The first humans arrived in North America a lot earlier than believed | Hacker News Reader

The first humans arrived in North America a lot earlier than believed

nouvelles.umontreal.ca

191 pointsbaalcat71 comments

Always wondered why this is such a surprise. Getting around the planet, especially over very long time periods, is just not that hard. We're stuck in a mentality that says long distance travel was impossible prior to Columbus. But realize he was just the guy who traveled and came BACK. To migrate over long distances you don't by definition need to return, so the people you left have no idea where you went. Also you have to have a motivation to tell people where you went. Supposedly there had been fishing expeditions to the new world coast for a long time prior to Columbus. The fishermen didn't want anyone to know where they were finding such good fishing grounds so never told where they had traveled.

In addition, the evidence points to a major impact around 12.5kybp centered around the northern plains. This would have destroyed most of the evidence of any human presence.

Madagascar is a large island about ~400km off the coast of Africa. It was settled by Austronesians who embarked about 2000 years ago launching from the island of Borneo (of Malaysia), not by Africans, although Bantu speakers do appear to have colonized the somewhat closer Comoros Islands.

Cape Verde, the Azores, the Falkland Islands--the world is not lacking for places that were never colonized until the Age of Exploration despite being remarkably close to continents. Actually colonizing a place is more difficult than getting a few people together on a boat and hoping you hit land (read up on how the Austronesians actually colonized the remote islands that they found). When crossing such massive bodies of water as the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean, you need stores of rations if you want to live to make it to the other side, and it's not clear that a Paleolithic society could have produced a sufficient food surplus to provision the voyage.

Also, the possible discovery of Newfoundland based on the Grand Banks doesn't predate Columbus by all that much. The clearest indications of its existence postdate Cabot's exploration in 1497. Claimants of precedence generally still date to the 1400s--usually making reference to around 1470. Archaeological evidence of any pre-Columbian, post-Viking contact with Newfoundland has not been forthcoming.

The parent is talking about visiting and you warp it into colonizing. Aboriginals probably knew about these places but had better places to live than a craggy, barren island with salt spray in their faces. If the aboriginals had the foresight to predict the land grabbing empire builders they may of dug themselves in but then some other fanciful justification tale like religious freedom would have been created to justify aboriginal displacement and land robbery.

> To migrate over long distances you don't by definition need to return, so the people you left have no idea where you went.

That sure sounds like discussing one-way colonization to me.

Also, the islands I discussed (save Madagascar, which is a full-on continental crust fragment and is the fourth-largest island in the world) are all volcanic islands, not atolls--the Azores are actually the highest point in Portugal.

The Caribs did expand into the Caribbean Islands, many of which are smaller than, say, the Falklands. It's highly unlikely that large islands would have remained unsettled by neighboring tribes if they could have reached them--especially since we know that the distances involved do seem to preclude them having been reached. Oceanic transport is not a trivial invention.

I didn't say atoll. Migrate doesn't mean you have to colonize every way point.The op also said "fishing expedition" which doesn't mean colonization. You don't have to marry the first person you have sex with either. Tule reeds are common in North America. Totora reeds grow in South America. Chumash regularly traveled 22 miles between what is now Catalina Islands and LA. The Chumash are best known for their sewn-plank canoe called a tomol that ranged up to 30 feet long. Cuba is 93 miles from Florida. Pre-Columbian South Americans built reed boats. Heyerdahl went 5,000 miles across the Pacific in a reed boat. Falkland Islands are 300 miles east of South American southern Patagonia coast. Pre-Incan pottery shards found in the Galapagos by Heyerdahl and Arne SkjolsvoId during an expedition to the archipelago in January 1953. Galapagos are 563 miles west of Ecuador. Regarding the Galapagos, Incan oral history tells of king Tupac Yupanqui voyage to the west and discovery of two "Islands of Fire." The Galapagos were not colonized either. Not everything in Caribbean Islands is tropical paradise. From worldwildlife.org: "Caribbean islands are often portrayed as lush tropical paradises, but Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao are better described as desert scrub. The three islands, known locally as the ABC’s, are located 40-80 km off the coast of Venezuela just 12 N of the equator. Due to their leeward location, the islands receive only 350-550 mm of rain per year."

