12 ms·

Archaeology and genetics can’t yet agree on when humans arrived in the Americas

97 points by HR01 4y ago

resuresu 4y ago
Over 100k years ago according to serpent mound in Ohio.
- googlryas 4y ago
  Wikipedia first line: > The Serpent Mound is believed to have been built by the Native American Adena peoples around 320 BCE, and then either added to or repaired by the Fort Ancient peoples around 1100 CE. So maybe 2k years?
  - maxbond 4y ago
    (See correction below.) Much older. T̶h̶e̶r̶e̶ ̶a̶r̶e̶ ̶v̶a̶r̶i̶o̶u̶s̶ ̶d̶i̶s̶p̶u̶t̶e̶d̶ ̶s̶i̶t̶e̶s̶,̶ ̶b̶u̶t̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶r̶e̶c̶e̶n̶t̶ ̶d̶i̶s̶c̶o̶v̶e̶r̶y̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶f̶o̶o̶t̶p̶r̶i̶n̶t̶s̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶W̶h̶i̶t̶e̶ ̶S̶a̶n̶d̶s̶ ̶e̶s̶t̶a̶b̶l̶i̶s̶h̶e̶s̶ ̶a̶ ̶l̶o̶w̶e̶r̶ ̶b̶o̶u̶n̶d̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶b̶e̶t̶w̶e̶e̶n̶ ̶2̶1̶k̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶2̶3̶k̶.̶ (This is less settled than I'd thought.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Sands_fossil_footprints https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Sands_fossil_footprints T̶h̶e̶ ̶p̶r̶e̶v̶i̶o̶u̶s̶ ̶u̶n̶c̶o̶n̶t̶r̶o̶v̶e̶r̶s̶i̶a̶l̶ ̶l̶o̶w̶e̶r̶ ̶b̶o̶u̶n̶d̶ ̶w̶a̶s̶ ̶b̶e̶t̶w̶e̶e̶n̶ ̶1̶2̶.̶8̶k̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶1̶3̶.̶5̶k̶.̶ (This hasn't been a lower bound for a while, see below.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clovis_point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clovis_point It's my understanding this is an active area of debate. To give a tentative upper bound, the Cerutti mastodon kill - who's anthropogenic origins, while they seem compelling to me (a nonexpert), are hotly debated, have a date of 130k years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerutti_Mastodon_site https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerutti_Mastodon_site (I suspect GP meant to reference the Cerutti Mastodon site, rather than Serpent Mound?) (And of course, much of this is referenced in the article, I'm busted for reading the comments first! Interesting article that says it far better than I, worth reading.)
    - notart666 4y ago
      Does that make sense for them to continued to have existed for thousands of years during the ice age where nothing grew? Or if the dating is even accurate at all?
      - maxbond 4y ago
        Well, the ice age[1] was everywhere right? Our ancestors would've had trouble surviving most anywhere, why not California? It's not that literally nothing grew, otherwise what were the mastadon & other animals in the kill site eating? Another possibility is that this was another group of hominids, not homo sapiens, and that they did in fact die out. But honestly I'm not qualified to say much more in the subject than I have, I think it's a fascinating hypothesis & that the evidence that the bones were broken apart by being impacted with stones, in a similar manner to how bones are broken up to extract marrow, is compelling. And that the further isotopic evidence suggesting it was the stones found around the site, rather than construction equipment, is also compelling. But I'm not an archaeologist, and when the debate settles, I'll accept the conclusion they come to. [1] Not to be pedantic, just to note because I find it fascinating, but the current ice age hasn't ended, this was the "last glacial period". Between ice ages there can be things like palm trees and turtles living at the poles. We're currently in an interglacial period of an ongoing ice age.
        kuhewa 4y ago
        Yeah worth mentioning, to put a fine point on it - geological ice ages are millions of years long and include alternating glacial and interglacial periods. In popular use of the terms, ice ages are those shorter glacial periods.
        moloch-hai 4y ago
        Most of the world was not iced over; mainly just higher latitudes like where European geologists come from. People in the tropics experienced big climatic shifts -- green Sahara, Amazon savannah, and the Java Sea, South China Sea, Yellow Sea, and Persian Gulf all lush bottom land -- but mostly not ice.
cvg 4y ago
Interesting read. I’m curious if anyone is familiar with the software they use to connect the genetic sequencing. I’m amazed that they can find migration patterns from this data.
dmckeon 4y ago
Great review of a complicated and developing topic. Best line, and so true: > Unfortunately, because science is all too often taught in school as a collection of facts, rather than a dynamic process of enquiry, people can be vulnerable to being misled ...
- tdrgabi 4y ago
  Tongue in cheek because I feel nitpicky: Feels like the above quote is misleading as well. It uses the pattern: <because reason suitable to my point> <situation that most of us agree happens>. We agree that situation happens but the reason is not obvious, it just sounds right. Maybe we will always be vulnerable to be misled, regardless of how we are thought, education won't change that, it just sounds pleasant etc...
