5 ms·

National Geographic marks the coastal route (20k - 15k ago) on their maps for schools. So it seems it's an already accepted theory? https://www.nationalgeograp

National Geographic marks the coastal route (20k - 15k ago) on their maps for schools. So it seems it's an already accepted theory? https://www.nationalgeographic.org/photo/bering-land-bridge/ https://www.nationalgeographic.org/photo/bering-land-bridge/

showerst 7y ago
This family of theories has been around for a while, 1491 by Charles Mann discusses them extensively, and that book is from 2005. Reliable evidence is sparse though, so this could be a major contribution.
- curtis 7y ago
  For more than a decade, evidence has been piling up that humans colonized the Americas thousands of years before the Clovis people. It's actually been longer than that. The site at Monte Verde [1] in Chile seems to have been widely accepted as a pre-Clovis site nearly 20 years ago (1997 according to Wikipedia [2]). Awareness of the site, at least among the archaeological community predates that (1989 [3]). The first radiocarbon dates indicating a pre-Clovis origin for the site go back to 1982[4]. The idea that Clovis was not the earliest culture in the Americas, and the commensurate theory that the earliest colonists must have been traveling by boat [5] goes back decades. I know I've been reading about it (in the popular press no less) since the 1990s. It seems like every article I read about it makes it seem like some new and revolutionary idea. The only conclusion I can draw is that archaeological science operates on time scales only slightly shorter than those the archaeologists study. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Verde https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Verde [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Verde#Acceptance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Verde#Acceptance [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Verde#Diffusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Verde#Diffusion [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Verde#Discovery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Verde#Discovery (third paragraph) [5] I'd like to give you a citation for this, but this theory, as far as I can tell has no official name. [Just quoting myself from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12603556 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12603556]
  - curtis 7y ago
    [5] I'd like to give you a citation for this, but this theory, as far as I can tell has no official name. "The coastal migration hypothesis" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coastal_migration_(Americas) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coastal_migration_(Americas), which should not be confused with "the Southern Dispersal scenario (also the coastal migration hypothesis)" at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Dispersal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Dispersal.
jcranmer 7y ago
It's been known since around the mid-90s that the "ice-free gap" opened up too late to allow for humans to arrive before Clovis, and that Clovis-first was an untenable theory. However, it takes a long time for scientific consensus to work its way into textbooks and popular imagination. When I was learning about this stuff in school around 2005-ish, the textbooks still suggested the ice-free migration route, although coastal migration was suggested as a plausible alternative. Even as late as 2017, there's still a popularly cited anthropology writer (but not an anthropologist) who believes in Clovis-first and vociferously argues against pre-Clovis migration.

showerst 7y ago

This family of theories has been around for a while, 1491 by Charles Mann discusses them extensively, and that book is from 2005. Reliable evidence is sparse though, so this could be a major contribution.

curtis 7y ago
For more than a decade, evidence has been piling up that humans colonized the Americas thousands of years before the Clovis people. It's actually been longer than that. The site at Monte Verde [1] in Chile seems to have been widely accepted as a pre-Clovis site nearly 20 years ago (1997 according to Wikipedia [2]). Awareness of the site, at least among the archaeological community predates that (1989 [3]). The first radiocarbon dates indicating a pre-Clovis origin for the site go back to 1982[4]. The idea that Clovis was not the earliest culture in the Americas, and the commensurate theory that the earliest colonists must have been traveling by boat [5] goes back decades. I know I've been reading about it (in the popular press no less) since the 1990s. It seems like every article I read about it makes it seem like some new and revolutionary idea. The only conclusion I can draw is that archaeological science operates on time scales only slightly shorter than those the archaeologists study. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Verde https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Verde [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Verde#Acceptance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Verde#Acceptance [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Verde#Diffusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Verde#Diffusion [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Verde#Discovery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Verde#Discovery (third paragraph) [5] I'd like to give you a citation for this, but this theory, as far as I can tell has no official name. [Just quoting myself from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12603556 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12603556]
- curtis 7y ago
  [5] I'd like to give you a citation for this, but this theory, as far as I can tell has no official name. "The coastal migration hypothesis" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coastal_migration_(Americas) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coastal_migration_(Americas), which should not be confused with "the Southern Dispersal scenario (also the coastal migration hypothesis)" at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Dispersal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Dispersal.

jcranmer 7y ago

It's been known since around the mid-90s that the "ice-free gap" opened up too late to allow for humans to arrive before Clovis, and that Clovis-first was an untenable theory. However, it takes a long time for scientific consensus to work its way into textbooks and popular imagination. When I was learning about this stuff in school around 2005-ish, the textbooks still suggested the ice-free migration route, although coastal migration was suggested as a plausible alternative. Even as late as 2017, there's still a popularly cited anthropology writer (but not an anthropologist) who believes in Clovis-first and vociferously argues against pre-Clovis migration.