4 ms·

Wouldn't people be able to traverse the continent in a few months? Why are they giving estimated ranges that span thousands of years?

garmaine 8y ago
Why would they?
- mongol 8y ago
  Tourism?
- vortico 8y ago
  Chasing migrating buffaloe?
  - dredmorbius 8y ago
    Game (and other biota) tend to distribute latitudinally, along uniform climate zones, far more than longitudinally, across them. Bison have a daily range of about 2 mi. (3.2 km). This would give a seasonal range (over 90 days) of only 200 miles (320km) or so , and likely far less.
simonh 8y ago
I’m just guessing, but community and social support networks are vital for survival and to retain access to potential mates. You don’t deliberately distance yourself from that without a really good reason. Also the nice you have built experience with the terrain, shelter, food, water and material resources of a region why give all that up? Even nomadic cultures have a range and set of routes and locations they know and visit. Suddenly changing climactic zone is also probably difficult as the different climate, flora and fauna might require very different sets of skills.
egjerlow 8y ago
Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond has its fair share of critics, but one thing I feel it does well is introduce to the general populace the ways of thinking around questions like this. In the case of migration, one of the factors that slowed it down so much is the lack of properly 'domestic' peoples that actually had a population surplus. If you're a hunter-gatherer tribe that has reached an equilibrium between children born and people dying, and your hunting grounds provide the resources you need to sustain that equilibrium, there is little reason to go looking elsewhere (migrate).
Alan_Dillman 8y ago
Climatic and geographic familiarity is a big thing. My ancestors left the Russian Steppes and ended up in Kansas, by all accounts a much nicer place. They left anyway, and homesteaded in an area of Canada that is quite similar to the terrain they'd left behind in the old country. They skipped over a lot of good farm land, and ended up in Northern Alberta for no discernible reason other than they knew how to deal with it. The problems made sense to their skill sets, and they did very well. As the other person said, familial support is darned important, which is why my family went to Kansas in the first place. They had relatives there. It was recent enough that my grandmother has gone there to visit her cousins over the years. I imagine that successful hunter-gatherer groups colonised over the next hill, or a days walk or two down the river. Probably someone could model that to narrow down prospective digs. I know that the land between the confluence of two rivers was a common place for groups to meet up. I guess my family also provides a modern example of far colonising. The way they bridged the Atlantic was by sending a few young men ahead to scout out new potential homelands. I suspect that they used this as a sort of social control, and to add a useful function to the young men who were disruptive agents in their society. In a hunter-gather society, this tactic would be better than straight banishment or death. "Climb that mountain pass and see if there is good land on the other side. Prove the land by staying over summer, and come back in the fall with skins and dried berries".
- neffy 8y ago
  It´s also possible that then as now, the idea of spending summer away from parental control was an excellent motivator for the younger members of the tribe to find new digs.
  - bilbo0s 8y ago
    So true. Sometimes, the answers are so much more simple than we think.
  - toyg 8y ago
    To be fair, "parental control" back then was so much looser than anything we could conceive today. Any family would have had a minimum of 3 or 4 children, and they would have been put to work at ages as early as 8, possibly becoming a tribe peer shortly after. There was probably control at tribe level, but parents were likely busy surviving. We also keep talking about this in terms of rejection (being banned, escaping parents etc), but it might well be that they were simply pushed by a reckless sense of exploration, curiosity, and personal ambition. Their world was endlessly new: what is beyond that hill? What is beyond that river? I'll find out, and if it's good, I'll make it mine. After all I'm a teenager, I obviously cannot die.
Balero 8y ago
You have to approach it with the knowledge and motivation of those people. First off, you don't know where you're going, at all. You have never been more than 20-30 miles from your home base, and neither has anyone out of the 30-40 people you know. The world is dangerous, there are lions and bears and worse everywhere, let alone the unknown things that you probably believe in. Camping out in the open is incredible dangerous. You much prefer to stick to places you know and have feel safe in. You have to think about why you're moving. There are two major reasons for going anywhere. First, something dangerous has come. A pack of wolves that like to eat people [0], a forest fire, a food shortage, another group of humans (not all bad, now you have some trade, but this was probably also a major danger with fighting for territory/reproduction). This drives you just far enough away to escape the danger, and there's always a chance you'll come back to the familiar territory when the danger has passed. Secondly, your group has grown and has started acting like two groups. This new group will probably only move next door. There will still be familial bonds and cooperation. Add in that the population isn't growing all that fast and this is very slow movement. You have to think how and what you're moving. You do not have a backpack. You have a bunch of baskets and maybe a couple of (literal dead animal) bladders of water. You can only take what you can carry, if the wheel had been invented it probably can't get over the terrain you're on. You need to stick to freshwater, so you can go down a river, and maybe chance along the coast hoping to get to another river a day or so away. Your group consists of babies that need carrying, children that need protecting, old people that know stuff but are slow, and more mouths to feed than you would like. Also bear in mind you were walking on game trails no human had ever walked on in bare feet/crap shoes at best. You also need to make fire (or take it with you) every night. Finding a rive will basically stop any travel, they are a great place to fish/hunt and have accessible water. So actually coming across a usable river is likely to slow your advance by a couple of decades/centuries at the least. Long story short, going anywhere more than a day away in pre-history was scary, dangerous and very very hard, and moving next door was a lot easier. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_of_Soissons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_of_Soissons (This was in the 1700's in Europe, they had guns and steel. Imagine having only leather and stone tools.
jghn 8y ago
this wasn’t a journey where people were trying to get from point a to point b.