- moloch-hai 4y ago
  The article nicely illustrates by numerous examples how opponents of not yet well-established proposals endlessly trot out long-since discredited assertions in defense of whatever they fought over while in grad school.
maxbond 4y ago
> When European settlers and explorers first encountered the Native peoples of the Americas, they sought to force the fact of the Native people’s existence into a Biblical worldview. The First Peoples, who built the impressive earthworks, monuments, temples and pyramids throughout the Americas, were recast as members of a lost tribe of Israelites, Irish sailors, or possibly Vikings, for the ideological convenience of settlers. > The pretence that the first peoples of the Americas were a different race than Native Americans – a view known today as the Myth of the Moundbuilders – became extremely popular in the 18th and 19th centuries. I'm always struck by how there's nothing new under the sun. This is basically the same conspiracy theory as Ancient Aliens, with different aesthetics for different centuries.
- eesmith 4y ago
  Minor nit: not all of the Norse settlers of Vinland were Christian.
- stevehawk 4y ago
  I toured those mounds near St Louis.. it's absolutely amazing. Especially since none of my childhood public education made a single effort to state their existence, let alone go into just how much of a society existed before we (Europeans) showed up.
  - mbg721 4y ago
    Cahokia is shockingly big, and the idea of multiple successive societies of mound-builders is sort of ignored or taken for granted; the concept of American Indians who wouldn't fit into a John Wayne movie doesn't cross Americans' minds.
    - prpl 4y ago
      On that point, can you name even 1 pre-columbian films that doesn’t involve a white person? Here is a relevant wikipedia article: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Films_set_in_pre-Columbian_America https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Films_set_in_pre-Co...
skymast 4y ago
What happened to the Mound People? And as an added credit, which civilization of North American 'natives' did the Mound People exterminate?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
taeric 4y ago
I love how the lede highlights that disagreement is good science. I realize that is largely just a hook, but it still makes me happy.
ericmcer 4y ago
I read about 'Population Y' in David Reichs book "Who We Are and How We Got Here" (which is a good read but was a bit too in depth for me). One interesting thing in the book was how humans kept repeating this cycle: societies migrate outward and form new societies. Then one of the societies would eradicate/consume a bunch of nearby ones, form a gigantic society, and the process would begin anew. On a human timescale it is horrific and brutal but over a 50,000 year period it is interesting how we spread out but always eventually reunite with the group we split from, unfortunately in a brutal way :(.
- nothrowaways 4y ago
  Interesting, the world might end up being one eventually
rfwhyte 4y ago
The only hypothesis I can come up with that lets me square the archaeological evidence (the numerous sites with pre-clovis dates) and the genetic evidence (almost all current North American indigenous population genetics derives from a single population that split off 17Kya) is that there's been multiple waves of people that have migrated into the Americas, and that either the events precluding or surrounding the Younger Dryas period contributed to a severe depopulating of the continent at that time, or that the most recent wave of immigrants almost entirely wiped out the previous population, as had they absorbed them I would assume we'd see more genetic evidence of that. Personally I think the preponderance of archaeological evidence is strongly suggesting that there were absolutely people in the Americas pre-clovis, but the really interesting question from here then is who were they and what happened to them?
- AlotOfReading 4y ago
  The 16-17ka date is the divergence between Northern and southern native american groups, both related to the later (~13ka) clovis culture. Indigenous americans as a whole diverged from Eurasians sometime before 20ka. That initial population eventually split into multiple lineages (Unsampled Population A, Ancient Beringians, Clovis ancestors) that entered the Americas, although it's not clear what order those events occurred in. We know that there was also later admixture between Alaskan and Eurasian populations across the bering strait and groups like the paleoinuit likely originated (partially) on the siberian side of the straight, but the vast majority of indigenous ancestry across the Americas as a whole derives to the ancestors of the clovis complex. It's not clear how preclovis people relate genetically to those clovis ancestors in the absence of genetic data for them.
- crazygringo 4y ago
