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When Were the Americas Populated?
evil agent passes along an article in Scientific American reporting that new radiocarbon dating techniques have cast doubt on the accepted story of how the Americas were populated. In the traditional view, "[M]igrants out of northeast Asia slipped into the Americas bearing finely shaped stone projectiles, so-called 'Clovis points,' after the town in New Mexico where they were first uncovered. This Clovis culture rapidly spread throughout the empty continents and by 1,000 years after their arrival had reached the southernmost tip of what is now South America, making them the original ancestors of indigenous Americans." The new dating of Clovis sites suggests that "Clovis" was not a people, but rather a technology. That is, a new and more efficient method of making arrowheads for hunting spread rapidly through a pre-existing population in both North and South America, over at most 350 years.
The Americas were populated by English pilgrims. That's why we have thanksgiving. Never mind about those damn injins.
Isn't this just the last gasp of the clovis-first proponents finally dying out? I have seen quite a number of documentaries about some archaeologist or other digging up evidence of 'pre-clovis' people for a number of years now. In each of the documentaries we hear about how the archaeologist is derided by the old guard who keep saying 'no, there couldn't have possibly been anyone here earlier'.
...have been around for 100's of thousands of years and they are not stupid. Who is to say that 60000 years ago somebody from Indonesia could not possibly have seen most of the world in a lifetime, if they had so desired? There wouldn't have been any evidence of small scale migration which modern archeologists could find, yet the written history is based only on mass movements of population.
TFA ends with I think there's enough evidence now to say that there were pre-Clovis people in the Americas."
Who is to say that it hadn't been happening for several times the 25000 year time scale they are talking about?
http://michaelsmith.id.au
If we look back at our cities in 5000 years we'd conclude that native africans built ships and came to the americas and built up a great expanse of technology and culture in what we now call "inner cities". Obviously that's not how it happened.
Dumb people have more children than smart people, especially when there is a natural abundance of food and shelter and intelligence offers no real reproductive benefit. So I don't think it matters one bit when the americas were populated. It is the sheeple that inherited it.
If you follow the work of Michael Cremo you will learn that modern human skeletons
:-)
have been found in strata deposited millions of years old and all over the world.
http://www.mcremo.com/cremo.htm
His book "Forbidden Archaeology" is a huge tome discussing hundreds of sites where
anomalous findings challenge (rip apart) todays dogmas in the field and it is also
an interesting read to see how the religion of western science preserves the purity
of its creed
Slashdot got scooped by Nova .
It spread over 350 years, give or take 5000. :-)
I think the idea that humans can only travel long distances over land should have been disproved by the population of Australia and the Pacific islands. There is no need for a land bridge to explain the population of the Americas.
There is now more than enough evidence to support the idea of a pre-clovis population in America. Due to the timing of glaciation, this requires these populations to have traveled via the ocean, either along the glaciated Alaskan coast, or along the edge of the arctic ice cap from Europe. Possibly both.
Though modern humans find this environment so impossibly inhospitable they cannot imagine how anyone could possibly survive there long enough to allow a population to migrate several thousand miles, they are thinking only of the glacial desert of ice. The sea however was rich with food. Humans have always followed the food. There are Inuit populations that until recently, fed themselves quite nicely hunting in seas full of pack ice, in boats made of whale bone and seal skin. I see no reason there why self-sustaining populations of humans couldn't have lived on the ice, feeding on the ocean, and slowly spreading along the coast until they found land (America).
I hope the guy thought of patenting his new arrowhead technology! Spread over 2 continents in less than 350 years! he must have made tons of cash or chicken heads, bear furs, or whatever :)
Think the patent still holds ?
Everybody knows that it is written in the Bible when Americas was populated.
Parent poster posts post with link to goatse...
