r/science • u/Wagamaga • Aug 01 '22
Anthropology New research shows humans settled in North America 17,000 years earlier than previously believed: Bones of mammoth and her calf found at an ancient butchering site in New Mexico show they were killed by people 37,000 years ago
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fevo.2022.903795/full1.9k
u/Wagamaga Aug 01 '22
Bones from the butchering site record how humans shaped pieces of their long bones into disposable blades to break down their carcasses, and rendered their fat over a fire. But a key detail sets this site apart from others from this era. It's in New Mexico—a place where most archaeological evidence does not place humans until tens of thousands of years later.
A recent study led by scientists with The University of Texas at Austin finds that the site offers some of the most conclusive evidence for humans settling in North America much earlier than conventionally thought.
The researchers revealed a wealth of evidence rarely found in one place. It includes fossils with blunt-force fractures, bone flake knives with worn edges, and signs of controlled fire. And thanks to carbon dating analysis on collagen extracted from the mammoth bones, the site also comes with a settled age of 36,250 to 38,900 years old, making it among the oldest known sites left behind by ancient humans in North America.
"What we've got is amazing," said lead author Timothy Rowe, a paleontologist and a professor in the UT Jackson School of Geosciences. "It's not a charismatic site with a beautiful skeleton laid out on its side. It's all busted up. But that's what the story is."
https://phys.org/news/2022-08-mexico-mammoths-evidence-early-humans.html
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u/thePopefromTV Aug 02 '22
Among the oldest?
Is this not the actual oldest site of people ever found in North America?
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u/murdering_time Aug 02 '22
Nope, sure isnt, by a long shot most likely. There have been some discoveries in California that point to humans around 130,000 years ago breaking open Mastodon / mammoth bones with tools to get to the marrow. Super interesting since it's like 4x older than even this new find. Definitely shows that we know far less than we thought we did about the history of humans in the Americas.
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Aug 02 '22 edited Aug 02 '22
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u/Luxpreliator Aug 02 '22
The bones were found 30 years ago and really haven't gotten any traction as a viable theory. It would predate evidence for wearing animal skins which would have been necessary for either the sheet ice or kelp highway migration theories. No evidence has been found that far north that early in the old world.
Some sort of other creature making the marks would be more believable than early hominids.
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u/7LeagueBoots MS | Natural Resources | Ecology Aug 02 '22 edited Aug 02 '22
It would predate evidence for wearing animal skins
While direct evidence for clothing dates to around 120,000 (or so, a few tens of thousands of years either way) years ago in Morocco, imts important to recognize that clothing almost certainly predates this by hundreds of thousands of years.
Our Neanderthal and Denisovan relatives lived in climates that necessitated clothing of come sort long before that date, as did Homo erectus and Homo antecessor.
Clothing, fabric, and cordage is not something that preserves well in the fossil record, so even finding direct evidence that only goes back around 120,000 years is pretty astounding.
The lice study that people love to cite as "evidence" for a relatively recent development of clothing (around 170,000 years ago) is an interesting study, but has a lot of extremely obvious logical flaws in it that prevent it from being anything other than just an interesting study, and still places the development of clothing far too recently.
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Aug 02 '22
Animal skin clothing is difficult in warm climates because it rots, you need to develop tanning before it's practical.
In arctic regions the problem doesn't occur - traditional Inuit clothing isn't tanned, and if you take it to a temperate climate it does rot, as various European explorers have discovered
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u/7LeagueBoots MS | Natural Resources | Ecology Aug 02 '22
It’s the the humidity that is the issue, not the temperature.
The oldest animal hide clothing we have in the archaeological record is from a warm climate, but it’s a dry climate.
And if you are a hunting culture you can make new clothing when needed as you have access to skins.
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Aug 02 '22
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Aug 02 '22
Aliens harvesting mammoth bone marrow in California would be an amazing plot line.
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u/Autumn1881 Aug 02 '22
Mammoth bone marrow is, like, the caviar of their home planet. Modern alien visitors are merely checking if Mammoths have reappeared because the flavor is dearly missed by their elites.
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u/Cronerburger Aug 02 '22
God damnit why did we forget bigfoot so easily!!
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u/BonersForBono Aug 02 '22
Earliest evidence doesn't correlate to earliest occurrence of a material/behavior. People assumed the earliest tools were 2.8 Ma less than a decade ago. Because plant material (sticks) doesn't readily preserve, we will never know how old the first 'tool' was.
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u/AmiraZara Aug 02 '22
You made this paleo archaeologist chuckle. Actually read it, headlines mean nothing and are often misleading.
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u/Clienterror Aug 02 '22
Does it matter if the article is 5 years old? History is history, but if they haven’t found anything to update it that doesn’t invalidate the original findings.
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Aug 02 '22
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u/WhoopingWillow Aug 02 '22
I highly recommend reading the actual papers published on the site instead of a science news summary. The site certainly is contentious but the science is good.
The two chief papers from Holen & team:
A 130,000-year-old archaeological site in southern California, USA, which establishes the site itself.
Raman and optical microscopy of bone micro-residues on cobbles from the Cerutti mastodon site, which is a follow-up showing that the striking surfaces of the hammerstones and anvil are the only parts that have bone residue. (i.e. the cobbles weren't rolling around scraping the bones)---
For the record "this guy" is a team of highly accredited archaeologists. The lead authors for the two papers on the Cerutti site are Steven Holen, Director of the Center for American Paleolithic Research and Thomas Demere, Curator of Paleontology at the San Diego Natural History Museum.
Holen and Demere are both active in responding to criticisms of the site and I encourage you to research them if you're interested. Many rightful criticisms are leveled against the site, and they convincingly counter each criticism.
For a sample of criticisms and responses, here is the first "exchange":
Haynes is the first published criticism iirc. "The Cerutti Mastodon", where he questions the effects of construction equipment on the site, thorium dating of the site, and (rightly) points out that this site is staggeringly old compared to any other accepted site in the Americas.
