The only hypothesis I can come up with that lets me square the archaeological evidence (the numerous sites with pre-clovis dates) and the genetic evidence (almost all current North American indigenous population genetics derives from a single population that split off 17Kya) is that there's been multiple waves of people that have migrated into the Americas, and that either the events precluding or surrounding the Younger Dryas period contributed to a severe depopulating of the continent at that time, or that the most recent wave of immigrants almost entirely wiped out the previous population, as had they absorbed them I would assume we'd see more genetic evidence of that.
Personally I think the preponderance of archaeological evidence is strongly suggesting that there were absolutely people in the Americas pre-clovis, but the really interesting question from here then is who were they and what happened to them?
The comet strike of 12,800 years ago neatly wiped out north American camels, horses, giant sloths, mammoths, mastodons, saber-tooth cats, dire wolves, the biggest bear and bison, cheetahs, and numerous other species, and neatly terminated all Clovis production. It would not be a stretch to guess it also wiped out most of the people making the Clovis points.
People living in southeast Asia 70,000 years ago were certainly sailing out of sight of land, because they reached and colonized Australia. It beggars belief to suggest they did not also go to other places in equally easy reach, and then others from there.
The article disgracefully trots out, once again, the "construction equipment" claim about the Cerutti mastodon site, despite its thorough refutation.
The article further vindicates Graham Hancock's complaints of vicious mis-representation. His projections are certainly wrong in myriad details, but he is totally sincere in advancing them. He has predicted, correctly, embarrassingly many recent developments historians laughably insisted were impossible; I would not be surprised at more. When you feel you need to lie about your opponent to discredit him, it tells us more about you than about him.
Genetic evidence, and notions of a more-or-less constant rate of accumulation of mutations, are on much shakier ground than the author suggests. That unreliability is unfortunate for people obliged to rely on it. We can still learn a great deal from it about the order of migrations, but not so much their dates relative to geological events.
> The article further vindicates Graham Hancock's complaints of vicious mis-representation. His projections are certainly wrong in myriad details, but he is totally sincere in advancing them.
I’ll +1 some of this - the evidence is mounting that standing theories re. the end of the last ice age, impact hypothesis, development of civilization, at the least deserve another look and not quite so much dogma. More underwater archaeology is needed off the coasts, and under the Amazon and probably Sahara. These are all tough places to investigate but who knows, maybe we need to push our civilizational history back a few thousand years.
Graham really can’t clutch his pearls too much though. His early stuff was just kooky and he still has a tendency to weave way too much of the metaphysical and flat-out conjecture into his ideas. It turns academics off (putting it mildly), exactly the people who’s credibility and attention he craves. It’s tough for me to tell when Graham has actually done some interesting research and is calling out something real vs Graham when he’s nine oh-what-if-they? levels deep into conjecture.
If Graham would put his head down, eat a great big ice cream scoop of skepticism chocolate, and then go do investigative work and let the facts lead him - full stop - he’d probably make a ton more progress with his ideas than he has.
Hancock is equipped neither by training nor temperament to be a scientist. He does not pretend to be one. Trying, he would fail. Judging him as one is deeply silly. He calls himself a journalist. He is a storyteller, and invents engaging stories.
What he attempts is very different from science. He openly speculates about where the evidence might lead. His failure to understand some of the evidence, and what is possible, sometimes leads him to howlers. But remarkably often he has predicted finds that historians foolishly insisted were impossible.
His appeal is in actually engaging with evidence historians and archaeologists try to conceal or downplay. He takes us to actual sites, and shows us evidence historians refuse to discuss, or as often openly lie about. His speculations are fluff. But taking us around to see things, and inviting us to speculate along with him, is engaging in ways nothing allowed to scientists can.
Scientists could draw huge benefit from engaging with the evidence he exposes, instead of demonizing him. Their complaints fall flat because he is, simply, not a scientist, even a bad one, and should not be treated like one. He inspires with what might be, which is a good thing, and that he would do better with better help.
(Uniquely, Scientists Against Myths, on YT, does more engagement than anybody else, but in a way that is badly off-putting. They forget that they are addressing the audience, not their perceived myth-maker enemies.)
He would still be often wrong, but more interestingly wrong. And sometimes, still, he would turn out to be right. There is nothing wrong with that.
>People living in southeast Asia 70,000 years ago were certainly sailing out of sight of land, because they reached and colonized Australia. It beggars belief to suggest they did not also go to other places in equally easy reach, and then others from there.
My understanding is that those who reached Australia did not go further, because they forgot how to build ocean-worthy vessels.
There was nowhere further to go, unless you count New Zealand. We don't know if they reached New Zealand. But Australia/New Guinea/Tasmania (called Sahul) was plenty of territory, by itself.
The people who sailed to Australia were of a culture that could sail in any direction, and would have. You would need to come up with a reason for them not to.
There's a theory that the Younger Dryas was caused by an impact of a bolide on a North American glacier, usually of one that fragmented considerably on entry.
There was certainly a bolide strike roughly coincident with the beginning of the 1300-year Younger Dryas cold spell.
Whether the strike caused the Younger Dryas cold spell is a matter of speculation. We can anyway be confident that the cold spell did not cause the bolide strike.