There were people in America using different kinds of arrowheads fashioned from flint. Then, some 11000 years ago, near where Albuquerque, New Mexio would be, an arrowhead maker named Beak Doors created a kind of arrowheads for his company Microhard and aggressively promoted it. Many of his detractors claimed he was using illegal methods and that his arrowheads were not superior to other competitors. But Corporate tribals never learned to distinguish between true interoperability and Microhard compatibility. Microhard arrowheads eventually achieved vendor-lock in the tribal societies. That is how what we now call clovis points became ubiquitous in the Americas.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I went to a conference years at which the head archaeologist of the Mashantucket Pequots in Connecticut spoke. He claimed that recent, casino-funded digs in the area had uncovered skulls which seemed to be much older than the 'land bridge' theory would allow for (about 30,000 years ago). The formation of the skull was also much closer to skulls found in France than anything being found locally. He didn't discount the possibility of people cross the Bering Strait, but suggested that more than one waves of migration had probably populated the Americas.
There is a PBS Nova show on this topic which discusses several alternative theories to the Clovis first one. America's Stone Age Explorers http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/stoneage/ It was recently airing (again) so you may be able to catch it again.
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice, in practice there is.
I'm sorry, but, as far as historical accuracy goes, that man comes in right after a velvet painting of the Black Jesus.
On PBS there was an episode of Nova all about this. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/stoneage/
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It's funny we rely on carbon dating so much, when it's inventor himself stated it was unreliable.
There are so many factors to change it, and plenty we don't know.
Hey Slashdot, why are PC users such ugly dweebs in comparison to Mac users? Is it because nobody has the time or patience to put up with Windows/Linux except for friendless, sexless nerds like you?
I have it on good authority that CowboyNeal has been carbon dated to 25,000BC. Clovis Shmovis.
What's even more ironic is that I was watching the same Nova program on PBS yesterday afternoon!!
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
You must believe that the pyramids are landing pads for alien spaceships.
Why is it that the further south you go into South America, the older the civilizations appear to be? Seems like they keep finding all kinds of ancient ruins there. Now what is the likelihood that people would wander from the north all the way down there before creating the civilizations they created? Could the Americas have been populated from Antarctica instead, before the polar shift? Prolly not, I guess there were no humans back then, but still...
Karma: Bad is the liberal way of saying this guy won't drink the kool aid here on slash dot. I wear my Karma with pride
All of this should eventually match up with the Genographic Project: https://www3.nationalgeographic.com/genographic/at las.html
This is not the sig you're looking for.
1491 is an awesome book that discusses this and lots of other evidence about the population and civilization of the Americas (N & S) before the Europeans arrived.
There's too much history to even attempt to paraphrase in this comment box. The Clovis controversy is just the tip of the iceberg.
The view that the Americas were populated by people carrying Clovis points 11,000 years ago has been steadily losing ground for at least the past decade, if not two. Pre-Clovis archaeological sites were discovered as far back as 30 years ago. Some findings suggest that the populating of the Americas was not one migration event, but many, with some coming along the Bering land bridge, some from along the coast and even some from Europe. This is simply one more nail in the coffin for the old Clovis viewpoint.
I think that the timescales involved in the splitting up of the continents from Pangea, and the evolution of humans, are totally different.
The Pangea breakup was going on back at around the same time the dinosaurs were in business; definitely pre-humans. According to WP, Pangea (or Pangaea) broke up between 55 and 100 million years ago, in the Cretaceous. Modern (genus Homo) humanoids didn't appear until around 2.5 million years, in the Pliocene.
I suspect that by the time the first proto-humans stood up and looked around, the map of of the world looked pretty similar to what's around now.
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Being nomads, these people spread down south, where there were deserts and mountains and jungles, but no great herds, so they had a choice: improvise, or walk all the way back to where it was cold and women covered themselves non-stop in great leather coats with the fur on the inside.
In the south, it was warm, and boobies were flying freely... so the paleogeeks did their thing. To advance civilization, of course.
You can't take the sky from me...
Unfortunately, it doesn't really matter when or who got here first. The US slaughtered almost all of them, in what ultimately became one of the most effective examples of genocide in history.
I don't respond to AC's.
That first the Americas were settled by Austronesians who got here by boat, and settled the west coast of South and Central America.
Then came the Clovis people - from Europe, following the seal and walrus along the margins of the ice cap, then came the first Siberians, who were canibals, as we see with the 9,000 year old European skeleton of a man killed by them in the PNW.
