humans in america 100,000 years earlier than thought, apparently

[Pickman's model]

smashing our understanding of migration to the americas
[Content removed at request of poster]

Humans Lived in North America 130,000 Years Ago, Study Claims

 

[ViolentPanda]

Ah, they've found Homo surficus, then.

 

[Sprocket.]

There will be denial in the Bible Belt tonight.

 

[weltweit]

Interesting stuff.

I read an article via twitter yesterday pointing to other humans much earlier than thought. Having trouble finding it again though. twitter isn't that easy to find things on <grr>

eta, found it in my history, it was this story!

 

[danny la rouge]

smashing our understanding of migration to the americas

View attachment 105428

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/26/...rth-america-california-nature-study.html?_r=0

I saw this yesterday and forwarded it to my Mum. She replied (you'll like this) "If you believe that kind of thing".

Fundamentalist Christians. Never disappoint.

 

[ferrelhadley]

Rubbish. Humans would have left very clear evidence especially tools over the 10 000s of years. H. sapiens had not yet left Africa, that would leave H. Neanderthal that was nowhere near the Bering Strait, they were no where near far enough east, H. Erectus who was much less technologically developed and had no sign they were further north than the Korean peninsula. Other humans like the Red Deer Cave People and Devisovans turn up very rarely in the fossil record so likely had very constrained population distributions.

Tools, fires and worked animal bones would have been much more in evidence across the two continents.

Also H. sapiens was late in crossing the Bering Strait because it would have been an incredibly tough task. The toolkit of the peoples who made the journey included sewing needles, fishing hooks and spear throwers, all "Upper Palaeolithic" technologies (around 50 000 years and younger). Sewing would make clothes much warmer and the others better hunting tools. It seems to have required "behavioural modernity" to have arrived for people to have the skills to last that long in that kind of cold to have made it across.

In short I think vastly more likely that it is an over interpretation of an animal bone than we missed about 90 000 years worth of human remains, tools and activity across North and South America.

 

[Pickman's model]

Also H. sapiens was late in crossing the Bering Strait because it would have been an incredibly tough task.

do you always do your tough tasks late?

 

[Pickman's model]

Rubbish. <snip>

Fundamentalist Christians. Never disappoint.

 

[EastEnder]

Rubbish. <snip>

How about trying: "Based on my current knowledge of this area of research I am doubtful of these findings, but remain open minded & am always willing to be convinced otherwise if a sufficiently compelling case can be made".

Immediately decrying the research with snorts of "Rubbish" makes you sound like the sort who advocated burning Giordano Bruno at the stake for agreeing with Copernican heliocentrism.

 

[ferrelhadley]

Immediately decrying the research with snorts of "Rubbish" makes you sound like the sort who advocated burning Giordano Bruno at the stake for agreeing with Copernican heliocentrism.

As I have been told for decades by creationists, homeopaths, moon hoaxers, climate deniers and so on.
It is a variation of a well tried and tested trope.
Galileo gambit - RationalWiki

The Galileo gambit (also Galileo fallacy) is a logical fallacy that asserts that if your ideas provoke the establishment to vilify or threaten you, you must be right. Users of the fallacy are to be understood as being essentially "Galileo wannabes". This logic is obviously flawed. For example, consider a horribly-oppressed ideology: ISIS. Western governments seek to persecute and censor ISIS members at every opportunity. Does this mean that ISIS is correct?

The idea that humans inhabited a two continents without leaving a trace for about 100 000 years, left no genetic markers and seem to have done so with much more primitive tool kits than those we know did make the journey is just flight of fancy. Like every time an anomalous star turns up people shout "alien civilisation".

Use your brain.

 

[danny la rouge]

Here's the link I sent my Mum:

Controversial study claims humans reached Americas 100,000 years earlier than thought

 

[Pickman's model]

.

 

[Pickman's model]

As I have been told for decades by creationists, homeopaths, moon hoaxers, climate deniers and so on.
It is a variation of a well tried and tested trope.
Galileo gambit - RationalWiki

The idea that humans inhabited a two continents without leaving a trace for about 100 000 years, left no genetic markers and seem to have done so with much more primitive tool kits than those we know did make the journey is just flight of fancy. Like every time an anomalous star turns up people shout "alien civilisation".

