Fnord wrote:
While interesting, I remain skeptical until independent carbon-dating is performed.
If true, then this would be the year 22,023 of the unofficial Human Era.
Nothing to do with that.
If verified we would still be in the year 12023. And Alexander the Great would still be 9670.
This "unofficial human era" thing, seems to be a sudden bee in your bonnet obsession, and you dont seem to even quite understand it.
This "human era" thing is NOT "the era that humans have existed", nor even "the era that anatomically modern humans have existed".
Its the era that "the planet's ecosystems have become dominated by human activity". Or something along those lines.
Its the "human dominated era" not "the era of humans" (the later would be a lot longer time span).
At then end of the last Ice Age humans began to play around with domestication and settling down and began to transition from the Paleolithic to the mesolithic and then to Neolithic and then finally to the Bronze Age after about five thousand years. And that end of the Ice Age and start of the transition began about ten thousand years ago. Which happens to be a nice round figure.
So some propose sticking ten K onto dates so that both BC and AD dates become positive numbers counted forward from this approximate prehistoric end of the last Ice Age.
Before ten thousand BC we existed, but were just another large mammal on the planet, after that we gradually became a geological force effecting the planet. Or thats the thinking.
So even if this evidence of Paleoindians in American prior to Clovis at 20 thousand years ago is verified it still has nothing to do with "the human era" because the people who left the evidence, though anatomically modern humans, were still "cave people" (ie stone age Paleolithic hunter gatherers).
Humans (the genus Homo) have been around for about two million years when Homo Erectus appeared.
Anatomically modern humans came out of Africa about a hundred thousand years ago, and reached Australia by at least 60 thousand years ago. And entered Europe and interacted with the Neanderthals already there about 40 thousand years ago, and finnished driving the Neanderthals to extinction some time shortly after 35 thousand years ago.
All of the above happened long before the start date of this "human era" thing.