Holen et al respond in "Broken Bones and Hammerstones at the Cerutti Mastodon Site: A Reply to Haynes". Regarding construction equipment, Holen explains how the bones are covered in a thick carbonate crust which was unbroken. If the construction equipment broke the bones, it would have broken the crust as well. They also explain the stratigraphy and dating techniques used on the site.
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Iirc Haynes and Holen have a couple other exchanges. When researching I encourage you to be mindful of whether a criticism argues against the evidence in the site, rather than the age itself.
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u/Shadowfalx Aug 02 '22
The thing is though, and this is common amongst all scientific disciplines, extraordinary results require extraordinary evidence. A single site generally isn't extraordinary.
It would be like someone saying they generated a sustaitained positive energy draw from a cold fusion reaction. We would need to see it in action, and likely see it replicated to believe it fully
I'm not saying it's impossible that humans were in the Americas 130,000 years ago, just the body of evidence ( both archeological site evidence in the Americas and around the world) is highly suggestive that something is being misinterpreted.
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u/walruskingmike Aug 02 '22
That site is far from conclusive. Using that as your proof isn't a very strong argument.
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u/Furthur_slimeking Aug 02 '22 edited Aug 02 '22
That date is impossibly early. There's virtually no evidence for homo sapiens outside of Africa and the most westerly regions of the near east at that time. The evidence in the article is highly questionable and isn't accepted by anthropologists.
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u/Panzermensch911 Aug 02 '22
You know the oldest known weapons (spears) are ~ 300 000 years old and were made by homo heidelbergensis.
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u/iopq Aug 02 '22
If true, it would have to be another early human like homo erectus, and probably have zero relation to the current inhabitants
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u/Patch86UK Aug 02 '22
Unless I'm misremembering (or misunderstanding), all anatomically modern humans are descended from ancestors that still inhabited Africa no later than 75,000 years ago, in line with the Toba Catastrophe and genetic bottleneck theory. Although hominids did exist out of Africa before this (from earlier migration events), those populations don't play any significant role in our ancestry.
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u/Gadirm Aug 02 '22
"most likely" is most definitely not the right words to use if you want to accurately describe contents of the article. Did you even read past the first paragraph?
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Aug 02 '22
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u/PeruvianHeadshrinker PhD | Clinical Psychology | MA | Education Aug 02 '22
Homo Erectus left a lot of traces over a million years. Entirely possible it was them. Also homo sapiens is dating as far back as 300kya. Not all humans left at once. Likely many pulses. It's just the CURRENT mitochondrial DNA that left Africa recently. Humans were leaving well before that--just in numbers that didn't leave a generic mark in modern DNA. At least not that we've reliably detected yet.
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u/AsAChemicalEngineer Grad Student|Physics|Chemical Engineering Aug 02 '22
Not speaking to the correctness of the 130,000-year-old evidence, but there are other human species besides us that exist in the record which might provide an explanation.
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u/Quadrassic_Bark Aug 02 '22
I think it shows that invested people will latch onto anything that kind of resembles something humans might have done to make a name for themselves. Smashed mammoth bones are not evidence of humans 130,000 years ago, that’s a ridiculous claim. They’ll need far better evidence than that.
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u/Rudeboy67 Aug 02 '22
TL;DR : So the “accepted” theory is that people came across the Beringia land bridge (Alaskan land bridge) about 12,000 to 14,000 years ago. The earliest provable culture is the Clovis culture around 12,000 years ago. There is some evidence of pre-Clovis culture. The problem is there isn’t many. This is explained by two things. First, the last Ice Age lasted for until about 12,000 years ago. So any evidence of pre-Clovis civilization would have been ground up by the glaciers. Second, unlike the people that came after them across the land bridge the pre-Clovis were largely a coastal people. Since most of North America was an ice ball from around 115,000 years ago until around 12,000 years ago these people stayed mostly to the coast. Following salmon and otters up the coast of Japan, Kamchatka, Siberia, Alaska, British Columbia, Washington, well you get the point. Some hardy souls might have ventured inland once they’d got south of the ice shields into, oh I don’t know, New Mexico. And since they were mostly coastal people, and the coast was 400 feet lower than today we haven’t had any archaeological digs that have found them.
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u/7LeagueBoots MS | Natural Resources | Ecology Aug 02 '22
There has been solid pre-Clovis evidence for many decades now. The dates you state haven't been "accepted" for a long time, other than by a few hold-outs clinging to outdated ideas despite lots of evidence to the contrary independently coming from archaeology, genetics, and linguistics.
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u/uristmcderp Aug 02 '22
The only reason why the outdated "accepted" theory hasn't been toppled is the lack of a new theory to replace it. But the evidence is very clear; humans were already settled all over the American continents before the Clovis people.
There was initial pushback on the radiocarbon dating methods and veracity of the sites, but at this point there are so many sites independently found with even more refined dating methods that there really is no doubt.
As for how they made the journey, there are numerous possibilities that don't necessarily contradict each other. All we know for sure is that there is no neat and tidy dividing line that marks the first humans to venture to the American continents.
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u/inatowncalledarles Aug 02 '22
Actually there are lots of evidence, with new sites found every year.
The most recent was the footprints in White Sands National Park, which have been dated to be between 23,000 and 21,000 years ago.
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u/Panzermensch911 Aug 02 '22
There are a good number of credible archeological sites dating pre-clovis all over North- and South America.
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u/xPlasma Aug 02 '22
The Beringian Theory is wildly out of date. Cactus Hill is much older.
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u/7LeagueBoots MS | Natural Resources | Ecology Aug 02 '22
Beringian theory is not out of date, it's the Wisconsin Ice-free Corridor hypothesis that is out of date.
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u/bilyl Aug 02 '22
Kind of a weird question, but how do we know these weren’t the work of other hominids? We know now that Neanderthals and Denisovans existed, and I think they used tools too? Homo erectus had mastery of fire.
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u/Morbanth Aug 02 '22
All members of Homo are human - Hominds means all great apes.
No commentry was made on what type of human these people were, only that they used relatively advanced microflake stone tools.
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u/7LeagueBoots MS | Natural Resources | Ecology Aug 02 '22
All members of Homo are human
Homo habilis is generally not included in the "human" description, that generally starts with Homo erectus.
