The Oldest Known Human Remains In the Americas Have Been Found In a Mexican Cave (seeker.com) 138
schwit1 shares a report from Seeker: An ice-free corridor between the Americas and Asia opened up about 12,500 years ago, allowing humans to cross over the Bering land bridge to settle what is now the United States and places beyond to the south. History books have conveyed that information for years to explain how the Americas were supposedly first settled by people, such as those from the Clovis culture. At least one part of the Americas was already occupied by humans before that time, however, says new research on the skeleton of a male youth found in Chan Hol cave near Tulum, Mexico. Dubbed the Young Man of Chan Hol, the remains date to 13,000 years ago, according to a paper published in the journal PLOS ONE. How he arrived at the location remains a great mystery given the timing and the fact that Mexico is well over 4,000 miles away from the Bering land crossing. For the new study, Gonzalez, Stinnesbeck, and their colleagues dated the Young Man of Chan Hol's remains by analyzing the bones' uranium, carbon, and oxygen isotopes, which were also found in stalagmite that had grown through the pelvic bone. The scientists believe that the resulting age of 13,000 years could apply to at least two other skeletons found in caves around Tulum: a teenage female named Naia and a 25-30-year-old female named Eve of Naharon. Gonzalez said that the shape of the skulls suggests that Eve and the others "have more of an affinity with people from Southeast Asia." He and his team further speculated that the individuals could have originated in Indonesia.
Fake News (Score:4, Funny)
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So...the original Mexican food was.......Chinese???
Sweet and Sour Tacos with a Jalapeños egg roll.
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Re:Fake News (Score:4, Insightful)
There is no such thing as native population. There are just descendants of previous conquerors.
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And who did they conquer, and so on? Or are you saying it's conquerors all the way down?
Re:Fake News (Score:4, Informative)
It is Conquerors all the way down.
They may not had conquered people. but they had conquered the elements, infections, wild animals, and unknown terrain.
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The elements, and the wildlife. Which would be non-trivial accomplishments for your average lardball ultra-survivalist with a ton of hardware and no cellphone coverage, but is even more of an accomplishment for a man with a pair of hands and a brain.
Native does not mean what you think it means (Score:1, Troll)
There is no such thing as native population.
The native population is the one born there. That is literally what native means: a person associated to a place by birth. So unless you actually believe that every pregnant woman migrates from the shores of North America back to Europe or Asia to give birth like some form of demented salmon there is quite a large native population in North America now.
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There is no such thing as indigenous population [of the Americas]; there are just [the] native descendants of the people who came to the Americas from elsewhere.
FTFY
In Canada the earliest peoples are referred to as "First Nations." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]. I like that term. I wish we would use it here (i.e. in the USA) as well.
Re: Fake News (Score:1)
The only problem is that evidence has now shown that the "first Nations" are actually the third to arrive in North America. The first being Vikings in north eastern Canada.
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No... the first nations have been around a lot longer than the Vikings. They're not the first in North America, not even by blood, as this story indicates, but they're groups of currently living people who can trace back some (somewhat arbitrary amount) of their lineage to political and cultural groups that existed at the time of first contact with Europeans.
Re: Fake News (Score:1)
And most of them really weren't nations in the modern sense. They lived in a stone age culture, not having discovered and utilized things like the wheel, refined metal, etc. Other parts of the continents (North and South) did have social structures you could call nations, but many of the people were just hunter-gatherers.
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And most of them really weren't nations in the modern sense.
True enough, if your mindset is limited to the "old stone age, new stone age, bronze age, iron age, steam age" mentality.
Other measures of nationhood and civilization exist, such as intra-group, and inter-group cooperation, trade agreements, and treaties. By many of those measures, the precolumbian peoples of North America were much more advanced than European contemporaries, and arguably more advanced than contemporary euroamerican peoples. This is definitely true when it comes to the careful crafting an
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There's good evidence that there was a fairly high level of civilization in both North and South America, with all of the accompanying alliances and wars that are familiar from European history. The Inca and Aztec empires in the south, and groups like the Iroquois Confederacy in the north. The Spanish ran into the Inca, but by the time Europeans started seriously exploring the north a lot of the agricultural civilization (and population) seemed to be gone. It's a reasonable hypothesis that what explorers
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The Inca and Aztec empires in the south, and groups like the Iroquois Confederacy in the north...
You mean the Inca in the South and the Aztec in the North.
You know the Aztecs lived in North America right? (Mexico is in North America)
Aztecs -> North (some Central)
Mayan -> Central (some North)
Inca -> South
Of course there were more civilizations in what today is US and Canada as well. Also further in South America.
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Vikings were first? Seriously?
AFAIK most evidence points to the Vikings being here around 1000 CE.
