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New Evidence Suggests Humans Arrived in the Americas Earlier Than Thought
- Retric 10y agoIt's only 50 miles by sea from Eurasia to the Americas. People got to Australia around 40,000–60,000 years ago by boat so it seems unlikely that people needed a land bridge to get to the Americas. Remember, the globe also looks like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eskimo#/media/File:Inuit_conf_map.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eskimo#/media/File:Inuit_conf_... PS: I suspect the Americas where well known in the 1700's, but nobody was talking to the Russian Far East when map making.
- hansjorg 10y agoBuckminster Fuller made a similar point with one of his dymaxion projections: https://telemachusunedited.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/lowpp.jpg https://telemachusunedited.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/lowpp...
- ellyagg 10y agoI wouldn't be surprised if climate affected our adventurousness, though, which this projection doesn't capture. I find ice cold seas a lot more forbidding.
- hansjorg 10y agoClimate has varied a bit over the years though. And Alaskan summers seem quite inviting.
- bbctol 10y agoMan, I understand the desire to make every map a rectangle, but filling that in with endless ocean is just so wrong
- dpc59 10y agoEvery single map is inaccurate in a way, I suggest you read How to lie with maps by Mark Monmonier.
- ebcode 10y agoYeah, you really need to see where the cuts are for it to make sense. Here is a better version (without fictitious ocean): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Fuller_projection_rotated.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Fuller_projection_rotated...
- mrec 10y ago> People got to Australia around 40,000–60,000 years ago by boat so it seems unlikely that people needed a land bridge Maybe, maybe not. Living for days on an open raft or equivalent is going to be a lot tougher when you're nearly in the Arctic Circle than it is in the sunny South Pacific. > PS: I suspect the Americas where well known in the about in the 1700's, but nobody was talking to the Russian Far East when map making. That's an interesting thought. If you use Reddit, might be a good one for /r/AskHistorians
- Fricken 10y agoI don't think it's unreasonable to hypothesize that a community that starts out fishing in nearby waters using rudimentary boats would, over the span of maybe dozens of generations, learn something about travelling longer distances over open water. A dude recently crossed the Atlantic on a stand-up paddle board. Which is insane, but it proves you be a prolific seafarer with very basic watercraft. http://www.mensjournal.com/adventure/articles/chris-bertish-the-first-to-sup-across-the-atlantic-needs-a-break-w475710 http://www.mensjournal.com/adventure/articles/chris-bertish-...
- patrickw 10y ago"Hokulea is a performance-accurate full-scale replica of a... Polynesian double-hulled voyaging canoe. Launched on 8 March 1975 by the Polynesian Voyaging Society, she is best known for her 1976 Hawaii to Tahiti voyage completed with exclusively Polynesian navigation techniques. The primary goal of the voyage was to explore the anthropological theory of the Asiatic origin of native Oceanic people, of Polynesians and Hawaiians in particular, as the result of purposeful trips through the Pacific, as opposed to passive drifting on currents, or sailing from the Americas." "Since the 1976 voyage, Hokulea has completed nine additional voyages.... On May 18, 2014, Hokulea and her sister vessel, Hikianalia embarked from Oahu for 'Malama Honua', a three-year circumnavigation of the earth. The journey will cover 47,000 nautical miles with stops at 85 ports in 26 countries." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hokulea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hokulea "Polynesian navigation used some navigational instruments, which predate and are distinct from the machined metal tools used by European navigators.... Polynesian navigators employed a whole range of techniques including use of the stars, the movement of ocean currents and wave patterns, the air and sea interference patterns caused by islands and atolls, the flight of birds, the winds and the weather." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polynesian_navigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polynesian_navigation http://www.hokulea.com/education-at-sea/polynesian-navigation/ http://www.hokulea.com/education-at-sea/polynesian-navigatio...
- WillPostForFood 10y agoWe know Russian explorers first sailed to America in the 1700s, but they didn't really explore or land enough to call it "well known" until the early 1800s. In 1725, Emperor Peter the Great ordered navigator Vitus Bering to explore the North Pacific for potential colonization. The Russians were primarily interested in the abundance of fur-bearing mammals on Alaska's coast, as stocks had been depleted by overhunting in Siberia. Bering's first voyage was foiled by thick fog and ice, but in 1741 a second voyage by Bering and Aleksei Chirikov made sight of the North American mainland. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_colonization_of_the_Americas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_colonization_of_the_Am...
