The nonprofit organization, founded in 2004, brings together the state’s top scientific, academic and corporate minds to support research in Texas.
The organization builds a stronger identity for Texas as an important destination and hub of achievement in these fields. Members of The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine and the state’s nine Nobel Laureates comprise the 270 members of TAMEST. The group has 18 member institutions, including SMU, across Texas.
Rohrer joins three other distinguished SMU faculty members in TAMEST — Fred Chang, executive director of the Lyle School’s Darwin Deason Institute for Cyber Security; Delores Etter, founding director of the Lyle School’s Caruth Institute for Engineering Education and electrical engineering professor emeritus; and David Meltzer, Henderson-Morrison Chair and professor of prehistory in anthropology in Dedman College.
Considered one of the preeminent researchers in electronic design automation, Rohrer’s contributions to improving integrated circuit (IC) production have spanned over 50 years. Rohrer realized early on that circuit simulation was crucial to IC design for progress in size reduction and complexity. Among his achievements was introducing a sequence of circuit simulation courses at the University of California, Berkeley, that evolved into the SPICE (Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit Emphasis) tool, now considered the industry standard for IC design simulation. At Carnegie Mellon University, Rohrer introduced the Asymptotic Waveform Evaluation (AWE) algorithm, which enabled highly efficient timing simulations of ICs containing large numbers of parasitic elements.
“The appointment of Ron Rohrer into TAMEST will increase the visibility of Lyle’s outstanding faculty members,” said Marc P. Christensen, dean of the Lyle School of Engineering.
“Through TAMEST, Rohrer will share his vast knowledge and inspire additional collaborative research relationships with other outstanding Texas professors and universities. This will elevate SMU and the state as a leading center of scholarship and innovation,” Christensen said.
Once an SMU electrical engineering professor back in the late 70’s, Rohrer rejoined the Lyle School as a faculty member in 2017. He is professor emeritus of electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon and Rohrer’s career has included roles in academia, industrial management, venture capital, and start-up companies.
“I’ve stayed close to industry to be a practicing engineer and close to academia to conduct deeper research on hard problems,” said Rohrer.
According to Rohrer, one pressing problem is analog integrated circuit design automation, also the name of the project-based research course he’s currently teaching.
“In the analog domain, it’s hard to design a 20-transistor circuit. My goal is to make analog integrated circuit design more accessible to students and industry, especially for our local corporate partners,” he said. “I want to get the ball rolling so younger engineers can keep it moving toward a complete solution.”
Along with his membership in TAMEST and the National Academy of Engineering, Rohrer is an IEEE Life Fellow. His professional service includes several other prominent positions with IEEE, AIEE and U.S. government committees. He is the author and co-author of five textbooks and more than 100 technical papers as well as the holder of six patents. Rohrer has received 11 major awards, including the IEEE Education Medal and the NEC C&C Prize.
An individual buried at Snugger, whose remains were some of those whose complete genomes were sequenced. (Credit: Libor Balák, Anthropark)
A new study has sequenced the genomes of individuals from an ancient burial site in Russia and discovered that they were, at most, first cousins, indicating that they had developed sexual partnerships beyond their immediate social and family group.
A new study has identified when humans transitioned from simple systems designed to minimize inbreeding to more complex ones suitable for hunter-gatherer societies.
The study findings are reported in the journal Science and demonstrate that, by at least 34,000 years ago, human hunter-gatherer groups had developed sophisticated social and mating networks that minimized inbreeding.
The study examined genetic information from the remains of modern humans who lived during the early part of the Upper Palaeolithic, a period when modern humans from Africa first colonized western Eurasia, eventually displacing the Neanderthals who lived there before.
The results suggest that people deliberately sought partners beyond their immediate family, and that they were probably connected to a wider network of groups from within which mates were chosen, thus avoiding inbreeding.
The research was carried out by an international team of academics, led by the University of Cambridge, U.K., and the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. The team included SMU archaeologist David J. Meltzer, whose expertise includes the First People in the Americas.
The researchers sequenced the genomes of four individuals from Sunghir, a famous Upper Palaeolithic site in Russia, which was inhabited about 34,000 years ago.
Complex mating systems may partly explain modern human survival
Among recent hunter-gatherers, the exchange of mates between groups is embedded into a cultural system of rules, ceremonies and rituals. The symbolism, complexity and time invested in the extraordinarily rich objects and jewellery found in the Sunghir burials, as well as the burials themselves, suggest that these early human societies symbolically marked major events in the life of individuals and their community in ways that foreshadow modern rituals and ceremonies — birth, marriage, death, shared ancestry, shared cultures.
The study’s authors also hint that the early development of more complex mating systems may at least partly explain why modern humans proved successful while other, rival species, such as Neanderthals, did not. More ancient genomic information from both early humans and Neanderthals is needed to test this idea.
The human fossils buried at Sunghir are a unique source of information about early modern human societies of western Eurasia. Sunghir preserves two contemporaneous burials – that of an adult man, and that of two children buried together and which includes the symbolically modified remains of another adult.
To the researchers’ surprise, however, these individuals were not closely related in genetic terms; at the very most, they were second cousins. This is true even for the two children who were buried head-to-head in the same grave.
“What this means is that people in the Upper Palaeolithic, who were living in tiny groups, understood the importance of avoiding inbreeding,” said Eske Willerslev, a professor at St John’s College and the University of Copenhagen, who was senior author on the study. “The data that we have suggest that it was being purposely avoided. This means that they must have developed a system for this purpose. If the small hunter and gathering bands were mixing at random, we would see much greater evidence of inbreeding than we have here.”
Early human societies changed ancestral mating system
The small family bands were likely interconnected within larger networks, facilitating the exchange of peoples between bands in order to maintain diversity, said Martin Sikora, a professor at the Centre for GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen.
Most non-human primate societies are organized around single-sex kin (matrilines or patrilines), where one of the sexes remains resident and the other migrates to another group, thus minimizing inbreeding. At some point, early human societies changed the ancestral mating system into one in which a large number of the individuals that form small resident/foraging units are non-kin, where the relations among units that exchange mating partners are formalized through complex cultural systems.
In at least one Neanderthal case, an individual from the Altai Mountains who died about 50,000 years ago, inbreeding was not avoided, suggesting that the modern human cultural systems that allows to decouple the size of the resident community from the danger of inbreeding was not in place. This leads the researchers to speculate that an early, systematic approach to preventing inbreeding may have helped modern humans to thrive in relation to with other hominins.
This should be treated with caution, however.
“We don’t know why the Altai Neanderthal groups were inbred,” Sikora said. “Maybe they were isolated and that was the only option; or maybe they really did fail to develop a network of connections. We will need more genomic data of diverse Neanderthal populations to be sure.”
Upper Palaeolithic human groups sustained very small group sizes
The researchers were able to sequence the complete genomes of all four individuals found within the two graves at Sunghir. These data were compared with information on both modern and ancient human genomes from across the world.
They found that the four individuals studied were genetically no closer than second cousins, while the adult femur filled with red ochre found in the youngsters’ grave would have belonged to an individual no closer than great-great grandfather of the boys. “This goes against what many would have predicted,” Willerslev said. “I think many researchers had assumed that the people of Sunghir were very closely related, especially the two youngsters from the same grave.”
The people at Sunghir may have been part of a network similar to that of modern day hunter-gatherers, such as Aboriginal Australians and some historical Native American societies. Like their Upper Palaeolithic ancestors, these societies lived in fairly small groups of some 25 people, but they were also connected to a larger community of perhaps 200 people, within which there were rules governing with whom individuals can form partnerships.
“The results from Sunghir show that Upper Palaeolithic human groups could sustain very small group sizes by embedding them in a wide social network of other groups maintained by sophisticated cultural systems,” said Marta Mirazón Lahr, a professor at the University of Cambridge.
Willerslev also highlights a possible link with the unusual sophistication of the ornaments and cultural objects found at Sunghir. Such band-specific cultural expressions may have been used to signal who are “we” versus who are “they,” and thus a means of reinforcing a shared identity built on marriage exchange across foraging units. The number and sophistication of personal ornaments and artefacts found at Sunghir are exceptional even among other modern human burials, and not found among Neanderthals and other hominins.
“The ornamentation is incredible and there is no evidence of anything like that with other hominins,” Willerslev added. “When you put the evidence together, it seems to be telling us about the really big questions: what made these people who they were as a species, and who we are as a result.”
Ancient genomics throw light on aspects of social life
These results show the power of ancient genomics to throw light on aspects of social life among early humans, and pave the way for further studies to explore variation in social and demographic strategies in prehistoric socieities.
“Much of human evolution is about changes in our social and cultural behavior, and the impact this has had on our success as a species. This study takes us a step further toward pinpointing when and why the things that make humans unique evolved,” said Robert Foley, a professor at the University of Cambridge.
Meltzer is Henderson-Morrison Professor of Prehistory in the SMU Department of Anthropology in Dedman College. As a scientist who studies how people first came to inhabit North America, Meltzer in 2009 was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in recognition for his achievements in original scientific research. In 2013 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. — University of Cambridge, SMU
Excavated dwellings in the stone-built Neolithic settlement of Skara Brae in the Orkney archipelago of Scotland. (John Burka)
Better integration of ancient DNA studies with archaeology promises deeper insights.
DNA testing alone of ancient human remains can’t resolve questions about past societies.
It’s time for geneticists and archaeologists to collaborate more fully in the face of ever greater advancements in ancient DNA research, according to SMU archaeologist David J. Meltzer and his colleagues in a recent article in the scientific journal Science.
The authors write in “A composite window into human history” that over the past decade, DNA testing of ancient human remains has become a valuable tool for studying and understanding past human population histories.
Most notably, for example, is how sequencing of ancient genomes resolved the dispute over our species’ evolutionary relationship with Neanderthals, the authors point out.
Even so, the authors caution that collaboration with archaeologists is key for scientific accuracy as well as navigating ethical implications.
Archaeologists know from the study of artifacts that it isn’t always the case that people who share material culture traits were likewise part of the same biological population.
“One can have similar traits without relatedness, and relatedness without similarity in traits,” say the authors in the article.
At the same time, where there is biological relatedness, cultural relatedness can’t be assumed, nor can language groups indicate that biological populations, material assemblages or even social units are related.
“Geneticists are often keen to use ancient DNA to understand the causes and mechanisms of demographic and cultural change,” the authors write. “But archaeologists long ago abandoned the idea that migrations or encounters between populations are a necessary or sufficient explanation of cultural change.”
The authors make the point that understanding population movements requires broad investigation of many factors, including environmental and social contexts, timing and logistics, how new resources and landscapes were managed, and the transfer of cultural knowledge.
“Hence, it requires evidence for archaeology, paleoecology and other fields to supplement and complement ancient DNA data,” the authors write. “And that entails effective collaboration, one that goes beyond archaeologists serving as passive sample providers.”
Meltzer is Henderson-Morrison Professor of Prehistory in the SMU Department of Anthropology in Dedman College. As a scientist who studies how people first came to inhabit North America, Meltzer in 2009 was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in recognition for his achievements in original scientific research. In 2013 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Co-authors on the perspective piece with Meltzer were Niels N. Johannsen, Aarhus University, Denmark; Greger Larson, University of Oxford; and Marc Vader Linden, University College London.
A Folsom spear point was discovered between the ribs of an extinct species of bison — but was it really proof that humans had killed the animal?
A Folsom spear point was discovered between the ribs of an extinct species of bison — but was it really proof that humans had killed the animal?
The research into the arrival of how and when people first arrived in North America by noted SMU archaeologist David J. Meltzer was covered in the online anthropology magazine Sapiens in a column by Stephen E. Nash, science historian and archaeologist at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science.
Meltzer, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and Henderson-Morrison Professor of Prehistory in SMU’s Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences, conducts original research into the origins, antiquity and adaptations of the first Americans.
Paleoindians colonized the North American continent at the end of the Ice Age. Meltzer focuses on how those hunter-gatherers met the challenges of moving across and adapting to the vast, ecologically diverse landscape of Late Glacial North America during a time of significant climate change.
Meltzer’s archaeology and history research has been supported by grants from the National Geographic Society, the National Science Foundation, The Potts and Sibley Foundation and the Smithsonian Institution. In 1996, he received a research endowment from Joseph and Ruth Cramer to establish the Quest Archaeological Research Program at SMU, which will support in perpetuity research on the earliest occupants of North America.
By Stephen E. Nash
Sapiens
Remember the iconic Folsom point? The one that I said, in my last post, changed the future of archaeology?
To recap: On August 29, 1927, paleontologists from the Colorado Museum of Natural History (renamed the Denver Museum of Nature & Science in 2000) discovered a stone projectile point embedded in the ribs of an extinct form of bison.
