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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

#21

Post by mrec »

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 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 making.

That's an interesting thought. If you use Reddit, might be a good one for /r/AskHistorians

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

#22

Post by obelos »

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.

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...

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

#23

Post by jcranmer »

FullMtlAlcoholc wrote: post #6
goodcanadian wrote: post #4

You can count me firmly in the skeptics category. However, it is interesting, and human beings have been around a long time. It would be a bit surprising if no one ever made it to the Americas until "recent" times.

I'm skeptical of this finding however it seems ludicrous to mean that scientists accept on its face that humans reached Australia like 50000 years ago, crossing over 55 miles of water but a 50-mile wide Bering Strait would pose huge problems.

Sea-levels were not the same 50kya as they were today; they were about 120m or so lower. At that level, a lot of the seas in Southeast Asia and Australia just simply cease to exist, and so the ultimate water gaps are only a few km wide--very likely, you could see the other shore at times. Of course, at the same time, the Bering Strait didn't exist for similar reasons.

By comparison, Madagascar, which is ~400km from Africa, was never settled by African tribes (they were settled from Austronesians from Indonesia). Malta, about 80km from the closest land in Italy, was apparently settled only around 7kya.

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

#24

Post by WillPostForFood »

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…

We know Russian explorers first sailed to America in the 1700s, but they didn't really explore or land enough to call it "well known" until the early 1800s.

In 1725, Emperor Peter the Great ordered navigator Vitus Bering to explore the North Pacific for potential colonization. The Russians were primarily interested in the abundance of fur-bearing mammals on Alaska's coast, as stocks had been depleted by overhunting in Siberia. Bering's first voyage was foiled by thick fog and ice, but in 1741 a second voyage by Bering and Aleksei Chirikov made sight of the North American mainland.

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

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

#25

Post by hansjorg »

ellyagg wrote: post #14
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...

I wouldn't be surprised if climate affected our adventurousness, though, which this projection doesn't capture. I find ice cold seas a lot more forbidding.

Climate has varied a bit over the years though. And Alaskan summers seem quite inviting.

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

#26

Post by tzs »

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 heidelbergensis was on the move around 600k years ago. Homo neanderthalensis was out of Africa around 300k years ago.

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

#27

Post by russdill »

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?

Probably by the way they are broken.

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

#28

Post by joe_the_user »

Will_Parker wrote: post #16
Jabanga wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Norseman had one small colony that was attacked by people already inhabiting North America. They settled the Eastern tip of Canada then departed. These people, if they existed, would have colonized all the way from Western Alaska to California, meaning they would have had numerous settlements, and in an uninhabited continent.

Not to mention, the difference in known human technology and capability from 130k years ago to 50k years ago is not small. Using something like Bayesian reasoning, I find it more plausible that this is experimental error than a one-off revelation that humans had technology to cross the Pacific 130kya.

Previously: "the article mentions the previous earlier evidence as being from 115K years ago" (edit, oops, misread, this is way before anything we've heard about thus much less certain, forget about it).

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

#29

Post by btilly »

jcranmer wrote: post #13
Will_Parker wrote: post #5

For a skeptical point of view, see the second half of Jared Diamond's article: https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27111

The problem with that argument is that you can use it to attack, well, anything, so long as the countervailing viewpoint is threatening to your own worldview. One could very well have applied the same objection to the null result of the Michelson-Morely experiment: since it showed that the Earth was acting weirdly with respect to the lumeniferous aether, obviously there must be something more pedestrian at work than…

Do you have a reference supporting "For most mainstream anthropologists"?

Do you have an explanation for why pre-Clovis humans didn't leave a ton of remains everywhere?

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

#30

Post by cityhall »

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?

Do bones maintain whatever properties they're exploiting thousands of years after the animal's death? I'd expect they'd have different wear or fracture patterns if they were very old when worked.

You'd also expect a mixture of ages in close proximity. Even if all the bones being processed were old at the time, they presumably would have a mixture of 100kya, 50 kya, etc. bones jumbled together.

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