CORE VIRTUES
  • Home
  • Our Approach
    • Program Overview
    • Why Stories?
    • Implementation
    • The Morning Gathering
    • Suggested Book Lists >
      • Year One Suggested Book Lists
      • Year Two Suggested Book Lists
      • Year Three Suggested Booklists
      • PDF Book Lists
    • Digging Deeper
    • Telling our Stories >
      • Blog Archives >
        • 2018 Blog Archives
        • 2019 Blog Archives
        • 2020 Blog Archives
        • 2021 Blog Archives
        • 2022 Blog Archives
        • 2023 Blog Archives
  • About Us
    • A Little History
    • Mission
    • Board and Staff >
      • Mary Beth Klee
    • Core Virtues Schools
    • Our First Champion >
      • The Portsmouth Declaration
    • Newsletters
    • Contact Us
  • Virtue of the Month
    • Virtue Cycle Definitions
    • September
    • October
    • November
    • December
    • January
    • February
    • March
    • April
    • May
    • June
  • Cycle of Virtues
    • Year 1
    • Year 2
    • Year 3
  • Heroes-Lives to Learn From
    • September Heroes
    • October Heroes
    • November Heroes
    • December Heroes
    • January Heroes
    • February Heroes
    • March Heroes
    • April Heroes
    • May Heroes
    • June Heroes
  • Holidays
    • Labor Day
    • Veteran's / Memorial Day
    • Thanksgiving
    • Hanukkah
    • Christmas
    • Martin Luther King Jr
    • President's Day
    • Black History Month
    • Saint Patrick's Day
    • Women's History Month
    • Passover
    • Easter
    • Ramadan
    • Immigrant Heritage Month
  • Poetry
  • Core Knowledge Connections
    • Kindergarten
    • First Grade
    • Second Grade
    • Third Grade
    • Fourth Grade
    • Fifth Grade
    • Sixth Grade
  • Links
  • Anthologies
  • Chapter Books
  • Parent Teacher Bibliography
  • Schools of Faith
    • Saint of the Month >
      • January Saints
      • February Saints
      • March Saints
    • Jewish Schools
    • Christian Schools
    • Islamic Schools
    • Eastern Faith Traditions
  • Grade Level Goals
    • Kindergarten Goals
    • First Grade Goals
    • Second Grade Goals
    • Third Grade Goals
    • Fourth Grade Goals
    • Fifth Grade Goals
    • Sixth Grade Goals
  • Store
  • Privacy Policy
  • Home
  • Our Approach
    • Program Overview
    • Why Stories?
    • Implementation
    • The Morning Gathering
    • Suggested Book Lists >
      • Year One Suggested Book Lists
      • Year Two Suggested Book Lists
      • Year Three Suggested Booklists
      • PDF Book Lists
    • Digging Deeper
    • Telling our Stories >
      • Blog Archives >
        • 2018 Blog Archives
        • 2019 Blog Archives
        • 2020 Blog Archives
        • 2021 Blog Archives
        • 2022 Blog Archives
        • 2023 Blog Archives
  • About Us
    • A Little History
    • Mission
    • Board and Staff >
      • Mary Beth Klee
    • Core Virtues Schools
    • Our First Champion >
      • The Portsmouth Declaration
    • Newsletters
    • Contact Us
  • Virtue of the Month
    • Virtue Cycle Definitions
    • September
    • October
    • November
    • December
    • January
    • February
    • March
    • April
    • May
    • June
  • Cycle of Virtues
    • Year 1
    • Year 2
    • Year 3
  • Heroes-Lives to Learn From
    • September Heroes
    • October Heroes
    • November Heroes
    • December Heroes
    • January Heroes
    • February Heroes
    • March Heroes
    • April Heroes
    • May Heroes
    • June Heroes
  • Holidays
    • Labor Day
    • Veteran's / Memorial Day
    • Thanksgiving
    • Hanukkah
    • Christmas
    • Martin Luther King Jr
    • President's Day
    • Black History Month
    • Saint Patrick's Day
    • Women's History Month
    • Passover
    • Easter
    • Ramadan
    • Immigrant Heritage Month
  • Poetry
  • Core Knowledge Connections
    • Kindergarten
    • First Grade
    • Second Grade
    • Third Grade
    • Fourth Grade
    • Fifth Grade
    • Sixth Grade
  • Links
  • Anthologies
  • Chapter Books
  • Parent Teacher Bibliography
  • Schools of Faith
    • Saint of the Month >
      • January Saints
      • February Saints
      • March Saints
    • Jewish Schools
    • Christian Schools
    • Islamic Schools
    • Eastern Faith Traditions
  • Grade Level Goals
    • Kindergarten Goals
    • First Grade Goals
    • Second Grade Goals
    • Third Grade Goals
    • Fourth Grade Goals
    • Fifth Grade Goals
    • Sixth Grade Goals
  • Store
  • Privacy Policy

Telling Our Stories

Perseverance Across the Sands of Time

10/7/2021

0 Comments

 
Picture

How did we get here?  That musing, which goes right to the heart of the human search for meaning, became an increasingly literal question last month.  How did we human beings get here – to the American continents? 
 
