Slashdot Mirror
New Study Suggests Humans Lived In North America 130,000 Years Ago (npr.org)
An anonymous reader writes: In 1992, archaeologists working a highway construction site in San Diego County found the partial skeleton of a mastodon, an elephant-like animal now extinct. Mastodon skeletons aren't so unusual, but there was other strange stuff with it. "The remains were in association with a number of sharply broken rocks and broken bones," says Tom Demere, a paleontologist at the San Diego Natural History Museum. He says the rocks showed clear marks of having been used as hammers and an anvil. And some of the mastodon bones as well as a tooth showed fractures characteristic of being whacked, apparently with those stones. It looked like the work of humans. Yet there were no cut marks on the bones showing that the animal was butchered for meat. Demere thinks these people were after something else. "The suggestion is that this site is strictly for breaking bone," Demere says, "to produce blank material, raw material to make bone tools or to extract marrow." Marrow is a rich source of fatty calories. The scientists knew they'd uncovered something rare. But they didn't realize just how rare for years, until they got a reliable date on how old the bones were by using a uranium-thorium dating technology that didn't exist in the 1990s. The bones were 130,000 years old. That's a jaw-dropping date, as other evidence shows that the earliest humans got to the Americas about 15,000 to 20,000 years ago. The study has been published in the journal Nature.
Chances are the dating method is incorrect. They aren't as precise as scientists pretend they are.
Why are Americans so desperate to prove that everything happened there first.
It is the whole who invented flight thing over again, they will just keep on redefining what flight is until they are first.
Trump won't be happy.
Paper here http://nature.com/articles/doi... also, would not be surprised if humanoids made it to North America several times prior to 130,000 years considering they've been around since about a million years - that's a lot of time to find your way out of Africa to a different continent by one means or another.
Namaste
I'm about a quarter of the way through the book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Interesting in the same way as Worlds in Collision (Velikovsky): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Maybe history isn't what we think it is.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
MMA is old, too.
Thank you for your latest submission to the Institute, labeled “211-D, layer seven, next to the clothesline post. Hominid skull.” We have given this specimen a careful and detailed examination, and regret to inform you that we disagree with your theory that it represents “conclusive proof of the presence of Early Man in Charleston County two million years ago.” Rather, it appears that what you have found is the head of a Barbie doll, of the variety one of our staff, who has small children, believes to be the “Malibu Barbie”. It is evident that you have given a great deal of thought to the analysis of this specimen, and you may be quite certain that those of us who are familiar with your prior work in the field were loathe to come to contradiction with your findings. However, we do feel that there are a number of physical attributes of the specimen which might have tipped you off to it’s modern origin:
1. The material is molded plastic. Ancient hominid remains are typically fossilized bone.
2. The cranial capacity of the specimen is approximately 9 cubic centimeters, well below the threshold of even the earliest identified proto-hominids.
3. The dentition pattern evident on the “skull” is more consistent with the common domesticated dog than it is with the “ravenous man-eating Pliocene clams” you speculate roamed the wetlands during that time. This latter finding is certainly one of the most intriguing hypotheses you have submitted in your history with this institution, but the evidence seems to weigh rather heavily against it. Without going into too much detail, let us say that:
A. The specimen looks like the head of a Barbie doll that a dog has chewed on.
B. Clams don’t have teeth.
"found the partial skeleton of A MASTODON" (my caps)
Basing a theory of this amount of evidence, given the masses of evidence that supports a much later date ... well, seems a tad optimistic to me.
Also, I'm guessing there are any number of reasons for bone fragmentation characteristics like that (rock falls after death, crushed bones due to a fall etc etc) that make the theory similarly optimistic.
And the fact that there's no evidence of butchery of said mastodon ... well, it looks like a long bow is being drawn from little or no evidence.
The stupid humans crossed (what is now) Bering's Straits, started too many fires and melted too much ice. The ocean-levels rose and there was no way for them to walk back... The Shamanry was settled — it was all their fault.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
If human beings, or our earlier ancestors, were killing mastodons 130,000 year ago without eating the meat, then it seems awfully likely that human/hominid hunting was an important factor in the eventual extinction of mastodons and other North American megafauna. Killing a big mammal like that for the bones/marrow implies a very effective predation capability and possible big environmental impact.
