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Comment by SmellyGeekBoy | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps OT, but these discoveries never seem to actually "upend our understanding of human history", they just refine it by changing our previous assumptions about various timelines.

Discovering that we were put here by aliens 6000 years ago would be an upending.

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Disrupting the Clovis paradigm is definitely upending in a field where new ideas take root by retiring the past generation of professors.

It's a case where an extraordinary claim should require unambiguous evidence, something more than making people say "hmm, maybe it was humans?" when they can't explain exactly what they see.

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.

Saying "just use common sense" is very pat and appealing in cases where we have direct apprehension about the domain in question- such as in plane geometry- but in cases where we have no direct access to a question aside from experiment and abstract reasoning (such as deep history or physics,) how do you distinguish "common sense" from simple conservatism?

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."

> most obviously, that the continent was much colder, and therefore supportive of much smaller populations,

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.

any thoughts on having a 'clickbait' headline vote button?

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?

Pay for your news.

I'd be in favour of a Clickbait button. Clickbait may be par for the course in many parts of the web, but I expect better from Hacker News.

As it is, it generally succeeds in keeping it out, but not always.

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