The Falklands are a pretty poor example imho. The fact that people were not there does not imply they couldn't get there. If they had no sheep, there would be no point staying.

I was responding to the assertion that European colonizers were discovering and claiming islands, specifically the Malvinas, from the backyard of indigenous peoples, of which they were totally ignorant.

Taino Indians got to Cuba from the Yucatan, which is a 135 mile sea voyage. The Galapagos Islands have pre-Incan pottery, and they are 563 miles west of South America. The Falkland Islands are around 200 miles from Isla de los Estados Island (reached by Fuegian Indians). So the Falklands (Malvinas) were very reachable. Very early Native American migrants were sea faring people who moved down along the North American and South American west coast then back up along the east coast. Haplogroup d4h3a found in bones at Prince of Wales Island on the Alaska panhandle, are 10,000 years old. Chumash who settled Channel Islands off southern California have haplogroup d4h3a, the Fuegians, who probably made it to the Falkland Islands, have haplogroup d4h3a. The Ainu people of Japan also built "lashed-canoes" -like the Chono and the Chumash (as well as dugouts), and they may have a link with the Amerindians. Like you say, oceanic transport is not trivial but Amerindians were doing it for distances over 100 miles for millennia.

But there's a difference between a remote island and a full continent with regards to having enough fauna to sustain human populations.

If you can hunt big prey all the way, it's is substantially easier than the places where you have to go by sea.

> Supposedly there had been fishing expeditions to the new world coast for a long time prior to Columbus. The fishermen didn't want anyone to know where they were finding such good fishing grounds so never told where they had traveled.

I've never heard of such an expedition. How did they transport fish that were worth consuming without refrigeration?

By drying it or salting it I suspect. The story is common knowledge where I grew up in Scotland, so I don't have a specific source but I did some Googling and found this :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_European_colon...

"c. 1200: English, Irish, Norse fisherman begin fishing off the coast of Newfoundland"

So at least I'm not making this up out of thin air.

See also the story of Prince Henry Sinclair where supposedly fishermen blown off course by a storm lived in Newfoundland, eventually returned home and their story became known to Henry, leading to his expeditions.

One of the challenges of North American archaeology is that it's likely that many potential archaeological sites are now underwater, since sea level was about 400 feet lower at the peak of the last ice age.

I've always felt like if there were other earlier migrations, since they necessarily would need to be coast and seafaring migrations (potentially no bridge or path through the glaciers to southern North America), then by definition all trace of those migrations and settlements would be almost entirely be lost because they are coastal cultures, at least initially. 400 feet is a lot of lost coastal area. So I've always felt very skeptical that the absence of earlier archeological sites proved anything.

You're not alone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coastal_migration#Sea_levels

I think most informed people share that skepticism. The entirety of the human story is probably many times more interesting than we know. But it's only scientifically responsible to include the well-attested facts in basic education.

That said, I do think a permissive imagination can be key to being receptive to new facts that support surprising outcomes. The impact of speculation and philosophy on science is underrated, in my opinion.

Something just seems wrong about the timeline. Not the NA timeline, I mean the European timeline.

We have seafarers reaching Australia 40,000 years ago. I don't think it should come as a shock that seafarers reach North America 24,000 years ago. Except that maybe we should keep digging because why did it take 16,000 more years?

I think we may be labeling the Dawn of Civilization pretty badly when we have agriculture and intercontinental tribes debuting thousands or tens of thousands of years prior.

Maybe the first inland civilization, sure.

The something you're looking for may be the ice age.

Personally I wouldn't be terribly surprised to hear that humans reached Alaska either before or after the last ice age. But right in the middle? Strange timing.

