Fossil footprints reveal humans in North America earlier than previously thought

Post by njacobs5074 » Sat, Sep 25, 2021, 3:46 AM UTC

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.

Post by lugged » Sat, Sep 25, 2021, 4:34 AM UTC

AlotOfReading wrote: post #39

irrational wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coastal foraging? Why can't they just fish? There are lots of fish in those northern reaches today, I assume there would have been even more back then. And fish doesn't necessarily have to be cooked, so no requirement to stop to make fires.

Note that the phrase "coastal foraging" typically implies fishing and the exploitation of other littoral/marine resources. Anyway, the current understanding of the paleoclimate is that entire region between approximately Valdez and Vancouver Island was entirely covered by glaciers out to the edge of continental shelf until ~18kya. Lesnek et al has some good diagrams [1]. Living exclusively off deep-sea marine resourc…

Post by shusaku » Sat, Sep 25, 2021, 8:15 AM UTC

8bitsrule wrote: post #74

Alaskan cave with a human-worked jaw bone of a Yukon horse, radiocarbon dated to 24,000 BP c. 1979; confirmed in 2017. [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluefish_Caves ] [ https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... ] [ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/jacques-cinq-m... ]

Post by ArchStanton » Sat, Sep 25, 2021, 1:39 PM UTC

_moof wrote: post #67

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…

I still don't understand why the question of originality or whatever is anything but a red herring. Europeans came and nearly wiped out the existing peoples and destroyed their cultures. Are we really going to split hairs and say that's a fine and dandy thing to have done? Because if so you'll have to follow it up with an argument for why that same logic does not apply to a hypothetical future invader of the United S…

Post by Causality1 » Sat, Sep 25, 2021, 2:22 PM UTC

shusaku wrote: post #76

Causality1 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct. The evidence isn't exactly overflowing but what little there is indicates the Clovis migration was not a peaceful one and existing populations either met a violent end or were forced to move to areas where their populations couldn't be sustained and slowly died out. The parallels to the European genocide of Native Americans has significant consequences to two groups of people. The first is the white supremac…

I don’t understand how it would be possible for the Clovis culture to conquer an earlier people without leaving a genetic record. I mean we even have Neanderthal DNA in each of us. Surely they would have intermingled?