Ruins found dating back to dawn of man?

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Steel And Bone

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I heard recently that some ancient ruins of some sort of building were found in Central or South America, dating back thousands and thousands of years ago, around the same time modern man is said to have evolved in Africa. Did anybody else hear this?
 
You are almost certainly thinking of the ruins of Caral in Peru. They are reputed to be be possibly the oldest ruins of a modern city on earth since about 2001, but debate continues to put it mildly. They were in the news recently.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caral
 
Nope. The oldest ruins I know of in Central America date to around 10,000 years ago or 8,000 BC. Modern man appeared in Africa much earlier.
 
Really? I am SERIOUSLY up on this sort of thing. And I haven't heard a word. I do know they recently found another ancient site by space aerial photos. It's huge. But it's not prehistoric. I'll certainly look around and I will let you know if I find anything.
Could you be talking about the Monte Verde site in south central Chile along a tributary of the Rio Maullín, where Tom Dillehay, an anthropologist at Vanderbilt University, has unearthed artifacts dated between 13,000 and 33,000 years ago?
Or maybe Pedra Furada, a series of rock shelters in eastern Brazil, which have been controversially dated to between 10,000 - 48,000 years ago?

I BET you are talking about the TOPPER SITE!

A couple of years ago they located a site that predate BOTH Monte Verde and Pedra Furada in NORTH AMERICA.

This would put the Topper site as the oldest known human occupation in the Americas.
The Topper Site on the Savannah River in Allendale County, South Carolina. Archaeologist Albert Goodyear of the University of South Carolina has obtained radiocarbon dates suggesting that people lived in eastern North America more than 50,000 years ago- much earlier than proposed by any widely held theory on the peopling of the Americas. Effectively, this would mean that Paleoindians arrived in North America at about the same time that anatomically modern humans were migrating from Africa into Australia and Central Asia.

Albert Goodyear initially explored the area in 1981 with the help of a local resident named Topper, for whom the site is named. In 1998, Goodyear discovered pre-Clovis artifacts there, indicating human presence by 16,000 years ago. This put the Topper site on approximately the same time level as several other early sites in eastern North America, including Cactus Hill, Virginia (45 miles south of Richmond), where artifacts have been dated at 15,070 years before present and Meadowcroft Rockshelter in Western Pennsylvania, where James Adovasio uncovered thousands of artifacts as well as animal and plant remains, the earliest C-14 dated to 19,600 years ago.

Yeah, I think what you heard about was the Topper site, just got the countries confused due to the comparison.
 
I found a couple of things, the first link concerns Caral, in Peru, a site dating back to the time of the pyramids.
The second link is an older site, and an older discovery. It's Monte Verde, and the article says it dates to about 1,000 years before Clovis (around 12-15,000 years before the present (B.P.). Clovis was previously believed to be the oldest in the Americas. Later work has found pre-Clovis points along the southeastern coast of the US. It's controversial, since these points are similar to some found in southern France, and the conjecture is that they were made by Europeans, who arrived before the Asians had reached that part of the continent.
 
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