I heard the story [1] that when people where able to cross the bering street due to the lower sea level, they could not proceed from Alaska due to the massive ice shield and when the shield was gone, the bering street was closed again, a mechanism described to be similar to a revolving door.

[1] Tim Flannery (2001), The Eternal Frontier: An Ecological History of North America and its Peoples

Yeah, I've read it too, but it's odd.

It's more difficult to move on ice or water than on grass. Moving on grass is convenient. But ice and water aren't impossible, we know that people reached Greenland from the northwest and stayed there, and we know that people reached Australia and even Easter Island.

Well-regarded books say strange things sometimes. Have you read Jared Diamond's Catastrophe? Its argument about why the Norwegians who moved to Greenland died presupposes that the technology that led to viking ships had nothing to do with fishing and, and states that Norwegians would rather hunger to death than eat fish.

I think you mean Collapse (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse:_How_Societies_Choose...)? Do you have more rebuttal to that? I'm reading it at the moment, and I'm always looking for issues with JD's usually compelling arguments.

Yes, Collapse, sorry.

No, I don't, really. Except that dried cod was a well-known foodstuff in Norway at the time, that's a recorded fact. Any argument that rests on Norwegians not eating cod is a poorly founded argument, no matter how well phrased.

(http://nrksuper.no/super/files/2013/10/t%C3%B8rrfisk2-e13823... is it. Tastes good, is light and doesn't require refrigeration. Smells though.)

Well, the seafarers reching Australia/Neuginea 40,000 years ago certainly had a much short distance to travel on the open sea. I can't find any good visualizations now but the difference between about 100 kilometers of open sea and multiple thousand is enormous. And going over the bering street wasn't that easy either like through the much harsher climate back then.

People can usually walk away faster than sea level can rise, so even if many of the piles of bones and pottery are now under water, the DNA of the inhabitants might not be. I'm hoping we'll soon be able to recover more of the early history of human migrations via DNA in living descendants.

We're apparently getting closer to being able to do an entire human gene sequencing for about $100. A $100 million project over the next generation or so could get us the complete genomes of a million people. Donated genomes could increase that number significantly. With enough data and improvements in algorithms, ever more subtle "shadows" of ancient people will emerge.

In addition, the ability to recover/reconstruct DNA from known archaeological sites will grow rapidly. The degradation of old DNA can be compensated for statistically, to some extent, by having many more samples. The number of samples will grow as the cost per sample falls, and the cost is plummeting.

In other words, we may not have to find a lot of new sites to experience a rush of new discoveries in the very near future. I'm looking forward to it.

Those people didn't die in a flood - instead, over thousands of years, they relocated their communities further inland. Unfortunately, this means that when we dig at a settlement, all we can hope to find is fairly recent artifacts. (As the old settlement is now underwater.)

Those people didn't die in a flood - instead, over thousands of years, they relocated

Yes, that's exactly what I said. They walked away from the coast as sea levels rose, taking their DNA with them.

Along most of the west coast of North America, the Pacific Ocean depth drops down past 400ft within a couple miles of shore. When we go scuba diving we're never far from land. So certainly some sites are now underwater, but as long as the people spent time at least a little ways inland then there should be evidence near the current coastline.

Yep. Not so much of a shelf here as a plummet. One of the things that makes Monterey Bay so interesting, for example.

Not just North America. The "Out of Arabia" scenario for AMH expansion from the now-underwater Levant is quite compelling and revolutionary, but obviously difficult to prove.

[1] http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2014/09/an-archaeological-scena...

[2] https://www.academia.edu/8214444/Out_of_Arabia_and_the_Middl...

Most ancient people were smart enough (or learned the hard way) to not build their cities on the coast. Most major coastal cities you can think of today -- New York, Singapore, Shanghai, Tokyo -- have only a couple hundred years of history as a city.

Most cities that were sizably developed in ancient times -- such as Paris, Beijing, Moscow, Rome, Kyoto, Xi'an, London -- were not built on the coast for good reasons. I suspect that the humans in North America would have also avoided living too close to the coast if they were smart.