After making that discovery in the field, the researchers left the point sitting where it was and immediately sent out a call to their colleagues to come to northeastern New Mexico to see it for themselves. Within two weeks a number of well-known scientists had visited the site, seen the point in position, and established a scientific consensus: Native Americans lived and hunted in North America during the end of the last Ice Age, about 12,000 years ago, far earlier than they were previously thought to be here.
It turns out, though, that the story at the Folsom Site was more complicated than researchers initially believed. So what has changed since 1927? The latest part of the story began 20 years ago.
In 1997, David Meltzer, an archaeologist at Southern Methodist University who studies “Paleoindians,” the earliest inhabitants of North America, began a three-year project at the Folsom Site to reassess and re-excavate the site using modern tools and techniques—which were not available in the 1920s. His goal was to better understand how, and under what conditions, the Folsom Site formed. Meltzer and his team used now-standard excavation-control techniques to record their findings in three-dimensional space and to determine if any unexcavated areas of the site could be found. In so doing, they hoped to find evidence of the Paleoindian campsite that might have been associated with the main bison-kill and butchering site.
As a result of Meltzer’s research, we now know that the bison-kill event occurred in the fall. How do we know? Bison reproduce, give birth, and grow up on a reasonably predictable annual cycle. Meltzer and his colleagues analyzed dental eruption patterns on excavated bison teeth to determine the season of the kill.
The archaeologists also determined that Folsom hunters were experts at their job, having systematically killed and butchered at least 32 bison at the site.
Hundreds of students, faculty and townspeople gathered in the rotunda of Dallas Hall on Monday, Aug. 21 to view a projection of the Great American Solar Eclipse at a viewing hosted by Dedman College and the SMU Physics Department. (Jeff McWhorter/SMU)
Dedman College, SMU Physics Department host Great American Solar Eclipse 2017 viewing
The festive event coincided with the kick-off of SMU’s Fall Semester and included Solar Eclipse Cookies served while viewing the rare astronomical phenomenon.
The eclipse reached its peak at 1:09 p.m. in Dallas at more than 75% of totality.
“What a great first day of the semester and terrific event to bring everyone together with the help of Dedman College scientists,” said Dedman Dean Thomas DiPiero. “And the eclipse cookies weren’t bad, either.”
Physics faculty provided indirect methods for observing the eclipse, including a telescope with a viewing cone on the steps of historic Dallas Hall, a projection of the eclipse onto a screen into Dallas Hall, and a variety of homemade hand-held devices.
Outside on the steps of Dallas Hall, Associate Professor Stephen Sekula manned his home-built viewing tunnel attached to a telescope for people to indirectly view the eclipse.
“I was overwhelmed by the incredible response of the students, faculty and community,” Sekula said. “The people who flocked to Dallas Hall were energized and engaged. It moved me that they were so interested in — and, in some cases, had their perspective on the universe altered by — a partial eclipse of the sun by the moon.”
A team of Physics Department faculty assembled components to use a mirror to project the eclipse from a telescope on the steps of Dallas Hall into the rotunda onto a screen hanging from the second-floor balcony.
Adjunct Professor John Cotton built the mount for the mirror — with a spare, just in case — and Professor and Department Chairman Ryszard Stroynowski and Sekula arranged the tripod setup and tested the equipment.
Stroynowski also projected an illustration of the Earth, the moon and the sun onto the wall of the rotunda to help people visualize movement and location of those cosmic bodies during the solar eclipse.
Professor Fred Olness handed out cardboard projectors and showed people how to use them to indirectly view the eclipse.
“The turn-out was fantastic,” Olness said. “Many families with children participated, and we distributed cardboard with pinholes so they could project the eclipse onto the sidewalk. It was rewarding that they were enthused by the science.”
Stroynowski, Sekula and others at the viewing event were interviewed by CBS 11 TV journalist Robert Flagg.
Physics Professor Thomas Coan and Guillermo Vasquez, SMU Linux and research computing support specialist, put together a sequence of photos they took during the day from Fondren Science Building.
“The experience of bringing faculty, students and even some out-of-campus community members together by sharing goggles, cameras, and now pictures of one of the great natural events, was extremely gratifying,” Vasquez said.
Sekula said the enthusiastic response from the public is driving plans to prepare for the next event of this kind.
“I’m really excited to share with SMU and Dallas in a total eclipse of the sun on April 8, 2024,” he said.
Using ancient DNA, researchers have created a unique picture of how a prehistoric migration route evolved over thousands of years – revealing that it could not have been used by the first people to enter the Americas, as traditionally thought.
The established theory about how Ice Age peoples first reached the present-day United States has been challenged by an unprecedented study that concludes that their supposed entry route was “biologically unviable.”
The first people to reach the Americas crossed via an ancient land bridge between Siberia and Alaska but then, according to conventional wisdom, had to wait until two huge ice sheets that covered what is now Canada started to recede, creating the so-called “ice-free corridor” that enabled them to move south.
In a new study published in the journal Nature, however, an international team of researchers used ancient DNA extracted from a crucial pinch-point within this corridor to investigate how its ecosystem evolved as the glaciers began to retreat.
They created a comprehensive picture showing how and when different flora and fauna emerged so the once ice-covered landscape became a viable passageway. No prehistoric reconstruction project like this has ever been attempted before.
Present day view south in Canada’s Peace River drainage basin where retreating ice sheets created an ice-free corridor more than 13,000 years ago. (Mikkel Winther Pedersen, University of Copenhagen)
The researchers conclude that while people may well have travelled this corridor after about 12,600 years ago, it would have been impassable earlier than that, as the corridor lacked crucial resources, such as wood for fuel and tools, as well as game animals essential to the hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
If this is true, then it means that the first Americans, who were present south of the ice sheets long before 12,600 years ago, must have made the journey south by another route. The study’s authors suggest that they probably migrated along the Pacific coast.
Who these people were is still widely disputed. Archaeologists agree, however, that early inhabitants of the modern-day contiguous United States included the so-called “Clovis” culture, which first appear in the archaeological record over 13,000 years ago. And the new study argues that the ice-free corridor would have been completely impassable at that time.
“There is compelling evidence that Clovis was preceded by an earlier and possibly separate population,” said archaeologist and co-author on the study David J. Meltzer, Henderson-Morrison Professor of Prehistory in the Department of Anthropology at Southern Methodist University, Dallas. “But either way, the first people to reach the Americas in Ice Age times would have found the corridor itself impassable.”
The ice-free corridor simply opened up too late to be the principal entry route
The research was led by evolutionary geneticist Eske Willerslev, a Fellow of St John’s College, University of Cambridge, who also holds posts at the Centre for GeoGenetics, University of Copenhagen, and the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Cambridge.
“The bottom line is that even though the physical corridor was open by 13,000 years ago, it was several hundred years before it was possible to use it,” Willerslev said. “That means that the first people entering what is now the U.S., Central and South America must have taken a different route. Whether you believe these people were Clovis, or someone else, they simply could not have come through the corridor, as long claimed.”
Mikkel Winther Pedersen, a doctoral student at the Centre for GeoGenetics, University of Copenhagen, who conducted the molecular analysis, added: “The ice-free corridor was long considered the principal entry route for the first Americans. Our results reveal that it simply opened up too late for that to have been possible.”
The corridor is thought to have been about 1,500 kilometers long, and emerged east of the Rocky Mountains 13,000 years ago in present-day western Canada, as two great ice sheets – the Cordilleran and Laurentide, retreated.
On paper, this fits well with the argument that Clovis people were the first to disperse across the Americas. The first evidence for this culture, which is named after distinctive stone tools found near Clovis, New Mexico, also dates from roughly the same time, although many archaeologists now believe that other people arrived earlier.
“What nobody has looked at is when the corridor became biologically viable,” Willerslev said. “When could they actually have survived the long and difficult journey through it?”
Radiocarbon dates, pollen, macrofossils and DNA revealed how ecosystem developed The conclusion reached by Willerslev and his colleagues is that the journey would have been impossible until about 12,600 years ago. Their research focused on a “bottleneck,” one of the last parts of the corridor to become ice-free, and now partly covered by Charlie Lake in British Columbia, and Spring Lake, Alberta — both part of Canada’s Peace River drainage basin.
The team gathered evidence — including radiocarbon dates, pollen, macrofossils and DNA taken from lake sediment cores — which they obtained standing on the frozen lake surface during the winter season. Willerslev’s own PhD, 13 years ago, demonstrated that it is possible to extract ancient plant and mammalian DNA from sediments, as it contains preserved molecular fossils from substances such as tissue, urine and feces.
Having acquired the DNA, the group then applied a technique termed “shotgun sequencing.”
“Instead of looking for specific pieces of DNA from individual species, we basically sequenced everything in there, from bacteria to animals,” Willerslev said. “It’s amazing what you can get out of this. We found evidence of fish, eagles, mammals and plants. It shows how effective this approach can be to reconstruct past environments.”
This approach allowed the team to see, with remarkable precision, how the bottleneck’s ecosystem developed. Crucially, it showed that before about 12,600 years ago, there were no plants, nor animals, in the corridor, meaning that humans passing through it would not have had resources vital to survive.
Clovis could not have travelled through ice-free corridor as previously believed Around 12,600 years ago, steppe vegetation started to appear, followed quickly by animals such as bison, woolly mammoth, jackrabbits and voles. Importantly 11,500 years ago, the researchers identified a transition to a “parkland ecosystem” – a landscape densely populated by trees, as well as moose, elk and bald-headed eagles, which would have offered crucial resources for migrating humans.
Somewhere in between, the lakes in the area were populated by fish, including several identifiable species such as pike and perch. Finally, about 10,000 years ago, the area transitioned again, this time into boreal forest, characterized by spruce and pine.
The fact that Clovis was clearly present south of the corridor before 12,600 years ago means that they could not have travelled through it.
“Most likely, you would say that the evidence points to their having travelled down the Pacific Coast,” Willerslev added. “That now seems the most likely scenario.”
SMU scientists and their research have a global reach that is frequently noted, beyond peer publications and media mentions.
By Margaret Allen
SMU News & Communications
It was a good year for SMU faculty and student research efforts. Here is a small sampling of public and published acknowledgements during 2015:
Hot topic merits open access
Taylor & Francis, publisher of the online journal Environmental Education Research, lifted its subscription-only requirement to meet demand for an article on how climate change is taught to middle-schoolers in California.
Co-author of the research was Diego Román, assistant professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning, Annette Caldwell Simmons School of Education and Human Development.
Román’s research revealed that California textbooks are teaching sixth graders that climate change is a controversial debate stemming from differing opinions, rather than a scientific conclusion based on rigorous scientific evidence.
Research makes the cover of Biochemistry
Drugs important in the battle against cancer were tested in a virtual lab by SMU biology professors to see how they would behave in the human cell.
A computer-generated composite image of the simulation made the Dec. 15 cover of the journal Biochemistry.
Scientific articles about discoveries from the simulation were also published in the peer review journals Biochemistry and in Pharmacology Research & Perspectives.
The researchers tested the drugs by simulating their interaction in a computer-generated model of one of the cell’s key molecular pumps — the protein P-glycoprotein, or P-gp. Outcomes of interest were then tested in the Wise-Vogel wet lab.
The ongoing research is the work of biochemists John Wise, associate professor, and Pia Vogel, professor and director of the SMU Center for Drug Discovery, Design and Delivery in Dedman College. Assisting them were a team of SMU graduate and undergraduate students.
The researchers developed the model to overcome the problem of relying on traditional static images for the structure of P-gp. The simulation makes it possible for researchers to dock nearly any drug in the protein and see how it behaves, then test those of interest in an actual lab.
To date, the researchers have run millions of compounds through the pump and have discovered some that are promising for development into pharmaceutical drugs to battle cancer.
Strong interest in research on sexual victimization
Teen girls were less likely to report being sexually victimized after learning to assertively resist unwanted sexual overtures and after practicing resistance in a realistic virtual environment, according to three professors from the SMU Department of Psychology.
The finding was reported in Behavior Therapy. The article was one of the psychology journal’s most heavily shared and mentioned articles across social media, blogs and news outlets during 2015, the publisher announced.
The study was the work of Dedman College faculty Lorelei Simpson Rowe, associate professor and Psychology Department graduate program co-director; Ernest Jouriles, professor; and Renee McDonald, SMU associate dean for research and academic affairs.
Consumers assume bigger price equals better quality
Even when competing firms can credibly disclose the positive attributes of their products to buyers, they may not do so.
Instead, they find it more lucrative to “signal” quality through the prices they charge, typically working on the assumption that shoppers think a high price indicates high quality. The resulting high prices hurt buyers, and may create a case for mandatory disclosure of quality through public policy.
That was a finding of the research of Dedman College’s Santanu Roy, professor, Department of Economics. Roy’s article about the research was published in February in one of the blue-ribbon journals, and the oldest, in the field, The Economic Journal.
