good evening welcome to the North Carolina office of state archaeology archaeology Month celebration tonight we're very fortunate to have dr. Chris Moore it's gonna talk about the early life on the southeastern coastal plain so in order not to get this wrong I want to read some of his accomplishments and give him a little set up so that he can come in here and talk to us tonight but before I begin I want to give a special thanks to the North Carolina Archaeological Society and the North Carolina archeological Council for helping us support this event and I guess I should say that I'm John Minton I'm the State Archaeologist and I'm very privileged to work at the office of state archaeology with some very fun individuals dr. Chris Moore is a gr geo archaeologist at the Savannah River archeological research program his research interests include site formation processes dating of stratified sites on the south eastern coastal plain paleo environment reconstruction early hunter-gatherer adaptations lithic technology and most recently immune immune immune Lunokhod blood residue analysis that word will not come yeah that's a hard word blood residue analysis which he did use some of our collection for that analysis dr. Moore's recent publications include an article in American antiquity where he and his co-authors identified ancient animal blood residues from pelean and stone tools in South Carolina and Georgia in 2017 dr. Moore was a lead author of a paper in Nature scientific reports that provide evidence of a possible global extraterrestrial impact a fragmented comment at the end of the paleo-indian Clovis period while this work is ongoing the proposed impact may have altered the climate system affecting both human and animal populations and possibly contributing to the extension extension of Ice Age animals or megafauna more recently dr. Moore and dr. Al Goodyear co-edited the book early human life on the southeastern coastal plain which is down here to my right your left recently published by the University Press of Florida earlier this year dr. Moore initiated the White Pond human paleo ecology project at White Pond in Eldon South Carolina this project involves multiple colleagues and specialists examined evidence from both geologic cores with archaeological investigations to link to early prehistoric human record with periods of climatic chains recorded in lake sediments over the last thirteen thousand years dr. Moore went to Appalachian State University as an undergrad a very fine University many of us here attended that and then he made his way east to East Carolina University took an MA in anthropology archaeology studied under Randy Daniels and then he moved up from that into the ph.d program where he received his doctorate at the coastal resource management program and did an awful lot of work on relics sand dunes and geo archaeology so we're very fortunate to have dr. Moore here tonight we have some archaeology months posters to my left your right and at the conclusion of this presentation dr. Moore will be happy to answer any of your question so please help me welcome dr. Christopher Moore all right I appreciate the invitation to come speak tonight I've got a lot of slides a lot of different topics to go through so I'm go ahead and get a get started on this see so just by way of presentation overview I'm gonna go over so many things including whoops there it is we'll go very briefly over time periods in prehistory the peopling of North America as we now understand it background or Pleistocene megafauna environments blood residue analysis which John mentioned I'll talk about my work with the Clovis comet the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis will discuss you know we're MegaFon 100 by Clovis in the southeast and then finally the archeological and Peele environmental work that I've done at White Pond so this is the chart I put together a few years ago shows a different time periods the paleo-indian period you got your time scale here on the left in calendar years so does people they do not familiar with our conventional time periods for the paleo-indian I was the paleo-indian period thirteen five to eleven for 50 archaic period 11 for 50 to 3,200 woodland period 3200 to 1000 of course Mississippian and historic which I'm not get into that at all the this image and poster is actually available in one of the books I did with Tommy Charles on South Carolina projector points if you're interested in that book we can talk about that later so to jump into it who were the first people to colonize North America and win and how did they do it traditional view people in the North America as you all know the late the Bering Land Bridge and we go back here we have from Siberia during low Ice Age during a low sea level during the Ice Age the crossing of the Bering Land Bridge the spread of people out of age over Beringia down that so-called ice-free corridor through the glacial ice sheet that's that separated from the cornelian and Laurentide Ice Sheet in the rapid spread of Clovis technology and culture over North America roughly from 13:5 to 13,000 and that date is always in flux but something like that here's some nice images I got from Dave Anderson that kind of show the extent of the ice sheet 21,000 years ago see Beringia and Russia this is the area that would have been exposed when all the sea ice was had sucked up all the water of the oceans and this massive ice sheet here it's sixteen thousand five hundred years ago it's starting to starting to melt starting to retreat possibly by thirteen seven fifty this is also in recent dispute we had this ice-free corridor opened up that might have allowed people coming across Beringia to move down into the lower 48 there's some dispute over this as to whether or not this was actually open in time for Clovis people to come through or the descendant their ancestors of Clovis to come through or whether it would have been viable for people to come through in other words it would have had it would have been open long enough to have plants and animals that would have allowed them - to come down through that corridor you see that little off the map here we've got the Clovis and Folsom sites in New Mexico in 1927 this was the first time archeologists identified ancient Folsom point earlier in association with extinct bison bones you know and this was the first time we realized that we had the really early sites in North America this map did not come out very well this is this is North America here but the migration routes that we people are talking about the traditional route across the Bering Land Bridge right but now and more recently there's a lot of evidence now for a coastal migration route using boats hopping along the the land moving down and