I disagree - we may not have built large settlements by the coast but there are thousands of small towns on the coastlines of the world that were essential in the exploration of the world that drove settlement.

The location of ancient capitals probably has more to do with the importance of trade and food production than avoiding coastal storms or flooding.

Not really, as coastal city can also benefit from fishing, and certain coastal area had maritime trade back in ancient times.

But it's not sea level either, my understanding is that the reason why most ancient capitals are built inland is military.

Coastal areas are harder to defend from foreign invasions than inland areas, as there is little signal and time to mobilize troops, moreover, martial strategy privileges high ground.

Capitals were usually built around a river that connects to the sea, and where that river meets the sea, you can usually find a fortified town which had a military garrison.

My guess is that the advent of the airplane bomber has changed the considerations.

Did you mean to reply to me? I ask because your comment appears to be disagreeing with arguments that I never made.

My major point was that (1)the coast, by itself, was not a critical factor either pro or con. (2) What appears to matter when it comes to becoming a first rate city is food production and access to trade, be it by road, river, or sea--preferably, all three.

Your defense thesis doesn't make sense. If defense really mattered, cities would be built on mountain tops, but they aren't. Instead, cities grow where trade flourishes. They take their lumps, periodically, from invasion, and then rebuild and get back to business. Virtually every major city from the ancient world is still in business, even though the empire that founded it has long since been destroyed. Only when the economic basis of the city gets destroyed, does the city die. That argues for economics trumping military considerations, which, again, was my thesis.

Finally, bombers don't appear to have altered this equation one bit. To the best of my knowledge, the major cities from before WWII are still major cities today.

Yes I meant to reply to you. I think we are confounding flourishing cities and capitals. I was more talking specifically about the later. Most ancient and especially modern capitals (D.C., Canberra, Ottawa etc.) are built inland, but the land mass offer less protection than it did in ancient times, not so much because of bombers actually (land offers ground air defense), but missiles, which were rendered effective at the end of WWII (V-2). Nonetheless it is still a preferred configuration for capitals for the same factors. Coastal cities are just more vulnerable in times of war.

Moscow was founded in the ~11th century. It only became the sprawling metropolis of today because of a series of historical accidents, that had more to do with who won what war, then its superior location.

which makes me realize - none of the current coral reefs existed back then, and the ones that were are no longer there (since corals need warm water near surface to thrive). and probably number of sea species that went extinct

"Bourgeon examined the approximately 36,000 bone fragments culled from the site and preserved at the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau — an enormous undertaking that took her two years to complete. Comprehensive analysis of certain pieces at UdeM's Ecomorphology and Paleoanthropology Laboratory revealed undeniable traces of human activity in 15 bones. Around 20 other fragments also showed probable traces of the same type of activity. "

15 out of 36,000 is not very strong evidence. In a collection of bone fragments this large, nature and random chance are bound to produce a few fragments that strongly resemble those processed by humans. If humans were in the region 24000 years ago, other sites of similar age will eventually be found. If not, this site probably doesn't provide strong enough evidence to stand on its own.

If you're wondering about the term "before present", the present is defined as 1950 for geological purposes. I'm afraid it's probably too late to correct it to 1985.

You probably meant 1970? :)

They might be thinking "Back to the Future" rather than unix?

you're right. they probably were thinking of Back to the Future, which was, in some ways, a far better film than Unix.

It was set because of nuclear testing. Thankfully we made it through the 80s without nuclear war.

This is pretty cool. I'll admit that, until a few years ago, my knowledge of human migration to the Americas was very poor. Based on my American public school education (and personal naïveté and lack of curiosity), I just thought everyone came over on the Bering land bridge in one go, then gradually split into the various cultures that Europeans eventually encountered. Of course, things are more complicated than that, and there appears to be a lot of uncertainty in the scientific community regarding the precise chronology and source populations of migrations.

