Mojave Mystery : Desert Artifacts May Push Back the Appearance of Man

The wastelands of the Mojave Desert northeast of Los Angeles may hold some of nature’s best-kept secrets about the existence of human life in the New World thousands of years ago.

The parched acres, still virtually uninhabited because of intense heat and poor land, have produced in recent years the first hints of human existence in California during the late Pleistocene era.

The Pleistocene is the geologic time dating from as recently as 10,000 years ago to 1.8 million years ago, when mastodons and mammoths still roamed the Earth.

Scientists generally agree that the latter part of the era was the time of the great glaciers. Dinosaurs were already extinct, the continents were close to their present shape and human beings had just set foot in North America.

A small team of researchers argues that that account of prehistoric time is fine, as stories go, but may not be the most accurate telling of what really happened in what now is the California desert.

They believe humans were around thousands of years earlier than is generally accepted. Their evidence comes in the form of what at first glance appears to be a small collection of broken stones, numbering no more than a dozen pieces.

A new dating technique--cation-ratio dating--developed at Texas Tech University in Lubbock suggests that the stones may be the strongest evidence yet of sparse settlements in Southern California long before the populations of Europe learned to farm.

The technique dates the varnish or coating that is formed on any surface in the environment by microorganisms. As water passed over the stones, it changed the chemistry of the varnish. It is these changes that the cation technique detects.

The stones, say the archeologists and anthropologists who found them, are remnants of spearhead production carried out at a Mojave quarry site. The cation test indicates that the pieces, shaped by human hands, range between 13,000 and 21,000 years old.

“We’re dealing with a dynamic situation here,” explained archeologist Mike Macko of Applied Conservation Technology in Westminster, a Los Angeles suburb.

“There are many identifiable Pleistocene surfaces in the Mojave because they have not been trampled or destroyed. So the likelihood is great that many have been preserved.

“Chances are slim, though, that anything will be found completely intact belonging to these people. Everything else is gone--bone, shell and other fragile organic remains or textiles.”

It is agreed among archeologists and anthropologists nationwide that the stones are artifacts. They were collected in the latter part of 1983 and over the last 2 1/2 years have been subjected to dating tests.

There is argument, however, over whether they are as old as Texas Tech claims and are products of the settlements some archeologists believe populated the area before recorded time.

“I would like to believe the dates they determined through the cation technique are legitimate, but I think a lot more work has to be done before that fact is generally accepted,” said Smithsonian Institution archeologist Dennis Stanford in Washington.

“The artifacts are clearly made by people, but if the new dating technique provides us with the correct dates for them is a question that I cannot answer.

“The only accepted age for people in Southern California is 11,700 years ago. That’s universally accepted by the majority of archeologists based on verified tests of artifacts that have been found in the area over the years,” he said.

Most archeologists agree that the earliest settlements in California belonged to the native American populations known as the Clovis settlements, evidence of which has been found throughout California, Arizona and New Mexico. The Clovis settlements were so named because of flint projectiles found near the New Mexico town of that name.

These early people are believed to have migrated from China and through the Bering land bridge.

“There were Clovis points throughout the Mojave where the latest artifacts were found,” Stanford said.

The question now is whether the stones were spearheads created by the Clovis people or are artifacts modeled by settlements that preceded them into the New World.

Doug Bamforth, an anthropologist from the University of California, Santa Barbara, who worked on the team that found the stones, said the quarry pieces may not be Clovis artifacts.

“I think they were fashioned by the Mojave River Valley Vanyume people,” he said. “Very little is known about them and it’s believed by some that they belonged to a larger group called the Seranos.

“Some of them lived in the San Bernardino Mountains. It’s not known how long they were there. Some people think there were a lot of migrations,” Bamforth said.

The stones were found in a 200-square-foot area of the Mojave chosen by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power as the site for a large section of the Intermountain Power Project.

The utility had commissioned the archeological study of the area before it brought in heavy equipment that would funnel coal-fired electricity from Utah into Southern California.

None of the scientists began the project with the idea of rewriting archeological history, Macko said. “This surprised all of us. None of us wanted to rock the boat,” he said.

Clusters of Artifacts

Bamforth said the scientists found well-defined clusters of artifacts spread throughout the quarry sites of the Mojave Desert, now characterized by dry lake beds, cacti and creosote bushes.

It was clear to the researchers that the people who fashioned the rock implements were hunters of large game. There was no evidence of seeding technology.

Macko explained that they did not make pottery, since this “did not come into the picture in the North America until 400 or 500 AD.”

Moreover, farming was still thousands of years away. In Europe, it developed only 8,000 to 9,000 years ago, Bamforth said.

“The stones tell us next to nothing about how these people lived,” Bamforth explained. “We can only surmise that they went to these quarry sites to get the raw materials for making tools and completed their manufacture at a home base some distance from the site.”

Test for Technique

The whole scenario of how the quarry stone toolmakers lived depends on how reliable the maverick dating technique turns out to be.

Unfortunately, going against the scientific grain with a dating technique has in the past caused embarrassment in California.

In 1974, researchers using a technique called amino acid resination estimated a skull found in Del Mar near San Diego to be 48,000 years old, clearly the oldest date ever obtained on a human fossil in the New World.

Scientists at universities across the country, however, did not react with excitement to the news that Del Mar Man was the oldest in North America.

“The skull was dated at the Scripps Institute (in La Jolla),” said Rose Simpson, a physical anthropologist at the San Diego Museum of Man, where the skull was displayed.

Findings in Error

“Amino acid resination was based on how fast the acids changed from one optical pattern to another,” she said. “Because it was a new chemical dating method, it had to be calibrated with another method, and as it turned out, Del Mar Man was only 5,400 years old.”

But the team that used the cation technique double-checked with the radioactive carbon-14 dating method, which the majority of archeologists agree yields absolute dates.

The testing by both methods, Macko said, produced correlating dates each time.

“Dates beyond 12,000 years are difficult for a lot of archeologists to accept,” he said.