following along that the West Coast coming along California and then making their way down in South America the famous Monteverde site that maybe is also a potential pre-clovis site you've also got ideas doing a Stanford and Bruce Bradley have been talking about for a European transatlantic migration the following the Ice Sheet dice you know that not only extended across North America but extended across the North Atlantic and so dinner Stanford has argued that these European hunter-gatherers from the solutrean time period were actually moving along the edge of the ice sheet very controversial idea but there is some possibility that groups may be able to come across this way as well North America thirteen thousand years ago we've got fluted points greater than 1,500 locations mapped in the the Pitt database by Dave Anderson and his students here's some beautiful Clovis points he's beautiful Lancelot spear points that are just incredible this one's from Ashley I photographed our from over in Georgia across the Savannah River this beautiful red stone point with this heat large flute that moves up the way up the middle of the point here so we have change through time so he kept lips have Clovis here again a widespread across the continent almost instantaneously from 13 to to 12 nine in the western US after twelve nine we have the Folsom complex slightly different with these full fluted tight forms in the East we have Eastern Folsom we have red stone which I'll talk about remember the red stone point which I'll good your talks about and for self carolina it seems to be the point that at least in South Carolina and Virginia and Georgia is the point that we normally find that appears to be immediately clovis immediately after their initial colonization by the Clovis people across North America this is some data I put together for Randy Daniel now a good year for publication we took collector data that dr. Randy Daniel and our Goodyear had a mass from for many years over the Carolinas and actually amassed that into a GIS database that would allow us to look at the distribution interpolate a distribution of various types of points about raw material here I've just got a few examples here our Allendale chert Clovis points distribution for South Carolina here's redstone distribution very similar focused on those Allen Dell current quarries on the Savannah River there is the meta volcanic stone distribution a lot of it from dr. Randy Daniels data you can see in North Carolina we have this major sort of Piedmont focused distribution fall line distribution coming down with the metal interesting thing I met a volcanic point seem to extend further into South Carolina then the Allendale chert extends into North Carolina we see very little Ellendale chert flow us or anything else occurring in North Carolina here we have the redstone point where these very long flutes that in some cases can travel all the way up the blade we these are assumed to be immediately post Clovis we really didn't have any dates on these possibly until recently Joe McEvoy and cactus Hill released a report he's part he describes these deeply in curve eight base points with these long flutes he's got dates on them that possibly put it right at the very end of Clovis maybe just slightly later than Clovis so those are really the first dates that are that we really can tie possibly possibly to red stone points but you can see the meadow volcanic distribution has this really interesting fall line distribution which is kind of interesting because the the Clovis distribution was a much broader distribution and the artifacts immediately post Clovis during the red stone times seemed to really contrive to constrict and for whatever reason they're focused on the fall line area of both North and South Carolina so North America 15,000 years ago these would be the pre-clovis sites right there's been a lot of evidence in recent times that we've got pre-clovis apparently not not too many people around but with a slight certainly like topper and cactus Hill we have medical rock shelter one of the early sites that was purported to be pre-clovis at 19,000 this was almost done Jim avada vasya did this almost too early people were not willing to accept pre-clovis at this time so there was a lot of a lot of controversy a lot of debate that still goes on about Meadowcroft cactus Hill and Virginia I worked there with Tom white and then early in the mid 90s they got these small little triangular points that appear to be to date to roughly 20,000 calibrated years ago Paige Lanson was published in science advances recently by Jessica Halligan and Mike waters this appears to be a pre-clovis point type dating to 14,500 years ago these were calibrated years in Florida and of course Darrin Lowry and Dana Stanford have worked on Delmarva Peninsula sites and they're finding all kinds of incredible stuff that really don't have a good handle on because most of what they're finding is coming out of these eroding Bluffs along the Delmarva Peninsula that are just do roading at an exceeding high rate we're losing this science we're losing the artifacts and very controversial of course these are the ones these are the science that Dennis Stanford of course has tied to possible solutrean European connection whatever they are there's something really interesting going on there because they're buried within soils two and a half meters down that have been dated multiple times with AMS to roughly 20 thousand years ago so we're looking at last glacial maximum time period for whatever these artifacts are and of course the sin Mars site which was off the continental shelf off of Maryland they were dredging they pulled up this beautiful white pointed artifact that Dennis Stanford says looks like a solutrean artifact from France or Spain right so this is very controversial the context is dubious but these are things that are being reported and maybe it's something worth looking at so one thing I like to go into whenever I talk to groups I talk to kids I talk to all kinds of archaeological societies I'd like to really explain that the Pleistocene environment during the LGM in North America radically different flora and fauna than we have now as recently as the LGM 20,000 years ago North America rival to Africa in regard to large megafauna or mega beasts about twelve thousand eight hundred years ago more than thirty-five genre of these animals were extinct this isn't even showing all of them and so these are dissing credible diversity of these large animals giant ground sloths Mastodon mammoths camels just really incredible species and I always tell people if you could bring a paler Indian you know pull them into the current time frame they would they would look around and see a devastated environment