Archaeology and genetics can’t yet agree on when humans arrived in the Americas
aeon.co
aeon.co
Personally I think the preponderance of archaeological evidence is strongly suggesting that there were absolutely people in the Americas pre-clovis, but the really interesting question from here then is who were they and what happened to them?
We know that there was also later admixture between Alaskan and Eurasian populations across the bering strait and groups like the paleoinuit likely originated (partially) on the siberian side of the straight, but the vast majority of indigenous ancestry across the Americas as a whole derives to the ancestors of the clovis complex. It's not clear how preclovis people relate genetically to those clovis ancestors in the absence of genetic data for them.
> Another possibility ties together evidence of Population Y and potential archaeological evidence at sites like White Sands. Could there have been multiple migrations into the Americas, with one pre-LGM migration consisting of Population Y individuals (and perhaps Unsampled Population A or other groups we have yet to identify), and one post-LGM migration? This would reconcile the archaeological evidence of early traces of humans in the Americas (if they are indeed legitimate, which has yet to be demonstrated to everyone’s satisfaction) and the genetic data.
> Archaeologists sceptical of White Sands’ early dates are dubious of the second scenario, and it is admittedly speculative. We need a great deal more data, both genomic and archaeological, to test it. But, as a field, we are actively engaged in collecting that data, even as I type these words.
People living in southeast Asia 70,000 years ago were certainly sailing out of sight of land, because they reached and colonized Australia. It beggars belief to suggest they did not also go to other places in equally easy reach, and then others from there.
The article disgracefully trots out, once again, the "construction equipment" claim about the Cerutti mastodon site, despite its thorough refutation.
The article further vindicates Graham Hancock's complaints of vicious mis-representation. His projections are certainly wrong in myriad details, but he is totally sincere in advancing them. He has predicted, correctly, embarrassingly many recent developments historians laughably insisted were impossible; I would not be surprised at more. When you feel you need to lie about your opponent to discredit him, it tells us more about you than about him.
Genetic evidence, and notions of a more-or-less constant rate of accumulation of mutations, are on much shakier ground than the author suggests. That unreliability is unfortunate for people obliged to rely on it. We can still learn a great deal from it about the order of migrations, but not so much their dates relative to geological events.
Whether the strike caused the Younger Dryas cold spell is a matter of speculation. We can anyway be confident that the cold spell did not cause the bolide strike.
There was not certainly a bolide strike. No one has identified an unambiguous sign of such a strike; a purported impact crater was identified in Greenland a few years ago, but it is not yet confirmed as an impact crater, nor is it well-constrained to occur around the Younger Dryas. (There's apparently a paper suggesting that it's off a tad, maybe 50 million years too early).
The smoking gun is the layer of massively enriched platinum dust without the excess sulfur an eruption would emit, and melt spherules. Anyone doubting a bolide strike needs to account for it all in some other way, a tall order.
A crater would be convenient, but is not necessary: we know about airbursts now. E.g., there is no Tunguska crater. Demanding a crater is not scrupulous.
If you wanna read em:
Paquay, François S., et al. “Absence of Geochemical Evidence for an Impact Event at the Bølling-Allerød/Younger Dryas Transition.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, vol. 106, no. 51, 2009, pp. 21505–10
Surovell, Todd A., et al. “An Independent Evaluation of the Younger Dryas Extraterrestrial Impact Hypothesis.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, vol. 106, no. 43, 2009, pp. 18155–58.
Update: Found (some?) ice core evidence, it is indeed more recent, but I'm hopelessly out of my wheelhouse at this point so I'll just cite it for anyone also interested and suggest that these more recent publications do seem pretty confident in their conclusion that the impact did happen. So it seems user moloch-hai is correct:
Petaev, Michail I., et al. “Large Pt Anomaly in the Greenland Ice Core Points to a Cataclysm at the Onset of Younger Dryas.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, vol. 110, no. 32, 2013, pp. 12917–20.
Pretty cool stuff, thanks for sharing and prompting me to learn more about it.
They are studiously silent now. [Edit: Thank you for Petaev. I had not seen it.]
Just so you're aware, you haven't actually cited the study yet in this thread.
(Kjær, Kurt H., et al. "A large impact crater beneath Hiawatha Glacier in northwest Greenland." Science advances 4.11 (2018) is the citation, for future reference)
(FWIW, Kenny, Gavin G., et al. "A Late Paleocene age for Greenland’s Hiawatha impact structure." Science advances 8.10 (2022) disputes the age given for that impact crater.)
