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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

#121

Post by tzs »

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?

Found an answer to this in the Reddit discussion [1] on /r/science. Fresh bone breaks in a different pattern than old bone. The breaks on the bones at this site are the kind that indicate the bone was fresh when it broke.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/67qs7r/paleontolog...

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

#122

Post by will_brown »

jacobolus wrote: post #105
will_brown wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Though people are suggesting the answer to your question is agriculture...I'd say it was likely writing (accounting/contracts) and in today's terms writing disrupted the existing systems of agriculture and city planning/building/management. As far as technology goes...one day there was spoken word the next voices/thoughts could be communicated without a person and through time - that is magic.

Writing doesn’t show up in a vacuum. It’s a product of needing scribes to manage complicated supply chains, tax collection, property boundary recording, dispute adjudication, and most of all debt tracking. Those come along with population density, social stratification, inherited wealth, etc., which are part of feedback loops that start with agriculture and permanent settlement. For instance in Mesopotamia, cuneiform…

>Those come along with population density, social stratification, inherited wealth, etc., which are part of feedback loops that start with agriculture and permanent settlement.

I agree writing doesn't show up in a vacuum. The cuneiform clay tablets from Mesopotamia are the oldest record of "written language" but certainly not the oldest form of writing.

At least according to the current historical record argiculture dates to 12,000bc while written numbers (tallies made of wood and bone) date back 25,000-35,000 years. So unless there is some as of yet discovered agricultural civilization(s) - I think very likely - there is a problem with your feedback loop compared to the historical record: writing(numbers)came long before agriculture.

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

#123

Post by Retric »

oliyoung wrote: post #114
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 It's generally accepted that over 80,000 years ago people crossed the land bridge over the Torres Strait before it was submerged https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torres_Strait

You still need boats to get from Asia to Australia even with that land 'bridge'. The difference is you don't need to do nearly as much Island hopping.

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

#124

Post by adrianratnapala »

jlarocco wrote: post #72
Balgair wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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…

It seems (though it is controversial) that some time during the last ice-age the brain (but not the visible anatomy) evolved to the point that there was a sudden explosion in culture (as visible to archaeology through art, burials etc.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Human_Revolution_(human_or....

Herding and framing then began as soon as that ice-age receded. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glacial_period#/media/File:Co2...

After that, human culture has been changing continuously as cities, states, writing and all the rest evolved and continue to evolve.

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

#125

Post by douche »

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.

Paleontology is built up out of the most tenuous of evidence. Whole pages of children's dinosaur books are extrapolated out from one or two fragmentary skeletons of unfortunate creatures that just happened to die in places where their corpses were covered up by preserving sediments, instead of being picked apart by scavengers.

Archaeology is a little better, just because it's more recent, and there's more stuff that has managed to survive, but in the absence of ceramics, metals, or large-scale use of stone, almost everything that primitive humans would use is extremely perishable, with the exceptions being where we just happen to have found bodies and graves in extremely preservative conditions, like bog people, or the Peruvian desert cave mummies, or frozen in glaciers. I've an uncle who is an archaeologist specializing in post-contact Native American sites, and the vast majority of the time, the only identifying aspects of a site will be that he's stumbled onto an ancient trash heap, full of discarded and broken mollusk shells.

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

#126

Post by lostlogin »

dpc59 wrote: post #60
Balgair wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Cultivating salt marshes isn't ideal.

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

#128

Post by ptaipale »

Retric wrote: post #123
oliyoung wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People got to Australia around 40,000–60,000 years ago by boat It's generally accepted that over 80,000 years ago people crossed the land bridge over the Torres Strait before it was submerged https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torres_Strait

You still need boats to get from Asia to Australia even with that land 'bridge'. The difference is you don't need to do nearly as much Island hopping.

And in the past, you didn't need to pass open ocean. That's a huge difference for stone age technology.

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

#129

Post by restalis »

BurningFrog wrote: post #44
riazrizvi wrote: post #39

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.

"Typically a population either grows exponentially or vanishes."

That is, if there don't arise artificial limiting factors, like a cult/religion rule or system that takes control over population's dynamics. When that happens, it may enter in a stable state until an occurring external disruptive change.

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

#130

Post by restalis »

anigbrowl wrote: post #78
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?

found a bunch of 115k year old bones from animals that died from natural deaths I can think of things that might kill a whole herd of animals at once, but I'm having trouble picturing their bones just lying there intact for 100,000 years before people came along.

Seemingly not applicable in this case, but bones can stay intact for thousands of years in caves, without being buried under layers of sediments. People may later find them and find them useful to whatever purpose. (Then later another bunch of humans may find everything again and draw whatever conclusions!)
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