you know missing all of these primarily these really you know important animals for the ecology and environment that they were used to soon we had we had a horse and the Late Pleistocene horses didn't come back after the extinction you know at least by twelve thousand eight hundred years ago horses were gone along with all the other animals they didn't return until they were introduced by the Spanish in 1519 they've got Mastodon oops shown with a modern African elephant by comparison saber-toothed cat these are the kind of animals you know as if you're a paler Indian you probably don't want to run into these guys right giant short-faced bear this is a black bear modern black bear this is a grizzly bear and this is a giant short-faced bear by comparison so a pretty dangerous environment for these people to be living in at that time giant beaver right Pleistocene beaver right the size of black bear can you imagine and know people who have to go down and like and get in you know the Beavers damn low and you know and spring floods people's you know property and they have to go and do something about it can you imagine what these guys were doing camels right when I heard his years ago I like wow camels you just never people don't think about that we had camels in North America right that's in the desert you know out the Middle East or something right so question is did early hunter-gatherers really hunt and kill these megafauna on a regular basis lacking bone in many cases and without southeast we don't have bone so is there any way to tell so Amin and logical analysis which Jon had trouble pronouncing and I often do is a method that can be applied successfully successfully to detect residues on stone tools many have said is this scientist really silence there's just science fiction well I'm an archaeologist right I'm not an immunologist but I looked into this a few years ago this really caught my attention and so what are we looking about we're looking at protein residues ever found on stone tools right the method here is called bear with me cross over am you know electrophoresis right and it's used in forensic medicine for 50 years started about 25 years ago the method was experimentally applied to the analysis of protein residues of blood residue preserved on and more likely within stone tools right and there's been experiments you know we're not talking about blood stains on tools that's gone but when you do when if when they're Flint Nappers are producing stone tools they're producing micro fractures within the rock and it under experimentation that's shown that those micro fractures can absorb blood residues through capillary uptake into them into the micro fractures and that's probably how they're being preserved so see got EP this long word here I won't say again uses it uses anti sera derive from living animals to test for proteins or another word called linear epitopes extracted from the stone tool micro fractures and they can to get a positive or negative reaction depending on if that protein residue is actually there in the tool so I said okay let's just have a look and then I've done a lot of work at flamingo Bay it's a Carolina Bay in South Carolina I've worked on with Martin Brooks and others for a long time and we've worked on the sand Rim over here so we went down here here we have in 2010 whenever our field text you didn't know what he had at first but quickly realized he had a beautiful Clovis point base of a Clovis from flamingo Bay we excavated it's probably made from this exotic green welded vitchard tuff that looks like material from north from Asheboro North Carolina possibly you know again possibly you know likely from North Carolina it's the first Clovis recovered from buried contacts within a Carolina base and rim this didn't come out too well but we we did a lot of work these are the block excavations and we identified many early archaic and paleo Indian artifacts from flamingo Bay over several years of excavations here we are with our field crew that Savannah River oncological program that's commanding that flamingo Bay and so we said let's go out let's esque of eight artifacts but let's not touch them right can you imagine digging with people and they find a beautiful spirit point or something they can't touch it right that caused him some problem the consternation among but you know we didn't touch it we didn't wash it we got this stuff in situ right and we sent this stuff all for blood residue because we didn't want to have any kind of contamination we wanted to know that they hadn't been touched you know and and there was no issues with contamination so we had this large beautiful hafted this beautiful scraper knife know that we excavated probably paleo-indian and right away we come back with this incredible result above it or bison blood or residue on this tool right which I thought was pretty cool so we continued with that and we got a whole series of artifacts including the additional paleo-indian artifacts including Clovis redstone Dalton early archaic middle Archaic more late archaic and then Willard Mississippian we tested a whole suite of these for various you know using a different anti Sarah to see what we could find and right away we were getting numerous bison the one one thing I wanted to emphasize early and often the Paleo Indian artifacts have bison along and capped which is kind of interesting if you think about ecologically if you've got herds of bison around and the early Pleistocene you're probably going to have animals that are you know predatory to those to those bison so that kind of makes sense ecologically that we're getting cat and that extends into the earlier cake we did we continue to we did sixty more artifacts we initially tested seventy five of got these results we tested sixty more artifacts and we increased our sample size we only get about twenty percent positive residues on the tools give or take but we all but this became a really obvious pattern that paleo-indian guys were seem to be they're going after bison there were the Archaea people are to some extent and even the middle Archaic people but we've tested self sense and we've got we've yet to find any evidence of bison after the men Holocene so after you know seventy five hundred years ago sort something in there we don't we have yet to find any evidence of ice which kind of makes sense we think about you know we have very little bone preservation but where we do have bone preservation tends to be in this time period here from the later archaic on so we don't have any bison bones that I've ever heard of in the Carolinas or Georgia or Virginia that's defended to bison bones but that kind of makes sense if they're gone if they're not around and so you know we need to do some more testing to