When Were the Americas Populated? 259
evil agent passes along an article in Scientific American reporting that new radiocarbon dating techniques have cast doubt on the accepted story of how the Americas were populated. In the traditional view, "[M]igrants out of northeast Asia slipped into the Americas bearing finely shaped stone projectiles, so-called 'Clovis points,' after the town in New Mexico where they were first uncovered. This Clovis culture rapidly spread throughout the empty continents and by 1,000 years after their arrival had reached the southernmost tip of what is now South America, making them the original ancestors of indigenous Americans." The new dating of Clovis sites suggests that "Clovis" was not a people, but rather a technology. That is, a new and more efficient method of making arrowheads for hunting spread rapidly through a pre-existing population in both North and South America, over at most 350 years.
Everybody knows (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Everybody knows (Score:5, Funny)
"Some people say that Columbus was not the first to discover America. They say that the vikings and Chinese had been to the Americas for at least a thousand years before Columbus. Others say you can't discover a continent that's already inhabited by an entire race of people. These people are communists. Columbus discovered America."
So, since the continent was not officially "discovered" until about 500 years ago, we can say anyone there before that "doesn't count."
Europeans *DID* discover America (Score:2)
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Face it, European culture is currently the most advanced. As a result, for people raised in European-descended cultures, only cultures directly linked to their current position actually matter.
Measured by what metric? Sustainability, balance, restraint? Fail. Compassion? Near-fail. Peacefulness? Serious failure. Equality? Fail. Pattern and systems literacy? Fail. Leisure time? Fail. Indigenous low-tech cultures of N.A. had the Euros beat on those metrics of advancement, including the political system that eventually heavily influenced the American Revolution--the Haudenosaunee, a democratic system with better checks and balances than the French system.
The agriculture of the Americas, in partic
Re:Everybody knows (Score:4, Interesting)
"Might wins", well, yeah. And even today, the group with the right combination of the biggest stick and the most will to use it will win.
I've yet to see any culture master sustainability, except by failure to develop the technology to destroy their environment. Humans are short sighted.
Reducing our potato varieties to five is a short term advance - it makes mass production of the tubers in question easier. In the long run, yes, we're damaging the soil and getting slightly less nutrition than we might have.
Diplomacy IS a joke. Look at it... diplomacy is used by weak countries to feel as if they're important by browbeating militarily stronger countries. Diplomacy is otherwise used by most nations as a delay tactic.
Just because the West recognizes its own (major) flaws doesn't mean it isn't a pretty good civilization overall. The failure of individuals to take advantage of all our opportunities doesn't take away from the fact that this culture has produced more opportunities than any other.
Re:Everybody knows (Score:5, Insightful)
Anybody whose "education in History" also included critical thinking should realize that almost every people in the entire world got where they are by way "genocide." When one group of people moves to land occupied by another people, they invariably throughout history have either displaced them [ethnic clensing], killed them entirely [genocide], assimilated them ["cultural" genocide often achieved by killing the men & boys, and taking the women and young children], or disappeared themselves. Make no mistake about it, every single Indian tribe present when the first English set foot on North America got where they were by "genociding" the previous inhabitants of their lands. From that point to the present, the vast majority of Indians were killed by... other Indians.
In the early days, the "noble savages" tried to exterminate the European settlers, over and over. They tried to genocide us; we did genocide them. We're the bad guys because we won. They can be idealized because they don't exist anymore. It's not like this is a unique situation-- how many damned romance novels are there about the Highlanders of Scotland? They were universally reviled while they posed a threat, then idealized after they were broken and forgotten for a while. A vaguely-understood, heavily-idealized, or entirely-imagined "little guy" struggling against the oppressive modern society whose faults everyone knows-- well, it makes for a good story.
If I sound unsympathetic, well, it's probably because I reserve for another stone-age people my ancestors genocided, the pre-pre-Celtic inhabitants of Southern France. Damn them and their iron working [a skill the American Indians never picked up]. My stone-age ancestors didn't stand a chance. And damn those Gauls, and Romans, and Franks, and Bretons, and Normans, and English, and...