Why is Snark Required?
They don't get special privileges for being first. They get it because European Americans more or less stole their land. It's a form of compensation colonial governments such as the US government voluntarily gave them. Also most tribes and the US BIA regulate based on quantum of blood for enrollment, I.e. too little native and you're out of the tribe because morons like you say these things.
No, actually arguing that people have lived here for longer does not help the argument that the effects of colonialism and responsibility of genocide can be ignored because "it was a long time ago". If you look at pretty much any poverty statistic, native americans will always be at the top. So yes, I'm sure the non-natives will be eagerly lining up to get their own "special treatment".
The car was co-invented by the German Mr. Daimler and the American Mr. Chrysler.
The light bulb -- that's easy, that was invented by Henry Ford, the founder of the Ford Motor Company, where it was incorporated into their advertising as representative of "Ford has a better idea!", such as their innovative double-clutch transmissions conveying the necessary impression of cheapness for their small cars to encourage the sale of their Lincoln Navigator as being "more solid."
Samsung in Korea invented the phone.
The computer was invented in England by a guy we don't want to talk about.
The steam engine? That's easy -- it was invented by Montgomery Scott, supported by his Irish-Jewish friend Cap'n Kirk.
It is amazing that a whole class of humanoids came to America from the middle east and became extinct as the article suggest, then the Natives came and colonized. Amazing how fast things change
http://saveie6.com/
I have read after many years on Slashdot.
In other news, water is wet. Cue the right wing religious lunatics who insist Earth is 3,000 years old, CO2 isn't a greenhouse gas and all of the science that clearly points out their idiocy is the work of "Satan". GFY!!!!
Not comparable to this situation per sister message, but as far as the first manned plane flight, the definition matters because it was relatively trivial to attach a motor to a propeller and then to a thing with wings and lunge sky-ward for a short period of time. After all, gliders, as in hang-gliders, were already common by then.
One could argue it was really an evolution, but the Wright Brothers were way ahead of the others in terms of control for several years regardless of who made the first lunge into the air. They were doing figure-8's when others could barely turn.
They finally lost that distinction when others moved and perfected the "tail" on the back instead of the front, which made planes safer.
Table-ized A.I.
Homo Sapiens have been around between 100,000-200,000 years. We still have that new species smell about us.
http://humanorigins.si.edu/evi...
Just sayin'
"Liberalism is a very noble idea, currently controlled by some very bad people. Be sure you do not get the two confused.
If you disagree, you're an antisemitic piece of garbage. Anything purporting to be older than 6000 years is fake news and needs to be memory holed.
I think it was Sagan who remarked that astronomers and physicists regarded Velikovsky's theories of recent Solar System catastrophes as pseudoscience but that the man had some interesting insights into the ancient world. Scholars of the antiquities, however, thought that his theories of catastrophes in the recent Solar System made for interesting reading, but that his chronologies and interpretations of ancient writings were stark-raving bonkers.
Velikovsky's bizarre account of the planet Venus ejected from Jupiter, whizzing around for some time as a comet, and then settling down as the Second Planet gets the most press, but his equally bizarre pronouncements about the ancient world are "inside baseball", accessible to only a select few who even care when the Egyptian Dynasties started and ended.
The 12'th century BCE, give or take, collapse of Mediterranean civilization, the start of the "Greek Dark Ages" separating the events of the Trojan War from the retelling by Homer hundreds of years later, is both kind of cool as well as sobering. There is a Web site "The Greek Dark Ages Never Happened" that takes inspiration from Velikovsky's claim that every other scholar apart from he has the ancient-world chronology all wrong as a consequence of double-counting Egyptian Pharohs or some such thing. This blends with the (mainly) Russians claiming that the chronology of the 2000+ years CE is all messed up and that all of the big historical events in the textbooks happened in a more recent past.
There is no way humans were living in California 130,000 years ago without draconian intellectual property laws and copyright. They would never have survived.
"Another problem is that due to interbreeding between "Native Americans" and Europeans who arrived within the past 500 or so years, many of today's "Native Americans" actually have significant European ancestry. "
But just try to find a Native American who brags about being one-sixteenth Belgian.
was contemporaneous with this ancient race.