  Yes, multiple waves is suggested near the very end of the article, and that this is a focus of current data collection: > Another possibility ties together evidence of Population Y and potential archaeological evidence at sites like White Sands. Could there have been multiple migrations into the Americas, with one pre-LGM migration consisting of Population Y individuals (and perhaps Unsampled Population A or other groups we have yet to identify), and one post-LGM migration? This would reconcile the archaeological evidence of early traces of humans in the Americas (if they are indeed legitimate, which has yet to be demonstrated to everyone’s satisfaction) and the genetic data. > Archaeologists sceptical of White Sands’ early dates are dubious of the second scenario, and it is admittedly speculative. We need a great deal more data, both genomic and archaeological, to test it. But, as a field, we are actively engaged in collecting that data, even as I type these words.
neonate 4y ago
http://web.archive.org/web/20221231170006/https://aeon.co/essays/the-first-americans-a-story-of-wonderful-uncertain-science http://web.archive.org/web/20221231170006/https://aeon.co/es...
Octokiddie 4y ago
> Then, in 2021, a team of archaeologists dropped a bombshell into this debate: they’d found footprints – unquestionable evidence of a human presence – at White Sands National Park in New Mexico, dating to between 23,000-21,000 years ago. The article places that date long before the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM): > It [the Clovis point] appeared widely across the continent beginning about 13,400 years ago, near the end of the LGM. Which raises the question of what people were doing in the Americas before the LGM? USGS has this to say about what might have been going on with the climate at the time the White Sands footprints were laid down: > During the late Pleistocene (~129,000 to ~11,700 years ago), full glacial conditions were interrupted repeatedly by abrupt warming events called Dansgaard-Oeschger, or D-O events. In the southwestern U.S., D-O events caused centuries-long megadroughts, which devastated spring ecosystems, lowered lake levels, affected sea-surface temperatures and circulation patterns, and even triggered seismic activity. One of these events, called D-O 2, dates to ~23,500 years ago and was especially impactful to spring ecosystems, as water tables never returned to the same levels after the event that they had maintained for thousands of years prior. https://www.usgs.gov/programs/climate-research-and-development-program/news/discovery-ancient-human-footprints-white https://www.usgs.gov/programs/climate-research-and-developme... Wikipedia notes that D-O events flared up extremely rapidly on a geological timescale: > In the Northern Hemisphere, they [D-O events] take the form of rapid warming episodes, typically in a matter of decades, each followed by gradual cooling over a longer period. ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dansgaard–Oeschger_event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dansgaard–Oeschger_event
- moloch-hai 4y ago
  The null hypothesis is that animals, including humans, moved where they could, when they could, regardless of any inconvenience for theorists of recent prehistory. All we can know about the prehistory of present populations from genetics is their direct ancestry. Who was in the Americas before those ancestors, but did not breed with them, is lost to us until we find actual remains. Pretending to know there weren't any is a mistake made over and over again, yet never learned from.
m0llusk 4y ago
Can't is a really strong word. More like we are still working on it, and so far the solution looks complicated.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
kvetching 4y ago
All the evidence points to North America being loaded with many remnants of past civilization but the narrative always took presidence over the truth. Don't underestimate the power of the narrative (Columbus discovered America, only containing savages) For example, check out this Twitter account, Waking Up with Analog. This guy has been reviewing old newspapers from 1700s-1900s and has found many many articles detailing ancient discoveries of civilizations here in North America. Again, most of these were quashed and disappeared in favor of the prevailing ideological narrative. https://twitter.com/1_analog_9 https://twitter.com/1_analog_9 Check out this new video released yesterday. It hypothesizes that Florida is actually the biblical Garden of Eden and that the true Fertile Crescent / cradle of humanity is the Gulf. https://youtu.be/v-zAxsAbpQo https://youtu.be/v-zAxsAbpQo Look up the Saxor Stones, very clear ancient boat anchors spread all throughout Florida. People say they are natural but you can clearly see the holes are manmade and you can see where the ropes had went. They are the largest stone boat anchors anywhere in the world. Here's a documentary about them https://youtu.be/L5Uu3bRPuIA https://youtu.be/L5Uu3bRPuIA