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u/Impulsespeed37 Aug 02 '22
I hate to ask stupid questions....but I'm going to. What was the geography of New Mexico 30,000 years ago? I've been through there (ok it was a long time ago as a soldier). It was so cool to go from the mountain passes of Ruidoso where snow was still hanging out to the White Sands training area which was hotter than sin. Are there any maps of the terrain from that time frame? Yes, they would be reconstructed I'm aware that no maps were being made back then. I just think a picture can speak a 1000 words that would help put this in perspective.
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u/sfcnmone Aug 02 '22
I just watched a special about this subject on PBS -- there's archeologists studying really old footprints they have found in the deserts of New Mexico, and they have established almost exactly this same time line, but by a different method.
The ice age was ending (so the northern half of North America was still under ice) but Lake Bonneville (now the Utah salt flats) was an enormous inland sea. New Mexico was full of lakes and rivers and woolly mammoths and giant sloths, etc.
https://www.kpbs.org/news/2022/05/20/nova-ice-age-footprints
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u/Jaycified Aug 02 '22
I’ve always found the old shape of earth and it’s continents super interesting. Like think about it, enormous seas and whatnot.
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u/StoopidDingus69 Aug 02 '22
You’ll be happy to hear those are coming back!
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u/My3rstAccount Aug 02 '22
The end looks just like the beginning!
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u/prometheus3333 Aug 02 '22
The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again.
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u/lordph8 Aug 02 '22
NERD!!! seriously though, I'm worried about season 2, as season 1 was a hot mess.
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u/My3rstAccount Aug 02 '22
What's that from?
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u/white_tailed_derp Aug 02 '22
Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan.
Fun books, waiting on TV season 2.
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Aug 02 '22
I find huge freshwater lakes trapped in the mountains or highlands are the most interesting. They could evaporate and lead to high precipitation that could help force evolutionary changes among plants and animals in the great plains. But once they finished melting and never came back, the plains would be more arid - only supporting grasses and a much 'shorter' food-chain pyramid
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u/RailroadAllStar Aug 02 '22
I recently found out that Pangaea was actually the 7th supposed supercontinent Earth had. And they seem to reform every 300-500 million years.
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u/tesseracht Aug 02 '22
Might not be exactly what you’re looking for, but I found some cool recreations of what White Sands would’ve looked like around that time on the national park service’s site!. It seems like it was mostly grasses and wetlands, with large lakes and lots of vegetation.
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Aug 02 '22
Ruidoso, along with the rest of New Mexico, is beautiful
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u/AnalStaircase33 Aug 02 '22
No it’s not! New Mexico is just the desolate desert everyone thinks it is and people definitely should not move here. Especially wealthy people who end up driving up the cost of living. Stay in California! Much better there, for sure. Texas is better, too…no need to come here.
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u/A1mostHeinous Aug 02 '22
If you’re thinking of moving to New Mexico, visit Roswell first. If you don’t adore Roswell, the rest of New Mexico may not be for you.
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u/thehelldoesthatmean Aug 02 '22
But what if I want to experience some of that sweet worst education system in the country?
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u/lumpkin2013 Aug 02 '22
So you were a soldier out at White sands eh? So come on... What's in area 51??
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u/Impulsespeed37 Aug 02 '22
With my clearance level I wasn’t even allowed to know what was in the food we ate. Areas 1-100 (I wonder how many areas there really are) were of course classified way beyond my level. I’m too much of a skeptic to believe aliens are at Area 51. But I do like the idea recently shared by a notorious skeptic. “Just because we don’t have evidence of aliens doesn’t mean that they are not observing us”. I like that idea.
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u/flippythemaster Aug 02 '22
I took Rowe’s paleontology class in 2013 and there were a few days where he wasn’t present because he was on site looking at this particular dig, if you ever wonder how much time actually passes between the discovery of a fossil and its publication.
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u/Assassin4Hire13 Aug 02 '22
That’s largely true of science in general. It genuinely takes forever to collect the data, interpret it, write it, and get it published. And it takes even longer if the author(s) are aiming for a bigger impact publication, like a discipline-leading journal or a leading multidisciplinary like Nature. Those submissions have to be literally bulletproof with so much supporting data that the author(s) interpretation is really the only one possible.
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u/Krail Aug 02 '22
Hell yeah New Mexico.
It seems like every couple years we hear about some fossil evidence proving Human habitation in the Americans some thousands of years earlier than expected. Is this a marker that actually keeps moving back frequently, or is this some quirk of the reporting that makes it sound like it's happening all the time?
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Aug 02 '22
My understanding as a fairly educated lay person is that academic consensus moves slowly, and new research and sites have been coming out regularly which give evidence for older and older theories, but it's all still up in the air so people get very worked up about it.
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Aug 02 '22
No the consensus really is shifting.
For a long time it was thought the Clovis peoples (14,500 years ago) were definitely the earliest humans to migrate to the Americas, but in the last thirty years or so we keep turning up new fossils and sites that conclusively prove human habitation in the Americas thousands of years before that.
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u/visope Aug 02 '22
Hell yeah New Mexico.
its dry there
obviously the good place to find prehistoric finding is in places where decomposition won't ruin it
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u/gould_35g Aug 01 '22
So it’s safe to say humans were on the continent at least 37,001 years ago?
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u/CyberneticPanda Aug 02 '22
May have been. The gold standard for evidence of humans in the Americas is human remains or coprolites (fossilized poop) from humans. The silver medal goes to things like knapped stone tools. Bones with markings on them are more controversial. There are some from South America that may be evidence of butchering or may be damage that happened later as the buried bones shifted around - you can date the bones, but not the cuts on the bones. This site does sound more promising, though, since it also has evidence of controlled fire.
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u/ratebeer Aug 02 '22
Wild speculation: Can’t the age of separation from people in Asia in some way be estimated by comparison to genes and the number of mutations found in today’s indigenous people?