- Balgair 10y agoAlso, Beringia went through many cycles of land and sea coverage[0]. Our climate has been pretty up and down since homo sapiens came onto the stage. Aside: The land-bridge was not just a passing point, it was actually a nice place to sit and stay, due to the wind, sea, and glacial climatic issues. Also, the coastal-migration idea states that we just skimmed the coast all the way to at least Chile. The issue with that idea is that all those coast lines and settlement areas are about 200m under water now and were likely destroyed by wave action, so it's hard to prove. Beringia is a really cool place to study, pardon the pun, and helps change some ideas about how humans came to be. It seems like we've been pretty smart for a long long time. There are civilizations all over the globe that rose, fell, and died, and we will never ever know of them. The idea of 'civilization' is ancient, it seems. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beringia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beringia
- dpc59 10y agoYou'd think the land bridge would have pretty fertile soil too, with it having been seabed a few years prior and whatnot.
- flukus 10y agoDoes it glaciate? That process often grinds away everything down to the bedrock.
- wavefunction 10y agoI don't believe the Bering Strait area was subject to any recent (within the timeframe we're discussing) glaciation. And there is always a leading edge of the glacier where all that ground-up goodness ends up. Many dynamic biomes are found on the boundaries of extreme and hostile environments.
- Balgair 10y agoTake a look at the wiki page linked above. Beringia was never really covered in ice due to the wind and sea currents near it when it existed. The area was a 'refugium' of steppe grasses and light forests. It is thought that people may have moved there, stayed there, and then moved back into Asia as time went on, as well as into the Americas. As for using the area to farm, the very short summer growing season of higher latitudes is not well suited for agriculture.
- riazrizvi 10y agoAt this point I assume only that we've found evidence showing humans got to Australia 40-60k years ago. I suspect they (we?) arrived earlier in smaller numbers that we haven't detected yet.
- BurningFrog 10y agoTypically a population either grows exponentially or vanishes. Remaining small but alive for thousands of years is not entirely unthinkable, but it's very unlikely.
- riazrizvi 10y agoAn isolated population seed, yes. But a sub-population that can be re-seeded by the main one, no. Homo Erectus has been discovered as far as SE Asia 1 or 2 million years ago. Also typically a population grows depending on birth-death rates which reach quick limits in places of low resources. This is self-evident from different population sizes in different geographic habitats. Instead human populations mushroomed only in select places. See Guns, Germs and Steel by Diamond for more.
- BurningFrog 10y agoSure, but an unpopulated Australia is hardly a place of low resources. The expansion possibilities would be enormous. Even if your colony is surrounded by impenetrable deserts, I'd think you could always propagate along the coast, living off the ocean. That I'm just some internet guy speculating without any deep knowledge is probably obvious, but let me make it extra clear!
- flukus 10y agoImpenetrable deserts aren't known for their abundance of fresh water. Just having resources available isn't everything either, you have to know how to extract those resources, this is a massive barrier to a primitive (excuse the term) culture landing on an alien continent, separated for millions of years. Living off the ocean is also incredibly dangerous.
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- oliyoung 10y ago> People got to Australia around 40,000–60,000 years ago by boat It's generally accepted that over 80,000 years ago people crossed the land bridge over the Torres Strait before it was submerged https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torres_Strait https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torres_Strait
- goodcanadian 10y agoYou can count me firmly in the skeptics category. However, it is interesting, and human beings have been around a long time. It would be a bit surprising if no one ever made it to the Americas until "recent" times.
- FullMtlAlcoholc 10y agoI'm skeptical of this finding however it seems ludicrous to mean that scientists accept on its face that humans reached Australia like 50000 years ago, crossing over 55 miles of water but a 50-mile wide Bering Strait would pose huge problems.
- jcranmer 10y agoSea-levels were not the same 50kya as they were today; they were about 120m or so lower. At that level, a lot of the seas in Southeast Asia and Australia just simply cease to exist, and so the ultimate water gaps are only a few km wide--very likely, you could see the other shore at times. Of course, at the same time, the Bering Strait didn't exist for similar reasons. By comparison, Madagascar, which is ~400km from Africa, was never settled by African tribes (they were settled from Austronesians from Indonesia). Malta, about 80km from the closest land in Italy, was apparently settled only around 7kya.
