In the desert two hour northeast of Los Angeles , just outside the town of Barstow , there is a peculiar trivial place called theCalico Early Man Site . If you ’ve driven either direction , from L.A. to Las Vegas or back , you ’ve probably seen the sign for it , mysteriously and without any real information implying that the visiting populace might desire to hold back by .
But what on the button is this blank space and what are you meant to see there ?
The Early Man Site is , look on who you ask , either a unique and globally important archaeological site — cross off where tool - using homo settled on the shores of an ancient lake more than 30,000 year ago — or it is the last gasp of a celebrated anthropologist ’s lamentable and fading career , a willfully misinterpreted landscape painting full of nothing but sluttish crushed rock and rock music .
In the latter face , the Early Man Site is not quite a fraudulence , but it is sure enough nothing more than an archaeological side - show , a circus enactment for people more interested in fiction than tight anthropology . In the former case , however , it would be one of the most important — and overlooked — historical sites in North America .
Astonishingly , it wasLouis Leakey , of all people — the venerable carbon monoxide - finder of the world ’s oldest hominid fossils , found in East Africa ’s Olduvai Gorge — who served as one of the former official shovel for the Calico site .
A more misanthropic theory , however , claim that Leakey , coming to the conclusion of both his animation and his life history , was feeling left out and bury as the archaeological macrocosm had moved on to talk about other uncovering and other scientists .
A find of this magnitude , and a internet site that might vie with Olduvai Gorge in human grandness , could fetch his name back into the limelight .
Enter Ruth “ Dee ” Simpson , the excavator who first regaled Leakey with tales of sharpened rock candy leaf blade and other by artificial means raise stones found amidst the rubble and sand of the area .
As the region was being bare by local collectors of its semi - cute stones — including sway such as agates — it seemed progressively pressing to set up an prescribed digging land site and to catalog the possible oddment of ancient puppet , these scattered technical artifacts forget behind by now long - lost human settler .
Leakey jump into his new role , help Simpson both to add the web site and to vouch for its authenticity — but either they want far too powerfully for the Harlan Stone scrap found at the site to be by artificial means make Harlan Fiske Stone tools , or there really were human beings in what is now southern California 30,000 years ago or more .
These humans were the “ Early Man ” of the web site ’s throwback title and , if they were real , they would change our understanding of how ( and when ) the continent was first inhabit .
The actual Calico Early Man Site , however , reached after a short drive on an unpaved road thread north from the pike , does not pose these two interpretative options . While remain open about the specific timeframe proposed for the region ’s initial small town — and explicitly freeze off some of the more gonzo claims of tools more than 200,000 , even 300,000 , years honest-to-god — the land site very much accepts its own Early Man hypothesis .
The overall notion is that , during the last Ice Age , an enormous lake cross the region , its wildlife - rich shoreline finally settle by human beings . These humans left their tools behind in the material body of especially shaped endocarp blade — many of which could then have been collect by late 19th - 100 prospectors . This was the narrative told to me by Chris Christensen , my on - internet site guide , who himself once collected rock in the region with his mother .
Oddly enough , this mean that these ancient human cock could very well have been scooped up , milled , sold , and incorporated into secret collections of semi - precious stones , without their collector realizing they had actually apprehend ancient artifacts .
Those are n’t rock and roll , then , but human instruments — prehistorical engineering mistaken for mere geology .
If these are in reality creature , in other words , not just rock music and crushed rock , then many purportedly geologic collection stocked with rocks from the region actually contain unrecognized technological object : deliberately designed and fabricated artifact that are not natural features at all . They are hokey tools mistaken for gravel .
However , the exact paired point can be made — and , in fact , this is the rife interpretation of this much - gainsay desert website — which is that these outback and moth-eaten landscapes are just gravel misguided for tools . It ’s just a crowd of tilt .
There is nothing at all to see here , in other words , except some unremarkable stones , accidentally nick and weather over ten of 1000 of year to resemble prehistorical human - made scrapers and blades .
So is this geology or is it technology ? Are these natural objective or are they artificial tools ? This weird interpretative dilemma is central to the Calico Early Man Site .
Of of course , this is precisely why the site is so weirdly reminiscent : it embodies perhaps the key question about the very line of “ human ” bodily function on Earth , challenging visitors to identify the phantasmagorical moment at which a particularly shaped rock music is suddenly so much more than bare geology .
The point at which a queer spell of agate , for instance , actually becomes a homo - shape tool — a design artefact , a piece of engineering science — represents an over-the-top cognitive and intellectual alteration in the animal realm .