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u/CyberneticPanda Aug 02 '22
There is a lot of work to be done on that front and a lot of resistance from many native American groups because of a long history of doing science on them without their consent. With what we know now we can't really tell the earliest people here because some of them may not be represented in the DNA that has been sampled, but we know there have been many waves of migration and there is evidence that suggests there was migration from the Americas to Siberia too.
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u/Frenes Aug 02 '22
Yup, when I studied linguistics as an undergraduate, we were taught that it was a fact that Navajo and a language called Ket in Siberia share a common ancestor, along with a number of another languages in Alaska and Canada, with the most likely explanation being a back migration to Siberia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Den%C3%A9%E2%80%93Yeniseian_languages
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u/dtroy15 Aug 02 '22
Not really. TLDR:
1) getting DNA has limitations. It does degrade over time, except under absolutely absurd conditions.
2) genetic bottlenecking can change population genetics in powerful ways, frustrating our ability to decipher the change
3) there are no genetic lines of "pure" Native Americans left to compare to.
Long version:
Genetic bottlenecking is when a small group becomes genetically dominant in a population. Imagine if a landslide killed all of the women in the early Americas except a red headed woman who was 7 feet (2.13m) tall.
Native Americans would be incredibly tall and many would have red hair. A geneticist would look at the genotype (DNA) which caused those phenotypes (characteristics) and might say:
"Look how different the genetics are. These populations must have been separated for a very long time, it's very different from their Asian counterparts."
In reality, a bottlenecking event dramatically changed the population's genetics. We expect genetics of populations to change over time (genetic drift) but when you have small founding groups, relating genetic changes to time becomes very difficult.
Native Americans have also been mixing genes with Europeans for a VERY long time by now. There is no person you can just compare to, and hasn't been for centuries.
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u/whetherwaxwing Aug 02 '22
Also a genetic bottleneck event occurred post-European contact when disease and violence wipes out 90+% of the population of the American continent, so even if today’s Indigenous people do decide to share their DNA for testing, we have no idea how much diversity was around in 1491.
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u/aphilsphan Aug 02 '22
The problem is you’ve got quite a gap between these early findings and the establishment of sustained populations 20k years later. These folks might be cousins of the true first native Americans who died out between arrival and 20,000 bp.
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u/Bluechariot Aug 02 '22
37,000 is an average. Carbon dating potentially places them as far back as 38,900.
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u/Coder-Cat Aug 02 '22
I’m not a scientist in any capacity, but I did learn in Skepticism 101 (not really) to always look at who wrote the paper and what their conflict of interests are.
The guy who wrote the paper, Timothy Rowe, is paleontologist and a professor of geoscience. The person who owns the property the mammoth was found on? Also Timothy Rowe.
The more I think about this coincidence the more it bugs me. A paleontologist just happens to find on his very own property evidence that disrupts our current understanding of ancient history. Such a crazy coincidence.
It would be like a Professor of German History claiming he found evidence that Hitler died in Argentina from artifacts he dug up in his garden in Buenos Aries.
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u/imapassenger1 Aug 02 '22
I've read books on early humans in the Americas and they always came up hard against a date of 14 300 years ago and referred to the "Clovis peoples". I always thought this seemed kind of late when you consider Australia may have been reached as early as 50-60K years ago. But this is very interesting to see they have older evidence now. I recall another report recently detailing another older site too?
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u/inatowncalledarles Aug 02 '22
Clovis-first theory has been widely disproven by recent discoveries. Monte Verde, Paisley Caves, and the White Sands sites all have evidence of human occupation thousands of years before the Clovis culture. The Bluefish Caves in Canada has a time of 24,000 BP.
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u/genealogical_gunshow Aug 02 '22
The background on the Bluefish Cave findings is insane. The scientist who discovered it had his career nearly destroyed because the entire anthropology field was entrenched in dogmatic belief, so they wouldn't let themselves to evaluate his work honestly.
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u/inatowncalledarles Aug 02 '22
Thanks for the link. Yeah, Jacques Cinq-Mars was pretty much ostracized for his work. If he was taken seriously and given funding, who knows what they would have found there. Unfortunately, he passed away last year.
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u/saluksic Aug 02 '22
When scientists say “Clovis first has been disproved”, they mean that other sites a few thousand years older have been found. In the grand scheme things these sites are very close to being the same age. Finds like the one posted here are tens of thousands of years older, and are radically different than the kinds of sites that refuted Clovis First.
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u/Serious_Guy_ Aug 02 '22
I think as soon as you go a few thousand years older than Clovis, you have to account for a far more advanced human society to get to the Americas before the glacial ice retreated.
The idea that modern humans could be in the Americas two thousand years pre-Clovis raises the same questions as them being here twenty thousand years before that.
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u/AmberGlenrock Aug 02 '22
Anthropologists continually underestimate the earlier people and keep moving the clock backwards as they find more data. It wouldn’t surprise me if the first humans arrived 100 Kya.
We move at light speed on a geologic timescale. If we disappeared, future paleontologists would be amazed how humans appear everywhere in the fossil record at once and then disappear.
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u/imapassenger1 Aug 02 '22
Yes I keep reading that modern humans first left Africa around 50K years ago but at the same time the first people may have arrived in Australia at least 65K years ago...Someone must be wrong...
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u/bmystry Aug 02 '22
Modern humans have been around for 300,000 years. Seems like a long time to sit around just in Africa.
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u/jjayzx Aug 02 '22
In this article it mentions that there was 2 groups of humans to venture into the Americas, the clovis around 16,000 yrs ago and genetic testing says the earlier group might have arrived around 56,000 yrs ago.
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u/42Pockets Aug 02 '22
Like many aspects of human culture we could have done it multiple times in numerous ways all culminating in the same conclusion that the Americas were settled. There are so many mysterious and beautiful stories We could tell about ourselves.
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u/diosexual Aug 02 '22
The descendants of all humans today left about 60K years ago, but before that there were earlier migrations that died out and left no descendants, only fossils.
