The First American: The Suppressed Story of the People Who Discovered the New World - Hardcover

Christopher Hardaker

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1564149420 ISBN 13: 9781564149428

Publisher: New Page Books, 2007

Synopsis

Forty years ago, an amateur prehistorian discovered an engraved mastodon bone near Mexico City, showing a virtual bestiary from the Ice Age. Harvard University took notice and excavated nearby sites around the Valsequillo Reservoir. They found perfectly buried kill sites with the oldest spearheads in the world. Some archaeologists postulated their age at 40,000 years, three times older than the official 12,000-year-old date for the first Americans. Then the shocker--United States Geology Survey (USGS) geologists came up with the date of 250,000 years old!

Even though these dates were published in peer-reviewed geological journals, archaeologists wrote off the geologists, saying they were mistaken and that their dates were too ridiculously old. Archaeologists never returned to the site and curiosity died out. Soon after, this once world-class archaeology region became off-limits for official research, a "professional forbidden zone."

The Valsequillo discoveries were legendary, but regarded as "fringe" by professional archaeologists. Why this radical turn-about? What was found that was so unspeakable, so impossible? What happened to these artifacts--America's earliest art and spearheads, and why don't archaeologists seem to care? In the new book, The First American, archaeologist Christopher Hardaker tries to unearth the mystery.

The book details the events of the discovery and its subsequent dismissal, as well as the attempt in 2001 by a wealthy outsider to find the truth about the Valsequillo discoveries. Included in The First American are photos of the original artifacts, and excerpts from reports, letters, and memos from the site participants themselves.

Archaeologists will once again be forced to ask the same question their mentors asked: Are we too in love with our own theories to ignore the evidence of science yet again? And readers will hear the real story of the great Valsequillo discoveries, the greatest story of early American man never told.

About this title

From the Back Cover

"Read Christopher Hardaker's shocking and enlightening book and you will realize that what we are taught about prehistory is often not the truth but a story fashioned by archaeologists to serve their own worldviews, careers, ego and interests. Hardaker does us all a service by exposing the facts and fictions behind conventional wisdom about the peopling of the Americas."
--Graham Hancock, best-selling author of Fingerprints of the Gods

"Famed British archaeologist Sir Mortimer Wheeler once said, `Archaeology is not a science; it is a vendetta.' Chris Hardaker gives a perfect example in his stunning blow-by-blow account of the attempts by the archeological establishment to dismiss and suppress the amazing date of 250,000 years obtained by geologists for the Valsequillo sites in Mexico."
--Michael A. Cremo, best-selling author of Forbidden Archeology

"As a scientist I am embarrassed that it has taken over 30 years for archaeologists and geologists to revisit the bone and artifact deposits of Valsequillo Reservoir. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, data were presented that suggested Early Man had been in the New World much earlier than anyone had previously thought. Rather than further investigate the discoveries, which is what should have been done, they were buried under the sands of time, in the hope that they would be forgotten.
Now we have at least five independent geological age estimates that all indicate an old, pre-Clovis age for the Valsequillo site. We have the choice of accepting the results as correct and concluding that the artifacts are greater than 200,000 years old or arguing that there is something significantly wrong with each of the geological age estimates."
--from the Foreword by Charles Naeser, geochemist, United States Geological Survey

About the Author

Christopher Hardaker earned an MA in anthropology from the University of Arizona and has worked as a field archaeologist for 30 years, dividing his research between the nature of stone tools and using simple geometry to explore architectural traditions ranging from Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, to Washington, D.C. He first learned of the "professionally forbidden" older horizons of New World prehistory in 1977 on a visit to the Mojave Desert's Calico Early Man site established by the legendary Louis S. B. Leakey. It was there that he first heard the name Valsequillo. He is currently analyzing the astonishing 60,000-plus artifacts from Calico.

About this edition

• Publisher: New Page Books
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 1564149420
• ISBN 13: 9781564149428
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 319