is 30,000 BP, and that date itself is controversial). The sheer number of possible tools, up to 60,000 by one account. The research by Duvall/Venner, Payen, and others providing possible natural explanations for the stone objects. History of excavations In 1959 Louis Leakey, while at the British Museum of Natural History in London, received a visit from Ruth DeEtte Simpson, an archaeologist from California. Simpson had acquired what looked like ancient scrapers from a site in the Calico Hills and showed it to Leakey. Leakey viewed it as important to study the Calico Hill site, as he was convinced that the number and distribution of native languages in the Americas required more time than 12,000 years to evolve and acquire their current distribution. In 1963, Leakey obtained funds from the National Geographic Society and commenced archaeological excavations with Simpson. Excavations in an area stratigraphically separate from a verified 10,000-year-old Paleoindian site were carried out by Leakey and Simpson, who believed that they had located stone artifacts that were dated 100,000 years or older, suggesting a human presence in North America much earlier than estimated. George F. Carter discusses this work and its background and context at length in Older Than You Think. The archaeologist Jeffrey Goodman who worked at the site with Leakey had also claimed the stone artifacts to be human made. Goodman has also made controversial statements that the artifacts found at Calico Hills may be as old as 500,000 years and if proven would be the oldest human artifacts in the world, which would place human origins in the Americas. However the majority of scientists have rejected these claims, according to Kenneth Feder "Goodman's claims were not backed up with even a shred of evidence." The geologist Vance Haynes had made three visits to the site in 1973 and had claimed that the artifacts of Leakey were naturally formed geofacts. According to Haynes, the geofacts were formed by stones becoming fractured in an ancient river on the site. In her autobiography, Louis' wife Mary Leakey wrote that because of his involvement with the Calico Hills site she had lost academic respect for him, and that the Calico excavations was "catastrophic to his professional career and was largely responsible for the parting of our ways". She did not share his visionary views about the Calico site. She regarded Louis as often slipping into incompetence and often publicized that