Suppressed Archeology: Virginia Steen-McIntyre and the Forbidden Date

[Doc]

Virginia Steen-McIntyre was a graduate student who was invited to go along with a team from the U.S. Geological Survey in 1966 to determine a date for the Hueyatlaco dig in Mexico. The plan was that she would assist with the field work and come home and write up the results as her dissertation to finish her degree. In 1981 she was still fighting to have her paper published. What went wrong? The geology team came up with a date for the site of 250,000BP. That was too old to fit the accepted theory that human beings had only entered North America 12,000 years ago.

Cynthia Irwin-Williams had excavated Hueyatlaco in 1962. She had a Ph.D. in anthropology from Harvard. The dig had followed all of the proper protocols and they wanted to date the site precisely, so they called in geologists to get the most accurate date possible for the levels where the human artifacts were found. They did not expect a controversial date for the site. The geologists followed proper procedures as well. They came up with a date for the dig at Hueyatlaco of 250,000BP. The archeologists and anthropologists would not accept the date even though it was tested by four of the most sophisticated testing methods of the day. As a result, Cynthia Irwin-Williams threw Hueyatlaco under the bus and walked away. Steen-McIntyre was not allowed to write her dissertation on that subject and had to choose another subject to write about to complete her degree. She wrote up her results for the dig and tried to get them published. Her manuscript went down the Rabbit Hole and disappeared for fifteen years or so. She inquired and either got excuses or no response. Her manuscript, by then her only copy, got "lost". She wrote it once again.

Meanwhile, for Virginia Steen-McIntyre there was still some hope in getting her work published. She presented a paper on Hueyatlaco at a conference. Such conferences make a permanent record by afterward publishing the papers that are presented in a document called "the proceedings". This is not quite as good as being published in a peer-reviewed journal but it is considered being "published" and carries some prestige. That meant that although her work was suppressed by peer review, by her presenting the paper she would get published when the proceedings were printed. The proceedings never got published. That is not the way things are done. The proceedings are always published. Apparently someone got to the conference people and had them kill the entire proceedings to stifle Steen-McIntyre's paper. The powers that be did not want the controversial date for the Hueyatlaco dig to get out.

Virginia Steen-McIntyre has written a documented account of how her work was suppressed and has given copies of some of her documentation and correspondence to various impartial and trustworthy venues. A pretty complete summary can be found here:

http://www.mail-archive.com/ctrl@listserv.aol.com/msg40306.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hueyatlaco (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hueyatlaco)

[southerncross]

So glad you posted this. I find her comments so compelling and make me so sad for her. A wonderful career misdirected and she has such a good and determined mind.
I had read about the site in Michael Cremo's book. I have a copy of it. There are 2 versions. The shorter "readers digest" version and the 2" scholarly book. I splurged and got the big one. Tons of eye popping information.

The site is clearly filled with human activity and these scientists were so cautious to stay with proper procedure, yet main stream scientists will not accept the data. I think its as much about not being discovered as wrong and marginalized as anything else. I don't understand an educated person being unwilling to review and accept good science. That kind of climate calls everything in to question. Nothing can be right if the timeline is wrong. There are too many pieces missing from this puzzle, and this dig may be one of the best smoking guns out there. It's clear Doc. We are not who we think we are... And just as I said in the other thread on Nabta Playa, we go back much further than we know as very intelligent and complex creatures. The timelines are a farce.

[CasperParks]

Truely, we know nothing of our history.

[enigphilo]

I don't understand an educated person being unwilling to review and accept good science. That kind of climate calls everything in to question. Nothing can be right if the timeline is wrong. There are too many pieces missing from this puzzle

Truer words have never been spoken. I completely agreee Southerncross

[Chris]

The system in place to drive the funding for such "scientific" endeavors is what is flawed.

Academics - when they are not teaching in the classroom - must publish or "die". They need to get papers published in peer-reviewed journals to maintain their status in the academic and scientific community. The research into what ever they are writing is paid for by grants. The heads of the departments at the universities and the journals are the ones who control the direction of the flow of money.

