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George Francis Carter (6 April 1912 - 16 March 2004) was an American geography professor who taught at Johns Hopkins University and later Texas A&M University. Carter had a background in anthropology and conducted archaeological excavations in Southern California. He is best known for supporting the theories of hyperdiffusionism and early human settlement of the Americas.

Biography
Carter was born in San Diego, California on 6 April 1912. As a teenager, he expressed interest in anthropology and began to spend much of his free time at the San Diego Museum of Man. At the age of fifteen, Carter befriended the archaeologist Malcolm Jennings Rogers, who was the museum's curator. Rogers allowed the young Carter to volunteer at the museum, and In the summer 1930, Carter accompanied Rogers on a five-week expedition to San Nicolas Island, where they excavated numerous sites. The following autumn, Carter began classes at the San Diego State University, then known as San Diego State College. He would eventually transfer to the University of California at Berkeley and earn a B.A. in anthropology in 1934. While at Berkeley, Carter was able to take classes with the noted cultural anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber, who had been a student of Franz Boas.

Immediately after graduating, Carter was hired by the San Diego Museum of Man and began working with his old mentor Malcolm Jennings Rogers. The two conducted field work on the coasts of Southern California and in the Mojave Desert. While surveying in 1937-1938 near Silver Lake in the Mojave, Carter found a fluted projectile point which he recognized to be Folsom. Up until this time, nothing of the Folsom tradition had been found in California, and Carter wanted to document and publish the find at once. Rogers was not comfortable rushing the publication and preferred to gather as much data about the Folsom point as possible. Carter and Rogers soon found themselves at odds regarding the approximate dates of human occupation of the Silver Lake area. Rogers thought occupation dated back to 4,000 years ago and Carter pushed the date back to 40,000 years ago, using the geology of area to make his guess. This disagreement led to a rift between Rogers and Carter which resulted in Carter's dismissal from the Museum of Man.

Bouncing back from his dismissal, Carter was quickly hired by San Diego State College in 1939 as a part-time teacher before returning to Berkeley to pursue a PhD in geography. He studied under Carl Sauer and completed his degree in 1941. During World War Two, Carter moved to Washington, D.C. to work as an analyst for the Office of Strategic Services. In 1943, he left the OSS to teach geography at Johns Hopkins University. For the summers between semesters, Carter would return to San Diego to conduct archaeological excavations, seeking to prove that man had inhabited the Americas at a much earlier date than accepted by scholars. In 1957, Carter's findings were published in his book Pleistocene Man at San Diego, in which he describes the climate of Southern California during the Pleistocene and accompanying archaeological sites, some of which Carter dated to the upper Wisconsin glaciation. Critics dismissed much of Carter's claims for early inhabitance, questioning his dating techniques and the possibility that most of the lithic artifacts were actually geofacts. Throughout the 1960s to the 1980s, Carter continued to publish papers and articles dealing with hyperdiffusionism and early peopling of the Americas.

In 1967, Carter left Johns Hopkins for Texas A&M University, where he was a distinguished professor of geography until 1978, retiring to become a professor emeritus. On 16 March 2004, Carter died.

Earlier Than You Think
In 1980, Carter published Earlier than You Think: A Personal View of Man in America. The book describes Carter's evidence for humans arriving in North America approximately 100,000 years ago. Much of the information is what Carter already published, but technological advances allowed for a new dating technique called amino acid racemization.

Amino acid racemization was pioneered by Jeffry Bada, who at the time was a geochemist at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography. The new technique allowed bones to be dated by extracting their protein. Learning of this new means of dating, Carter selected some skulls from the San Diego Museum of Man to be tested. The skulls were excavated on the California coast by M.J. Rogers in 1929 and the museum had them dated from 5,000 to 7,000 years ago. Jeffery Bada tested the specimens in 1974, and the dates came back ranging from 20,000 to 70,000 years ago. Carter saw this as definitive proof of the early populating of the Americas.

Criticism of Dating
Critics quickly refuted Bada's results. When using amino acid racemization to date bones, one must know the approximate temperature the bones were exposed to while buried. Additionally, the stratigraphy of the bones suggested dates around 10,000 years ago rather than 70,000.

In December of 1984, Jeffery Bada came forward and retracted all the dates of bones gleaned from amino acid racemization. Newer methods of dating, such as accelerator mass spectrometry gave the same bones dates of less than 10,000 years.

Carter and Hyperdiffusionism
George Carter was a proponent of hyperdiffusionism, or the idea that all major inventions and cultures can be traced back to one original culture. For example, in Pleistocene Man at San Diego, Carter proposes that the lithic technology found in Southern California was brought there from Asia. Carter thought that ancient people had reached the New World by boat and spread their technologies and cultures. He cites Hannes Lindemann and his solo crossing of the Atlantic in a dugout canoe as evidence that humans could in fact have made the journey. Carter also mentions the Polynesians' and Vikings' seafaring abilities as support.

Carter believed that independent invention of the same item was a rarity. He claimed that the probability of something being independently invented is fifty percent. Therefore, the probably of the same thing being independently invented elsewhere is twenty-five percent. This means that the probability of humans independently inventing the same tools all over the world is very low.

Artifacts
Mainstream archaeology scholars have dismissed many of Carter's lithic artifacts as geofacts, rocks that have a similar appearance to stone tools due to natural weathering processes. Carter's tendency to find questionable artifacts led scholars to call questionable artifacts "cartifacts."

Hyperdiffusionism
Most anthropology scholars dismiss hyperdiffusionism. The theory assumes that humanity is singularly uninventive and cannot create tools to meet the challenges of the environment. Hyperdiffusionism also assumes that if artifacts have a similarity in appearance, they must be related in some manner. Just the same, if cultural traits are similar between two or more peoples, there must be a connection. In Carter's case, seafaring peoples came to the New World and diffused their cultures, but there is no sound archaeological evidence in support of his claim.