Published by the U.K.’s Royal Economic Society, The Economic Journal is one of the founding journals of modern economics. The journal issued a media briefing about the paper, “Competition, Disclosure and Signaling,” typically reserved for academic papers of broad public interest.
Chemistry research group edits special issue
Chemistry professors Dieter Cremer and Elfi Kraka, who lead SMU’s Computational and Theoretical Chemistry Group, were guest editors of a special issue of the prestigious Journal of Physical Chemistry. The issue published in March.
The Computational and Theoretical research group, called CATCO for short, is a union of computational and theoretical chemistry scientists at SMU. Their focus is research in computational chemistry, educating and training graduate and undergraduate students, disseminating and explaining results of their research to the broader public, and programming computers for the calculation of molecules and molecular aggregates.
The special issue of Physical Chemistry included 40 contributions from participants of a four-day conference in Dallas in March 2014 that was hosted by CATCO. The 25th Austin Symposium drew 108 participants from 22 different countries who, combined, presented eight plenary talks, 60 lectures and about 40 posters.
CATCO presented its research with contributions from Cremer and Kraka, as well as Marek Freindorf, research assistant professor; Wenli Zou, visiting professor; Robert Kalescky, post-doctoral fellow; and graduate students Alan Humason, Thomas Sexton, Dani Setlawan and Vytor Oliveira.
There have been more than 75 graduate students and research associates working in the CATCO group, which originally was formed at the University of Cologne, Germany, before moving to SMU in 2009.
Vertebrate paleontology recognized with proclamation
Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings proclaimed Oct. 11-17, 2015 Vertebrate Paleontology week in Dallas on behalf of the Dallas City Council.
The proclamation honored the 75th Annual Meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, which was jointly hosted by SMU’s Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences in Dedman College and the Perot Museum of Science and Nature. The conference drew to Dallas some 1,200 scientists from around the world.
Making research presentations or presenting research posters were: faculty members Bonnie Jacobs, Louis Jacobs, Michael Polcyn, Neil Tabor and Dale Winkler; adjunct research assistant professor Alisa Winkler; research staff member Kurt Ferguson; post-doctoral researchers T. Scott Myers and Lauren Michael; and graduate students Matthew Clemens, John Graf, Gary Johnson and Kate Andrzejewski.
The host committee co-chairs were Anthony Fiorillo, adjunct research professor; and Louis Jacobs, professor. Committee members included Polcyn; Christopher Strganac, graduate student; Diana Vineyard, research associate; and research professor Dale Winkler.
KERA radio reporter Kat Chow filed a report from the conference, explaining to listeners the science of vertebrate paleontology, which exposes the past, present and future of life on earth by studying fossils of animals that had backbones.
SMU earthquake scientists rock scientific journal
Modelled pressure changes caused by injection and production. (Nature Communications/SMU)
Findings by the SMU earthquake team reverberated across the nation with publication of their scientific article in the prestigious British interdisciplinary journal Nature, ranked as one of the world’s most cited scientific journals.
The article reported that the SMU-led seismology team found that high volumes of wastewater injection combined with saltwater extraction from natural gas wells is the most likely cause of unusually frequent earthquakes occurring in the Dallas-Fort Worth area near the small community of Azle.
The research was the work of Dedman College faculty Matthew Hornbach, associate professor of geophysics; Heather DeShon, associate professor of geophysics; Brian Stump, SMU Albritton Chair in Earth Sciences; Chris Hayward, research staff and director geophysics research program; and Beatrice Magnani, associate professor of geophysics.
The article, “Causal factors for seismicity near Azle, Texas,” published online in late April. Already the article has been downloaded nearly 6,000 times, and heavily shared on both social and conventional media. The article has achieved a ranking of 270, which puts it in the 99th percentile of 144,972 tracked articles of a similar age in all journals, and 98th percentile of 626 tracked articles of a similar age in Nature.
“It has a very high impact factor for an article of its age,” said Robert Gregory, professor and chair, SMU Earth Sciences Department.
The scientific article also was entered into the record for public hearings both at the Texas Railroad Commission and the Texas House Subcommittee on Seismic Activity.
Researchers settle long-debated heritage question of “The Ancient One”
The skull of Kennewick Man and a sculpted bust by StudioEIS based on forensic facial reconstruction by sculptor Amanda Danning. (Credit: Brittany Tatchell)
The research of Dedman College anthropologist and Henderson-Morrison Professor of Prehistory David Meltzer played a role in settling the long-debated and highly controversial heritage of “Kennewick Man.”
Also known as “The Ancient One,” the 8,400-year-old male skeleton discovered in Washington state has been the subject of debate for nearly two decades. Argument over his ancestry has gained him notoriety in high-profile newspaper and magazine articles, as well as making him the subject of intense scholarly study.
Officially the jurisdiction of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Kennewick Man was discovered in 1996 and radiocarbon dated to 8500 years ago.
Because of his cranial shape and size he was declared not Native American but instead ‘Caucasoid,’ implying a very different population had once been in the Americas, one that was unrelated to contemporary Native Americans.
But Native Americans long have claimed Kennewick Man as theirs and had asked for repatriation of his remains for burial according to their customs.
Meltzer, collaborating with his geneticist colleague Eske Willerslev and his team at the Centre for GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen, in June reported the results of their analysis of the DNA of Kennewick in the prestigious British journal Nature in the scientific paper “The ancestry and affiliations of Kennewick Man.”
The results were announced at a news conference, settling the question based on first-ever DNA evidence: Kennewick Man is Native American.
The announcement garnered national and international media attention, and propelled a new push to return the skeleton to a coalition of Columbia Basin tribes. Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) introduced the Bring the Ancient One Home Act of 2015 and Washington Gov. Jay Inslee has offered state assistance for returning the remains to Native Tribes.
Science named the Kennewick work one of its nine runners-up in the highly esteemed magazine’s annual “Breakthrough of the Year” competition.
The research article has been viewed more than 60,000 times. It has achieved a ranking of 665, which puts it in the 99th percentile of 169,466 tracked articles of a similar age in all journals, and in the 94th percentile of 958 tracked articles of a similar age in Nature.
In “Kennewick Man: coming to closure,” an article in the December issue of Antiquity, a journal of Cambridge University Press, Meltzer noted that the DNA merely confirmed what the tribes had known all along: “We are him, he is us,” said one tribal spokesman. Meltzer concludes: “We presented the DNA evidence. The tribal members gave it meaning.”
Prehistoric vacuum cleaner captures singular award
Paleontologists Louis L. Jacobs, SMU, and Anthony Fiorillo, Perot Museum, have identified a new species of marine mammal from bones recovered from Unalaska, an Aleutian island in the North Pacific. (Hillsman Jackson, SMU)
Science writer Laura Geggel with Live Science named a new species of extinct marine mammal identified by two SMU paleontologists among “The 10 Strangest Animal Discoveries of 2015.”
The new species, dubbed a prehistoric hoover by London’s Daily Mail online news site, was identified by SMU paleontologist Louis L. Jacobs, a professor in the Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences, Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences, and paleontologist and SMU adjunct research professor Anthony Fiorillo, vice president of research and collections and chief curator at the Perot Museum of Nature and Science.
Jacobs and Fiorillo co-authored a study about the identification of new fossils from the oddball creature Desmostylia, discovered in the same waters where the popular “Deadliest Catch” TV show is filmed. The hippo-like creature ate like a vacuum cleaner and is a new genus and species of the only order of marine mammals ever to go extinct — surviving a mere 23 million years.
Desmostylians, every single species combined, lived in an interval between 33 million and 10 million years ago. Their strange columnar teeth and odd style of eating don’t occur in any other animal, Jacobs said.
As noted by the CERN Courier — the news magazine of the CERN Laboratory in Geneva, which hosts the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest science experiment — more than 250 scientists from 30 countries presented more than 200 talks on a multitude of subjects relevant to experimental and theoretical research. SMU physicists presented at the conference.
The SMU organizing committee was led by Fred Olness, professor and chair of the SMU Department of Physics in Dedman College, who also gave opening and closing remarks at the conference. The committee consisted of other SMU faculty, including Jodi Cooley, associate professor; Simon Dalley, senior lecturer; Robert Kehoe, professor; Pavel Nadolsky, associate professor, who also presented progress on experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider; Randy Scalise, senior lecturer; and Stephen Sekula, associate professor.
Sekula also organized a series of short talks for the public about physics and the big questions that face us as we try to understand our universe.
Karitiana children in their village near Porto Velho, Rondonia, Brazil. Scientists found that some people in the Brazilian Amazon have an ancient genetic tie to indigenous Australians, New Guineans and other Australasians. (Credit: New York Times)
New York Times reporter James Gorman interviewed SMU’s David Meltzer, a professor in the SMU Department of Anthropology in the Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences, about a new large genome-scale study that revealed that the ancestors of all present-day Native Americans arrived in the Americas as part of a single migration wave, no earlier than 23,000 years ago.
The finding addresses the ongoing debate over when and how many times the ancestors of present-day Native Americans entered the New World from Siberia.
Meltzer was a co-author on the study, which was conducted by an international team headed by the Centre for GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen. It published online July 23, 2015 in Science.
Meltzer’s research focus is on the origins, antiquity, and adaptations of the first Americans – Paleoindians – who colonized the North American continent at the end of the Ice Age. He focuses on how these hunter-gatherers met the challenges of moving across and adapting to the vast, ecologically diverse landscape of Late Glacial North America during a time of significant climate change.
Book a live interview
To book a live or taped interview with David Meltzer in the SMU News Broadcast Studio contact SMU News at 214-768-7650 or news@smu.edu.
His research has been supported by grants from the National Geographic Society, the National Science Foundation, The Potts and Sibley Foundation and the Smithsonian Institution. In 1996, he received a research endowment from Joseph and Ruth Cramer to establish the Quest Archaeological Research Program at SMU, which will support in perpetuity research on the earliest occupants of North America.
Meltzer is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and is Henderson-Morrison Professor of Prehistory in SMU’s Dedman College.
The New York Times article published July 21, 2015.
Some people in the Brazilian Amazon are very distant relations of indigenous Australians, New Guineans and other Australasians, two groups of scientists who conducted detailed genetic analyses reported Tuesday. But the researchers disagree on the source of that ancestry.
The connection is ancient, all agree, and attributable to Eurasian migrants to the Americas who had some Australasian ancestry, the scientists said.
But one group said the evidence is clear that two different populations came from Siberia to settle the Americas 15,000 or more years ago. The other scientific team says there was only one founding population from which all indigenous Americans, except for the Inuit, descended and the Australasian DNA came later, and not through a full-scale migration. For instance, genes could have flowed through a kind of chain of intermarriage and mixing between groups living in the Aleutian Islands and down the Pacific Coast.
Both papers were based on comparisons of patterns in the genomes of many living individuals from different genetic groups and geographic regions, and of ancient skeletons.
David Reich of Harvard, the senior author of a paper published Tuesday in the journal Nature, said the DNA pattern was “surprising and unexpected, and we weren’t really looking for it.” [….]
[….] David Meltzer, an anthropologist and archaeologist at Southern Methodist University and another author of the Science paper, said the difference in interpretation between the two groups was “not an irresolvable problem.” More analysis of ancient DNA or the discovery of a new skeleton could provide an answer.
SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.
SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.
Scientists are analyzing ancient and modern DNA to learn more about how people first colonized the Americas. Pictured here: tools discovered in 1968 at a Clovis-era burial site in western Montana, alongside remains of a boy who died more than 12,000 years ago, known as Anzick-1. The child’s DNA was used as a basis for comparison in two new genetics studies released on Tuesday. (Sarah L. Anzick / AP)
Los Angeles Times reporter Eryn Brown interviewed SMU’s David Meltzer, a professor in the SMU Department of Anthropology in the Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences, about a new large genome-scale study that revealed that the ancestors of all present-day Native Americans arrived in the Americas as part of a single migration wave, no earlier than 23,000 years ago.
The finding addresses the ongoing debate over when and how many times the ancestors of present-day Native Americans entered the New World from Siberia.
Meltzer was a co-author on the study, which was conducted by an international team headed by the Centre for GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen. It published online July 23, 2015 in Science.
Meltzer’s research focus is on the origins, antiquity, and adaptations of the first Americans – Paleoindians – who colonized the North American continent at the end of the Ice Age. He focuses on how these hunter-gatherers met the challenges of moving across and adapting to the vast, ecologically diverse landscape of Late Glacial North America during a time of significant climate change.
Book a live interview
To book a live or taped interview with David Meltzer in the SMU News Broadcast Studio contact SMU News at 214-768-7650 or news@smu.edu.