There was not certainly a bolide strike. No one has identified an unambiguous sign of such a strike; a purported impact crater was identified in Greenland a few years ago, but it is not yet confirmed as an impact crater, nor is it well-constrained to occur around the Younger Dryas. (There's apparently a paper suggesting that it's off a tad, maybe 50 million years too early).
The ice core record is unambiguous, corroborated by soil samples from literally dozens of sites as far away as Syria, South Africa, and southern Chile. South African lake sediment identifies an exact year.
The smoking gun is the layer of massively enriched platinum dust without the excess sulfur an eruption would emit, and melt spherules. Anyone doubting a bolide strike needs to account for it all in some other way, a tall order.
A crater would be convenient, but is not necessary: we know about airbursts now. E.g., there is no Tunguska crater. Demanding a crater is not scrupulous.
What's the citation for the ice core stuff? I found two papers that investigated this and neither found evidence to support the impact theory, so it seems ambiguous to me, but this isn't my field so obviously I might just be failing to find a more recent result.
If you wanna read em:
Paquay, François S., et al. “Absence of Geochemical Evidence for an Impact Event at the Bølling-Allerød/Younger Dryas Transition.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, vol. 106, no. 51, 2009, pp. 21505–10
Surovell, Todd A., et al. “An Independent Evaluation of the Younger Dryas Extraterrestrial Impact Hypothesis.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, vol. 106, no. 43, 2009, pp. 18155–58.
Update: Found (some?) ice core evidence, it is indeed more recent, but I'm hopelessly out of my wheelhouse at this point so I'll just cite it for anyone also interested and suggest that these more recent publications do seem pretty confident in their conclusion that the impact did happen. So it seems user moloch-hai is correct:
Petaev, Michail I., et al. “Large Pt Anomaly in the Greenland Ice Core Points to a Cataclysm at the Onset of Younger Dryas.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, vol. 110, no. 32, 2013, pp. 12917–20.
Pretty cool stuff, thanks for sharing and prompting me to learn more about it.
> Those are both from 2009, ten years before the smoking gun cited.
Just so you're aware, you haven't actually cited the study yet in this thread.
(Kjær, Kurt H., et al. "A large impact crater beneath Hiawatha Glacier in northwest Greenland." Science advances 4.11 (2018) is the citation, for future reference)
(FWIW, Kenny, Gavin G., et al. "A Late Paleocene age for Greenland’s Hiawatha impact structure." Science advances 8.10 (2022) disputes the age given for that impact crater.)
As already noted, any connection to Hiawatha crater was only ever conjecture. Evidence that Hiawatha was not coincident with the YDB obviously tells us nothing at all about YDB events.
A recent survey article is Sweatman,
The Younger Dryas impact hypothesis: Review of the impact evidence
The remaining controversy is how much the strike contributed to the Younger Dryas development and other coincident events, particularly extinctions. To me, it is ludicrous to blame those on Clovis people, or on a climate hiccup smaller than they had weathered easily many times before. Now that we know people had already been there for 10+ millennia, the sudden wipeout idea gets much sillier.
The idea that the strike triggered the YD is appealing, but the record shows several other such cooling periods with very similar profile and duration in the past 100ky. It seems unlikely they were all triggered by comet strikes. But they could have been: we now know our records of comet strikes are woefully incomplete, having detected a very recent one only by enormous effort.
See also Wendy S. Wolbach et al.
Extraordinary Biomass-Burning Episode and Impact Winter Triggered by the Younger Dryas Cosmic Impact ∼12,800 Years Ago.
Adding: it is disgraceful how sloppy and unscrupulous most opponents of the cosmic impact model have been. They should be ashamed. There is nothing wrong with demanding a high standard of evidence. Failing to maintain even the most basic standards for your own work is, especially in context, inexcusable.
They are righteous defenders of what amounts to the current creation myth of scientism. Nothing to see here when The Science is understood to be a religion.
Wikipedia seems to suggest that evidence for such a bolide strike is disputed. Some claim that the iridium layer, glass sphericals, etc have other explanations.
If wikipedia says something is controversial, then that something is controversial if for no other reason than because there is controversy on wikipedia about it.
This is different than claiming "wikipedia says it's [right/wrong], so it must be [right/wrong]" Demonstrating that an idea is controversial is much easier than proving that idea right or wrong.
Certain individuals are very diligent at scrubbing out whatever they disagree with. The YDIH page is "curated" by a retired professor who insists it lead with a 19th-century speculation, and no doubt will be for a few years more.
Wikipedia "controversies" often carry on for many years after the pros have settled down, until retirees with an axe to grind move on.
Your threshold for "controversy" is way below anybody else's.
Is it controversial whether the Earth is flat? Whether people walked on the moon? Whether they found alien spacecraft there? Whether viruses are involved in AIDS and cancers?
This trivializes the meaning of "controversial" in the context of science, at least, and at the same time places Wikipedia on a level of authority I'm unconvinced is justified. I'm sure there are Wikipedia articles suggesting that climate change is "controversial", too: that doesn't mean it is.
There isn't any scientific controversy about climate change. There is made-up politically motivated obfuscation in service of certain industries, which is controversial.