97 points by HR01 4y ago

resuresu 4y ago

Over 100k years ago according to serpent mound in Ohio.

googlryas 4y ago
Wikipedia first line: > The Serpent Mound is believed to have been built by the Native American Adena peoples around 320 BCE, and then either added to or repaired by the Fort Ancient peoples around 1100 CE. So maybe 2k years?
- maxbond 4y ago
  (See correction below.) Much older. T̶h̶e̶r̶e̶ ̶a̶r̶e̶ ̶v̶a̶r̶i̶o̶u̶s̶ ̶d̶i̶s̶p̶u̶t̶e̶d̶ ̶s̶i̶t̶e̶s̶,̶ ̶b̶u̶t̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶r̶e̶c̶e̶n̶t̶ ̶d̶i̶s̶c̶o̶v̶e̶r̶y̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶f̶o̶o̶t̶p̶r̶i̶n̶t̶s̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶W̶h̶i̶t̶e̶ ̶S̶a̶n̶d̶s̶ ̶e̶s̶t̶a̶b̶l̶i̶s̶h̶e̶s̶ ̶a̶ ̶l̶o̶w̶e̶r̶ ̶b̶o̶u̶n̶d̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶b̶e̶t̶w̶e̶e̶n̶ ̶2̶1̶k̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶2̶3̶k̶.̶ (This is less settled than I'd thought.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Sands_fossil_footprints https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Sands_fossil_footprints T̶h̶e̶ ̶p̶r̶e̶v̶i̶o̶u̶s̶ ̶u̶n̶c̶o̶n̶t̶r̶o̶v̶e̶r̶s̶i̶a̶l̶ ̶l̶o̶w̶e̶r̶ ̶b̶o̶u̶n̶d̶ ̶w̶a̶s̶ ̶b̶e̶t̶w̶e̶e̶n̶ ̶1̶2̶.̶8̶k̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶1̶3̶.̶5̶k̶.̶ (This hasn't been a lower bound for a while, see below.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clovis_point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clovis_point It's my understanding this is an active area of debate. To give a tentative upper bound, the Cerutti mastodon kill - who's anthropogenic origins, while they seem compelling to me (a nonexpert), are hotly debated, have a date of 130k years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerutti_Mastodon_site https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerutti_Mastodon_site (I suspect GP meant to reference the Cerutti Mastodon site, rather than Serpent Mound?) (And of course, much of this is referenced in the article, I'm busted for reading the comments first! Interesting article that says it far better than I, worth reading.)
  - notart666 4y ago
    Does that make sense for them to continued to have existed for thousands of years during the ice age where nothing grew? Or if the dating is even accurate at all?
    - maxbond 4y ago
      Well, the ice age[1] was everywhere right? Our ancestors would've had trouble surviving most anywhere, why not California? It's not that literally nothing grew, otherwise what were the mastadon & other animals in the kill site eating? Another possibility is that this was another group of hominids, not homo sapiens, and that they did in fact die out. But honestly I'm not qualified to say much more in the subject than I have, I think it's a fascinating hypothesis & that the evidence that the bones were broken apart by being impacted with stones, in a similar manner to how bones are broken up to extract marrow, is compelling. And that the further isotopic evidence suggesting it was the stones found around the site, rather than construction equipment, is also compelling. But I'm not an archaeologist, and when the debate settles, I'll accept the conclusion they come to. [1] Not to be pedantic, just to note because I find it fascinating, but the current ice age hasn't ended, this was the "last glacial period". Between ice ages there can be things like palm trees and turtles living at the poles. We're currently in an interglacial period of an ongoing ice age.
      - kuhewa 4y ago
        Yeah worth mentioning, to put a fine point on it - geological ice ages are millions of years long and include alternating glacial and interglacial periods. In popular use of the terms, ice ages are those shorter glacial periods.
      - moloch-hai 4y ago
        Most of the world was not iced over; mainly just higher latitudes like where European geologists come from. People in the tropics experienced big climatic shifts -- green Sahara, Amazon savannah, and the Java Sea, South China Sea, Yellow Sea, and Persian Gulf all lush bottom land -- but mostly not ice.

cvg 4y ago

Interesting read. I’m curious if anyone is familiar with the software they use to connect the genetic sequencing. I’m amazed that they can find migration patterns from this data.

