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?
Which political considerations are you talking about?
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?
Yep, the article is talking about a group of people that are definitely pre-Clovis, which is super exciting!
I was replying to WalterBright's comment mentioning the Clovis culture coming from what is now Europe.
> 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 developed very late, about 5-6kya in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and China, and around 2-3kya in Mesoamerica. Even in the Americas, the large empires of the Aztecs and the Inca, as well as large complexes like the Mississippian culture, developed without writing (although the Incan quipu seems to have some sort of non-numeric data encoded that may strain our definition of writing system, and the Aztecs did have some form of proto-writing).
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
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…
~12k thousand years ago is when it appears we first started to form together into large communities, Göbekli Tepe is a good example. More here https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Göbekli_Tepe
From the link :
> This corresponds well with an ancient Sumerian belief that agriculture, animal husbandry, and weaving were brought to mankind from the sacred mountain Ekur, which was inhabited by Annuna deities, very ancient gods without individual names
We find the first evidence of cultivation around 11.5k years ago not so far away in the Levant. Aggrecuture appears to have been the major change which kickstarted civilisation as we know it off.
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?
A colleague of one of the authors of this paper commented on this point on Reddit. Old bone fractures differently from recently-living bone.
"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
If it wasn't permanently inhabited, then it's not a city. There are the remains of massive camps in Russia built out of Mammoth bones and tusks that held many thousands of people, made possible by massive culls of migrating herds, but these are not permanent settlements either.
Living permanently in the same place on a large scale is a completely different way of life compared to living a mainly nomadic life and gathering at special sites from time to time, even if you make a permanent mark on those sites.
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.
Fossilisation takes much longer and very different conditions over millions of years.
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 developed very late, about 5-6kya in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and China, and around 2-3kya in Mesoamerica. Even in the Americas, the large empires of the Aztecs and the Inca, as well as large complexes like the Mississippian culture, developed without writing (although the Incan quipu seems to have some sort of non-numeric data encoded that may strain our definition of writing system, and the Aztecs did have some…
Record of written numbers (e.g. tallies, tallie sticks/bones) dates 25,000-35,000 years.