- Will_Parker 10y agoFor a skeptical point of view, see the second half of Jared Diamond's article: https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27111 https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27111
- ZanyProgrammer 10y agoOr they are like the Norsemen-sure they made it early, but with 100,000 missing years of continuous habitation until Clovis, et al, they died out and didn't contribute anything.
- Jabanga 10y agoThe Norseman had one small colony that was attacked by people already inhabiting North America. They settled the Eastern tip of Canada then departed. These people, if they existed, would have colonized all the way from Western Alaska to California, meaning they would have had numerous settlements, and in an uninhabited continent.
- Will_Parker 10y agoNot to mention, the difference in known human technology and capability from 130k years ago to 50k years ago is not small. Using something like Bayesian reasoning, I find it more plausible that this is experimental error than a one-off revelation that humans had technology to cross the Pacific 130kya.
- joe_the_user 10y agoPreviously: "the article mentions the previous earlier evidence as being from 115K years ago" (edit, oops, misread, this is way before anything we've heard about thus much less certain, forget about it).
- _saturnine 10y ago>previous earlier evidence as being from 115K years ago I think you may have misread that. The article said this discovery "predat[es] the best evidence up to now by about 115,000 years".
- redsummer 10y agoThere's a lot of Sasquatch stories among Native Americans. Homo Floresiensis overlaps with the Ebu Gogo myth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebu_gogo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebu_gogo
- WalterBright 10y agoIt's hard to believe a story can persist for 15,000 years by verbal transmission.
- obelos 10y agoHard to believe, but it happens. Australian Aboriginal story telling, for example, conveys historical events from 10k+ years ago: http://theconversation.com/ancient-aboriginal-stories-preserve-history-of-a-rise-in-sea-level-36010 http://theconversation.com/ancient-aboriginal-stories-preser...
- drowned 10y agoYou may find this interesting: The town of Carencro, Louisiana takes its name from an American Indian legend about a mastodon that died there. The name has been interpreted as either "carrion crow" for wake of vultures that feasted upon its carcass, or "carnero"--"bone pile"--for the bones of the creature itself. The fossil was discovered in the 18th century. Oral cultures have a long memory.
- WalterBright 10y agoMastodons used to be everywhere. Finding a mastodon's bones is not that unusual, so is not compelling proof of the veracity of the legend.
- drowned 10y agoAs far as I remember the story was regarding a fairly specific segment of Bayou Carencro where the creature was said to have drowned, and is where the fossils were found. That makes it a bit more compelling than some Mastodon being unearthed in the general region.
- WalterBright 10y agoI think it was Nova a while back that suggested that clovis technology came from a stone age french tribe, and that there were traces of them in the genes of eastern native americans.
- canjobear 10y agoThat is the "Solutrean Hypothesis": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solutrean_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solutrean_hypothesis My understanding is that it is roundly rejected by almost all archaeologists.
- WalterBright 10y agoThe text and the pictures are confusing - the picture shows haplogroup X having a european origin, and the text says otherwise.
- enceladus_ice 10y agoI recently watched a NOVA documentary from last year that refutes the Eurocentric theories of Clovis origins. Great Human Odyssey: http://www.pbs.org/video/2365856257/ http://www.pbs.org/video/2365856257/ Geneticists sequenced the DNA from a young boy's 13,000-year-old bones found in Montana. His DNA matches a specific combination of Eastern Asian and Siberian DNA that is found in all North and South American native populations, and only in these populations. This lends to the theory that the first people to permanently settle the America's (Clovis) were made up of groups from Siberia and Eastern Asia combining and crossing the Bering Strait.
- red_hairing 10y agobut given political considerations, can that particular science be trusted?
- Steko 10y agoIf you're going to object to their science, let's hear the actual objections and not just handwavey notions that somehow the science is bad because you don't favor the conclusions.
- cucucfudud 10y agoThat cant be right. Humans didnt leave africa until 100 thousand years ago. If this is real there should also be more evidence of them. Not just the this one find.
- tzs 10y agoHomo sapiens mostly didn't leave Africa until about 100k years ago, but when dealing with these things there is always a fair amount of uncertainty so some could have left much earlier. There are also other early human species besides Homo sapiens that could in theory be responsible for something like this. Homo erectus was galavanting around the world perhaps up to 2 million years ago, and they were tool users. Homo heidelbergensis was on the move around 600k years ago. Homo neanderthalensis was out of Africa around 300k years ago.