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Displacement of a culture and ethnic cleansing are different things. The first can happen quite peacefully and amicably, and proceeded that way to some extent in many places in north america. Ethnic cleansing, on the other hand, has a strong genetic component. It basically means "Kill all who have 'dirty' genes so the race will be purer". That's what happened in Europe, well, pretty much for all time. It's not what happened in America. (There was some of it early on, like the thing about giving blanke
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That sounds like a usage of "fair" which is unknown to me, but we can probably agree they were treated equally poorly with respect to any non-white minority and white minorities that showed up later during the noteable immigration waves of the late 19th/early 20th century. But the types of poor treatment varied, as they did with the other minorities in the country.
I don't think assimilation was always the goal, but I do think it would be hard to nail down a goal that applied for everyone involved. Many s
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Yes; measuring in metric is the sign of all advanced cultures.
Re:Everybody knows (Score:5, Informative)
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And yes, "all cultures except my own are irrelevant" is bound to be flamed from people from any number of cultures. Since there's no "-1 ignorant" or "-1 jing" choices, flamebait will have to do.
Re:Everybody knows (Score:5, Insightful)
"Only cultures that made significant contributions to, or have a current significant impact on, the one I live in count when I'm considering how we got here" is a different matter.
It doesn't mean the American Indians weren't interesting, or that Europeans didn't invade and take their land... it just means that the American Indians don't count as discoverers of the Americas from the viewpoint of the current culture.
We didn't develop from them, we barely integrated them. We REPLACED them.
Re:Everybody knows (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Everybody knows (Score:4, Insightful)
The reality is this: The population density of the New World was incredibly low compared to Europe.
What drives all world politics is love and sex. Too much fucking produces too many people, said people do what they can to survive and continue the trend.
Europeans were many and the aboriginal peoples of the Americas were few. It is only natural that they would be displaced. They would have done the same had the situations been reversed. That is what people do.
Borders are never static, they expand and contract and perhaps even disappear, depending upon population density and technological advancements that minimize population pressures (ie, fertilizer).
Definition of Genocide (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, though the percentage of dead through disease is hard to estimate, 95% might be high. It doesn't matter, there was a plan being developed for the survivors. Since elsewhere in the discussion there are those who deny there was a genocide, here's the legal definition of genocide [hrweb.org], as adopted by the UN:
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
* (a) Killing members of the group;
* (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
* (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
* (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
* (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Now if one knows much about indigenous-settler relations in N.A., then you know that: wars and disease took care of (a), alcohol and linguistic-cultural suppression took care of (b), forced migration and
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Nova Program on this Topic (Score:5, Informative)
Oh really? (Score:2, Interesting)
oldest civilization in the Americas (Score:3, Interesting)
Why is it that the further south you go into South America, the older the civilizations appear to be? Seems like they keep finding all kinds of ancient ruins there. Now what is the likelihood that people would wander from the north all the way down there before creating the civilizations they created? Could the Americas have been populated from Antarctica instead, before the polar shift? Prolly not, I guess there were no humans back then, but still...
Actually I wonder why this article says nothing about
Beware Goatse in parents link... (Score:2, Informative)
old news (Score:3, Interesting)
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Why is it so hard to belive these people had been trading in ideas and customs for mellenia, then one day someones idea took the traceable form of a clovis and spread rapidly through an existing netwo
Re:old news (Score:5, Informative)
His main answer has to do with food production: North America had hardly any good domesticable crops, so the most populous and advanced North American civilization (in the Mississipi valley) could only emerge after the slow spread of Mexican corn and beans across the deserts north of the Aztec homeland, which gave them very little time to 'prepare' for the European invasion.
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Pre Columbian America (Score:2)
A book I recommend is 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus [amazon.com] by Charles C Mann.
FalconRe: (Score:3, Funny)
Yeah, still, they could've put all their cities in coinage and bought a shitload of phalanxes every couple of turns. I still think the Aztecs could have beat Cortez. Hell, even a few diplomats could have stolen the techs in a few turns after Cortez took his first city!