It contradicts the idea that humans left Africa around 60,000 to 80,000 years ago.
Modern humans are about 165,000 to 180,000 years old: This claim suggests that human society, believed to number in the hundreds, fragmented soon after the species arose and long before it had invented religion, government or the printed word.
At what point does the gravy train end? Every other civilization from that era isn't getting paid. Moreover, they stole it from these other guys that were here before them.
Right. There were three distinct migrations. The first has all died out and no one in north America has been proven to have their genetic markers. The "First Nations" truly did commit genocide, wiping out an ethnicity permanently all for their own exclusive benefit that they are riding to this day.
At what point does the gravy train end? Every other civilization from that era isn't getting paid. Moreover, they stole it from these other guys that were here before them.
Certainly since none alive today had their land stolen. I don't go crying about shit that happened to my ancestors in europe- because it wasn't me.
Many of the treaties basically say forever (as long as the Sun shines kind of time frames) and the American Constitution puts treaties pretty high in the law. A deal is a deal and the people who traded a few beads for most of the natives land have done pretty good.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
I'll believe this when I see the human bones...
Nuff Said
Here, in Eurasia, there is no "native population", there are just descendants of previous conquerors.
It seems that it is the same in New World.
Politics start to get involved because so-called "Native Americans" receive preferential treatment
Why are you disparaging Elizabeth Warren?
Of course:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
Was caused by the so called 'Native Americans' who masqueraded and raped this more native american hominid after they crossed the land bridge. Take that liberals
A one-off example isn't going to persuade any but the true believers and the gullible. There's consensus that we have clear evidence for human habitation of the America's by 14,000 ybp. There's significant evidence for 20,000; 25,000 and even 30, 35, 40 and 45,000 years ago. But it's not very persuasive. Yet. A picnic on the beach is not a historically significant event (unless it is). The question is human habitation. There's always going to be outliers that can't be easily (or fully) explained. Nothing is fool proof, fools are far too clever. Anyway, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Except if you're a moron journalist. We know some of our predecessors were using tools 1 million years ago, so the fact that something was using stone tools 130,000 yrs ago isn't a stretch. But just because they found a glove near OJs home, doesn't mean it was his glove. Just because they found some bones near some stone chips, doesn't mean they're from the same event or even from the same time. That is really hard to prove, and there's always an alternate explanation. The more archeologist dig, the more often they'll "discover" false positives. The real question is: if we (or our relatives) were here 130k ypb, then what were we doing in the 100,000 years between then and when the clear archeological record starts? Only thing I can think of is video games. Because unless they had lots of video games to play, they'd be doing the dirty in the bushes and the population would have soared. Gotta explain the very limited population growth, and for 100,000 years. And in areas which weren't glaciated. Good luck with that. But it'll be interesting to see if they can find other evidence, can't say they can't until they've tried - exhaustively. And that'll never happen. (budget cuts, you know)
They don't get special privileges for being first. They get it because European Americans more or less stole their land. It's a form of compensation colonial governments such as the US government voluntarily gave them. Also most tribes and the US BIA regulate based on quantum of blood for enrollment, I.e. too little native and you're out of the tribe because morons like you say these things.
Thanks. Good retort. Quick and simple.
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
Hear Hear!
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
"But just try to find a Native American who brags about being one-sixteenth Belgian."
Ha!
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
We are all descendants of conquerors and slaves.
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
IF you accept the dating (see my posts up-thread - I'm by no means convinced by the dating, but need to read the other dozen pages of published material as well as the main paper), then this puts ONE or more H.sapiens (or close relative) in California 130kyr ago. That does not mean a breeding population. That could be one ship-wrecked (is "raft-wrecked" a word?) storm-tossed East Asian who arrived with a fish hook and is starting to re-build his tool kit. This could have happened thousands of times without a breeding population being established.
Off to the Real World.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
we're all descendants of Africa
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Some of the Alaskan and Canadian native groups had taken their large land holdings from others so recently when Europeans arrived that there were still small refugee camps of people who had escaped the slaughter.
I've yet to see the observation benefit any of the related policy discussions, though.
Did they have a license to hunt the mastodon?