Then came -many- waves of immigrants from Siberia, then the Jomon People from Japan and Korea who settled along the PNW, keeping their cultural relationship with the Ainu preserved in isolation for thousands of years.
Then came the occasional shipwrecked Egyptian, Phonecian and Irish monk, who didn't have any significant cultural impact, then came the Norse from Europe, to Greenland and Labrador, and possibly points south, then came the Athabascans, including the 'Navajo' and 'Apache', related to the Basques in Spain and the Georgians in the Caucasus mountains, then finally came the Inuit from Siberia, and then the Sundergaard expedition to Lake Winnepeg and Minnesota, and then finally, the fishermen out of Bristol along the Grand Banks, followed by Columbus and the rest you may have touched on very briefly and inaccurately in school.
Cremo's first book 'Forbidden Archeology' has not one sentence of anything Vedic in it. None whatsoever.
Get that straight, please. The book is nothing but straight reprinting and discussion of hundreds of repressed papers written by real, accreditied professionals on the field over 150 years.
There is nothing in FA but cold, hard logic and extremely high quality evidence.
before the Mormons jump on this to support their "lost tribes of Israel" mantra?
There is not a single sentence in 'Forbidden Archeology' that references the Vedas or the Weekly World News.
The book is a review of hundreds of suppressed papers written by professional and accredited archaeologists over the last 150 years.
It is a book of cold logic and compelling evidence.
There isn't anything remotely 'nutty' or absurd in the entire volume.
You have not read it, obviously.
Last night... with your mother!
It doesn't matter that aboriginals lived in pre-Columbian America, because they didn't know where they were in context of the larger world. They were completely unaware that the rest of the world even existed. (Ironically, Columbus himself was unable to tell where he was, because he thought he was in Asia). Only the Europeans could integrate America into a geographical world-view. They could make maps and come and go repeatedly. They were able to integrate America into world trade. Hernan Cortes (conquered Aztecs) and Francisco Pizzaro (conquered Incas) would have been able tell you exactly where they were in relation to the rest of the world. The wisest Incan or Aztec would have been unable to tell you the same.
thousands of tham have came into the USA, isint homeland security a great program?
As an Anthropology student, it seems obvious that there were flaws with this hypothesis. Technology aside, blood types and other genetic markers are an easy way to discover the source peoples because the founder effect tends to limit genetic variation. If you look at a map of blood type it becomes immediately apparent that the clovis point hypothesis has some holes in it.
Why is it that the further south you go into South America, the older the civilizations appear to be? Seems like they keep finding all kinds of ancient ruins there. Now what is the likelihood that people would wander from the north all the way down there before creating the civilizations they created? Could the Americas have been populated from Antarctica instead, before the polar shift? Prolly not, I guess there were no humans back then, but still...
Actually I wonder why this article says nothing about Monte Verde, the oldest known settlement in the Americas. It is located in the southern tip of Chile which makes it the southern most settlement site in the Americas and it dates to 12,500 BP (Before Present), so it was settled before the Clovis people were around. This dating also places the settlement before the opening of the Bering land bridge between Asia and America.
FalconShould there be a Law?
A book I recommend is 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C Mann.
FalconShould there be a Law?
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/stoneage/clovis.html
~!J!
But A) Cremo is full of crap; you don't need peer review to rule out a guy who starts out blithering about his past lives; B) Chip Morninstar doesn't know enough about litcrit to damn a whole field by the sample of twits who hang out at any event called cyber-something; and finally, C) There are a lot of idiots on Slashdot blowing smoke about things of which they have little more than a single clue. YMMV, Ciao!
For many people including myself, The Book of Mormon (a volume of holy scripture comparable and compatible with the Bible and an ancient record) answers the question "when was the Americas populated". The Americas were populated by one group who left Jerusalem circa 600 B.C, led by a man named Lehi, who branched out to become the Nephite and the Lamanite peoples. The other group, known as the Jaredites, came much earlier when the Lord confounded the tongues at the Tower of Babel.
You can read about it yourself by going to Mormon.org and requesting a free copy of the Book of Mormon for yourself, and you can learn more about the evidences of the Book of Mormon at Jeff Lindsay's website.
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The Past.