see if if bison do they go extinct in the mid Holocene during this more mountain timeframe and of course the other thing that's missing there glaringly missing any extinct megafauna right right there's no or as the mastodon where's the mammoths it's all these images of Paleo Indians you know slaughtering and killing you know mastodons and mammoths we have yet to find any evidence of it doesn't mean it's not there but we just maybe need to test more artifacts here's the schematic that I showed again that shows the paler Indian artifacts in the art and the types of animals rabbit believe it or not is really comment on on any of the tools we've tested and we think in many cases the rabbit based on some of the people we've talked to primitive technologists the sinew and blood and skin from rabbits is very useful in the hafting of tools so they were a common and it would they would be used maybe on a lot of the tools in the actual hafting process and of course we've got tools like this Clovis here that's got cat rabbit and bison on the same tool which is kind of interesting some of these may relate to hafting and know at the base of the artifact work was put into the four shaft and some of these may relate to the actual the hunting of some of the remaining herds of bison very recently I was lucky enough to get a collection of the Austin our collection Bob and Jim anak who live in North Carolina donated it's incredible collection to the office of works into archaeology just an incredible number of beautiful paleo-indian points that they documented precisely their locations they were found in plowed fields and we tested 30 of those using the same technique and we were able to come back again bison you know something that we see over and over again when we test paleo-indian tools right of course deer and rabbit bear kind of interesting most of them didn't produce anything but that's common probably got something to do with preservation these artifacts come or coming out of a plows own context they're probably being exposed to a lot of weathering and that kind of thing so data from blood residue analysis of the stone tools that I've done so far suggests that bison were heavily targeted you know based on the limited sample we've tested in the number of bison blood residues that we've got it indicates they were heavily targeted during the paleo-indian period and especially continued into the early archaic and into the middle Archaic to some degree there's no bison residues after seventy five hundred years ago around the time of MOR Mountain and there's no evidence of large extinct species of um so one of the things that kind of struck me and you know we don't know the answer but is it possible that some megafauna already extinct in portions of the southeast prior to Clovis I've talked about this with my colleagues many of the supposed kill sites that have Mastodon and mammoths at least outside of Florida and maybe even in Florida really are not necessarily associated with Clovis there's evidence that they're really associated with pre-close cotons is a good example in Tennessee again the jury's out on that if those are real artifacts you know you've heard the story before that kind of thing but there's some evidence that maybe the pre Clovis people here maybe were the ones that were hunting or doing most of the hunting at least in the east of some of the extinct megafauna so what was responsible for the extinction of so many Ice Age animals at least 14 megafauna kill site to date into 13,000 BP are currently known in North America at least that that's the latest that I've gotten right not very many but they're dating right to the time of extinction it's kind of odd that we the ones that are found quite often are found they tend to date right at the event where they they appear to go extinct so or early paleo-indians responsible for the extinction of mega fauna including more than 35 genre of animals right that's always been a big question in archaeology big debates going on the overkill hypothesis about Paul Martin Surovell and others have actually come out believe it or not this actually went out of favor people say well there's no way right how could these small bands of hunter-gatherers come in and wipe out all of these animals across the entire continent right but there was actually some evidence that's been presented at least in peer-review it kind of supports that again I'm not sure that I buy it but you know but many don't believe it and don't think humans alone could have done the job so paleo-indians didn't kill off megaphone or what did but something else something else have caused the extinction so the Younger Dryas climate event many of you may have heard about this is a temperature graph over the last fifteen thousand year coming out of the Ice Age 15,000 and then we go into a very warm period just just around the time of Clovis just before Clovis temperatures warm up we've got Clovis people moving around everywhere bowling alley or on time period and then at the end of Clovis around twelve thousand eight hundred years ago the bottom drops out we have this major climate event called the Younger Dryas it gets colder and you know thousand years twelve million years we are in this climate event very rapidly move into it and we come out of it so the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis it was proposed by Firestone and he's got we're finding magnetic micros murals they'd indicate a possible extraterrestrial comet or an impact at this time may be responsible we've got nano diamonds and go back Carbon spherules platinum group elements we've got melt glass it's being found at some of these younger dryas science high-tech high-temperature melt glass we've got our Goodyear and Dave Anderson have suggested there was a population decline immediately following Clovis we have the age of the younger the ydb is the younger driest boundary that lower boundary when we find those in archaeological sites the the initial onset of that major climate event is the Younger Dryas boundary and then we have ydb into impact proxies as a potential datum layer and so now this is actually out of date but even a few years ago there were 42 sites on four continents with a distribution of ydb impact proxies including micro spirals nano diamonds all of these things milk glass platinum group elements and so the idea was Jim Kenan and others very real respected glaciologist osha oceanographers suggested that there may have been an extraterrestrial impact of the North American Ice Sheet their sheet over North America certainly at that time we had retreated but in places was several kilometers thick the massive ice sheet if you have an impact into that it might have penetrated through you but it might not let the crater but