The Younger Dryas Impact Event theory - there's some evidence that a disintegrating comet impacted North America ~ 12800 years ago and caused widespread forest fires and the equivalent of a nuclear winter.
Professor Robert Schoch, geologist and writer (2013 book Forgotten Civilization: The Role of Solar Outbursts in Our Past and Future) on this topic has came to the conclusion that it was a Sun outburst which caused this.
https://www.robertschoch.com/plasma_iceage.html
Robert Schoch rides his hobby-horse hard. Solar flares and ejections of course occur, and some even hit Earth, but we don't blame them for mass extinctions. (The recent Carrington Event was a small example.) There would be too many mass extinctions.
Anything the sun spits out hits, if anything, the entire hemisphere. You don't get to pick out a specific rock for it to melt, but not the next one over.
There is I think a little bit of chronological confusion that I will try to clear up. My understanding of the consensus rough chronology is as follows:
* Populations move into Beringia maybe 20-25kya. (My knowledge of this date is particularly hazy).
* Populations start moving from Beringia into the Americas. This date is highly contested, but it's accepted that this occurred at least 15kya.
* Clovis culture starts up around 13kya, ends around 11.5kya.
* Younger Dryas starts up 12.8kya, ends around 11.5kya.
So genetic evidence suggesting that peopling starts from around 17kya isn't inconsistent with mainstream dates for peopling of Americas, although it would mean being suspicious of sites much older than 17kya.
> but the really interesting question from here then is who were they and what happened to them?
My interpretation of the evidence... they became Clovis culture.
The lakebed footprints securely scotch that timeline, and Cerutti blasts it to smithereens. The most that could be left of it is that these late migrations somehow wholly supplanted earlier populations.
Either the earlier pop. died out before the later crew arrived, or ... well, genocide is a demonstrated human behavior. It is hard to carry out continent-wide without microbial assistance, but they could have had that.
It’s cool to be excited about this - who wouldn’t be? - but you’re using very definitive language for highly speculative. The article outlines a timeline which, as with the post you’re replying to, is compatible with the White Sands lake footprints.
The Cerutti site _could_ completely upset that theory but it’s far from proven that it’s not a misunderstanding, or that it was Homo sapiens and not another hominid. That would be exciting in its own right, but until there’s more confirmation we should be careful not to describe these as facts or highly-probable.
There seems no possibility of an upset to Cerutti. Bone fragments in the rock faces, greenstick fracturing, adjacent placement of stones and hip-joint ends.
The only plausible complaint I have heard of is lack of stone-knife flakes, but the site is still being excavated.
That it might have been H. e. is exciting. They did get around!
Yes, multiple waves is suggested near the very end of the article, and that this is a focus of current data collection:
> Another possibility ties together evidence of Population Y and potential archaeological evidence at sites like White Sands. Could there have been multiple migrations into the Americas, with one pre-LGM migration consisting of Population Y individuals (and perhaps Unsampled Population A or other groups we have yet to identify), and one post-LGM migration? This would reconcile the archaeological evidence of early traces of humans in the Americas (if they are indeed legitimate, which has yet to be demonstrated to everyone’s satisfaction) and the genetic data.
> Archaeologists sceptical of White Sands’ early dates are dubious of the second scenario, and it is admittedly speculative. We need a great deal more data, both genomic and archaeological, to test it. But, as a field, we are actively engaged in collecting that data, even as I type these words.
The 16-17ka date is the divergence between Northern and southern native american groups, both related to the later (~13ka) clovis culture. Indigenous americans as a whole diverged from Eurasians sometime before 20ka. That initial population eventually split into multiple lineages (Unsampled Population A, Ancient Beringians, Clovis ancestors) that entered the Americas, although it's not clear what order those events occurred in.
We know that there was also later admixture between Alaskan and Eurasian populations across the bering strait and groups like the paleoinuit likely originated (partially) on the siberian side of the straight, but the vast majority of indigenous ancestry across the Americas as a whole derives to the ancestors of the clovis complex. It's not clear how preclovis people relate genetically to those clovis ancestors in the absence of genetic data for them.
Great review of a complicated and developing topic. Best line, and so true:
> Unfortunately, because science is all too often taught in school as a collection of facts, rather than a dynamic process of enquiry, people can be vulnerable to being misled ...
The article nicely illustrates by numerous examples how opponents of not yet well-established proposals endlessly trot out long-since discredited assertions in defense of whatever they fought over while in grad school.
I read about 'Population Y' in David Reichs book "Who We Are and How We Got Here" (which is a good read but was a bit too in depth for me).
One interesting thing in the book was how humans kept repeating this cycle: societies migrate outward and form new societies. Then one of the societies would eradicate/consume a bunch of nearby ones, form a gigantic society, and the process would begin anew. On a human timescale it is horrific and brutal but over a 50,000 year period it is interesting how we spread out but always eventually reunite with the group we split from, unfortunately in a brutal way :(.
> When European settlers and explorers first encountered the Native peoples of the Americas, they sought to force the fact of the Native people’s existence into a Biblical worldview. The First Peoples, who built the impressive earthworks, monuments, temples and pyramids throughout the Americas, were recast as members of a lost tribe of Israelites, Irish sailors, or possibly Vikings, for the ideological convenience of settlers.
