Archaeologists claimed they had “unequivocal” evidence humans butchered a mastodon at the Coats-Hines site located in Tennessee. Now, some of these same archaeologists recently published a paper admitting their evidence was equivocal. I wrote a beautiful article on my blog about the Coats-Hines site a number of years ago, and it always gets a lot of hits early during the school year because a teacher uses it as a reference for a school assignment. Unfortunately, the assumption the site includes evidence of human-butchered mastodon remains may be bogus. (See: https://markgelbart.wordpress.com/2013/04/15/the-coats-hines-pre-clovis-site-in-williamson-county-tennessee/ )
The Coats-Hines site is located adjacent to a golf course. During construction of the golf course 40 years ago workers found the remains of a mastodon. Further digging by trained experts over the years yielded the remains of 3 more mastodons, white-tailed deer, muskrat, turkey, and painted turtle. This most recent paper noted the additional identification of ground sloth bones (probably Harlan’s) from the site. A mastodon vertebrae apparently had cut marks on it, suggesting evidence of anthropogenic butchery, and it was associated with supposedly human-made artifacts. In a paper published just 7 years ago the archaeologists wrote it was “unequivocal” evidence of human butchery. However, in his more recent study Jesse Tune admits the cutmarks could’ve been caused by the bone being tumbled against rocks in an high energy stream environment. He thinks the artifacts associated with that specimen are geofacts. A geofact is a natural stone formation that resembles an human-modified object. The stones come from local outcrops that naturally eroded into the stream. There are definitive human-made tools at Coats-Hines, but they were found some distance away from the mastodon bones. Coats-Hines was a former stream, and deposits of different ages can get mixed together when currents erode through different aged strata.
Jesse Tune used what he learned from studying the Coats-Hines site to debunk claims made for the antiquity of the Topper site in South Carolina, and the Burnham site in Oklahoma. Archaeologists excavating these sites claim the evidence they found was older than the Last Glacial Maximum. (The LGM dates to roughly between 18,000 years BP-22,000 years BP.) Jesse Tune thinks the evidence at these sites consists of geofacts eroded from adjacent local outcrops that perhaps mixed with real artifacts of more recent origin in an high energy stream.
The new paper (referenced below) includes the Coats-Hines site as a proposed pre-LGM site. This puzzles me because I can’t find anyone who ever claimed the artifacts and evidence from Coats-Hines dated to before 22,000 years ago. The sediment around the mastodon bone thought by some to be butchered by humans produced a radio-carbon date of 13,100 years BP (~=15,000 calendar years BP). This is well after the LGM. I always considered Coats-Hines to be pre-Clovis but not pre-LGM. It seems as if the authors of this paper are making a straw man argument because as far as I can determine, nobody claimed Coats-Hines was pre-LGM.
Who claimed Coats-Hines was pre-LGM? I asked 2 authors of the below study but I didn’t get a response. Are they making a strawman argument about Coats-Hines?
References:
Tune, Jesse; et. al.
“Assessing the Proposed Pre-Last Glacial Maximum Human Occupation of North America at Coats-Hines-Litchy, Tennessee and Other Sites”
Quaternary Science Reviews April 2018
Wolf, Aaron; Jesse Tune, and John Broster
“Excavations and Dating of Late Pleistocene and Paleoindian Deposits at the Coats-Hines Site, Williamson County, Tennessee”
Tennessee Archaeology 5 (2) Fall 2011
GeorgiaBeforePeople 
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