Use your brain.

so rather than engage with the evidence your first thought is to say 'based on my pitiful hearsay knowledge it's clearly bollocks and i will not entertain it'.

 

[EastEnder]

As I have been told for decades by creationists, homeopaths, moon hoaxers, climate deniers and so on.
It is a variation of a well tried and tested trope.
Galileo gambit - RationalWiki

The idea that humans inhabited a two continents without leaving a trace for about 100 000 years, left no genetic markers and seem to have done so with much more primitive tool kits than those we know did make the journey is just flight of fancy. Like every time an anomalous star turns up people shout "alien civilisation".

Use your brain.

Oh dear, you've rather missed the point, haven't you?

Good science is not based on immediately discounting a possibility because it contradicts your prior position. I have no idea whether this new research will stand up to the full weight of scientific scrutiny, it's interesting but at this stage I personally would need significantly more persuasion to have any degree of confidence in it. But I would not immediately discount it, that would be wholly unscientific.

 

[Pickman's model]

Oh dear, you've rather missed the point, haven't you?

Good science is not based on immediately discounting a possibility because it contradicts your prior position. I have no idea whether this new research will stand up to the full weight of scientific scrutiny, it's interesting but at this stage I personally would need significantly more persuasion to have any degree of confidence in it. But I would not immediately discount it, that would be wholly unscientific.

 

[danny la rouge]

Oh dear, you've rather missed the point, haven't you?

Good science is not based on immediately discounting a possibility because it contradicts your prior position. I have no idea whether this new research will stand up to the full weight of scientific scrutiny, it's interesting but at this stage I personally would need significantly more persuasion to have any degree of confidence in it. But I would not immediately discount it, that would be wholly unscientific.

From my link:

Says John McNabb, a Palaeolithic archaeologist at the University of Southampton, UK. “I suspect there will be a lot of reaction to the paper, and most of it is not going to be acceptance.”

Well, quite.

 

[ferrelhadley]

Oh dear, you've rather missed the point, haven't you?

Good science is not based on immediately discounting a possibility because it contradicts your prior position.

Good science is not assuming every anomaly in your data makes you Copernicus.

There dating puts this in the Eemian interglacial when sea levels were about 5m higher than today. So that means they would have had to cross thousands of years earlier. So you have a compounding series of unlikely events. A group of proto humans made one of the toughest journeys achieved by pre-Neolithic peoples, did so with the Mousterian tool kit but thrived for 10 000s of years, left virtually no trace then suddenly died out.
Whats more they did so in the country that trains the most geologists, archaeologists and paleoanthropologists in the world. People have been looking intensely at rocks in the states for over a hundred years, collecting fossils avidly. Its not like the Western Desert in Australia. Yet have missed something like 115 000 years plus of human habitation while collecting a wealth of evidence of the past 15000 years.

Its also worth pointing out the candidate species all had constrained ranges that are way outside being able to cross the Bering Strait. They were living in latitudes of around the south of France during the glacials when the journey would have had to be made, but they would have had to cross the Bering when average temperatures above there were about 10C colder than today. Cold enough for permanent frozen sea ice. You need Innuit level tools not bloody hand axes.

"Highly unlikely event" usually brings out the doe eyed romantics arguing we need to keep our minds open about alien civilisations, faster than light nutrinos and the endless supply of "pre clovis" Americans. These stories invariably turn out to be bunk. You can argue that researchers need to keep themselves open to the extremely unlikely but the public? Did not happen until you get a wealth of new evidence.

Good luck hunting for the Loch Ness Monster though, you know never say never

 

[bluescreen]

As I have been told for decades by creationists, homeopaths, moon hoaxers, climate deniers and so on.
It is a variation of a well tried and tested trope.
Galileo gambit - RationalWiki

The idea that humans inhabited a two continents without leaving a trace for about 100 000 years, left no genetic markers and seem to have done so with much more primitive tool kits than those we know did make the journey is just flight of fancy. Like every time an anomalous star turns up people shout "alien civilisation".

