REM: You to to think outside the box, bro.........Over the past two centuries, researchers in Europe and elsewhere have found anatomically modern human skeletal remains and artifacts in geological contexts extending to the Pliocene and earlier. In the late nineteenth century, these discoveries attained wide circulation among archeologists and researchers in allied fields (geology, paleontology, anthropology). At this early point in the history of archeology, a fixed scheme of human evolution had not yet emerged, and researchers were able to approach the evidence of extreme human antiquity with little theoretical bias. With the discovery of Pithecanthropus (Java man) in the late nineteenth century and the discovery of Australopithecus in the early twentieth century, archeologists and others were finally able to construct a credible and widely accepted theoretical picture of human origins, with the anatomically modern human type arriving rather late on the scene. This caused the earlier evidence for extreme human antiquity to be dropped from active discourse, and eventually forgotten. In the late twentieth century, finds that could be taken as evidence for extreme human antiquity continue to be made. But archeologists often interpret them to fit within the now generally accepted scheme of human evolution. It is therefore possible that commitment to a particular evolutionary scheme has resulted in a process of knowledge filtration, whereby a large set of archeological evidence has dropped below the horizon of cognition. This filtering, although unintentional, has left current researchers with an incomplete data set for building and rebuilding our ideas about human origins.
In 1849, gold was discovered in the gravels of ancient riverbeds on the slopes of the Sierra Nevada Mountains in central California, drawing hordes of rowdy adventurers to places like Brandy City, Last Chance, Lost Campe, You Bet, and Poker Flat. Occasionally, the miners would find stone artifacts, and more rarely, human fossils.
The majority of gold-bearing gravels were laid down in stream channels during the Eocene and Early Oligocene. During the Oligocene, Miocene, and Pliocene, volcanic activity in the same region covered some of the auriferous gravels with deposits of rhyolite, andesite, and latite.
In particular, widespread andesitic mudflows and conglomerates were deposited during the Miocene. These attained a considerable thickness, varying from more than 3,000 feet along the crest of the Sierras to 500 feet in the foothills. The volcanic flows were so extensive that they almost completely buried the bedrock landscape of the northern Sierra Nevada mountain region.
Over the course of time, rivers carved deep channels up to a couple of thousand feet below the level of the prevolcanic gravels. This allowed Gold Rush miners to reach the auriferous gravels by digging horizontal tunnels into the sides of the channels. The advanced stone tools found in these tunnels could be from Eocene to Pliocene in age. California State Geologist J. D. Whitney concluded that modern man existed in California previous to the cessation of volcanic activity in the Sierra Nevada.
Edited by - thichi on 1 November 2002 20:0:14
Edited by - thichi on 1 November 2002 20:2:12