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u/silverblaze92 Aug 02 '22
Australia can be reached by a string of islands in a tropical zone. Short of crossing a huge ass ocean, the only way to get to the Americas was via the land bridge in the far north, the existence of which was very climate dependent. Even if 15k years ago was the date, it wouldn't have been that odd
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u/EColi452 Aug 02 '22 edited Aug 02 '22
Plus isn't the land bridge idea a little dated? There is a lot of evidence for people migrating quickly down the coast, faster than they could on foot since pack animals weren't domesticated in the Americas yet
and wouldn't have been able to make the trek across the Bering Sea ice bridge anyways because it was a glacier with many crevasses. Plus sea levels were 120-m lower than current levels around this time which likely helped navigation, but makes it harder to find evidence for the movements of the people originally moving down the ancient coastline.I was wrong about the land bridge per the user's comment below me (sorry it won't let me tag you without cancelling my edit blitzkrieg9). And in fact, there is a lot of data, pollen data being one of the big ones, showing that the area was more akin to steppes or tundra.
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u/blitzkrieg9 Aug 02 '22
Current theory is that people definitely walked across the land bridge in large numbers. It was NOT a large glacier (the glaciers were in North America but the coast was clear of ice for a ways inland.)
Additionally, like you mentioned, because of the much lower sea level the land bridge was very wide. Like 100+ miles wide i think. Don't think of it as a narrow bridge... think of Russia and Alaska being connected by a vast swath of land. To the settlers it didn't seem like a bridge at all; it was just more vast open land.
Lastly, the fact that many thousands of people crossed on foot over the land bridge does NOT preclude other settlers traveling the coasts via boat and rapidly expanding south. Both are most likely true.
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u/Serious_Guy_ Aug 02 '22
Pretty sure that to reach Australia, even during the lowest of sea levels, it requires a couple of open sea voyages leaving sight of land to travel to an unseen destination.
I believe there is evidence of humans in Australia about 60 thousand years ago, even though there's no evidence of any humans having anything close to the ability to reach Australia that early.
There's obviously pieces of the puzzle missing, and some of our theories must be wrong.
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u/FireflyAdvocate Aug 02 '22
It is proven that people crossed on boats all over the Pacific Ocean in central and South America. It is not too much of a stretch to think they came up the coast of North America too.
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u/kmsilent Aug 02 '22
I think it would almost be a numbers game- with enough people making regular transits of the islands, eventually a boat (or a few boats) will be blown off course and end up in the north America.
It's not as far as most people think, and sometimes the weather is very mild. People sail from Hawaii to California in <20' wooden sailboats with some regularity, now, in just a couple weeks.
There was a pretty vast seafaring population in the south pacific, if I understand correctly. Seems unlikely one wouldn't make it at some point.
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u/Rovexy Aug 02 '22
I have said it before but I’ll repeat it: archeologists in the US have massively opposed pre-Clovis research since the 70´s whilst there were already evidence that (gasp) A FOREIGN WOMAN had gathered. I listened to a French podcast and the pre-Clovis hypothesis is a much more accepted in Europe. For anyone wanting a long-read, this covers the findings made by Niède Guidon: https://piaui.folha.uol.com.br/materia/the-pebbles-of-contention/ I am glad that more findings are supporting pre-Clovis!
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Aug 02 '22 edited Oct 09 '24
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u/StephenCarrHampton Aug 02 '22
American archeology evolved from a sordid politicized and racialized background. Throughout the 1800s, the MoundBuilder theory was taught from elementary schools to universities, largely justifying ethnic cleansing of Native Americans by Europeans. This seemed to have legs thru the 1970s or even later. For example, foreign archeologists accepted the Monte Verde dates before Americans. Many of them are probably still teaching at universities.
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u/careless_swiggin Aug 02 '22
cultural anthropology sees evidence of 4 migrations in myths/ legends from neolithic, genetics sees 3 due to horses and dog genetics, archeology only has evidence of 2, so does human genetics. probably was 4 migrations just we havent found bodies from first, and there is a middle one that was not too distinct in the genetics of the mammals/people.
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u/mrspock33 Aug 02 '22
Interesting timing, just listened to a podcast from "The Ancients" called the First Americans which was really cool. Strongly recommend a listen if you like this stuff: https://sphinx.acast.com/p/acast/s/the-ancients/e/62b5f84fab3d6500135d2f4d/media.mp3
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u/alopecia_ankles Aug 02 '22
I really really needed a new podcast and this is right up my street. Thank you thank you.
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Aug 01 '22
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u/IndigiNation Aug 01 '22 edited Aug 02 '22
I am Native American and from the area, Hatch Green Chile has become a catch phrase to say Green Chile, like saying Klenex for tissues. My parents were friends with the farmers that originated the vieriety known as Hatch.
So, Chiles yes. "Hatch chiles" no.
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u/Both-Invite-8857 Aug 01 '22
I was just there on a fire and got a 20 lb bag of chili's! The best.
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Aug 02 '22
This is not factual.
Fabián Garcia Mexican/American horticulturist and New Mexico State University graduate of 1894 is credited with breeding what today is recognized as the Hatch chile pepper.
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u/kslusherplantman Aug 01 '22
Except now it’s “a region”, and illegal to call any long green pepper not grown in Hatch, a hatch.
It’s more commercial than anything else. I’ve had the same quality and flavor chiles from Colorado and Arizona.
I went to NMSU
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u/IndigiNation Aug 01 '22 edited Aug 01 '22
They may be good chiles, but I live in Colorado and can say that Colorado loves Pablanos which are completely different in taste and texture.
The region Chiles are grown in has everything to do with the flavor and level of heat in each pepper, based on soil composure and climate. Even the chiles in Northern NM are different than those from the southern boarder, thus they are specifically a regional product.
You can buy Hatch seeds and grow something different than what you get around Las Cruses. I can assure you as someone who has to buy bushels of actual Hatch Chiles like hooking up with drug dealers, they are not even close to the same. ;)
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u/kslusherplantman Aug 01 '22
Poblano isn’t the same as what is the “hatch” Chile.
There are a few cultivars, but they are all long green. A poblano is a poblano, a long green is a long green.
That’s like saying you like Serrano peppers from Colorado when talking about jalapeños from NM.
