Expert: John Shea - 1/20/2010

Question
QUESTION: After finding a footprint with an extended hallux that appears to be wearing a stitched leather Mukluk, and I have collected several eroded after knapped lower paleolithic tools from lacustrine geology. Why when I show them to American Archeologists do I get treated like I have Leporsy, is it totally impossible for the Laetoli Hominid to have crossed Beringa?

ANSWER: William
A series of footprints like those you describe were "discovered" in Texas.  Paleontologists concluded that they were the "heel" impacts of a dinosaur running
down a slope.  At some point (between when they were first photographed and the 1960s) someone  chiseled "toes" onto them and they were
proffered as evidence of humans living alongside the dinosaurs (Creationism's own little Piltdown, in a way).  It is written up in either Ken Feder's or Stephen Williams' books on hoaxes in archaeology.
Some of the archaeologists you approach may be aware of this and be leery for this reason.
For any such find, dating is key.  How old are the sediments in which the footprints are embedded.
Laetoli hominid (A. afarensis) fossils are only known from equatorial Africa.  Northeastern Asia was probably too cold for them, as was most of Eurasia north of
the Alps-Himalayas.
Sincerely
John Shea

---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------

QUESTION: The clay sediments in which the footprint was made are dated 248 million ybp then covered by sediment or loess that is roughly dated at 1 to 2 million ybp the only geologist I got to look at my site said 1.6 million was date of oldest loess on this ridge. The footprint was only 25 CM or 9 3/4 inches long. There were two distinct layer above the covering layer with the top one turning bright red from brown when exposed to air. The USGS lists this area as the Wellington McPherson Formations.

Answer
Dear William
1 million is still a lot older than the next-oldest evidence of human occupation in that part of the world.  Having seen neither footprints nor tools, I cannot
judge them definitively.  The next time you show them to an archaeologist, ask for an evaluation before you tell them about the age of the rocks.
A couple of comments
Footprints are exceedingly rare in Old World Pleistocene sites. They are much less common than human fossils, cut-marked bones, and stone tools.  When people show such evidence as proof for a early human presence in the New World, my
first instinct is to ask "Where are the lithics, the cut-marked bones, the human fossils."
Also, natural processes can create replicas of very simple stone tools-typically pebble cores and flakes.
Such artifacts are not necessarily "Lower Paleolithic", just rocks so minimially modifed that they resemble the earliest stone artifacts.
Cheers
John Shea