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There are Inuit populations that until recently, fed themselves quite nicely hunting in seas full of pack ice, in boats made of whale bone and seal skin.
Ah but now the Inuit are finding it harder to feed themself. They used to be able to depend on thick ice to hunt now the ice is getting thinner and thinner with some Inuits breaking through and getting soaked, and three minutes in the freezing water is enough to kill ya. Another problem the Inuit have is PCB which compromises their immune system.
FalconShould there be a Law?
I found it fascinating that all of the focus is on Creationism or Creation Science arising out of interpretation of Christian writings, but it stands to reason that people of other faiths have their own creation narratives and may one to publish what they consider as scholarly books supporting those other viewpoints.
What I gather is that there are examples of anachronisms to the stratigraphic hypothesis -- that lower strata predate higher strata. The stock natural-science explanation is that strata can get jumbled through faulting, a human could be buried into a hole dug into exposed Jurassic rocks, or that human footprints could occur during the Age of Dinosaurs owing to us seeing some pock marks in the rocks and allowing ourselves to say, "Aha, human footprints."
What is interesting is that Christian Creationists see this and go "See, anachronism, those rocks cannot be x-million years old," and there is at least one Vedic Creationist (different set of religious holy books, different time lines) who goes "see, humans have existed for millions of years."
There's been evidence of earlier migrations for a lot of years the evidence was always dismissed as anomolous and obviously had another explaination. Something that is rarely mentioned is the fact that it was far easier to get here 16,000 to 20,000 years ago from either Europe or Asia. Sea levels were 250' lower and I believe they were 300' lower 30,000 years ago. This extends the coastline hundreds of miles reducing the distance they'd need to travel. There was even the potential of following the ice sheet. Fishing was excellent and there were even mamals to hunt. The ice sheet would have been at sea level in places allowing for landfall. There's been evidence for early migrations as far back as 35,000 years or more ago. There's also an unspoke problem with South America seeming to have been potentially colonized first. The very oldest evidence of humans in the americas has been found in South America. No one is sure why but there is a belief that pacific islanders managed to make it to South American. Part of the problem tracing the migration is it seems several of the migrations died out leaving no DNA traces. Unless bones are found it's going to be hard to prove to anyone's satisfaction. Why isn't more evidence found? A guess would be the earlier migrations lacked the tecnology to survive well in the americas that were still ruled by megafauna. Clovis points were fairly recent if there were migrations going back 35,000+ years. The earliest people may have never numbered more than a few hundred to a few thosuand making them suseptible to desease and droughts. It's not hard to kill off a population of a few thousand. Clovis technology allowed them to grow into the millions allowing humans to weather major die offs. There was even an extreme idea floated about aboriginals making it from Australia to South America by way of Antarctica. This borders on impossible because they never were seafarers and the strait between Antarctica and South America was barely passible by 16th century Europeon ships. Dugouts and skin ships would have zero chance of surviving a crossing.
If you consider someone saying that "something un-PC is not flamebait", as a troll, then I have to question your ability to reason. Or, at the least, the ability to reason objectively.
This note will most likely burn more karma, but I have to object to being modded as a troll.
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
I agree 100%. *dips some french fries in ketchup*
Are you adequate?
The weak tribes were driven out by the strong tribes. Humans are territorial by nature and limted resources are usually controlled by those with more power, leaving the weak to find food in less hospitable places.
I wish I had a link to a study I read about to share with you. The study was mentioned in an article regarding this topic in one of the science magazines. Anyway the study concluded that people living where there's plenty to eat are more likely to be peaceful and share food, land and other resources, and that's it's those people who live in harsh environments such as in deserts that are more warlike and that there's more fighting between tribes. That I know of there's only one tribe or group of tribes that breaks this, the Bedouin Arabs. In Israel they call themself Israeli Arabs and don't fight Hebrews or Jews. Some are elected members of Israel's government. Then again Bedouins have been and are generally pastorialists and don't wage war.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Maize(corn) has done WONDERS to help boost European food supplies after its introduction FROM the Americas. If that weren't enough... the potato for god's sake!! To say we didn't learn from the Americas is ignorant. European food supplies were able to grow, thus populations, because of two very vital food products from the Americas. Respecting the Earth is something native cultures tried to teach the European cultures... sadly, they didn't listen.
