Recently I was reading through an
old copy of the Mammoth Trumpet (1) for a bit of entertainment and I came
across a report on the 2nd International Symposium “El Hombre
Temprano en America” (Early Humans in the Americas) which was held in Mexico
City 6-10th September 2004. Amongst the interesting snippets of news
was a reference to a mystery fossil that has always been close to my heart,
namely the Solorzano Homo erectus brow
ridge. It was only a snippet, so I reproduce it in full here:
“Frederico Solorzano (Centro INAH
Guadalajara) discussed bone fossils collected from 1937 to 1996 from the
margins of Lake Chapala in Jalisco. The resulting assemblage includes some 40
fragments of human bone. Noteworthy among these is a brow ridge fragment of a
frontal bone that more closely resembles Homo
erectus than anatomically modern humans. Solorzano’s paper caught the
interest of an Associated Press reporter, who wrote a news article entitled “Debate
over Human Origins in America”.
Naturally this piqued my interest,
so I googled the title. Lo and behold on an extremely esoteric website (2) I
found a transcript of the article with a picture. I have reproduced it below
for any of those interested.
Solorzano holding the brow ridge.
Photo credit: source unknown (2)
Photo credit: Adapted from Homo erectus, University of Michigan Museum of Natural History, Ann Arbor, Michigan
“For decades, Federico Solorzano has gathered old bones from the shores
of Mexico’s largest lake - bones he found and bones he was brought, bones of
beasts and bones of men. The longtime teacher of anthropology and paleontology
was sifting through his collection one day when he noticed some that didn’t
seem to fit: a mineral-darkened piece of brow ridge bone and a bit of jaw that
didn’t match any modern skulls. But Solorzano found a perfect fit when he
placed the brow against a model of the Old World’s Tautavel Man - member of a
species, Homo erectus, that many believe was an ancestor of modern Homo
sapiens. The catch: Homoerectus is believed to have died out 100,000 to 200,000
years ago - tens of thousands of years before men are believed to have reached
the Americas.
And archaeologists have never found a trace of Homo erectus in the
Americas. ‘‘Most people sort of just shook their heads and have been baffled by
it,’’ said Robson Bonnichsen, director of the Center for the Study of the First
Americans at Texas A&M University. ‘‘That doesn’t mean it’s not real. It
just means there’s not any comparative evidence.’’ Solorzano’s find was
described at a September conference here that drew academics from Europe and
the Americas to discuss new research on early man in the Americas. That
primitive brow ridge from Lake Chapala ‘‘is in a category by itself,’’
Bonnichsen said. It is so strange - and so out of context - that it has been
largely ignored even as other discoveries are raising basic questions about the
story of human beings in the Americas: when they arrived and where they came
from.
Changing picture
Until recently, most U.S. archaeologists believed that the first
Americans arrived about 13,500 years ago when a temporary land corridor opened
across the Bering Strait. The migrant Clovis people, named for a site near
Clovis, N.M., apparently hunted mammoths and other large animals, leaving
scatterings of finely worked spear tips and other tools across North America
and, some argue, South America. A sometimes vehement minority still holds to
that ‘‘Clovis first’’ position. The evidence of what could have come before
remains sparse, scattered and controversial. Archaeologists have proposed
possible alternative routes to the Americas - across the Pacific from Asia or
Australia, across the Atlantic from Europe or Africa - though most say a trip
from northeast Asia is most likely, perhaps by people advancing along a frozen
coast in small boats.
South American researchers say they have found numerous sites that are
10,000 to 15,000 years old and argue that Clovis people could not have migrated
all the way to Tierra del Fuego, at the southern tip of South America, so soon
after the ice-free corridor opened from Asia to Alaska.
Argentine archaeologist Laura Miotti agrees the settlers likely came
from the north. But she and others say there are no Clovis-like finds in the
part of Asia from which the migrants supposedly came, and they question why
North American sites don’t appear to be older than those in South America.