A recent survey article is Sweatman,
The Younger Dryas impact hypothesis: Review of the impact evidence
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00128...
The remaining controversy is how much the strike contributed to the Younger Dryas development and other coincident events, particularly extinctions. To me, it is ludicrous to blame those on Clovis people, or on a climate hiccup smaller than they had weathered easily many times before. Now that we know people had already been there for 10+ millennia, the sudden wipeout idea gets much sillier.
The idea that the strike triggered the YD is appealing, but the record shows several other such cooling periods with very similar profile and duration in the past 100ky. It seems unlikely they were all triggered by comet strikes. But they could have been: we now know our records of comet strikes are woefully incomplete, having detected a very recent one only by enormous effort.
See also Wendy S. Wolbach et al.
Extraordinary Biomass-Burning Episode and Impact Winter Triggered by the Younger Dryas Cosmic Impact ∼12,800 Years Ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas_impact_hypothesi...
Fixing errors and omissions has become difficult.
This is different than claiming "wikipedia says it's [right/wrong], so it must be [right/wrong]" Demonstrating that an idea is controversial is much easier than proving that idea right or wrong.
Wikipedia "controversies" often carry on for many years after the pros have settled down, until retirees with an axe to grind move on.
FWIW, I do tend to think the bolide hypothesis seems right. But I wasn't there so I don't really know.
Is it controversial whether the Earth is flat? Whether people walked on the moon? Whether they found alien spacecraft there? Whether viruses are involved in AIDS and cancers?
For those interested, here is a podcast with Robert where he talks about it. https://youtu.be/uavVGruCUyc
My understanding is that those who reached Australia did not go further, because they forgot how to build ocean-worthy vessels.
The people who sailed to Australia were of a culture that could sail in any direction, and would have. You would need to come up with a reason for them not to.
I’ll +1 some of this - the evidence is mounting that standing theories re. the end of the last ice age, impact hypothesis, development of civilization, at the least deserve another look and not quite so much dogma. More underwater archaeology is needed off the coasts, and under the Amazon and probably Sahara. These are all tough places to investigate but who knows, maybe we need to push our civilizational history back a few thousand years.
Graham really can’t clutch his pearls too much though. His early stuff was just kooky and he still has a tendency to weave way too much of the metaphysical and flat-out conjecture into his ideas. It turns academics off (putting it mildly), exactly the people who’s credibility and attention he craves. It’s tough for me to tell when Graham has actually done some interesting research and is calling out something real vs Graham when he’s nine oh-what-if-they? levels deep into conjecture.
If Graham would put his head down, eat a great big ice cream scoop of skepticism chocolate, and then go do investigative work and let the facts lead him - full stop - he’d probably make a ton more progress with his ideas than he has.
What he attempts is very different from science. He openly speculates about where the evidence might lead. His failure to understand some of the evidence, and what is possible, sometimes leads him to howlers. But remarkably often he has predicted finds that historians foolishly insisted were impossible.
His appeal is in actually engaging with evidence historians and archaeologists try to conceal or downplay. He takes us to actual sites, and shows us evidence historians refuse to discuss, or as often openly lie about. His speculations are fluff. But taking us around to see things, and inviting us to speculate along with him, is engaging in ways nothing allowed to scientists can.
Scientists could draw huge benefit from engaging with the evidence he exposes, instead of demonizing him. Their complaints fall flat because he is, simply, not a scientist, even a bad one, and should not be treated like one. He inspires with what might be, which is a good thing, and that he would do better with better help.
(Uniquely, Scientists Against Myths, on YT, does more engagement than anybody else, but in a way that is badly off-putting. They forget that they are addressing the audience, not their perceived myth-maker enemies.)
He would still be often wrong, but more interestingly wrong. And sometimes, still, he would turn out to be right. There is nothing wrong with that.
* Populations move into Beringia maybe 20-25kya. (My knowledge of this date is particularly hazy).
* Populations start moving from Beringia into the Americas. This date is highly contested, but it's accepted that this occurred at least 15kya.
* Clovis culture starts up around 13kya, ends around 11.5kya.
* Younger Dryas starts up 12.8kya, ends around 11.5kya.
So genetic evidence suggesting that peopling starts from around 17kya isn't inconsistent with mainstream dates for peopling of Americas, although it would mean being suspicious of sites much older than 17kya.
