The location of the Valsequillo Reservoir is southeast of the city of Puebla, and in the shadows of some volcanoes.
http://valsequillo.e...de02_large.html
Overview: http://www.earthmeas...t-american.html
Was Homo erectus in the Americas? I don't think we can make the leap just yet.
At Valsequillo, the diatoms give a minimum date of 80ky. Some of the geochemistry is pointing to 400ky. The archaeology is younger than 780ky (polar reversal) because the magnetism in the site sediments is all pointing north. The ash that underlies the sites is around 1.3 million and it does show evidence of pole shift. So older than the end of the Sangomon Interglacial, ca. 80ky, and before the last pole shift. The former is inside the H. Sapiens window. 780ky is definitely in the H. Erectus period. In between: its magic time for some, and epistemological nightmare for others.
Think of the Valsequillo sites as a geological column because that’s what they are found in. The geological feature is called the Valsequillo formation. Higher is younger, lower is older. All of the discussion in the film about dates for Valsequillo actually focuses on a single site. There were three others earmarked for excavation, and they were all deeper, lower in the column, i.e. older. El Horno, the lowest, was near the bottom of the formation. It was never dated because like all sites other than Hueyatlaco, it is now underwater. And Hueyatlaco itself is under about 15 feet of water for most of the year. So in a way, since Hueyatlaco is the youngest of all the sites, whatever dates come out of there can all be considered minimums!
The technology is not part of the H. Erectus toolkit. Until 2000, the technology was firmly linked to H. Sapiens during the Upper Paleolithic, ca. 10-40ky. That's what made the discoveries so unsettling to mainstream archaeology. Not only were the dates for the sites so unbearably old but the sites yielded such a modern technology. Even at 80ky the stone technology at all the sites but El Horno (which had not points) were Upper Paleolithic, which is the same time period the Clovis appeared over here, at 12ky. How could they then be 200,000 years old, like the geologists said they were? Hence the Trilemma. Valsequillo is one of those ongoing mysteries that fit into a rare category for anachronisms usually absent from professional journals. It is called, O.O.P.s -- for out-of-place artifacts. If they were H. Erectus tools, maybe everyone would have been more cordial towards the discoveries because they would have jived in time with the Old World artifacts. But at Valsequillo, it was about a 10-40ky technology in a 200ky geology – it was just too much for the frail sensitivities of archaeology’s professional leadership.
Then in 2000, an article appeared that showed a similar advanced technology in East African sites dating to 300ky, during the Middle Stone Age. These types of bifaces had previously been owned by the Upper Paleolithic, but these discoveries reveal where Europe and Eurasian UP got its start -- in East Africa.
Cf. McBrearty S. and A. Brooks 2000. The revolution that wasn’t: A new interpretation of the origin of modern human behavior. Journal of Human Evolution 39: 453–563.
Valsequillo tech has a contemporary precedent in Africa. That’s pretty much how things stand today.
