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I think the point still stands that there has been a desperate clinging to a chronology that denies plenty of evidence and essentially all oral tradition of the

I think the point still stands that there has been a desperate clinging to a chronology that denies plenty of evidence and essentially all oral tradition of the people in question.

AlotOfReading 1y ago
Which oral histories allow us to differentiate between the various hypotheses for the initial peopling of the Americas? I'm not aware of any and it's very difficult to identify direct relationships between modern groups and the earliest groups. Moreover, operationalizing oral histories and tying them to cultural memories of specific historical events is difficult at best, since that's not really how ancient oral histories get preserved.
- ab5tract 1y ago
  Ancient oral histories are preserved through constant communication across generational boundaries. There are too many examples of oral history matching historical events for me to bother being your Google here. Very little weight has been given to the accuracy of these oral histories until recent times. Meanwhile tribes have been saying “that’s not how it happened” to the Clovis hypothesis the entire time.
  - AlotOfReading 1y ago
    You don't have to tell me how oral histories are preserved. I've worked as an anthropologist and documented some. What I was asking is how you operationalize what is preserved to distinguish between the various competing hypotheses for the initial peopling of the Americas and which histories you're referencing. I probably don't need to tell someone like you who's intimately familiar with them, but for others reading oral histories don't work like the literary histories we're all familiar with from textbooks. What's preserved has some fairly consistent modifications that take place on the journey from the top of the hourglass to the bottom of the hourglass and into deep time histories. 1) Events become omitted, repeated, or conflated to support the narrative purpose of the tradition 2) Elements of the narrative that support the narrative purpose are emphasized or modified to better suit that purpose, sometimes at the expense of modern ideas of historical accuracy 3) Elements from other narratives that support the narrative purpose may be incorporated, or supplant other elements within a tradition of parallel narratives. 4) Elements that are dramatic and narratively meaningful are the ones that survive These are more or less basic knowledge by anyone working with deep time stories, but if you insist on an indigenous source here's a paper by Roger Echo-Hawk saying the same thing much more eloquently: https://doi.org/10.2307/2694059 https://doi.org/10.2307/2694059 So, to use these stories in academic work we typically have to find some way of matching the narrative echos of the real historical events to the things that are visible archaeologically. That's incredibly difficult beyond a few hundred years, and tends to center around dramatic events like natural disasters and geographic features. Well, we don't have many of those for the LGM. Past work has usually centered around identifying either "Dark World" motifs with Beringia Standstill populations (the BSH is incompatible with the White Sands timeline), or Diving Bird myths, which are shared with many Eurasian groups. I'm not aware of any feature of Diving Bird myths that would allow a timeline for the initial peopling, hence the question.
    - ab5tract 1y ago
      My long reply got devoured so for the sake of my own sanity I will reiterate my original point from a quote with the resource you linked: > In conceptual terms, scholarship on the past should revisit the bibliocentric assumptions of “prehistory,” and pursue, instead, the study of “ancient American history”-an approach that treats oral documents as respectable siblings of written documents.
      - AlotOfReading 1y ago
        I agree with both of those points and I'm well known in my social circle to go on long rants about the term prehistory. I avoid using it. Though, in that same vein is another semantic paper called something like "Rehumanizing Pleistocene People", can't remember the author with bad Internet.
        ab5tract 1y ago
        Thanks for these resources, I look forward to reading them.
  - rfwhyte 1y ago
    And there are literally thousands of times more examples of oral histories not matching historical events. A broken clock is right twice a day, but that doesn't mean we should rely upon it for timekeeping.
    - ab5tract 1y ago
      There are literally thousands of scientific theories that have been disproven over time. What’s your point? Edit: Also thousands of historical written documents that are disputed or tossed aside.
rfwhyte 1y ago
I would argue its actually been those "People in question" who are one of the primary barriers to the acceptance of the growing body of evidence that the Americas were peopled earlier than previously thought. The issue is that there is clear genetic evidence that the current indigenous population of the Americas arrived onto the continents around 14KYA-15KYA, and all their various land claims and special rights / privileges fundamentally derive from the argument that "They were here first." Whoever the people leaving footprints at White Sands were, the genetic evidence is clear that they weren't the ancestors of North America's current indigenous population. They were a genetically distinct people group (My suspicion is they would have been more closely related to Australian Aborigines) and are in fact the ones "Who were here first." Accepting that there were already people in the Americas when the current indigenous population arrived, would undermine the land claims of the current North American indigenous populations, and would force them to reckon with the fact they too are colonizers / settlers who displaced an earlier population, likely through violence and possibly even outright genocide, as apart from some isolated groups in the Amazon, there's no genetic evidence the current indigenous population of the Americas meaningfully intermixed with any other populations once they arrived onto the continent as we would expect were the existing population absorbed into the new population through interbreeding. This is in large part why so many indigenous groups are adamantly opposed to participating in genetics studies, or allowing archaeologists to conduct digs in their "Traditional territories" as a great many indigenous groups actually have "Oral traditions" that there were already people in the Americas when their ancestors arrived, and they know that further study will contradict the narrative that "They were here first," and could eventually invalidate their "Blood and soil" based land claims.
- skywhopper 1y ago
  Phew, buddy, don’t hurt yourself by grinding that axe too close to the handle.