- red_hairing 10y agomaybe there was a form of homo erectus already in america, using stone tools etc, having arrived 130k yrs or more ago, and then the indians wiped them out when they arrived much later--that would explain indian tales of having wiped out primitive cannibal tribes (a movie called bone tomahawk was inspired by these tales)...of course the political considerations would tend to suppress this idea.
- aetherson 10y agoCome on, you can't take legends from circa 1500 AD to be evidence of anything that happened somewhere between 11,000 and 20,000 years earlier, especially without writing. It's far more likely that primitive cannibal tribes were made up wholesale than that societies carried the memory of them for more than 10,000 years.
- acid__ 10y agoWell, it wouldn't be entirely unprecedented. See: "Indigenous Australian storytelling accurately records sea level rises 7,000 years ago" https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/sep/16/indigenous-australian-storytelling-records-sea-level-rises-over-millenia https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/sep/16/indig...
- julienchastang 10y agoECREE. "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." -Carl Sagan
- tzs 10y agoGiven 1. a site that appears to have been used by humans to do some kind of processing of bones, and 2. very old (130k) bones at that site that have been processed, how would you rule out the possibility that the site was made and the bones processed by people that came much later (say, 15k years ago) who found a bunch of 115k year old bones from animals that died from natural deaths and used them?
- russdill 10y agoProbably by the way they are broken.
- cityhall 10y agoDo bones maintain whatever properties they're exploiting thousands of years after the animal's death? I'd expect they'd have different wear or fracture patterns if they were very old when worked. You'd also expect a mixture of ages in close proximity. Even if all the bones being processed were old at the time, they presumably would have a mixture of 100kya, 50 kya, etc. bones jumbled together.
- ska 10y agohow would you rule out the possibility You know what? I have no idea. I have a pretty strong prior that any archeologist could tell you though. I suppose it won't surprise me if one or two pop up here to tell you, but have to imagine there are more efficient ways to find out.
- astine 10y agoI'm pretty sure that they would have been fossilized by that point. Broken rock is different than broken bone.
- simonh 10y agoFossilisation takes much longer and very different conditions over millions of years.
- ar-jan 10y agoThey say the technique used on the bones was for extracting marrow. I don't know if there could be any reason to break bones already more than 100k years old, but it seems unlikely?
- meri_dian 10y agoNotice that the article states the bones themselves are from 130kya, not that they were discovered in a layer of sediment deposited 130kya. This means that the age of the bones says nothing about the tools scattered around them at the site, or the ancient users of those tools. Taking this into account, I think a more plausible explanation is that ancient humans - Clovis ancient (13kya) or perhaps older (20kya) - discovered these bones and kept them, used them, then discarded them or lost them with the other stone tools from the site.
- icc97 10y agoThe video in the middle of the story [0] says that they were found in a silt layer (which I'm guessing is aged at 130kya) [0]: https://youtu.be/HyfSsgCrjb0?t=1m21s https://youtu.be/HyfSsgCrjb0?t=1m21s
- restalis 10y agoIt pains me to see these scientists handling those ancient bones with bare hands. That's not a good practice.
- takk309 10y agoMore coverage of this can be found on ArsTechnica. A few more details are given that the NPR report omits. https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/04/unknown-humans-were-in-california-130000-years-ago-say-scientists/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/04/unknown-humans-were-...
- nickjarboe 10y agoThe journal article in Nature can be found here[1]. The abstract is publicly accessible with the article behind a paywall. I'm not familiar enough with the dating method to comment on the possible problems of the age determination, but it was calculated by the complicated method of "230Th/U radiometric analysis of multiple bone specimens using diffusion–adsorption–decay dating models indicating a burial date of 130.7 ± 9.4 thousand years ago." [1]https://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v544/n7651/full/nature22065.html https://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v544/n7651/full/nature...
- aaron695 10y agoI really wish I could bet against this XKCD style its quite a sure thing. It doesn't make sense plus we know there are competing issues at play as people try to get get know in their fields by finding 'the oldest' Extrodinay claims need extrodinay evedence here they seem to have fit a theory that would lack provable evedence as a explanation.