we think it threw up terrestrial material from the Earth's surface it created these micro spirals that we find in younger dry sites under an SEM microscope this is from Squires Ridge on the tall River one of the sites I've worked on for my dissertation this is a beautiful image of a micro spiral that I extracted from sediments there that date to around the time of the Younger Dryas these are incredible just to look at I mean under an SEM they have these what's called dendritic crystalline textures which indicate they were melted and then rapidly cooled right and and the elements that have been detected in these indicate very high temperature melting had to occur what's interesting about this there's this is a little hole than saying this thing is an eggshell thin and some people have called it I've heard my colleague Malcolm la compra fruit to it as iron bubbles or iron vapor of course these are very small the 20 micron or slightly bigger here are some other micro spirals from suarez Ridge we analyzed under the SEM you see a variety of surface textures many of them to me look like planets you know your moons around Jupiter or something you know really incredible you know images so the Younger Dryas layer of ice was looked at and said okay there's a there's evidence of an impact we know some of the glaciologist said we know there's an area on the edge of the Greenland ice sheet there's a dusty layer that they know dates to the beginning of the all of this is at the beginning of the Younger Dryas so they went out they didn't have the core data you know they drill cores in the guys but they went out to the edge of the ice sheet found the dusty layer and collected samples through the ice and what they found is at the base of this ice they found a peak in nano diamonds which are microscopic diamonds which are formed under very high temperature high pressure events such as catastrophic extraterrestrial impacts there's really isn't any other known source for these here are some images here's one from the Greenland ice core where they were first found here's Murray Springs in Arizona they're just full of nano diamonds so what other proxies may indicate an ET impact 2013 a team published results from Greenland showing a large platinum anomaly with an IX dating to the Younger Dryas like no the Greenland ice cores sort of the gold standard for payload climatology it doesn't get better than that right they drill down through these massive deep cores they find they have these inter-annual layers of ice and they can go in and can precisely date with a know where they're out they can analyze the ice anything that's coming out of the atmosphere is gonna be in there right and when they looked they actually went in thinking they were gonna be bumped the eet the extra-terrestrial impact and they were looking for iridium rady iridium is associated with the dinosaur killing event right it's another rare earth element like platinum well they didn't find a radium or not much but they found a huge spike in platinum which is also known to be common in asteroids and comets so given that I embarked on a study with a bunch of colleagues and said you know if it was in the ice these the proxies for an extraterrestrial impact should be in archaeological sites I had sediment samples from the work I've done for my dissertation along the Troy River or kind I've already had many of them ready to go and so we tested the samples for platinum we had AMS dates we got OSL dates we had the archaeology we knew about where the Younger Dryas should be and so we wanted to see or is that platinum anomaly there is it consistent with what's been found in the Greenland ice core and so on the study would document eleven archaeological sites across North America that have platinum anomalies from stratified sequences dating to the onset of the Younger Dryas all the way from California New Mexico Arizona Ohio and then these are all the sites I worked on from a dissertation work and then work since I've been at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina so platinum is rarer than the earth crust but Commons at common in asteroids and comets here's a view from Arlington Canyon the blue line shows platinum you get down to the Younger Dryas dated sediments and you have this huge I can climb right word ought to be and so we said we went to the topper site and worked with our Goodyear down he's got a beautiful Clovis occupation there excuse me over here I've got early archaic points above I've got Clovis preforms Clovis blades micro blades and this layer here we've got a platinum anomaly at the Kolbe site on the Pee Dee River Chris judge and Karl Stein have worked there for years beautiful sequence here with LSL dates we've got a platinum anomaly very large platinum anomaly bracketed bioaccel dates that fits perfectly with where the Younger Dryas settlement should be for men go baby which I showed you earlier for the blood residue we have off the charts platinum anomaly right where the Clovis artifacts are located right it's this fact this is the largest platinum anomaly that we've recorded in North America it's almost 40 again we're talking about parts per billion but still looking at almost 40 parts per billion square Ridge one of them it's the only one that I've tested it has multiple platinum anomalies some of our more clearly impost younger dryas younger sediments but the earliest ones are in sediments that are well constrained and dated to the initial young of dryers we really never find them below that we never find them in older sediments and we think we can explain this through by our probation through windblown sand the Olien reworking with sediments is going to rework and move some of that stuff up into her profiles Barbara Creek working with Randy Daniel for many years that on the tour River here again we've got well dated OSL radiocarbon dates of the Younger Dryas they've got a large platinum anomaly there so again pretty much everywhere I'm looking including additional sites I'm working on in Florida and elsewhere I'm finding the same thing so what could be responsible for producing a continent-wide platinum anomaly a recent study indicates there have been 26 nuclear scale asteroid explosions in Earth's atmosphere between 2001 and 2013 the most powerful the impacts was dozens of times the magnitude of it mom and devastated Hiroshima Japan in 1945 we didn't we have all these centrioles around the world to detect when North Korea detonates a nuclear weapon right well the bonus to that is there they're all suddenly able to hear the you know the explosions from these smaller meteoroids and comets that hit the atmosphere most of them explode high on the atmosphere don't they don't do any damage they may go into the ocean but what we've learned