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I wonder, did humans cross the Bering Strait much earlier whether by boat or foot? Or did they travel by boat to the west coast from Pacific islands?
Actually, question for those who know: what is the earliest evidence of human occupation of the various islands in the Pacific?
The Polynesian migration got under way about 3000 years ago.
However humans have been using boats for longer. That's how Australia was settled about 40,000 years ago.
I am still cautious about this discovery. The number of archeological sites exploded starting 13,000 years ago, and it coincided with a major set of extinctions. That extinction might not be us, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas_impact_hypothesi.... But human arrival in places like Australia is generally associated with major extinctions. So we should expect the same in North America.
Early human remains in America have to explain both why they did not leave more remains and why they did not come with a major mass extinction.
One possibility is that we were not the only hominids, and 13,000 years ago was not the only time that there was a land bridge across the Bering Strait. What we are is the only primates known to easily cooperate in groups bigger than Dunbar's Number (150 for us). That gives us an outsized impact.
If, for instance, the Denisovans had made it to the New World, they could leave convincingly human footprints while having a far lighter ecological impact than we would have.
It wasn't from Pacific islands, they're not close enough to America. The closest polynesian island is Easter Island and it's 2,000 miles away and was only reached 1,000 years ago.
Well, it might've been from the Pacific. There's genetic evidence for Polynesian individuals in S. Amer prior to the settlement of Easter Island.
Polynesians were among the greatest navigators in world history and didn't reach the eastern Pacific until many thousands of years later. It's like pointing to Alex Honnold to argue that ancient people climbed cliffs instead of walking around. Yeah, it's physically possible but there's a hell of a lot of skill, knowledge, and technology that goes into supporting those physical feats.
Besides, Polynesians are genetically distant from the oldest DNA we've recovered in the Americas, which universally points to a northeastern Asian origin for early Americans.
I was responding to the GP who incorrectly stated that there wasn't Polynesian gene flow to the Americas prior to 1000 years ago. The evidence of early admixture events is quite strong. No one thinks the Americas were initially peopled across the Pacific — please do pardon my imprecision!
Wow. This looks like a very significant discovery. Humans in New Mexico in 25,000 BCE, incredible.
This calls for a movie
Was that before the native Americans from the South Pacific arrived?
Indigenous people in North America have always disputed the academic consensus on how and when humans first got there, and archeologists keep making discoveries supporting their position.
Indigenous peoples of North America have a range of positions, not just one. All the way from saying maybe migration should be pushed back some X number of millennia before Clovis, to holding that the Creator created their tribes right where they are and it is offensive to claim they migrated from Asia.
I'd further say that even people from the same tribe will have differing views on this sort of thing. Indigenous people don't have homogeneous beliefs.
It's sort of like saying "Europeans believe the Garden of Eden was in Missouri".
The academic consensus, incorrect as it may be, is based on scientific evidence of human existence in the Americas. Is there similar evidence that academia has ignored but indigenous peoples are aware of? Or are you referring to oral tradition?
The academic consensus is usually reached through a social process, so who wields authority within the discipline also influences what the consensus is.
An example from mathematics: the shunning of Georg Cantor for his proof that the real numbers are uncountably infinite.[1]
Academics is entirely different depending on the field.
In the case of archeology, it's almost always spoken in terms of "here's the earliest evidence we have of humans in an area".
I don't think any archeologist will say "Oh, humans were not here earlier than X date" but rather "Here's the evidence we have of humans being at this location at this date. Digging through their refuse, it appears this is what they ate.".
A field like mathematics has historically had a large degree of philosophy in it. There's not exactly a bunch of empirical evidence you can bring in to prove math one way or another (hence things like irrational numbers creating cults).
That is true, mathematics is different in the substance of the debate.
In archeology, to my cursory understanding as a non-archeologist, the debate has been about whether the evidence for pre-Clovis human habitation in the Americas can be accepted as valid. There is a wide gray area where acceptance comes down to subjective views, and if it is so, then authority affects what consensus is reached.
If enough evidence is amassed, then we presumably shift out of the grey area and authority becomes unimportant in the consensus.
Sure, but that doesn't mean consensus is wrong by default. If there's evidence that mainstream academia is ignoring without good reason, that's another matter, but to my knowledge that's not the case.
I don't think people are suggesting it is wrong by default, just that it's not correct by default, and is in this case the theory it has arrived at is deeply underdetermined by the evidence.
.. and therefore a Native Americans' belief that they were always here is equally valid, because social yada yada yada?
Nonsense.
There are more than two statements that can be made about the world. The statement that you are claiming that I made I did not make.
> ”academic consensus”
This should probably be qualified as US academic consensus. Academics in Brazil have disputed the 13k yo date for America occupation for some time already.
To wit, the Luzia woman was found to be ~12 thousand years-old in South America, so it puts the 13 thousand date in question
Disclaimer: I know absolute nothing about this topic and this is from my recollection of reading wikipedia and soft-science articles
As I understand it, it should have taken a lot of time for full migration from North to South America; and while a thousand years seems more than enough for travel, apparently migration takes a long, long time - and the odds are that a fossil comes from a migrated population, virtually impossible to be from an odd outlier that traveled ahead (for whatever reason)
I know very little too, but just happened to listen to an interview about this topic.
