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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.
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.
That is a relatively modern trend. One, many previous cultures valued children and gained both productive and prestige benefit for large families. Two, effective contraceptives are relatively modern inventions. Three, the social and economic mobility of those who are "not dumb" is also a relatively modern trend. In dictatorial and feudal societies in which education and wealth is controlled by a few intelligence is less likely to be rewarded.
If we look back at our cities in 5000 years...
I agree with you here and think you're making a great point. We place a high level of certainty on conclusion drawn from a limited set of data, and as you pointed out the conclusions are really rather useless anyway.
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).
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.
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...
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...