William sent in the link https://www.yahoo.com/news/mammoth-bones-ghost-footprints-add-170000900.html … mammoth bone is combined with human footprints but the two things are thousands of years apart. However, the debate is obviously hotting up, when it comes to the arrival of modern humans in North America. The old guard are in resistant mood but the evidence is beginning to accrue. Had humans arrived in the Americas during the Late Pleistocene period, at a time when the late glacial ice sheet was at its furthest extent, as far as NW Europe and NE America are concerned? The possibility of humans arriving during the depths of the last Ice Age is subject to resistance as it seems so unlikely. Perhaps it is the Ice Age theory that requires adjustment.
Were humans in North America thousands of years prior to Clovis First has been a festering sore in American archaeology ranks. The old Clovis First paradigm was so cosy it managed to eliminate numerous instances of evidence of humans, simply by pointing at a map of the mainstream ice sheet conjured up by assuming the Ice Ages embraced a massive ice sheet right across the top of the world. In this latest piece we have the claim that mammoth bones in New Mexico, is dated to 37,000 years ago, display evidence of human butchering. Patterns of fractures on the bones are said to be consistent with that process. Critics point out the same pattern could have been produced by natural means, not necessarily described in detail. However, we might add that the same pattern might be consistent with a natural catastrophe of some kind, as it is interesting to note the date is not too distant from the Laschamp Event, at 40,000 years ago.
The ghost footprints came from another location, an air force base in Utah, not finally dated as yet but somewhat later than another set of footprints from New Mexica dated to 21,000 years ago, at the height of the late glacial maximum. Stone tools from a cave in New Mexico are also mentioned. These are said to date back to 33,000 years ago. None of this is in opposition to Paul Reich and his genetic research which claims humans were living in Siberia during the Late Pleistocene and their descendants can be found in the Americas.