Yukon who is who

Jacques Cinq-Mars (d. 2021)

Jacques Cinq-Mars was an archaeologist working on the staff of the Canadian Museum of History. He started working in the Old Crow area in the 1970s and excavated the Bluefish Caves from 1977 to 1987. His contention, that humans lived in the area around 24,000 years ago, was contested by some archaeologists.¹⁾ Cinq-Mars’s work challenged mainstream scientific thinking that humans, the Clovis people, first reached the Americas around 13,000 years ago.²⁾

Instead of meeting the challenge, the discovery launched an acrimonious debate. Between 1979 and 2001, Cinq-Mars published a series of studies on the Bluefish Caves that were met with opposition that he likened to the Spanish Inquisition. Funding for his work dried up. In the 1990s, studies showed that the Clovis people lived in the Americas between 13,800 and 15,500 years ago and possibly earlier. Then in 2017, a PhD candidate from the University of Montreal and her colleagues confirmed that the human-butchered bones from Bluefish Caves were 24,000 years old. It was a huge surprise because Cinq-Mars had been so discredited. The affirmation prompted the first serious discussion about the site, nearly forty years after its excavation. It also launched a discussion about the way dissenting voices are treated by main-stream archaeologists and the way that science may be impeded.³⁾

Ruth Gotthardt was on the Bluefish Caves excavation team and believes the burden of proof demanded of Cinq-Mars was extreme. In 2017, the Bluefish Caves site was cautiously accepted by scientists as evidence of the oldest human occupation found in North America.⁴⁾