From that moment on , objects can be separate as either lifelike or unreal . Before this distributor point , there was mere geology . After this point , there are artifacts , tools , technology , gadgets .
So the Calico site basically stands exactly on this weird dilemma , where the distinction between a mere rock-and-roll and an artificially shaped tool takes on an grandness it might not otherwise seem to have .
However , the divergence between a rock and a influence peter is literally the difference between a planet — a natural , un - contrive debris field of operations of crushed rock and waste stone — and what we would now call the build environment , a shaped collection of tools and technologies specifically identified with our specie and , rightly or not , recognise as separate from the natural public .
So that ’s the Calico Early Man Site , locate midway between Los Angeles and Las Vegas , two of the most exorbitant urban settlement on the Earth today , easy reached — if you do n’t listen gravel road — from the nearby freeway .
Here is it onGoogle Maps .
It ’s not a small web site by any means — yet , if you zoom out even the pocket-size amount , you could lose the whole thing , ineffectual to locate where it was you once hiked , where you parked your machine , or where you idly kicked the gravel look for old shaft .
Now imagine , zooming back in again to see the internet site , amidst the millions of loose rock see scattered all over the site , trying to blot a few particular rocks , a few specifically enhanced stones that would indicate prehistoric human village . The nous boggle at the difficulty of sort through and filtering the landscape painting , trying to differentiate between Earth and artifact , between mere rock and roll and human technology .
Equally strangely , now imagine falter upon the Calico Early Man Site as an alien visitor tasked with interpreting the planetary surface you ’ve landed on .
Similar to theMars rovers , your goal is to sort through the dust and do some tests ; to poke amongst the rock candy , analyze some chemicals , and zap a optical maser here and there to calculate out what ’s snuff it on .
Knowing what you now cognize about the Calico Early Man Site , however , and visualizing , say , the most recent round of landscape photographs taken by NASA ’s Opportunity rover , what would you really make of the apparently geological objects spread out before you on a landscape painting scale of measurement , visually indistinguishable from random rocks and stone ?
You have landed in a desert here on Earth to look for signs of spirit ; soon thereafter , you arrive at the Calico Early Man Site . Wheeling and whirring through the rubble and backbone , what do you make of the weirdly mold gravel all around you ?
Is that geology — or a well - camouflaged appeal of abandoned tools ? Are those rocks — or are they an archive of prehistorical applied science ?
It is good to say that I am a sceptic when it come to the Calico Early Man Site , but I also recognize why such a place hold a deep interpretive fascination for the people who work there ( it is an active dig site ) and why they continue to analyse it .
There is something immensely compelling about the idea that humans once settle here , hunting and slaughter animals on the shore of a now - lost lake , and that many of the rocks now found here are actually tools specifically shaped to aid those action .
What ’s amazing about the site is how it foregrounds this unsufferable labor of interpretation . In another context — and the reason I remark the “ alien visitant ” affair , above — it also dispute our power to understand what we see on other planets and whether we can rede those landscape at all .
After all , if even the rock around us might be ancient tools , what does that say about our understanding of other world and other landscape ? Would we be able-bodied to recognize sign of technology and news in the depths of infinite when those things , even here , two hour out of doors of Los Angeles , within a few miles of a major motorway , seem so hard to distinguish ?
This is by no means the enceinte fact-finding purpose of the Calico Early Man Site , but this is nonetheless the interrogation that it poses .
shortly , I ’m cue of a point made in arecent book by Paul Murdin . There , Murdin quotes the work of palaeontologist Simon Conway - Morris . Conway - Morris , discussing the difficulty of fall upon and recognise life on other planets , suggests that we would most likely not have any idea what we ’re even look at . As he pose it , and I do it this description , other life form could be “ building so unfamiliar that they are only convey home by stroke and then unwittingly handed over for curation in a section of mineralogy . ”
The estimate that ancient artifacts might also be “ unknowingly handed over for curation in a section of mineralogy ” is stupefying , and this is what Chris Christensen , at the Calico site , also implied when describing how the web site had been picked over by gem hunters .
In any case , on my elbow room out of the site I noticed the sifting screens — objects through which the landscape is filtered , in guild to sort larger rocks and potential artifacts from the dust and Baroness Dudevant — which took on the condition of metaphor for the intact performance . It is through these gridded object that we seek to locate the fine argument between nature and artifice , geology and engineering .
The Calico Early Man Site is open to the public , requires driving on unpaved roads , and is some midway between Las Vegas and Los Angeles . Some of the paths were closed when I was there due to damage from an earlier pelting storm , but they should be unfastened again shortly . [ Bureau of Land Management ]
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