Here is a paper suggesting that the region of where is Mexico had populations 30k years ago.
> apparently migration takes a long, long time
if we take a generation to be 20 years, and the grown children move 20 miles away so as not to compete for resources and/or find fresh ones, then we get about 1 mile per year. 1000 years == 1000 miles of migration,
Weren't people hunter-gatherers at this point in time?
They would be highly mobile and actively looking for new, richer ground.
Any reason to assume they would move in a consistent direction?
I believe there was another recent study that found some pre-Clovis ancient DNA and concluded that modern Native Americans shared little in common, implying that pre-Clovis people were largely wiped out and thus are not ancestors of modern Native Americans.
Also not sure that the academic consensus has been that Clovis was the earliest settlement for maybe a decade.
Do you have any more details than that? The only purported preclovis sequencing I'm aware of are the paisley caves coprolites, for which the genetics didn't indicate that, had a much more complicated story, and aren't even this old.
And claimed what, instead? Stating they've "always been here", rode on a giant bird from "another world", or that they emerged from the Earth's navel just aren't things a scientist expects to find evidence for...
Well what is the Native American perspective on it?
Here's an interview.
https://srslywrong.com/podcast/252-the-indigenous-paleolithi...
I mean they are made of rock.
The article explains the carbon dating comes from seeds, pollen, and quartz from the sediment layer and not directly from the footprints themselves.
White Sands, New Mexico is also a region where a ton of UFO activity has been observed for many years.
So it’s aliens? Get a hold of yourself man.
You realize there's a USAF base and missile range next door right?
Get a hold of yourself men.
It was simply noting an interesting parallel. No conclusions were made or mentioned.
IMO, these look totally fake. [1]
Just compare the footprints to real verified footprints [2]
[1] https://www.npr.org/2023/10/07/1204031535/fossil-footprints-...
[2] https://fineartamerica.com/featured/footprints-in-sand-on-be...
A good rule of thumb for forming beliefs (and commenting on fora about studies) is if you don’t have more than a passing awareness of an entire academic field, and your observation relies on no unique knowledge, talent, or perspective that you bring to the table, then you can safely assume other people see it too and that there is more to it than what took you a few seconds to evaluate. Just something to consider?
That's true and his observation IS silly.
In general, though, common sense is widespread, and a belief that conventional science is wrong isn't necessarily crackpot. Scientists do manage to deceive themselves fairly regularly.
But yeah, you have a higher burden of proof.
Unfortunately we live in a world where "doing your own research" by someone who has no business doing any research is celebrated.
Assuming that you’re serious, let me reply with two things.
First, fossilized impressions in sand and mud are always distorted. Look at more and you’ll see. These impressions are actually remarkably well-preserved.
Second, you can’t be sure that the second footprints are any more real. I could easily carve fake feet out of wood and make those impressions. So could the artist.
Epistemology is everywhere, eh?
I think that there are good reasons to distrust this sort of 'evidence'.
Firstly, I don't think dating (dendrochronoloy or luminescence (whatever that is)) is valid. It is unverifiable guess work.
Secondly, how does one date something intangible like a footprint? Oh the grass and pollen.... please. I don't think you can date a secondary trace of something like this. Its like a detective using dust to see the oil on a criminal's finger print. Nice idea, but highly unlikely to be practical.
> "People can argue against any single dating technique," he said. "But it's the totality of the study, the congruence of the ages from all three different dating techniques, that really make our results exceptionally robust."
"exceptionally robust"... if you say so.
> Jolie, who is of Oglala Lakota and Hodulgee Muscogee heritage, says technology is transforming his field. But there's something else, too: more Indigenous people are involved in research into these early Americans.
Ok - so there is a modern angle too. Amazing how history cross-references as it does and with such good timing. Well, not that amazing ... if you think that the history we are presented is simply the history for today (not yesteryear or tomorrow's history). We get the message for our timeline as we need it. The underlying message that this history supports is: its time 'we' gave the history and land back to the people 'we' stole it from, brothers and sisters. Except, that no one alive now committed the crimes that they are being accused of - so we are going to commit new crimes on account of stories that manufacture consent to the crimes..
>I don't think you can date a secondary trace of something like this.
FTA:
“One key problem in archaeology is that we are often not getting a date (radiometric date, for example) on the objects we are directly interested in.”
According to the article, secondary sources are the norm in archaeology.
Thankfully, you’ve prefaced your comment with an indication that your observation — based on a visual comparison of two photographs on the internet — is just your opinion.
Why bother going to the effort of applying the footnote notation for something so unashamedly un-academic?
Just thinking, HN is not an academic forum. It is ok to propose not so well-thought-out questions and propositions here. Nobody is really trying to scientifically prove anything here. Stupid questions and propositions are good here, because then someone can explain why they are stupid. They would not be ok in academic setting of course.
How did you determine that? Could you link to a preprint or a publication where you make your argument?
Your response comes across even more shallow than the original post - As if putting those two sentences and pictures in a pre-print would validate the position.