
Humans May Have Reached North America by More Than One Route - curtis
https://gizmodo.com/humans-may-have-reached-north-america-by-more-than-one-1828194893
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protomyth
_“My professional opinion is that if we actually want to test which of these
hypotheses is true, we need more data—and it should be combining
archaeological, climatic, and genetic—and it needs to be systematic,” she
said. “At the moment we are forced to cobble together puzzle pieces from
disparate sources and there isn’t congruity between methods used at various
sites, so it’s hard to say what is really comparable and what isn’t.”_

Good luck getting the genetic data. A lot of tribes in the US have been taken
advantage of by universities to get grant money with no real benefit for the
tribe. Some tribes have even gone so far to restrict research data. One reason
I use tarsnap is that the encrypted locally data complies with the local
tribal resolutions on data sharing.

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nathancahill
Was curious, googling came up with this resolution:
[http://www.ncai.org/resources/resolutions/supporting-the-
hav...](http://www.ncai.org/resources/resolutions/supporting-the-havasupai-
indian-tribe-in-their-claim-against-the-arizona-board-of-regents-regarding-
the-unauthorized-use-of-blood-samples-and-research)

Curious how tarsnap relates to this?

~~~
protomyth
Tarsnap is encrypted locally and they don't see the unencrypted data. Dropbox
can see the actual files, so it would violate our local law if we put any
research or demographic data on a Dropbox share.

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shams93
The land theory was popular because it’s easier to prove a lot ice age coast
line is deep under water and it’s hard to find the easy evidence but the
cultural and linguistic evidence are there

~~~
curtis
Not may people appreciate that at the peak of the last ice age, "sea level"
was 400 feet lower than it is today. It's likely that there's a whole bunch of
archaeological sites that we can't easily get to right now, even if we could
find them.

~~~
Bucephalus355
Yes, it’s very likely most of the human pathway out of Africa to Australia
would have gone over these kinds of routes.

For instance, Indonesia would have been connected to Australia more or less
and so one could cross over land from Southeast Asia to Australia.

~~~
jcranmer
Not quite. There are some oceanic trench faults in between Indonesian islands,
so there was no full land connection.

At the last glacial maximum (and sea-level minimum), the big islands of
Sumatra, Java, and Borneo would have been portions of a massive Southeast Asia
peninsula. In addition, New Guinea would have been attached to Australia. The
other Indonesian islands, such as Sulawesi and Timor, would still have been
islands. The gaps between the islands would be somewhat smaller, perhaps about
25mi (even between Timor and Australia), which is close enough that you can
sail between them without ever losing sight of land.

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teh_klev
Link to original article and not Gizmodo's reheat:

[http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/4/8/eaat5473](http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/4/8/eaat5473)

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mozumder
Wouldn't people be able to traverse the continent in a few months? Why are
they giving estimated ranges that span thousands of years?

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Alan_Dillman
Climatic and geographic familiarity is a big thing. My ancestors left the
Russian Steppes and ended up in Kansas, by all accounts a much nicer place.
They left anyway, and homesteaded in an area of Canada that is quite similar
to the terrain they'd left behind in the old country.

They skipped over a lot of good farm land, and ended up in Northern Alberta
for no discernible reason other than they knew how to deal with it. The
problems made sense to their skill sets, and they did very well.

As the other person said, familial support is darned important, which is why
my family went to Kansas in the first place. They had relatives there. It was
recent enough that my grandmother has gone there to visit her cousins over the
years.

I imagine that successful hunter-gatherer groups colonised over the next hill,
or a days walk or two down the river. Probably someone could model that to
narrow down prospective digs. I know that the land between the confluence of
two rivers was a common place for groups to meet up.

I guess my family also provides a modern example of far colonising. The way
they bridged the Atlantic was by sending a few young men ahead to scout out
new potential homelands. I suspect that they used this as a sort of social
control, and to add a useful function to the young men who were disruptive
agents in their society.

In a hunter-gather society, this tactic would be better than straight
banishment or death. "Climb that mountain pass and see if there is good land
on the other side. Prove the land by staying over summer, and come back in the
fall with skins and dried berries".

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neffy
It´s also possible that then as now, the idea of spending summer away from
parental control was an excellent motivator for the younger members of the
tribe to find new digs.

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toyg
To be fair, "parental control" back then was so much looser than anything we
could conceive today. Any family would have had a minimum of 3 or 4 children,
and they would have been put to work at ages as early as 8, possibly becoming
a tribe peer shortly after. There was probably control at tribe level, but
parents were likely busy surviving.

We also keep talking about this in terms of rejection (being banned, escaping
parents etc), but it might well be that they were simply pushed by a reckless
sense of exploration, curiosity, and personal ambition. Their world was
endlessly new: what is beyond that hill? What is beyond that river? I'll find
out, and if it's good, I'll make it mine. After all I'm a teenager, I
obviously cannot die.

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InitialLastName
> We also keep talking about this in terms of rejection (being banned,
> escaping parents etc), but it might well be that they were simply pushed by
> a reckless sense of exploration, curiosity, and personal ambition. Their
> world was endlessly new: what is beyond that hill? What is beyond that
> river? I'll find out, and if it's good, I'll make it mine. After all I'm a
> teenager, I obviously cannot die.

Right on. There are a lot of instincts humans show in developed society that
work great in a hunter-gatherer society, including this one. See also:

-Tribalism

-Territorialism

-Hoarding