The era of humanity's initial diaspora is truly fascinating. I'm particularly awed by just how quickly humans managed to colonize the Americas. By any account, humanity progressed from the just a few thousand people gaining their first footholds in the Americas to conquering the entirety of both continents with an established population numbering in the tens of millions in just ~10,000 or so years. The pace of expansion and growth is truly amazing considering how challenges posed by geography and nature.

It's not that it's impossible for humans to branch off and establish new groups in previously unexplored regions, it's that establishing sustainable communities on virgin territory isn't a one-time affair. Think about how many failed attempts were made by the groups who conquered the vast deserts, mountain ranges, and rivers between their place of origin and their new homes. To successfully conquer two continents in such a short span of time is just insane in my mind whenever I stop and think about it.

It's also funny to see how confused the efforts of archaeologists can be on this topic. This article cites the previous date of "earliest human presence" in North America as 14,000 BP while there has been well known evidence* available for years that humanity had spread as far south as Chile by that time. Obviously this discovery now makes the Monte Verde evidence far less controversial but the disconnect between the Canadian and Chilean researchers shows just how regional and siloed the study of the early America's can be.

*Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Verde

> It's also funny to see how confused the efforts of archaeologists can be on this topic. This article cites the previous date of "earliest human presence" in North America as 14,000 BP while there has been well known evidence* available for years that humanity had spread as far south as Chile by that time. Obviously this discovery now makes the Monte Verde evidence far less controversial but the disconnect between the Canadian and Chilean researchers shows just how regional and siloed the study of the early America's can be.

The date of 14000 BP would assume that the earliest migrations were essentially the Clovis culture, which is a theory that is generally considered thoroughly discredited by the archeological community and has been for several years. However, to the public, the Clovis-First, single-wave migration hypothesis is probably what they learned in school, and so every press release of a scientific find that further discredits this theory gets touted as "Earth-shattering evidence that everything we knew was wrong!"--despite the fact that this is far from the first evidence of the fact and even that the scientific community is largely unsurprised at this point.

It's been long known to linguists that the Na-Dené and Eskimo-Aleut language families represent basically distinct migrations from the bulk of Native American languages. While Greenberg's lumping of everyone else into Amerind is very controversial, that there should exist such a clear gulf isn't. It seems pretty clear to most linguists that a three-migration model (perhaps more) is better supported by linguistic evidence than a one-migration model, particularly since the recent linking of Siberian languages to Na-Dené.

I recall learning about Beringia "pause" hypotheses in high school, although coastal migration theories were still presented as niche alternative theories back then.

Guns, Germs, and Steel is a decent introduction (at least the arguments were fairly compelling)

I read that about five years ago! It's what made me realize how little I knew. Granted, there are apparently some big problems with the book (it's quite popular to hate on the book), which I accept, but I think I can still have enjoyed the heck out of it without treating it as gospel.

GG&S persuasively argues that human subpopulations spent a lot of time in very different environments.

But what tends to happen to populations that spend thousands of generations in very different environments? Diamond is curiously silent on this point.

>> there appears to be a lot of uncertainty in the scientific community regarding the precise chronology and source populations of migrations.

Studied quite a bit of Antropology/Physical Anthropology in college and nearly every ancient migration is fought with a mix of facts and conjecture, theories and speculation.

The most baffling I ran into was that of the South Pacific islands. The archaeological evidence doesn't support a neat and tidy expansion, but quite the opposite. You have evidence that cultures were popping up and then dying out without any distinct patterns to them at all. When you consider the distances between the islands and the isolation of the various archipelagos, it really makes your brain bend.

My professor Jeffery Clark has done some fascinating work in the field:

Archaeology in Oceania - http://www.academia.edu/1548763/Archaeology_in_Oceania

Simplified map from national geographic helps show migration patterns of the world: https://genographic.nationalgeographic.com/human-journey/

Actual article is open-access: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....

Simply amazing that a human community existed for 8,000 years in total isolation from the world.

I'm more impressed by how the coordinated migration to Australia took place around 50,000 years ago! Thanks for the link.

