New Evidence Suggests Humans Arrived in the Americas Earlier Than Thought
npr.org
npr.org
Remember, the globe also looks like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eskimo#/media/File:Inuit_conf_...
PS: I suspect the Americas where well known in the 1700's, but nobody was talking to the Russian Far East when map making.
Maybe, maybe not. Living for days on an open raft or equivalent is going to be a lot tougher when you're nearly in the Arctic Circle than it is in the sunny South Pacific.
> PS: I suspect the Americas where well known in the about in the 1700's, but nobody was talking to the Russian Far East when map making.
That's an interesting thought. If you use Reddit, might be a good one for /r/AskHistorians
A dude recently crossed the Atlantic on a stand-up paddle board. Which is insane, but it proves you be a prolific seafarer with very basic watercraft.
http://www.mensjournal.com/adventure/articles/chris-bertish-...
"Since the 1976 voyage, Hokulea has completed nine additional voyages.... On May 18, 2014, Hokulea and her sister vessel, Hikianalia embarked from Oahu for 'Malama Honua', a three-year circumnavigation of the earth. The journey will cover 47,000 nautical miles with stops at 85 ports in 26 countries."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hokulea
"Polynesian navigation used some navigational instruments, which predate and are distinct from the machined metal tools used by European navigators.... Polynesian navigators employed a whole range of techniques including use of the stars, the movement of ocean currents and wave patterns, the air and sea interference patterns caused by islands and atolls, the flight of birds, the winds and the weather."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polynesian_navigation
http://www.hokulea.com/education-at-sea/polynesian-navigatio...
The novel "The Navigator" by Morris West talks about this, some. In fact, the whole theme of the book is about a voyage that a motley group of people take, from Hawaii, to find a lost Polynesian island, that is talked about by the old Polynesian navigators, and where they go to die. There are lots of other sub-plots in the story, like about human relationships, power, etc., so the whole book is not about the navigation stuff, but overall, the book was very good reading, IMO.
Also, IIRC, the National Geographic Society had done a study of these navigation techniques many years ago. They had sent a team - scientists, sailors, photographers, etc. - to various Polynesian islands, and interviewed some of the still-living navigators, took boat rides between islands during which the navigators used their ancient techniques, etc. It describes many of the kinds of things that you say they used - stars, currents, wave patterns, air and sea patterns, birds, winds, etc. They published an article or series about it in NatGeo magazine. I was lucky to read it as a kid. Very interesting article.
In 1725, Emperor Peter the Great ordered navigator Vitus Bering to explore the North Pacific for potential colonization. The Russians were primarily interested in the abundance of fur-bearing mammals on Alaska's coast, as stocks had been depleted by overhunting in Siberia. Bering's first voyage was foiled by thick fog and ice, but in 1741 a second voyage by Bering and Aleksei Chirikov made sight of the North American mainland.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_colonization_of_the_Am...
Aside: The land-bridge was not just a passing point, it was actually a nice place to sit and stay, due to the wind, sea, and glacial climatic issues. Also, the coastal-migration idea states that we just skimmed the coast all the way to at least Chile. The issue with that idea is that all those coast lines and settlement areas are about 200m under water now and were likely destroyed by wave action, so it's hard to prove. Beringia is a really cool place to study, pardon the pun, and helps change some ideas about how humans came to be. It seems like we've been pretty smart for a long long time. There are civilizations all over the globe that rose, fell, and died, and we will never ever know of them. The idea of 'civilization' is ancient, it seems.
And there is always a leading edge of the glacier where all that ground-up goodness ends up. Many dynamic biomes are found on the boundaries of extreme and hostile environments.
I've wondered about that a lot, actually. If homo sapiens have been around for ~200k years (according to wikipedia), what were we doing for the first 185k years? What changed ~15k years ago that we started building cities, constructing tools, etc., and why did it take 185k years to happen?
On a larger time frame, how many species have lived and died and had every trace of their existence crushed and melted down by plate tectonics?
It's fascinating to think about, and a little sad that we'll never know the answer.