I think the point still stands that there has been a desperate clinging to a chronology that denies plenty of evidence and essentially all oral tradition of the people in question.

AlotOfReading 1y ago

Which oral histories allow us to differentiate between the various hypotheses for the initial peopling of the Americas? I'm not aware of any and it's very difficult to identify direct relationships between modern groups and the earliest groups. Moreover, operationalizing oral histories and tying them to cultural memories of specific historical events is difficult at best, since that's not really how ancient oral histories get preserved.

ab5tract 1y ago
Ancient oral histories are preserved through constant communication across generational boundaries. There are too many examples of oral history matching historical events for me to bother being your Google here. Very little weight has been given to the accuracy of these oral histories until recent times. Meanwhile tribes have been saying “that’s not how it happened” to the Clovis hypothesis the entire time.
- AlotOfReading 1y ago
  You don't have to tell me how oral histories are preserved. I've worked as an anthropologist and documented some. What I was asking is how you operationalize what is preserved to distinguish between the various competing hypotheses for the initial peopling of the Americas and which histories you're referencing. I probably don't need to tell someone like you who's intimately familiar with them, but for others reading oral histories don't work like the literary histories we're all familiar with from textbooks. What's preserved has some fairly consistent modifications that take place on the journey from the top of the hourglass to the bottom of the hourglass and into deep time histories. 1) Events become omitted, repeated, or conflated to support the narrative purpose of the tradition 2) Elements of the narrative that support the narrative purpose are emphasized or modified to better suit that purpose, sometimes at the expense of modern ideas of historical accuracy 3) Elements from other narratives that support the narrative purpose may be incorporated, or supplant other elements within a tradition of parallel narratives. 4) Elements that are dramatic and narratively meaningful are the ones that survive These are more or less basic knowledge by anyone working with deep time stories, but if you insist on an indigenous source here's a paper by Roger Echo-Hawk saying the same thing much more eloquently: https://doi.org/10.2307/2694059 https://doi.org/10.2307/2694059 So, to use these stories in academic work we typically have to find some way of matching the narrative echos of the real historical events to the things that are visible archaeologically. That's incredibly difficult beyond a few hundred years, and tends to center around dramatic events like natural disasters and geographic features. Well, we don't have many of those for the LGM. Past work has usually centered around identifying either "Dark World" motifs with Beringia Standstill populations (the BSH is incompatible with the White Sands timeline), or Diving Bird myths, which are shared with many Eurasian groups. I'm not aware of any feature of Diving Bird myths that would allow a timeline for the initial peopling, hence the question.
  - ab5tract 1y ago
    My long reply got devoured so for the sake of my own sanity I will reiterate my original point from a quote with the resource you linked: > In conceptual terms, scholarship on the past should revisit the bibliocentric assumptions of “prehistory,” and pursue, instead, the study of “ancient American history”-an approach that treats oral documents as respectable siblings of written documents.
    - AlotOfReading 1y ago
      I agree with both of those points and I'm well known in my social circle to go on long rants about the term prehistory. I avoid using it. Though, in that same vein is another semantic paper called something like "Rehumanizing Pleistocene People", can't remember the author with bad Internet.
      - ab5tract 1y ago
        Thanks for these resources, I look forward to reading them.
- rfwhyte 1y ago
  And there are literally thousands of times more examples of oral histories not matching historical events. A broken clock is right twice a day, but that doesn't mean we should rely upon it for timekeeping.
  - ab5tract 1y ago
    There are literally thousands of scientific theories that have been disproven over time. What’s your point? Edit: Also thousands of historical written documents that are disputed or tossed aside.

rfwhyte 1y ago

I would argue its actually been those "People in question" who are one of the primary barriers to the acceptance of the growing body of evidence that the Americas were peopled earlier than previously thought. The issue is that there is clear genetic evidence that the current indigenous population of the Americas arrived onto the continents around 14KYA-15KYA, and all their various land claims and special rights / privileges fundamentally derive from the argument that "They were here first." Whoever the people leaving footprints at White Sands were, the genetic evidence is clear that they weren't the ancestors of North America's current indigenous population. They were a genetically distinct people group (My suspicion is they would have been more closely related to Australian Aborigines) and are in fact the ones "Who were here first." Accepting that there were already people in the Americas when the current indigenous population arrived, would undermine the land claims of the current North American indigenous populations, and would force them to reckon with the fact they too are colonizers / settlers who displaced an earlier population, likely through violence and possibly even outright genocide, as apart from some isolated groups in the Amazon, there's no genetic evidence the current indigenous population of the Americas meaningfully intermixed with any other populations once they arrived onto the continent as we would expect were the existing population absorbed into the new population through interbreeding. This is in large part why so many indigenous groups are adamantly opposed to participating in genetics studies, or allowing archaeologists to conduct digs in their "Traditional territories" as a great many indigenous groups actually have "Oral traditions" that there were already people in the Americas when their ancestors arrived, and they know that further study will contradict the narrative that "They were here first," and could eventually invalidate their "Blood and soil" based land claims.

skywhopper 1y ago
Phew, buddy, don’t hurt yourself by grinding that axe too close to the handle.