For more than a century, scientists have speculated that when massive ice sheets began to melt at the end of the last Ice Age (c. 20,000 years ago) humans crossed a newly exposed land bridge in pursuit of their animal prey.  They migrated from Eurasia to the Americas and eventually peopled the northern and southern continents.  Settlement took time, and humans were not imagined to be in the Americas more than thirteen thousand years ago.  But that date has been under fire.  And last month some hauntingly well-preserved footprints in White Sands, New Mexico and some dogged researchers threw all that into doubt.

The Journal of Science reported that a rich array of human tracks uncovered in the White Sands National Park have now been dated to 21,000-23,000 years ago.  The process of documentation was painstaking and the supporting evidence impressive. Yet glacial ice-sheets would still have covered the North American crossing at that point.  So, were humans already in the Americas before the end of the last Ice Age? It sure looks like it, according to lead geologist Michael Bennett and the fifteen co-authors of the blockbuster study. Two thousand years before.
 
The White Sands findings are stunning because the tracks are so undeniably human, so numerous, and have lent themselves to scrupulous radiocarbon dating protocols.  Their discovery comes on the heels of earlier discoveries that hinted at human settlement long before thirteen thousand years ago in Mexico and as far south as Chile.  So, did humans find little known land routes from Eurasia to America before an ice wall closed off the two continents? Or was the land bridge itself exposed thirty thousand years ago, and might hunter humans have crossed before a wall of ice separated the continents?  Or did early humans come by sea? The new findings open new mysteries.  A paradigm shift is underway. ​

Archives

October 2021
September 2021
July 2021
May 2021
April 2021
March 2021
February 2021
January 2021
December 2020
November 2020
October 2020
August 2020
July 2020
June 2020
May 2020
April 2020
March 2020
February 2020
January 2020
December 2019
November 2019
October 2019
September 2019
July 2019
June 2019
May 2019
April 2019
March 2019
January 2019
December 2018
November 2018
October 2018
September 2018
August 2018
July 2018
June 2018
May 2018
April 2018
March 2018
February 2018

PictureMichael Bennett; Photo credit: Bournemouth University
​This moment and these findings have something to teach us about intellectual virtue and the nature of science. Some very tenacious researchers at White Sands had literally been digging in these dunes for decades when the new prints were exposed.  The geologists who uncovered them had been over this region a dozen times before, seeking, wondering.  But one day in 2019 high winds literally turned back the sands of time, and tireless British geologist Michael Bennett along with White Sands Park Director David Bustos beheld a different landscape.  Exposed in the bluff were undeniably human footprints fading into a mound of sand.  The two held their breath and forged forward. Gentle scraping exposed outlines of a buried track. “At that point,” Bennett recalled, “we said Bingo, we’ve got it.”
​
White Sands had been on geologists’ radar since the 1930s, when a twenty-two-inch footprint thought to be the mythical “Bigfoot,” was discovered there.  The remarkable print turned out to be a giant ground sloth, and in subsequent years ancient human and extinct animal prints were discovered nearby, dating to perhaps ten thousand years ago.  Maybe more… But radiocarbon dating is a tricky business and requires seed samples from above and below the imprints, from which the age can be calculated.  Many tracks are better than one. That’s why the 2019 discovery is breathtaking.

Picture
Photo credit: David Bustos
In the eighteen months after their discovery, Bennett and Bustos assembled a team of geologists, archaeologists, geophysicists, and dating experts to both dig and date.  Using exquisite care, they uncovered eight separate “horizons of footprints,” sixty-one prints in all by as many as sixteen people, mostly teens and children, they believe.  National Geographic reports, “Multiple track layers were bookended above and below by layers of sediment containing seeds from the Ruppia grass” which formerly grew in the area.
Picture
The dating of seeds above and below the prints suggests humans and animals tramped here between 21,000 and 23,000 years ago.  “We’ve really tried to prove it’s not that old, and we keep coming up dry,” Daniel Odess, archaeologist and one of the authors of the study reports.  Layer after layer of track yields the same data.  Wow.  
 