And they didn't have a complete land bridge to get there. There has always been a sea gap between SE Asia and Australia/New Guinea. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallace_Line

They had to have been pretty damn smart to get a large party across a sea gap. Proud of our ancestors haha!

"Civilization is always older than we think, and below our feet were also men and women who lived and loved." -Will Durant

Beautiful quote. Never heard of Durant before. Any recommendations?

I've read The Story of Philosophy. That particular quote comes from Our Oriental Heritage. His writing is generally good, the major difficulty being that he wrote a lot

I think his "story of civilization" is considered his most famous work. https://archive.org/details/storyofcivilizat035369mbp

One thing that bothers me, is that most first world archeologist keep ignoring evidence of humans in Brazil at least 40.000 years ago.

Even more interesting, there are evidence of "negroids" in Brazil at that time, while the "mongoloids" people (the current native americans, that have features shared with asians) timeline seemly match the straight theory, some Brazillian historians believe that what happened is that the first attempt of colonizing South America failed somehow, and when the current natives arrived, they early settlers were already long gone.

As for a controversial archeological dig, one with 40.000 years ago humans in it, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedra_Furada_sites

I just saw something about this last week when I was curiosity browsing:

http://rbth.com/science_and_tech/2016/02/23/its-official-nat...

According to this research, not only did they find a Siberian link to NAs, but they found a link between Australian indigenous people among some NAs.

Wikipedia says:

    Two 2015 autosomal DNA genetic studies confirmed the
    Siberian origins of the Natives of the Americas. 
    However an ancient signal of shared ancestry with the 
    Natives of Australia and Melanesia was detected among 
    the Natives of the Amazon region.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_history_of_indigenous_...

Can you expand on the evidence of "Negroids" in Brazil 40,000 years ago? I'm familiar with the idea of pre-Clovis settlements and the controversy around that, but I was under the impression these were thought to be earlier settlers from East Asia, like the Clovis people.

The only indication of Africans in South America I can think of are the much later statues and idols of faces from Olmec Mexico, circa 1000 BC, which some claim have "Negroid" features (a supposition that has to be debunked with an unfortunate degree of frequency).

The Negroid thing is more speculative, due to the lack of decent human remains with that age, but we DO have some old remains (older than 10.000) that are seemly negroid, for example the skull nicknamed "Luzia" that was found in Brazil. (there are some others too, but Luzia made international news when it was found).

Some people are trying to find more remains, and others are trying to do genetic research on those remains, one theory is that there was two (or more) waves of migration.

Another theory, is that the people that crossed the strait 22000 years ago were negroids, and "co-evolved" to have Asian features like modern Asians because of converging evolution or coincidence.

A third theory that was more popular when there was fewer evidence (when Luzia was first found) was that Luzia features were just normal genetic variation, and that she was a mongoloid that looked negroid because of randomness.

I'd never heard of Luzia, but I just read into it a bit and it's definitely intriguing. Thanks for the response and the new rabbit hole to dive into!

Very interesting related Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Columbian_trans-oceanic_co...

So is it safe to say even native americans are actually immigrants?

Well yeah. We've known that for years.

Hell, if you live anywhere that isn't a specific part of Africa, you're pretty much guaranteed to be an immigrant or a descendant thereof.

If only the Neanderthals had thought of building a wall (and made homo sapiens pay for it, of course).

Yes, but... The native Americans colonized an empty territory and very important here - they didn't had anything to do with it being empty and available for colonization. And also, to be honest, reading the Beringia theory, I think they paid their ticket in full for that land!

I'm not sure that evidence of stone tools means that these were human animals. Many other species can conceivably use stone tools.

The oldest direct evidence are dated feces from a island cave 14K BP. Then there is a lot of bones 13K.

> This has been demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt by xxxxxx, a professor in yyyyyy's Department of Anthropology

Anthropology and "shadow of a doubt" never fit well with me in a sentence.

I'd like to hear an independent view on the data.

A lot of bone and not many 'human made' scratches with clear evidence of carnivore activity in the cave.

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