His research has been supported by grants from the National Geographic Society, the National Science Foundation, The Potts and Sibley Foundation and the Smithsonian Institution. In 1996, he received a research endowment from Joseph and Ruth Cramer to establish the Quest Archaeological Research Program at SMU, which will support in perpetuity research on the earliest occupants of North America.
Meltzer is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and is Henderson-Morrison Professor of Prehistory in SMU’s Dedman College.
The Los Angeles Times article published July 21, 2015.
This week, two teams of scientists released reports detailing the origins of Native American peoples. Both groups looked at ancient and modern DNA to attempt to learn more about the movements of populations from Asia into the New World, and about how groups mixed once they got here. Both discovered a hint that some Native Americans in South America share ancestry with native peoples in Australia and Melanesia.
But the two groups came to different conclusions when it came to how that DNA with ties to Oceania made its way into the Native American genome.
In a wide-ranging paper in the journal Science, University of Copenhagen Centre for GeoGenetics Director Eske Willerslev and coauthors studied genomes from ancient and modern people in the Americas and Asia. They concluded that migrations into the New World had to have occurred in a single wave from Siberia, timed no earlier than 23,000 years ago. They also calculated that any genes shared with Australo-Melanesian peoples must have been contributed through relatively recent population mixing.
In the meantime, Harvard Medical School geneticist David Reich and colleagues, focusing more closely on the Australo-Melanesian genes in a study published in Nature, came to a different conclusion: that the DNA had to have arrived in the Americas very long ago and that founding migrations occurred in more than one wave.
“It was crazy and unexpected and very weird and we spent the last year and a half trying to understand it,” Reich said on Monday. But “it’s inconsistent to a single founding population. People in Amazonia have ancestry from two divergent sources…we think this is a real observation.”
David Meltzer, an archaeologist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas and a coauthor of the Science paper, said that researchers in his field had been wrestling with the early history of the Americas for centuries — debating when the first settlers arrived here, whether there were pulses of migrations, and so on.
SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.
SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.
No support for ‘Paleoamerican Model,’ which holds that Central and South American groups were relicts of an early and separate migration into the Americas
This area around the confluence of the Silverthrone and Klinaklini Glaciers in southwestern British Columbia provides a glimpse into how the terrain traveled by Native Americans in Pleistocene times may have appeared. (Credit: David J. Meltzer).
A new large genome-scale study reveals that the ancestors of all present-day Native Americans arrived in the Americas as part of a single migration wave, no earlier than 23,000 years ago.
The finding addresses the ongoing debate over when and how many times the ancestors of present-day Native Americans entered the New World from Siberia.
There is archaeological evidence of modern humans in the Americas by about 15,000 years ago.
The new study was conducted by an international team headed by the Centre for GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen.
“With this study,” said study co-author David J. Meltzer, in the Department of Anthropology, Southern Methodist University, “we are not only addressing key questions related to the peopling of the Americas, we are beginning to integrate the archaeological, anatomical and genetic evidence bearing on that process.”
Book a live interview
To book a live or taped interview with David Meltzer in the SMU News Broadcast Studio contact SMU News at 214-768-7650 or news@smu.edu.
Within the Americas, the ancestral Native American pool diversified into two basal branches around 13 thousand years ago. The team also reports a later gene flow into some Native Americans from groups related to present-day East Asians and Australo-Melanesians.
Finally, the results from this study show no support for certain historical Central and South American groups with distinctive cranial morphology being relicts of an early and separate migration into the Americas, as proposed by the ‘Paleoamerican Model’.
Debate centers around demographic processes that led to peopling of Americas
Although there is little disagreement in the scientific literature that the ancestors of present-day Native Americans originated in Siberia, debate over the demographic processes that led to the peopling of the Americas still persists.
Experts know through archaeological sites such as Monte Verde in Chile that humans were present in the Americas by about 15,000 years ago.
The question remains, however, as to when the first Native Americans cross over from Siberia into the New World?
Did they arrive in a single wave or did successive migration waves give rise to the genetic diversity prevalent among present-day Native Americans? Did they split from their Old World ancestors and immediately cross into the Americas? Or was there, as one genetic model suggests, an “incubation” period in Beringia, the now-inundated land bridge that connected northeastern Siberia to Alaska? And if they came in a single wave, when did the ancestral Native American population split into the genetic branches seen today among their descendants?
Tracing the initial migrations into the Americas
To develop details of when and how the Americas were peopled, the team generated genomic data from several present-day Native American and Siberian populations, which are poorly represented in the genetic literature.
The researchers also sequenced ancient samples from across the Americas, spanning about 6,000 to 200 years ago to trace the genetic structure over time.
“Our study presents the most comprehensive picture of the genetic prehistory of the Americas to date,” said one lead author Maanasa Raghavan, a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for GeoGenetics. “We show that all Native Americans, including the major sub-groups of Amerindians and Athabascans, descend from the same migration wave into the Americas. This was distinct from later waves that gave rise to the Paleo-Eskimo and Inuit populations in the New World Arctic region.”
This initial migration of the ancestors of all present-day Native Americans happened no earlier than 23,000 years ago, the new study found.
That represents the split date of Native Americans from East Asian and Siberian populations and is very similar for both Amerindians and Athabascans, which confirms that both groups arrived into the New World as part of the same migration.
“We applied several statistical methods that differ in modelling or utilize different information in the data,” said Yun Song, a study co-author and a professor at the University of California at Berkeley. “That we obtained consistent results across different methods is significant and reassuring.”
It is likely that after diverging from Old World populations around 23,000 years ago, the ancestral Native Americans remained isolated in Beringia for about 8 thousand years ago, given that the earliest archaeological evidence for humans in the Americas is around 15 thousand years ago.
A timeline of the genomic landscape of the Americas
Since Amerindians and Athabascans were part of the same migration into the Americas, the current genetic differences observed between them would have emerged sometime after 23,000 years ago.
The team found evidence for a split in the ancestral Native American gene pool that lead to the formation of two distinct genetic branches, namely the northern and southern branches, and that this split occurred about 13,000 years ago.
The northern branch was found to be present in northern North America and included both northern Amerindian groups as well as Athabascans. The southern branch, in contrast, included Amerindians from southern North America and Central and South America.
“We can date this split so precisely in part because we previously have analyzed the 12,600 years ago remains of a boy associated with the first unique Native American culture – the Clovis culture,”said study co-author Rasmus Nielsen from the Department of Integrative Biology at the University of California at Berkeley. “The first diversification of the ancestors of modern Native Americans happened in the Americas and likely just before — or at the time of — the appearance of the Clovis culture.”
When comparing the genetic affiliations of sequenced ancient samples from the Americas, the team found that several samples were genetically more closely related to modern-day populations from the same geographical location. This result indicates that there was a genetic and geographic continuity of Native American groups across the millennia in at least some parts of the Americas.
A recent Old World connection
The study reports a signal of gene flow between some Native Americans and groups related to present-day East Asians and Australo-Melanesians, the latter including Papuans, Solomon Islanders and South East Asian hunter-gatherer groups.
While the signal is weak, it presents an intriguing scenario of a distant Old World connection to Native Americans after their split from one another and after the latter had peopled the Americas.
“It’s a surprising finding and it implies that New World population were not completely isolated from the Old World after their initial migration,” said study leader Eske Willerslev, Lundbeck Foundation Professor from the Centre for GeoGenetics at the Natural History Museum, University of Copenhagen. “We cannot say exactly how and when this gene flow happened, but one possibility is that it came through the Aleutian Islanders living off the coast of Alaska.”
A genetic relationship with the Australo-Melanesians, however weak, invokes a highly debated hypothesis in the scientific literature that suggests, based on cranial morphology, that populations related to Australo-Melanesians were part of a separate migration. From them, that gave rise to the earliest Americans (Paleoamericans), who were later replaced by the ancestors of present-day Native Americans.
Genomic analyses indicates Palaeoamericans related to preseng-day Native Americans
The current study undertook genomic analyses on historical Central and South American populations considered to be relicts of Paleoamericans, namely the Pericúes and Fuego-Patagonians. It found no evidence, however, for them being closely related to Australo-Melanesians.
On the contrary, the results show that they were genetically closest to present-day Native Americans, a finding supported by re-analysis of cranial morphological evidence.
“Our findings show that supposed Palaeoamerican relict populations, such as the Pericúes and Fuego-Patagonians, belong to the same population as present-day Native Americans and that the distinct cranial morphology of these groups is not a consequence of a distinct migration history,” said one of the lead authors, Cristina Valdiosera, a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for GeoGenetics.
The lines of evidence do not, as yet, fully converge, said SMU’s Meltzer, an expert on the prehistoric Native American Clovis culture.
“For example, was there a causal link between the Clovis expansion known archaeologically and the genetic divergence of the northern and southern branches?” he said. “If so, how does the evidence of a pre-Clovis presence at sites such as Monte Verde fit in? As more archaeological sites and remains are dated and ancient and modern genomes are sequenced, we will be able to resolve these issues, and develop a more precise record of the colonization of what was then a truly New World.”
Willerslev said the study also seems to have challenged older hypotheses such as a Beringian incubation for Native American ancestors for tens of thousands of years; entrance to the Americas much earlier than the Last Glacial Maximum; and, independent migrations of Amerindians and Athabascan ancestors into the Americas.
“At the same time, we see surprises including genetic signals of East Asians and Australo-Melanesians, presumably coming in after the first migration wave,” he said. — University of Copenhagen, SMU
SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.
SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.
The skull of Kennewick Man and a sculpted bust by StudioEIS based on forensic facial reconstruction by sculptor Amanda Danning. (Credit: Brittany Tatchell)
Meltzer was part of a new study, “The Ancestry and Affiliations of Kennewick Man” in the journal Nature, that analyzed Kennewick Man’s genome sequence and found that Kennewick Man is more closely related to modern Native Americans than to any other population worldwide.
The study was led by the Centre for GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen and was published online June 18, 2015 in Nature.
Meltzer researches the origins, antiquity, and adaptations of the first Americans – Paleoindians – who colonized the North American continent at the end of the Ice Age. He focuses on how these hunter-gatherers met the challenges of moving across and adapting to the vast, ecologically diverse landscape of Late Glacial North America during a time of significant climate change.
Book a live interview
To book a live or taped interview with David Meltzer in the SMU News Broadcast Studio contact SMU News at 214-768-7650 or news@smu.edu.
Meltzer’s archaeology and history research has been supported by grants from the National Geographic Society, the National Science Foundation, The Potts and Sibley Foundation and the Smithsonian Institution. In 1996, he received a research endowment from Joseph and Ruth Cramer to establish the Quest Archaeological Research Program at SMU, which will support in perpetuity research on the earliest occupants of North America.
Meltzer is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the Henderson-Morrison Professor of Prehistory in SMU’s Dedman College.
Nearly two decades after an ancient skeleton was discovered in Kennewick, Washington, scientists finally have a better idea about its hotly-debated origins. SMU anthropologist David Meltzer co-authored a recent study into what’s been dubbed the Kennewick Man.
Interview Highlights: David Meltzer …
… on the age of the ‘Kennewick Man’: “Kennewick man is about 8,500 years old and that’s based on radiocarbon dating of the actual skeleton, and his origins have been quite controversial. The question was: Was he related to modern day Native Americans or does he represent an earlier population that came into the new world, which was in turn subsequently replaced by modern day Native Americans? What the DNA evidence shows is he was one of them, he was a Native American.”
… on why it took so long to figure out his origins: “In the late 90s, DNA efforts were made to recover something, but in those days the techniques and technologies was so very primitive. You needed a decade or more of ancient DNA work to bring it up to speed to make it possible to reconstruct Kennewick’s DNA.”
… on how the research turned into a lawsuit: “The Army Corps of Engineers, at the request of the Native American tribes, sought to reinter Kennewick into the ground immediately. The tribes had made the argument that Kennewick was one of their ancestors and that therefore his remains fell under what is referred to as NAGPRA or the ‘Native Americans Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.’ A number of individuals sued in turn claiming that he wasn’t a Native American and therefore NAGPRA does not apply. The lawsuit started in the fall of 1996, it was finally resolved in 2004. An appeals court said he’s not a Native American [and to go] ahead and do a study. Here’s the ironic part — as a part of that study, a bit of the bone was provided to my colleague … who analyzed the DNA, which demonstrates in fact that he is a Native American. The lawsuit to basically show that he wasn’t turned out to show that in the end, he was.”
SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.
SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.
New study based on skeleton’s genome sequence shows Kennewick Man is in fact more closely related to modern Native Americans
The locale in Washington State where Kennewick Man was discovered in 1996.