> but the really interesting question from here then is who were they and what happened to them?
My interpretation of the evidence... they became Clovis culture.
Either the earlier pop. died out before the later crew arrived, or ... well, genocide is a demonstrated human behavior. It is hard to carry out continent-wide without microbial assistance, but they could have had that.
The Cerutti site _could_ completely upset that theory but it’s far from proven that it’s not a misunderstanding, or that it was Homo sapiens and not another hominid. That would be exciting in its own right, but until there’s more confirmation we should be careful not to describe these as facts or highly-probable.
The only plausible complaint I have heard of is lack of stone-knife flakes, but the site is still being excavated.
That it might have been H. e. is exciting. They did get around!
> Unfortunately, because science is all too often taught in school as a collection of facts, rather than a dynamic process of enquiry, people can be vulnerable to being misled ...
Feels like the above quote is misleading as well. It uses the pattern:
<because reason suitable to my point> <situation that most of us agree happens>.
We agree that situation happens but the reason is not obvious, it just sounds right.
Maybe we will always be vulnerable to be misled, regardless of how we are thought, education won't change that, it just sounds pleasant etc...
One interesting thing in the book was how humans kept repeating this cycle: societies migrate outward and form new societies. Then one of the societies would eradicate/consume a bunch of nearby ones, form a gigantic society, and the process would begin anew. On a human timescale it is horrific and brutal but over a 50,000 year period it is interesting how we spread out but always eventually reunite with the group we split from, unfortunately in a brutal way :(.
> The pretence that the first peoples of the Americas were a different race than Native Americans – a view known today as the Myth of the Moundbuilders – became extremely popular in the 18th and 19th centuries.
I'm always struck by how there's nothing new under the sun. This is basically the same conspiracy theory as Ancient Aliens, with different aesthetics for different centuries.
Here is a relevant wikipedia article:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Films_set_in_pre-Co...
One thing that struck me when I read about The Great Flood of 1862 [0], was that the Native Americans recognized the weather patterns for a series of atmospheric rivers and warned the settlers to relocate to the hills. (Tl;Dr: Central Valley ca was under water for months, Sacramento was abandoned) IIRC, it wasn’t until the 1990s that we had the ability to detect/”recognize” atmospheric rivers with satellites and finally gave them a name.
[edit: added link] [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Flood_of_1862
Maybe Atanarjuat doesn’t?
Meanwhile, the two remaining Raiders chase Jaguar Paw towards the coast, where all three are astonished at the sight of Spanish conquistadors making their way to the shore. As the two Raiders are confounded by the Spanish ships and begin walking towards the coast, Jaguar Paw uses the distraction to flee and return to his village.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apocalypto
Although much reduced, a significant Maya presence remained into the Postclassic period after the abandonment of the major Classic period cities; the population was particularly concentrated near permanent water sources.[78] Unlike during previous cycles of contraction in the Maya region, abandoned lands were not quickly resettled in the Postclassic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_civilization#Postclassic_...
“Dances With Wolves”, nominated for 12 Academy awards and won 7. Guess you missed that one.
Sadly, the effect of past racisms and prejudices still distort what has become common knowledge today.
I can’t even begin to imagine how humans would have interpreted such an event.
Wikipedia doesn't quote the records associated with 1054, but does quote the record of a supernova in the year 185:
> In the 2nd year of the epoch Zhongping [中平], the 10th month, on the day Guihai [癸亥] [December 7, Year 185], a 'guest star' appeared in the middle of the Southern Gate [南門] [an asterism consisting of ε Centauri and α Centauri], The size was half a bamboo mat. It displayed various colors, both pleasing and otherwise. It gradually lessened. In the 6th month of the succeeding year it disappeared.
( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SN_185 )
What people thought appears to have been "sometimes there are new stars, but they go away again".
And it tells us nothing of what people on other continents thought. The null hypothesis would be that it varied.
Wait, what? The Wikipedia article on SN 1054 has an extensive discussion of the Chinese records (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SN_1054#Chinese_astronomy), as well as Japanese records and the Arabic account of Ibn Butlan.
That's a pretty dubious assertion (and I notice that there aren't any references to which archaeologists supposedly believe this), since:
a) I'm pretty sure there aren't any examples of buildings or structures being "influenced" by this or any other historical supernova in any other cultures; and
b) No mention of the supernova of 1006, which was brighter and longer-lasting than the supernova of 1054?
