Mastodon Bone Findings Could Upend Our Understanding of Human History (2017)
nbcnews.com
nbcnews.com
"We'll just target 100,000 years before the earliest known human presence."
Professional archaeologist checking in. I hate to spoil the party, but the argument this represents evidence of human occupation of North America 130 thousand years ago doesn't hold water.
First, there isn't even consensus that Homo sapiens left Africa by that time. Additionally, the preponderance of evidence shows humans didnt occupy fully glacial environments until 80+ thousand years later, which would be necessary to make it to NE Asia and North America. The claim they were in North America by 130 thousand years ago is inconsistent with all available archaeological and genetic evidence (a whole other topic).
Second, the argument that the "tools" and bone modification seen at this site were made by people doesn't hold up either. There are many natural processes that can mimic these types of breakage. There are diagnostic features of stone tools and broken bones produced by humans, but none of them are present on the objects Holen et al. point to.
Holen has a long history of making similar claims with no real evidence. He consistently fails to rule out obvious natural processes at sites he works at. I have personally seen him pick up a piece of naturally fractured fossil bone from a flood deposit and say "see, people." This is science by press release at it's worst, and there is good reason no other archaeologists accept his arguments. Unfortunately flashy headlines with extraordinary claims grab the press.
Don't get me wrong, I would LOVE for this to be true. Finding evidence for a much earlier occupation of North America would be super exciting. But as a responsible scientist, I have to go with the evidence.
I mean... when they find 130000 year-old human bones, then we'll know... Until then...
The earliest neanderthals date to 400k years ago. And the high arctic at the time of this find 130k years ago was pretty much one cold dry circumpolar ecosystem as ocean levels were much lower than today. Given all of this context it's not really insane to think this could have happened though of course more evidence is needed.
Discovering that we were put here by aliens 6000 years ago would be an upending.
If you postulate pre-Clovis settlements, now you need to explain why they weren't able to quickly expand to fill what was very fertile land for hunting, the way the Clovis people did. And how they managed to get so far south without having populations large enough to leave any unambiguous artifacts.
From the outside, I like Jared Diamond's article about it: https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27111
These "upending" discoveries of pre-Clovis sites remind me of the frequent news articles that were being written about the EM Drive which purported to revolutionize space travel by violating the fundamental law of conservation of momentum.
I'd imagine there's plenty of possible reasons pre-Clovis Americans wouldn't have been as numerous or left as much evidence as Clovis-people did; most obviously, that the continent was much colder, and therefore supportive of much smaller populations, than it was in the Clovis culture era- particularly in the northern regions, where it's often objected that they "should" have left remains. Obviously, this isn't an argument that there were pre-Clovis settlers, but an example of why the idea can't be objected out-of-hand through "common sense."
Okay, but we're assuming a population capable of migrating as far as San Diego, and capable of hunting mammoths. You'd need enough population to sustain the many hundreds of years of generations it would take to get that far, and just exactly the sort of population balance where they wouldn't leave any obvious traces? And given they made it halfway down the continent, and through the most inhospitable places, why didn't they go further south where they could have immediately flourished in lush lands full of megafauna who hadn't evolved to fear us? Humanity's record seems full enough of such population explosion incidents after all, including the Clovis-people themselves.
Does anyone think this would be helpful? what can be done about headlines written like this one and their relationship to HN
Any thoughts on what we cando to help journalists write better headlines as well in newspapers etc?
As it is, it generally succeeds in keeping it out, but not always.
> “My first reaction on reading this paper was ‘No. This is wrong. Something’s wrong,'” said stone tool expert John McNabb of the University of Southampton in Britain. “If it does turn out to be true, it changes absolutely everything.”
And
> “This discovery is rewriting our understanding of when humans reached the New World,” Judy Gradwohl, president and CEO of the San Diego Natural History Museum, said in a statement.
Those quotes were probably cherry picked and a little out of context, but when experts in the field use such strong language, I think it's justified for reporters to do the same.