An 8,500-year-old male skeleton discovered in 1996 in the Columbia River in Washington State has been the focus of a bitter dispute between Native Americans and American scientists, and even within the American scientific community. Craniometric analysis showed that Kennewick Man, as the skeleton was named, resembled populations in Japan, Polynesia or even Europe, suggesting he was not ancestral to Native Americans, a finding that helped block Native Americans’ request for a repatriation of the skeleton.
Now a new study, “The Ancestry and Affiliations of Kennewick Man” in the journal Nature, based on his genome sequence shows that Kennewick Man is in fact more closely related to modern Native Americans, than to any other population worldwide and, further, that the earlier craniometrics analyses cannot be supported.
The study was led by the Centre for GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen and is published online June 18, 2015 in Nature.
The human skeletal remains of “Kennewick Man were found below the surface of Lake Wallula, a section of the Columbia River. (Credit: J. Chatters)
When Kennewick Man was discovered in 1996 initial cranial analysis suggested that he was a historic-period Euro-American. Later radiocarbon dating of the bones revealed an age of about 8,000-9,000 years Before the Present making him pre-Columbian in age. This sparked a legal battle over the disposition of the skeletal remains.
Tribes inhabiting the region where Kennewick Man was found requested the remains to be turned over to them for reburial based on him being Native American and ancestor to them.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which managed the land where the skeleton was found, was prepared to do so. However, this was blocked by a lawsuit by eight scientists questioning his Native American origins and generated a scientific stir as to Kennewick Man’s ancestry and affiliation.
The lawsuit lacerated the anthropological community, badly damaged relations with Native American groups, and triggered a divisive, long-running and expensive legal tug of war that ended in 2004 with a ruling in favor of a more detailed study, a study published in 2014.
The skull of Kennewick Man and a sculpted bust by StudioEIS based on forensic facial reconstruction by sculptor Amanda Danning. (Credit: Brittany Tatchell)
Kennewick Man – a Native American ancestor The 2014 study included isotopic, anatomical and morphometric analysis. That study concluded that Kennewick Man resembles circumpacific populations, particularly the Japanese Ainu and Polynesians and also has certain “European-like morphological” traits, and reinforced the claim that he was anatomically distinct from modern Native Americans.
Book a live interview
To book a live or taped interview with David Meltzer in the SMU News Broadcast Studio contact SMU News at 214-768-7650 or news@smu.edu.
However, those recent studies did not include DNA analysis, which prompted a new study of the genome sequence of Kennewick. Leader of this new study is geneticist and Lundbeck Foundation Professor Eske Willerslev from the Centre for GeoGenetics, University of Copenhagen – a center funded by the Danish National Research Foundation. About the new results Willerslev says:
“Comparing the genome sequence of Kennewick Man to genome wide data of contemporary human populations across the world clearly shows that Native Americans of today are his closest living relatives. Our study further shows that members of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation that belongs to the Claimant Plateau tribes of the Pacific Northwest, who originally claimed him as their ancestor, is one of the groups showing close affinities to Kennewick Man or at least to the population to which he belonged.”
And anthropologist David Meltzer from the Department of Anthropology, Southern Methodist University in Dallas adds:
“The trail from past to present is often poorly marked in the archaeological record, making it difficult to follow a people through time by their changing artifacts or their rarely encountered and often fragmentary skeletal remains. With the recovery and careful analysis of ancient DNA, we can better follow that trail: in Kennewick’s case, it leads unerringly to Native Americans.”
Rejecting a hypothesis Working in an ultraclean and over-pressurized laboratory first author on the paper Postdoctoral researcher Morten Rasmussen from the Centre for GeoGenetics has been heavily involved with analyzing Kennewick’s bones. Rasmussen says:
“Although the exterior preservation of the skeleton was pristine, the DNA in the sample was highly degraded and dominated by DNA from soil bacteria and other environmental sources. With the little material we had available, we applied the newest methods to squeeze every piece of information out of the bone.”
About the results seen in a global context Associate Professor Martin Sikora from the Centre for GeoGenetics says:
“The wealth of genomic data available for modern humans allowed us to directly test whether the Kennewick Man was more closely related to populations other than Native Americans, such as the Ainu or peoples from Polynesia. What we found instead was that he was only distantly related to those peoples, therefore clearly rejecting that hypothesis.”
However, the researchers have also been able to narrow Kennewick Man’s affiliations to modern Native Americans. Rasmus Nielsen is Professor at the Department of Integrative Biology, University of California, Berkeley. On this issue Nielsen says:
“For an 8,500 year old sample, we will probably never be able to show affiliation with any specific tribe, but we can show that the Kennewick Man is more closely related to some members of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation in the state of Washington, than to many other contemporary Native Americans.”
Still a loose end Rather than developing new DNA methods for analyzing the genome data the researchers chose standard and widely accepted methods for analyzing ancient DNA. One thing that always lurks in the background of this kind of work is contamination from modern DNA. Associate Professor Anders Albrechtsen from the Biological Institute, University of Copenhagen, has been involved in the part of bioinformatics. About the danger of contamination in the present study Albrechtsen says:
“Ancient samples have very little endogenous DNA. Therefore, we have to be extremely careful not to contaminate the samples with even the slightest amount of modern DNA. In this study we were successful in obtaining human DNA that almost exclusively was of ancient origin and we were able to show that the source of the DNA was a single individual; the Kennewick Man.”
As the earlier data from Kennewick Man had been based on cranial morphology the research group chose also to make use of this method. Professor Christoph Zollikofer and Dr. Marcia Ponce de León from the Anthropological Institute, University of Zurich are world-leading experts on cranial analyses. They did not make new measurements but re-examined the earlier data and concluded the following:
“We started with the observation that cranial variation within human populations – both past and present – is high, and that it is typically higher than variation among populations. One important consequence of this is that, for single individuals such as Kennewick Man, cranial data do not reliably indicate population affiliations. In fact, drawing reliable inferences requires hundreds of independent features – precisely the kind of information that is now available through the new genomic analyses.”
The new study pinpoints the population origins of this heretofore highly controversial find along the banks of the Columbia River in Washington, but comes short of naming the closest modern day relatives. Professor Eske Willerslev ends:
“It is important to emphasize that currently it is not possible to identify which modern Native Americans are most closely related to Kennewick Man, since our comparative DNA database is limited, particularly for Native American groups in the United States. However, among the groups for which we have sufficient genetic data, we find that the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation to be one of the groups showing close affinities to Kennewick Man or at least to the population to which he belonged. Additional modern descendants could be identified as more Native American groups are sequenced. — University of Copenhagen, SMU
SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.
SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.
AAAS is the world’s largest general scientific society and publisher of the journal Science. Stump, Albritton Chair of Geological Sciences in the Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences in SMU’s Dedman College, is the fifth professor at Southern Methodist University to be recognized as an AAAS Fellow.
“Dr. Stump is a scientist of the first rank and brings the results of his outstanding research into the classroom, where his students benefit from his example and insights as a scholar,” said SMU President R. Gerald Turner. “He richly deserves the AAAS recognition by his peers and we are proud that he calls SMU home.”
Stump is well known regionally for his continued work researching the increase of small earthquakes that have been occurring in North Texas since 2008.
But his work in detecting ground motion from explosions has for more than 20 years proved invaluable to the United States government in ensuring that the world’s nuclear powers abide by their agreements related to underground nuclear testing.
“Brian’s work has been seminal in scientists’ ability to rapidly and accurately discern the difference between an earthquake, a conventional explosion — such as might occur in a mining accident — and a nuclear test,” said James E. Quick, SMU vice president for research and dean of graduate studies. “His research is tremendously important to all of us, and yet he is equally committed to teaching and serving as a mentor to young faculty.”
Stump served as scientific adviser to the U.S. delegation to the Conference on Disarmament from 1994 through 1996 and continues to be called upon frequently to assist the U.S. government in the interpretation of seismic and acoustic data.
“I’m humbled by the recognition by the AAAS that science impacts the society in which we live,” Stump said. “I really believe that. And the work we’ve done at SMU on inducted seismicity in North Texas has that same blend of real science and societal impact.”
For the last five years Stump has chaired the Air Force Technical Applications Center Seismic Review Panel, which provides a review of federally funded efforts in nuclear monitoring. He served as a committee member on the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Seismology and Continental Dynamics from 2007 through 2012, and recently completed a term as board chair for Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (IRIS), a consortium of more than 100 universities funded by the National Science Foundation.
Stump joined SMU in 1983 from the Seismology Section of the Air Force Weapons Laboratory at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico. He graduated summa cum laude from Linfield College in McMinnville, Ore. with a bachelor of arts in physics in 1974, received a master of arts from the University of California at Berkeley in 1975 and received his Ph.D. in geophysics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1979 after completing a thesis titled Investigation of Seismic Sources by the Linear Inversion of Seismograms.
SMU faculty previously named as AAAS Fellows are James Quick, volcanologist and research dean, who was named a Fellow in 2013; environmental biochemistry scholar Paul W. Ludden, SMU provost and vice president for academic affairs and a professor in the Department of Biological Sciences, who was named a Fellow in 2003; anthropologist David J. Meltzer, Henderson-Morrison Professor of Prehistory in the Department of Anthropology who was named a Fellow in 1998; and James E. Brooks, provost emeritus and professor emeritus in the Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences, who was named a Fellow in 1966.
The AAAS Fellows program began in 1874. AAAS members may be considered for the rank of fellow if nominated by the steering group of their respective sections, by three fellows, or by the association’s chief executive officer. Each steering group then reviews the nominations of individuals within its respective section and forwards a final list to the AAAS Council, which votes on the final list of fellows.
The Council is the policy making body of the AAAS, chaired by the president, and consisting of the members of the board of directors, the retiring section chairs, delegates from each electorate and each regional division, and two delegates from the National Association of Academies of Science. — Kimberly Cobb
A member of the National Academy of Sciences, Meltzer researches the origins, antiquity, and adaptations of the first Americans who colonized the North American continent at the end of the Ice Age. He focuses on how these hunter-gatherers met the challenges of moving across and adapting to the vast, ecologically diverse landscape of Late Glacial North America during a time of significant climate change.
The Zimbabwe Star, from the IANS news service, highlights Meltzer’s latest study to show that a comet, or any other kind of extraterrestrial impact, was not responsible for sudden climate change at the end of the Ice Age 12,800 years ago. Proponents of the comet-impact theory have pointed to sedimentary deposits that they say prove that an object from outer space hit the Earth, extinguishing the Clovis culture and causing the mass extinction of many animals.
Zimbabwe Star (IANS)
Archaeologists have debunked the cosmic-impact theory that a comet sparked climate change at the end of the Ice Age, causing mass animal extinction.
According to the study, led by archaeologist David Meltzer from Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, nearly all sediment layers purported to be from the Ice Age at 29 sites in North America and on three other continents are actually either much younger or much older.
Meltzer and his co-authors found that only three of 29 sites commonly referenced to support the cosmic-impact theory actually date to the window of time for the Ice Age.
“The supposed impact markers are undated or significantly older or younger than 12,800 years ago. Either there were many more impacts than supposed, including one as recently as five centuries ago, or, far more likely, these are not extraterrestrial impact markers,” Meltzer noted.
Scientists agree that the brief episode at the end of the Ice Age – officially known as the Younger Dryas for a flower that flourished at that time – sparked widespread cooling of the earth 12,800 years ago and that this cool period lasted for 1,000 years.
But theories about the cause of this abrupt climate change are numerous.
They range from changes in ocean circulation patterns caused by glacial meltwater entering the ocean to the cosmic-impact theory.
Meltzer and his colleagues sorted the 29 sites by the availability of radiometric or numeric ages and then the type of age control, if available, and whether the age control is secure.
SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.
SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.
A member of the National Academy of Sciences, Meltzer researches the origins, antiquity, and adaptations of the first Americans who colonized the North American continent at the end of the Ice Age. He focuses on how these hunter-gatherers met the challenges of moving across and adapting to the vast, ecologically diverse landscape of Late Glacial North America during a time of significant climate change.
The Daily Mail piece by Jonathan O’Callaghn highlights Meltzer’s latest study to show that a comet, or any other kind of extraterrestrial impact, was not responsible for sudden climate change at the end of the Ice Age 12,800 years ago. Proponents of the comet-impact theory have pointed to sedimentary deposits that they say prove that an object from outer space hit the Earth, extinguishing the Clovis culture and causing the mass extinction of many animals.
By Jonathan O’Callaghan
Daily Mail
It has long been though that a comet struck Earth 12,800 years ago, bringing an end to the Ice Age.
This event was thought to have not only sparked climate change, but also killed America’s earliest people and caused a mass animal extinction.
But a new study suggests this comet theory is false, as most supposed impact indicators at 29 sites are too old or too young to be remnants of an ancient comet.
Controversy over what sparked the Younger Dryas, a brief return to near glacial conditions at the end of the Ice Age, includes a theory that it was caused by a comet hitting the Earth.