Hell, we made atlatls in middle school
One of the dumbest was the claim that the close fits of rocks in South America "so tight a knife won't fit in the cracks" must have been done by space alien technology. This silliness persisted until an archaeologist showed how to make such a joint in about half an hour by banging and rubbing rocks together.
What the ancients did do very well with, however, was manipulating the natural world to their benefit. I.e. making gardens, cultivating plants, managing livestock, etc.
Edit: for those who are wondering, the altitude and azimuth of the sun at the solstice can be accurately determined simply by erecting a vertical pointed stick, and having a bit of patience. That's it.
As to some of the more general science knowledge though, subsequent societies could certainly replicate the scale and precision of cities like Angkor Wat or Tikal. Likewise, later ocean navigators had far more sophisticated navigation methods, using such tools as the compass and the kamat. As to qanat and wind-catcher architecture, it wasn't ever really lost...
I'll grant you that knowledge of public health has been very uneven, though it has generally been on the upswing in the past couple centuries (as objectively measured by life expectancy and the burden of communicable diseases), nothwithstanding certain missteps (such as adopting droplet theory which was less accurate than miasma theory).
The fact that the 19th century featured provably wrong theories about where the native peoples came from is not suggestive of anything. They thought there was an ether that light traveled through, too.
Native peoples' myths are often "we were always here; we sprang from the earth." Well, we all came from Africa, ultimately.
I think it's interesting that conspiracy theory tropes seem to recur very reliably over time. I have an interest in this topic and when I'm reading about it, I find there's a lot of rhyming.
Conspiracism and exploded scientific hypothesis are quite different in nature. They're "wrong" in quite different ways. I recently made a comment addressing this and it might interest you:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34186172
To your last point, origin myths are a claim about religious truth, not scientific truth. You can't meaningfully compare statements from different epistemologies like that.
So how would they be left IN? Would the archeological community say to them, respectfully, "Our evidence is that First Peoples arrived from Siberia somewhere between 20,000 - 10,000 BCE. What do you think?"
So what would their reaction be? Would it be:
1) We don't know; our myths don't go back that far; you tell US, or
2) You are a colonialist to even talk about this.
??
Has that in fact happened?
> we've lost their trust & aren't entitled to the pieces of the puzzle they may have
That would be unfortunate, but if you're an anthropologist who'd like to solve the puzzle, what should you do?
Certainly. I've heard of some native archaeologists, but I'll confess I'm not super up on the topic.
> If you're an anthropologist who'd like to solve the puzzle, what should you do?
Well, if you're an anthropologist, and some group of people makes it very clear they aren't a puzzle & won't be studied (say, the people of Sentinel Island) - go do something else maybe? Curiosity doesn't entitle you to answers, there's plenty of other stuff for an anthropologist to do. I feel like the first rule of anthropology is, "respect the culture you're studying and take it seriously," and if what they're telling you is "mind your business" - well, listen.
Returning to Sentinel Island, we might not know why they don't want to talk to us, but they've made it abundantly clear that the lines of communication are closed. Surely we could spy on them from satellites, drop surveillance devices from helicopters, et cetera, and start to understand their culture that way. For that matter, we could create some sort of arrow-proof vehicle and overpower their efforts to repel us. But why should be? Just because we're curious about them? Why should we privilege our curiosity over their clear desire to be left alone?
And if they are interested in sharing their oral tradition with you, and you sneer at it - well, they might rescind your invitation.
In any case, what constitutes "sneering" at their oral tradition? As you said, science & religion are not the same. So what should a scientist do if their beliefs differ from science's?
Sneering would be something like saying, and I mean this with all due respect, "you didn't come out of the ground in that canyon, we all came from Africa" - misconstruing what they're saying, seeking to correct rather than understand, generally being rude and dismissive. If someone shares something with you, it's up to you to figure out how and whether to incorporate it into your epistemology; if you're having trouble with that, it might be tempting to say, "the problem is that your epistemology sucks," but a.) That's an indecent way to treat someone and b.) No one is going to learn anything that way and c.) The problem is actually that you gave up on trying to understand, not that there was no resolution to the conundrum, and not that their epistemology is "inferior" in some way.
Consider that when a native culture has an origin story involving a specific place, regardless of whether we believe that humanity evolved there, there is really no reason to doubt their culture emerged there and that that place has an important bearing in their history.
I'm pretty sure that's what I would do.