Old question, the answer is: Agricultural Revolution
Not saying that I've got a good answer for what did happen -- just that agriculture wasn't it.
> Around the beginning of the 8th millennium BCE Göbekli Tepe ("Potbelly Hill") lost its importance. The advent of agriculture and animal husbandry brought new realities to human life in the area, and the "Stone-age zoo" (Schmidt's phrase applied particularly to Layer III, Enclosure D) apparently lost whatever significance it had had for the region's older, foraging communities.
I haven't seen any sources citing evidence for Göbekli Tepe post-dating agriculture, but there are many lines of evidence that it pre-dates it -- such as an absence of cultivated grains, granary structures, or other evidence that one sees as agriculture actually gets going. All the plant remains that have been found are wild varieties. Thus the mainstream assumption is that Göbekli Tepe was built by hunter-gatherers.
1. The site seems to be built with a plan. Maybe they did not use paper and pencil, maybe they were using some kind of sand table[2]. And there was a number of people involved, who were quite good at stone cutting, and on a large scale. Just have a look at central obelisk and pedestal [3] - those sharp edges, those smooth surfaces. Now, getting good at something requires daily practice, for a long period of time during which one would rather not go around for hunting. So not only there was a population of proto-carpenters but also societal structure to support them, at least for times of learning and construction work.
2. Even more unusual, the site seems to have been abandoned (evacuated?) in planned manner. Great effort has been made to cover it up with huge mass of soil mixed up with broken stones, as if to make it tougher against elements. This, for me, really stands out. AFAIK the norm is, when supporting culture "loses interest" in site maintainance (like, when all its members are dead), the site is being taken over and/or decaying and/or reused by next wave of humans. But not this time.
Quite fascinating.
[1] what I know is subject to change as time goes by and I get updates
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand_table
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Göbekli_Tepe,_Urfa.jpg
https://evolution-institute.org/blog/complex-societies-befor...
Further, civilizations based on wood instead of stone may have vastly fewer remnants. Which creates bias as we assume civilizations started in areas without much wood.
Or, it's actually not food that's the limitation but rather something else like culture with farming going back much further.
That site isn't pre agriculture anyway.
*Citation needed. Every source I've seen says that it is.
> But without agriculture you can't have dense cities or anything like civilization. The population that can be supported by hunting and gathering alone is tiny.
Göbekli Tepe says otherwise. It was a truly large-scale undertaking, requiring the highly-organised planning, engineering, and construction efforts of many hundreds, possibly thousands of people. And all the evidence points to these people being hunter-gatherers, not agrarians.
Living permanently in the same place on a large scale is a completely different way of life compared to living a mainly nomadic life and gathering at special sites from time to time, even if you make a permanent mark on those sites.
[0]https://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/03/commuters-near...
Yes, but we don't have civilization because of those religious sites.
If the best explanation is "it just took a long time to discover," then I can believe it, but it's very odd that not even once (that we've discovered) in 185k years did anybody get the idea to build any kind of permanent stone structures or buildings or even rock formations like Stonehenge.
As far as technology goes...one day there was spoken word the next voices/thoughts could be communicated without a person and through time - that is magic.
Those come along with population density, social stratification, inherited wealth, etc., which are part of feedback loops that start with agriculture and permanent settlement.
For instance in Mesopotamia, cuneiform writing started out as a shorthand representation of little piles of clay tokens representing various stored goods (grain, beer, etc.)
I agree writing doesn't show up in a vacuum. The cuneiform clay tablets from Mesopotamia are the oldest record of "written language" but certainly not the oldest form of writing.
At least according to the current historical record argiculture dates to 12,000bc while written numbers (tallies made of wood and bone) date back 25,000-35,000 years. So unless there is some as of yet discovered agricultural civilization(s) - I think very likely - there is a problem with your feedback loop compared to the historical record: writing(numbers)came long before agriculture.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scapulimancy
Edit: Found it, Oracle bones were used in the early 1200's BC, which does not predate cunieform usage from the 3500's BC : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Bones
Also, wow! -3500 is when writing started, damn that is a long time ago.