As proof, proponents point to sediments containing deposits they believe could result only from a cosmic impact.
Now a new study disproves that theory, said archaeologist David Meltzer of the Southern Methodist University in Dallas.
Meltzer is lead author on the study and an expert in the Clovis culture, the peoples who lived in North America at the end of the Ice Age.
His research team found that nearly all sediment layers purported to be from the Ice Age at 29 sites in North America and on three other continents are actually either much younger or much older.
Scientists agree that the brief episode at the end of the Ice Age – officially known as the Younger Dryas after a flower that flourished at that time – sparked widespread cooling of the Earth 12,800 years ago and that this cool period lasted for 1,000 years.
But theories about the cause of this abrupt climate change are numerous; they range from changes in ocean circulation patterns caused by glacial meltwater entering the ocean to the cosmic-impact theory.
The cosmic-impact theory is said to be supported by the presence of geological indicators that are extraterrestrial in origin.
However a review of the dating of the sediments at the 29 sites reported to have such indicators proves the cosmic-impact theory false, said Meltzer.
Meltzer and his co-authors found that only three of 29 sites commonly referenced to support the cosmic-impact theory actually date to the window of time for the Ice Age.
SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.
SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.
A member of the National Academy of Sciences, Meltzer researches the origins, antiquity, and adaptations of the first Americans who colonized the North American continent at the end of the Ice Age. He focuses on how these hunter-gatherers met the challenges of moving across and adapting to the vast, ecologically diverse landscape of Late Glacial North America during a time of significant climate change.
The Science piece by Michael Balter highlights Meltzer’s latest study to show that a comet, or any other kind of extraterrestrial impact, was not responsible for sudden climate change at the end of the Ice Age 12,800 years ago. Proponents of the comet-impact theory have pointed to sedimentary deposits that they say prove that an object from outer space hit the Earth, extinguishing the Clovis culture and causing the mass extinction of many animals.
By Michael Balter
Science
Things were looking up for Earth about 12,800 years ago. The last Ice Age was coming to an end, mammoths and other large mammals romped around North America, and humans were beginning to settle down and cultivate wild plants. Then, suddenly, the planet plunged into a deep freeze, returning to near-glacial temperatures for more than a millennium before getting warm again. The mammoths disappeared at about the same time, as did a major Native American culture that thrived on hunting them. A persistent band of researchers has blamed this apparent disaster on the impact of a comet or asteroid, but a new study concludes that the real explanation for the chill, at least, may lie strictly with Earth-bound events.
The study “pulls the rug out from under the contrived impact hypothesis quite nicely,” says Christian Koeberl, a geochemist at the University of Vienna. Most evidence for the extraterrestrial impact hypothesis, he says, was conjured up “out of thin air.”
The 1300-year big chill is known as the Younger Dryas, so-called because of the sudden worldwide appearance of the cold-weather flowering plant Dryas octopetala. A number of causes have been suggested, including changes in ocean currents due to melting glaciers and volcanic activity. In 2007, a diverse group of 26 researchers, led by nuclear chemist Richard Firestone of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, formally proposed what is known as the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis, in which one or more extraterrestrial bodies blew up over North America, leading to widespread wildfires and strewing sun-blocking dust and debris across the globe.
In a series of papers, Firestone and his colleagues claimed various kinds of evidence for the hypothesis, including deposits of the element iridium (rare on Earth but abundant in meteorites), microscopic diamonds (called nanodiamonds), and magnetic particles in deposits at sites supposedly dated to about 12,800 years ago. The notion was popularized in television documentaries and other coverage on the National Geographic Channel, History Channel, and the PBS program NOVA. These claims were sharply contested by some specialists in the relevant fields, however, who either did not detect such evidence or argued that the deposits had other causes than a cosmic impact. For example, some say that nanodiamonds are common in ordinary geological formations, and that magnetic particles could come from ordinary fires.
Now comes what some researchers consider the strongest attack yet on the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis. In a paper published online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team led by David Meltzer, an archaeologist at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, in Texas, looks at the dating of 29 different sites in the Americas, Europe, and the Middle East in which impact advocates have reported evidence for a cosmic collision. They include sites in which sophisticated stone projectiles called Clovis points, used by some of the earliest Americans to hunt mammals beginning about 13,000 years ago, have been found, such as Chobot in Alberta, Canada, Murray Springs in Arizona, and Paw Paw Cove in Maryland; the site of Abu Hureyra in Syria, where evidence of plant-cultivating hunter-gatherers occurs; and sites in Greenland, Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands where other evidence for an impact has been claimed. The team argues that when the quality and accuracy of the dating—which was based on radiocarbon and other techniques—is examined closely, only three of the 29 sites actually fall within the time frame of the Younger Dryas onset, about 12,800 years ago; the rest were probably either earlier or later by hundreds (and in one case, thousands) of years.
SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.
SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.
A member of the National Academy of Sciences, Meltzer researches the origins, antiquity, and adaptations of the first Americans who colonized the North American continent at the end of the Ice Age. He focuses on how these hunter-gatherers met the challenges of moving across and adapting to the vast, ecologically diverse landscape of Late Glacial North America during a time of significant climate change.
The Nature piece by Alexandra Witze focuses on Meltzer’s latest study to show that a comet, or any other kind of extraterrestrial impact, was not responsible for sudden climate change at the end of the Ice Age 12,800 years ago.
Proponents of the comet-impact theory have pointed to sedimentary deposits that they say prove that an object from outer space hit the Earth, killing the Clovis culture and causing the mass extinction of many animals.
By Alexandra Witze
Nature
One of the most controversial ideas about prehistoric North America — that an impact by an extraterrestrial object 12,800 years ago triggered a cold snap that killed off mammoths and decimated early human populations — is under fresh attack. Independent archaeologists have reanalysed the dates of geological material that reportedly represents the impact, and found that they do not match.
Supporters of the impact theory have put forth 29 sites, from North America to Europe and beyond, that contain a thin layer of sediments said to date to the start of the cosmic impact event. The latest study checked to see whether those sites were all really 12,800 years old.
Only 3 of the 29 are, the researchers report today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1. The other sites either have not been dated using the usual radiometric methods, or are much older or younger than the reported impact. “The chronology doesn’t hold up,” says team leader David Meltzer, an archaeologist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas.
There is no doubt that something important happened in this region around 12,800 years ago. Temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere plummeted in a cold spell known as the Younger Dryas, and sophisticated hunters known as the Clovis people vanished from what is now the western United States. Many of North America’s famous large mammals, such as mammoths, went extinct
Carbon footprint
Impact proponents say that many lines of evidence point to a cosmic object crashing into Earth at the time2. These include reported tiny diamonds formed in the high pressure of an impact, and soot and charcoal from fires possibly triggered by the smash. Opponents counter that there are other explanations for these materials, and that a comet blast should have left a huge fingerprint in the geological record — but nothing of the sort has been found.
Meltzer’s team includes experts on North American Palaeoindians. “We know some of these sites, we’ve worked at some of these sites,” he says. “When we started to read the details [of the impact theory], it just didn’t add up.”
SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.
SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.[/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]
Most supposed impact indicators at 29 sites are too old or too young to be remnants of an ancient comet that proponents claim sparked climate change at the end of the Ice Age, killed America’s earliest people and caused a mass animal extinction
Controversy over what sparked the Younger Dryas, a brief return to near glacial conditions at the end of the Ice Age, includes a theory that it was caused by a comet hitting the Earth.
As proof, proponents point to sediments containing deposits they believe could result only from a cosmic impact.
Book a live interview
To book a live or taped interview with David Meltzer in the SMU News Broadcast Studio call SMU News at 214-768-7650 or email news@smu.edu.
Now a new study disproves that theory, said archaeologist David Meltzer, Southern Methodist University, Dallas. Meltzer is lead author on the study and an expert in the Clovis culture, the peoples who lived in North America at the end of the Ice Age.
Meltzer’s research team found that nearly all sediment layers purported to be from the Ice Age at 29 sites in North America and on three other continents are actually either much younger or much older.
Scientists agree that the brief episode at the end of the Ice Age — officially known as the Younger Dryas for a flower that flourished at that time — sparked widespread cooling of the Earth 12,800 years ago and that this cool period lasted for 1,000 years. But theories about the cause of this abrupt climate change are numerous. They range from changes in ocean circulation patterns caused by glacial meltwater entering the ocean to the cosmic-impact theory.
The cosmic-impact theory is said to be supported by the presence of geological indicators that are extraterrestrial in origin. However a review of the dating of the sediments at the 29 sites reported to have such indicators proves the cosmic-impact theory false, said Meltzer.
Meltzer and his co-authors found that only three of 29 sites commonly referenced to support the cosmic-impact theory actually date to the window of time for the Ice Age.
The findings, “Chronological evidence fails to support claim of an isochronous widespread layer of cosmic impact indicators dated to 12,800 years ago,” were reported May 12, 2014, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Co-authors were Vance T. Holliday and D. Shane Miller, both from the University of Arizona; and Michael D. Cannon, SWCA Environmental Consultants Inc., Salt Lake City, Utah.
“The supposed impact markers are undated or significantly older or younger than 12,800 years ago,” report the authors. “Either there were many more impacts than supposed, including one as recently as 5 centuries ago, or, far more likely, these are not extraterrestrial impact markers.”
Dating of purported Younger Dryas sites proves unreliable
The Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis rests heavily on the claim that there is a Younger Dryas boundary layer at 29 sites in the Americas and elsewhere that contains deposits of supposed extraterrestrial origin that date to a 300-year span centered on 12,800 years ago.
The deposits include magnetic grains with iridium, magnetic microspherules, charcoal, soot, carbon spherules, glass-like carbon containing nanodiamonds, and fullerenes with extraterrestrial helium, all said to result from a comet or other cosmic event hitting the Earth.
Meltzer and his colleagues tested that hypothesis by investigating the existing stratigraphic and chronological data sets reported in the published scientific literature and accepted as proof by cosmic-impact proponents, to determine if these markers dated to the onset of the Younger Dryas.
They sorted the 29 sites by the availability of radiometric or numeric ages and then the type of age control, if available, and whether the age control is secure.
The researchers found that three sites lack absolute age control: at Chobot, Alberta, the three Clovis points found lack stratigraphic context, and the majority of other diagnostic artifacts are younger than Clovis by thousands of years; at Morley, Alberta, ridges are assumed without evidence to be chronologically correlated with Ice Age hills 2,600 kilometers away; and at Paw Paw Cove, Maryland, horizontal integrity of the Clovis artifacts found is compromised, according to that site’s principal archaeologist.
The remaining 26 sites have radiometric or other potential numeric ages, but only three date to the Younger Dryas boundary layer.
At eight of those sites, the ages are unrelated to the supposed Younger Dryas boundary layer, as for example at Gainey, Michigan, where extensive stratigraphic mixing of artifacts found at the site makes it impossible to know their position to the supposed Younger Dryas boundary layer. Where direct dating did occur, it’s sometime after the 16th century A.D.
At Wally’s Beach, Alberta, a radiocarbon age of 10,980 purportedly dates extraterrestrial impact markers from sediment in the skull of an extinct horse. In actuality, the date is from an extinct musk ox, and the fossil yielding the supposed impact markers was not dated, nor is there evidence to suggest that the fossils from Wally’s Beach are all of the same age or date to the Younger Dryas onset.
At nearly a dozen other sites, the authors report, the chronological results are neither reliable nor valid as a result of significant statistical flaws in the analysis, the omission of ages from the models, and the disregard of statistical uncertainty that accompanies all radiometric dates.
For example, Lake Cuitzeo, Mexico, Meltzer and his team used the data of previous researchers and applied a fifth-order polynomial regression, but it returned a different equation that put the cosmic-impact markers at a depth well above that which would mark the Younger Dryas onset.
The authors go on to point out that inferences about the ages of supposed Younger Dryas boundary layers are unsupported by replication in more cases than not.
In North America, the Ice Age was marked by the mass extinction of several dozen genera of large mammals, including mammoths, mastodons, American horses, Western camels, two types of deer, ancient bison, giant beaver, giant bears, sabre-toothed cats, giant bears, American cheetahs, and many other animals, as well as plants.
Meltzer is the Henderson-Morrison Professor of Prehistory in the SMU Department of Anthropology in Dedman College and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. — Margaret Allen
SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.
SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.
Nature Magazine journalist Rex Dalton interviewed SMU archaeologist David J. Meltzer as an expert source to weigh in on the claim by University of Oregon archaeologists who say they’ve found the oldest known artifact in the Americas.
Dalton’s Nov. 5 article, “Oldest American Artifact Unearthed,” quotes a number of expert sources on the discovery of a scraper-like tool in an Oregon cave. The discovery team dates the tool to 14,230 years ago.
