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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.
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.
Old theories get replaced as new generations change the dogma.
Its the way science advances,regardless of the discoveries.The Clovis proponents are going to slowly die out,when new generation will more readily accept discoveries contradicting the conservative view.The cycle will repeat itself until there is nothing to discover.Its a much faster cycle then religion though.
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).
The thing I find odd is that most of the advanced civilizations were in Mexico and S. America, rather than from the North. Aside from the Incas and Myan's, there is also good evidence the Amazon was once crisscrossed with roads and towns. Civilizations pop up in the most bizzare places, Easter Island anyone?
Why is it so hard to belive these people had been trading in ideas and customs for mellenia, then one day someones idea took the traceable form of a clovis and spread rapidly through an existing network?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Besides, once you've already decided how life originated, you are pretty much limited in how things play out in your own particular "theory". And if this guy were correct, there's a massive multinational conspiracy to cover up the "truth", a wall of silence perpetuated for centuries and only finally penetrated by Mr. Cremo's dedication and intellect.
If there were ever a reason to repair the education system in this country, this is it. Unless ignorance really is bliss, and we've all been missing something all these years.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Well, what you say might all be fine and dandy, but at the heart of this issue there is no binary "yes-no" dichotomy.
Meaning that it is perfectly possible for Mr. Cremo to be a nutjob, *and* for a not-so-small percentage of established science being junk.
Being a professional scientist myself, I can unfortunately testify to the latter being far more probable than most people outside academia would hope.
An uncomfortably large number of "researchers" and "professors" in academia are basically subpar scientists, without much of a vision where the field they are allegedly proficient in is heading.
For people like that, one easy way to deflect questions about their own performance is to hamper the work of others. This is not made any better by the prevalent systems of academic self-assessment, which penalise anyone who openly admits that he or she was wrong, and that it is someone else's idea which is, in fact, brilliant.
Interestingly, this is even true for the engineering sciences where I happen to work - although the ratio of meaningful scientific output vs. effort invested is even lower in many other areas (such as the social sciences), which have less recourse to objective analysis of the results which are generated.
Chip Morningstar once wrote a brilliant essay about the mechanisms behind the decay of literary criticism as a science - read that for some really nice observations on the inner workings of academia in general.
That having been said, the theories of Mr. Cremo still do not sound particularly credible, even if one takes this "inherent bias against anything new" within academia into account. And this has nothing to do with him being a follower of a non-Western, non-standard religion.
Logic and common sense (as well as the requirement to base any conclusions on independently verifiable facts) should also apply to someone follwing ancient Vedic teachings, one would hope...
A.
That should be obvious.
UNIX is still in the remedial class as far as usability goes. Apple is an entirely proprietary scheme forcing you to buy hardware and software from the same vendor at outrageous prices.
The value of a machine is directly proportional to the amount of software it can run. So there is a selection bias towards already dominant O/S.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
Although it would be nice if there were something like isochron dating that worked well in the last 100,000 years.
They brought with them European technology and domestic animals. When you have draft horses or oxen, suddenly farming in North America is a whole lot more practical than it is when you just have your own to hands and some light tools. One guy and an ox can put a few acres into production, which would probably take a whole village otherwise.
c.f. Guns, Germs, and Steel.
The North American natives just got a cruddy piece of real estate to bootstrap a civilization on. They managed to do pretty well in some places, but in the end they just couldn't compete with the Eurasians.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I agree that "all cultures except my own are irrelevant" is a disgustingly ignorant outlook.
"Only cultures that made significant contributions to, or have a current significant impact on, the one I live in count when I'm considering how we got here" is a different matter.
It doesn't mean the American Indians weren't interesting, or that Europeans didn't invade and take their land... it just means that the American Indians don't count as discoverers of the Americas from the viewpoint of the current culture.
We didn't develop from them, we barely integrated them. We REPLACED them.
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...
The agriculture of the Americas, in particular, was in places fairly advanced. Many of your staple foodstuff were developed in the Americas. The Inca, for instance, were cultivating over 3000 distinct varieties of potato at the time of invasion, now reduced to 5 machine-friendly less-nutritious varieties in the supermarket.
The metric that equates technical advancement with cultural virtue, that confuses complexity with development, that lauds aggression over diplomacy, that values power over honour, and rewards personal greed over multigenerational-foresight... well, it seems like a primitive metric to me.
The parent post demonstrates that in a settler State (e.g. Canada, USA, ANZA, formerly South Africa, Israel) there is a huge blind spot that is used ideologically to obscure the nature of the genocide that underpins the new state. A big part of that blind spot is used to zero out the original cultures, to deprecate and suppress their achievements, to suppress claims of sovereignty and continuity, to disrupt the propagation of the original cultures, and to prop up notions of superiority in a 'might-makes-right without actually saying so' framework.
Your explanation of racism and ethnocentrism is bizarre and tautological. It's obvious that your education, particularly in History, was oriented towards this settler state ideology. You are confusing power and ambition with advancement--but that confusion is part of your cultural heritage.
Damn those pesky terrorists
Look. Just call it genocide, OK? Be honest.
Damn those pesky terrorists
Europeans may have replaced most of the indigenous people in present day USA and Canada, but not so much south of the Rio Grande. And judging from current immigration patterns, it looks as though those folks south of the Rio Grande now intend to take back what they think they lost. And they'll do it too, if the US doesn't do something about enforcing their immigration laws.
