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Fossil footprints reveal humans in North America earlier than previously thought

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Re: Fossil footprints reveal humans in North America earlier than previously thought

#41

Post by jcranmer »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #30
ArchStanton wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a good point. Generally, I'd say that any group of Native Americans (or folks who profit from them either emotionally or financially) wants to be thought of as the 'first' people who ever lived on that piece of land. Perhaps they popped up from the earth like the skeletons in Jason and the Argonauts. There's a legitimacy angle here that's become super important in the last decade or so. Then there's the argume…

> It isn't like the Sioux or the Navajo have been in their current location all that long. It's all so tiresome. Are there particular reasons that you use the Sioux or the Navajo in this? Is this a general claim that "no populations stay in a particular location for more than X years", or something more specific?

Various Sioux tribes were pushed west of the Mississippi around 1600-1700 by various wars that took place between natives at the time. It's probably the most well-known pre-contact migration of Native American tribes (at least those that live in US/Canada; the Mexica migration into the Central Mexico Valley is probably even more well-known, as it's a very key part of their own histories).

Re: Fossil footprints reveal humans in North America earlier than previously thought

#42

Post by jcranmer »

_3u10 wrote: post #33
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It isn't like the Sioux or the Navajo have been in their current location all that long. It's all so tiresome. Are there particular reasons that you use the Sioux or the Navajo in this? Is this a general claim that "no populations stay in a particular location for more than X years", or something more specific?

They are likely alluding to the trail of tears.

Neither the Sioux nor the Navajo were on the Trail of Tears, which affected the tribes who lived in the US Southeast, most notably the Cherokee, but also the Muskogee, Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw.

Re: Fossil footprints reveal humans in North America earlier than previously thought

#43

Post by mistrial9 »

haroldp wrote: post #17
kwonkicker wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically true but wrong. If your oldest Facebook post is from 2015, how likely is it that you've been using the internet before 2005?! Archeologists are very smart people in their own right, some are much smarter than we are. They do consider everything that we think they haven't. Let's give some benefit of the doubt to our fellow researchers.

I first joined facebook in 2009, but have been on the internet since 1991. You might counter that facebook only started in 2004, and didn't get much traction until 2006. But I was invited before that and simply didn't care to join, preferring to occupy other parts of the `net. Likewise, Clovis artifacts all date from after the peak of the last ice age, when glaciers were melting, land routes were opening, and sea lev…

you were using what network protocol stack in 1991 ? Banyan "vines" or token-ring ?

Re: Fossil footprints reveal humans in North America earlier than previously thought

#44

Post by tejtm »

satronaut wrote: post #40
irrational wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume they built boats. It isn't exactly surprising after 20k years that we can't find any proof of these boats, but how else would then have come across? Fly?

tbh they were probably way more advanced than we give, or want to give, them credit for

And possibly more raw intelligence as we have mainly been selecting for "smarter than grass" since beginning this experiment in agriculture 10k - 20k years ago.

Re: Fossil footprints reveal humans in North America earlier than previously thought

#45

Post by beenBoutIT »

imbnwa wrote: post #34
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Clovis-Americans have certain unique rights based on legal theories that their ancestors were the first human occupants of the land Please point to these rights and legal theories. Do you just mean NAGPRA? As far as I know, whatever legal rights any native American people have in the Americas at this point in time are based purely on them being here when Europeans arrived near the start of the 16th century. Whether…

This whole digression seems like a weird snipe at "identity politics" when in this particular case, its pretty clear cut.

As of 1995 more than 50% of people who identified as Indigenous preferred the term "American Indian".[0]

It's interesting how people outside of a group can erase that group's identity just by taking away the name that they use to define themselves. Any politically correct American has to say "Native American" or use the even more generic term "Indigenous People" while the majority of the people being referred to understand themselves to be "Indians" or "American Indians". Hundreds of years being known as Indians and having that taken away by scholars and academics. It's a sad final twist on an exceptionally sad story.

0.https://www.census.gov/prod/2/gen/96arc/ivatuck.pdf

Re: Fossil footprints reveal humans in North America earlier than previously thought

#46

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

beenBoutIT wrote: post #45
imbnwa wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This whole digression seems like a weird snipe at "identity politics" when in this particular case, its pretty clear cut.