> The pretence that the first peoples of the Americas were a different race than Native Americans – a view known today as the Myth of the Moundbuilders – became extremely popular in the 18th and 19th centuries.
I'm always struck by how there's nothing new under the sun. This is basically the same conspiracy theory as Ancient Aliens, with different aesthetics for different centuries.
I toured those mounds near St Louis.. it's absolutely amazing. Especially since none of my childhood public education made a single effort to state their existence, let alone go into just how much of a society existed before we (Europeans) showed up.
That’s interesting. Where I grew up in central Ohio, we had a whole year of “Ohio history” in, I think, 4th grade. We spent a ton of time on the Ohio mound builders and even took a class trip to see the mounds.
> “[…] archaeologists believe that the mound's creation could have been influenced by two different astronomical events: the light from the supernova that created the Crab Nebula in the year 1054 CE […] The light of the supernova would have been visible for two weeks after it first reached earth, which could even be seen in broad day light.“
I can’t even begin to imagine how humans would have interpreted such an event.
Historical records from the year 1054 are available (and are of course the reason we date the nebula to "1054" rather than "the eleventh century"). You can just go see what people of the time thought.
Wikipedia doesn't quote the records associated with 1054, but does quote the record of a supernova in the year 185:
> In the 2nd year of the epoch Zhongping [中平], the 10th month, on the day Guihai [癸亥] [December 7, Year 185], a 'guest star' appeared in the middle of the Southern Gate [南門] [an asterism consisting of ε Centauri and α Centauri], The size was half a bamboo mat. It displayed various colors, both pleasing and otherwise. It gradually lessened. In the 6th month of the succeeding year it disappeared.
> Wikipedia doesn't quote the records associated with 1054
Wait, what? The Wikipedia article on SN 1054 has an extensive discussion of the Chinese records (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SN_1054#Chinese_astronomy), as well as Japanese records and the Arabic account of Ibn Butlan.
Anyway people transcribing what they wrote thought that. A very great deal of such Chinese history was sketchily paraphrased when copying to newer media.
And it tells us nothing of what people on other continents thought. The null hypothesis would be that it varied.
The null hypothesis for a celestial phenomenon like this is that it was viewed as an omen. But since it is not obviously good or bad and isn't responsive to anything on Earth, you'd expect it to be viewed as support for whatever anyone already believed. Omens that appear during unpopular reigns are bad omens. Omens that appear during popular reigns are good omens.
"archaeologists believe that the mound's creation could have been influenced by two different astronomical events: the light from the supernova that created the Crab Nebula"
That's a pretty dubious assertion (and I notice that there aren't any references to which archaeologists supposedly believe this), since:
a) I'm pretty sure there aren't any examples of buildings or structures being "influenced" by this or any other historical supernova in any other cultures; and
b) No mention of the supernova of 1006, which was brighter and longer-lasting than the supernova of 1054?
Serpent Mound and Sunwatch are the big show-stoppers, but lots of Ohioans have mounds practically in their backyards. My dad used to joke that the Adena and Hopewell had some mounds for burial, and some for religious rituals, but the one near our house was where they threw their empty beer bottles.
Indeed. I'm from Indiana, our 4th grade had lots of Indiana history, and talked about the mound builders a lot. We have a small one uphill from our local YMCA. We talked about the local mounds regulary, from here to St. Louis. Seems to be almost a weird sense of local pride.
Cahokia is shockingly big, and the idea of multiple successive societies of mound-builders is sort of ignored or taken for granted; the concept of American Indians who wouldn't fit into a John Wayne movie doesn't cross Americans' minds.
I’m Hacker News’ resident chud, but this is an actual issue. Natives exist only in relation to colonization. Prey, Apocalypto, and other well-made movies about first peoples ALWAYS include a white guy. Prey was egregious, could have easily only been about natives.
It is odd that Apocalypto included conquistadors as contact was very late in the story of the Maya:
Meanwhile, the two remaining Raiders chase Jaguar Paw towards the coast, where all three are astonished at the sight of Spanish conquistadors making their way to the shore. As the two Raiders are confounded by the Spanish ships and begin walking towards the coast, Jaguar Paw uses the distraction to flee and return to his village.
Although much reduced, a significant Maya presence remained into the Postclassic period after the abandonment of the major Classic period cities; the population was particularly concentrated near permanent water sources.[78] Unlike during previous cycles of contraction in the Maya region, abandoned lands were not quickly resettled in the Postclassic.
If you actually look at the link prpi provided, there are several examples. E.g., Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (yes), Hiawatha, and Kings of the Sun; if you allow animated films, there's Pachamama and The Emperor's New Groove. More recent examples not in that list include the Canadian movies Maina (2013) and Edge of the Knife (2018).
I don't know many movies set in pre-Columbian America at all. The idea that this was once the largest city in North America north of Mexico and it's as unknown as it is even to people who live nearby is crazy to me.
People talk about what they know. A more relevant list probably would be how many American natives are filmmakers. I assume that they have several films without any white on it.
One tragedy, on top of the mountain of others, is that their histories were passed down orally. Much of that has been destroyed.
