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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

#81

Post by flukus »

pmalynin wrote: post #74
jlarocco wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I've wondered about that a lot, actually. If homo sapiens have been around for ~200k years (according to wikipedia), what were we doing for the first 185k years? What changed ~15k years ago that we star…

"What changed ~15k years ago that we started building cities, constructing tools, etc., and why did it take 185k years to happen?" Old question, the answer is: Agricultural Revolution

More specifically, what made societies around the world start building cities at roughly the same time? I suspect the answer will be that humans were a lot more mobile than we assume.

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

#82

Post by flukus »

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.

Or maybe there was an event that led us to over hunting. We could have been fine for thousands of years until another food supply was exhausted and what had to hunt mega-fauna more. They weren't stupid, they didn't hunt large animals unless they had too.

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

#83

Post by nkoren »

dragonwriter wrote: post #77
nkoren wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the traditional answer, but it's wrong. Göbekli Tepe[1] decisively pre-dates agriculture. Although it wasn't inhabited, it displays a level of technology and social organisation on par with city-building. But agriculture definitely had nothing to do with it. Not saying that I've got a good answer for what did happen -- just that agriculture wasn't it. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe

Your citation does not support the "decisively predates agriculture" claim, and in fact refers to early agriculture at the site as one of the competing interpretations.

Göbekli Tepe was built ~11,500 years ago, and it probably isn't a coincidence that early agriculture was developed in the same area -- about 1,000 years later. The early agriculture reference that you mention concerns the fact that the was abandoned as early agriculture started to take hold:

> Around the beginning of the 8th millennium BCE Göbekli Tepe ("Potbelly Hill") lost its importance. The advent of agriculture and animal husbandry brought new realities to human life in the area, and the "Stone-age zoo" (Schmidt's phrase applied particularly to Layer III, Enclosure D) apparently lost whatever significance it had had for the region's older, foraging communities.

I haven't seen any sources citing evidence for Göbekli Tepe post-dating agriculture, but there are many lines of evidence that it pre-dates it -- such as an absence of cultivated grains, granary structures, or other evidence that one sees as agriculture actually gets going. All the plant remains that have been found are wild varieties. Thus the mainstream assumption is that Göbekli Tepe was built by hunter-gatherers.

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

#84

Post by jlarocco »

pmalynin wrote: post #74
jlarocco wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I've wondered about that a lot, actually. If homo sapiens have been around for ~200k years (according to wikipedia), what were we doing for the first 185k years? What changed ~15k years ago that we star…

"What changed ~15k years ago that we started building cities, constructing tools, etc., and why did it take 185k years to happen?" Old question, the answer is: Agricultural Revolution

Does that answer the question, though, or just change it to "Why did it take 185k years to discover agriculture, cities, and tool making?" Not to mention all the millennia of close human ancestors like Neanderthals who could have potentially stumbled upon them.

If the best explanation is "it just took a long time to discover," then I can believe it, but it's very odd that not even once (that we've discovered) in 185k years did anybody get the idea to build any kind of permanent stone structures or buildings or even rock formations like Stonehenge.

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

#85

Post by nkoren »

ceedan wrote: post #79
nkoren wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the traditional answer, but it's wrong. Göbekli Tepe[1] decisively pre-dates agriculture. Although it wasn't inhabited, it displays a level of technology and social organisation on par with city-building. But agriculture definitely had nothing to do with it. Not saying that I've got a good answer for what did happen -- just that agriculture wasn't it. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe

One area in the world where society may have evolved differently doesnt seem to be enough evidence to debunk the idea that the agricultural revolution gave rise to cities. Isn't this just an outlier... if it even does predate agriculture.

No time for a proper reply, but here's a series of blog posts addressing those issues (among others):

https://evolution-institute.org/blog/complex-societies-befor...

https://evolution-institute.org/blog/why-become-a-farmer/

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

#86

Post by WalterBright »

drowned wrote: post #49
obelos wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

You may find this interesting: The town of Carencro, Louisiana takes its name from an American Indian legend about a mastodon that died there. The name has been interpreted as either "carrion crow" for wake of vultures that feasted upon its carcass, or "carnero"--"bone pile"--for the bones of the creature itself. The fossil was discovered in the 18th century. Oral cultures have a long memory.

Mastodons used to be everywhere. Finding a mastodon's bones is not that unusual, so is not compelling proof of the veracity of the legend.

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

#87

Post by wavefunction »

flukus wrote: post #80
dpc59 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Does it glaciate? That process often grinds away everything down to the bedrock.

I don't believe the Bering Strait area was subject to any recent (within the timeframe we're discussing) glaciation.

And there is always a leading edge of the glacier where all that ground-up goodness ends up. Many dynamic biomes are found on the boundaries of extreme and hostile environments.

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

#88

Post by baddox »

nkoren wrote: post #75
pmalynin wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"What changed ~15k years ago that we started building cities, constructing tools, etc., and why did it take 185k years to happen?" Old question, the answer is: Agricultural Revolution

That's the traditional answer, but it's wrong. Göbekli Tepe[1] decisively pre-dates agriculture. Although it wasn't inhabited, it displays a level of technology and social organisation on par with city-building. But agriculture definitely had nothing to do with it. Not saying that I've got a good answer for what did happen -- just that agriculture wasn't it. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe

Seems to me that it could still be correct. It seems likely that humans were smart and well-equipped enough to build sites like Göbekli Tepe before the agricultural revolution, but the vast majority of them simply didn't have enough time to do so.

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

#89

Post by acid__ »

aetherson wrote: post #69
red_hairing wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Come on, you can't take legends from circa 1500 AD to be evidence of anything that happened somewhere between 11,000 and 20,000 years earlier, especially without writing. It's far more likely that primitive cannibal tribes were made up wholesale than that societies carried the memory of them for more than 10,000 years.

Well, it wouldn't be entirely unprecedented.

See: "Indigenous Australian storytelling accurately records sea level rises 7,000 years ago"

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/sep/16/indig...

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

#90

Post by hyperpallium »

nkoren wrote: post #75
pmalynin wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"What changed ~15k years ago that we started building cities, constructing tools, etc., and why did it take 185k years to happen?" Old question, the answer is: Agricultural Revolution

That's the traditional answer, but it's wrong. Göbekli Tepe[1] decisively pre-dates agriculture. Although it wasn't inhabited, it displays a level of technology and social organisation on par with city-building. But agriculture definitely had nothing to do with it. Not saying that I've got a good answer for what did happen -- just that agriculture wasn't it. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe

Agriculture allows higher population density - a nice alternative to starvation, war, infanticide. But agriculture is less pleasant than hunter-gathering, so you avoid it til you have serious population problems.
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