You might counter that facebook only started in 2004, and didn't get much traction until 2006. But I was invited before that and simply didn't care to join, preferring to occupy other parts of the `net.
Likewise, Clovis artifacts all date from after the peak of the last ice age, when glaciers were melting, land routes were opening, and sea levels were rising to obliterate any coastal artifacts from any previous waves of migration.
Clovis-first has been debunked for decades. This is just another - particularly solid - nail in that theory's coffin. It is worth asking why it has persisted so doggedly. I don't think it is because archeologists aren't very smart people.
I also used some higher-level stuff like telnet, FTP (sites mostly found via anonymous FTP lists), nntp, smtp, gopher, archie and veronica.
There was no consumer Internet in 1990.
However, TCP/IP was in use across a broad range of academic institutions and corporations, and it was possible for pretty much anyone to buy access to TCP/IP-based inter-networks.
Which, if you were a network engineer (and not for Novell or DEC) at the time, you would know.
Sure archeologists are very smart people, and like all other very smart people, can still be caught on the wrong side of history as new evidence piles up against existing theories.
Who knows. It could be that person has been using the Internet for a very long time and is thus a late adopter of Facebook due to preferring to do things the old way. It could also be a person who started using the Internet in 2015. GP's point that we really can't conclude anything beyond a lower bound isn't falsified by your example
This can be said of almost any observation made about a particular field of research. Outsiders aren't familiar enough with the current state of research and they often assume experts haven't considered some rather obvious things.
That's not to say that outsiders shouldn't participate in the discussion, but they should acknowledge that there is a good chance their ideas have already been considered.
My Facebook account dates back to 2015, but I have been using the internet since the mid 90s. (As far as I'm aware, there's no evidence of the previous account I had from 2006-2010ish)
> Let's give some benefit of the doubt to our fellow researchers.
Agree here
There were these early internet tribes called researchers ;)