Assumption: nomadic lifestyle = less time. Not necessarily true, moving around frees people from the drudgery that is agriculture, and nomads tend to work on elaborate ceremony and narrative. How would you like to work only 26 hours per week? It does mean they're less materialistic, since stuff is a liability. That outlook means that advanced camping gear is good enough technologically, and pretty comfortable. Development occurs in other ways.
Assumption: unified population and cultures. Not true, considerable linguistic and cultural variety in N.A., including sedentary cultures in the Pacific Northwest and some desert regions (one tied to abundant food outside the front door, the other tied to marginal agriculture). Blame the difference in development on the horse, flux of empires, and specialization derived from large city societies.
Damn those pesky terrorists
I think the parent post is proof-positive of Western culture's superiority. How many other peoples truly lament what their ancestors did 500 years ago, to the point of inventing mythologies where they are the bad guys?
Anybody whose "education in History" also included critical thinking should realize that almost every people in the entire world got where they are by way "genocide." When one group of people moves to land occupied by another people, they invariably throughout history have either displaced them [ethnic clensing], killed them entirely [genocide], assimilated them ["cultural" genocide often achieved by killing the men & boys, and taking the women and young children], or disappeared themselves. Make no mistake about it, every single Indian tribe present when the first English set foot on North America got where they were by "genociding" the previous inhabitants of their lands. From that point to the present, the vast majority of Indians were killed by... other Indians.
In the early days, the "noble savages" tried to exterminate the European settlers, over and over. They tried to genocide us; we did genocide them. We're the bad guys because we won. They can be idealized because they don't exist anymore. It's not like this is a unique situation-- how many damned romance novels are there about the Highlanders of Scotland? They were universally reviled while they posed a threat, then idealized after they were broken and forgotten for a while. A vaguely-understood, heavily-idealized, or entirely-imagined "little guy" struggling against the oppressive modern society whose faults everyone knows-- well, it makes for a good story.
If I sound unsympathetic, well, it's probably because I reserve for another stone-age people my ancestors genocided, the pre-pre-Celtic inhabitants of Southern France. Damn them and their iron working [a skill the American Indians never picked up]. My stone-age ancestors didn't stand a chance. And damn those Gauls, and Romans, and Franks, and Bretons, and Normans, and English, and...
By your logic, European culture would then not count when viewed from the Asian perspective. Asia, and China in particular, had everything down pat way before the Europeans, and it was largely due to importing that culture that the Europeans advanced as fast as they did. I guess the nice thing about the world being round is that it always looks like you're on top no matter where you stand.
"Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life
When people start referring to the Roman conquest of Gaul, the Muslim conquest of the Balkans and Hispania, and the Slavic invasions of Central Europe as "genocide", perhaps you'll have a point.
The reality is this: The population density of the New World was incredibly low compared to Europe.
What drives all world politics is love and sex. Too much fucking produces too many people, said people do what they can to survive and continue the trend.
Europeans were many and the aboriginal peoples of the Americas were few. It is only natural that they would be displaced. They would have done the same had the situations been reversed. That is what people do.
Borders are never static, they expand and contract and perhaps even disappear, depending upon population density and technological advancements that minimize population pressures (ie, fertilizer).
I don't read or respond to AC posts
That sounds like a usage of "fair" which is unknown to me, but we can probably agree they were treated equally poorly with respect to any non-white minority and white minorities that showed up later during the noteable immigration waves of the late 19th/early 20th century. But the types of poor treatment varied, as they did with the other minorities in the country.
I don't think assimilation was always the goal, but I do think it would be hard to nail down a goal that applied for everyone involved. Many soldiers during the Indian Wars, for example, didn't go out with the intent to wipe out the natives. They went for more personal reasons, like seeking a career, exploring new areas, opening new areas for settlement (which required doing something about the natives in some cases, but not all cases). Generals and politicians got behind the Indian Wars for their own reasons (Custer was after career advancement, and many politicians got elected on a "wipe out the Indians" platform that some, at least, didn't strongly believe in). But before the Indian Wars, in particular before the American Revolution, I don't think assimilation was an option. There was very much a "their culture" and "our culture" attitude which was in many ways (by modern standards) more monstrous than what came later. The smallpox blanket thing I mentioned involved peaceful trade, and such behavior was justified religiously all too often. What makes the Indian War period more important, imo, in defining the action as genocide is that it was A) a concerted effort by the government with support of enough people to justify the government taking action, and B) happened during a period of enlightenment, i.e. the previous settlers were more fanatically religious and narrow in their views of the natives, but the people around during the Indian Wars were less so in both areas and more inclined to view natives as people rather than evil pagan savages. But I think the people that did it were of a mind that we can define it as genocide if it meets the criteria because they were capable of knowing better, which iirc is another part of the definition of genocide.
It's always hard to try to judge history, particularly by modern standards, because so much of history has to be examined under the then-current standards before it's even meaningful to apply modern standards. Even so, I think applying modern standards to history is only useful in determining our future, it doesn't provide useful insight into historical events otherwise. So to apply modern standards like genocide, it has to be established that modern standards can be applied. :) We probably have no problems agreeing that with the Armenians, we can definitely apply modern standards. The Indian Wars were only within 50 years of that event, which places them on a potential cusp as far as modern standards are concerned. So it's most useful, imo, to determine where to draw the line between the early modern period and the modern period, and if we can apply genocide to the Indian Wars, we push the line back and essentially include that part of the century in the modern period. But now I'm babbling.
But we can disagree without a flame war, right? :) I'm not a historian, just a history buff.
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