These results decreased belief in an aether (though more complex experiments were needed to falsify the possibility that the Earth was dragging aether with it). Additionally, a series of length / time dilations were proposed for moving objects to explain the bizarre fact that the speed of the any light was measured the same regardless of the relative movement of the measuring observer. At this point Einstein stepped in and explained the theory of Special Relativity and how speeds don't add linearly and distances and times don't transform as one would naively expect under Galilean relativity. It was a really a generalization of the previously proposed Lorentz transformations that returned to the idea that all movement was relative. The spacetime that transforms in this way is called "Minkowskian".
Eventually after this, Quantum Mechanics developed into Quantum Field Theory, which is inherently relativistic and embedded in Minkowskian spacetime. In this view, electromagnetic photons are just excitations of the quantum field. Things basically came full circle and the quantum field is essentially an aether as envisioned all along. The difference is that it is relativistic / Minkowskian, and as such doesn't have a particular reference frame in which it is "not moving".
Note that even before the development fo QFT, this is what Einstein was saying: "More careful reflection teaches us however, that the special theory of relativity does not compel us to deny ether. We may assume the existence of an ether; only we must give up ascribing a definite state of motion to it, i.e. we must by abstraction take from it the last mechanical characteristic which Lorentz had still left it. We shall see later that this point of view, the conceivability of which I shall at once endeavour to make more intelligible by a somewhat halting comparison, is justified by the results of the general theory of relativity."
Einstein's whole letter is a great read: https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Extras/Einstein_ether/
If the documentary was older than 2015, it's likely they didn't have this information and would be relying on inferences from the DNA of modern populations, which would be complicated by mixed race people.
Heyerdahl believed that people from South America could have reached Polynesia during pre-Columbian times. His aim in mounting the Kon-Tiki expedition was to show, by using only the materials and technologies available to those people at the time, that there were no technical reasons to prevent them from having done so.
Check out this new video released yesterday. It hypothesizes that Florida is actually the biblical Garden of Eden and that the true Fertile Crescent / cradle of humanity is the Gulf. https://youtu.be/v-zAxsAbpQo
Look up the Saxor Stones, very clear ancient boat anchors spread all throughout Florida. People say they are natural but you can clearly see the holes are manmade and you can see where the ropes had went. They are the largest stone boat anchors anywhere in the world. Here's a documentary about them https://youtu.be/L5Uu3bRPuIA
The article places that date long before the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM):
> It [the Clovis point] appeared widely across the continent beginning about 13,400 years ago, near the end of the LGM.
Which raises the question of what people were doing in the Americas before the LGM?
USGS has this to say about what might have been going on with the climate at the time the White Sands footprints were laid down:
> During the late Pleistocene (~129,000 to ~11,700 years ago), full glacial conditions were interrupted repeatedly by abrupt warming events called Dansgaard-Oeschger, or D-O events. In the southwestern U.S., D-O events caused centuries-long megadroughts, which devastated spring ecosystems, lowered lake levels, affected sea-surface temperatures and circulation patterns, and even triggered seismic activity. One of these events, called D-O 2, dates to ~23,500 years ago and was especially impactful to spring ecosystems, as water tables never returned to the same levels after the event that they had maintained for thousands of years prior.
https://www.usgs.gov/programs/climate-research-and-developme...
Wikipedia notes that D-O events flared up extremely rapidly on a geological timescale:
> In the Northern Hemisphere, they [D-O events] take the form of rapid warming episodes, typically in a matter of decades, each followed by gradual cooling over a longer period. ...
All we can know about the prehistory of present populations from genetics is their direct ancestry. Who was in the Americas before those ancestors, but did not breed with them, is lost to us until we find actual remains.
Pretending to know there weren't any is a mistake made over and over again, yet never learned from.
> The Serpent Mound is believed to have been built by the Native American Adena peoples around 320 BCE, and then either added to or repaired by the Fort Ancient peoples around 1100 CE.
So maybe 2k years?
Much older.