One thing that struck me when I read about The Great Flood of 1862 [0], was that the Native Americans recognized the weather patterns for a series of atmospheric rivers and warned the settlers to relocate to the hills. (Tl;Dr: Central Valley ca was under water for months, Sacramento was abandoned) IIRC, it wasn’t until the 1990s that we had the ability to detect/”recognize” atmospheric rivers with satellites and finally gave them a name.
I actually haven't seen it, you're right, but my understanding is that it's about the Sioux in the American Western frontier, which is more in line with media stereotypes than, for instance, the Iroquois in New York or Seminoles in Florida.
Comanche were the stereotype. The memory of the Comanche empire would have been fresh in the minds of Americans (and Mexicans) in the classical hollywood era. Comanche held territory from Kansas all the way to Mexico. They literally destroyed Northern Mexico. Europeans have no idea how intense life was for anybody that had to live in and around that tribe. And this was in the 1870's (not the 1400's).
With all due respect, perhaps you should see a seminal film before making sweeping judgements of American film portrayal of Native Americas? I'm not sure what your reference to the Iroquois and Seminoles has to do with it. Certain tribes are in American awareness more than others. That happened pre-TV and modern-day media. I don't think you get to decide who Kevin Costner writes films about, but you could write your own.
Same. Any time someone complains about X not being taught in school, it’s important to remember that it likely is taught and they likely didn’t pay attention.
I wouldn't say we spent too long covering it, but having grown up near rayiner but a decade or so after from them, we covered it several times. It was the first unit of 6th and 11th grade US history, as well as 4th grade state history, and tangentially covered in 5th grade world history.
For whatever reason there's a consistent tendency for people of every era I've read about to think they are the smartest and most advanced that have walked the earth, topping a long arc of progress. The more I read about history the more obvious it is that over and over we've gained and then lost significant bodies of knowledge about civil engineering, surveying, agriculture, navigation, mathematics, etc. Pretty amazing.
I watch a lot of ancient history shows on PBS, etc. There are many groaners in there about "sophisticated astronomy", like when some ancients managed to point a building at the summer solstice. Another groaner is bleating about "advanced engineering" when talking about a large mound or pile of rocks.
One of the dumbest was the claim that the close fits of rocks in South America "so tight a knife won't fit in the cracks" must have been done by space alien technology. This silliness persisted until an archaeologist showed how to make such a joint in about half an hour by banging and rubbing rocks together.
What the ancients did do very well with, however, was manipulating the natural world to their benefit. I.e. making gardens, cultivating plants, managing livestock, etc.
Edit: for those who are wondering, the altitude and azimuth of the sun at the solstice can be accurately determined simply by erecting a vertical pointed stick, and having a bit of patience. That's it.
Have any examples? My general summary of technological / scientific / engineering history would be that people in past eras who thought they were more advanced than anyone prior were largely correct.
Sure, plenty of historical examples of things that were in wide use and then misunderstood or forgotten. The scale and precision of cities like Angkor Wat or Tikal including canal systems. Large scale systematic fish trapping and fisheries management in many places including the Salish Sea. Controlled burning and cultivation of a variety of crops across the North American plains. The three sisters planting system. Pacific islander open ocean navigation, especially the stick charts. Persian evaporatively cooled architecture (qanat + wind catcher). Progress is uneven and non-linear and it takes a while to figure out we've gone backwards. For example controlled burns had a purpose but at some point in the US we decided to put out every fire. Turns out that causes problems. People decided to seal buildings up super tight with no ventilation for energy efficiency reasons. Turns out that causes problems too (mostly solvable with more technology in this case). Europeans showed up in the Pacific Northwest and thought it was a bunch of savages living in the wilderness. Turns out it was a structured society with large scale systematic agriculture, just not in a way that was easily understood by outsiders of the time. The Kansas Dust Bowl is a whole microcosm of this. The ancient Greeks, Romans, Chinese, etc washed their hands but in the US just 150 years ago it was not considered necessary. It's a meandering path.
A lot of what you have listed is more about knowledge of local ecosystems - not "civil engineering, surveying, agriculture, navigation, mathematics, etc.".
As to some of the more general science knowledge though, subsequent societies could certainly replicate the scale and precision of cities like Angkor Wat or Tikal. Likewise, later ocean navigators had far more sophisticated navigation methods, using such tools as the compass and the kamat. As to qanat and wind-catcher architecture, it wasn't ever really lost...
I'll grant you that knowledge of public health has been very uneven, though it has generally been on the upswing in the past couple centuries (as objectively measured by life expectancy and the burden of communicable diseases), nothwithstanding certain missteps (such as adopting droplet theory which was less accurate than miasma theory).
> I'm always struck by how there's nothing new under the sun
The fact that the 19th century featured provably wrong theories about where the native peoples came from is not suggestive of anything. They thought there was an ether that light traveled through, too.
Native peoples' myths are often "we were always here; we sprang from the earth." Well, we all came from Africa, ultimately.
I think you misunderstand me. I'm not making an argument (ie I'm not claiming this to prove anything), I'm remarking on a pattern that I see recur, and an example in this article that sparked my interest. Not every comment is an argument, and not every discussion needs to be a debate.
I think it's interesting that conspiracy theory tropes seem to recur very reliably over time. I have an interest in this topic and when I'm reading about it, I find there's a lot of rhyming.
