[onlooker]

https://www.yahoo.com/news/m/0e970f29-4 ... umans.html
Research suggests humans occupied the Americas earlier than previously thought
I have also watched and read data suggesting different peoples were in the Americas long before Academia is yet willing to accept. I think we have much catching up and revealing to do with regard to this. Also, it seems civilization sprung up earlier here than previously thought. Any thoughts?
Especially Tanada who is known to be a history buff.

[sparky]

.
the dating of Homo Sapiens sapiens earliest presence in the Americas is given as ~15.000BC
this fit with a migration of hunters from northern Asia after the end of the late Glacial maximum .
at a pinch , this could have happened a bit earlier , hunters and fishermen are notorious for ranging far ,
if it's doable they would do it .
even the great glaciation is no impediment to migration along the Western coast ,
the sites are now underwater and hard to search but finding some dated around 18.000
wouldn't really be surprising .

the humans arrival is indicated by the spike in large animals extinctions ,
that's the very typical signature of human irruption in a new land .

the Americas population genetic indicate their genome is from northern Asia ,
so the migration waves must have separated from their cousins around the 20.000 timeline
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ ... groups.png


Had there be in the long past an earlier humanoid population which has left no trace ?
there is a lot of difficulties in believing an American Neanderthal or Homo Erectus population ever existed .
so far there is no indication this has been the case ,
only some vague and inconclusive hints
it would be nice but without solid evidence one must stick to the post Glacial migration

[Synapsid]

onlooker,

We've had solid dates from the Monte Verde site in Chile of about 14 600 years before present since the late 1990s, and 14 200 years BP at least from Paisley Caves in Oregon within the last ten years or so. Both predate Clovis by more than a thousand years. There are older ages from sites in Texas, Virginia (?) and, I believe, Florida, and several more in South America, among others, but there isn't yet as widespread agreement about those as there is for the ones above.

Clovis hasn't been viewed widely in archaeology as recording earliest human occupation of the New World since the late 1990s but you'd not guess that from the news media. Part of the reason for this is the strong influence that Jared Diamond's superb book Guns, Germs and Steel has had. It was published in 1997 and thus written earlier, but Monte Verde had already been published and very carefully done; Diamond chose not to acknowledge that. I don't know if he has even now. To this day Elizabeth Kolbert, who writes on environmental and sometimes archaeology-related topics for the New Yorker, seems to have read nothing beyond Diamond on the question of earliest settlement in North America.

She isn't alone in this. It isn't uncommon to come upon something in a news report about an early find that "is older than Clovis!" Another fossil in print, as Asimov called such things, is the idea that not only was Clovis first but it was brought down into what's now the US through the ice-free corridor between the Laurentide and Cordilleran ice sheets, after they'd melted back somewhat. The corridor was real, for a while, but opened too late for that.

[onlooker]

Interesting youtube video positing that many types of people arrived in the Americas in prehistoric times. People like Asian, Celtic, and Polynesian tribes, among others.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyTRaU06GVc

[ROCKMAN]

"...many types of people arrived in the Americas in prehistoric times." Just more proof that we needed that "wall" a long time ago to prevent that illegal traffic. LOL.

[Tanada]

https://www.yahoo.com/news/m/0e970f29-4457-3167-96c5-9ab4bcee5688/ss_research-suggests-humans.html
Research suggests humans occupied the Americas earlier than previously thought
I have also watched and read data suggesting different peoples were in the Americas long before Academia is yet willing to accept. I think we have much catching up and revealing to do with regard to this. Also, it seems civilization sprung up earlier here than previously thought. Any thoughts?
Especially Tanada who is known to be a history buff.

This has been speculated about for at least 50 years and increasingly more evidence has been found since the 1990's to support earlier arrival in the America's than the Clovis period.

Some of these finds were shockingly obvious in retrospect. In the early 20th century 'everyone knew' that Clovis had been the first culture/people in the Americas. Prominent Archeologists had concluded this and all the text books were written with this "fact" firmly in place. Because of this "knowledge" any time a University sponsored a dig site in a paleo encampment they would dig through the layers of camp debris until they got to the bottom of the Clovis era they would stop digging. After all if the Clovis were the first people then why dig deeper where there was nothing to find?

From around 1930 when the Clovis were declared to have been first until around 1990, a span of 60 years, this situation prevailed even though occasionally artifacts that were clearly not Clovis turned up. Those 'erratic' artifacts were almost always dismissed as being mis-dated or site contamination, not evidence of earlier occupation by other cultures. Finally some of the younger generation of Archeologists decided to actively check and see if there were artifact layers deeper than Clovis and Voile' they found artifacts from pre-Clovis cultures buried in some of the same camp sites dating back 1,000 to several thousand years earlier, using a different type of neolithic stone shaping technology.