This would predate agriculture.
"Lake Toba is the site of a massive supervolcanic eruption estimated at VEI 8 that occurred 69,000 to 77,000 years ago, representing a climate-changing event. It is the largest known explosive eruption on Earth in the last 25 million years. According to the Toba catastrophe theory [2], it had global consequences for human populations; it killed most humans living at that time and is believed to have created a population bottleneck in central east Africa and India, which affects the genetic make up of the human worldwide population to the present."
~15k years ago coincides about the with ice retreating at the end of the last glacial period. A large part of human history was too cold to farm.
The last glacial period, popularly known as the Ice Age, was the most recent glacial period, which occurred from c. 110,000 – c. 11,700 years ago.
From the link :
> This corresponds well with an ancient Sumerian belief that agriculture, animal husbandry, and weaving were brought to mankind from the sacred mountain Ekur, which was inhabited by Annuna deities, very ancient gods without individual names
We find the first evidence of cultivation around 11.5k years ago not so far away in the Levant. Aggrecuture appears to have been the major change which kickstarted civilisation as we know it off.
Herding and framing then began as soon as that ice-age receded. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glacial_period#/media/File:Co2...
After that, human culture has been changing continuously as cities, states, writing and all the rest evolved and continue to evolve.
https://thenaturalhistorian.com/2014/02/04/fishing-for-fossi...
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:abo:tlg...
Remaining small but alive for thousands of years is not entirely unthinkable, but it's very unlikely.
Also typically a population grows depending on birth-death rates which reach quick limits in places of low resources. This is self-evident from different population sizes in different geographic habitats. Instead human populations mushroomed only in select places. See Guns, Germs and Steel by Diamond for more.
Even if your colony is surrounded by impenetrable deserts, I'd think you could always propagate along the coast, living off the ocean.
That I'm just some internet guy speculating without any deep knowledge is probably obvious, but let me make it extra clear!
Living off the ocean is also incredibly dangerous.
Well, logistically limited by the carrying capacity of the local area with available technology, etc.
But logistic growth looks exponential...until it doesn't.
That is, if there don't arise artificial limiting factors, like a cult/religion rule or system that takes control over population's dynamics. When that happens, it may enter in a stable state until an occurring external disruptive change.
It's generally accepted that over 80,000 years ago people crossed the land bridge over the Torres Strait before it was submerged https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torres_Strait
1. a site that appears to have been used by humans to do some kind of processing of bones, and
2. very old (130k) bones at that site that have been processed,
how would you rule out the possibility that the site was made and the bones processed by people that came much later (say, 15k years ago) who found a bunch of 115k year old bones from animals that died from natural deaths and used them?
You'd also expect a mixture of ages in close proximity. Even if all the bones being processed were old at the time, they presumably would have a mixture of 100kya, 50 kya, etc. bones jumbled together.
how would you rule out the possibility
I don't know if there could be any reason to break bones already more than 100k years old, but it seems unlikely?
I can think of things that might kill a whole herd of animals at once, but I'm having trouble picturing their bones just lying there intact for 100,000 years before people came along.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/67qs7r/paleontolog...
[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2017/04/26/humans...
Taking this into account, I think a more plausible explanation is that ancient humans - Clovis ancient (13kya) or perhaps older (20kya) - discovered these bones and kept them, used them, then discarded them or lost them with the other stone tools from the site.
Using something like Bayesian reasoning, I find it more plausible that this is experimental error than a one-off revelation that humans had technology to cross the Pacific 130kya.
I think you may have misread that. The article said this discovery "predat[es] the best evidence up to now by about 115,000 years".
According to Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settlement_of_the_Americas "Available scientific evidence indicates that humanity emerged from Africa over 100,000 years ago, yet did not arrive in the Americas until less than 20,000 years ago."