As of 1995 more than 50% of people who identified as Indigenous preferred the term "American Indian".[0] It's interesting how people outside of a group can erase that group's identity just by taking away the name that they use to define themselves. Any politically correct American has to say "Native American" or use the even more generic term "Indigenous People" while the majority of the people being referred to unde…

This is perhaps a better take on the things (from https://americanindian.si.edu/nk360/faq/did-you-know)

----------

What is the correct terminology: American Indian, Indian, Native American, or Native?

All of these terms are acceptable. The consensus, however, is that whenever possible, Native people prefer to be called by their specific tribal name. In the United States, Native American has been widely used but is falling out of favor with some groups, and the terms American Indian or indigenous American are preferred by many Native people.

-----------------

This also provides a good overview through a series of personal viewpoints:

https://web.archive.org/web/20170913022941/https://indiancou...

Re: Fossil footprints reveal humans in North America earlier than previously thought

#47

Post by ajross »

irrational wrote: post #20
AlotOfReading wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is actually how archeologists estimate their ranges for human habitation in an area, just with math instead of guesses. This paper isn't about that (try timing papers like [1] instead), it's about the actual radioisotope boundary dates for an actual site. Part of the problem these LGM dates keep running into is that it's not obvious how people got here in the first place. After about 48kya, the ice free corridor…

I assume they built boats. It isn't exactly surprising after 20k years that we can't find any proof of these boats, but how else would then have come across? Fly?

> I assume they built boats

There was a land bridge due to lower sea levels during the last glaciation. HOW people from Asia populated the Americas is not really the question.

Re: Fossil footprints reveal humans in North America earlier than previously thought

#48

Post by ajross »

Causality1 wrote: post #19

Expect this to get messy. There are powerful interest groups whose self-identity relies on Clovis culture and its descendants being the first peoples of the Americas.

Uh... who? I mean, yes, it's true that almost all native americans (the exceptions being the Inuit and their relatives who are more recent immigrants) are descendants of a single wave of population motion out of asia about 12kya that coincides closely with the Clovis culture.

But hints that there were people here before that have been around for a long time, starting with the Monte Verde work in Chile a few decades back.

And I don't recall any particular "mess" from indigenous americans.

I mean, scientifically there's definitely a big question of why the population density of the earlier settlers seems to have been so low (vs. clovis, which basically exploded onto the scene and went everywhere on the continent very fast), or why they are not identifiable in contemporary DNA (which very closely supports the "clovis only" hypothesis).

But there's no politics at work here. Stop it.

Re: Fossil footprints reveal humans in North America earlier than previously thought

#49

Post by ajross »

quercusa wrote: post #26
Causality1 wrote: post #19

Expect this to get messy. There are powerful interest groups whose self-identity relies on Clovis culture and its descendants being the first peoples of the Americas.

e.g., with regard to Kennewick Man: "From our oral histories, we know that our people have been part of this land since the beginning of time," a leader of the Umatilla tribe wrote in a statement at the time. "We do not believe that our people migrated here from another continent, as the scientists do." https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2016/05/05/476631934...

I hesitate to try to engage in this nonsense, but it's worth pointing out that the Kennewick remains were 9k years old. He was all but certain a clovis descendant, just like modern native americans.

Re: Fossil footprints reveal humans in North America earlier than previously thought

#50

Post by SECProto »

kwonkicker wrote: post #8
lkrubner wrote: post #4

My dad used to make this argument: of all the millions of footprints that humans made, after arriving in North America, what is the likelihood that we found the very first of those footprints? The point is, whatever evidence we find, it's unreasonable to think that evidence we've found is the first evidence that existed, so we have to assume the real arrival was a bit before that. When we had evidence of humans arriv…

Technically true but wrong. If your oldest Facebook post is from 2015, how likely is it that you've been using the internet before 2005?! Archeologists are very smart people in their own right, some are much smarter than we are. They do consider everything that we think they haven't. Let's give some benefit of the doubt to our fellow researchers.

> If your oldest Facebook post is from 2015, how likely is it that you've been using the internet before 2005?!

My Facebook account dates back to 2015, but I have been using the internet since the mid 90s. (As far as I'm aware, there's no evidence of the previous account I had from 2006-2010ish)

> Let's give some benefit of the doubt to our fellow researchers.

Agree here

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