The Bering land bridge was around 16,000 BCE. Even if you don't buy the land bridge theory, there's other evidence of humans in North America dating back to at least 10,000 BCE. If today's AmerIndian population, including Aztec, Mayan, Incan, First Nations, etc., etc., are descended from either of those peoples that still places them here long before the Vikings.
And then who, according to you, were the second t
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Being unduly generous to the AC, she might be misremembering a speculation popular a few years ago which suggested that Neanderthal or early Cro-Magnons from the Lusitania/ Galicia/ Pays Basque/ Aquitaine / Brittany region could have possibly island- an iceberg hopped across the Atlantic by kayaking on fishing expeditions that went wrong. And that could have happened 20kyr ago. It's not impossible, but it is a big ask. And calling them "Vikings" is ... peculiar.
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In Canada the earliest peoples are referred to as "First Nations." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ [wikipedia.org]... [wikipedia.org]. I like that term. I wish we would use it here (i.e. in the USA) as well.
I'm not a huge fan; "First" is a Eurocentric label that's a little dismissive of pre-Columbian cultures in the Americas. It doesn't reflect the fact that there was a rich history of cultures rising and falling in North America prior to European contact. The natives at the time were really the latest in a series of diff
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Sorry but for the Jews it was intentional for native Americans it was more of a by product of immigration. More native Americans died from European diseases than Europeans killing them. So yeah it was worse for the Jews.
Actually there was both intentional and unintentional killing. The trail of tears was pretty intentional. I'd argue that injustuce is pretty bad no matter who it happens to. If you want to put metrics to it though I suspect that the natives had it worse than the Jews. A better approach would be to stop complaining about the past as both are currently protected classes and, in the case of "First Nations" they get a slew of government benefits. The past cannot be changed but it sure set up their descenda
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The past cannot be changed but it sure set up their descendants pretty nicely.
Ask me how I know your white.
Native people die at higher rates than other Americans from [ncai.org]
tuberculosis: 600% higher ? alcoholism: 510% higher ? diabetes: 189% higher
vehicle crashes: 229% higher ? injuries: 152% higher ? suicide: 62% higher
Income and Poverty
$38,530
The median household income of single-race American Indian and Alaska Native households in 2015. This compares with $55,775 for the nation as a whole.
Source: 2015 American Community Survey
http://factfinder.census.gov/bkmk/table/1.0/en/AC
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Someone else mentioned the Trail of Tears. But what should also be mentioned, since it is directly relevant to parent post, is the Carter Extermination Policy and the use of blankets from the beds of soldiers dying from small pox as trade goods, which is one of the earliest documented forms of germ warfare. "Blankets for land, what a bargain indeed" as Buffy Sainte Marie sings it. There are numerous other examples that USA school history books gloss over.
Genocide by germ warfare is still genocide. Much of
Re: Fake News (Score:1)
The 'smallpox germ warfare' angle has been debunked.
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Citation needed.
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Here [umich.edu] is one direct citation.
You can just peruse the whole duckduckgo search [duckduckgo.com] if you wish.
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If you had read past the one paragraph abstract, you would have seen the last paragraph of the introduction:
Given the politicization of this topic, it seems necessary to acknowledge at the outset that far too many instances of the U.S. Army committing outrages against various Indian tribes can be documented. A number of these were explicitly genocidal in intent. It is not the intention of this author to deny that simple fact. However, as the eminent Cherokee sociologist Russell Thornton has observed of Ward Churchill's fabricated version of the 1837 smallpox epidemic: "The history is bad enough—there's no need to embellish it" (Jaschik, 2005). That the U.S. Army is undoubtedly guilty of genocidal outrages against Indians in the past in no way justifies Ward Churchill's fabrication of an outrage that never happened.
All that has been debunked is the shoddy scholarship of one "researcher". And while there are perhaps a dozen who, like you, are citing that one instance to whitewash the whole issue, that is merely one more example of the Internet acting as an echo chamber. It remains the case that the oral history of several tribes in both the USA and Canada agree that a man named Carter who was a functionary or pos
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No, that article is talking about policies that began much later. About 70 years after the extinction policies that involved massive killing of buffalo and the deliberate efforts to cause smallpox epidemics in the First Nations populations. Vaccinations and quarantine were known, and effective, tools in controlling smallpox outbreaks, but no effort was made to provide these to the tribes.
Trying to force kids to assimilate into the dominant euro-american culture through boarding schools and isolation from
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https://www.amazon.com/Empire-Summer-Moon-Comanches-Powerful/dp/1416591060
Re:Fake News (Score:5, Insightful)
Like the ex-President (Score:1)
You're saying the Young Man of Chan Hol followed the same path as Obama? Born in Africa, came to the US via Indonesia?
