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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

#31

Post by Fricken »

mrec wrote: post #21
Retric wrote: post #3

It'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…

> People got to Australia around 40,000–60,000 years ago by boat so it seems unlikely that people needed a land bridge Maybe, maybe not. Living for days on an open raft or equivalent is going to be a lot tougher when you're nearly in the Arctic Circle than it is in the sunny South Pacific. > PS: I suspect the Americas where well known in the about in the 1700's, but nobody was talking to the Russian Far East when map…

I don't think it's unreasonable to hypothesize that a community that starts out fishing in nearby waters using rudimentary boats would, over the span of maybe dozens of generations, learn something about travelling longer distances over open water.

A dude recently crossed the Atlantic on a stand-up paddle board. Which is insane, but it proves you be a prolific seafarer with very basic watercraft.

http://www.mensjournal.com/adventure/articles/chris-bertish-...

Re: New Evidence Suggests Humans Arrived in the Americas Earlier Than Thought

#32

Post by jcranmer »

Will_Parker wrote: post #19
jcranmer wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

One of the pieces of evidence that proponents of human overhunting of megafauna point to is the seeming correlation between "arrival of humans" and "extinction of megafauna" on most continents. Drawing that out by a few thousand years on one continent in particular weakens the correlation dramatically.

Re: New Evidence Suggests Humans Arrived in the Americas Earlier Than Thought

#34

Post by Balgair »

Retric wrote: post #3

It'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…

Also, Beringia went through many cycles of land and sea coverage[0]. Our climate has been pretty up and down since homo sapiens came onto the stage.

Aside: The land-bridge was not just a passing point, it was actually a nice place to sit and stay, due to the wind, sea, and glacial climatic issues. Also, the coastal-migration idea states that we just skimmed the coast all the way to at least Chile. The issue with that idea is that all those coast lines and settlement areas are about 200m under water now and were likely destroyed by wave action, so it's hard to prove. Beringia is a really cool place to study, pardon the pun, and helps change some ideas about how humans came to be. It seems like we've been pretty smart for a long long time. There are civilizations all over the globe that rose, fell, and died, and we will never ever know of them. The idea of 'civilization' is ancient, it seems.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beringia

Re: New Evidence Suggests Humans Arrived in the Americas Earlier Than Thought

#35

Post by jcranmer »

btilly wrote: post #29
jcranmer wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Do you have a reference supporting "For most mainstream anthropologists"? Do you have an explanation for why pre-Clovis humans didn't leave a ton of remains everywhere?

No, I don't have a specific reference supporting "for most mainstream anthropologists." Rather, this comes from most of my reading of books, websites, and various forums, and the general consensus I've gotten from it all is that there's few people trying to defined Clovis-First. See " rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3kmwfq/clovi... for an example of such a commentary.

Re: New Evidence Suggests Humans Arrived in the Americas Earlier Than Thought

#36

Post by bbctol »

hansjorg wrote: post #9
Retric wrote: post #3

It'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...

Man, I understand the desire to make every map a rectangle, but filling that in with endless ocean is just so wrong

Re: New Evidence Suggests Humans Arrived in the Americas Earlier Than Thought

#37

Post by WalterBright »

canjobear wrote: post #17
WalterBright wrote: post #10

I 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.

The text and the pictures are confusing - the picture shows haplogroup X having a european origin, and the text says otherwise.

Re: New Evidence Suggests Humans Arrived in the Americas Earlier Than Thought

#38

Post by Will_Parker »

jcranmer wrote: post #32
Will_Parker wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

One of the pieces of evidence that proponents of human overhunting of megafauna point to is the seeming correlation between "arrival of humans" and "extinction of megafauna" on most continents. Drawing that out by a few thousand years on one continent in particular weakens the correlation dramatically.

How could some human settlements exclusively on and around the Pacific shore kill all megafauna on a whole continent?

Postulating that the first settlement is more important than the time of a population explosion seems to lack the kind of common sense that Jared Diamond is talking about, to me.

Re: New Evidence Suggests Humans Arrived in the Americas Earlier Than Thought

#39

Post by riazrizvi »

Retric wrote: post #3

It'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…

At this point I assume only that we've found evidence showing humans got to Australia 40-60k years ago. I suspect they (we?) arrived earlier in smaller numbers that we haven't detected yet.

Re: New Evidence Suggests Humans Arrived in the Americas Earlier Than Thought

#40

Post by tmalsburg2 »

cucucfudud wrote: post #11

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.

There is always a first discovery. Arguing that it can't be true because it it were, it would have been found earlier is therefore not logical.
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