construction site in San Diego County found the partial skeleton of a mastodon, an elephant-like animal now extinct. Mastodon skeletons aren't so unusual, but there was other strange stuff with it.

"The remains were in association with a number of sharply broken rocks and broken bones," says Tom Deméré, a paleontologist at the San Diego Natural History Museum. He says the rocks showed clear marks of having been used as hammers and an anvil. And some of the mastodon bones as well as a tooth showed fractures characteristic of being whacked, apparently with those stones.

It looked like the work of humans. Yet there were no cut marks on the bones showing that the animal was butchered for meat. Deméré thinks these people were after something else. "The suggestion is that this site is strictly for breaking bone," Deméré says, "to produce blank material, raw material to make bone tools or to extract marrow." Marrow is a rich source of fatty calories.

Don Swanson, a paleontologist with the San Diego Natural History Museum, points at a rock fragment near a large horizontal mastodon tusk fragment.

San Diego Natural History Museum/Nature

The scientists knew they'd uncovered something rare. But they didn't realize just how rare for years, until they got a reliable date on how old the bones were by using a uranium-thorium dating technology that didn't exist in the 1990s.

The bones were 130,000 years old. That's a jaw-dropping date, as other evidence shows that the earliest humans got to the Americas about 15,000 to 20,000 years ago.

"That is an order of magnitude difference. Wow," says John Shea, an archaeologist at New York's Stony Brook University who specializes in studying ancient toolmaking. "If it's correct, then there's an extraordinarily ancient dispersal to the New World that has a very different archaeological signature from anything left behind by recent humans."

Shea says it's different because Stone Age toolmakers usually leave behind stone flakes — sharp pieces broken or "knapped" from certain kinds of rock that serve as cutting implements. There were none at the California site. Another odd thing: no signs that the mastodon was butchered for the meat.

"This is weird," Shea says. "It's an outlier in terms of what archaeological sites from that time range look like everywhere else on the planet." He suggests these bones might have been broken up by natural causes — by a mudflow, perhaps, or by the trampling of animals sometime after the mastodon died.

Another skeptic is John McNabb, an archaeologist at the University of Southampton in England. His question: How did those people get to California?

Twenty thousand years ago, archaeologists agree, people did cross over to Alaska from Siberia, perhaps more than once. Sea levels were lower then and there was a land bridge connecting the continents. In an interview with the journal Nature, which published the California research, McNabb says that land bridge wasn't there 130,000 years ago. "The sea lane in between the two continents [was] wider [then]," he says, "so that's one problem with this: How do we get humans across?"

Nature YouTube

McNabb says what's needed to really prove that this is truly an archaeological site are bones from the people who got there.

The California team counters that it has spent over 20 years examining the evidence. "I know people will be skeptical with this because it is so surprising," says team member and archaeologist Steve Holen, "and I was skeptical when I first looked at the material myself. But it's definitely an archaeological site."

Holen, with the Center for American Paleolithic Research, says these early people could have come across in boats. As for the broken bones, he says the type of fracture isn't accidental. And the way the hammerstones and bones were distributed in the ground doesn't look natural.

One question the team can't answer is who these people were. A genetic technique that uses mutations in a population's genome as a sort of "clock" says the first common ancestor of Native Americans lived about 20,000 years ago. So if there were indeed earlier settlers, it could be they made an arduous migration from Siberia, only to die out without leaving any descendants.