Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

New Evidence Suggests Humans Arrived in the Americas Earlier Than Thought

npr.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 155 posts

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

#51

Post by astine »

tzs wrote: post #18

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?

I'm pretty sure that they would have been fossilized by that point. Broken rock is different than broken bone.

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

#52

Post by nickjarboe »

The journal article in Nature can be found here[1]. The abstract is publicly accessible with the article behind a paywall. I'm not familiar enough with the dating method to comment on the possible problems of the age determination, but it was calculated by the complicated method of "230Th/U radiometric analysis of multiple bone specimens using diffusion–adsorption–decay dating models indicating a burial date of 130.7 ± 9.4 thousand years ago."

[1]https://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v544/n7651/full/nature...

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

#53

Post by Torgo »

WalterBright wrote: post #12
redsummer wrote: post #2

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.

Wikipedia is filled with speculative cryptozoological connections to extinct animals, the notes are more of an acknowledgement that such speculation exists as a cultural artifact connected to that animal, rather than that the speculation is valid or well-supported.

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

#54

Post by enceladus_ice »

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.

I recently watched a NOVA documentary from last year that refutes the Eurocentric theories of Clovis origins.

Great Human Odyssey: http://www.pbs.org/video/2365856257/

Geneticists sequenced the DNA from a young boy's 13,000-year-old bones found in Montana. His DNA matches a specific combination of Eastern Asian and Siberian DNA that is found in all North and South American native populations, and only in these populations. This lends to the theory that the first people to permanently settle the America's (Clovis) were made up of groups from Siberia and Eastern Asia combining and crossing the Bering Strait.

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

#55

Post by rjsw »

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.

The suggested date for this puts it the other side of a genetic bottleneck [1]. Whatever was the cause for this, there is evidence that human population numbers reduced at some point.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory

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

#56

Post by pkhagah »

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 a competing hypothesis of Recent African origin that states humans evolved over 2 millions years in Eurasia and Africa.

> Multiregional evolution holds that the human species first arose around two million years ago and subsequent human evolution has been within a single, continuous human species

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiregional_origin_of_modern...

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ca/Homo-Sta...

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

#57

Post by patrickw »

Fricken wrote: post #31
mrec wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.mensjourn…

"Hokulea is a performance-accurate full-scale replica of a... Polynesian double-hulled voyaging canoe. Launched on 8 March 1975 by the Polynesian Voyaging Society, she is best known for her 1976 Hawaii to Tahiti voyage completed with exclusively Polynesian navigation techniques. The primary goal of the voyage was to explore the anthropological theory of the Asiatic origin of native Oceanic people, of Polynesians and Hawaiians in particular, as the result of purposeful trips through the Pacific, as opposed to passive drifting on currents, or sailing from the Americas."

"Since the 1976 voyage, Hokulea has completed nine additional voyages.... On May 18, 2014, Hokulea and her sister vessel, Hikianalia embarked from Oahu for 'Malama Honua', a three-year circumnavigation of the earth. The journey will cover 47,000 nautical miles with stops at 85 ports in 26 countries."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hokulea

"Polynesian navigation used some navigational instruments, which predate and are distinct from the machined metal tools used by European navigators.... Polynesian navigators employed a whole range of techniques including use of the stars, the movement of ocean currents and wave patterns, the air and sea interference patterns caused by islands and atolls, the flight of birds, the winds and the weather."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polynesian_navigation

http://www.hokulea.com/education-at-sea/polynesian-navigatio...

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

#58

Post by red_hairing »

enceladus_ice wrote: post #54
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.

I recently watched a NOVA documentary from last year that refutes the Eurocentric theories of Clovis origins. Great Human Odyssey: http://www.pbs.org/video/2365856257/ Geneticists sequenced the DNA from a young boy's 13,000-year-old bones found in Montana. His DNA matches a specific combination of Eastern Asian and Siberian DNA that is found in all North and South American native populations, and only in these popula…

but given political considerations, can that particular science be trusted?

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

#59

Post by red_hairing »

tzs wrote: post #26
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.

Homo sapiens mostly didn't leave Africa until about 100k years ago, but when dealing with these things there is always a fair amount of uncertainty so some could have left much earlier. There are also other early human species besides Homo sapiens that could in theory be responsible for something like this. Homo erectus was galavanting around the world perhaps up to 2 million years ago, and they were tool users. Homo…

maybe there was a form of homo erectus already in america, using stone tools etc, having arrived 130k yrs or more ago, and then the indians wiped them out when they arrived much later--that would explain indian tales of having wiped out primitive cannibal tribes (a movie called bone tomahawk was inspired by these tales)...of course the political considerations would tend to suppress this idea.

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

#60

Post by dpc59 »

Balgair wrote: post #34
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…

You'd think the land bridge would have pretty fertile soil too, with it having been seabed a few years prior and whatnot.
Post reply on HN