Meltzer, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, researches the origins, antiquity, and adaptations of the first Americans — Paleoindians — who colonized the North American continent at the end of the Ice Age. He focuses on how these hunter-gatherers met the challenges of moving across and adapting to the vast, ecologically diverse landscape of Late Glacial North America during a time of significant climate change.
Meltzer is chair of SMU’s Department of Anthropology and the Henderson-Morrison Professor of Prehistory in SMU’s Dedman College.
By Rex Dalton
Nature Magazine
Archaeologists claim to have found the oldest known artefact in the Americas, a scraper-like tool in an Oregon cave that dates back 14,230 years.
The tool shows that people were living in North America well before the widespread Clovis culture of 12,900 to 12,400 years ago, says archaeologist Dennis Jenkins of the University of Oregon in Eugene.
Studies of sediment and radiocarbon dating showed the bone’s age. Jenkins presented the finding late last month in a lecture at the University of Oregon.
His team found the tool in a rock shelter overlooking a lake in south-central Oregon, one of a series of caves near the town of Paisley.
…
Laid to rest?
The dating of the bone tool, and the finding that the sediments encasing it range from 11,930 to 14,480 years old, might put these questions to rest. “You couldn’t ask for better dated stratigraphy,” Jenkins told the Oregon meeting.
“They have definitely made their argument even stronger,” says Todd Surovell, an archaeologist at the University of Wyoming in Laramie who was not involved in the research.
Other researchers questioned whether the cave’s inhabitants would have been mainly vegetarian, as the coprolites suggested4. (Editor’s note: Please see the comments thread of this article for the authors of this reference weighing in on the significance of their work.) In his recent lecture Jenkins noted other evidence reflecting a diet short on meat but including edible plants such as the fernleaf biscuitroot Lomatium dissectum.
In late September, a group of archaeologists who study the peopling of the Americas met with federal officials and a representative of the local Klamath tribe to review the evidence at Paisley Caves. The specialists spent two days examining sediments, checking the tool, and assessing other plant and animal evidence.
“It was an impressive presentation,” says David Meltzer, an archaeologist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, who attended the meeting. “This is clearly an important site, but there are some tests that need to be done to seal the deal.” One key, he says, is to better understand how the specimens got to the cave.
SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.
SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.
D Magazine journalist Dawn McMullan reported on the accomplishments of SMU anthropologist David J. Meltzer in Undiscovering a Killer Comet in the monthly magazine’s “Dallas’ Big Thinkers” article, which published Sept. 21.
A member of the National Academy of Sciences, Meltzer researches the origins, antiquity, and adaptations of the first Americans — Paleoindians — who colonized the North American continent at the end of the Ice Age. He focuses on how these hunter-gatherers met the challenges of moving across and adapting to the vast, ecologically diverse landscape of Late Glacial North America during a time of significant climate change.
Meltzer is chair of SMU’s Department of Anthropology and the Henderson-Morrison Professor of Prehistory in SMU’s Dedman College.
McMullan’s D Magazine piece focuses on six of the region’s scientists who are making a difference in their scientific field: “We gave the world the microchip and the margarita machine. Here are six cool scientists whose brains are making waves,” McMullan writes.
By Dawn McMullan
D Magazine
In the summer of 1971, David Meltzer’s mom was looking for something to get her 15-year-old son out of the house. She asked him his plans. He said he was going to watch TV. “That,” she said, “isn’t good enough.” She read that archaeological excavations would begin the next week in the Shenandoah Valley. She convinced the project director that he needed to take her son. The next week, Meltzer had shovel in hand at the Thunderbird Paleoindian site.
He continued for four summers and is now a world-renowned archaeologist. Meltzer has recently been in the news for disproving a theory that a comet crash killed a culture, but his career research focuses on the first people who came to North America at the end of the Ice Age. It appears they adapted at breathtaking speed.
“What I’m trying to understand is what were the challenges they faced?” he says. “What happened the first time a wayward Siberian encountered a rattlesnake? How did they do all this while figuring out this utterly new landscape?”
In the midst of this research, which got him elected to the National Academy of Sciences, comes the “silliness” of the comet.
A controversial theory was put forth in 2006 that the ancient Clovis culture of North America was killed by a comet crashing. Meltzer and his colleague Vance Holliday were honored for the Undiscovery of the Year by the Archaeological Institute of America after refuting the concept with archaeological evidence proving the population of North America didn’t drop when the comet allegedly hit.
SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.
SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.
Archaeology magazine, published by the Archaeological Institute of America, recognized
SMU archaeologist David Meltzer and his colleague Vance Holliday of the University of Arizona for their “undiscovery” that the important ancient Clovis culture didn’t die out from the impact of a comet.
Melter and Holliday, who published their research in the October issue of Current Anthropology, challenged the controversial theory that the impact of an ancient comet devastated the Clovis people, one of the earliest known cultures to inhabit North America.
Nothing in the archaeological record suggests an abrupt collapse of Clovis populations, said Meltzer and Holliday.
“Whether or not the proposed extraterrestrial impact occurred is a matter for empirical testing in the geological record,” the researchers wrote in their article. “In so far as concerns the archaeological record, an extraterrestrial impact is an unnecessary solution for an archaeological problem that does not exist.”
Their point-by-point refutation was awarded the “Undiscovery of the Year” by Archaeology as part of the magazine’s list of Top 10 Discoveries of 2010.
EXCERPT:
By Zach Zorich
Archaeology Magazine
It’s commonly believed that North America’s Clovis culture came to an end around 12,900 years ago, when their characteristic spear points disappeared from the archaeological record. At the same time a number of large animal species such as mammoths and saber-toothed tigers became extinct. In 2006, a team led by geologist Richard Firestone of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory put forth a theory that a comet struck the Earth around this time, engulfing the continent in forest fires and causing the mass extinctions as well as the demise of the Clovis culture. They deduced this from the existence of a one-millimeter-thick soil layer at several Clovis sites that contains a high concentration of particles that appear to have extraterrestrial origins.
From picking apart atomic particles at Switzerland’s CERN, to unraveling the mysterious past, to delving into the human psyche, SMU researchers are in the vanguard of those helping civilization understand more and live better.
With both public and private funding — and the assistance of their students — they are tackling such scientific and social problems as brain diseases, immigration, diabetes, evolution, volcanoes, panic disorders, childhood obesity, cancer, radiation, nuclear test monitoring, dark matter, the effects of drilling in the Barnett Shale, and the architecture of the universe.
The sun never sets on SMU research
Besides working in campus labs and within the Dallas-area community, SMU scientists conduct research throughout the world, including at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, and in Angola, the Canary Islands, Mongolia, Kenya, Italy, China, the Congo Basin, Ethiopia, Mexico, the Northern Mariana Islands and South Korea.
“Research at SMU is exciting and expanding,” says Associate Vice President for Research and Dean of Graduate Studies James E. Quick, a professor in the Huffington Department of Earth Sciences. “Our projects cover a wide range of problems in basic and applied research, from the search for the Higgs particle at the Large Hadron Collider in CERN to the search for new approaches to treat serious diseases. The University looks forward to creating increasing opportunities for undergraduates to become involved as research expands at SMU.”
Funding from public and private sources
In 2009-10, SMU received $25.6 million in external funding for research, up from $16.5 million the previous year.
“Research is a business that cannot be grown without investment,” Quick says. “Funding that builds the research enterprise is an investment that will go on giving by enabling the University to attract more federal grants in future years.”
The funding came from public and private sources, including the National Science Foundation; the National Institutes of Health; the U.S. Departments of Agriculture, Defense, Education and Energy; the U.S. Geological Survey; Google.org; the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation; Texas’ own Hogg Foundation for Mental Health; and the Texas Instruments Foundation.
Worldwide, the news media are covering SMU research. See some of the coverage. Browse a sample of the research:
CERN and the origin of our universe Led by Physics Professor Ryszard Stroynowski, SMU physics researchers belong to the global consortium of scientists investigating the origins of our universe by monitoring high-speed sub-atomic particle collisions at CERN, the world’s largest physics experiment.
Compounds to fight neurodegenerative diseases
Synthetic organic chemist and Chemistry Professor Edward Biehl leads a team developing organic compounds for possible treatment of neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s, Huntington’s and Alzheimer’s. Preliminary investigation of one compound found it was extremely potent as a strong, nontoxic neuroprotector in mice.
Hunting dark matter Assistant Professor of Physics Jodi Cooley belongs to a high-profile international team of experimental particle physicists searching for elusive dark matter — believed to constitute the bulk of the matter in the universe — at an abandoned underground mine in Minnesota, and soon at an even deeper mine in Canada.
Robotic arms for injured war vets
Electrical Engineering Chairman and Professor Marc Christensen is director of a new $5.6 million center funded by the Department of Defense and industry. The center will develop for war veteran amputees a high-tech robotic arm with fiber-optic connectivity to the brain capable of “feeling” sensations.
Green energy from the Earth’s inner heat
The SMU Geothermal Laboratory, under Earth Sciences Professor David Blackwell, has identified and mapped U.S. geothermal resources capable of supplying a green source of commercial power generation, including resources that were much larger than expected under coal-rich West Virginia.
Exercise can be magic drug for depression and anxiety
Psychologist Jasper Smits, director of the Anxiety Research and Treatment Program at SMU, says exercise can help many people with depression and anxiety disorders and should be more widely prescribed by mental health care providers.
The traditional treatments of cognitive behavioral therapy and pharmacotherapy don’t reach everyone who needs them, says Smits, an associate professor of psychology.
Virtual reality “dates” to prevent victimization
SMU psychologists Ernest Jouriles, Renee McDonald and Lorelei Simpson have partnered with SMU Guildhall in developing an interactive video gaming environment where women on virtual-reality dates can learn and practice assertiveness skills to prevent sexual victimization.
With assertive resistance training, young women have reduced how often they are sexually victimized, the psychologists say.
Controlled drug delivery agents for diabetes Associate Chemistry Professor Brent Sumerlin leads a team of SMU chemistry researchers — including postdoctoral, graduate and undergraduate students — who fuse the fields of polymer, organic and biochemistries to develop novel materials with composite properties. Their research includes developing nano-scale polymer particles to deliver insulin to diabetics.
Sumerlin, associate professor of chemistry, was named a 2010-2012 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow, which carries a $50,000 national award to support his research.
Human speed An expert on the locomotion of humans and other terrestrial animals, Associate Professor of Applied Physiology and Biomechanics Peter Weyand has analyzed the biomechanics of world-class athletes Usain Bolt and Oscar Pistorius. His research targets the relationships between muscle function, metabolic energy expenditure, whole body mechanics and performance.
Weyand’s research also looks at why smaller people tire faster. Finding that they have to take more steps to cover the same distance or travel at the same speed, he and other scientists derived an equation that can be used to calculate the energetic cost of walking.
Pacific Ring of Fire volcano monitoring An SMU team of earth scientists led by Professor and Research Dean James Quick works with the U.S. Geological Survey to monitor volcanoes in the Pacific Ocean’s Ring of Fire near Guam on the Northern Mariana Islands. Their research will help predict and anticipate hazards to the islands, the U.S. military and commercial jets.
The two-year, $250,000 project will use infrasound — in addition to more conventional seismic monitoring — to “listen” for signs a volcano is about to blow.
Reducing anxiety and asthma A system of monitoring breathing to reduce CO2 intake is proving useful for reducing the pain of chronic asthma and panic disorder in separate studies by Associate Psychology Professor Thomas Ritz and Assistant Psychology Professor Alicia Meuret.
The two have developed the four-week program to teach asthmatics and those with panic disorder how to better control their condition by changing the way they breathe.
Breast Cancer community engagement Assistant Psychology Professor Georita Friersen is working with African-American and Hispanic women in Dallas to address the quality-of-life issues they face surrounding health care, particularly during diagnosis and treatment of breast cancer.
Friersen also examines health disparities regarding prevention and treatment of chronic diseases among medically underserved women and men.
Paleoclimate in humans’ first environment Paleobotanist and Associate Earth Sciences Professor Bonnie Jacobs researches ancient Africa’s vegetation to better understand the environmental and ecological context in which our ancient human ancestors and other mammals evolved.
Jacobs is part of an international team of researchers who combine independent lines of evidence from various fossil and geochemical sources to reconstruct the prehistoric climate, landscape and ecosystems of Ethiopia in particular. She also identifies and prepares flora fossil discoveries for Ethiopia’s national museum.
Ice Age humans
Anthropology Professor David Meltzer explores the western Rockies of Colorado to understand the prehistoric Folsom hunters who adapted to high-elevation environments during the Ice Age.
Meltzer, a world-recognized expert on paleoIndians and early human migration from eastern continents to North America, was inducted into the National Academy of Scientists in 2009.
