VERO BEACH — When Ice Age archaeologist Dennis Stanford lectures at the Emerson Center this week, it will be at the behest of an old friend. The esteemed expert from the Smithsonian Institution is coming at the invitation of Judi Collins, whose father, the late Henry B. Collins, a scholar of ancient Arctic peoples, worked a floor above Stanford in the dusty offices of the Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.
In a way, though, Stanford is coming because of an even older Vero acquaintance – 14,000 to 20,000 years older.
Stanford, along with his staff at the Smithsonian, evaluated the etched prehistoric mammal bone found in Vero Beach several years ago and now considered the oldest piece of art ever found in the Americas.
Stanford wrote an article in the June 2011 issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science corroborating the bone’s ancient age.
Though the exact location of where the bone was found has never been revealed by the amateur fossil hunter who came upon it, it is believed to be in the same general area as another landmark find in the early 20th century that came to be known as Vero Man.
In the past year, Collins has become closely involved in an ambitious effort led in part by two other island residents, Susan Grandpierre and Nancy Thayer, to excavate that site south of the Vero Beach Airport near the Indian River County Administration Complex.
Collins began working with a group trying to raise money for the excavation after a presentation – also at the Emerson Center – last year.
“I was falling off my chair,” she says. “I had never heard about this until I saw the (Florida) Humanities Council mammoth lecture. I was just blown away.”
The Old Ice Age Site Committee is forging ahead with fund-raising despite tough going due to the pressing economic needs of non-profits countywide, Collins says.
“It’s the most exciting project I’ve been involved in since I moved to Florida.”
As Collins tells it, her father was close to retirement when Stanford, now head of the Smithsonian’s Division of Archaeology, was just getting his start there.
Stanford, the son of a clothing retailer in Wyoming, had developed a fascination for archaeology when as a boy of 10, he began finding artifacts.
When Stanford was still in high school, a construction worker brought him a mammoth bone to identify.
Stanford pursued the quest to great success, eventually drawing in a research team from Harvard, who allowed him join them in the dig.
Bitten by the bug, when Stanford found himself at the University of Wyoming which had no anthropology major, he sought out the one professor in the field.
That professor mentored him by assigning a book a week on the subject and personally gave him a test on the material every Friday.
Stanford credits his success to the personal attention of that professor.
Today, Stanford has written more than 100 articles, book chapters and books, with his latest coming out this month: “Across Atlantic Ice: The Origin of America’s Clovis Culture,” written with Bruce Bradley, a professor at the University of Exeter in the U.K.
The book addresses one of Stanford’s signature contributions to the field.
Known as the Solutrean hypothesis, his theory was first put forth in1998.
Revolutionary and controversial, it postulates that the first Americans were not those who crossed a land bridge across the Bering Sea around 13,500 years ago, as the prevailing theory holds.
Instead, Stanford believes they came much earlier – possibly 19,000 years BP (before the present time) from southwest Europe, crossing the Atlantic by following the edges of the masses of ice that existed at the time, fishing and killing seals for food, melting ice for water, and using blubber for heat.
Stanford bases his theory on the technology of Clovis points, the fluted flint heads lashed to spears for hunting, once believed to have originated in the Americas.
No predecessor for the points, if it existed, has been found in Asia or Alaska.
Instead, Stanford believes the chipping technique used in making the points is derived of a method used in Europe 8,000 years earlier, by the Solutrean people who lived in what is now France and Spain more than 20,000 years ago.
Archaeologists have challenged the Solutrean hypothesis on the basis that there has been no evidence found pointing to sea-faring by ancient Americans, or signs of having lived by the sea alone.
Recent DNA studies pointing to a single origin – and an Asian one at that – have cast further doubt.
Another challenge has to do with what was thought to be a lack of evidence that the Solutreans, known for their cave drawings in Spain and France, ever passed that inspiration on to Clovis culture.
Now, though, a piece of bone etched with a mammoth discovered in Vero Beach has been dated to 13,000 to 20,000 years ago.
At least one art historian has compared its style to European drawings and engravings of mammoths, lending possible support to the Solutrean hypothesis.
That bone was found in the same general area as remains that put Vero on the archaeological map.
In 1914, remains were found on a site near what is now the county administration complex, alongside bones from early Ice Age mammals including mammoths, saber-tooth tigers and a tapir that has come to be known as the Vero tapir.
A state geologist found the tandem discovery a landmark, claiming it proved humans existed alongside Ice-Age mammals.
That was a radical shift from the thinking of the day, that humans didn’t populate North America until after the prehistoric mammals died out.
At the time of the find, a Smithsonian archaeologist disputed the geologist’s claim – but not before the site was turned into a major tourist attraction with a name only a Florida marketer could conjure up: Tarzan Park.
The human bones were lost in 1945, on their way from Tallahassee to the Smithsonian. It was long before carbon dating could verify the older age.
University of Florida scientists feel confident that important fossils and artifacts may remain at the Vero man site.
Hence, the Old Ice Age Site Committee formed to find money to excavate the site before it is covered with 200 tons of concrete when a new storm-water treatment plant is built.
For Collins, having Stanford visit will be a throwback to her childhood, when greats like paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey and Rear Admiral Richard Byrd visited their Washington home, she says.
Stanford, whom she remembers from his days as a young scientist “is just absolutely delightful as a human being,” she says.
“We’re so lucky to get him. We’ve been after him for a year at least to come. I groveled, I pleaded, and he agreed because this site is so unique. It’s so fragile, and so threatened by urbanization. It’s urgent – if we don’t do it now it may not get done. And there’s a whole level of human history – our history – that’s going to be lost if we don’t do it now.”// Stanford, who is replacing another scheduled speaker in the Florida Humanities Series, will speak on Feb. 16 at 7 p.m.
The Emerson Center is located at 1590 27th Ave. Call (772)778-5249 for more information.