Barstow is a desert town and was important years ago for being on Route 66 (all the way from Chicago to Santa Monica!) and being an important terminal for the Sante Fe railroad. I believe these were mentioned in the earlier post about Barstow. This time we'll talk about something different.
Just outside of Barstow to the east is an active archeological site. A number of years ago some rocks were found here an knowledgeable people said "wow, that rock shows signs that it was struck by another rock." And who would do that? Early humans in this area. But the big deal was that carbon dating and other techniques indicated that the rock striking took place 35,000 to 50,000 years ago. This is significant because for the most part scientists think the earliest humans were in North America starting 10 to 12,000 years ago.
We talked with the site manager and he gave us the whole story. The people who found the rocks originally took them to Louis Leakey (of Lucy and early man fame) in 1959 and he was impressed enough to visit the site and encourage people to dig and find more! Well, there are lots of rocks in this part of Southern California!
Here are some pictures of the dig site. The archeologists are very systematic about controlling what they dig and recording everything they find. There was no active digging going on when we were there.
Additional views.
If you are interested in learning more, check this out - Link to Wikipedia article.
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