from this is is that we're being hit about ten times more than we expected right see if some of you may remember 94 should make shoemaker-levy 9 comet broke apart do the gravitational perturbations from Jupiter didn't stretch didn't pulled it apart and then it sucked it into Jupiter this was the first time Hemans have ever witnessed the impact of a comet with another planet you guys y'all didn't know I was gonna talk about astronomy right but but you know these things were really relevant and what's really cool is we've learned that Jupiter gets hit Bob who's quite a bit in thankfully for us it does because it acts like a vacuum cleaner for the solar system and sucks all these materials into Jupiter rather than hitting us is probably why we are still around just as an example here's one of the impacts I actually watched I could see this do one telescope in 94 you could see the impacts not like this but I could see it in that's that's one of the impacts that scaled to the earth shoemaker-levy not an impact of the earth that would have been a very bad day probably greater than what we may have experienced during the Younger Dryas estimated to have released an energy equivalent of 6 million megatons of tnt so these are massive explosions hidden get very high velocity huge amounts of energy released and of course on Jupiter these are they're exploding in the atmosphere there's no crater being produced on Jupiter and so this may have been actually what happened here we don't know yet we haven't found a crater we don't have the smoking gun for the Clovis comet which has been one of the critics have pointed out but you know we actually may have had a series of these Tunguska style you heard the Tunguska 1908 events that is flatten trees from from hundreds of miles right but it exploded in the atmosphere so the thermal shock and the shock wave came out and burnt some of the trees but mostly just pushed him down right and that released equivalent of 15 million tons of TNT so the Younger Dryas empire if it occurred might have been a series of commentary impacts possibly into the ice sheet made it made whichever we're getting evidence now that there were other areas including South America or refining these things but it might have been airburst like this over in north america so it might have been a series of explosions series of errors globally that we're only just beginning to learn about so okay let's get back to some archaeology and write in people what what effect if any did the Younger Dryas impact if it occurred it's still being debated it's controversial if it happened what effect did it have on early paleo-indians right well some of the work by Dave a nurse and they looked at some of the large quarry science some of you may know the topper site this large dirt quarry in South Carolina on the Savannah River Carson con short Tennessee Adams Kentucky these are large quarry sites of our good material that were used extensively by Clovis and the evidence so far indicates that following the Younger Dryas at the very end of close around twelve nine twelve eight twelve nine there's a massive decline in the use of these quarters there's a none one that would call it an abandonment but there seems to be much less use being going on it is temporarily at these quarters we also see when we look at the for the pit but database which is probably this is probably out of date but you can see these are Clovis artifacts and/or the numbers of flows that have been documented and then you have the Younger Dryas and you have this massive decline in red stone and other post Clovis forms which indicate maybe there was some decline possibly a Democratic crash and population or movement of people possibly as a result of some environmental calamity no we don't know and then a return and then by Dalton times huge explosion in population everything has come back to normal dr. Goodyear has been documenting Clovis points in South Carolina a trainee Daniels done the same thing and he's noted there's roughly four-and-a-half Clovis points and every red stone right so in and this is just for South Carolina in North Carolina but the red stones you know seem to really it seems to be a lot fewer them so the artifact the spear point that we associate with immediately post close we don't find that many of relative too close so what happened to close what happened right do we know well no we don't really don't did they move somewhere did they move somewhere the better environment better conditions we just don't know there was a look this is an ongoing research it's controversial there may be many factors including climate the end of the Ice Age you know it affected people that affected megafauna we just don't know didn't did an extraterrestrial impact contribute to those extinctions did an extraterrestrial impact contribute to the decline temporary decline in human populations those are questions that are up in the air and we don't simply don't know the answer yet but there's been a whole flurry of papers that have come out that really dealing with that including more actually coming out fairly soon and so I want to close here with a project that I started last year with colleagues mark Brooks and our Goodyear and Terry Ferguson we started the white pine human paleo ecology project in South Carolina White Pond is a natural lake situated along the western edge of the upper coastal plain north of Columbia near Elgin Bobby it was kind enough to come out and help us this year and we appreciate that Bobby and domes work out there with us we've had other many other people have really helped us on this has really been a collaborative project we've used a vocational or ecologist volunteers there's a light our image Shaun White Pond white pond is famous in the 1980s it was one of the first pollen studies by watts that really documented climate change for the southeast over the last 20,000 years and it had been any work done since since then so we went back with a lot of the questions that we have about paleo environment and how that relates to early hunter-gatherers and we went in with some colleagues of mine from East Carolina University Dave Milan s'en and his colleague South Carolina DNR or Sean Taylor was really helped out a lot but we got a but this is a viper core you stick it in and it just vibrates its way down through the sediments and then you wind up with something like this and so you split it open and you have these layers of sediments that go back you know thousands of years so this is really like a time capsule you know you talked about archaeological sites as a time capsule but this is a lock us tree in a lake setting with very slow sedimentation very layers of sediments being laid down this is as close as we can get to an ice core they