Mexico discovery fuels debate about man's origins

MEXICO CITY — For decades, Federico Solorzano has gathered old bones from the shores of Mexico's largest lake — bones he found and bones he was brought, bones of beasts and bones of men.

The longtime teacher of anthropology and paleontology was sifting through his collection one day when he noticed some that didn't seem to fit: a mineral-darkened piece of brow ridge bone and a bit of jaw that didn't match any modern skulls.

But Solorzano found a perfect fit when he placed the brow against a model of the Old World's Tautavel Man — member of a species, Homo erectus, that many believe was an ancestor of modern Homo sapiens.

The catch: Homo erectus is believed to have died out 100,000 to 200,000 years ago — tens of thousands of years before men are believed to have reached the Americas.

And archaeologists have never found a trace of Homo erectus in the Americas.

"Most people sort of just shook their heads and have been baffled by it," said Robson Bonnichsen, director of the Center for the Study of the First Americans at Texas A&M University.

"That doesn't mean it's not real. It just means there's not any comparative evidence."

Solorzano's find was described at a September conference here that drew academics from Europe and the Americas to discuss new research on early man in the Americas.

That primitive brow ridge from Lake Chapala "is in a category by itself," Bonnichsen said.

It is so strange — and so out of context — that it has been largely ignored even as other discoveries are raising basic questions about the story of human beings in the Americas: when they arrived and where they came from.

Until recently, most U.S. archaeologists believed that the first Americans arrived about 13,500 years ago when a temporary land corridor opened across the Bering Strait.

The migrant Clovis people, named for a site near Clovis, N.M., apparently hunted mammoths and other large animals, leaving scatterings of finely worked spear tips and other tools across North America and, some argue, South America.