41–50 of 155 posts
There'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.
Given 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?
how would you rule out the possibility
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Previously: "the article mentions the previous earlier evidence as being from 115K years ago" (edit, oops, misread, this is way before anything we've heard about thus much less certain, forget about it).
I think you may have misread that. The article said this discovery "predat[es] the best evidence up to now by about 115,000 years".
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.
Remaining small but alive for thousands of years is not entirely unthinkable, but it's very unlikely.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Previously: "the article mentions the previous earlier evidence as being from 115K years ago" (edit, oops, misread, this is way before anything we've heard about thus much less certain, forget about it).
According to Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settlement_of_the_Americas "Available scientific evidence indicates that humanity emerged from Africa over 100,000 years ago, yet did not arrive in the Americas until less than 20,000 years ago."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Previously: "the article mentions the previous earlier evidence as being from 115K years ago" (edit, oops, misread, this is way before anything we've heard about thus much less certain, forget about it).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's hard to believe a story can persist for 15,000 years by verbal transmission.
Hard to believe, but it happens. Australian Aboriginal story telling, for example, conveys historical events from 10k+ years ago: http://theconversation.com/ancient-aboriginal-stories-preser...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Typically a population either grows exponentially or vanishes. Remaining small but alive for thousands of years is not entirely unthinkable, but it's very unlikely.
Also typically a population grows depending on birth-death rates which reach quick limits in places of low resources. This is self-evident from different population sizes in different geographic habitats. Instead human populations mushroomed only in select places. See Guns, Germs and Steel by Diamond for more.