Use your brain.

This obviously never occurred to the paleolithic archaeologists researching the matter.

 

[Pickman's model]

Good science is not assuming every anomaly in your data makes you Copernicus.

being as these are not astronomers i doubt any of them thought even for an instant that they were copernicus

 

[Pickman's model]

Good science is not assuming every anomaly in your data makes you Copernicus.

There dating puts this in the Eemian interglacial when sea levels were about 5m higher than today. So that means they would have had to cross thousands of years earlier. So you have a compounding series of unlikely events. A group of proto humans made one of the toughest journeys achieved by pre-Neolithic peoples, did so with the Mousterian tool kit but thrived for 10 000s of years, left virtually no trace then suddenly died out.
Whats more they did so in the country that trains the most geologists, archaeologists and paleoanthropologists in the world. People have been looking intensely at rocks in the states for over a hundred years, collecting fossils avidly.

for your information, the united states has only existed for 241 years. so i think you'll find these people did not die in a country with any archaeologists, geologists or even paleoanthropologists.

and i think you'll find people have been looking at rocks in north america for rather longer than 100 years. unless you mean no one bothered looking at them before say 1900.

 

[ferrelhadley]

for your information, the united states has only existed for 241 .

So beige.

 

[Pickman's model]

So beige.

a wanker's reply. which is no surprise.

 

[Idris2002]

do you always do your tough tasks late?

Well, yeah, if it takes me that long to develop spear throwers, needles, etc.

It's just about possible that this was some much earlier troupe who tried it but didn't make it - it took about three attempts to settle the high Arctic in prehistory, with the ancestors of today's Inuit/Eskimoes being the third wave to attempt it, and the first to make it.

(I've not read this new bit of work, mind, so maybe an egg is spinning faceward at me even as I type)

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

As I have been told for decades by creationists, homeopaths, moon hoaxers, climate deniers and so on.
It is a variation of a well tried and tested trope.
Galileo gambit - RationalWiki

The idea that humans inhabited a two continents without leaving a trace for about 100 000 years, left no genetic markers and seem to have done so with much more primitive tool kits than those we know did make the journey is just flight of fancy. Like every time an anomalous star turns up people shout "alien civilisation".

Use your brain.

The debunking of the 'Galileo Gambit' is erroneous. It equates a philosophy, with fact-based knowledge derived via the scientific method.

The beliefs of ISIS members aren't in the same category of ideas with the belief of biochemists in the Krebs Cycle.

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

smashing our understanding of migration to the americas

View attachment 105428

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/26/...rth-america-california-nature-study.html?_r=0

Thanks for the cite: it's very interesting.

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

Rubbish.

Arguably, a more balanced response is found in the article itself:

But other archaeologists said the bone fractures and rock scratches were unconvincing.

“They present evidence that the broken stones and bones could have been broken by humans,” said Vance T. Holliday, an archaeologist at the University of Arizona. “But they don’t demonstrate that they could only be broken by humans.”

 

[Yuwipi Woman]

I'm reminded of the time that I brought some rock samples to work--pyrite, salt crystals, fluorite, etc. There were people who were convinced that they were the work of humans because they were "too regular" to be natural formations. My mind is open to the possibility. There is plenty of old tools and fossils yet to be found, but I give it little likelihood in this case.

 

[Sprocket.]

Does this mean another Times best seller from Yuval Noah Harari?

 

[Idris2002]

Now the Neanderthals are in the frame as possible Mastodon killers:

First Americans may have been Neanderthals 130,000 years ago

It's a long way from the Neander valley to Calif-orn-i-ay, is all I can say.

 

[ViolentPanda]

Now the Neanderthals are in the frame as possible Mastodon killers:

First Americans may have been Neanderthals 130,000 years ago

It's a long way from the Neander valley to Calif-orn-i-ay, is all I can say.

Motherfuckers probably surfed there, using Ireland as a stepping stone across to eastern Canada, then took the prehistoric equivalent of a VW camper trek across from the eastern seaboard to the west, because one of them had had a dream about the big waves to be found there.