In the future, archaeologists will dig up these bones among our most advanced scientific instruments in the remains of our civilization and conclude humans had advanced technology 130,000 before it was thought we did based on dating of the bones...
We've developed electronics in a relatively short time.
Who's to say they didn't develop space-or interdimensional travel and went somewhere else? (And neatly cleaned up after themselves, for the most part).
It's not like sci-fi hasn't dealt with this concept before.
They would have found the Raptor the colonials landed in and we would not be on our way to being FTL-capable.
Perhaps the bones were old and the humans were more recent. The humans could have found the ancient bones and processed them for use. Just as we do today with mastodon tusks.
We're descended from microbes and mud.
Since this was obviously a BBQ site.
A deal is a deal and the people who traded a few beads for most of the natives land have done pretty good.
That's nice for the guys who profited but lame for the vast majority of the US which pays for this ... forever while receiving none of the benefit. This is one of the earliest cases of privatise the gains socialise the losses.
And you probably won't. If anyone else does it it's ok. If a European country does it then and only then is it bad and deserving of some form of reparations.
Bannon is that you?
Your attitude, sarcastic or not, is a good example of why factual observations are of low utility in dealing with these issues. All you do is make the conversation worse for everybody, and make solutions more difficult. That's true regardless of what policies or solutions you support!
As long as there have been creatures that we would call human they surely showed up all over the world rather quickly. Whether it is a deliberate migration, a sort of automatic migration while looking for more food, or people trying to keep from drowning by hanging on to a floating log, people simply spread out and tend to get everywhere. I do wonder how many times a migration turned out to be stopping in a more miserable place than the place from which they started.
Exactly.
many idiots speak to the 'Native Americans" as perfect people, never having wars, only looking out for the welfare of their citizens, living in complete harmony with the earth.
This is simply all rubbish. Native Americans deforested large areas of North America, had wars, fought and killed one another just like the Europeans did, only with more primitive weapons.
are you speaking about the next Democrat Presidential candidate?
Actually, you not only need to provide some evidence to be considered, but also a bit of definition.
P.S.: I don't need to find the evidence believable to consider it evidence, but it sure needs to be more than a blank assertion.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
The fact that the genetic markers of earlier migrations seem to have vanished entirely is actually an argument *against* genocide. In any violent conflict there's almost always quite a lot of women claimed as prizes by the conquerors, and their genetics enter the new culture that way.
To complete absence of the earlier markers suggests either intentional genocide, which is very rare and unlikely to have swept across the entirety of two continents - a process that would almost certainly have taken many centuries, or more likely that the earlier immigrants had already died out before the new ones arrived.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Treaties in general may be put pretty high in the law, but there seems to be a special exception for Native Americans - the US has completely violated virtually every treaty ever made with them.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
...but Native Americans are just East Asians and Western Europeans that went to North America 15-20 thousand years ago.
If you want to prove the Americas were settled 130,000 years ago you need to find human bones buried in the Americas that are reliably dated to be that old. Otherwise, any indirect evidence is very suspicious.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
Well, if you don't think there is any benefit to living on the lands that were previously owned by the Natives, you could always go back to Europe or wherever.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Not quite completely, which is why posters such as the above want to violate the last few that are still standing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
These reports are part of Fake news and they are constantly trying to perpetuate the evolution lies. Their stories are falsified. Humans have only been alive on earth since only 7000 years ago. Their way of determining age is also falsified. The only fossils found beyond 7000 years are only of animals. Any so called discovery of humans before that time is completely falsified information and can be proven that its falsified.
Only a fool says in his heart there is no God...
Psalm 14King James Version (KJV)
14 The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God. They are corrupt, they have done abominable works, there is none that doeth good.
April fools day is their holiday
I think American natives before Columbus are the result of clashing simultaneous migrations from Europe and Polynesia. Polynesia won. But the drive was Europeans, Caucasians, as we now call them. And the same happened in India, driving the big migration we now call Indoeuropean. Krishnas followed and fought by Rakshasas, Rakshasas eventually predominating, etc.
Most archeologists agree that Humans have been in North America for around 15000 years.
HOWEVER, Both the Navajo and Hopi nations claim 50000 years of history in their ancestral lands.
MAYBE they're right and the archeologists are wrong.