Response to Comment on "Late Upper Paleolithic occupation at Cooper's Ferry, Idaho, USA, ~16,000 years ago"

L G Davis; L Becerra-Valdivia; D B Madsen; T Higham

doi:10.1126/science.aaz6626

Response to Comment on "Late Upper Paleolithic occupation at Cooper's Ferry, Idaho, USA, ~16,000 years ago"

Science. 2020 Apr 10;368(6487):eaaz6626. doi: 10.1126/science.aaz6626.

Authors

L G Davis^#¹, L Becerra-Valdivia^#^{2

3}, D B Madsen⁴, T Higham⁵

Affiliations

¹ Department of Anthropology, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR 97331, USA. [email protected] [email protected].
² Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit, Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art, School of Archaeology, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 3TG, UK. [email protected] [email protected].
³ Chronos C-Cycle Facility, SSEAU, Mark Wainwright Analytical Centre, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia.
⁴ Texas Archeological Research Laboratory, University of Texas, Austin, TX 78758, USA.
⁵ Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit, Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art, School of Archaeology, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 3TG, UK.

^# Contributed equally.

PMID: 32273440
DOI: 10.1126/science.aaz6626

Abstract

Manning builds an inappropriate Bayesian age model to assert that the initial occupation at Cooper's Ferry began only ~15,935 ± 75 to 15,130 ± 20 cal yr B.P., suggesting that our estimation of ~16,560 to 15,280 cal yr B.P. is unsupported. However, this analysis both ignores evidence of human occupation from the earliest undated cultural deposits and reflects a misapplication of Bayesian age-modeling techniques. Consequently, his results are unreliable.

Publication types

Comment

MeSH terms

Archaeology
Bayes Theorem
Humans
Idaho
Occupations*