Unfortunately like so many other fields of science once the dogma of the Clovis being first was set in the text books the Universities have generally not changed their teaching courses to fit the new evidence. Most Universities do not have Archeology departments. They have a general Archeology class taught by a non-specialist Professor who has that subject as a side class from their main interest. It is the same way with all the major courses of study in Universities, for example if you go to University of Michigan the main focus is on Medical fields, if you go to Michigan State University the focus in on Agriculture and if you go to Eastern Michigan University the core focus is on teaching. If you want to be an Archeologist you go to a school that specializes in Archeology, but if you are just an average Journalism major your school is likely still using 50 year old "facts" about all of the scientific fields in their teaching curriculum about Archeology, or Rocketry or Genetics.

Our failing educational system no longer turns out well educated generalists, it focuses on a narrow field like the guild system of the middle ages and if you can not afford to attend the school that teaches the subject you want to focus on the education you get on that subject elsewhere tends to be weak or even very poor.

[SeaGypsy]

Onlooker, 'prehistoric' simply means. 'before anything was written' (about current events as they occurred). By the common definition, history began in Mesopotamia around 5-6 thousand years ago, vaguely similarly India, Egypt, then a few thousand years later in latin America & SE Asia, about 100 years ago in parts of Papua New Guinea etc. In other words, the great migrations all occurred 'prehistorically'.

[onlooker]

Good info T. Also I heard listening to Paul Erlich that different fields are reluctant to share data especially if that data somehow de-legitimizes or disproves any long standing accepted theory or conclusion. So it is really amazing how specialized all occupations and fields of inquiry or curriculum have become.

[sparky]

.
the Clovis style spear points were developed by the Amerinds for large mammals hunting ,
this style didn't exist West of the Bering strait ,
there must have been a people in a new environment with a need for such robust weapon
obviously there were pre-Clovis hunters without those points which they then developed
Clovis is the most recent possible date , not the earliest possible

[Subjectivist]

Onlooker have you seen this idea? I saw something about this book on PBS when it came out but never got around to reading it.

Some of the earliest humans to inhabit America came from Europe according to a new book Across Atlantic Ice: The Origin of America’s Clovis Culture. The book puts forward a compelling case for people from northern Spain traveling to America by boat, following the edge of a sea ice shelf that connected Europe and America during the last Ice Age, 14,000 to 25,000 years ago."Across Atlantic Ice : The Origin of America's Clovis Culture" Across Atlantic Ice is the result of more than a decade’s research by leading archaeologists Bruce Bradley of the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, and Dennis Stanford of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. Through archaeological evidence, they turn the long-held theory of the origins of New World populations on its head. For more than 400 years, it has been claimed that people first entered America from Asia, via a land bridge that spanned the Bering Sea. We now know that some people did arrive via this route nearly 15,000 years ago, probably by both land and sea. Eighty years ago, stone tools long believed to have been left by the first New World inhabitants were discovered in New Mexico and named Clovis. These distinctive Clovis stone tools are now dated around 12,000 years ago leading to the recognition that people preceded Clovis into the Americas. No Clovis tools have been found in Alaska or Northeast Asia, but are concentrated in the south eastern United States. Groundbreaking discoveries from the east coast of North America are demonstrating that people who are believed to be Clovis ancestors arrived in this area no later than 18,450 years ago and possibly as early as 23,000 years ago, probably in boats from Europe. These early inhabitants made stone tools that differ in significant ways from the earliest stone tools known in Alaska. It now appears that people entering the New World arrived from more than one direction.

http://insider.si.edu/2012/03/ice-age-m ... h-america/

[Synapsid]

subjectivist,

The book Across Atlantic Ice is a great source of information about the Clovis culture. NB: Keep in mind that to an archaeologist "culture" is stuff you dig up; it is not the same as the word "culture" in everyday English.

The primary evidence presented in the book in support of the idea that Clovis is descended from the Solutrean culture of SW France and adjacent parts of the Iberian Peninsula is the striking similarity in the manufacture of the stone points. Flakes are removed across the whole face of the blade in both traditions, not a common feature of stone-point manufacture. Bruce Bradley is an accomplished maker of stone tools and considered one of the authorities on Clovis techniques.

A principal difficulty of the Solutrean hypothesis is a time gap of about 6000 years between latest Solutrean and earliest Clovis material. There's still no strong evidence that might help close that gap. The Solutrean hypothesis has little acceptance among archaeologists.

A later paper in support of the Solutrean hypothesis, by Stephen Oppenheimer, Bruce Bradley and Dennis Stanford, presents genomic evidence (Oppenheimer is a prominent worker in the field of phylogeography, mapping genomic data through time and across Earth's surface.) The strong new evidence is the presence of mitochondrial haplogroup X2a in North Africa and adjacent eastern Mediterranean lands, on one side of the Atlantic, and in North America in the region containing the Great Lakes and down the Saint Lawrence River, on the other side. On a map this looks pretty suggestive. The paper points out that there are no reports of X2a's presence anywhere in Central Asia or NE Asia, from which New World settlers are generally accepted to have come.