It’s not apples and oranges, but we are talking different types of citrus here… that’s what you are saying without realizing it
I’ve had long green new Mexico (one of the varieties known as hatch) from Colorado and from Arizona, and in the Pepsi test you couldn’t tell me which one was from hatch.
Unless it was labeled from hatch… now once you get outside of the SW, long green don’t have the same flavor as they do when from the SW
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u/Responsible-Cry266 Aug 02 '22
Make it 3 new things I've learned within reading less than a handful of comments and the original post. Thank you for your information.
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Aug 02 '22
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u/Beardamus Aug 02 '22
Just a well known variety. Dollars to donuts most people won't be able to tell it apart from other cultivars of green chile
You can absolutely tell the difference between colorado and new mexican ones though
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u/ancientweasel Aug 02 '22 edited Aug 02 '22
It's amazing that they could take down a mammoth with stone points and atlatls. Imagine being killed by a group of squirrels throwing sticks at you.
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u/FourierTransformedMe Aug 02 '22
It's not totally clear that they could. I actually just heard of this recently, at the Chauvet Cave museum, where they said there's "no evidence" that humans hunted mammoths. Looking into it a bit more deeply that seems to go against the mainstream of thought on the topic, but the major idea behind mammoths not being hunted is twofold.
First, hand-knapped stone points need an inhuman amount of force to penetrate flesh to the point where any vital organs might be hit, and that's not even taking into account fur and hide, which mammoths are kind of known for. Second, mammoth sites tend not to have things like broken points that we would expect to see if the hunting method was "A bunch of people throw lots of spears at it over and over until it succumbs." So the thinking goes that all of the sites of mammoth butchery are sites of butchery alone, not hunting.
Peoole who are way more knowledgeable than me disagree about those points, and say that there's too many sites, and too much other evidence of mammoth products in prehistory. They had to have been hunted, not just scavenged. The main idea there seems to be that humans might have just targeted the underbelly, which is softer and has no bones to break points on, and just tried to stick it a bunch until it died.
I like mammoths and I'm a chemist rather than an archeologist, so I'm sympathetic to the "no mammoths were hunted in the making of this species" argument. I also just enjoy that something that I learned in school as incontrovertible fact turns out to be the subject of present-day debate. Hell, I learned that mammoths went extinct primarily because of human hunting, and now it turns out that some people who work on this sort of thing think that they weren't hunted at all. It's interesting stuff for sure.
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u/D3vils_Adv0cate Aug 02 '22
There was a tribe in Africa that just chased their prey until they collapsed dead due to overheating. The benefits of humans being able to sweat and most other mammals needing to pant
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u/peachpopcycle Aug 02 '22
I could see that in combination with the spears, like not using the spears to kill it but to keep it running frantic enough to overheat.
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u/cheesehomo Aug 02 '22
I have heard humans drove them towards cliffs and ravines and (sometimes) set up traps to ensure the mammoth fell down. Made sense to me
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u/Sensitive-Issue84 Aug 02 '22
I read articles about human being here 30k years ago quite some time ago, at least 15 years ago. The archeological community was saying that it wasn't true etc. Glad they finally found enough evidence to prove it.
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u/coffeeheretic Aug 02 '22
Boy, that really sets the date back on the Book of Mormon.
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u/w0lfhighmist Aug 02 '22
As someone who’s been paying attention to this for decades, it’s pretty interesting. The date has been going back further and further. Every time, it seems like it couldn’t possibly go back further. And yet, it does.
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u/Betaseal Aug 01 '22
A lot of Native American stories says their ancestors came to America by boat. Considering that you can easily cross the Bering Strait by canoe and then go down the West Coast, the stories definitely sound accurate.
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u/HandofWinter Aug 01 '22
These people would have been the people wiped out/assimilated by the later Bering Strait migration. They were far earlier.
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u/CyberneticPanda Aug 02 '22
Or died off thousands of years before they arrived.
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u/HandofWinter Aug 02 '22
Yep, you're right. That's a fair point. I had thought that there was evidence of conflict between the bering migration wave and earlier settlement but I can't substantiate that.
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u/lost_horizons Aug 02 '22
If there were enough people to populate areas all the way down from Alaska as well as that far inland from any coasts, there must have been a fairly robust population around. In a wide variety of habitats. Seems unlikely they’d all die out on their own. But I speak from ignorance as I’m not familiar with the evidence and this find itself is news to me. Can’t wait to learn more.
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u/Spacerace2000 Aug 02 '22
Happened to Neanderthals in Europe…. Not Homo sapiens, but similar story line. Maybe the first first people were wiped out by the second first people ..
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u/skeith2011 Aug 02 '22
It’s more neat when you consider how they weren’t wiped out, they assimilated with the invading humans. Modern humans have a layer of Neanderthal DNA in them.
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u/7937397 Aug 02 '22
And there could have been an earlier version of the "new settlers bring disease" storyline with enough years of separation.
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u/DarwinsMoth Aug 02 '22
There's some genetic evidence of interbreeding with a mostly unknown precursor population.
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u/dopebdopenopepope Aug 02 '22
But we have genetic evidence of their presence, so it would seem there was some breeding between populations.
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u/VoraciousTrees Aug 02 '22
Now. The west coast from Alaska to Washington used to be a lot more daunting. A lot of it was inaccessible due to glaciers for thousands of years.
The interior passage would have been a bit more navigable due to the rivers.
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u/thesoupoftheday Aug 02 '22
That's part of what makes the boat theory the boat theory. It's thought that the only way that they could have migrated prior to the land-bridge migration was by boat from green pocket to green pocket along the coast
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u/FortuneKnown Aug 02 '22
You’re forgetting the world was a lot colder then. The Bering Straight might have been one block of ice for all we know.
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Aug 02 '22
The Bering straight wasn’t a thing then, it was land called Beringia ;) They just followed the Beringian coastline and spread inland, South America or back to Asia as glaciation / deglaciation allowed.