So, they do not allow "controversial" data such as indicated above because it challenges everything these authorities have written about and staked their reputations on as they were coming up through the system.

Consequently, nothing new ever really gets funded and published unless it serves to enhance the previously accepted standards within that particular field. The controversial data is is either relegated to a shelf in cabinet deep in the warehouse or is conveniently lost.

There are several cases of "out of place" archeological facts that have never seen the light of day because of this system.

[enigphilo]

Great point Chris.

I'm not a religious scholar but many disciplines have echoed the sentiment that, money is the root of all evil. Seems they have a point. When all other motivations i.e. truth, understanding, compassion and knowledge fall second to monetary gain then they cease to move forward. I don't want to be a hermit with a cabin in the woods but I now understand it. I can't think of an unaffected field, and that's a problem.

[Doc]

The people who do these things are also debasing science and doing harm to colleagues and students. The Clovis Mafia, as they were known, did two things that go against the Scientific Method: 1) They fell in love with their theory that there was no earlier culture here than Clovis and 2) They ignored or suppressed evidence that did not fit the theory. #1 is bad science. #2 is dishonest. Careers of others were ruined or damaged by their dishonesty.

[southerncross]

Kinda like the rules of Fight Club......


1st RULE: You do not talk about FIGHT CLUB.

2nd RULE: You DO NOT talk about FIGHT CLUB.

[atmjjc]

World’s Oldest Cave Paintings May Be Work of Neanderthal Artists

An academic bombshell.” That’s what Professor Jose Luis Sanchidrian of the University of Cordoba, author of “The Manual of Prehistoric Art,” calls his latest archeological find. In southern Spain, in Andalusia’s Caves of Nerja, Sanchidrian’s team may have discovered the oldest surviving cave paintings in the world. And the identity of the artists could change conventional conceptions of just what it means to be human.

Rediscovered by 20th century humans in 1959, the Caves of Nerja were home to many groups of prehistoric people over the course of several thousand years. In the past several decades, a number of ancient artifacts and cave paintings have been discovered at the Nerja site. But this latest find could trump them all in archaeological importance.

This set of simple ochre paintings — thought to be a representations of seals, which were a major food source for some prehistoric peoples — may be more than 10,000 years older than the Chauvent-Pont-d’Arc Cave paintings, which were previously thought to be the oldest surviving paintings in the world. While directing a conservation project to preserve Nerja’s paintings, Sanchidrian sent a sample of charcoal found near the paintings to a lab in Miami for carbon dating, and discovered that the seal paintings were likely painted more than 42,000 years ago.

But the paintings’ origin may be even more remarkable than their age. As far as archaeologists can tell, there were no humans of the Homo sapiens sapiens variety living at Nerja 42,000 years ago. At that time, the cave complex in southern Spain was inhabited by a different branch of the human family tree — Neanderthals.

Anatomically modern humans — that is, Homo sapiens sapiens, people who, anatomically speaking, were pretty much indistinguishable from the people who populate the world today — evolved as early as 200,000 years ago, but it took time for our ancestors to migrate across the globe, and for tens of thousands of years, while modern humans were spreading throughout Africa, Neanderthals still dominated Europe. Scientists working at Nerja have previously found Neanderthal tools dating to around 40,000 years ago in the caves, but there is no evidence that modern humans inhabited the caves at that time. The area is thought to be one of the last Neanderthal refuges before the Neanderthal extinction at around 30,000 B.C.E.

Smaller, simpler works of art created by Neanderthals have been found before, but the cave paintings at Nerja — so similar to cave paintings created during the same era by anatomically modern humans — indicate a sophisticated understanding of artistic principles and a high level of artistic skill. If the Nerja paintings were created by Neanderthals, Sanchidrian says, it could prompt a “radical change” in the way we view our extinct human cousins — and ourselves.

http://www.care2.com/causes/worlds-oldest-cave-paintings-may-be-work-of-neanderthal-artists.html

[Doc]

Thanks for the link, atmjjc. I'm going to re-post it on our Facebook page.

I haven't seen any updates recently but a few years back archeologists in Israel found evidence suggesting that Neanderthals and modern Humans lived in adjoining caves.