Louis Leakey’s 200,000-year-old Americans, or 60,000 naturally broken rocks
In 1959 a California archaeologist, Ruth DeEtte Simpson, showed Louis Leakey in London what looked like ancient stone scrapers from the Calico Hills near Barstow. Leakey was convinced people had been in the Americas far longer than 12,000 years, and in 1963, with National Geographic money, he and Simpson began digging into the old fan deposits above the bed of vanished Lake Manix. They believed they were pulling out stone tools 100,000 years old or more, and one stone from the Master Pit dated to over 200,000. Most archaeologists do not accept it. The geologist Vance Haynes and others showed that tectonic stress, mudflows and rocks tumbling in streams can break chalcedony into shapes indistinguishable from tools, and the site offers up to 60,000 candidates by one count with no human bones, no hearths and nothing else a camp leaves behind. It remains one of the boldest claims ever made about the first Americans, and volunteers are still sorting the finds and sending some for dating.
Calico Hills near Barstow, California
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Other places on the map within a couple of hours of here.
