Calico Early Man Site

This web site describes and analyzes the Calico Archaeological Site and the Calico Lithic Industry, which have been controversial since they appear to support the presence of tool-makers in California’s Mojave Desert some 200,000 years ago–nearly twenty times more remote in time than the generally-accepted date for the earliest human arrivals in the Americas.

About the Site

One of the most controversial archaeological sites in the Western Hemisphere is located in the Mojave Desert of California, near the town of Barstow. The site, in low hills east of the Calico Mountains, displays evidence for the presence of tool-making humans in the Americas some 200,000 years ago, far earlier than any Western Hemisphere site that has been accepted by the majority of the archaeological community. The Calico site has been developed since 1964 by Ruth DeEtte Simpson with the active involvement of Louis B. Leakey, one of archaeology’s greatest names, famed for his pioneering work on the African Paleolithic at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania.



Controversy centers on two issues: the authenticity of the Calico lithic artifacts and the age of the deposits in which the artifacts are found. At present, more than 11,000 inferred chert and chalcedony tools and detached flakes have been recovered from trenches and pits up to 10 meters deep, excavated in alluvium and fanglomerate cemented to an almost rocklike state by calcium carbonate either leached downward from the surface or deposited by capillary rise from an ancient high water table. The artifacts identified range from crude choppers, scrapers, and handaxes to delicate gravers, reamers, and burins. There is a conspicuous absence of spear or projectile points in any form, suggesting that the artifacts were those of a culture based on collecting rather than the pursuit of large animal prey.

The objective of this internet site is to permit interested parties to view the controversial Calico Site specimens, to answer specific questions about them and their geological context, and to open an informed dialogue about their origin and wider implications.

The site is dedicated to the memories of “Dee” Simpson and Louis Leakey, who had the courage to persevere in the face of academic criticism and even derision. We remember when Alfred Wegener’s “preposterous” theory of “continental drift” was derided similarly, eventually to be reincarnated and embraced as the ruling geological paradigm in the form of “plate tectonics”–a term and concept yet unknown when work at the Calico Site was beginning.

CAUTION!

It is easy to scoff at the Calico “tools” the first time one sees them. They are far from the familiar beautifully-crafted arrowheads and spear points we find in surface and near-surface Indian/PaleoIndian sites across North America. A variety of evidence (presented on subsequent pages) indicates that the Calico tools are some 200,000 years old. Thus they have little resemblance to Indian/PaleoIndian material, which has a maximum age of 11,000-13,000 years. To compare the crude Calico tools with finely-worked Indian/PaleoIndian projectile points is to compare technologies separated in time by well over 100,000 years.

A much more appropriate comparison is with the crude choppers, scrapers, and hand axes of the Old World Paleolithic (Acheulean, Clactonian, etc.), well illustrated in Francois Bordes’ “The Old Stone Age,” or by Googling “Acheulean” (see “image results”). Looking at 200,000-year-old tool assemblages from well-authenticated Old World sites, one sees that Old World Paleolithic tools are, in fact, the very tools unearthed at Calico. Observers familiar only with the North American Neolithic toolkit of refined arrowheads and spear and dart points, will not easily recognize Paleolithic artifacts, which include no projectile points at all. Before assessing the Calico material, such observers should consult illustrations of accepted 200,000-year-old artifacts–the Old World Paleolithic.

In fact, the Calico Site appears to open the door to the New World Paleolithic!!!





Introduction



The North American Great Basin is an arid expanse that reaches from northern Mexico to southern Oregon. It is presently a land of desert shrubs and isolated mountain ranges separated by arid basins that often contain salt flats or parched clay pans. However, it was not always so. At times in the past it has been a brushy landscape spattered with lakes, large and small, and rich with animal life including extinct forms of bison, horses, camels, mammoths, and their predators. In most lowlands, some 15,000 years of Late Pleistocene and Holocene alluvial deposition has effectively buried and sealed earlier sediments and possible traces of a human presence in the region in Pleistocene time–the “Ice Age”–when tool-making humans were present throughout the Old World and when the Great Basin was not the desert it is today.

However, in the Manix Basin (Lower Mojave River Valley) of San Bernardino County, California, close by the Calico Mountains, a fortuitous combination of environmental factors have exposed a series of deposits that represent more than 350,000 years of Quaternary history. Within these deposits are rocks that, if found outside the Western Hemisphere, could easily be regarded as having been artificially modified to form stone tools, or lithic artifacts.

The obvious antiquity of the geologic deposits containing these objects has caused the most influential North American archaeologists to reject them as artifacts. They are rejected on the basis of where they are more than what they are. Consequently the objects have been regarded as geofacts: artifact-like forms produced by natural geologic processes. On the other hand, many European and Asian scholars familiar with Old World Paleolithic technology do indeed recognize many of the Calico specimens as authentic lithic artifacts, implying a human presence in the Americas for a span of time vastly longer than that generally accepted.