Conspiracism and exploded scientific hypothesis are quite different in nature. They're "wrong" in quite different ways. I recently made a comment addressing this and it might interest you:
To your last point, origin myths are a claim about religious truth, not scientific truth. You can't meaningfully compare statements from different epistemologies like that.
I take your point about origin myths and epistemology, but the original article makes repeated points about the First Peoples being left out of the debate.
So how would they be left IN? Would the archeological community say to them, respectfully, "Our evidence is that First Peoples arrived from Siberia somewhere between 20,000 - 10,000 BCE. What do you think?"
So what would their reaction be? Would it be:
1) We don't know; our myths don't go back that far; you tell US, or
I don't have all the answers, and I certainly can't react on behalf behalf of First Peoples (and even if that were my ethnicity, I could of course still only respond on my own behalf, as they are not a monolith), but I think the answer lies somewhere in the tension between archeologists & anthropologists taking native people seriously, native people becoming archaeologists & anthropologists & being respected as colleagues, and having the humility to accept that some peoples feel like we've lost their trust & aren't entitled to the pieces of the puzzle they may have (a legitimate and frankly understandable position).
Certainly. I've heard of some native archaeologists, but I'll confess I'm not super up on the topic.
> If you're an anthropologist who'd like to solve the puzzle, what should you do?
Well, if you're an anthropologist, and some group of people makes it very clear they aren't a puzzle & won't be studied (say, the people of Sentinel Island) - go do something else maybe? Curiosity doesn't entitle you to answers, there's plenty of other stuff for an anthropologist to do. I feel like the first rule of anthropology is, "respect the culture you're studying and take it seriously," and if what they're telling you is "mind your business" - well, listen.
Returning to Sentinel Island, we might not know why they don't want to talk to us, but they've made it abundantly clear that the lines of communication are closed. Surely we could spy on them from satellites, drop surveillance devices from helicopters, et cetera, and start to understand their culture that way. For that matter, we could create some sort of arrow-proof vehicle and overpower their efforts to repel us. But why should be? Just because we're curious about them? Why should we privilege our curiosity over their clear desire to be left alone?
Sure, but there's also many threads to tug on there, you doing need to demand any particular person or group share what they know with you if they don't want to. You can break out your map and start looking for promising sites.
And if they are interested in sharing their oral tradition with you, and you sneer at it - well, they might rescind your invitation.
> Sure, but there's also many threads to tug on there, you doing need to demand any particular person or group share what they know with you if they don't want to.
In any case, what constitutes "sneering" at their oral tradition? As you said, science & religion are not the same. So what should a scientist do if their beliefs differ from science's?
The scientist should thank them for their time, refrain from patronizing them, and continue going about their day.
Sneering would be something like saying, and I mean this with all due respect, "you didn't come out of the ground in that canyon, we all came from Africa" - misconstruing what they're saying, seeking to correct rather than understand, generally being rude and dismissive. If someone shares something with you, it's up to you to figure out how and whether to incorporate it into your epistemology; if you're having trouble with that, it might be tempting to say, "the problem is that your epistemology sucks," but a.) That's an indecent way to treat someone and b.) No one is going to learn anything that way and c.) The problem is actually that you gave up on trying to understand, not that there was no resolution to the conundrum, and not that their epistemology is "inferior" in some way.
Consider that when a native culture has an origin story involving a specific place, regardless of whether we believe that humanity evolved there, there is really no reason to doubt their culture emerged there and that that place has an important bearing in their history.
The conception of the aether was not some kind of substance of the kind that we get with physical solids, gases, and liquids, but more of a medium through which EM waves propagate. That's really what the EM field is. The big difference is that the EM field is Minkowskian whereas the aether was originally conceived of as Galilean (and the Galilean aether was decisively falsified by experiments).
Well so basically the original thinking was that if electromagnetic waves travelled through a medium, then they would have a constant speed relative to this medium. As such, an object moving relative to this medium would measure different speeds for waves in different directions. No such effect was found, despite doing such things as measuring when the Earth was going in a different direction around the Sun.
These results decreased belief in an aether (though more complex experiments were needed to falsify the possibility that the Earth was dragging aether with it). Additionally, a series of length / time dilations were proposed for moving objects to explain the bizarre fact that the speed of the any light was measured the same regardless of the relative movement of the measuring observer. At this point Einstein stepped in and explained the theory of Special Relativity and how speeds don't add linearly and distances and times don't transform as one would naively expect under Galilean relativity. It was a really a generalization of the previously proposed Lorentz transformations that returned to the idea that all movement was relative. The spacetime that transforms in this way is called "Minkowskian".
Eventually after this, Quantum Mechanics developed into Quantum Field Theory, which is inherently relativistic and embedded in Minkowskian spacetime. In this view, electromagnetic photons are just excitations of the quantum field. Things basically came full circle and the quantum field is essentially an aether as envisioned all along. The difference is that it is relativistic / Minkowskian, and as such doesn't have a particular reference frame in which it is "not moving".
Note that even before the development fo QFT, this is what Einstein was saying: "More careful reflection teaches us however, that the special theory of relativity does not compel us to deny ether. We may assume the existence of an ether; only we must give up ascribing a definite state of motion to it, i.e. we must by abstraction take from it the last mechanical characteristic which Lorentz had still left it. We shall see later that this point of view, the conceivability of which I shall at once endeavour to make more intelligible by a somewhat halting comparison, is justified by the results of the general theory of relativity."
