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

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:old news

[mrvan]

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.

Re:Time to get over the 'land bridge'

[mrvan]

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.

That is true, but if you look at the date of 'colonization' by Austronesian people of these pacific islands, you will notice

1. Sailing large distances is difficult. It took them until 3000/2000 BC to get their island-hopping act together and start colonizing these islands. By this date America was well populated
2. Sailing large distances takes time. While it took a couple centuries up to one millenium to fill America, it took about 4000 years to colonize all islands from Indonesia to Easter Island / Hawaii

Combined: this proves that sailing between continents is quite possible but also very difficult, and cannot explain the people living in America around 10,000 BC.

Nova Program on this Topic

[tealwarrior]

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.

Nexessity is the mother of invention.

[Scrameustache]

The thing I find odd is that most of the advanced civilizations were in Mexico and S. America, rather than from the North. If the first humans came from the north through asia, then the first people were nomads, with a lifestyle that is still surviving in remote parts of asia (mongols still ride and herd semi-tamed horses, people in siberia still stalk deer herds). These people found massive herds in north america, and they came from people who had been hunting from massive heards for thousands of years, so they kept doing what worked. The beasts looked a little different, but they gave Perfectly Normal Meat.
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.