ask the ice cores the gold standard for payload climatology lake records like this is or sort of the next level right and so we got this Viper core we want to do some work on and here's the entire core it says the it says the water interface up here the water and this is the these are this is pete pd deposits it's called these wonderful dark layers of that we haven't looked at yet that might represent a period of drought or fire so we're really we're really excited to look at that and date that and this whole section here is the Holocene the last 10,000 years and we're only just beginning to look at this right so we got this incredible record of 10,000 years of climate history just waiting to be analyzed we have the Pleistocene and Holocene transition right that's the Ice Age the end of the Ice Age transition to our modern climate which has the Clovis people that has the possible data that might tell us something about the extinction event that goes on here right so we have the paleo-indian time period here they've got sections of the core that relate to the archaic into the woodland period Mississippi period it's all there so all of this can be related directly back Assam paly environment or research directly back to archeological questions and this is the section of core we've been focused on the last couple of years for our research so much of the work we've been doing you might have guessed work on the sediment core from White Pond I wanted to look at a higher resolution record from a lake to see if I could replicate the Platinum anomalies if we could find a platinum anomaly in the lake or we could get very precise rate of carbon dance we could nail that we could really say that it happened at the beginning of the Younger Dryas climate event so that's one of the major research avenues that were looking at hoping to publish on that early early 2019 Angie Parodi who was a grad student at Texas A&M looked at some of the samples from our Corps where we've got she found spore Miele which our dung spores or dung funk fungi that are found primarily within the poop of mastodons and mammoth and other large mega herbivores right what a what a field right you know people study coprolites reitman but she's looking at spores that are predominantly their whole lifecycle was within the dung of these large mega herbivores this has been used elsewhere in other environments and they've been able to show that there's a big large amounts of sport Miele in the late in the Ice Age period and then at the end of it the end of the Ice Age the plummets indicating it likely indicates of the extinction event we have a guy Prius D student I'll sent samples to Josh cafe at the Paley genomics laboratory at UC Santa Cruz he is currently working very diligently and very hard to extract DNA out of the mud right some of you may have heard of the work by the Max Planck Institute in Europe they went into a cave and were able to extract there were no bones on Neanderthals or Denisovans in there but they were able to find Neanderthal and Anissa van DNA and the sediments right using the technology for DNA extraction for sequencing for looking at tiny tiny fragments of DNA is just it's science fiction level now it's really it's going to revolutionize archaeology and so I've got really high hopes that that josh is gonna be able to look at those samples and say yeah we've had we've got the spores but they what what animals are really leaving those fours I mean other animals can leave the spores but the DNA will be definitive if we can find DNA and not only that well here we go Here I am in the lab trying to I'm taking the cord I've got a I've got a make in I've got a face mask on we've sterilized everything we've got I'm wearing gloves because the first time I send samples we weren't really thinking about we were taking samples for chemistry and we said hey we'll send these samples and let them try to find DNA where they found DNA all right they found my DNA so I contaminated the crap out of these things but and so they told me what to do and I went back and I and I followed the protocol and I did everything I could to extract a core from sediment plug from the center of the core that would not be contaminated with my DNA or anybody else they're currently looking at these samples in conjunction with the spore data to try to find if there's any DNA preserved in this core here you go you can see a section of the core again here's the Younger Dryas interval here late pleistocene the spore data is over here do we have evidence of macedon a mammoth of white pine we don't know yet but you can see hopefully these are all DNA samples and so hopefully within a few weeks I'm going to get some evidence he III was in touch with him recently and they they sequence these samples and they come back with hundreds of thousands and millions of DNA fragments you know just vast vast data set it probably includes bacteria and fungus and everything else that's in there and they have to use computers and these DNA libraries to try to find these tiny fragments of megafauna DNA that may or may not be preserved in here so it's really incredible science that that's going on we also have an archaeological component at White Pond with his own V on the slopes overlooking the lake we started in 2016 there's our Goodyear John Taylor it some of you may know tark Jaffar the DNR folks have been a huge help along with Bobby and Dawn at White Pond in 2016 we did some work there opened up several large blocks it's just pure sand right I've got a really deep sand we've got artifacts down over a meter deep in places and I was lucky enough to get in and come up with a beautiful Institute Dalton point ortho quartzite Dalton can kind of see it there you know when you find those things it kind of makes your day you know so Sean Sean Taylor you made Sean Sean was digging for me you know and I said show me you know get out I'll get go you know I'll give you a break I'll get in and dig a little bit and so he helps out and I'm scraping along and boom there there it is right so he wasn't real happy with me but but that's the look of the drawl right but we actually this isn't reported we actually talked about this in a legacy which is a newsletter from the South Carolina Institute but we tested this artifact for blood residue Bobby helped us with this and Donnellan helped us with this this one came back with human blood residue we never touched it and we never washed it we didn't do anything you know we did as carefully as we could do we scooped it up throw it in a bag Senate for analysis so either you know many of you know when people are flint knapping and they cut themselves that's a possibility right or maybe maybe it's a murder weapon so we have a murder scene at twelve thousand year old