The following outlines the setting of the Manix Basin and presents the evidence for occupation of California’s Mojave Desert by tool-fabricating beings at a time equivalent to the classic “Stone Age” in the Old World.

The Setting



The Manix Basin, a structural depression in the central Mojave Desert, bounded by the barren Calico, Paradise, Alvord, Cady, and Newberry Mountains, is the third and lowest major valley of the Mojave River. This withering exotic stream rises in the San Bernardino Mountains, some 200 km to the southeast, and generally carries only a small flow of subsurface water into the Basin. Exceptional storms in the headwater area generate flood flows that occasionally fill the Mojave River channel out to and beyond the town of Barstow. However, surface flow at Barstow is rare.

Some 400,000 - 500,000 years ago, factors relating to elevation and drainage patterns, annual precipitation, mountain snow pack, cloud cover and evaporation were such that the Manix Basin became the site of a freshwater lake known as Pleistocene Lake Manix. The size of the early lake, fed by the inflow of a much enhanced Mojave River, is uncertain, and the early lake is known only by local exposures of its sediments. Lakes persisted in the basin until Late Pleistocene time. The last stand of the Pleistocene lake left a shoreline at an elevation of 543 m (Meek 1989, 1990), indicating a surface area of approximately 236 km2, and a volume of approximately 3.15 km3. Lake Manix drained to the east, perhaps catastrophically, approximately 18,100 years ago, probably as a result of tectonic movement on the Manix fault or a major increase in river inflow that caused the lake to overflow and wash out its topographic dam (Meek 1989, 1990, 1999).


Meek, N.
1989 Physiographic History of the Afton Basin, Revisited. In The West-Central Mojave: Quaternary Studies Between Kramer and Afton Canyon, edited by R.E. Reynolds, pp. 78-83. San Bernardino County Museum Association, Redlands, California.

Meek, N.
1990 Late Quaternary Geochronology and Geomorphology of the Manix Basin, San Bernardino County, California. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles.

Meek, N.
1999 New Discoveries About the Late Wisconsinan History of the Mojave River System. In Tracks Along the Mojave: A Field Guide from Cajon Pass to the Calico Mountains and Coyote Lake, edited by R.E. Reynolds and J. Reynolds, San Bernardino County Museum Association, Redlands, California.





Evidence of the history of Lake Manix remains in the clay, silt, sand, and gravel sequences of the Manix Formation, which contains remains of numerous Rancholabrean animals ranging in age from approximately 20,000 years to well in excess of 350,000 years before present (Jefferson 1968, 1985a, 1985b, 1987, 1989, 1991). The richest fossiliferous section has been well dated by radiocarbon dating, uranium-series techniques, and trace element correlation of a volcanic tephra to a source well dated by the potassium-argon (K/Ar) method. Among the fossils recovered are camel, horse, mammoth, ground sloth, saber-tooth cat, dire wolf, short-faced bear, coyote, flamingo, pelican, eagle, swan, geese, mallard duck, ruddy duck, canvas-backed duck, double-crested cormorant, grebe, crane, seagull and stork. This fauna would have been a bountiful resource for any humans in the vicinity of the lake.

Jefferson, G.T.
1968 The Camp Cady Local Fauna from Pleistocene Lake Manix, Mojave Desert, California. Unpublished Master's thesis, University of California, Riverside.

Jefferson, G.T.
1985a Review of the Late Pleistocene Avifauna from Lake Manix, Central Mojave Desert, California. History Museum of Los Angeles, Contributions in Science 362:1-13

Jefferson, G.T.
1985b Stratigraphy and Geologic History of the Pleistocene Manix Formation, Central Mojave Desert, California. In Cajon Pass to Manix Lake, Geologic Investigations along Interstate 15, compiled by R.E. Reynolds, pp. 157-169. San Bernardino County Museum, Redlands, California.

Jefferson, G.T.
1987 The Camp Cady Local Fauna Paleoenvironment of the Lake Manix Basin. San Bernardino Museum Association Quarterly 34(3-4):3-35.

Jefferson, G.T.
1989 Late Pleistocene and Earliest Holocene Fossil Localities and Vertebrate Taxa from the Western Mojave Desert. In The West-Central Mojave Desert: Quaternary Studies Between Kramer and Afton Canyon, edited by R.E. Reynolds, pp. 27-40. Special Publication, San Bernardino County Museum Association, Redlands, California.

Jefferson, G.T.
1991 A Catalogue of Late Quaternary Vertebrates from California: Part One, Nonmarine Lower Vertebrates and Avian Taxa. Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, Technical Reports, No. 5.




Three separate associations of lithic artifacts are recognizable in the Manix Basin. These are described in the following section.