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From what I have read, the North was less suitable for large, settled-down civilizations, in terms of food sources and climate. This led to the nomadic lifestyle of the population in the North. Since in general nomadic cultures produce less in the way of technological advances (less free time, basically), this would account for much of the difference.
There were also simply less peop
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Re:old news (Score:4, Insightful)
c.f. Guns, Germs, and Steel.
The North American natives just got a cruddy piece of real estate to bootstrap a civilization on. They managed to do pretty well in some places, but in the end they just couldn't compete with the Eurasians.
Re:old news (Score:5, Insightful)
Assumption: nomadic lifestyle = less time. Not necessarily true, moving around frees people from the drudgery that is agriculture, and nomads tend to work on elaborate ceremony and narrative. How would you like to work only 26 hours per week? It does mean they're less materialistic, since stuff is a liability. That outlook means that advanced camping gear is good enough technologically, and pretty comfortable. Development occurs in other ways.
Assumption: unified population and cultures. Not true, considerable linguistic and cultural variety in N.A., including sedentary cultures in the Pacific Northwest and some desert regions (one tied to abundant food outside the front door, the other tied to marginal agriculture). Blame the difference in development on the horse, flux of empires, and specialization derived from large city societies.
Re:old news (Score:4, Informative)
The thing I find odd is that most of the advanced civilizations were in Mexico and S. America, rather than from the North.
That's just because the ones in the North aren't [wikipedia.org] so famous [wikipedia.org]...Nexessity is the mother of invention. (Score:5, Insightful)
Being nomads, these people spread down south, where there were deserts and mountains and jungles, but no great herds, so they had a choice: improvise, or walk all the way back to where it was cold and women covered themselves non-stop in great leather coats with the fur on the inside.
In the south, it was warm, and boobies were flying freely... so the paleogeeks did their thing. To advance civilization, of course.
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If the first humans came from the north through asia,
Ah, but the first people in the Americas didn't come from Asia acroos the Bering land bridge into the Americas. Monte Verde [wikipedia.org] in southern Chile, and fathest south you can get in the Americas, is dated 12,500 BP (Before Present) which means it predates the Bering Land Bridge [wikipedia.org]. The Bering Land Bridge formed around 12,000 BP.
Falcon
Re:old news (Score:4, Interesting)
IIRC the pre-Clovis sites are a few ripples spotted here and there and most have controversial dating evidence available, where as the Clovis evidence is like a tsunami of archaeology. While there may well have been pre-Clovis people this dating evidence (and from the article that's all it appears to be) simply confirms the date of the sites and does little to add anything of merit to the debate. The argument that it took a maximum 350 years to spread and this is "too fast" for a settlement is spurious. Why is it inconcievable that it "only" took 350 years to get from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego? As it's about 8000 miles at most you would need to drift south at a leisurely 20-30 miles per year. Now this isn't feasible for an agricultural, settled people, but these were hunter-gatherers (as evidenced by the Clovis points) and could conceivably have done their year's quota in a single hunting trip. I doubt getting that far would have been much of a struggle, especially when most of the fat [wikipedia.org], stupid [wikipedia.org] and tasty [wikipedia.org] animals were in South America.
While it seems very likely that there were people in South America before the Clovis people, they were probably only there in very small numbers, whereas the Clovis people were clearly very numerous indeed and seem to be the first meaningful inhabitants.
BTW, it occcurs to me that if Clovis points were a technology that spread amongst an existing people (rather than the spread of the people with the technology) then neighbouring tribes/families/whatever would have to have been on good terms for it to spread. Anecdotally at least it would seem from what is known of tribes who were recently in this sort of situation that they tend not to be particularly friendly with their neighbours.
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Not necessarily. If you look at the spread of bronze-making technology
Re:old news (Score:4, Informative)
In the archaeological world Clovis population theories have been dead or dying for at least 5 years. Isotopic dating of human dwellings in the Americas throughout the 90s as well as single parent DNA research have been available for years that show human populations were present and separated from Asian populations thousands of years before the glacial corridor was a possibility. This doesn't even mention that Clovis technology likely didn't even come from Asia.