Since the paper was published genomic data have been presented on Kennewick Man, found in central Washington State. Stable-isotope data indicate that he lived on the NW coast before moving inland. He carries X2a, and it is stated to be a basal form, less derived than what is found in Western Eurasia. This weakens the claim that X2a is a strong indicator of European presence in North America before Clovis.

[vtsnowedin]

.
the Clovis style spear points were developed by the Amerinds for large mammals hunting ,
this style didn't exist West of the Bering strait ,
there must have been a people in a new environment with a need for such robust weapon
obviously there were pre-Clovis hunters without those points which they then developed


Clovis is the most recent possible date , not the earliest possible

Would not somewhere in the middle be the accurate position? The stone tools of the Aztecs and other pre. Colombian tribes would be the most recent.

[onlooker]

https://www.yahoo.com/news/humans-ameri ... 28244.html

High-tech dating of mastodon remains found in southern California has shattered the timeline of human migration to America, pushing the presence of hominins back to 130,000 years ago rather than just 15,000 years, researchers said Wednesday.

Teeth and bones of the elephant-like creature unmistakably modified by human hands, along with stone hammers and anvils, leave no doubt that some species of early human feasted on its carcass, they reported in the journal Nature.

[Synapsid]

onlooker,

"unmistakably modified by human hands..."

Well, no.

First, read the paper.

Then, keep up on responses to the paper. What is missing, in reports in the media on papers published in the peer-reviewed literature, is that a peer-reviewed publication is a contribution to a field of study which is active. Such a paper is not saying "OK, we've established the final version" of whatever the object of publication is. The paper is saying, "These are the data we've been working on and here are our conclusions so far. Responses?"

If only the media understood this. Oh! if only.

[onlooker]

Well sounds pretty unless one believes animals were creating "stone hammers and anvils,"

[onlooker]

Well sounds pretty unless one believes animals were creating "stone hammers and anvils,"

He said the animals were mastodons.

Yes but apparehtly right next to it were found those tools. mastodons do not make tools

[rockdoc123]

Well, no.

First, read the paper.

an excellent point. Too often people take press releases on science topics at face value. Luckily we are dealing here with something that falls into the Archeology/Anthropology framework which doesn't attract money or political views. So there are critical opinions that get out there without the standard "denier" "anti-science" rhetoric standard to topics like climate change. Case in point a press piece:

https://www.wired.com/2017/04/130000-year-old-mastodon-threatens-upend-human-history/

points out:

Now the big unknown is whether the bones were broken by a person more than 100,000 years earlier than we thought possible, or somehow dug up and broken more recently. “The crux of the arguments is whether those bones had to be broken when they were fresh,” says Sharp, who admits that he’s not an archaeologist. “That’s the only way to associate the bone date with presence of humans.”

and when you go to the paper in question the authors state:

Bone breakage for marrow extraction and/or bone and molar tool manufacture is the preferred archaeological interpretation of the CM site, as there is no evidence of butchery.

The dating technology used is something that is new to the scene since I did my time in geochronology classes. They couldn't use the well calibrated C14 method since there wasn't enought carbon matter around on the bones. What they used instead was U/Th dating which from my rather quick reading seems to have been verified down to around 10,000 years and up to 500,000 years which is around the half-life of U234 which converts to Th230. So lets assume the dating of the bones is valid (no reason not to) the question remains as to whether the bones were disturbed with tools quickly after the mastodon died or rather if some 100,000 years after the mastodon died a New World explorer who had made his way south happened upon a bunch of bones that just looked ideal for making tools. That's the question that needs to be solved with further work.


the article I mentioned above has an important point:

Alistair Pike, an archaeologist at the University of Southamton (UK) and dating expert, thinks additional finds of early human activity in North America will back up the paper’s conclusions. “It is rare that archaeology adopts a single instance of dating as a benchmark, and the smoking gun usually comes from a second, third, or fourth instance of something similar,” Pike writes in an e-mail to WIRED. “I doubt that these individuals butchered just one mastodon ever, so this is our cue to go look for more.”
More mastodon bones with chisel marks would be good, but 130,000-year-old human fossils would be better. Thomas Demere, curator of paleontology at the San Diego Museum of Natural History, and an author on the new paper, excavated the original site 25 years ago. He notes that there are additional bone beds protected by a freeway sound berm. The answer to this mystery might just lie under a San Diego neighborhood.

The one thing I would say is this is great science.....detective work at it's best. Too bad the approach has been lost elsewhere.