In Diamond's case, he's dismissing all claims of pre-Clovis settlement of the Americas. For most mainstream anthropologists, the case is settled: Clovis was not the first group of humans to settle the Americas, and the Americas were settled perhaps ~20kya, not ~13kya, probably via coastal migrations (whose sites are now underwater) rather than via the interior route blocked by the Laurentide. The biggest problem with the traditional Clovis + ice-free corridor hypothesis is that the Laurentide opened up about a 1000 years too late.
For someone like Jared Diamond, I suspect the main resistance to accepting earlier habitation of the Americas is that it throws major wrenches into the hypothesis that the mastodons were hunted to extinction by early humans.
Why would some small settlements ~20kya be a problem for this hypothesis? Regardless of whether previous settlements at a smaller scale existed, the Clovis people were the first to have the technology and culture to be able to rapidly explode across the continent, and the time they did this coincides with the time of extinction pretty well, doesn't it?
Postulating that the first settlement is more important than the time of a population explosion seems to lack the kind of common sense that Jared Diamond is talking about, to me.
Do you have an explanation for why pre-Clovis humans didn't leave a ton of remains everywhere?
I do like Jared Diamonds' books, I read... a lot of them, perhaps all of them.
But his reasoning - quoted above - is just plain wrong. He fails at grasping at how the basic logic works.
Example: "We did not find it so far" - which, according to Jared, rests the case -- does not mean "it does not exist".
As per that logic, the discovery of Denisovans and Homo Florensiensis can be ignored, because they came up after the Jared's decree that "we did not find it so far".
That's just silly.
Still, I love any evidence that the world may be more complicated and strange than we previously thought. This is definitely a story that sparks the imagination.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/04/unknown-humans-were-...
By comparison, Madagascar, which is ~400km from Africa, was never settled by African tribes (they were settled from Austronesians from Indonesia). Malta, about 80km from the closest land in Italy, was apparently settled only around 7kya.
OUTLIER DATE:
This site is an outlier among archaeological sites in terms of the date. The date given for Californians according to this research is 130 000 year ago.
As far as I am aware, the earliest recorded human site outside of Africa is one in China 120 000 years ago.
And even that site is an outlier because human migration into the middle east began happening 120 000 -100 000 years ago, 60 000 years ago into Asia, and and 45 000 years into Europe.
Now that in itself is not conclusive, maybe there are older sites that we haven't found and this discovery pushes back human migration. Except there are other problems here.
LACK OF HUMAN REMAINS OR HUMAN ARTIFACTS
So the scientists say the rocks have markings that look like they had been used as a hammer and anvil and there are some mastodon bones near it.
Now no actual human bones were found near this site. Which is certainly not impossible for these kinds of sites. More problematic is that there were no obvious stone tools other than rocks with markings that look like they'd been hit.
With ancient humans, especially ones capable of hunting mastodons, you would expect them to make sharp stone points by flaking (hiting one stone against another). This should leave flakes and tools on the ground. Yet, at this site, there were no stone tools of this sort found anywhere at this site.
LACK OF CUT MARKINGS ON BONES
Further, once ancient humans killed the mastodon, you would expect them to cut pieces of flesh off with a stone knife so that it could be eaten. This process would leave marks on the bones where the flesh had been cut. The article tells us that no such markings were found on these bones.
> Yet there were no cut marks on the bones showing that the animal was butchered for meat.
AVAILABILITY OF ALTERNATIVE EXPLANATIONS
None of these factors itself is fatal, but all three combined, the outlier date (way to early considering the mainstream evidence shows that our species were just getting set up in the middle east at this time,) the absence of human tools nearby, the absence of cut marks on the bones, the absence of any human skeletons or remains in the area. All of these lead me to think there must be another explanation.
It's not impossible that the bones of dead mastodons can get trampled or broken. Under the right circumstances, it's not impossible that trampling can cause rocks to smash against one another or leave marks on the rock. Maybe there was a cliff in the area many years ago and the bones and the rocks took a deep fall. In any event, there are alternative explanations and it is not inconceivable that this happened through natural means. This is hardly smoking gun evidence of human in California 130 000 years ago.