murder scene who knows but the first one that we've got back with human blood residue so a future archaeological fieldwork at White Pond again we're going to search for evidence of early paleo-indian pre-clovis occupation so we don't have any evidence of that yet although I feel like it's got to be they're White Pond we know goes back based on previous were twenty thousand years and so there's plenty of time for Clovis people to have occupied the site we really want to evaluate the likely effects of humans and are this possible extraterrestrial impact on the local environment MegaFon extinction at the end of the Pleistocene and the evidence from the core data again we're working on that now we've got some of the data back and we hope to publish that in science advances or something like that in early 2019 and finally I was lucky enough I thought that some of you may know Tommy Charles he's in his I think he's in his 80s now he's retired he worked tirelessly for years going around South Carolina documenting private collections in virtually every county in South Carolina thousands and thousands of horns in fact I think we wound up using almost 90,000 points to produce the maps that are you'll see in the book the GIS interpolation maps so this is an incredible resource it goes through all the various types as Tommy has seen over the years this is available on Amazon the money goes to support archaeological work in the Upstate of South Carolina and then also worked with our Goodyear we published an edited volume recently the University of Florida Press this will be available at the southeastern ornithological conference you can also go on the University for Florida Press website if you use siak 18 you can get a discount you get the discount price this is a hardback you can see it it's on the table on the piano over here if you'd like to look at it but there's 15 authors dave anderson all kinds of people really incredible work so we're really proud of that if you need very interested let me know thank you [Applause] for the blood residue work yeah some of the from flamingo Bay we went in and excavated with the explicit intent on recovering stuff that had not been touched that's right that's right that that's right absolutely the caveat there is you know they were touched but for to do the work on any any significant number of paleo-indian points we have no choice well there's always the possibility of contamination you know we didn't find any extinct elephant you know or Mastodon or mammoth on there so but we did find plenty of evidence of bison there's a potential for contamination but it's very consistent with the results that we got on all of the artifacts that were not touched and not handled so ideally we would want to use ones that were never hand on and touch absolutely there's been I think there's been more blood residue working on out west and there they actually have got some evidence of extinct not gonna find on some of the Clovis tools out there to my knowledge there's never been there's been blood residue it's been very limited work done as blood residue work was done in cactus Hill they found bison it wasn't really it was in the appendix of the cactus II report it was never put out an internal article so it's not well known the Williamson cite in Virginia they got bison again no extinct megafauna no in Florida they looked at bowling points same thing they got bison there they got you know all the normal species deer that kind of thing but and I think this is I don't know if this has been reported but Dennis Stanford one of the one of these by points which I have a cast on the table up here from the Delmarva Peninsula Sciences that Darren Lowry has been finding these artifacts one of those buy points tested positive for camelid or camel and I think that might be in one of Danis books but it hasn't been published in peer review and if that's true that's the first artifact I know of in the East that has come back with extinct megafauna but absolutely the pre-clovis stuff needs to be tested I mean I know that a lot of people are skeptical of the blood residue we we had to deal with that we published an article in American antiquity 2016 and we sort of had to deal with that but it is what it is and I will just say that you know trying to be careful in Escovedo artifacts without touching and testing those and getting really interesting results one thing I didn't mention is that flamingo Bay we find these little polish stones or gas to lifts gizzard stones that birds ingest right we started finding these things and wow they look like teeth but they're stones or polished stones we found large numbers of them so we knew that the was evidence of mass processing come waterfowl at flamingo Bay well the blood residue results that we got back with totally blind came back with wild turkey on artifacts grouse and quail you know so things like that give you you know give me at least a little bit of faith that that the art that the method works and so I think it's definitely something that should be explored most of the ones that I've tested have been the you know the coastal plain shirt in South Carolina and Georgia I've got results on courts I've got results on the ortho quartzite Dalton which kind of makes sense cuz it's probably more like a sponge then you know it's got a lot of voids you know within the rock that you wouldn't even have to have micro fractures the you that would be mechanism for absorbing blood down into the stone so I think the porous rocks maybe you know would have better chances but I really can't answer because we most of what I've done has been on coastal plain shirt I'm sorry it's well we're not really looking at DNA it's an immunological technique and so they're actually taking antibodies from living animals and it's a method the electrophoresis technique they take the extract residues from the tools insert them on one end and they take the antibodies of modern animals like for example the Africa they'll use I think either African or Asian elephant will react positive to a Macedon or mammoths if it's there and so they use those antibodies and through this process those antibodies will migrate in the direction of the residues if it's positive so but we're not actually we're not actually extracting DNA in fact I've talked to some people and there's protocol them linear epitopes of protein it may or may not have preserved DNA but there's something there that elicits a positive immunological reaction I've talked to people about you know can we can we take these positive residues can we find DNA you know we forget a positive residue can we then take it and look for DNA and something I'm looking into but that would be yeah that's really what's needed is DNA anyway else thank you [Applause]
