News and Perspective Regarding an Early Site in Canada’s Yukon

By: John Feliks, PCN Jan/Feb 2017

Engineer, rock art researcher and preservationist, Ray Urbaniak—who has written in PCN about the generational potential of oral tradition in U.S. rock art—was first of several researchers to send us news of a recent report regarding Bering Land Bridge theories. The technical report is L. Bourgeon et al, 2017, Earliest Human Presence in North America Dated to the Last Glacial Maximum: New Radiocarbon Dates from Bluefish Caves, Canada. PLoS ONE 12 (1): e0169486. We offer some perspective to this on how anthropology publications continue to mislead science readers with false statements of fact. One popular rendition titled “Archaeological find puts humans in North America 10,000 years earlier than thought: New evidence suggests human presence in a Yukon cave during the last ice age 24,000 years ago” (Hakai Magazine: Coastal Science and Societies, Jan 13, 2017) shows how popular presses simply believe and then echo anthropology press releases without researching whether or not statements made are actually true. For instance, taking into account evidence published in PCN, 24,000 years ago is “not” an old date for early humans in the Americas. Instead, it is a predictably late date. A while back we observed a pattern in anthropology, namely, that a few thousand years are predictably added in increments every few years. At this rate, evidence from sites like Hueyatlaco and Calico wouldn’t be acknowledged for 25–100 years. An ideological motivation that predictable is not science. It suggests the stretching out of a paradigm that has already been demonstrated not in alignment with evidence we already have. Here are a few quotes from the article showing how early dates are rejected and false statements of fact go unchallenged: “The bones [recently shown to contain signs of butchering by way of super-sharp stone shards called microblades] came from excavations led by archaeologist Jacques CinqMars between 1977 and 1987 … Cinq-Mars and his team concluded that the Bluefish Caves showed evidence of occasional human use as much as 30,000 years ago.”

So far, so good. However, the article goes on to say: “That is so much older than anything else found in the Americas that Cinq-Mars’s conclusions were widely disputed, and the three small caves were largely left out of discussions about the peopling of the Americas.” First of all, 30,000 years ago is not “much older” than anything else found in the Americas. As explained, this is a false statement of fact, standard in anthropology. Such statements are only possible when conflicting evidence, such as Hueyatlaco, 250,000 years by USGS geologists, or Calico, 200,000 years, excavated by famed archaeologist Dr. Louis Leakey, is blocked.

Here is one more example to drive the point home: “The finding—published in the journal PLoS ONE—makes the Bluefish Caves the oldest known archaeological site in North America.”

Left: A 47,000-year-old Neanderthal engraving from Bacho Kiro Cave, Bulgaria, compared with a modern representation. This is only one of countless examples of likely symbolic awareness in Homo erectus and Neanderthals routinely blocked from discussion so that standard-trained anthropologists can continue to sell a picture of early people as less than human. It has been a central practice of evolutionary anthropology to represent Neanderthals as incapable of depictive artwork or geometric creativity and so encourage the production of scientific-sounding theories, such as entoptic hallucinations or phosphenes, to explain away geometric figures. Right: Photographs of the exact region where the Bacho Kiro engraving was discovered, demonstrating the reasonable conjecture that the Bacho Kiro zig-zags represent a mountain range and perhaps someone returning from a journey or someone known to have enjoyed hiking. Photos courtesy of Jinal Shah, Sheen Ltd, Bulgaria (top image); and Bulgarian mountain guide Lyuben Grancharov, https://bulguides.com/the-guides-lyuben-grancharov/ (bottom image). Study is from A prehistory of hiking—Neanderthal storytelling (PCN #10 (March-April 2011).