Manix Basin Artifact Assemblages

Three separate assemblages of lithic artifacts can be distinguished in the Manix Basin. The youngest are Indian and Paleo-Indian, consisting of pottery sherds, spear points, arrowheads, knives, and debitage, all of which lie loose on the surface, and lack significant discoloration by iron- and manganese-rich rock varnish. Such artifacts may range in age from 200 years to a maximum of about 8,000 years.

Clearly older is the Lake Manix Lithic Industry, including artifacts found on and just below the surface at elevations above 543 m, the shoreline elevation of Pleistocene Lake Manix, which drained approximately 18,000 years ago. Artifacts of the Lake Manix Lithic Industry exhibit rock varnish patinas on both their buried and exposed surfaces and are often found embedded in desert pavements, unlike the Paleo-Indian artifact assemblage. The Lake Manix artifacts are described in more detail on the next screen.

The controversial Calico Lithic Industry artifacts are present within a severely eroded deposit that appears to be the remnant of an ancient alluvial fan that was formerly connected to the Calico Mountains, north of Yermo. The fan remnant–the so-called Yermo Fan–consisting of round-crested ridges and narrow gullies, is now well separated from its original source by uplift and erosion that has completely destroyed the original fan form, exposing the material upon which the fan was deposited. The objects identified as artifacts have been recovered from the nested Pleistocene mud and debris flows composing the original fan. The fan deposits are cemented throughout by calcium carbonate older than the limit of radiocarbon dating (~40,000 yrs), beneath a surface soil having an estimated age of 100,000 years. The deposits have been dated to 135,000 years by thermoluminescence (TL) dating and to about 200,000 years by uranium-series analysis. It is the objects found in these deposits that are in question. Are they artifacts or geofacts? If they are artifacts, they appear to be close to twenty times the age of the oldest North American artifacts that have achieved general acceptance–the Clovis tool kit.



The Lake Manix Lithic Industry

Surface sites of the Lake Manix Lithic Industry have been recorded in the northern half of the Manix Basin (Simpson 1960, 1976; Alsoszatai-Petheo 1975, Binning et al. 1985). They are devoid of pottery, shell objects, and projectile points. Lithic artifacts, fashioned primarily of chalcedony, chert, and jasper, include large oval bifaces, scrapers of several forms (end, straight, concave, pointed, convex, pointed, and plano-convex), cutting tools, choppers, chopping tools, large stout picks, gravers, cutting tools, rotational tools, and flakes, as well as cores, anvils and hammerstones.

Simpson, R.D.
1960 Archaeological Survey of the Eastern Calico Mountains. The Masterkey 34(1):25-35

Simpson, R.D.
1976 The Manix Lake Industry: Early Lithic Tradition or Workshop Refuse? A Commentary on W. Glennon's Article. Journal of New World Archaeology 1(1):63-66.

Alsoszatai-Petheo, J.
1975 The East Rim Site, California (S.B.C.M. 1803): An Early Western Lithic Co-Tradition. Unpublished Master's thesis. Eastern New Mexico State College, Portales, New Mexico.

Binning, J.D., R.S. Brown, N. Meek, and E.B. Weil
1985 Intermountain Power Project (IPP): The Cultural Resources Studies of the Ground Electrode Facility at Coyote Lake, San Bernardino County, California. Prepared for City of Los Angeles, Department of Water and Power by Applied Conservation Technology, Inc., Westminster, California.







Manix Lithic Industry artifacts are often found incorporated into desert pavements, and usually exhibit rock varnish on both their buried and exposed surfaces: sporadic black, manganese-rich varnish atop orange, iron-rich varnish on exposed surfaces, and orange, iron-rich varnish on surfaces in contact with the soil. Younger Paleo-Indian artifacts found at lower elevations along the river and in sand dune sites are not varnished, nor are they incorporated into desert pavements.



Based on a dated pollen profile at site CA-SBR-2120 and the occurrence of this assemblage above the most recent shoreline elevation of Pleistocene Lake Manix (543 m), the Lake Manix Lithic Industry is inferred to be at least 18,000 years old.

The presumed eastern extension of the Yermo Fan, known as The East Rim Site (CA-SBR-2120), is a lithic workshop with bifacial and unifacial artifacts as well as debitage on and beneath a desert pavement surface to a depth of 15 cm (Alsoszatai-Petheo 1975). Recovered pinyon and juniper pollen suggests occupation 17,000 - 34,000 years ago. Unifacial artifacts include choppers and end, side, and convex-edged side scrapers. Bifacial artifacts include chopping tools, generalized bifaces, wedge-shaped bifaces, ovate bifaces, cutting tools, and utilized flakes. Unflaked artifacts include hammerstones, pecking stones, and pointed tools. Rare specimens include multiple scrapers, tortoise scrapers, gravers, pointed scrapers (borers), and keeled scrapers.