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Just a mention of the study by Barry Fell called "America B.C., Ancient Settlers In The New World" that folks might find interesting. Book link: http://www.amazon.com/America-B-C-Ancient-Settlers -World/dp/0671555030/sr=8-1/qid=1172451097/ref=sr_ 1_1/002-9487846-1462453?ie=UTF8&s=books
There's a series of posts up this thread that touch on the subject, yet I want to separate my post from that particular context and start fresh from another angle.
Why were the american cultures 'discovered', while they had no inkling of other cultures across the oceans, nor their place in the panoramic view of the world?
Because they were not seafarers. The question I keep repeating to myself is: Why was that?
The reason why the ancient phoenicians, greeks, etc, set sail, was gigantic and in front of their noses: The Mediterranean Sea, which represented the shortest way between two points of commerce in a concave land: a straight line. Same with the norse people: The Baltic Sea.
Middle eastern cultures also developed seafaring capabilities, spanning the area from India to the eastern African coast.
Much more intriguing are the chinese, as their land is convex with respect to the ocean, so there is no obvious short term advantage to develop seafaring capabilities, yet they did have a majestic fleet of immense junks for a short period of time, during which they were gazing waaay over the horizon, and with noble intentions to boot.
In fact, it seems that in every region of the world, for one reason or another, civilizations set to the oceans with commerce and/or conquest in mind, yet excepting the colonization of islands in the Gulf Of Mexico, once settled, the pre-columbian people seem to have completely lost whatever sea legs they ever had.
The Gulf Of Mexico is concave, commerce between Yucatan, Veracruz and Florida seems like an obvious thing. Olmecs, Toltecs, Mayans, Aztecs, among others, inhabited the general basin area, yet while they navigated lakes, rivers and fished close to the coast, show no evidence of technology for longer term sea travel. What the hell happened? Why that gigantic, eventually fatal blind spot?
Maybe, just maybe, it's because of the fact that the Gulf Of Mexico, for half of the year, is smack in the center of hurricane alley. Maybe the Mayans, for example, tried and had their fleet decimated one time too often, then completely scrapped the endeavor. Yet I've read nothing on the matter, I've never stumbled upon pre-columbian academics even discussing the matter, so if anybody knows or has any ideas, please post! Thanks.
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Yes, though the percentage of dead through disease is hard to estimate, 95% might be high. It doesn't matter, there was a plan being developed for the survivors. Since elsewhere in the discussion there are those who deny there was a genocide, here's the legal definition of genocide, as adopted by the UN:
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:* (a) Killing members of the group;
* (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
* (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
* (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
* (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Now if one knows much about indigenous-settler relations in N.A., then you know that: wars and disease took care of (a), alcohol and linguistic-cultural suppression took care of (b), forced migration and enclosure and ecodisaster took care of (c), it's coming to light that the mid-20C saw forced sterilizations in many parts of the continent(d), and the residential schools (e) are currently costing taxpayers a fortune in Canada due to massive restitution. The deliberate destruction of hundreds of languages can be laid at the feet of the residential schools, as well as a sorry history of rape, murder, and destroyed families for generations. The last ones closed in Canada in the '70's (not 500 years ago as some of the ideologues are stating in other threads).
Damn those pesky terrorists
IT is what barbaric people do.
The colonizers of the American continent knew damn well of all the immoralities they were commiting during the savage conquest of the New World, there were many voices raised in disgust at the time.
YOu make it appear like if there was a universal favourable consensus on the matter.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
At the time Europeans arrived to America the Maya, just to name one of the peoples in the new continent, were performing surgical procedures, have invented a numerical system with positional zero, had a more accurate measurement of the year and were conversant with many astronomical events. Then you have the Inca, the Aztec, The Zapotec, the Olmec and many other cultures that were more advanced than the european in many meaningful ways.
The Aztec capital city, Tenochtitlan (today's Mexico City) was by all measurements perhaps the most amazing city in the world back then, For people interested you can get the description of the town from the conqueror himself, Hernan Cortes or from Bernal Diaz del Castillo, one regular soldier in Cortes' party during the conquest.