The only thing that Clovis had going for it is that the theory neatly solved several issues. Since archaeology at that time was not as sophisticated with its techniques and the lack of a good selection of sites, the people digging stuff up just noticed that after about 13,000 years ago they stopped finding these spear points when they found a large mammal skeleton. Also, within a short period after this tool showed up, the large mammal population of the Americas seemed to have died out. In addition, climatologists at the time came out with a breakthrough theory that massive glaciation had lowered sea levels significantly allowing for the Bering Straight land bridge. This convergence of new information seemed like the perfect way to integrate the known information at the time. Unfortunately, except for the coincidence, they didn't have a shred of evidence it actually happened that way.
So, like so much "news", this is just an old hat. Carry on.
Modern humans... (Score:5, Interesting)
...have been around for 100's of thousands of years and they are not stupid. Who is to say that 60000 years ago somebody from Indonesia could not possibly have seen most of the world in a lifetime, if they had so desired? There wouldn't have been any evidence of small scale migration which modern archeologists could find, yet the written history is based only on mass movements of population.
TFA ends with I think there's enough evidence now to say that there were pre-Clovis people in the Americas."
Who is to say that it hadn't been happening for several times the 25000 year time scale they are talking about?
Re:Modern humans... (Score:5, Funny)
How do you explain "windows being the dominant OS (yet)", then? Just curious.
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That should be obvious.
UNIX is still in the remedial class as far as usability goes. Apple is an entirely proprietary scheme forcing you to buy hardware and software from the same vendor at outrageous prices.
The value of a machine is directly proportional to the amount of software it can run. So there is a selection bias towards already dominant O/S.
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There, fixed that for you.
Having a word processor and a spreadsheet adds a definite amount of value to a platform. Maybe even two word processors and two spreadsheets. But the value of additional pieces of software to do the same thing rapidly diminish. The value is in the things you can do with the tools, not with the number of tools themselves.
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That phrase may have been valid in the 80's or early 90's, but I don't think it holds the same value right now. Web browsing / e-mail reading are the main purposes for which people buy computers these days, and those task are done mostly using open protocols that don't rely on a specific computer architecture or operating system.
Applications that were once only
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Stela have been decoded showing a large and round-headed cult leader foaming at the mouth and shouting "Clovis! Clovis! Clovis", whipping the masses into a frenzy, and paying off spear-makers to keep them from making spears without clovis points.
They further cemented their status by periodically introducing pointless "imp
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Then again, read last week's New Yorker artical about those 3 Mexican fishermen who drifted for 9 months, ending up in the Phillipines. They did a good job of developing survival techniques, and I'll grant you the present-day drift patterns might not support a drift from West to East, but it
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Who is to say? Anyone who has actually studied the matter. Sailing across the ocean is hard - and unpredictable. Walking across an unknown continent equally so.
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It doesn't matter Who was here first. (Score:2, Insightful)
Dumb people have more children than smart people, especially when there is a natural abundance of food and shelter and intelligence offers no real reproductive benefit. So I don't think it matters one bit when the americas were populated. It is the sheeple that inheri
Re:It doesn't matter Who was here first. (Score:5, Insightful)
That is a relatively modern trend. One, many previous cultures valued children and gained both productive and prestige benefit for large families. Two, effective contraceptives are relatively modern inventions. Three, the social and economic mobility of those who are "not dumb" is also a relatively modern trend. In dictatorial and feudal societies in which education and wealth is controlled by a few intelligence is less likely to be rewarded.
If we look back at our cities in 5000 years...
I agree with you here and think you're making a great point. We place a high level of certainty on conclusion drawn from a limited set of data, and as you pointed out the conclusions are really rather useless anyway.
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Please cite your source.
Are you an anthropologist? Did barneyfoo strike a nerve. If anything his statements attack an anthropologists ability to properly recreate a true history of what has occurred in the past. It has nothing to do with race or politics. Maybe you should keep taking your meds... it seems you've slipped into some sort of delusion where there is a skin head and evil Young Republican around ev
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"A number of demographers, journalists, and sociologists have noted a strong correlation between religious values and fertility rates. The more frequent the church attendance, the higher the birthrate. "White fundamentalist Protestants" who attend services weekly show a fertility rate 27 percent higher than the national average. Mormons show twice the national birth rate."