dmckeon 4y ago

Great review of a complicated and developing topic. Best line, and so true: > Unfortunately, because science is all too often taught in school as a collection of facts, rather than a dynamic process of enquiry, people can be vulnerable to being misled ...

tdrgabi 4y ago
Tongue in cheek because I feel nitpicky: Feels like the above quote is misleading as well. It uses the pattern: <because reason suitable to my point> <situation that most of us agree happens>. We agree that situation happens but the reason is not obvious, it just sounds right. Maybe we will always be vulnerable to be misled, regardless of how we are thought, education won't change that, it just sounds pleasant etc...
moloch-hai 4y ago
The article nicely illustrates by numerous examples how opponents of not yet well-established proposals endlessly trot out long-since discredited assertions in defense of whatever they fought over while in grad school.

maxbond 4y ago

> When European settlers and explorers first encountered the Native peoples of the Americas, they sought to force the fact of the Native people’s existence into a Biblical worldview. The First Peoples, who built the impressive earthworks, monuments, temples and pyramids throughout the Americas, were recast as members of a lost tribe of Israelites, Irish sailors, or possibly Vikings, for the ideological convenience of settlers. > The pretence that the first peoples of the Americas were a different race than Native Americans – a view known today as the Myth of the Moundbuilders – became extremely popular in the 18th and 19th centuries. I'm always struck by how there's nothing new under the sun. This is basically the same conspiracy theory as Ancient Aliens, with different aesthetics for different centuries.

eesmith 4y ago
Minor nit: not all of the Norse settlers of Vinland were Christian.
stevehawk 4y ago
I toured those mounds near St Louis.. it's absolutely amazing. Especially since none of my childhood public education made a single effort to state their existence, let alone go into just how much of a society existed before we (Europeans) showed up.
- mbg721 4y ago
  Cahokia is shockingly big, and the idea of multiple successive societies of mound-builders is sort of ignored or taken for granted; the concept of American Indians who wouldn't fit into a John Wayne movie doesn't cross Americans' minds.
  - prpl 4y ago
    On that point, can you name even 1 pre-columbian films that doesn’t involve a white person? Here is a relevant wikipedia article: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Films_set_in_pre-Columbian_America https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Films_set_in_pre-Co...

skymast 4y ago

What happened to the Mound People? And as an added credit, which civilization of North American 'natives' did the Mound People exterminate?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

taeric 4y ago

I love how the lede highlights that disagreement is good science. I realize that is largely just a hook, but it still makes me happy.

ericmcer 4y ago

I read about 'Population Y' in David Reichs book "Who We Are and How We Got Here" (which is a good read but was a bit too in depth for me). One interesting thing in the book was how humans kept repeating this cycle: societies migrate outward and form new societies. Then one of the societies would eradicate/consume a bunch of nearby ones, form a gigantic society, and the process would begin anew. On a human timescale it is horrific and brutal but over a 50,000 year period it is interesting how we spread out but always eventually reunite with the group we split from, unfortunately in a brutal way :(.

nothrowaways 4y ago
Interesting, the world might end up being one eventually

rfwhyte 4y ago

The only hypothesis I can come up with that lets me square the archaeological evidence (the numerous sites with pre-clovis dates) and the genetic evidence (almost all current North American indigenous population genetics derives from a single population that split off 17Kya) is that there's been multiple waves of people that have migrated into the Americas, and that either the events precluding or surrounding the Younger Dryas period contributed to a severe depopulating of the continent at that time, or that the most recent wave of immigrants almost entirely wiped out the previous population, as had they absorbed them I would assume we'd see more genetic evidence of that. Personally I think the preponderance of archaeological evidence is strongly suggesting that there were absolutely people in the Americas pre-clovis, but the really interesting question from here then is who were they and what happened to them?