The Aztecs had complex agriultural systems based on desecation of the lake where the city was funded as well as an extensive system of canals to transport goods which allowed Tenochtitlan to grow to more than 100000, one of the biggest towns in the world back then. Their sculpture and handicraftshad no parallel in Europe. We don;t have many examples left, because the "superior" culture systematically destroyed any traces of the old cultures, but if you go to Rufino Tamayo's museum in Oaxaca you can see the finest examples of high culture.
What fucked the Aztecs was the monumental luck of Cortes, who was mistaken by a god, a white skinned god, which had been prophecised would come back. That created vital indecisions in Moctezuma (Montezuma, Motecuzoma, you'll find different names) that did not unleash his army against the invaders until it was too late. That had nothing to do with cultural superiority, since the Aztecs were brave and damn well versed in the art of war, but with politics and luck.
In any case, many foodstufs you take for granted now were domesticated and made productive by American peoples: potatoes, corn, tomatoes, chillies, cocoa (chocolate), turkey and many others I can't care to mention. Without those Italian, Spanish, Chinese, Indian cuisine would be completely different today. If you don't consider that relevant, ask the Irish, they can tell you one or two things about how important potatoes are, or the Indian, whose curry may be derived from concoctions origanally made in Mexico (mole).
The monumental insult of pretending that you can discover a continent populated by other peoples has been disowned officialy by Spain, the biggest conqueror of the time, and certainly no American country refers anymore to the encounter as discovery anymore.
Only the more retarded racists refer to it as a discovery. So if you are not a racist you would be well adviced to dissociate yourself from such concept, it will only mark you in the most negative of lights.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Some recent archaeology (with stable isotopes, I believe) suggests that the population of the Americas wasn't actually low when the first Europeans landed -- but that the diseases spread by the pigs Spanish explorers released killed ninety percent of the population of the agriculturally rich, densely settled, East and Southeast. And if you've read, say, George Washington's biography, or Benjamin Franklin's, you will remember that the early Indian wars were not easy for the Europeans to win -- if we had been fighting ten times as many people, history would probably be different.
This also explains why early settlers reported a land with natural cleared fields. There were cleared fields; there had been settlements around them; there hadn't been enough time for the forests to regrow. There has been a myth, ever since, that this continent was unused without us, that we 'deserve' it because we can keep more people alive on it.
Careful! by that logic, Southeast Asia 'deserves' to spread bird flu and take over everyplace that has less resistance than they do...
Consider my idea that the Americas were populated by the descendants of dolphins, who due to evolutionary convergence, were able to interbreed with the humans when they finally did arrive from across the land bridge. Consider that.
It may not be as old as the ideas put forth in holy scriptures, but just wait - it will be.
Step into a huge movement. Don't Tread In Me.
Careful! by that logic, Southeast Asia 'deserves' to spread bird flu and take over everyplace that has less resistance than they do...
I think you'll find China or India will invade Africa sometime soon, using this very same logic.
I could care less. It's the natural order of things. As for the rest of your post - I categorically reject any notion that disease can have such an effect. Archaeological evidence is wholly insufficient.
Your post is based upon the myth that disease is somehow unnatural. It is not. As I said in another post, infectious non-human cells outnumber human cells in your body all the time. Living without disease simply isn't possible.
The Indians lost because the lacked advanced technology. This is the way the world works, and has always worked.
I don't read or respond to AC posts
There is not a single sentence in 'Forbidden Archeology' that references the Vedas or the Weekly World News. The book is completely secular.
The book is a review of hundreds of suppressed papers written by professional and accredited archaeologists over the last 150 years.
It is a book of cold logic and compelling evidence. And nothing else.
There isn't anything remotely 'nutty' or absurd in the entire volume.
You have not read it, obviously.
There isn't one sentence regarding the Vedas in 'Forbidden Archeology'!
Its a secular book focusing on suppressed field reports of trained, professional, accredited archaeologists from the last 150 years.
Cremo wrote a Vedic oriented SEPARATE book, "Human Devolution". But FA stands on its own as a work of empiricism, logic and cold facts.
Its not even a book of theory at all!