Slashdot Mirror
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
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).
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.
On PBS there was an episode of Nova all about this. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/stoneage/
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
Although it would be nice if there were something like isochron dating that worked well in the last 100,000 years.
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
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...
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?
First of all, it's nice that you use the word "mantra", since that, by its basic meaning, is an instrument of thought; e.g., say a mantra to clear your mind in order to think deeply about things.
Second, and also a technicality, the Mormons don't view the Native American as the Lost Tribes of Israel. It's pretty simple: the Book of Mormon describes a group of displaced Jews (from the tribe of Manessah, Ephraim, and Judah). We have ideas about the Lost Tribe, to be sure, but only prophecies - many of which are shared by various other religions.
Third, while some Mormons share a cultural view on the origins of the Native American - that the Book of Mormon people are the "principle ancestors" - there is nothing in the texts to indicate this view. Many modern Mormons accept the genetic studies of Native Americans that indicate that their ancestral home is in Central/Eastern Asia and that the Book of Mormon peoples are a small aberration in the population of Pre-Columbian America whose genetic heritage may not be easily seen (if even still existent), especially after the decimation caused by the European conquest.
Fourth, about two hours.
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.
SEO Copywriter. Just Say ON
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.
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.
Lil' Thindime, lilting a lacrimose lament, krashes the kwaint konfines of Kokonino Kounty
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