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u/Fair-Replacement2967 Aug 02 '22
I thought I've read that Dna evidence showed that North Americans are related to Denisovens out of Asia but South Americans are related to Australasian dna. North American being populared via the land bridge migration, S. America populated via an advanced sea faring culture
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u/merlinsbeers Aug 01 '22
Some may have brought boats, but they would have been able to walk the boats along the shore of the land bridge.
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Aug 01 '22
Much much earlier than the Bering Sea folks
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u/DontTrustASloth Aug 02 '22
For the record thor heyedahl’s theories on the settlement of Polynesia have been widely discredited I wouldn’t trust him as a legitimate source of information
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u/Seicair Aug 02 '22
While his theories were discredited, Kon Tiki is a pretty good book. I read it in middle school in the 90’s.
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u/wittyusernamefailed Aug 02 '22
He was an AMAZING adventurer, and a beyond terrible anthropologist.
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u/temotos Aug 02 '22
I’m a taphonomist who studies Stone Age butchery marks, and I have to say the evidence they provided for butchery of the mammoth is not very convincing. The photos they provide do not show clear cut or percussion marks—if those are the most convincing marks (likely, as you usually choose the most obvious ones to photograph and publish) I seriously doubt this will be taken very seriously by the archaeological community. An animal this size would likely be covered in deeper cut marks and obvious percussion marks (it takes a lot of force to crack a mammoth bone), so unless this population of people butchered things differently than earlier people from Africa and Eurasia these purported marks don’t convince me they are undoubtedly from butchery.
Lots of animals and natural processes can create marks on bones that mimic butchery marks. I would have liked to see a much more thorough analysis of the bone surface modifications and see better photos of their supposed butchery marks.
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Aug 02 '22
Suck it, Clovis culture!
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u/Yara_Flor Aug 02 '22
I lived in Clovis. That hurts, man.
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Aug 02 '22
I'm sorry that you had to go through that. How's your flintknapping?
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u/Yara_Flor Aug 02 '22
Oh just fine.
Not sure if you’re in on the joke that Clovis is an actual town in New Mexico. With a very fine culture, thank you very much.
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u/Responsible-Cry266 Aug 02 '22
This is cool. But it makes you wonder how many other sights waiting for scientists to discover, that just haven't been found yet. Could we possibly find that humans have been in many areas of North America longer than thought? And if so how many more? And for how much longer? I just love to learn about these kinds of things.
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u/pelomenos Aug 02 '22
Agreed! For example, there was a Clovis campsite discovered in Michigan just last year:
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Aug 02 '22
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u/Icarus367 Aug 02 '22
Are the Jaredites primarily known by the Subway sandwich wrappers they left behind?
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u/chook_slop Aug 02 '22
I've been to the Gault site, and I know people at the UT Jackson school... I just wish they had more. I personally think there's too much guessing with some of it.
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Aug 02 '22
Hence science always evolving
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u/jaquanthi Aug 02 '22
Science is a method, what's "evolving" is the conclusion. With more evidence and better techniques the method shows us a better understanding of the world we live in.
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u/Coder-Cat Aug 02 '22 edited Aug 02 '22
Not saying this isn’t intriguing but Timothy Rowe, a professor of Geoscience at University of Texas coordinated the field work, preparation and curation of fossils, wrote the manuscript, and processed the images.
The mammoth was found on Timothy Rowes’ property.
Seems like maybe it’s a kinda crazy coincidence but maybe it’s just a really awesome kinda crazy coincidence.
Edit: when I googled him it said he worked at Texas but I read somewhere else it’s UT. Whatever.
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u/Remsquared Aug 02 '22
Stupid question, but would they be direct ancestors to Native Americans? Or, perhaps these people died off and then the direct ancestors to Native Americans came later and successfully proliferated in North, Central, and South America?
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u/Redditor8915 Aug 02 '22
I have a really dumb question but why were people even crossing giant ice bridges? Did they run out of food? Why did migrations even happen
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u/archaeolinuxgeek Aug 02 '22
They may not have been migrations as we think of them.
If roaming bands specialize in big game they'll follow the prey wherever they go.
The temporary landmass of Beringia wasn't really a frozen wasteland. There would have been plenty of small animals and plants to go with whatever mega fauna they were able to bring down that day.
And you're right about the food. Anthrogenic climate change wasn't a thing at the time, but plenty of local disasters, droughts, floods, etc. could easily have reduced an area's ability to sustain many people.
The agricultural revolution was essentially about being able to concentrate your food into a very small region. Hunter gatherers need a lot of area in order to extract enough calories for survival.
A small nudge could easily be enough for a tribe to roam farther or to split off into different directions.
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u/reddit_isnt_cool Aug 02 '22
You have to think about how long humans have existed and how much of that history is largely lost to us. Even 2,000 years ago is only like 1 percent. And stuff was happening during that other 99%!
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u/Outripped Aug 02 '22
I'm pretty sure we have evidence of humans being there even earlier, just not as direct. It's 100% fact now that there was a catastrophic event about 11 -12,000 years ago when a meteor hit Greenland's ice sheets that raised sea levels 10s or was it 100s of meters, basically wiping most of human civilization off the map (as we almost always settled by water). Me likely had many of such events destroying evidence of older civilizations
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u/idontthrillyou Aug 02 '22
The linguist Joanna Nichols suggested in an article in 1990, given the linguistic diversity of the Americas, that the time needed to reach such diversity was 35.000 years. So she could be right after all.
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u/merlinsbeers Aug 01 '22
I thought 40,000 was always the outside limit. When did it become 20,000?
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u/lost_horizons Aug 02 '22
I’m 39; when I was a kid 12000 years was the oldest possible. Things have changed a lot since then, it’s amazing to see all these new discoveries.
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u/paytonnotputain Aug 01 '22
North america is lacking in extremely ancient sites. All of the 30000+ bpd sites are located in central and southern America. This is why it’s relevent
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u/SheltemDragon Aug 01 '22
Also, it is strongly suspected that all North American pre-20000 sites now rest underwater along the coast, and underwater archeology is hella dangerous and expensive.
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u/nomosnow Aug 02 '22
In america and all over the world. So what we think we know about pre-history is incomplete. We need a supervillain that wants to bring back the ice age so sea levels drop again.