Part of the reason why in particular English & French settlers saw the local Indians as incapable of building the things they saw is because by the time they were settling these areas, the local Indians were massively depopulated and really weren't capable of it anymore. This isn't the case in the Spanish settlement regions because the Spanish got there so much earlier and actually saw the complex societies in their heyday. Bernal Diaz exploring and conquering Mexico in 1521 was not dismissive of the locals' construction abilities! Mexico did depopulate - it didn't reach the same population as it had in the early 1500s until the mid-20th century - but the plagues didn't hit until the Spanish saw what was there.
I saw a PBS show some years back that found traces of french DNA in the eastern tribes, along with some similarities of arrowheads with some found in caves in France. The speculation is that some ice age french cavemen crossed the Atlantic ice to get to America.
That theory has lost a lot of legs in the past few years now that DNA results from ancient North Americans have been sequenced and they don't show any affinity to Europeans, such as Anzick-1 who's body was found in a Clovis burial and Kennewick Man who's skull shape was used as proof by Solutrean Hypothesis supporters.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature14625
If the documentary was older than 2015, it's likely they didn't have this information and would be relying on inferences from the DNA of modern populations, which would be complicated by mixed race people.
Sounds like part of Thor Heyerdahl's larger theory of vikings everywhere. Part of the story was folks settling the Pacific from South America, recreated in the Kon-Tiki expedition.
Heyerdahl believed that people from South America could have reached Polynesia during pre-Columbian times. His aim in mounting the Kon-Tiki expedition was to show, by using only the materials and technologies available to those people at the time, that there were no technical reasons to prevent them from having done so.
This is known as the Solutrean hypothesis. I understand it to be controversial, but it seems like everything about this topic is controversial to somebody.
All the evidence points to North America being loaded with many remnants of past civilization but the narrative always took presidence over the truth. Don't underestimate the power of the narrative (Columbus discovered America, only containing savages)
For example, check out this Twitter account, Waking Up with Analog. This guy has been reviewing old newspapers from 1700s-1900s and has found many many articles detailing ancient discoveries of civilizations here in North America. Again, most of these were quashed and disappeared in favor of the prevailing ideological narrative.
https://twitter.com/1_analog_9
Check out this new video released yesterday. It hypothesizes that Florida is actually the biblical Garden of Eden and that the true Fertile Crescent / cradle of humanity is the Gulf. https://youtu.be/v-zAxsAbpQo
Look up the Saxor Stones, very clear ancient boat anchors spread all throughout Florida. People say they are natural but you can clearly see the holes are manmade and you can see where the ropes had went. They are the largest stone boat anchors anywhere in the world. Here's a documentary about them https://youtu.be/L5Uu3bRPuIA
> Then, in 2021, a team of archaeologists dropped a bombshell into this debate: they’d found footprints – unquestionable evidence of a human presence – at White Sands National Park in New Mexico, dating to between 23,000-21,000 years ago.
The article places that date long before the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM):
> It [the Clovis point] appeared widely across the continent beginning about 13,400 years ago, near the end of the LGM.
Which raises the question of what people were doing in the Americas before the LGM?
USGS has this to say about what might have been going on with the climate at the time the White Sands footprints were laid down:
> During the late Pleistocene (~129,000 to ~11,700 years ago), full glacial conditions were interrupted repeatedly by abrupt warming events called Dansgaard-Oeschger, or D-O events. In the southwestern U.S., D-O events caused centuries-long megadroughts, which devastated spring ecosystems, lowered lake levels, affected sea-surface temperatures and circulation patterns, and even triggered seismic activity. One of these events, called D-O 2, dates to ~23,500 years ago and was especially impactful to spring ecosystems, as water tables never returned to the same levels after the event that they had maintained for thousands of years prior.
Wikipedia notes that D-O events flared up extremely rapidly on a geological timescale:
> In the Northern Hemisphere, they [D-O events] take the form of rapid warming episodes, typically in a matter of decades, each followed by gradual cooling over a longer period. ...
The null hypothesis is that animals, including humans, moved where they could, when they could, regardless of any inconvenience for theorists of recent prehistory.
All we can know about the prehistory of present populations from genetics is their direct ancestry. Who was in the Americas before those ancestors, but did not breed with them, is lost to us until we find actual remains.
Pretending to know there weren't any is a mistake made over and over again, yet never learned from.
Interesting read. I’m curious if anyone is familiar with the software they use to connect the genetic sequencing. I’m amazed that they can find migration patterns from this data.
> The Serpent Mound is believed to have been built by the Native American Adena peoples around 320 BCE, and then either added to or repaired by the Fort Ancient peoples around 1100 CE.
T̶h̶e̶ ̶p̶r̶e̶v̶i̶o̶u̶s̶ ̶u̶n̶c̶o̶n̶t̶r̶o̶v̶e̶r̶s̶i̶a̶l̶ ̶l̶o̶w̶e̶r̶ ̶b̶o̶u̶n̶d̶ ̶w̶a̶s̶ ̶b̶e̶t̶w̶e̶e̶n̶ ̶1̶2̶.̶8̶k̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶1̶3̶.̶5̶k̶.̶ (This hasn't been a lower bound for a while, see below.)
