More early Americans

I’ve been working on other things and reluctant to push this server beyond its bandwidth limit, hence the relative lack of posting. I have noticed that Tim Worstall has linked me from the Britblog round-up with a nice comment. So unusally I’m within a day or so of it happening to say thank you.

There’s a backlog of things I’d like to write. For instance I still want to follow-up on the problem of Mexican footprints, but it needs reading and time to write the post. It’s doesn’t help that this is a hot area at the moment. Today there’s a story from Missouri that an early site has been found which pushes back earliest human habitation in North America by 500 years.

My gut feeling, without reading around the area to actually know anything about it, is that this one could stand. 500 years is a big chunk of time, but it doesn’t totally throw out previous work in North America and is consistent with early habitation in South America. Additionally “the entire prehistoric record — over 14,000 years — is represented at the Big Eddy” according to the story. That makes it harder to argue that strata are mis-dated if they’re all laid out.

Of course if they’re not laid out neatly then there’ll still be arguments about whether or not they’re being interpreted correctly.