AlotOfReading 4y ago
The 16-17ka date is the divergence between Northern and southern native american groups, both related to the later (~13ka) clovis culture. Indigenous americans as a whole diverged from Eurasians sometime before 20ka. That initial population eventually split into multiple lineages (Unsampled Population A, Ancient Beringians, Clovis ancestors) that entered the Americas, although it's not clear what order those events occurred in. We know that there was also later admixture between Alaskan and Eurasian populations across the bering strait and groups like the paleoinuit likely originated (partially) on the siberian side of the straight, but the vast majority of indigenous ancestry across the Americas as a whole derives to the ancestors of the clovis complex. It's not clear how preclovis people relate genetically to those clovis ancestors in the absence of genetic data for them.
crazygringo 4y ago
Yes, multiple waves is suggested near the very end of the article, and that this is a focus of current data collection: > Another possibility ties together evidence of Population Y and potential archaeological evidence at sites like White Sands. Could there have been multiple migrations into the Americas, with one pre-LGM migration consisting of Population Y individuals (and perhaps Unsampled Population A or other groups we have yet to identify), and one post-LGM migration? This would reconcile the archaeological evidence of early traces of humans in the Americas (if they are indeed legitimate, which has yet to be demonstrated to everyone’s satisfaction) and the genetic data. > Archaeologists sceptical of White Sands’ early dates are dubious of the second scenario, and it is admittedly speculative. We need a great deal more data, both genomic and archaeological, to test it. But, as a field, we are actively engaged in collecting that data, even as I type these words.

neonate 4y ago

http://web.archive.org/web/20221231170006/https://aeon.co/essays/the-first-americans-a-story-of-wonderful-uncertain-science http://web.archive.org/web/20221231170006/https://aeon.co/es...

Octokiddie 4y ago

> Then, in 2021, a team of archaeologists dropped a bombshell into this debate: they’d found footprints – unquestionable evidence of a human presence – at White Sands National Park in New Mexico, dating to between 23,000-21,000 years ago. The article places that date long before the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM): > It [the Clovis point] appeared widely across the continent beginning about 13,400 years ago, near the end of the LGM. Which raises the question of what people were doing in the Americas before the LGM? USGS has this to say about what might have been going on with the climate at the time the White Sands footprints were laid down: > During the late Pleistocene (~129,000 to ~11,700 years ago), full glacial conditions were interrupted repeatedly by abrupt warming events called Dansgaard-Oeschger, or D-O events. In the southwestern U.S., D-O events caused centuries-long megadroughts, which devastated spring ecosystems, lowered lake levels, affected sea-surface temperatures and circulation patterns, and even triggered seismic activity. One of these events, called D-O 2, dates to ~23,500 years ago and was especially impactful to spring ecosystems, as water tables never returned to the same levels after the event that they had maintained for thousands of years prior. https://www.usgs.gov/programs/climate-research-and-development-program/news/discovery-ancient-human-footprints-white https://www.usgs.gov/programs/climate-research-and-developme... Wikipedia notes that D-O events flared up extremely rapidly on a geological timescale: > In the Northern Hemisphere, they [D-O events] take the form of rapid warming episodes, typically in a matter of decades, each followed by gradual cooling over a longer period. ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dansgaard–Oeschger_event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dansgaard–Oeschger_event

moloch-hai 4y ago
The null hypothesis is that animals, including humans, moved where they could, when they could, regardless of any inconvenience for theorists of recent prehistory. All we can know about the prehistory of present populations from genetics is their direct ancestry. Who was in the Americas before those ancestors, but did not breed with them, is lost to us until we find actual remains. Pretending to know there weren't any is a mistake made over and over again, yet never learned from.

m0llusk 4y ago

Can't is a really strong word. More like we are still working on it, and so far the solution looks complicated.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

kvetching 4y ago

All the evidence points to North America being loaded with many remnants of past civilization but the narrative always took presidence over the truth. Don't underestimate the power of the narrative (Columbus discovered America, only containing savages) For example, check out this Twitter account, Waking Up with Analog. This guy has been reviewing old newspapers from 1700s-1900s and has found many many articles detailing ancient discoveries of civilizations here in North America. Again, most of these were quashed and disappeared in favor of the prevailing ideological narrative. https://twitter.com/1_analog_9 https://twitter.com/1_analog_9 Check out this new video released yesterday. It hypothesizes that Florida is actually the biblical Garden of Eden and that the true Fertile Crescent / cradle of humanity is the Gulf. https://youtu.be/v-zAxsAbpQo https://youtu.be/v-zAxsAbpQo Look up the Saxor Stones, very clear ancient boat anchors spread all throughout Florida. People say they are natural but you can clearly see the holes are manmade and you can see where the ropes had went. They are the largest stone boat anchors anywhere in the world. Here's a documentary about them https://youtu.be/L5Uu3bRPuIA https://youtu.be/L5Uu3bRPuIA