Talk:Cerutti Mastodon site

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Sounds like the 2015 dispute over a 24,000 year old mammoth in Maryland [1]--Moxy (talk) 16:20, 29 April 2017 (UTC)

Location?

Where is the site, precisely? Possibly at Coordinates: 32.670136°N 117.042044°W / 32.670136; -117.042044, just south of Highway 54, in among the houses of Paseo De La Vista, Bonita? --RoyGoldsmith (talk) 20:47, 29 April 2017 (UTC)

After further investigation I found the above was a bit off - after extensive image recon I have found the site to be, plus or minus 5 meters, at the following grid: 32°39'57.4"N 117°03'11.4"W - I used the image of the bulldozer covering the site from here https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/26/science/prehistoric-humans-north-america-california-nature-study.html and used Google Maps to identify the homes and various shrubbery in the image - particularly the tall cone shaped conifers in the background of the image, plus the 2 unique full length windows in the upper floor of the home behind the bulldozer. Furthermore, the drawings and descriptions from this site https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/20555563.2019.1589663?scroll=top&needAccess=true&fbclid=IwAR3eky-dqVfsbl1K8UozP0HfHSYsYa7ba-L833lMqxfKkvJU48Ss1e-BD7M& gave me a little more insight.

OK. I just scanned (with Google Street View) Highway 54 in 2017 till I found somewhere that looked good, in this case like a small park but fenced off. This assumes that the archeologists wanted the site left open for further study. Further investigation shows there are signs on the property that say "Emerald Ranch HOA Property - NO TRESPASSING". (Emerald Ranch is a community half a mile north.) I never read the NYT's article about refilling the site when they were finished.

Good work. You might put a coords template in the upper right corner of the article. Make sure the reference to your NYT article, especially the bulldozer picture, is cited as well. You might even use your second reference (Ferrell at Taylor Francis) to expand the section on Criticism. Ferrell evidently believes that the damaged bones were caused by freeway construction. --RoyGoldsmith (talk) 16:45, 28 April 2019 (UTC)

To the best of my knowledge that area is within the city limits of National City, as per this source from KPBS. This is corroborated by this article published in 1992 by the Los Angeles Times.

This is the source which RoyGoldsmith (talk · contribs) was referring to. This is far more west south west than the current location in the article.--RightCowLeftCoast (Moo) 01:15, 15 May 2019 (UTC)

If it is not in National City than it is just within the city limits of San Diego particularly in the Paradise Hills neighborhood, as noted in this Times of San Diego article. This is the only news source which mentions the neighborhood with the mastodon.--RightCowLeftCoast (Moo) 01:32, 15 May 2019 (UTC)

My Google map says the border of San Diego runs along the northern edge of Rt. 54 then turns northward about midway between I805 and Reo Drive. Since the site that is ascribed to me ([2]) is east of Reo and just north of 54, it's in the city of San Diego. (BTW @RightCowLeftCoast, until now I never saw the citation of the source "that is ascribed to me".) --RoyGoldsmith (talk) 14:57, 17 May 2019 (UTC)

The image is from the tandfonline.com journal article, so if you had not seen it, is it not included in a printed version of the journal article?

The Google Maps version of the National City city limits, is slightly off of the actual city limits. That said the KPBS and the Los Angeles Times sources state what they state, regardless of our dead reckoning of the site based off of our intpretation of the location description from the journal article ( Ferrell, Patrick M. (22 March 2019). "The Cerutti Mastodon Site Reinterpreted with Reference to Freeway Construction Plans and Methods". PaleoAmerica. 5 (1): 1–7. doi:10.1080/20555563.2019.1589663. Retrieved 14 May 2019. ).--RightCowLeftCoast (Moo) 23:41, 17 May 2019 (UTC)

@RightCowLeftCoast: First, I looked briefly at the tandfonline article but I did not read it thoroughly. Second, you are right. What counts is the sources, not my reckoning (or anybody else's). However, there are sources that identify the location as in San Diego. (For example, the San Diego Community News says that "An Ice Age paleontological-turned-archaeological site in San Diego preserves...".) I notice that the article says San Diego County, thus neatly side-stepping the whole question of what municipality the site was located in. --RoyGoldsmith (talk) 18:19, 20 May 2019 (UTC)

quotation spelling

The quotation by prof. Waters presents an interesting case. He is American, where 'artifact' is the standard spelling (e.g., in the article Waters co-wrote:"Pre-Clovis Mastodon Hunting 13,800 Years Ago at the Manis Site, Washington." But when the BBC quotes him, it uses the British spelling, 'artefact.' So, when we are quoting, should we use the (inferred) spelling of the speaker or the (foreign) spelling of the quoting body? Kdammers (talk) 15:26, 31 January 2018 (UTC)