A cursory look at the Center for Disease Control's birthrate stati
With all the dishonesty in science... (Score:5, Funny)
have been found in strata deposited millions of years old and all over the world.
http://www.mcremo.com/cremo.htm [mcremo.com]
His book "Forbidden Archaeology" is a huge tome discussing hundreds of sites where
anomalous findings challenge (rip apart) todays dogmas in the field and it is also
an interesting read to see how the religion of western science preserves the purity
of its creed
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Yeah in fact just down the road from here is a place where there are thousands of bodies buried in strata at least 10000 years old: about two metres down.
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Unfortunately there's a 48 million year gap. (Score:2)
The Pangea breakup was going on back at around the same time the dinosaurs were in business; definitely pre-humans. According to WP [wikipedia.org], Pangea (or Pangaea) broke up between 55 and 100 million years ago, in the Cretaceous. Modern (genus Homo) humanoids didn't appear until around 2.5 million years, in the Pliocene.
I suspect that by the time the first proto-humans stood up and
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have been found in strata deposited millions of years old and all over the world.
Yeah. Because obviously, more than a hundred years ago people couldn't dig to bury their dead - they just left 'em where they fell.
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His articles are published in magazines like "Atlantis Rising" and "Back to Godhead", and he wrote chapters for the classic "Chant and Be Happy!".
Science is not perfect, nor complete, nor will it ever be. But talking about "all the dishonesty in science", and using t
Re:With all the dishonesty in science... (Score:4, Insightful)
If there were ever a reason to repair the education system in this country, this is it. Unless ignorance really is bliss, and we've all been missing something all these years.
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Michael Cremo's factual research itself for me to defend and stand up for
because I don't have the foggiest whether his findings are true or not.
I am not an archaeologist nor a geologist. I'm just saying that it's there,
it's interesting and chances are that some of it may actually be correct.
What I personally find interesting in his book is how he details to what
length people go in the field to discredit the deviant author or even tam
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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find myself way out of my waters to have much of an opinion on that score. So what I do is I
limit myself to pointing out his research and that I find his research and his findings
interesting, especially in light of the growing body of evidence like the pyramid in Bosnia
I mentioned before. I try to reserve judgment on the credibility of Cremo's work because my
professional background does not prepare me for the task of e
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Re:With all the dishonesty in science... (Score:5, Funny)
Also Lyall Watson fights the good fight on a number of fronts against an array entrenched and protectionist theories espoused by not only archaeologists but also geologists, physicists and scienctific dogma in general.
Hancock, is the new guy on the block but he is able to link all the good work undertaken by the likes of Von Daniken and Watson and prove that these space-faring super civilizations came from Orion and he can also prove not just the exact date but the exact second, minute, hour and day that they were all wiped out by the various utterly catastrophic yet strangely localised disasters which managed to wipe them out utterly so quickly they didn't even have time to jump back in their spaceships.
Obviously they did have enough time to build a series of enigmatic and utterly conclusive monuments throughout the world to speak to future super-archaelogists such as Mr Hancock, Bauval, Daniken and Watson and tell of the terrible catastrophe they could see coming and how it would wipe them out utterly and how this caused them to gather every member of their super civilisation, complete with houses, buildings and strange alien flying machines directly over the catastrophe, disable their spaceships and entrust the vast learning and knowledge of their super-society to a few, scattered enigmatic encoded monuments.
I can't wait for the next valiant defender of the true science to take up the torch and carry on where Hancock left off.
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pyramids == landing pads (Score:2)
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Michael Cremo (Score:2)
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Never thought I'd see the day... (Score:2)
Yeah, well, yesterday was that day. (Score:2)
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Time to get over the 'land bridge' (Score:5, Insightful)
There is now more than enough evidence to support the idea of a pre-clovis population in America. Due to the timing of glaciation, this requires these populations to have traveled via the ocean, either along the glaciated Alaskan coast, or along the edge of the arctic ice cap from Europe. Possibly both.
