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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

#101

Post by flukus »

BurningFrog wrote: post #67
riazrizvi wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An isolated population seed, yes. But a sub-population that can be re-seeded by the main one, no. Homo Erectus has been discovered as far as SE Asia 1 or 2 million years ago. 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 onl…

Sure, but an unpopulated Australia is hardly a place of low resources. The expansion possibilities would be enormous. Even if your colony is surrounded by impenetrable deserts, I'd think you could always propagate along the coast, living off the ocean. That I'm just some internet guy speculating without any deep knowledge is probably obvious, but let me make it extra clear!

Impenetrable deserts aren't known for their abundance of fresh water. Just having resources available isn't everything either, you have to know how to extract those resources, this is a massive barrier to a primitive (excuse the term) culture landing on an alien continent, separated for millions of years.

Living off the ocean is also incredibly dangerous.

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

#102

Post by jnicholasp »

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.

Alongside the comments about Aboriginal legends, a copy of my comment from elsewhere in the thread:

The Klamath Native American tribe has legends of the eruption of Mt. Mazama that formed Oregon's Crater Lake - which happened in ~5677 BC [1]. If oral legends that reflect real events can last seven and a half thousand years, is there any reason to think they couldn't last 15ky, or 20ky? It seems to me all that's needed is a continuous cultural line.

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

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

#103

Post by flukus »

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…

> Geneticists sequenced the DNA from a young boy's 13,000-year-old bones found in Montana.

Wouldn't that make the boy a member of the clovis culture and not the pre-clovis one being discussed?

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

#104

Post by [deleted] »

jdmichal wrote: post #62
dpc59 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every single map is inaccurate in a way, I suggest you read How to lie with maps by Mark Monmonier.

Every single map that's not a globe, anyway... And even those are technically lies, since the Earth is not perfectly spherical.

[deleted]

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

#105

Post by jacobolus »

will_brown wrote: post #93
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…

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 writing started out as a shorthand representation of little piles of clay tokens representing various stored goods (grain, beer, etc.)

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

#106

Post by Houshalter »

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

So what? No one is claiming that prehistoric people couldn't build anything. But without agriculture you can't have dense cities or anything like civilization. The population that can be supported by hunting and gathering alone is tiny.

That site isn't pre agriculture anyway.

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

#107

Post by gregn »

vivekd wrote: post #98

So lets look at the evidence: OUTLIER DATE: This site is an outlier among archaeological sites in terms of the date. The date given for Californians according to this research is 130 000 year ago. As far as I am aware, the earliest recorded human site outside of Africa is one in China 120 000 years ago. And even that site is an outlier because human migration into the middle east began happening 120 000 -100 000 year…

I agree with your criticisms. It doesn't seem clear that these rocks were used for what they claim. I recently found what I believed was an arrowhead. It is symmetrical and sharp on both edges, but it is not an arrowhead. It is a rock that looks like an arrowhead and my wishful thinking pushed it the rest of the way. If I were that researcher I would have claimed that I found the real thing.

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

#108

Post by gregn »

vivekd wrote: post #98

So lets look at the evidence: OUTLIER DATE: This site is an outlier among archaeological sites in terms of the date. The date given for Californians according to this research is 130 000 year ago. As far as I am aware, the earliest recorded human site outside of Africa is one in China 120 000 years ago. And even that site is an outlier because human migration into the middle east began happening 120 000 -100 000 year…

What bothers me is that nowhere in both articles I read do they once mention: "what if it wasn't what we are postulating it is." That tact of reasoning is never explored. The entirety of their position is foregone conclusion. I'm not saying they are wrong or right, but first of all, it seems entirely unlikely due to everything we already know. Second of all there are no human remains, just some rocks that _kind_of_ resemble tools and some broken bones that they can date. It is closer to flight of fantasy that proven fact. I wish they would approach it as such while chasing their hypothesis. I would feel much easier about it. But I suppose people who don't brandish brazen egos are much less likely to get the front-page stories.....

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

#109

Post by hoorayimhelping »

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…

>What changed ~15k years ago ... and why did it take 185k years to happen?

~15k years ago coincides about the with ice retreating at the end of the last glacial period. A large part of human history was too cold to farm.

The last glacial period, popularly known as the Ice Age, was the most recent glacial period, which occurred from c. 110,000 – c. 11,700 years ago.

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

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

#110

Post by ebcode »

bbctol wrote: post #36
hansjorg wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yeah, you really need to see where the cuts are for it to make sense. Here is a better version (without fictitious ocean): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Fuller_projection_rotated...
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