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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.
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
Who cares about the fact that Americans invented flight first?
I think we are most concerned about who who invented the radio first? Oh yeah, it was the pre-cursor to the modern transceiver and the modem which makes digital life possible.
Also, I went to American school and my textbooks told me America invented everything first:
The Car
The Lightbulb
The Phone
The Computer
The Steam Engine
and of course, Al Gore got us the Internet
America first in everything. Also, is the best country to play in CIV 5, you invent everything first.
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.
Wait until he finds out these first humans in North America probably weren't white Europeans.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
What is "first" in this bone case in terms of competitor nations? I don't see any relationship between that and planes. If the claim were that Americans reached America before Europeans did, then it may be comparable, but then its meaningless. I-dont-geddit
Table-ized A.I.
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.
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.
It's widely taught in the US that human flight was first done by the Montgolfliers, in France (unless you believe in Icarus). Americans only claim the first sustained, controlled, powered heavier-than-air manned flight (and the Federation Aeronautique Internationale agrees). You know, like the vast majority of modern day flights.
Why are you so insecure?
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
"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.
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.
In other news, water is wet. Cue the right wing religious lunatics who insist Earth is 3,000 years old ...
Cue them? Seeing a lot of these posts here on Slashdot, are you?
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.
YAY, PISSING CONTEST!
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
Far more than there should be.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
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"
why? they found his family
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
we're all descendants of Africa
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
I went to American public school and I was taught about Icarus in 4th grade, and the Wright Brothers in 5th grade. We were not taught about Montgolfier or other balloons; we had units on ancient mythology, and useful inventions. The discovery of how to harness lift and create functional artificial wings sufficient to loft a human was taught; other forms of flight were only covered in blooper reels.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'd be reluctant to form that conclusion with the known (to me) evidence. How much of the bone fracture seems to have happened while the bone was fresh? If all, or most, then that's a reasonable point. If only a bit, then I suspect a sabretooth of the original fracture, and humans of much later work.
FWIW, I don't have access to Nature, and haven't looked at the article, so perhaps they explain this. And "fits within a broader pattern of Palaeolithic bone percussion technology in Africa, Eurasia and North America." seems to be including prior known North American patterns.
Certainly it's possible that the evidence is much better than I am assuming, but I'll wait for a consensus before assuming that. I sometimes for solid opinions on matters as much out of my field as this is, but I try to have solidly known evidence with agreed upon interpretations to base them on.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
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
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.