Of course, caution should prevail.  Is there anything “off” about these radiocarbon dating results?  Can a second method of dating be found?  Or do these new findings constitute a body of evidence so overwhelming that it’s time to alter former theories? We don’t know yet, and I am a student of history not science, but I’m betting on a paradigm shift.  And that will challenge teachers.
​

For almost three decades first graders in Core Knowledge Schools across the country --and high schoolers everywhere--have been learning that human settlement in the Americas dates to the end of the last Ice Age. I personally wrote and recorded song a called “Back in the Ice Age” that hundreds of former Crossroads Academy students can sing.  It has the lyrics “Back in the Ice Age, twenty thousand years ago…woolly mammoths crossed the land bridge with hunters close behind, from Asia to America, a new world they did find, back in the Ice Age.” Now what? Maybe I just change the lyrics to “Before the ice froze, thirty thousand years ago….”

In October the Core Virtues program spotlights the virtues of diligence and perseverance.  Those are indispensable intellectual excellences: care in our work, pressing on despite difficulty.  My hat is off to the tenacious team of international researchers at White Sands, who worked assiduously and never gave up on an elusive quest.  Well done, noble scholars!  And I tip my hat too to the 22,000-year-old teens and kids, who left their mark, perhaps drawing water for their folks at the now extinct “Lake Otero,” where the prints remain.
 
And let’s not forget to spotlight two other intellectual virtues these scientists displayed, ones that are also cultivated at Core Virtues Schools:  openness to inquiry and humility in the face of facts.  Those traits are key to the progress of knowledge in general and science in particular.  
 
Scientists construct theories (or “paradigms”) of what happened in accord with the most reliable data they have.  For years, it has seemed from dating of glacial moraines, ice cores, human remains and artifacts that a post-Ice Age crossing was the most likely explanation of human settlement in the Americas.  But that is a theory, not a fact. 
 
And science is a process.  New evidence hinted the theory might be incorrect, and an intrepid few researchers were open to questioning how “settled” the science was.  They didn’t shy away from research that might yield pre-thirteen-thousand-year-old results.  Colorado geologist Thomas Stafford notes that it has not been common scientific practice to think past that date.  As a radiocarbon dating expert, he would often receive samples to date and be told not to bother looking past the thirteen-thousand-year material. “If you’re not looking for anything, you’re not going to find it,” Stafford says.  
 
Openness to inquiry must guide intellectual endeavor.  When advocates for various theories and policies proclaim, “the science is settled,” all our alarm bells should go off. On highly complex issues, the science is hardly ever “settled.”  Ask Copernicus.  Ask Galileo.  Ask Einstein. Ask Michael Bennett.  Nature surprises us, and our understanding evolves. We have to be humble enough to allow that evolution -- admit that we might not know it all.
 
Meanwhile, what do we teach those first graders and high school students about how human beings came to inhabit the Americas?  Maybe we say: 
 
Well, it was a very long time ago, and because we don’t have written records and our scientists are literally still digging, we don’t know for sure.  But here’s what we think.  Early human hunters probably crossed from Asia to America at a time when that area wasn’t covered with ice.  That could have been before the last Ice Age.  We used to think we humans came at the end of the Ice Age, but now we’re not sure because of evidence found in our own national park at White Sands, New Mexico.  Maybe you can help solve that puzzle if you become an archaeologist or geologist. 
 
And teachers shouldn’t miss the opportunity to tell students they should learn some lessons from those Ice Age youth.  When your parents tell you to take your little brother or sister and go do something, just do it.  Leave a legacy…..
Picture
Courtesy of Karen Carr and the National Park Service
​Mary Beth Klee, Ph.D. has taught the Ice Age unit to first graders numerous times and now needs to regroup.
 
The Bennett, et. al. study is at https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abg7586 and the National Geographic article at https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/fossil-footprints-challenge-theory-when-people-first-arrived-americas. And for another thought-provoking challenge to a realm in which “the science is settled,” read New York University physicist and Obama Under Secretary of Energy Steven Koonin’s latest work Unsettled. What Climate Science Tells Us, What it Doesn’t and Why it Matters. (April 2021)
0 Comments

    Author

    Write something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview.

    Archives

    March 2023
    February 2023
    January 2023
    December 2022
    November 2022
    October 2022
    September 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    July 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

Home

About us

Resources

Contact

NEWSLETTER

Core Virtues Foundation Copyright © 2018