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

[Idris2002]

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.

Harsh realm, dude.

 

[Pickman's model]

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.

 

[EastEnder]

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

I can't decide whether your arguments are more ad hominem or strawman. You certainly seem unnecessarily riled for no apparent reason. You are a lot more interesting when debating sensibly rather than resorting to histrionics.

I agree that the case for human occupation in America some 130000 years ago seems exceedingly thin at this stage, and contradicts everything I've ever learnt of palaeoanthropology. As I said before, I'll need a lot more convincing evidence than a few vague marks on animal bones to find this latest research remotely plausible. I am highly sceptical, but remain open to the possibility. Following the tenets of falsification, rather than seeking to explain how early man could not have made the journey there, if I were a researcher I would focus on trying to prove that the bone marks were not made by man, ideally by hypothesising about what else could have caused them. That would seem a logical way forward.

 

[Pickman's model]

I can't decide whether your arguments are more ad hominem or strawman.

more shitferbrains in my book.

 

[ferrelhadley]

I can't decide whether your arguments are more ad hominem

I agree that the case for human occupation in America some 130000 years ago seems exceedingly thin at this stage,

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.

Its Urban. You wanted an argument.

Anyways ignoring the above there are a number of reasons this kind of vastly over blown announcement is just shite.

First it plays indirectly into a racist trope about indigenous peoples of pre Columbian Americas.

Racist fantasy

The Solutrean hypothesis has won some following among white supremacist and other White racists. It forms the premise of Kyle Bristow's pseudo-historical novel White Apocalypse;[8] he apparently wishes to make the point that the first settlers in the New World were Europeans rather than "Beringian" Asians. That the mtDNA evidence suggests that the real first claimants of North America live on as Arabic-speaking people in the Middle East is apparently not something the novel dwells on, either.[9][10] For that matter, nothing that we know about them suggests that the Solutreans were White, either, at least not in any sense we'd understand it.[11]
Our Author also spoils his ending with his title. He has the brave white Solutreans getting killed off by the savage Beringians, just like in the Book of Mormon. This isn't the Solutrean hypothesis; the hypothesis actually says that the Solutreans survived and founded the Algonquian speaking peoples. Considering that the entire point of white supremacists taking up the Solutrean cause is to claim that modern native Americans are intentionally covering up an act of organized genocide, they basically haven't got a leg to stand on, scientifically or historically. There is also the unanswered question: if one group did in fact cross the Atlantic and died out, why exactly should modern people be outraged over what would be at most a historical oddity?[12]

Solutrean hypothesis - RationalWiki
While not the same thing it can be used in the same way by some to try to deligitimise or throw some doubts onto Native Americans claims to land.

Secondly there it the "burnt toast causes cancer" angle. These kind of wild and dramatic stories that gain traction in the media then are roundly debunked. They enter the popular conscious as science exaggerating or just making stuff up.

And there is my old pals the creationists\IDers who will take great delight in dragging this up "but it was the consensus that people were in the Americas 130 000 years ago and now it is shown to be wrong. Science is always open to correction *cue* "Galileo proved the Earth was round\Copernicus was burnt at the stake for his views etc.... thus my version of evolution is just as likely to be valid".
Finally and most mundanely, the hype in the press is creating a very bad over view of our current state of knowledge of this field. The fan fair just reeks of crap like "fossils in Martian meteorites!" and many other stories that really were not what was originally claimed.

As always your mileage may vary and its Urbnan 75. What are you here for other than to kick off a fight.

 

[Bahnhof Strasse]

ferrelhadley, take a look at Australia. Currently the arrival of the Aboriginal people stands at around 75,000 years ago. This number is continually being pushed further back. To get there they had to build boats and learn to navigate to a destination they could not see or even know was there. If people were seafaring with such skill at least 75,000 years ago there is every chance they were able to walk and canoe to the Americas long before that. And in Oz there is not much in the way of evidence of existence, no buildings etc.

 

[Cid]

ferrelhadley, take a look at Australia. Currently the arrival of the Aboriginal people stands at around 75,000 years ago. This number is continually being pushed further back. To get there they had to build boats and learn to navigate to a destination they could not see or even know was there. If people were seafaring with such skill at least 75,000 years ago there is every chance they were able to walk and canoe to the Americas long before that. And in Oz there is not much in the way of evidence of existence, no buildings etc.

<citation needed>

 

[ferrelhadley]

ferrelhadley, take a look at Australia. Currently the arrival of the Aboriginal people stands at around 75,000 years ago. This number is continually being pushed further back..

I have had a hunt around and can only find very speculative sources on that kind of dating.

Here is a paper from last year putting the genetic evidence as about 50kya
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982216000786

Here is a very recent genetic study giving about 50kya
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v544/n7649/full/nature21416.html


This sumerises physically dated sites

There are a few "if may be perhaps and thusly" sites around. But there are always those kind of speculative sites in human paleoanthorpology. Generally they get tidied up with better methodologies or reanalysis. Especially when you have such a strong convergence for the roughly 50kya date.


And this backs up the point I had made, when humans turn up over something the size of a continent they leave traces. You see them.

To get there they had to build boats and learn to navigate to a destination they could not see or even know was there. If people were seafaring with such skill at least 75,000 years ago there is every chance they were able to walk and canoe to the Americas long before that. And in Oz there is not much in the way of evidence of existence, no buildings etc

We know, or at least think that Homo florensiensis' ancestors made an open water journey perhaps 900 000 years ago. We know the peoples who made it to New Guinea and Australia also had sea faring skills of a sort. But an open boat across tropical waters is not the Bering Strait during a glacial maximum. In all likely hood the journey would have been made when there was a land bridge.

The 20-15kya time when Homo sapiens made the journey, it was a walk. But this was a tough tough tough part of the world.

Globally temperatures would have been about 5-6C below the preindustrial average, but at the poles this would have been closer to 10C colder. Permanent sea ice surrounded the Bering region, so it would be even colder than the current north coast of Alaska. When it is that cold it is also a very very dry world as in modern Antartica. The winters would easily be hitting cold nights of -50C as we see in the coldest parts of modern Siberia, at these temperatures any flesh exposed for a few minutes is frost bitten. The giant Laurentide Ice Sheet is 3km thick, this means you will get katabatic winds of 100mph will be regular and hitting peaks of 190mph when it gets funneled in Alaskan valleys. It will be like the coasts of north Greenland or Antartica. The kind of conditions that could take severe casualties on modern, specialist Arctic warfare units. Getting tribes of families through that for decades without the advanced tools that emerge with "behavioral modernity"? Then finding a path through the Rockies, between the glaciers and living long enough to last into the Eemian interglacial before dying out?

We see very little evidence of pre Homo sapiens peoples in the north east of Eurasia during the great glaciations.

I have laboured my point ad nauseum. Time will tell. Certainly our tools for exploring the past are always moving forward.
DNA of extinct humans found in caves - BBC News