In 1959, Ruth Dee Simpson showed stone fragments from California's Calico Hills to Louis Leakey. He believed they were tools over 100,000 years old. National Geographic funded excavations starting in 1963. The controversial 'Calico Early Man Site' remains disputed, with most mainstream archaeologists considering the stones geofacts rather than human-made tools.
Louis Leakey claims 100,000+ year old tools at Calico, California
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Key facts
- In 1959, Ruth Dieter Simpson showed stone fragments from Calico Hills to Louis Leakey
- Leakey believed the stones were tools over 100,000 years old, not 15,000 years
- Leakey's reasoning was based on linguistic diversity in Native American languages
- The Americas held nearly half of the world's distinct language families despite being a fraction of Earth's land mass
- Leakey estimated 35,000 to 100,000 years needed for that many languages to evolve
- National Geographic funded excavations at Calico in 1963
- Over the next decade, the team excavated roughly 70,000 fractured stone specimens
- All pieces came from high-quality stone suitable for tool making: chalcedony, chert, jasper, quartz
- Thermoluminescence dated deposits to 135,000 years old
- Uranium series analysis came back at roughly 200,000 years
- Beryllium 10 dating gave a minimum age of 197,000 years, give or take 20,000
Sources
sapiens.org
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