An archaeological site in Southern California has revealed evidence of human activity that took place about 130,000 years ago. The evidence found is crashed bones and teeth of a mastodon, an elephant-like prehistoric animal. It is very clear to scientists that these mastodon bones and teeth were not accidentally crashed as it is evident that they were crashed by someone using rocks most likely in order to extract bone marrow.
These findings were published in a scientific paper by Steven Holen and his team of researchers. Steven Holen is the director of the Center for American Paleolithic Research in South Dakota.
Crashing animal bones with rocks in order to extract bone marrow is a typical archaic fuman behavior that has been associated with both Neandertlals and Denisovans. An additional factor that indicates that this activity was not performed by Homo Sapiens, modern humans, at this particular site is that scientific evidence shows that modern humans migrated out of Africa about 80,000 years ago. Thus, since this site is roughly 130,000 years old, it is highly unlikely that the bone smashers were Homo Sapiens. No human fossil remains were found at the site so it cannot be said with absolute certainty in which human species the California bone smashers belonged.
Who were Neanderthals and Denisovans?
It has been well documented by scientists that modern humans coexisted with other human species during prehistoric times.
Two of those human species were the Neanderthals and the Denisovans who were not, as once believed, subspecies of Homo Sapiens. They were closely related to modern humans with whom they shared a common ancestor, the Homo Erectus. In fact, Neanderthals and Denisovans were so closely related with Homo Sapiens that recent DNA studies revealed that they interbred.
According to the same studies, many humans living today carry Neanderthal and Denisovan genes.
How they got to California
According to Steven Holen, they could have reached North America by either land or sea. They could have come from Asia through the Beringea land bridge that once connected Siberia to Alaska, or via water along the Beringea coast.
After arriving to North America, they moved south to California.
The significance
The discovery of this site suggests that the first hunabs who arrive in North America did not, as believed, arrived 15.000 years ago but a staggering 130,000 years ago. This dramatically changes history and the way that we perceive our archaic cousin human species since it seems that they were much more advanced than we thought.
