Continuing with Graham Hancock's work 'America Before The Key to Earth’s Lost Civilization'

ALTHOUGH HE HIMSELF IS NOT an archaeologist, Tom Deméré, curator of paleontology at the San Diego Natural History Museum in California, does have occasion to work with archaeologists. I was therefore not surprised when his response to my request to interview him and have him show me certain stones and bones in the museum’s archives was declined. My initial approach was on September 18, 2017, and the polite refusal came on September 20, not from Dr. Deméré himself but from Rebecca Handelsman, the museum’s communications director. “While we’re unable to accommodate your request for a meeting,” she wrote, “I’d like to share with you our online press kit which has a wealth of information about the project and the discovery.”1 Though they have their place, press kits are low on my list of priorities when I’m researching books, and because of the very special nature of what Rebecca called “the project and the discovery,” I was not going to be so easily fobbed off. Deméré had been closely involved from the outset with the excavation of a controversial site near San Diego and had published a paper in 2017 claiming that humans had been present there as early as 130,000 years ago.2 The paper was a prominent one, since it appeared in the prestigious scientific journal Nature, and almost immediately aroused the 59 fury of archaeologists committed to a much later date for the peopling of the Americas.

Among them was Professor Donald Grayson of the University of Washington.3 “I have read that paper,” he sniped, “and I was astonished by it. I was astonished not because it is so good, but because it is so bad.”4

In a response that was typical of many, David J. Meltzer, professor of prehistory at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, also dismissed the paper. “If you are going to push human antiquity in the New World back more than 100,000 years in one fell swoop,” he said, “you’ll have to do so with a far better archaeological case than this one. I’m not buying what’s being sold.”5
https://exploringrealhistory.blogspot.com/2020/07/part-2-america-before-key-to-earths.html