Understanding evolution The research of paleontologist Alisa WInkler focuses on the systematics, paleobiogeography and paleoecology of fossil mammals, in particular rodents and rabbits.
Her study of prehistoric rodents in East Africa and Texas, such as the portion of jaw fossil pictured, is helping shed more light on human evolution.
“An extraterrestrial impact is an unnecessary solution for an archaeological problem that does not exist.”
USA Today has written about the research of SMU archaeologist David Meltzer that challenges the controversial theory that an ancient comet devastated the Clovis people, one of the earliest known cultures in North America.
Writing online in USA Today’s Science Fair section, journalist Elizabeth Weise notes in her article “Researchers — Clovis people didn’t disappear because of comet” that Meltzer demonstrates in a recent study that there is nothing in the archaeological record to suggest an abrupt collapse of Clovis populations.
The study was published in the October issue of Current Anthropology, Meltzer and archaeologist Vance Holliday from the University of Arizona argue that there is nothing in the archaeological record to suggest an abrupt collapse of Clovis populations.
“Whether or not the proposed extraterrestrial impact occurred is a matter for empirical testing in the geological record,” the researchers write. “In so far as concerns the archaeological record, an extraterrestrial impact is an unnecessary solution for an archaeological problem that does not exist.”
Clovis spear points from the original Clovis site in New Mexico. (Photo: David Meltzer)
EXCERPT:
What caused the Clovis people of North America to disappear? A 2006 book suggested a massive comet strike over the Great Lakes 12,900 years ago cooled the climate, killing off mammoths and dispersing the people and their ancient culture. But a paper in the October issue of Current Anthropology disputes this theory, saying the evidence presented for it is easily explained away.
The Clovis people are known for their characteristic spear points, which vanished from the archaeological record close to 13,000 years ago. Those in favor of the comet theory say few of the Clovis sites show evidence of people living in them after the Clovis left, and that there are sediment layers empty of human habitation between the occupations.
But archaeologists Vance Holliday of the University of Arizona and David Meltzer of Southern Methodist University argue that people in those hunter gatherer cultures routinely moved around.
“An extraterrestrial impact is an unnecessary solution for an archaeological problem that does not exist.”
Clovis spear points
Clovis spear points from the original Clovis site in New Mexico. (Photo: David Meltzer)
New research challenges the controversial theory that the impact of an ancient comet devastated the Clovis people, one of the earliest known cultures to inhabit North America.
Writing in the October issue of Current Anthropology, archaeologists David Meltzer, Southern Methodist University, and Vance Holliday, University of Arizona, argue that there is nothing in the archaeological record to suggest an abrupt collapse of Clovis populations.
“Whether or not the proposed extraterrestrial impact occurred is a matter for empirical testing in the geological record,” the researchers write.
“In so far as concerns the archaeological record, an extraterrestrial impact is an unnecessary solution for an archaeological problem that does not exist.”
Comet theory devised to explain apparent disappearance
The comet theory first emerged in 2007 when a team of scientists announced evidence of a large extraterrestrial impact that occurred about 12,900 years ago.
The impact was said to have caused a sudden cooling of the North American climate, killing off mammoths and other megafauna.
It could also explain the apparent disappearance of the Clovis people, whose characteristic spear points vanish from the archaeological record shortly after the supposed impact. The findings are reported in the article “The 12.9-ka ET Impact Hypothesis and North
American Paleoindians.”
As evidence for the rapid Clovis depopulation, comet theorists point out that very few Clovis archaeological sites show evidence of human occupation after the Clovis.
At the few sites that do, Clovis and post-Clovis artifacts are separated by archaeologically sterile layers of sediments, indicating a time gap between the civilizations. In fact, comet theorists argue, there seems to be a dead zone in the human archaeological record in North America beginning with the comet impact and lasting about 500 years.
High Plains of Texas excavations
Lubbock Lake site excavations on lake bed dated 13,000 to 12,000 years old, the time of the purported extraterrestrial impact. (Photo: Vance Holliday)
Evidence at Clovis sites doesn’t support a disaster scenario
But Meltzer, a professor in the SMU Department of Anthropology, and Holliday dispute those claims. They argue that a lack of later human occupation at Clovis sites is no reason to assume a population collapse.
“Single-occupation Paleoindian sites — Clovis or post-Clovis — are the norm,” Holliday said. That’s because many Paleoindian sites are hunting kill sites, and it would be highly unlikely for kills to be made repeatedly in the exact same spot.
“Those of us who do our research in the archaeology of this time period,” Meltzer says, “would actually be surprised if these sites were occupied repeatedly.”
“So there is nothing surprising about a Clovis occupation with no other Paleoindian zone above it, and it is no reason to infer a disaster,” Holliday said.
No evidence of post-comet gap in radiocarbon dating
In addition, Holliday and Meltzer compiled radiocarbon dates of 44 archaeological sites from across the U.S. and found no evidence of a post-comet gap. “Chronological gaps appear in the sequence only if one ignores standard deviations (a statistically inappropriate procedure), and doing so creates gaps not just around (12,900 years ago), but also at many later points in time,” they write.
Book a live interview
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Sterile layers separating occupation zones at some sites are easily explained by shifting settlement patterns and local geological processes, the researchers say. The separation should not be taken as evidence of an actual time gap between Clovis and post-Clovis cultures.
Disappearance more likely a cultural choice Holliday and Meltzer believe that the disappearance of Clovis spear points is more likely the result of a cultural choice rather than a population collapse.
“There is no compelling data to indicate that North American Paleoindians had to cope with or were affected by a catastrophe, extraterrestrial or otherwise, in the terminal Pleistocene,” they conclude. — Kevin Stacey, University of Chicago Press
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An SMU archaeologist whose work centers on how people first came to inhabit North America has been elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). David Meltzer, chair of SMU’s Department of Anthropology, has been elected a member of the NAS in recognition for his achievements in original scientific research.
Meltzer’s work looks at the origins, antiquity, and adaptations of the first Americans. Paleoindians colonized the North American continent at the end of the Ice Age. Meltzer focuses on how these hunter-gatherers met the challenges of moving across and adapting to the vast, ecologically diverse landscape of Late Glacial North America during a time of significant climate change.
Membership in the NAS is one of the highest honors given to a scientist or engineer in the United States.
The Henderson-Morrison Professor of Prehistory in Dedman College, Meltzer will be the third SMU professor to be inducted into the NAS. All three have come from the University’s highly regarded anthropology department. Meltzer is also director of QUEST Archaeological Research Program.
Meltzer was elected April 28 along with 71 other scientists, joining more than 2,000 active NAS members. More than 180 living Academy members have won Nobel Prizes. NAS members have included Albert Einstein, Robert Oppenheimer, Thomas Edison, Orville Wright, and Alexander Graham Bell.
“It’s really an honor to be in that wonderful company,” Meltzer said shortly after being notified of his selection by phone. “I am thrilled, excited, shocked, humbled. It’s a great day.” He said he was particularly touched that the NAS members who voted him in then passed a cell phone around to offer their individual congratulations.
“David Meltzer serves as the model of a professor whose research contributes to his discipline and our understanding of civilization, and who uses that knowledge to enliven his classroom,” said SMU President R. Gerald Turner. “His election to the NAS brings much-deserved recognition to Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences and honor to SMU.”
“One of the hallmarks of top universities is the election of their faculty to the prestigious National Academy of Sciences,” said Paul Ludden, university provost and vice president for academic affairs. “SMU is so proud of its top-tier anthropology faculty member, David Meltzer, for his election today.”
Meltzer’s archaeology and history research has been supported by grants from the National Geographic Society, the National Science Foundation, The Potts and Sibley Foundation and the Smithsonian Institution. In 1996, he received a research endowment from Joseph and Ruth Cramer to establish the Quest Archaeological Research Program at SMU, which will support in perpetuity research on the earliest occupants of North America.
His research has appeared in more than 130 publications, and Meltzer has written or edited half a dozen books, including “First People in a New World: Colonizing Ice Age Americans,” recently published by The University of California Press. He received his Ph.D in anthropology/archaeology from the University of Washington in Seattle and joined the faculty at SMU in 1984.
Two emeritus faculty members in SMU’s Anthropology Department are also NAS members: Lewis Binford was elected to the NAS in 2001 and Fred Wendorf was elected in 1987. Only an Academy member may submit formal nominations to the NAS, and supporting nomination materials and candidate lists remain confidential. The evaluation process occurs throughout the year, culminating in a final ballot at the Academy’s annual meeting in April.
The National Academy of Sciences is a private, nonprofit honorific society of distinguished scholars engaged in scientific and engineering research, dedicated to the furthering science and technology and to their use for the general welfare. Established in 1863, the National Academy of Sciences has served to “investigate, examine, experiment, and report upon any subject of science or art” whenever called upon to do so by any department of the government.
HOW I BECAME AN ARCHAEOLOGIST
David Meltzer said that although he had told it many times, this story first appeared in print in “The Dallas Morning News” on Dec. 24, 2001. Photo shows him (below) on his first day in the field in June 1971.
One June day after school let out (I had just finished 10th grade), my mother asked me what my plans were for the summer. I told her I hoped to slouch on the couch and watch television.
“That,” she announced, “isn’t good enough.” She showed me a piece in The Washington Post (our local newspaper) about excavations beginning in a week’s time in the nearby Shenandoah Valley, at the recently-discovered Thunderbird Paleoindian site.
“Would you like to join the group?”
“Sure,” I said, figuring at that late date the university’s plans must already be set and they couldn’t possibly want to take some snotty high school kid. I went back to watching My Favorite Martian.
Never underestimate your mother.
A day later she’d made fast friends with the administrative assistant at the office, who then talked the project director — Bill Gardner, of Catholic University — into taking me on. He wasn’t so keen on my being there, either! That was over 30 years ago. I went on to excavate for four consecutive seasons at the Thunderbird and nearby Fifty site, and I’ve been doing archaeology ever since.
I’m not sure why that newspaper story caught my mother’s eye, or why she thought her son would enjoy the experience. And I’m certain she didn’t imagine it would set me on a career. But I guess that’s just a mother’s gift, now, isn’t it?
$3.78 million awarded by Department of Defense to SMU STEM project for minority students
Kennewick Man: genome sequence of 8,500-year-old skeleton solves scientific controversy
At peak fertility, women who desire to maintain body attractiveness report they eat less
SMU seismology team to cooperate with state, federal scientists in study of May 7 Venus, Texas earthquake
1st proton collisions at the world’s largest science experiment expected to start the first or second week of June
1st proton collisions at the world’s largest science experiment expected to start the first or second week of June
Most likely cause of 2013-14 earthquakes: Combination of gas field fluid injection, removal
Physicists tune Large Hadron Collider to find “sweet spot” in high-energy proton smasher
SMU geothermal scientist Maria Richards to guide global energy organization
17 million-year-old whale fossil provides 1st exact date for East Africa’s puzzling uplift
SMU analysis of recent North Texas earthquake sequence reveals geologic fault, epicenters in Irving and West Dallas
Bitcoin scams steal at least $11 million in virtual deposits from unsuspecting customers
Teen girls report less sexual victimization after virtual reality assertiveness training
Women who are told men desire women with larger bodies are happier with their weight
Fossil supervolcano in Italian Alps may answer deep mysteries around active supervolcanoes
SMU seismologist Brian Stump named AAAS Fellow for distinguished scientific contributions
Study: Contraception may change how happy women are with their husbands
Study funded by NIH is decoding blue light’s mysterious ability to alter body’s natural clock
Jurassic climate of large swath of western U.S. was more complex than previously known
Study will teach algebra with student-authored stories that draw on their own interests
Hunt begins for elusive neutrino particle at one of the world’s largest, most powerful detectors
Key to speed? Elite sprinters are unlike other athletes — deliver forceful punch to ground
Real-time audio of corporal punishment shows kids misbehave within 10 minutes of spanking
Conventional vs. modern: Repertoire drives opera house identity, market share
Women have made strides for equality in society, but gender gap still exists in art museum directorships
Search for dark matter covers new ground with CDMS experiment in Minnesota
NOvA experiment glimpses neutrinos, one of nature’s most abundant, and elusive particles
SMU scientists to deploy seismic monitors in North Texas region near Azle, Texas
Parents less likely to spank after reading briefly about its links to problems in children
Wall Street’s short sellers wrongly maligned — detected red flags ahead of US financial crisis
A director’s skills, experiences and workload drive their compensation, SMU study finds
Gut reaction of marital partners could foretell their marriage satisfaction
Fossil supervolcano discovered in Italy by SMU-led team is now key feature of new UNESCO Geopark
SMU to help solve dangerous refugee water issues
Anthropology researcher to study human-fire-climate interactions
Wildfire on warming planet requires adaptive capacity at local, national, int’l scales