I assume they didn't ask him how he spelled it. Let's stick to "artifact". Doug Weller talk 17:18, 31 January 2018 (UTC)

Crticism

The only source we give for criticism is the BBC. But there are scientific articles calling the hominid connection into question, e.g, Haynes, Gary, 2017, "The Cerruti Mastodon," PaleoAmerica A journal of early human migration and dispersal Volume 3, 2017 - Issue 3https://doi.org/10.1080/20555563.2017.1330103 . Kdammers (talk) 15:33, 31 January 2018 (UTC)

Downloadable from ResearchGate. If you can't get access email me. Doug Weller talk 17:19, 31 January 2018 (UTC)

A giant capuchin monkey is a better candidate for the smasher of the femurs and teeth of the Cerutti Mastodon than Homo sapiens.

See [3]. "My disagreement is not, in short, with the Cerutti team’s factual findings, but rather with their conclusion that there is “no other way that the material of the Cerutti Mastodon site could have been produced than through human activity.”[3] In this article I suggest that it is more likely that the Cerutti mastodon’s bones and teeth were smashed by an individual or individuals of a large platyrrhine monkey species descended from, or otherwise related to, the giant capuchin Acrecebus fraileyi." Doug Weller talk 18:59, 9 March 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for bringing this to our attention, I'm going to add a note about this to the article. Zaurus (talk) 18:32, 31 January 2019 (UTC)

And why you should? What is the referenced science that that article offers? The very biased opinion of dr. Baz? And how referenced is him? Just because he was a friend of mr. Martin and still believes in the blitzkrieg theory (that even if most cannot understand it, was crushed togheter with the Clovis first theory)? Megafauna.com is not even an ufficial site of any institution, just a sort of blog taken by a mr 'nobody' that probably not even claims to be a legitimate scientist. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 62.11.3.98 (talk) 02:09, 9 February 2019 (UTC)

blitzkrieg theory? That sounds more like Jared Diamond. I think Baz Edmeades wrote about human-caused African extinctions a million years ago. But you are right, that megafauna.com might be a case of self-publishing. --Zaurus (talk) 02:14, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

yes, it think it's a case of self publishing. I know dr Baz, he is a good man, but when i questioned his 'findings' like the fancy theory that hominids extingued about ten species of elephants over 1 m years ago (but strangely enough, they utterly failed everywhere since then and actually became extinct before Paleoxodon or Stegodon), he sentenced me stating that 'for your mindset it's natural being in disagreement', despite the notorious general law 'extraordinary claims need extraordinary proofs'. Anyway, Baz is nothing else than an amateur, then his opinion is intriguing (maybe even brilliant), but definitively not an authority in this field. More than this: his theory simply did nothing about Hueyatlaco, a site even older (and never dismissed, just ignored by the mainstream) also in America. So we have a bizarre theory that doesn't fit with all the american sites. In this way, someone else could even claim that the clovis points were made by particularly smart capucine monkeys. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 62.11.3.98 (talk) 02:00, 4 April 2019 (UTC)

Damage caused by freeway construction?

See this article in PaleoAmerica. Doug Weller talk 14:05, 4 April 2019 (UTC)

@Doug Weller: I have added it to the criticism section of the article.--RightCowLeftCoast (Moo) 01:46, 15 May 2019 (UTC)

@RightCowLeftCoast: thanks. Doug Weller talk 19:21, 15 May 2019 (UTC)

When tag for peopling of the Americas - since Darwin?

@Delusion23: - what are you looking for here? I guess it's been contentious since evolution showed that there might have been people in the Americas many thousands of years ago. A large number of Americans are still Young Earth Creationists. Doug Weller talk 12:20, 2 May 2019 (UTC)

Firstly I want to make it clear that I'm not disputing the dates for the peopling of America. I tagged the use of the word "recent" as it's a word that should be avoided on Wikipedia, see MOS:DATED. "Recent" is vague and so more specific wording should be used. "Recent" could mean anything from "last year" to as you suggested "since Darwin (i.e. relatively recent history)". I would be looking for something more like "several theories since <YEAR/DECADE> suggest dates of approximately 15,000 to 24,000 years ago". Cheers, Del_Usion23 (talk) 19:11, 2 May 2019 (UTC)