USE OF WEAK EXPLANATORY MECHANISMS
And I think the weakness of this evidence is belied by the unusual explanatory leaps made by the discoverers. When pointed out that there is no evidence that the remains had been butchered for meat, he responds:
"The suggestion is that this site is strictly for breaking bone, to produce blank material, raw material to make bone tools or to extract marrow." Seriously? Why would they break bones without butchering the meat and eating it? Why would you have a separate site just for bone marrow? That makes no sense.
EVIDENCE THAT IS ANYTHING BUT CLEAR LABELED AS CLEAR
>He says the rocks showed clear marks of having been used as hammers and an anvil.
Really, I mean they have pictures of the rocks on the site. It doesn't seem that clear to me that they were hammer and anvil stones. Are they clear to anyone else? They could just easily be old worn rocks. I would expect humans that could make it from Africa or wherever all the way to California 130 000 years ago to be somewhat advanced enough that they have tools more advanced than just two random pieces of rock to bang together. This was the age where humans had started molding rocks for suited purposes by flaking them. Why they would just use two natural rocks instead of created rocks is questionable. If you type in acheulean tools into google, you can see the sophisticated flaked tools (sharp looking leaf shaped blades) our ancestors were making 1.7 million years ago . . . yet ones that traveled all the way to California and kill mastodons are still stuck banging random un-molded rocks against each other for marrow- why?
I have nothing against pushing back migration to Americas, but this site is probably more wishful thinking on part of its founders than legitimate discovery.
My understanding is that it is roundly rejected by almost all archaeologists.
Great Human Odyssey: http://www.pbs.org/video/2365856257/
Geneticists sequenced the DNA from a young boy's 13,000-year-old bones found in Montana. His DNA matches a specific combination of Eastern Asian and Siberian DNA that is found in all North and South American native populations, and only in these populations. This lends to the theory that the first people to permanently settle the America's (Clovis) were made up of groups from Siberia and Eastern Asia combining and crossing the Bering Strait.
Wouldn't that make the boy a member of the clovis culture and not the pre-clovis one being discussed?
I was replying to WalterBright's comment mentioning the Clovis culture coming from what is now Europe.
[1]https://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v544/n7651/full/nature...
If this is real there should also be more evidence of them. Not just the this one find.
There are also other early human species besides Homo sapiens that could in theory be responsible for something like this.
Homo erectus was galavanting around the world perhaps up to 2 million years ago, and they were tool users. Homo heidelbergensis was on the move around 600k years ago. Homo neanderthalensis was out of Africa around 300k years ago.
See: "Indigenous Australian storytelling accurately records sea level rises 7,000 years ago"
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/sep/16/indig...
> Multiregional evolution holds that the human species first arose around two million years ago and subsequent human evolution has been within a single, continuous human species
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiregional_origin_of_modern...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ca/Homo-Sta...
Archaeology is a little better, just because it's more recent, and there's more stuff that has managed to survive, but in the absence of ceramics, metals, or large-scale use of stone, almost everything that primitive humans would use is extremely perishable, with the exceptions being where we just happen to have found bodies and graves in extremely preservative conditions, like bog people, or the Peruvian desert cave mummies, or frozen in glaciers. I've an uncle who is an archaeologist specializing in post-contact Native American sites, and the vast majority of the time, the only identifying aspects of a site will be that he's stumbled onto an ancient trash heap, full of discarded and broken mollusk shells.
It doesn't make sense plus we know there are competing issues at play as people try to get get know in their fields by finding 'the oldest'
Extrodinay claims need extrodinay evedence here they seem to have fit a theory that would lack provable evedence as a explanation.
Homo Floresiensis overlaps with the Ebu Gogo myth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebu_gogo
It's like the psychic who correctly predicted the last 7 presidential elections. One doesn't hear about the other psychics whose predictions didn't pan out.
The Klamath Native American tribe has legends of the eruption of Mt. Mazama that formed Oregon's Crater Lake - which happened in ~5677 BC [1]. If oral legends that reflect real events can last seven and a half thousand years, is there any reason to think they couldn't last 15ky, or 20ky? It seems to me all that's needed is a continuous cultural line.