Progress Notes

Calico 032 copy.jpg

1973. It often takes about twenty years for a new idea to go from the field to the textbook. If your name is on the accepted textbook you can expect to get royalties for a long time. Textbooks average $102 these days. Fifteen percent of $102 makes a nice retirement income as long as your book is still current. Professors say new textbooks are hardly ever justified (surprise). If a new guy comes along and makes a discovery that makes your textbook obsolete you have fifteen percent of nothing for your supplementary income. The longer you can keep the new guy's textbook from being published, the longer you get the royalties. This gives professors, journal editors and publishers great incentive to maintain the status quo. If nothing new comes along to make the current standard textbook obsolete, they all keep making money without doing any additional work.

There are egos and reputations involved, too, of course. If every single scholarly author, professor and department head has supported the theory that human beings only arrived in the Western Hemisphere in the last 14,000 years +/- a few hundred years, none of them will be thrilled to be proved wrong. No new information that challenges the accepted date will be welcomed--it will be rejected vehemently, universally, among that group of people. No one will have to be asked or told to write articles disputing the new information, the articles will practically write themselves. If the new guy has to be attacked personally, destroyed professionally, ruined financially to maintain the status quo, many will be happy to do so.

Vance Haynes, a geologist, had made several trips to the Calico Early Man Archeology Site. In 1973 he published a paper which suggested that the stone objects found at Calico were geofacts, not tools but broken rocks changed by natural forces. The natural force was water running quickly in a riverbed, tumbling the rocks over and over and causing them to break into shapes that resembled stone tools. All of the alleged artifacts were geofacts, Haynes claimed. That was all the debunkers needed. Geofacts, objects shaped by "natural forces", became the explanation for Calico. Case closed.

It didn't matter that there was no evidence of such a river having existed in the area. It didn't matter that known rivers in the geographical record provided less than half of the force it takes to break that sort of rock into large tool-like shapes. It didn't matter that no one had ever witnessed this happen. It didn't matter that he didn't identify any river anywhere in the world that had broken rocks this way. It didn't matter that the natural force he described couldn't possibly make the small, intricately worked scrapers and blades dug up at Calico. None of that mattered.

What did matter was what always matters to debunkers: to get an explanation, the simpler the better, out in front of the public so that whenever the name Calico came up, people would remember "natural forces". Like "weather balloon" or "light from the lighthouse". Calico had to be killed and "natural forces" would do nicely. The old date? 80,000 years? 200,000 years? Dates don't matter if they were all made by "natural forces". Thermolumenescence test has a huge error margin? Doesn't matter if it is "natural forces". Leakey was senile? Doesn't matter if it is "natural forces".

To this day if you go anywhere where people talk about these things and the name Calico comes up in relation to Early Man, within five minutes you will hear, "That geologist proved they were all made by natural forces." But Haynes had done no such thing. He proved nothing about the stone tools nor did he claim to do so. Haynes had done no scientific investigation beyond a survey of the surrounding terrain, no experimentation, no attempt to replicate the process he was proposing. What Haynes did is known as Theory Building. There is nothing wrong with that and a lot of good science begins with a few observations and Theory Building. Haynes made some observations and began to draw some conclusions about how various observed facts might relate to one another. Others called it Science and Proof. Geofacts. Natural Forces. Case closed.

Separately from the Calico excavations, Ritner Sayles located the shoreline of the ancient Pleistocene Lake Manix that had existed when the area was a savannah and dried up as it became a desert. He walked old shoreline at 1,700 ft elevation and found artifacts, good ones, very old. Sayles' finds were instrumental in bringing Dee Simpson and Dr. Gerald A. Smith out to the Yermo Fan area in 1952. Surely he escaped the "rocks rolling down a riverbed, natural forces" explanation? Yes, he did. But he could not escape the "rocks struck by lightning and smashed into pieces that look like tools, natural forces" explanation. Yes. Lightning. Every last one of them struck by lightning. (I'm not making this up, I swear.) Geofacts. Natural Forces. Case closed.

The Fire Ring, uncovered deep in the pit, upon which so many hopes were hung, was another great disappointment. This is not reported officially anywhere that I have seen. It was told to me at the time back in the early 1990s. The official story is that there are some indications of high heat such as fire having been in proximity to the rocks tested. What we were told in 1993 is that for some unfathomable reason the person handling the testing lied about the initial results being positive, raising hopes sky high, then he disappeared from the scene. The final results did not confirm any proximity to fire, dashing those hopes. (The latest version is that one rock may have been exposed to high heat.)

This was crushing when I heard it back in the mid-1990s. They were left with a Fire Ring that no one ever lit a fire in or some ceremonial ring that we do not understand. I don't think it is possible for that ring to have occurred by "natural forces". Fifteen matching stones in a circle? Natural? No. Some sentient something was there, picked those stones out of a riverbed and placed them in a circle. Whatever age that fire ring turns out to be, whether 35,000 years old or 200,000 years old, I cannot accept that it was made by natural forces.

And there things sat for a very long time. At least through the 1990s. Dee Simpson and others continued to write papers and no one minded. Opponents wrote critical responses that had no problem being published. The case had already pretty much been closed.

Tours of the Calico Early Man Archeological Site continued. Students came and learned. Volunteers dug up what surely looked like stone tools. Dee Simpson held it all together by what appeared to me like the force of grim determination, badgering the few volunteers until they were exhausted or they ducked her. She aged noticeably, then she passed away. Then it was left to whoever became the Site Director and the remaining volunteers to carry on.

Calico 038 copy.jpg

Robert Bakker, the paleontologist who proposed the theory of the warm blooded dinosaurs, once said that if you want to get a new idea accepted in Paleontology or Archeology, sometimes you have to wait for the old farts in charge to die off. He was right. The old authorities as a cohort are retiring, becoming frail, dying off and a younger group is assuming positions of authority. Some of them are not so invested in the 14,000 year date for the entry of humans into the Western Hemisphere.

Apparently in the last ten years something has changed. A few noted archeologists and paleontologists are allowing their names to be associated with or are digging at sites dated older than 14,000BP. New tests have been devised and older tests have been refined. Old data is getting a second look, dates revised. The science has advanced sufficiently that the results of the tests are not as controversial as they were 40 or 50 years ago. There are some indications that the Calico Early Man Archeology Site may be getting another look.

The last thing the Site Manager told me on our visit to the Calico Early Man Archeology Site a few weeks ago was that the dates that they had been working with in the past were wrong. This is a huge change in position. A review of the testing and advances in interpretation have invalidated the old results. He said that they are now working with dates of 35,000 to 40,000BP and they were happy with those dates. This corresponds with the oldest dates being claimed at very old sites that are being excavated and interpreted now. New dating may help Calico gain acceptance. I don't know if the new dates are right or wrong but it will be easier to get people to look at the evidence without the claims for the age of Calico that start at 80,000 years BP and go up from there to 200,000 years and beyond. Other sites, such as in Mexico, claim 250,000BP and they are still bogged down in Peer Review Hell.

Calico 045 copy.jpg