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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.
...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 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
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).
I can recommend http://www.amazon.com/Guns-Germs-Steel-Fates-Socie ties/dp/0393317552 :
His main answer has to do with food production: North America had hardly any good domesticable crops, so the most populous and advanced North American civilization (in the Mississipi valley) could only emerge after the slow spread of Mexican corn and beans across the deserts north of the Aztec homeland, which gave them very little time to 'prepare' for the European invasion.
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
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.
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