It's my understanding this is an active area of debate. To give a tentative upper bound, the Cerutti mastodon kill - who's anthropogenic origins, while they seem compelling to me (a nonexpert), are hotly debated, have a date of 130k years ago.
(I suspect GP meant to reference the Cerutti Mastodon site, rather than Serpent Mound?)
(And of course, much of this is referenced in the article, I'm busted for reading the comments first! Interesting article that says it far better than I, worth reading.)
The current uncontroversial bound is roughly 15kya--as the article notes, the White Sands fossil footprints are still controversial. The Clovis First hypothesis has been considered thoroughly discredited in the academic community for about 20 years now.
The Cerutti Mastodon site is not compelling to me, because a date of 130kya would put it before any other site of homo sapiens outside of Africa. Being so far out of line with other evidence means that the evidence in favor of hominids needs to be exceptionally rock solid, which it isn't.
For sure, thanks for keeping me honest. I'm a decidedly a nonexpert, I just watch some documentaries and such.
I would submit we should be cautious with metaobservations like, "this is much older than other sites," because we should be trying to prove ourselves wrong, whereas these sorts of metaobservations amplify confirmation bias. I'm not saying skepticism is unwarranted, just that we need to be careful with this sort of reasoning.
As a side note, I've seen people strike through stuff out on HN, and I'd like to strike through this claim to emphasize there's a correction; it's not in the undocumented features repo[1], and I've tried a few standard things like ~this~ and ~~this~~ and -this- and --this-- and have never figured it out. Can anyone tell me what the markdown is?
> I would submit we should be cautious with metaobservations like, "this is much older than other sites," because we should be trying to prove ourselves wrong, whereas these sorts of metaobservations amplify confirmation bias.
Both 'we should be trying to prove ourselves wrong' and 'Being so far out of line with other evidence means that the evidence in favor of hominids needs to be exceptionally rock solid' can both be valid at the same time. The base rate of a 'false positive' for extraordinary claims that conflict with an existing body of evidence is typically much higher so confidence in the evidence would need to quite strong for that piece of evidence to move the consensus.
I'd consider myself largely a frequentist but the relevant xkcd [1] comes to mind
I'd argue that ignoring that aspect can amplify one's susceptiblity to confirmation bias if one is predisposed to believing in a very early American hominid story for whatever reason.
Cerutti being real doesn't mean it's H. Sapiens tho does it? It could be an older hominin, an other descendant of H.Erectus (after all as far as we know H. Neandertalensis did not evolve in africa, and H. Erectus reached the sea of china and the pacific ocean)
Although Fuyan also shows H.Sapiens may (its datation is also disputed) also have reached out of africa much earlier than otherwise supported.
The problem of cerutti's dating is that the archaeological record of hominids in the high Arctic begins <50kya, 80k after the hypothetical dating. There's some middle paleolithic stuff in southern/central Siberia, but also few options to get to the new world without boats or beringia (which was submerged during previous interglacials).
Does that make sense for them to continued to have existed for thousands of years during the ice age where nothing grew? Or if the dating is even accurate at all?
Furthermore the LGM event started around 33000 BCE, reached its peak around 25000 BCE, and the deglaciation started around 19000 BCE with a significant acceleration around 15000 BCE.
I wasn't the one insisting that Mexico and Central America were ice-free. The glaciation blocked off many high-altitude passes like the paso de cortes. Most of the taller ranges along the American cordillera had some level of glacial activity during the LGM and that meaningfully impacted regional climates throughout the Americas.
Well, the ice age[1] was everywhere right? Our ancestors would've had trouble surviving most anywhere, why not California? It's not that literally nothing grew, otherwise what were the mastadon & other animals in the kill site eating?
Another possibility is that this was another group of hominids, not homo sapiens, and that they did in fact die out.
But honestly I'm not qualified to say much more in the subject than I have, I think it's a fascinating hypothesis & that the evidence that the bones were broken apart by being impacted with stones, in a similar manner to how bones are broken up to extract marrow, is compelling. And that the further isotopic evidence suggesting it was the stones found around the site, rather than construction equipment, is also compelling. But I'm not an archaeologist, and when the debate settles, I'll accept the conclusion they come to.
[1] Not to be pedantic, just to note because I find it fascinating, but the current ice age hasn't ended, this was the "last glacial period". Between ice ages there can be things like palm trees and turtles living at the poles. We're currently in an interglacial period of an ongoing ice age.
Most of the world was not iced over; mainly just higher latitudes like where European geologists come from. People in the tropics experienced big climatic shifts -- green Sahara, Amazon savannah, and the Java Sea, South China Sea, Yellow Sea, and Persian Gulf all lush bottom land -- but mostly not ice.
Yeah worth mentioning, to put a fine point on it - geological ice ages are millions of years long and include alternating glacial and interglacial periods. In popular use of the terms, ice ages are those shorter glacial periods.
Personally I think the preponderance of archaeological evidence is strongly suggesting that there were absolutely people in the Americas pre-clovis, but the really interesting question from here then is who were they and what happened to them?