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.

Comments

Everybody knows

[Anonymous Coward]

The Americas were populated by English pilgrims. That's why we have thanksgiving. Never mind about those damn injins.

Re:Everybody knows

[BakaHoushi]

To paraphrase America: The Book:
"Some people say that Columbus was not the first to discover America. They say that the vikings and Chinese had been to the Americas for at least a thousand years before Columbus. Others say you can't discover a continent that's already inhabited by an entire race of people. These people are communists. Columbus discovered America."

So, since the continent was not officially "discovered" until about 500 years ago, we can say anyone there before that "doesn't count."

With all the dishonesty in science...

[gd23ka]

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 :-)

Re:With all the dishonesty in science...

[CmdrGravy]

Have you read Von Daniken ? I definitely recommend "The Chariots Of The Gods" since he also pretty much single handedly destroys the modern archaelogical conspiracy of silence surrounding the facts about how the Gods used their advanced space-faring technology to live amongst us across the globe until a series of unfortunate yet totally ( locally ) cataclsymic events removed most traces of their presence except for the few totally conclusive tell tale hints left strewn from Machu Pichu to the Egypt for dedicated super-archaelogists like Erik to uncover.

Also Lyall Watson fights the good fight on a number of fronts against an array entrenched and protectionist theories espoused by not only archaeologists but also geologists, physicists and scienctific dogma in general.

Hancock, is the new guy on the block but he is able to link all the good work undertaken by the likes of Von Daniken and Watson and prove that these space-faring super civilizations came from Orion and he can also prove not just the exact date but the exact second, minute, hour and day that they were all wiped out by the various utterly catastrophic yet strangely localised disasters which managed to wipe them out utterly so quickly they didn't even have time to jump back in their spaceships.

Obviously they did have enough time to build a series of enigmatic and utterly conclusive monuments throughout the world to speak to future super-archaelogists such as Mr Hancock, Bauval, Daniken and Watson and tell of the terrible catastrophe they could see coming and how it would wipe them out utterly and how this caused them to gather every member of their super civilisation, complete with houses, buildings and strange alien flying machines directly over the catastrophe, disable their spaceships and entrust the vast learning and knowledge of their super-society to a few, scattered enigmatic encoded monuments.

I can't wait for the next valiant defender of the true science to take up the torch and carry on where Hancock left off.

Re:Modern humans...

[marcello_dl]

> [modern humans] have been around for 100's of thousands of years and they are not stupid.

How do you explain "windows being the dominant OS (yet)", then? Just curious.

What really happened with Clovis Point.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

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.