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Actually we are probably repatriated depending on how the contents were shaped back when vertebrates first walked on land. A lot of Africa Continental plate was squished against other land masses.
Native = born there (Score:2, Informative)
Everyone in the Americas is technically an immigrant or a descendant of immigrants.
No, anyone born in the Americas is a native. So while I am native to Europe my kids are native to North America. Native literally means a person associated to a place by birth and comes from the latin verb "to be born".
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Depends where. In the Pacific Northwest, warfare had descended to the point of being celebrated with sports (Shiny Ball, a game played on a huge field, and it was a more violent game than rugby) and Potlatch (where chiefs would compete to see who was the most generous while everybody had a good feast, only to starve the next winter if your chief was TOO generous- the only form of warfare I know where the declared winners could suffer more than the losers).
But you're right- Peaceful is not a word I'd use to
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...and, technically, all sex is incest. These are crucial observations.
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Everyone living on land is a descendant of immigrants. The only natives are in the ocean.
Unless transpermiation is correct....
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Hydrothermal springs, if you ask me. Damn these eukaryotes and their choking oxygenic toxic waste !
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Also, given the clockwise nature of North Pacific currents, and the fact that drift rafts were well within the technology available to stone age man 13,000 years ago, is it not more probable that Indonesian people came from Mexicans who came from Eskimos who came from Siberia?
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Thor Heyerdahl is that you?
This was essentially the theory that drove his Kon-Tiki expedition, exteded past Polynesia into Indonesia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
It's a really good theory, but DNA and linguistic evidence suggest there's not much basis for it (though of course they can't do much to rule out isolated instances as opposed to larger trends).
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Trouble is it all falls apart when you notice that the Bering Sea, even in summer, is too far north to be survivable on a raft....
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The Bering Sea's typically not involved in the Indonesia raft theory. The Kon-Tiki route was all south of the equator. And the Bering Strait was a land route beginning c. 21,000 BP, though access along the coast was blocked by ice until about 17,000 BP and the interior route didn't clear up until about 13,500 BP. There's a pretty good history of the sea level in the area here: http://theconversation.com/fir... [theconversation.com]
But like I said there's plenty of other evidence against the theory, at least as a significant d
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Why guess. Schwit1 provided a direct link to the paper. You can read it for yourself. In fact, this is the less interesting bit of what they say :
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Do you have evidence to support this proposition? In particular, if your experimental set up starts with people who have spent their whole lives, for generations past, living in the glacial Siberian NE.
You might not be able to survive on a raft in the Bering sea tomorrow. That doesn't mean that its impossible, only that you don't know how to survive in Bering sea conditions.
So within the error bars from the last one (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:So within the error bars from the last one (Score:4, Insightful)
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The sentence from the article which set off my "put this in the maybe column" reaction was this one "Only 1 to 2 percent of the collected DNA was human," When combined with my knowledge from other sources that, in general, DNA older than 10,000 years is unrecoverable makes me wonder how reliable these DNA tests were. The final thing which keeps this in the "maybe" column is the fact that the central argument for the Clovis people being from Europe is that there are tools with similar design features to the distinctive "Clovis" tools in Europe, but not in Asia.
I beg to differ, one can recover DNA much older than 10k years. The Frauenhofer institute has sequenced Neanderthal DNA from fossilised bone and teeth that is at least 35-40k years old. The Frauenhofer team sequenced the Denisovan genome from a single finger bone not much bigger than a blueberry. Such old DNA is very fragmented and has lots of errors but if you sequence the same specimen often enough (IIRC they sequenced their first Neanderthal genome something like 30 times) you can eliminate the vast majo
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The limit for recovery of sequenceable DNA is around 400kyr - from a horse(-ish), IIRC.
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This can probably be assigned to the actions of one or two (presently unidentified) people.
When the skeleton was discovered it was about 80% complete, including some lovely dense molar teeth in the skull. Between the discovery dive and the excavation dive programme (you need things like Teflon bags to avoid DNA contamination, and rigid boxes to protect th
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Cool story, bro.
You have to wonder about folks who know so little of the technology that they are using to try to up end history-as-we-know-it that they place the majority of their thesis on 'data' that is simply artifact from the data collection process (those linear lines you see all over towed sonar scans and the occasional square 'mountain' or 'structure' that the scans create due to limited resolution).
Tart things up with a neat intro from a pilfered copy of After Effects and you have just upended thou
Up your creationists! (Score:1)
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Young earth creationists say the universe is younger than some 9,550 year living tree roots.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Well, what difference would it make if it were yesterday?
