That cant be right. Humans didnt leave africa until 100 thousand years ago.
If this is real there should also be more evidence of them. Not just the this one find.
New Evidence Suggests Humans Arrived in the Americas Earlier Than Thought
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Re: New Evidence Suggests Humans Arrived in the Americas Earlier Than Thought
#12There's a lot of Sasquatch stories among Native Americans. Homo Floresiensis overlaps with the Ebu Gogo myth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebu_gogo
It's hard to believe a story can persist for 15,000 years by verbal transmission.
Re: New Evidence Suggests Humans Arrived in the Americas Earlier Than Thought
#13For a skeptical point of view, see the second half of Jared Diamond's article: https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27111
The problem with that argument is that you can use it to attack, well, anything, so long as the countervailing viewpoint is threatening to your own worldview. One could very well have applied the same objection to the null result of the Michelson-Morely experiment: since it showed that the Earth was acting weirdly with respect to the lumeniferous aether, obviously there must be something more pedestrian at work than "the aether doesn't work like we thought it did."
In Diamond's case, he's dismissing all claims of pre-Clovis settlement of the Americas. For most mainstream anthropologists, the case is settled: Clovis was not the first group of humans to settle the Americas, and the Americas were settled perhaps ~20kya, not ~13kya, probably via coastal migrations (whose sites are now underwater) rather than via the interior route blocked by the Laurentide. The biggest problem with the traditional Clovis + ice-free corridor hypothesis is that the Laurentide opened up about a 1000 years too late.
For someone like Jared Diamond, I suspect the main resistance to accepting earlier habitation of the Americas is that it throws major wrenches into the hypothesis that the mastodons were hunted to extinction by early humans.
Re: New Evidence Suggests Humans Arrived in the Americas Earlier Than Thought
#14It's only 50 miles by sea from Eurasia to the Americas. People got to Australia around 40,000–60,000 years ago by boat so it seems unlikely that people needed a land bridge to get to the Americas. Remember, the globe also looks like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eskimo#/media/File:Inuit_conf_... PS: I suspect the Americas where well known in the 1700's, but nobody was talking to the Russian Far East when map ma…
Buckminster Fuller made a similar point with one of his dymaxion projections: https://telemachusunedited.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/lowpp...
I wouldn't be surprised if climate affected our adventurousness, though, which this projection doesn't capture. I find ice cold seas a lot more forbidding.
Re: New Evidence Suggests Humans Arrived in the Americas Earlier Than Thought
#15ECREE. "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." -Carl Sagan
Re: New Evidence Suggests Humans Arrived in the Americas Earlier Than Thought
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or they are like the Norsemen-sure they made it early, but with 100,000 missing years of continuous habitation until Clovis, et al, they died out and didn't contribute anything.
The Norseman had one small colony that was attacked by people already inhabiting North America. They settled the Eastern tip of Canada then departed. These people, if they existed, would have colonized all the way from Western Alaska to California, meaning they would have had numerous settlements, and in an uninhabited continent.
Not to mention, the difference in known human technology and capability from 130k years ago to 50k years ago is not small.
Using something like Bayesian reasoning, I find it more plausible that this is experimental error than a one-off revelation that humans had technology to cross the Pacific 130kya.
Re: New Evidence Suggests Humans Arrived in the Americas Earlier Than Thought
#17I think it was Nova a while back that suggested that clovis technology came from a stone age french tribe, and that there were traces of them in the genes of eastern native americans.
That is the "Solutrean Hypothesis": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solutrean_hypothesis
My understanding is that it is roundly rejected by almost all archaeologists.
Re: New Evidence Suggests Humans Arrived in the Americas Earlier Than Thought
#18Given
1. a site that appears to have been used by humans to do some kind of processing of bones, and
2. very old (130k) bones at that site that have been processed,
how would you rule out the possibility that the site was made and the bones processed by people that came much later (say, 15k years ago) who found a bunch of 115k year old bones from animals that died from natural deaths and used them?
Re: New Evidence Suggests Humans Arrived in the Americas Earlier Than Thought
#19For a skeptical point of view, see the second half of Jared Diamond's article: https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27111
The problem with that argument is that you can use it to attack, well, anything, so long as the countervailing viewpoint is threatening to your own worldview. One could very well have applied the same objection to the null result of the Michelson-Morely experiment: since it showed that the Earth was acting weirdly with respect to the lumeniferous aether, obviously there must be something more pedestrian at work than…
> it throws major wrenches into the hypothesis that the mastodons were hunted to extinction by early humans.
Why would some small settlements ~20kya be a problem for this hypothesis? Regardless of whether previous settlements at a smaller scale existed, the Clovis people were the first to have the technology and culture to be able to rapidly explode across the continent, and the time they did this coincides with the time of extinction pretty well, doesn't it?
Re: New Evidence Suggests Humans Arrived in the Americas Earlier Than Thought
#20Notice that the article states the bones themselves are from 130kya, not that they were discovered in a layer of sediment deposited 130kya. This means that the age of the bones says nothing about the tools scattered around them at the site, or the ancient users of those tools.
Taking this into account, I think a more plausible explanation is that ancient humans - Clovis ancient (13kya) or perhaps older (20kya) - discovered these bones and kept them, used them, then discarded them or lost them with the other stone tools from the site.