T̶h̶e̶r̶e̶ ̶a̶r̶e̶ ̶v̶a̶r̶i̶o̶u̶s̶ ̶d̶i̶s̶p̶u̶t̶e̶d̶ ̶s̶i̶t̶e̶s̶,̶ ̶b̶u̶t̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶r̶e̶c̶e̶n̶t̶ ̶d̶i̶s̶c̶o̶v̶e̶r̶y̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶f̶o̶o̶t̶p̶r̶i̶n̶t̶s̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶W̶h̶i̶t̶e̶ ̶S̶a̶n̶d̶s̶ ̶e̶s̶t̶a̶b̶l̶i̶s̶h̶e̶s̶ ̶a̶ ̶l̶o̶w̶e̶r̶ ̶b̶o̶u̶n̶d̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶b̶e̶t̶w̶e̶e̶n̶ ̶2̶1̶k̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶2̶3̶k̶.̶ (This is less settled than I'd thought.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Sands_fossil_footprints
T̶h̶e̶ ̶p̶r̶e̶v̶i̶o̶u̶s̶ ̶u̶n̶c̶o̶n̶t̶r̶o̶v̶e̶r̶s̶i̶a̶l̶ ̶l̶o̶w̶e̶r̶ ̶b̶o̶u̶n̶d̶ ̶w̶a̶s̶ ̶b̶e̶t̶w̶e̶e̶n̶ ̶1̶2̶.̶8̶k̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶1̶3̶.̶5̶k̶.̶ (This hasn't been a lower bound for a while, see below.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clovis_point
It's my understanding this is an active area of debate. To give a tentative upper bound, the Cerutti mastodon kill - who's anthropogenic origins, while they seem compelling to me (a nonexpert), are hotly debated, have a date of 130k years ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerutti_Mastodon_site
(I suspect GP meant to reference the Cerutti Mastodon site, rather than Serpent Mound?)
(And of course, much of this is referenced in the article, I'm busted for reading the comments first! Interesting article that says it far better than I, worth reading.)
Another possibility is that this was another group of hominids, not homo sapiens, and that they did in fact die out.
But honestly I'm not qualified to say much more in the subject than I have, I think it's a fascinating hypothesis & that the evidence that the bones were broken apart by being impacted with stones, in a similar manner to how bones are broken up to extract marrow, is compelling. And that the further isotopic evidence suggesting it was the stones found around the site, rather than construction equipment, is also compelling. But I'm not an archaeologist, and when the debate settles, I'll accept the conclusion they come to.
[1] Not to be pedantic, just to note because I find it fascinating, but the current ice age hasn't ended, this was the "last glacial period". Between ice ages there can be things like palm trees and turtles living at the poles. We're currently in an interglacial period of an ongoing ice age.
The ice stopped well short of the southern border of california: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/26/Iceage_n...
Furthermore the LGM event started around 33000 BCE, reached its peak around 25000 BCE, and the deglaciation started around 19000 BCE with a significant acceleration around 15000 BCE.
All of lowland Mexico and central America were ice-free throughout.
People mostly don't try to live on mountaintops, icy or not.
The Cerutti Mastodon site is not compelling to me, because a date of 130kya would put it before any other site of homo sapiens outside of Africa. Being so far out of line with other evidence means that the evidence in favor of hominids needs to be exceptionally rock solid, which it isn't.
I would submit we should be cautious with metaobservations like, "this is much older than other sites," because we should be trying to prove ourselves wrong, whereas these sorts of metaobservations amplify confirmation bias. I'm not saying skepticism is unwarranted, just that we need to be careful with this sort of reasoning.
As a side note, I've seen people strike through stuff out on HN, and I'd like to strike through this claim to emphasize there's a correction; it's not in the undocumented features repo[1], and I've tried a few standard things like ~this~ and ~~this~~ and -this- and --this-- and have never figured it out. Can anyone tell me what the markdown is?
Beautiful, thank you.
Both 'we should be trying to prove ourselves wrong' and 'Being so far out of line with other evidence means that the evidence in favor of hominids needs to be exceptionally rock solid' can both be valid at the same time. The base rate of a 'false positive' for extraordinary claims that conflict with an existing body of evidence is typically much higher so confidence in the evidence would need to quite strong for that piece of evidence to move the consensus.
I'd consider myself largely a frequentist but the relevant xkcd [1] comes to mind
I'd argue that ignoring that aspect can amplify one's susceptiblity to confirmation bias if one is predisposed to believing in a very early American hominid story for whatever reason.
[1] https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/frequentists_vs_bayesians_2x.pn...
Although Fuyan also shows H.Sapiens may (its datation is also disputed) also have reached out of africa much earlier than otherwise supported.
The problem is clearly in preconceptions about H. migration, and beliefs about the capabilities of our ancestors long ago.
People constructed boats and settled Crete 200,000 years ago. Like it or not. Were they H. sap., in Europe already? Maybe!