Graham Hancock on archaeology: what the evidence says · JRE #2136
SUBJECT: ARCHAEOLOGY
Not a true/false call. Every claim is logged with its sources; read the exhibits below.
this is Jacques Saint-Germain, who investigated bluefish caves in the Yukon and found evidence of human beings there more than 20,000 years ago. Now if that evidence were correct, it would blow the Clovis first model out of the water. People are suddenly in America more than 7,000 years before Clovis.
What the evidence says 01 / RECORD
A 2017 reanalysis of Bluefish Caves in the Yukon (Bourgeon, Burke and Higham, PLOS ONE) applied AMS radiocarbon dating to cut-marked animal bones and concluded humans occupied the site as early as 24,000 cal BP, making it the oldest known archaeological site in North America and offering support for the Beringian standstill hypothesis. That figure is well above Hancock's stated floor of more than 20,000 years, and since Clovis dates to roughly 13,000 years ago, it is actually about 11,000 years earlier, not the more than 7,000 he cites (his numbers are conservative lower bounds rather than errors). The site's original excavations were led by Jacques Cinq-Mars, not the garbled name in the quote. The dates remain debated because of questions about the stratigraphic context linking the cut-marked bones to the sediments, so the claim is scientifically defensible but not settled.