Removing the macrofauna self published source

Already said before in the talk. This guy is not noticeable at all. Not a famed scientist, not a prominent web site. Just his conjecture. I have even tried to discuss with him his theories and he refused to talk deeply about his convinctions. Apart this, his work is not made by a reckown professional writer and his only aim, is to display how any kind of extinct megafauna was killed by humans, basically a very biased 'scientist'. So sorry, i remove this source. IF someone would to re-ad it, then he must display HOW megafauna.com and Baz are more than a simple amateur scientist in paleontology. Cheers.62.11.3.98 (talk) 21:17, 20 March 2020 (UTC)

also because, about the 'giant' protopytecus, the main source about this monkey states that it was argually vegetarian (no need to crush mastodon bones), and its movements should have been still over trees instead of open fields. Really such a monkey should fall from trees to smash mastodon bones, and meanwhile, there are zero proof that that animal was present in California at any time?

While this large body size prompted a previous suggestion in the literature that Protopithecus would have spent more time traveling on the ground than any living platyrrhinedoes today, detailed investigation of the morphology of the postcranial skeleton did not show anyadaptations to terrestriality. The hypothesis put forth by Heymann (1998) is thus falsified. Theoriginal hypotheses of Hartwig (1995) and Hartwig and Cartelle (1996) are supported,suggesting that Protopithecus was a suspensory animal that moved in a way similar to extant Ateles and Brachyteles, with the addition of muscular Alouatta -like climbing.

https://www.academia.edu/1832433/Paleobiology_of_Protopithecus_brasiliensis_a_Plus-Size_Pleistocene_Platyrrhine_from_Brazil

The autor of this long work would perhaps laugh at the mr. Baz smashing monkey hypotesis, just motivated by the rough inability for many to understand that men did go to Americas far before than tough before (see clovis first theory, see Hueytlaco and so on). 62.11.3.98 (talk) 21:59, 20 March 2020 (UTC)

Meades is a lawyer by profession, archaeology is a hobby of his. I've removed it again. Doug Weller talk 15:24, 21 March 2020 (UTC)

"hominims"

What are "hominims" (this term found in the current version of the article)? 173.88.246.138 (talk) 10:23, 1 December 2020 (UTC)

https://www.britannica.com/topic/hominin means any part of the immediate Homo family, not counting more distant ancestors like the Hominidae, for example Pongo (orangutans. Also sometimes not included are gorillas and chimps, along with extinct variations not meeting the Homo standards of similarities. If you see the Latin term Homo in front of their proper name, these automatically belong to the Hominini, well inside the cut.

It quite understandably a confusing situation, since the terms have considerably changed rather recently and remain to some degree controversial within accepted dispute. Many people have been at loss to find basic agreement, and the later permanent genetic interchange may well have survived purely for disease immunity purposes (and of course partially due to random chance) rather than any tissue and structural borrowings.

The historically attested ascent/descent of man representation is almost certainly wholly in error, especially in that large brains came well after the ability to routinely walk, and Encephalization quotient (EQ or EL) throwbacks like the hominini Homo naledi or hominoid Oreopithecus were contemporarily alongside and very close in proximity to much better endowed relatives. Further, a better analogy is to multiple lines joining and dividing a glacial stream braids into innumerable channels except more so as in 3-D rather than only two dimensions that ground surface liquid flowing water has. Even artesian models are insufficient in just about all basins. Over considerable time frames, hominini the genetic record shows many unusual connection possibilities that became permanent.

If insisting to think of a tree branch form, consider a fig's hanging roots or other intermixed species, such as an aspen grove. While certainly not a clone like an aspen grove, there is enough similarity to have a generally defining interconnecting thread. Where the stem limits are drawn in the Miocene is still greatly debated and a very hot topic.

More fossils in Africa, Asia, and Europe are needed to gain better definition and focus, to help settle the issue. Apparently this intermixing does not stop with where ever the hominini boundaries are ultimately decided upon. We come from a very motley background, albeit with at least occasional bottlenecks of surviving dna. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 216.196.72.164 (talk) 21:25, 29 April 2023 (UTC)

New source being added.

@Joe Roe: any comments? Doug Weller talk 15:41, 1 September 2022 (UTC)

I think you and Hemiauchenia have it right, it's too soon to state the 23 ka date as fact. @Sabrefencer9: See [4], [5], [6] and [7] for example. It's still controversial. Also pretty irrelevant to this article, since the claim is for 130 ka. – Joe (talk) 18:25, 1 September 2022 (UTC)