The evidence for earlier human habitation in the Americas, however
scanty, is tantalizing. It includes:
A possible handscraper splotched with blood more than 34,000 years ago
at Monte Verde in Chile.
Possible stone tools at a site in Brazil that is 40,000 to 50,000 years
old.
A not-yet-published report of human remains dated as much as 28,000
years old near Puebla in central Mexico.
Early dates questioned
Most crucially, a majority of archaeologists are convinced that a
second site at Monte Verde dates to at least 14,000 years ago - about 500 years
before the land bridge from Asia opened more than 9,000 miles to the north.
Yet the early dates are still often questioned.
A claim of 250,000-year-old human tools near Mexico’s Valsequillo
reservoir was widely laughed at in the 1970s, though other researchers are once
again working at that area.
Clovis-first advocates suggest that the early dates may reflect variations
or errors in the still-developing technologies of dating old samples.
They say natural breakage could account for some of what look like
early tools and that the dating of others was likely confused, as when streams,
floods or human beings mix new material into old.
As for human remains, only two teeth in Brazil seem to have been
directly dated to clearly pre-Clovis times.
‘‘If you are trying to break through a barrier that is well
established, you need well documented, incontrovertible proof,’’ said
archaeologist Stuart Fiedel, author of a textbook on early Americans and a
proponent of the Clovis-first model.
Both sides say that new research on DNA and climate history supports
their claims, or at least fails to undermine them.
Solorzano’s finds raise so many unanswerable questions that they have
remained just a curiosity.
Solorzano, 83, is a respected researcher who has taught generations of
university students in the city of Guadalajara. His home office holds a cabinet
full of bones - some of them human - topped by 14 realistic models of hominid
skulls.
He says the brow bone raises ‘‘many questions, one of them being its
great and amazing resemblance to primitive hominid forms whose presence in the
Americas has not been generally accepted.’’
The few other scientists who have analyzed the bones closely agree that
they look human - not animal - and are very, very old.
‘‘They were definitely human,’’ said Joel Irish, a specialist in
bioarchaeology at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.
He suggested they could be from ‘‘a very primitive looking modern
human,’’ but said they would be ‘‘very early.’’
Efforts to date the pieces using modern techniques so far have failed
due to lack of surviving tissue.
Most frustrating for archaeologists, who are accustomed to fussing over
the tiniest details, is that nobody knows quite where the bone came from or
even when it was found. It was apparently picked up when drought exposed a
large ring of the Chapala lake bed from 1947 to 1956.
Archaeologist Stanley Davis, then at Texas A&M, spent several
seasons accompanying Solorzano on surveys of the region and said he located
places he would like to investigate further.
‘‘It takes a lot of money. That’s the reason I’m not down there working right now,’’ he said by telephone.
Davis said other human bones in the same area that are about 6,000 to 7,000 years old lack the mineralized darkness of age found in the brow and jaw pieces.
Migration hot spot?
Davis said the Chapala area is interesting because the lake is very old
and is a likely spot for coast-hopping migrants to come inland.
Yet relatively few people have investigated the area so far. Until
recently, Mexican archaeologists tended to focus on the spectacular indigenous
cultures of the Olmecs, Mayas, Aztecs and others that arose in the last 3,000
years or so.
Davis said the Chapala-area finds included 12 scattered skulls of a
long-extinct horse species. All have been smashed between the eyes.
‘‘Either we have a herd of very stupid horses . . . or we have some
other action responsible for their death. That action is probably human,’’ he
said. He estimated the horses were likely 10,000 to 20,000 years old.
A cache of swamp-deer teeth included several that were grooved,
apparently for use in a necklace, he said. A radio carbon test showed one was
roughly 20,000 years old. ‘‘That tells us we may have something.’’”
Verdict: Homo erectus in the Americas not proved, the fossil however is an interesting anomaly, Chapala needs more study!
References
2. http://www.hotspotsz.com/search.php?q=erectus&offset=6&go=5
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