- vivekd 10y agoSo lets look at the evidence: OUTLIER DATE: This site is an outlier among archaeological sites in terms of the date. The date given for Californians according to this research is 130 000 year ago. As far as I am aware, the earliest recorded human site outside of Africa is one in China 120 000 years ago. And even that site is an outlier because human migration into the middle east began happening 120 000 -100 000 years ago, 60 000 years ago into Asia, and and 45 000 years into Europe. Now that in itself is not conclusive, maybe there are older sites that we haven't found and this discovery pushes back human migration. Except there are other problems here. LACK OF HUMAN REMAINS OR HUMAN ARTIFACTS So the scientists say the rocks have markings that look like they had been used as a hammer and anvil and there are some mastodon bones near it. Now no actual human bones were found near this site. Which is certainly not impossible for these kinds of sites. More problematic is that there were no obvious stone tools other than rocks with markings that look like they'd been hit. With ancient humans, especially ones capable of hunting mastodons, you would expect them to make sharp stone points by flaking (hiting one stone against another). This should leave flakes and tools on the ground. Yet, at this site, there were no stone tools of this sort found anywhere at this site. LACK OF CUT MARKINGS ON BONES Further, once ancient humans killed the mastodon, you would expect them to cut pieces of flesh off with a stone knife so that it could be eaten. This process would leave marks on the bones where the flesh had been cut. The article tells us that no such markings were found on these bones. > Yet there were no cut marks on the bones showing that the animal was butchered for meat. AVAILABILITY OF ALTERNATIVE EXPLANATIONS None of these factors itself is fatal, but all three combined, the outlier date (way to early considering the mainstream evidence shows that our species were just getting set up in the middle east at this time,) the absence of human tools nearby, the absence of cut marks on the bones, the absence of any human skeletons or remains in the area. All of these lead me to think there must be another explanation. It's not impossible that the bones of dead mastodons can get trampled or broken. Under the right circumstances, it's not impossible that trampling can cause rocks to smash against one another or leave marks on the rock. Maybe there was a cliff in the area many years ago and the bones and the rocks took a deep fall. In any event, there are alternative explanations and it is not inconceivable that this happened through natural means. This is hardly smoking gun evidence of human in California 130 000 years ago. USE OF WEAK EXPLANATORY MECHANISMS And I think the weakness of this evidence is belied by the unusual explanatory leaps made by the discoverers. When pointed out that there is no evidence that the remains had been butchered for meat, he responds: "The suggestion is that this site is strictly for breaking bone, to produce blank material, raw material to make bone tools or to extract marrow." Seriously? Why would they break bones without butchering the meat and eating it? Why would you have a separate site just for bone marrow? That makes no sense. EVIDENCE THAT IS ANYTHING BUT CLEAR LABELED AS CLEAR >He says the rocks showed clear marks of having been used as hammers and an anvil. Really, I mean they have pictures of the rocks on the site. It doesn't seem that clear to me that they were hammer and anvil stones. Are they clear to anyone else? They could just easily be old worn rocks. I would expect humans that could make it from Africa or wherever all the way to California 130 000 years ago to be somewhat advanced enough that they have tools more advanced than just two random pieces of rock to bang together. This was the age where humans had started molding rocks for suited purposes by flaking them. Why they would just use two natural rocks instead of created rocks is questionable. If you type in acheulean tools into google, you can see the sophisticated flaked tools (sharp looking leaf shaped blades) our ancestors were making 1.7 million years ago . . . yet ones that traveled all the way to California and kill mastodons are still stuck banging random un-molded rocks against each other for marrow- why? I have nothing against pushing back migration to Americas, but this site is probably more wishful thinking on part of its founders than legitimate discovery.
- theprop 10y agoNew theory: they were a Hominid people (but not Homo Sapien or human) that came to America to escape marauding communities of humans attacking them.
- restalis 10y agoThat was pretty much my conclusion too. Homo Sapiens got out of Africa around 130-90k years ago. Here they found bones broken by tools. Those bone-breakers might have been humans (as Homo genus) but definitely not our species. Our species got in Americas much, much later.
- xHopen 10y agohttp://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13166597-beyond-the-blue-horizon http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13166597-beyond-the-blue-...
- peatmoss 10y agoA slightly more skeptical look at the claims: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ancient-bones-spark-fresh-debate-over-first-humans-in-the-americas/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ancient-bones-spa... Still, I love any evidence that the world may be more complicated and strange than we previously thought. This is definitely a story that sparks the imagination.