Children, drag up a rock, because this is quite a tale. More on that later. When you hear about them, you may want to. Here are a few things you should look up in Wikipedia: Calico Hills early man site, and Ruth de Ette Simpson. Again, more on these. In the early 1960s, the great Louis Leakey, paleoanthropologist who was first to discover a true prehistoric human ancestor, was finishing out his professional life at UC at Riverside, with a student helper named Dee Dee Simpson. Professor Leakey caused a. Furor when he claimed that the stone tools that he had found in the Calico Hills of the Mojave desert were perhaps as old as 60,000 years. The lake manix tools have been controversially dated at 12-19,000 bc, which, until very recently, was considered to be ridiculous. Everyone knew that the clovis people were the first people in north america, but now they have found footprint evidence in White Sands national Park that there were humans there as early as 22,000 BC. Suddenly, the idea that Lake Manix tools might be pre-Clovis, as they have always been claimed to be, sounds more probable. Bob, the teenager given the tools, took them to the San Bernardino County archeologist: Dr. Ruth De Ette Simpson (aka Dee Dee), who told him that these were identical to the controversial Leakey discoveries. Look at these things! God lord, they are WAY more primitive than any Amerindian tool in current collecting circulation and clearly designed to process heavy duty meat. And notice the orange back of the stone, proof of theyre being a set. ANCESTRAL PASSIONS: the Leakey Family and the quest for humankind’s beginnings, “Misadventure at Calico, ” pp 358-371. Are these as old as Leakey assumed? Likely no, but could they be pre-clovis? Are they an early archaic toolkit clearly created for meat processing on a large scale basis, in late Pleistocene times?