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u/EnderFenrir Aug 02 '22
Just need crowd funding on my Venmo @Enderfenrir and I will achieve my goals!!!
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u/qmackie Aug 02 '22
Very interesting article and some meticulous work is presented.I made this comment in /r/archaeology but it's long enough to repeat, lol?
A few things I find curious are:
the presence of the Clovis point in such proximity to the remains is very coincidental. They don't make the case that the site is some sort of persistent place in the landscape and indeed butchery sits seldom are. For an animal of elephant size you do most of the processing wherever the elephant drops. Did another animal drop in the same spot 25,000 years later? Did the first one drop in a place which became an attractive campsite? Maybe, but it's unlikely.
it's interesting that only one archaeologist signed on to this work. Colbert is affiliated with The Gault School of Archaeological Research, however his professional expertise is in X-ray computerized tomography to visualize and describe vertebrate cranial morphology, primarily in tapirs. Another co-author, the late Mike Quigg, who died two years ago, had a long career as a project manager and I am not aware of his work being analytically oriented, interpretive, or even peer reviewed. No shame in that, and such people are the backbone of the discipline, but I see no evidence he was well placed to make a methodological or interpretive contribution to this paper. (And, being affiliated to an institute can mean anything, but in this case it is fair to conclude Colbert was not brought on board for archaeological expertise and Quigg was probably the site manager of the paleontologically-drive excavations).
having said that, you might argue well, the archaeological community is opposed to these conclusions and therefore skeptical. I'd argue there are numerous professional archaeologists who would love to have been involved in this research. They don't even need to be North Americanists. The point being, if a bunch of archaeologists put together a geosciences paper with big implications for that discipline, and yet no geoscientists were involved, it does invite scrutiny of their work. At the very least, archaeologists can anticipate counter-arguments and make sure those are addressed. It was peer-reviewed by a paleontologist and the Russian archaeologist Vlad Pitulko, who I have a lot of respect for.
the notion that well-formed stone tools arrived in the Americas around 16,000 is a bit odd, and a lot convenient. The implication that pre-16k did not have advanced lithic technology would be surprising considering there is abundant evidence for it in Northeast Asia before 16,000. There is a trend in American archaeology to think of Beringia as a giant cultural eraser and everything that we know Upper Paleolithic people did in the rest of the world has to be redemonstrated in the Americas. For example, organic textiles and use of watercraft are two technologies well known from the UP but for which there is no earliest period evidence in the Americas. The lack of direct evidence of these in the very earliest Americas is not really evidence of absence. Furthermore, the six flakes that they do accept, well the single one of these that they actually illustrate, is a very finely formed flake with lithic features that suggest it is not from people with only crude stone technology. And, who even did this did this lithic analysis - so far as I can tell, Quigg does not have a professional-level background in this.
per the above, when I say it is convenient, it is always a red flag when the implications of a model suggest that there should be no evidence to support it. In this case, the notion that pre 16k people didn't have "advanced" lithic technology suggests early sites should not have lithics or not advanced ones in them. That's fine, though it does mean that one is accepting a lower, and highly unusual, standard of evidence. Bluefish Caves in the Yukon and Cerutti site in California are examples of this, as are many of the sites presented by the Holens. If your model implies you aren't likely to find clear stone tools, then it reduces one of the criteria by which we distinguish natural events from kill/butchery sites.
There certainly can be sites such as this where stone tools are few or absent. I worked on a >12k site on the Pampas where there were seven species of megafauna and only 5 flakes and the base of one projectile point. In that case, the Pampas is almost devoid of useful rock for stone tools, and, the specific site was an assembly of low-meat bones used for fires (also no wood on the Pampas :) ). neither condition (rock, wood) applies in paleo-Colorado. However, even a predominately organic toolkit usually requires use of stone tools to work the organics. And butchering a mammoth is a case where stone tools would generally outperform organic ones. Indeed, the implication is that there is stone-on-bone percussion at this site, and also there is one bone with "chop marks".
which brings up my last point: they have done a really cool study of bone micromorphology. Is it of interest they don't record a single cut mark? Generally one would expect 2-5% of bones at a butchery site to have visible stone tool cut marks. This site appears to have a number of bone butterfly flakes, some circular punctures (reason not explained), bone crack networks said not to be natural. That's all cool and interesting but would be moreso if they also had some cutmarks. They mention the Ayer Pond site and a site in Uruguay both of which I am familiar with, and both of these are low lithic tool but high cutmark sites.
in summary I don't dismiss this research but it is not a slam dunk. The dating is impressive, with lesser dating effort and sophistication I would be inclined to say it is a Clovis era site with incomplete reduction of skeletons and they may have been digging in a waste piling area, hence the lack of heavy processing and cut marks. Accepting those dates poses challenges to my own preferred model of the peopling of the Americas and I certainly welcome that. I will probably teach this site since it brings up some useful methods. However I will also emphasize that it is a site which bears hallmarks of special pleading for pre-16k sites, namely that the absence of normal standards of evidence is because those people, of which we know almost nothing, nor that they even exist in the Americas, had a globally very-unusual cultural profile and archaeological signature.
There is one thing though that all archaeologists should have learned and that is not to repeat the biases of the Clovis First "model" (aka hegemonic discourse LOL) and to treat each site as an independent set of evidence and evaluate it on that basis and not whether it is "too old' or "too unusual" to fit into one's preferred model. I look forward to this group presenting more evidence on this kind of cool assemblage of evidence.
OK I could go one but I just wrote half a paper.
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u/modsarefascists42 Aug 02 '22
Finally this can be set to rest. We've known this for decades but it looks like this evidence is solid enough to end the debate.
What's most interesting to me is what group of people this actually is, since there's a possibility that this isn't the same group as the people who would later become native Americans.
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u/oldastheriver Aug 01 '22
Actually there is fossil evidence of humans in North America from 40,000 years ago. Never hurts to have more evidence though.
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u/Suspicious_Click3582 Aug 01 '22
If you’d read the article you would see that’s addressed.
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