Some theologians believe the universe is continually created, moment by moment, in the mind of God. On the other hand, some atheists believe we are living in a simulation being run in some kind of meta-universe, which is much the same thing. Every tick of the cosmic CPU clock creates a new universe according to some set of rules which use the prior universe as input. There is no logical need to have run the simulation from the postulated starting
Brilliant! (Score:2)
You provide a great insight: "This would manifest itself in the realization that the universe is logically impossible as a consequence of the past."
Of course, maybe that is what the debuggers in black are for? :-)
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Sailing across Pacific.
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by Vitus Wagner
User name almost checks out!
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Using common technology from 13,000 years ago? Not so much across, as around- the current would take you North to Japan, then east across the Bering Sea, then down the coast of North America to get you to Mexico.
In other words, the current is flowing very much the wrong way for the journey you describe.
The OPPOSITE journey, from Mexico to Indonesia, however, is quite short indeed.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/04/castaway-story-backing-from-mexican/ [theguardian.com]
Names (Score:2)
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It is kind of like someone calling themself JaredOfEuropa. Names are all arbitrary and made up.
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Re:Names (Score:5, Funny)
There was a young man of Chan Hol
Who went to the debutante ball
He met Naia and Eve
And said: By your leave
My stalagmite will be doing it all
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But what would drive people with enough population to all get into the boats and just boat to the east aimlessly in hope to find a large land mass to live on?
Columbus was finding an alternate route to India to avoid Italian taxes.
The vikings were further north, where they could travel to iceland without killing themselves. Both after had arrived had then traveled back.
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Hunter-gatherers live at pretty low density so when the population of an area hits some critical mass the kids find out mom and dad would rather they get their own place. So you pack up your stone tools, shelters, clothes and preserved foods and go where you're pretty sure there aren't any other folks to dispute your desire to settle down.
If you're in Siberia that means going north and east until you get to where the land curves due east and you end up in Alaska. Getting there's no problem because you use b
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"But what would drive people with enough population to all get into the boats and just boat to the east aimlessly in hope to find a large land mass to live on?"
Aimlessly?
Remember, you can see Russia from Sarah Palin's house. Also the sea was probably frozen at that time.
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Erm .... the sea level was 100m lower than now.
You could simply walk over on land, which was covered by glaciers, which added another few 1000m height.
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Remember, you can see Russia from Sarah Palin's house.
You can see Russia from Tina Fey's house, not Sarah Palin's house.
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But what would drive people with enough population to all get into the boats and just boat to the east aimlessly in hope to find a large land mass to live on?
Well... considering the multiple females present together with a young and viral male, I'd say that there is plenty of evidence in favor of the "blackjack hypothesis". [youtube.com]
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Damn auto-correct. Virile not viral... Ah, screw the whole thing.
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Boats. It's been a known thing for a long time.
He has also heard he can get an authentic burrito if he goes further south.
Alternative explanation (Score:4, Funny)
I reckon they found the world's first buttplug.
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Did they tell you the parables were true also?
I remember them being primarily concerned with attempts to raise money to fix the roof on the church.
Pre Clovis, Pre-12.5k People in the Americas (Score:1)
When I took archaeology back in the 90s Tom Dillahay found archaeological remains of humans at Monte Verde, Chile, that dated from 14k to 18.5k years ago. The archaeological orthodoxy, nicknamed The Clovis Police, all defending their dissertations, attacked him for the pre-12.5k date. Dina Dincauze was the chief of the Clovis Police, and I mention her because she went down to Monte Verde and wrote a paper saying yes, Dillahay's work is sound and there were people here that long ago. Not everyone has aban
Canada? (Score:5, Insightful)
...to settle what is now the United States and places beyond to the south.
I'm now curious to know whether Canada's aboriginal peoples came from somewhere else or whether knowledge of geography in the US has declined to the point that you no longer know where even Canada is.
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I'm now curious to know whether Canada's aboriginal peoples came from somewhere else or whether knowledge of geography in the US has declined to the point that you no longer know where even Canada is.
Canada doesn't really exist. It's just a ongoing joke created by Hollywood. As if people would really live that far North surrounded by snow, Polar Bears and Elves making toys for Santa.
Oldest? (Score:5, Interesting)
Evidence of humans in the Americas go back further. A 14,000 year old village was found on Triquet Island, northwest of Victoria Canada. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/one-oldest-north-american-settlements-found-180962750/ [smithsonianmag.com]
Controversially, James M. Adovasio, Dennis Stanford and Joseph and Lynn McAvoy; and on the wilder side, Albert Goodyear and Tom Demere say there is evidence for humans in the Americas that goes back much further. Their evidence and theories are not generally accepted. Good reads though.
You say cave, but we all know it was a tunnel (Score:2)
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The postulated "land bridge settlement" of North America took place ten thousand years earlier, across Arctic (not tropical) waters. I'd suggest you review your Arctic marine survival training course and compare it with your tropical training course if you can't remember the differe