4 ms·

For 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/2

For 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 9y ago
Or 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 9y ago
  The 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 9y ago
    Not 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 9y ago
      Previously: "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 9y 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".
      - Will_Parker 9y ago
        Is there really evidence from before 20kya that is taken seriously by anyone these days? According to Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settlement_of_the_Americas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settlement_of_the_Americas "Available scientific evidence indicates that humanity emerged from Africa over 100,000 years ago, yet did not arrive in the Americas until less than 20,000 years ago."
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
jcranmer 9y ago
The problem with that argument is that you can use it to attack, well, anything, so long as the countervailing viewpoint is threatening to your own worldview. One could very well have applied the same objection to the null result of the Michelson-Morely experiment: since it showed that the Earth was acting weirdly with respect to the lumeniferous aether, obviously there must be something more pedestrian at work than "the aether doesn't work like we thought it did." In Diamond's case, he's dismissing all claims of pre-Clovis settlement of the Americas. For most mainstream anthropologists, the case is settled: Clovis was not the first group of humans to settle the Americas, and the Americas were settled perhaps ~20kya, not ~13kya, probably via coastal migrations (whose sites are now underwater) rather than via the interior route blocked by the Laurentide. The biggest problem with the traditional Clovis + ice-free corridor hypothesis is that the Laurentide opened up about a 1000 years too late. For someone like Jared Diamond, I suspect the main resistance to accepting earlier habitation of the Americas is that it throws major wrenches into the hypothesis that the mastodons were hunted to extinction by early humans.
- Will_Parker 9y ago
  > it throws major wrenches into the hypothesis that the mastodons were hunted to extinction by early humans. Why would some small settlements ~20kya be a problem for this hypothesis? Regardless of whether previous settlements at a smaller scale existed, the Clovis people were the first to have the technology and culture to be able to rapidly explode across the continent, and the time they did this coincides with the time of extinction pretty well, doesn't it?
  - jcranmer 9y ago
    One of the pieces of evidence that proponents of human overhunting of megafauna point to is the seeming correlation between "arrival of humans" and "extinction of megafauna" on most continents. Drawing that out by a few thousand years on one continent in particular weakens the correlation dramatically.
    - Will_Parker 9y ago
carterehsmith 9y ago
> If there really had been pre-Clovis settlement, we would already know it and would no longer be arguing about it. I do like Jared Diamonds' books, I read... a lot of them, perhaps all of them. But his reasoning - quoted above - is just plain wrong. He fails at grasping at how the basic logic works. Example: "We did not find it so far" - which, according to Jared, rests the case -- does not mean "it does not exist". As per that logic, the discovery of Denisovans and Homo Florensiensis can be ignored, because they came up after the Jared's decree that "we did not find it so far". That's just silly.

For 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 9y ago

Or 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 9y ago
The 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 9y ago
  Not 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 9y ago
    Previously: "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 9y 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".
    - Will_Parker 9y ago
      Is there really evidence from before 20kya that is taken seriously by anyone these days? According to Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settlement_of_the_Americas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settlement_of_the_Americas "Available scientific evidence indicates that humanity emerged from Africa over 100,000 years ago, yet did not arrive in the Americas until less than 20,000 years ago."
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]

jcranmer 9y ago

The problem with that argument is that you can use it to attack, well, anything, so long as the countervailing viewpoint is threatening to your own worldview. One could very well have applied the same objection to the null result of the Michelson-Morely experiment: since it showed that the Earth was acting weirdly with respect to the lumeniferous aether, obviously there must be something more pedestrian at work than "the aether doesn't work like we thought it did." In Diamond's case, he's dismissing all claims of pre-Clovis settlement of the Americas. For most mainstream anthropologists, the case is settled: Clovis was not the first group of humans to settle the Americas, and the Americas were settled perhaps ~20kya, not ~13kya, probably via coastal migrations (whose sites are now underwater) rather than via the interior route blocked by the Laurentide. The biggest problem with the traditional Clovis + ice-free corridor hypothesis is that the Laurentide opened up about a 1000 years too late. For someone like Jared Diamond, I suspect the main resistance to accepting earlier habitation of the Americas is that it throws major wrenches into the hypothesis that the mastodons were hunted to extinction by early humans.

Will_Parker 9y ago
> it throws major wrenches into the hypothesis that the mastodons were hunted to extinction by early humans. Why would some small settlements ~20kya be a problem for this hypothesis? Regardless of whether previous settlements at a smaller scale existed, the Clovis people were the first to have the technology and culture to be able to rapidly explode across the continent, and the time they did this coincides with the time of extinction pretty well, doesn't it?
- jcranmer 9y ago
  One of the pieces of evidence that proponents of human overhunting of megafauna point to is the seeming correlation between "arrival of humans" and "extinction of megafauna" on most continents. Drawing that out by a few thousand years on one continent in particular weakens the correlation dramatically.
  - Will_Parker 9y ago

carterehsmith 9y ago

> If there really had been pre-Clovis settlement, we would already know it and would no longer be arguing about it. I do like Jared Diamonds' books, I read... a lot of them, perhaps all of them. But his reasoning - quoted above - is just plain wrong. He fails at grasping at how the basic logic works. Example: "We did not find it so far" - which, according to Jared, rests the case -- does not mean "it does not exist". As per that logic, the discovery of Denisovans and Homo Florensiensis can be ignored, because they came up after the Jared's decree that "we did not find it so far". That's just silly.