garmaine 8y ago

Why would they?

mongol 8y ago
Tourism?
vortico 8y ago
Chasing migrating buffaloe?
- dredmorbius 8y ago
  Game (and other biota) tend to distribute latitudinally, along uniform climate zones, far more than longitudinally, across them. Bison have a daily range of about 2 mi. (3.2 km). This would give a seasonal range (over 90 days) of only 200 miles (320km) or so , and likely far less.

simonh 8y ago

I’m just guessing, but community and social support networks are vital for survival and to retain access to potential mates. You don’t deliberately distance yourself from that without a really good reason. Also the nice you have built experience with the terrain, shelter, food, water and material resources of a region why give all that up? Even nomadic cultures have a range and set of routes and locations they know and visit. Suddenly changing climactic zone is also probably difficult as the different climate, flora and fauna might require very different sets of skills.

egjerlow 8y ago

Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond has its fair share of critics, but one thing I feel it does well is introduce to the general populace the ways of thinking around questions like this. In the case of migration, one of the factors that slowed it down so much is the lack of properly 'domestic' peoples that actually had a population surplus. If you're a hunter-gatherer tribe that has reached an equilibrium between children born and people dying, and your hunting grounds provide the resources you need to sustain that equilibrium, there is little reason to go looking elsewhere (migrate).

Alan_Dillman 8y ago

Climatic and geographic familiarity is a big thing. My ancestors left the Russian Steppes and ended up in Kansas, by all accounts a much nicer place. They left anyway, and homesteaded in an area of Canada that is quite similar to the terrain they'd left behind in the old country. They skipped over a lot of good farm land, and ended up in Northern Alberta for no discernible reason other than they knew how to deal with it. The problems made sense to their skill sets, and they did very well. As the other person said, familial support is darned important, which is why my family went to Kansas in the first place. They had relatives there. It was recent enough that my grandmother has gone there to visit her cousins over the years. I imagine that successful hunter-gatherer groups colonised over the next hill, or a days walk or two down the river. Probably someone could model that to narrow down prospective digs. I know that the land between the confluence of two rivers was a common place for groups to meet up. I guess my family also provides a modern example of far colonising. The way they bridged the Atlantic was by sending a few young men ahead to scout out new potential homelands. I suspect that they used this as a sort of social control, and to add a useful function to the young men who were disruptive agents in their society. In a hunter-gather society, this tactic would be better than straight banishment or death. "Climb that mountain pass and see if there is good land on the other side. Prove the land by staying over summer, and come back in the fall with skins and dried berries".

neffy 8y ago
It´s also possible that then as now, the idea of spending summer away from parental control was an excellent motivator for the younger members of the tribe to find new digs.
- bilbo0s 8y ago
  So true. Sometimes, the answers are so much more simple than we think.
- toyg 8y ago
  To be fair, "parental control" back then was so much looser than anything we could conceive today. Any family would have had a minimum of 3 or 4 children, and they would have been put to work at ages as early as 8, possibly becoming a tribe peer shortly after. There was probably control at tribe level, but parents were likely busy surviving. We also keep talking about this in terms of rejection (being banned, escaping parents etc), but it might well be that they were simply pushed by a reckless sense of exploration, curiosity, and personal ambition. Their world was endlessly new: what is beyond that hill? What is beyond that river? I'll find out, and if it's good, I'll make it mine. After all I'm a teenager, I obviously cannot die.

Balero 8y ago

You have to approach it with the knowledge and motivation of those people. First off, you don't know where you're going, at all. You have never been more than 20-30 miles from your home base, and neither has anyone out of the 30-40 people you know. The world is dangerous, there are lions and bears and worse everywhere, let alone the unknown things that you probably believe in. Camping out in the open is incredible dangerous. You much prefer to stick to places you know and have feel safe in. You have to think about why you're moving. There are two major reasons for going anywhere. First, something dangerous has come. A pack of wolves that like to eat people [0], a forest fire, a food shortage, another group of humans (not all bad, now you have some trade, but this was probably also a major danger with fighting for territory/reproduction). This drives you just far enough away to escape the danger, and there's always a chance you'll come back to the familiar territory when the danger has passed. Secondly, your group has grown and has started acting like two groups. This new group will probably only move next door. There will still be familial bonds and cooperation. Add in that the population isn't growing all that fast and this is very slow movement. You have to think how and what you're moving. You do not have a backpack. You have a bunch of baskets and maybe a couple of (literal dead animal) bladders of water. You can only take what you can carry, if the wheel had been invented it probably can't get over the terrain you're on. You need to stick to freshwater, so you can go down a river, and maybe chance along the coast hoping to get to another river a day or so away. Your group consists of babies that need carrying, children that need protecting, old people that know stuff but are slow, and more mouths to feed than you would like. Also bear in mind you were walking on game trails no human had ever walked on in bare feet/crap shoes at best. You also need to make fire (or take it with you) every night. Finding a rive will basically stop any travel, they are a great place to fish/hunt and have accessible water. So actually coming across a usable river is likely to slow your advance by a couple of decades/centuries at the least. Long story short, going anywhere more than a day away in pre-history was scary, dangerous and very very hard, and moving next door was a lot easier. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_of_Soissons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_of_Soissons (This was in the 1700's in Europe, they had guns and steel. Imagine having only leather and stone tools.

jghn 8y ago

this wasn’t a journey where people were trying to get from point a to point b.