The reason is that along the western edge of the Laurentide Ice Sheet, which had been assumed to have ended along the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, there are thousands of erratics boulders. And the story behind them shows that no land corridor could have existed between the Laurentide and the Cordilleran ice sheets.
Huge “erratics” boulders and massive
rocks pushed by glaciers across the western Canadian plains during the Last Ice
Age
The pathway of these boulders, named the Foothills Erratics Train by geologists is important, because it is the reason why the previously so-called open land corridor between the ice sheets has now been discarded as the means by which the first people arrived in the Americas. First of all, to better understand what this “boulder train” is and why it exists where it is, and the significance of it, is to understand that “erratics boulders” are those boulders that differ from the surrounding rock and brought from a distance by glacial action. And in knowing where they are now located in relationship to their original placement, shows when and along what path they were moved by the glacial action.
Originally located along Mount Edith Carvell by the city of Jasper in the Jasper National Forest, the 580-mile-long Foothills Erratics Train, with its thousands of angular boulders of distinctive quartzite and pebbly quartzite that lie on the surface of a generally north-south strip of the temperate grasslands and shrublands of the Canadian Prairies. These boulders, which are between one and 135-feet in length, are glacial erratics that lie upon the surficial blanket of Late Wisconsin glacial till.
Map showing the area of Mt Edith
Cavell, the city of Jasper and the general area of the Jasper National Forest,
along with the Athabasca and Astoria Rivers
Their specific source has been identified as being near Mount Edith Cavell in Jasper National Park. Lying on prairie to the east of the Rocky Mountains, the larger glacial erratics of the Foothills Erratics Train are visible for a considerable distance across the prairie and likely served as a prominent landmark for Indigenous people in antiquity.
More importantly, the erratics reveal the direction in which the ice sheet travelled. The rocks take a sharp right-angle turn out on the Plains, changing from an easterly to a southerly direction. Scientists believe that the western Cordilleran ice sheet "bumped into" the eastern Laurentide Ice Sheet, and was deflected southward. This shows that the two ice sheets were joined together, and no "ice free corridor" could have existed between them until later, when the glaciers started to melt. Yet, even after the ice melted, it would have taken many years before the land could support plants and animals (Lionel Jackson, Adjunct Professor, Department of Earth Sciences, Simon Fraser University, Museum of Archeology and Ethnology, Burnaby British Columbia, Canada, 2005).
Map showing
ancient coastal sites that support man being in the Americas before the end of
the last Ice Age, and before the so-called Open Land Corridor through Canada
could have possibly been opened, and five of the fifteen before the Clovis
(11,500 BC), and seven others only 500 years after them, making any pretense of
a Land Bridge inaccurate as the means that people first arrived in the
Americas. Note that two specific areas in South America date to 1500 years and
1000 years and are about 5000 miles to the south, with another four within 500
years to migrate of the Clovis people arriving in the U.S.—If the uncalibrated
dates (actual measurement dates) are used (11,500 to 1,000 years ago (which is
9,500 BC to 9.000 BC, then 14 of the 15 sites were occupied before the Land Bridge
existed
Until about twenty years ago, the debate itself was settled: Researchers were certain that the first people to enter North America walked down an ice-free corridor in western Canada some 13,500 years ago. School textbooks claim it as fact, all research and dating was based upon that so-called fact. However, recently, many archaeological sites in the Americas have been dated even earlier, as shown on the map above. According to Quentin Mackie, associate professor of Anthropology at the University of Victoria, and who has spent the last fifteen years excavating sites and studying their results of modern climatic and vegetation conditions and their effect on the early indigenous populations that first settled along the British Columbia coast—a set of islands once known as the Queen Charlotte Islands, and now the archipelago of over 150 islands covering 3900-square miles, Haida Gwaii, states: “Early sites on Haida Gwaii are changing our thoughts on the earliest occupation of the Northwest Coast and the Americas.”
In fact, though not involved in the erratics train study, Mackie claims that “Ancient landscape reconstructions like this provide a good starting point for imagining how ancient peoples would have come down the coast, and where archaeologists should look for their settlements.” In the work he has personally done, he says that the early ancestral Haida people were fluent in marine resource use and organic technologies so early adds context to broader models of early West Coast occupation—they also showed human occupation at a time of extreme environmental change, which attests to the resilience of these early coastal adaptations.”
With these recent archaeological evidences casting doubt on the Land Bridge theory, scientists are seeking new explanations. Today, most archaeologists are thinking the first Americans left Beringia, the now-drowned land between Siberia and Alaska, about 16,000 years ago—likely before the ice-free corridor opened—and traveled by boat down the Pacific coast, though any direct evidence for such a journey is lacking.
At least the Land Bridge theory is no longer the prevailing idea of how the Americas were first populated, and scientists are now looking to the arrival of the first people into the Americas as traveling by boat. Alia Lesnek, a geologist at the University at Buffalo, part of the State University of New York system, wanted to figure out when the trip would have been possible. So she spent the summer of 2015 helicoptering between remote islands off southeastern Alaska, seeking rocks exposed to the sky. Such rocks are constantly hit by cosmic rays hurtling down from space, which change individual oxygen-16 atoms in quartz to beryllium-10 atoms, one by one.
It is claimed that measuring the
exposed rocky shore along Alaska’s coastline has pointed to a time when the
last ice on this area had melted away
The point of all of this is to show that the idea of a Land Bridge across the Bering Strait, no matter if it existed or not, and there are those who insist it did—it does not alter the fact that the so-called open land corridor between and through the ice sheets did not exist until long into the period of the sheets melting since they were abutted into one another as the Foothills Erratics Train proves.
It is of interest to us that scientist have moved now from man walking from Siberia to North America via a land bridge and open land corridor has now been shown to be in error and not possible to provide the original migration into Alaska, Canada and the U.S. That scientists are now entertaining the idea that man arrived in the Americas via the ocean is of interest—though they do not yet have it right, at least they are moving in the right direction!
They are certainly not going to let their beliefs coincide with scripture.
ReplyDeleteSo I guess the question still remains, who were the Clovis people who came to North America? I think you are correct that they came by boat but from where? I doubt they were Jaredites as the
ReplyDeleteAlso, the ice age lasted about 1000 years after the flood. That means depending on the time chart you accept (flood between 3000 and 2350bc) the ice age ended between 2000 to 1300bc.
Del, Who do you think were the "Adam"-ites, the real first people on this Earth?
ReplyDelete