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Comment by octaane | Hacker News Reader

I'm glad this has finally been put to rest. Per the Ars article: "...that makes for a grand total of 55 radiocarbon results in support of the earlier dates across the three studies."

The evidence of much earlier human habitation in the Americas has been around for decades, yet has always been shoved aside in favor of a hypothesis with all ends tidied up and bound with a neat bow. Humans traveling over ice sheets from eurasia to the americas never made a huge amount of sense when they could skirt it's resource-rich edges - and traveling by water is much faster, and much less calorically intensive than traveling by land. You also have your food readily available.

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> Humans traveling over ice sheets from eurasia to the americas never made a huge amount of sense when they could skirt it's resource-rich edges - and traveling by water is much faster, and much less calorically intensive than traveling by land. You also have your food readily available.

... No-one is suggesting people traveling over ice sheets? In fact, the primary reason for the conventional chronology is that it avoids any ice sheets.

During the last glacial maximum, the sea level was low enough that the entirety of Beringia was above sealevel. It was also not covered by ice, and it was one of the richest places for hunter-gatherers to live north of the tropics. Think less of a land bridge and more of a continent. This allowed access to western and central Alaska, but the way forwards was blocked by the Laurentide ice sheet, both on the continent and extending significantly over the ocean. For someone to cross from Alaska to the southern part of the continent, they would have to sail over 2000km without access to anything but deep ocean and floating ice.

> For someone to cross from Alaska to the southern part of the continent, they would have to sail over 2000km without access to anything but deep ocean and floating ice.

Not exactly. The leading explanation is the "Kelp Highway" theory - the complex coastal geography of SE Alaska and ocean currents could have created a small pockets of ice-free land and given access to rich marine resources. You could effectively island hope down the inland passage until you hit the Columbia river. Having made it to Australia 50kya, we know at least some prehistoric humans had the maritime technology to pull it off.

My take is, it seems likely that at least some of the Beringians made it south of the ice wall during the glacial maxima. If the ice wall was indeed impenetrable 25kya (ie the kelp highway theory is wrong) , the White Sands footprints must have come from people who migrated even earlier.

I think the point still stands that there has been a desperate clinging to a chronology that denies plenty of evidence and essentially all oral tradition of the people in question.

Which oral histories allow us to differentiate between the various hypotheses for the initial peopling of the Americas? I'm not aware of any and it's very difficult to identify direct relationships between modern groups and the earliest groups. Moreover, operationalizing oral histories and tying them to cultural memories of specific historical events is difficult at best, since that's not really how ancient oral histories get preserved.

Ancient oral histories are preserved through constant communication across generational boundaries.

There are too many examples of oral history matching historical events for me to bother being your Google here.

Very little weight has been given to the accuracy of these oral histories until recent times. Meanwhile tribes have been saying “that’s not how it happened” to the Clovis hypothesis the entire time.

You don't have to tell me how oral histories are preserved. I've worked as an anthropologist and documented some. What I was asking is how you operationalize what is preserved to distinguish between the various competing hypotheses for the initial peopling of the Americas and which histories you're referencing.

I probably don't need to tell someone like you who's intimately familiar with them, but for others reading oral histories don't work like the literary histories we're all familiar with from textbooks. What's preserved has some fairly consistent modifications that take place on the journey from the top of the hourglass to the bottom of the hourglass and into deep time histories.

1) Events become omitted, repeated, or conflated to support the narrative purpose of the tradition

2) Elements of the narrative that support the narrative purpose are emphasized or modified to better suit that purpose, sometimes at the expense of modern ideas of historical accuracy

3) Elements from other narratives that support the narrative purpose may be incorporated, or supplant other elements within a tradition of parallel narratives.

4) Elements that are dramatic and narratively meaningful are the ones that survive

These are more or less basic knowledge by anyone working with deep time stories, but if you insist on an indigenous source here's a paper by Roger Echo-Hawk saying the same thing much more eloquently: https://doi.org/10.2307/2694059

So, to use these stories in academic work we typically have to find some way of matching the narrative echos of the real historical events to the things that are visible archaeologically. That's incredibly difficult beyond a few hundred years, and tends to center around dramatic events like natural disasters and geographic features. Well, we don't have many of those for the LGM. Past work has usually centered around identifying either "Dark World" motifs with Beringia Standstill populations (the BSH is incompatible with the White Sands timeline), or Diving Bird myths, which are shared with many Eurasian groups. I'm not aware of any feature of Diving Bird myths that would allow a timeline for the initial peopling, hence the question.

My long reply got devoured so for the sake of my own sanity I will reiterate my original point from a quote with the resource you linked:

> In conceptual terms, scholarship on the past should revisit the bibliocentric assumptions of “prehistory,” and pursue, instead, the study of “ancient American history”-an approach that treats oral documents as respectable siblings of written documents.

I agree with both of those points and I'm well known in my social circle to go on long rants about the term prehistory. I avoid using it.

Though, in that same vein is another semantic paper called something like "Rehumanizing Pleistocene People", can't remember the author with bad Internet.

Thanks for these resources, I look forward to reading them.

And there are literally thousands of times more examples of oral histories not matching historical events. A broken clock is right twice a day, but that doesn't mean we should rely upon it for timekeeping.

There are literally thousands of scientific theories that have been disproven over time. What’s your point?

Edit: Also thousands of historical written documents that are disputed or tossed aside.

I would argue its actually been those "People in question" who are one of the primary barriers to the acceptance of the growing body of evidence that the Americas were peopled earlier than previously thought.

The issue is that there is clear genetic evidence that the current indigenous population of the Americas arrived onto the continents around 14KYA-15KYA, and all their various land claims and special rights / privileges fundamentally derive from the argument that "They were here first."

Whoever the people leaving footprints at White Sands were, the genetic evidence is clear that they weren't the ancestors of North America's current indigenous population. They were a genetically distinct people group (My suspicion is they would have been more closely related to Australian Aborigines) and are in fact the ones "Who were here first." Accepting that there were already people in the Americas when the current indigenous population arrived, would undermine the land claims of the current North American indigenous populations, and would force them to reckon with the fact they too are colonizers / settlers who displaced an earlier population, likely through violence and possibly even outright genocide, as apart from some isolated groups in the Amazon, there's no genetic evidence the current indigenous population of the Americas meaningfully intermixed with any other populations once they arrived onto the continent as we would expect were the existing population absorbed into the new population through interbreeding.

This is in large part why so many indigenous groups are adamantly opposed to participating in genetics studies, or allowing archaeologists to conduct digs in their "Traditional territories" as a great many indigenous groups actually have "Oral traditions" that there were already people in the Americas when their ancestors arrived, and they know that further study will contradict the narrative that "They were here first," and could eventually invalidate their "Blood and soil" based land claims.

Phew, buddy, don’t hurt yourself by grinding that axe too close to the handle.

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