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Indigenous people in North America have always disputed the academic consensus on how and when humans first got there, and archeologists keep making discoveries
by mbgerring 3y ago
Indigenous people in North America have always disputed the academic consensus on how and when humans first got there, and archeologists keep making discoveries supporting their position.
- soneca 3y ago> ”academic consensus” This should probably be qualified as US academic consensus. Academics in Brazil have disputed the 13k yo date for America occupation for some time already.
- gota 3y agoTo wit, the Luzia woman was found to be ~12 thousand years-old in South America, so it puts the 13 thousand date in question Disclaimer: I know absolute nothing about this topic and this is from my recollection of reading wikipedia and soft-science articles As I understand it, it should have taken a lot of time for full migration from North to South America; and while a thousand years seems more than enough for travel, apparently migration takes a long, long time - and the odds are that a fossil comes from a migrated population, virtually impossible to be from an odd outlier that traveled ahead (for whatever reason)
- soneca 3y agoI know very little too, but just happened to listen to an interview about this topic. Here is a paper suggesting that the region of where is Mexico had populations 30k years ago. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2509-0 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2509-0
- AlbertCory 3y ago> apparently migration takes a long, long time if we take a generation to be 20 years, and the grown children move 20 miles away so as not to compete for resources and/or find fresh ones, then we get about 1 mile per year. 1000 years == 1000 miles of migration,
- themaninthedark 3y agoWeren't people hunter-gatherers at this point in time? They would be highly mobile and actively looking for new, richer ground.
- AlbertCory 3y ago.. and so? they'd spread less than a mile per year? Or more?
- AlotOfReading 3y agoTypical mobility numbers for North American lithic and archaic groups are in the hundreds of miles/kilometers annually, generally decreasing over time. Those estimates come from groups many thousands of years after the dates being discussed here, but they're the best we have.
- AlbertCory 3y agoSo: I estimated 365 miles/year and you had "hundreds of miles/kilometers annually." I don't see anything to argue about, specifically, especially no one really knows.
- AlotOfReading 3y agoYour response above is 1 mi/year, but in any case I'm not really responding to argue. Just stating what a reasonable mobility is in North American archaeology, around ~500km/yr.
- AlbertCory 3y agoBeat me to it. It occurred to me that I had one mile per year, not per day, and I was about to delete that post.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- marcellus23 3y agoThe academic consensus, incorrect as it may be, is based on scientific evidence of human existence in the Americas. Is there similar evidence that academia has ignored but indigenous peoples are aware of? Or are you referring to oral tradition?
- nequo 3y agoThe academic consensus is usually reached through a social process, so who wields authority within the discipline also influences what the consensus is. An example from mathematics: the shunning of Georg Cantor for his proof that the real numbers are uncountably infinite.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Cantor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Cantor
- marcellus23 3y agoSure, but that doesn't mean consensus is wrong by default. If there's evidence that mainstream academia is ignoring without good reason, that's another matter, but to my knowledge that's not the case.
- calderknight 3y agoI don't think people are suggesting it is wrong by default, just that it's not correct by default, and is in this case the theory it has arrived at is deeply underdetermined by the evidence.
- marcellus23 3y agoMy understanding is that the theory made sense given the evidence we had, and now that we have new evidence, it calls that theory into question — isn't this the nature of scientific progress? And, regardless, what does any of this have to do with indigenous knowledge?
- calderknight 3y ago
- huytersd 3y agoWell what is the Native American perspective on it?
- funnywallnutt 3y agoHere's an interview. https://srslywrong.com/podcast/252-the-indigenous-paleolithic-of-the-western-hemisphere-w-dr-paulette-steeves/ https://srslywrong.com/podcast/252-the-indigenous-paleolithi...
- OfSanguineFire 3y agoIndigenous peoples of North America have a range of positions, not just one. All the way from saying maybe migration should be pushed back some X number of millennia before Clovis, to holding that the Creator created their tribes right where they are and it is offensive to claim they migrated from Asia.
- cogman10 3y agoI'd further say that even people from the same tribe will have differing views on this sort of thing. Indigenous people don't have homogeneous beliefs. It's sort of like saying "Europeans believe the Garden of Eden was in Missouri".
- telotortium 3y agoI believe there was another recent study that found some pre-Clovis ancient DNA and concluded that modern Native Americans shared little in common, implying that pre-Clovis people were largely wiped out and thus are not ancestors of modern Native Americans. Also not sure that the academic consensus has been that Clovis was the earliest settlement for maybe a decade.
- AlotOfReading 3y agoDo you have any more details than that? The only purported preclovis sequencing I'm aware of are the paisley caves coprolites, for which the genetics didn't indicate that, had a much more complicated story, and aren't even this old.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- yencabulator 3y agoAnd claimed what, instead? Stating they've "always been here", rode on a giant bird from "another world", or that they emerged from the Earth's navel just aren't things a scientist expects to find evidence for...