Though modern humans find this environment so impossibly inhospitable they cannot imagine how anyone could possibly survive there long enough to allow a population to migrate several thousand miles, they are thinking only of the glacial desert of ice. The sea however was rich with food. Humans have always followed the food. There are Inuit populations that until recently, fed themselves quite nicely hunting in seas full of pack ice, in boats made of whale bone and seal skin. I see no reason there why self-sustaining populations of humans couldn't have lived on the ice, feeding on the ocean, and slowly spreading along the coast until they found land (America).
Re:Time to get over the 'land bridge' (Score:5, Informative)
That is true, but if you look at the date of 'colonization' by Austronesian people of these pacific islands, you will notice
- Sailing large distances is difficult. It took them until 3000/2000 BC to get their island-hopping act together and start colonizing these islands. By this date America was well populated
- Sailing large distances takes time. While it took a couple centuries up to one millenium to fill America, it took about 4000 years to colonize all islands from Indonesia to Easter Island / Hawaii
Combined: this proves that sailing between continents is quite possible but also very difficult, and cannot explain the people living in America around 10,000 BC.Re: (Score:2)
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I don't know why our default scientific assumptions in such matters always err on the simplistic side. We have the same problem with 'out of Africa'. No there was not one single monolithic migration out of Africa. The actual history of human migration is probably very complex, and certainly not subject to the simplifying assumptions of sc
multiple sources of migration (Score:3, Interesting)
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What really happened with Clovis Point. (Score:5, Funny)
As seen on Nova last week.... (Score:3, Informative)
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I think the theory that the same people who made all of these famous cave paintings in France came to the Americans and didn't make any cave paintings here seems especially hard to swallow. However the part where they showed that people in Asia had drastic
Nothing new... (Score:2)
How long (Score:2)
Consider The Book of Mormon (Score:3, Interesting)
You can read about it yourself by going to Mormon.org [slashdot.org] and requesting a free copy of the Book of Mormon for yourself, and you can learn more about the evidences of the Book of Mormon at Jeff Lindsay's website [jefflindsay.com].
There's always been evidence (Score:3, Interesting)
A nagging question about pre-columbian cultures. (Score:3, Interesting)
Why were the american cultures 'discovered', while they had no inkling of other cultures across the oceans, nor their place in the panoramic view of the world?
Because they were not seafarers. The question I keep repeating to myself is: Why was that?
The reason why the ancient phoenicians, greeks, etc, set sail, was gigantic and in front of their noses: The Mediterranean Sea, which represented the shortest way between two points of commerce in a concave land: a straight line. Same with the norse people: The Baltic Sea.
Middle eastern cultures also developed seafaring capabilities, spanning the area from India to the eastern African coast.
Much more intriguing are the chinese, as their land is convex with respect to the ocean, so there is no obvious short term advantage to develop seafaring capabilities, yet they did have a majestic fleet of immense junks for a short period of time, during which they were gazing waaay over the horizon, and with noble intentions to boot.
In fact, it seems that in every region of the world, for one reason or another, civilizations set to the oceans with commerce and/or conquest in mind, yet excepting the colonization of islands in the Gulf Of Mexico, once settled, the pre-columbian people seem to have completely lost whatever sea legs they ever had.
The Gulf Of Mexico is concave, commerce between Yucatan, Veracruz and Florida seems like an obvious thing. Olmecs, Toltecs, Mayans, Aztecs, among others, inhabited the general basin area, yet while they navigated lakes, rivers and fished close to the coast, show no evidence of technology for longer term sea travel. What the hell happened? Why that gigantic, eventually fatal blind spot?
Maybe, just maybe, it's because of the fact that the Gulf Of Mexico, for half of the year, is smack in the center of hurricane alley. Maybe the Mayans, for example, tried and had their fleet decimated one time too often, then completely scrapped the endeavor. Yet I've read nothing on the matter, I've never stumbled upon pre-columbian academics even discussing the matter, so if anybody knows or has any ideas, please post! Thanks.
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Although it would be nice if there were something like isochron dating [wikipedia.org] that worked well in the last 100,000 years.
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