
Idaho artifacts show humans came to North America via a water route, not land - curtis
https://www.cnn.com/2019/08/30/us/idaho-artifacts-coopers-ferry-trnd/index.html
======
mabbo
> show

This word is great for headlines, but bad science. We're uncovering tiny
fragments of a vast history and extrapolating the full story as best we can
from those few clues we have. We can't ever be _sure_ we're right, only that
we're maybe a little more right than before. Next week, someone will find a
new piece of evidence that could rewrite the entire story all over again (wow,
the Beringians had dogsleds and could cover fifty miles per day over
snow?[0]).

And this matters in science writing because the general public see words like
"show" and "proves" and take it as truth, unbreakable. And next week when we
find that new piece of evidence, that article will use the same strong
terminology and the reader who isn't science literate will lose trust in
science- last week they said X was true, now they say Y is true? Are they
lying or making this all up?

Nothing is certain. We're just trying to be less wrong over time.

[0]I made that fact up, so that we're all clear here- dogs weren't even
domesticated that far back. But hey, what if, right?

~~~
nerdponx
You could do s/show/suggest and still get an interesting headline that is also
more correct.

------
doodlebugging
[https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/2019/08/coopers-l...](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/2019/08/coopers-
landing-idaho-site-americas-oldest/)

Here is a link to a National Geographic article that goes a bit further with
the story including showing a map of the general area of the archaeological
site. It also includes a photo of the actual dig site as seen from a high
point on the canyon downstream. As you can see from the photo, the site is
right on the river at the mouth of the canyon that runs roughly south out of
Cooper's Ferry to the river.

I don't know why CNN didn't link any actual published material about the site,
choosing instead to link to random unrelated stuff.

I visited this site back in 2011 while rafting the Salmon with my family. Back
then they were carefully sifting, cataloging, etc., all the things they were
finding. They had a pretty enthusiastic group of students carefully
excavating.

[https://imgur.com/a/9ypO8Xz](https://imgur.com/a/9ypO8Xz)

This is a photo I took while we toured the site. Our guide knew the river and
everyone working on it and made arrangements for us to have a brief visit.
Wapiti River Guides out of Riggins, Idaho.

The site that others have mentioned in Texas is actually very near our old
family land in Central Texas. You never had any trouble collecting arrowheads
or spearheads in that area. Limestone outcrops with extensive chert nodules
likely made it a popular place for early humans to visit and fashion tools and
that chert was widely traded elsewhere.

------
agilebyte
National Geographic marks the coastal route (20k - 15k ago) on their maps for
schools. So it seems it's an already accepted theory?

[https://www.nationalgeographic.org/photo/bering-land-
bridge/](https://www.nationalgeographic.org/photo/bering-land-bridge/)

~~~
showerst
This family of theories has been around for a while, 1491 by Charles Mann
discusses them extensively, and that book is from 2005. Reliable evidence is
sparse though, so this could be a major contribution.

~~~
curtis
_For more than a decade, evidence has been piling up that humans colonized the
Americas thousands of years before the Clovis people._

It's actually been longer than that. The site at Monte Verde [1] in Chile
seems to have been widely accepted as a pre-Clovis site nearly 20 years ago
(1997 according to Wikipedia [2]). Awareness of the site, at least among the
archaeological community predates that (1989 [3]). The first radiocarbon dates
indicating a pre-Clovis origin for the site go back to 1982[4].

The idea that Clovis was not the earliest culture in the Americas, and the
commensurate theory that the earliest colonists must have been traveling by
boat [5] goes back decades. I know I've been reading about it (in the popular
press no less) since the 1990s. It seems like every article I read about it
makes it seem like some new and revolutionary idea. The only conclusion I can
draw is that archaeological science operates on time scales only slightly
shorter than those the archaeologists study.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Verde](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Verde)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Verde#Acceptance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Verde#Acceptance)

[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Verde#Diffusion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Verde#Diffusion)

[4]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Verde#Discovery](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Verde#Discovery)
(third paragraph)

[5] I'd like to give you a citation for this, but this theory, as far as I can
tell has no official name.

[Just quoting myself from
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12603556](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12603556)]

~~~
curtis
_[5] I 'd like to give you a citation for this, but this theory, as far as I
can tell has no official name._

"The coastal migration hypothesis" \-
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coastal_migration_(Americas)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coastal_migration_\(Americas\)),
which should not be confused with "the Southern Dispersal scenario (also the
coastal migration hypothesis)" at
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Dispersal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Dispersal).

------
JoeAltmaier
It seems obvious in hindsight. Inuit can travel 100km a day in an ocean-going
kayak. It would be incredible if historically they _didn 't_ ever think of
going down the coast to see what was there.

~~~
throwaway2048
while this was likely also true of earlier groups, its important to remember
that the Inuit came to North America at a much later date (from around
500-900AD) and had very advanced stone age technology and techniques, amongst
the most sophisticated known to exist.

Earlier groups did not necessarily have their technological sophistication[1],
nor their cultural and technical mastery of the ocean, so its misleading to
argue via analogy.

[1] A kayak is really a marvel in terms of engineering the most with the
absolute least amount of materials, even modern materials and techniques are
hard pressed to match a traditional design, particularly with the outer skin,
animal skin is much lighter, quieter, more durable and repairable than
something like fiberglass. Each boat is carefully fitted to its owner, and
designed precisely for maximum agility and stability.

------
8bitsrule
Interesting to consider why they might have wound up at Cooper's on the Salmon
River

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salmon_River_(Idaho)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salmon_River_\(Idaho\))

instead of going farther up the Columbia. Might not have been a viable option!

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cordilleran_Ice_Sheet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cordilleran_Ice_Sheet)

"On the western edge at the Haida Gwaii ... the lower thickness of the ice
sheet meant that sea levels were as much as 170 metres lower than they are
today.... migrants ... were able to travel southward during the deglaciation
process due purely to the exposure of submerged land between the mainland and
numerous continental islands...."

~~~
boomboomsubban
Or they did go further up the Columbia and we haven't discovered evidence of
it. It's not easy for things to survive for fifteen thousand years.

~~~
undersuit
Nor would the timing of the last predicted flood of Glacial Lake Missoula
help.

------
curtis
[https://science.sciencemag.org/content/365/6456/848](https://science.sciencemag.org/content/365/6456/848)

~~~
aaron695
[https://science.sciencemag.org/content/365/6456/891.full](https://science.sciencemag.org/content/365/6456/891.full)

DOI: 10.1126/science.aax9830

~~~
angry_octet
I don't know what you've done, but you're shadowbanned or someone is killing
almost all your comments, which I find egregious because your most recent
comment is on point.

------
alephnan
> [radiocarbon dating is] the most accurate dating method for archeologists,
> so the team is confident in their accuracy.

That seems like a logical jump. (Not familiar with the accuracy of radiocarbon
dating, please educate me.)

~~~
gus_massa
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiocarbon_dating](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiocarbon_dating)

In particular

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiocarbon_dating#Errors_and_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiocarbon_dating#Errors_and_reliability)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiocarbon_dating#Interpretat...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiocarbon_dating#Interpretation)

------
elihu
> Similar tools to what Davis found in Cooper's Ferry have also been found in
> northern Japan. Davis hypothesizes that that's where those early settlers
> came from.

> But to verify, he'll have to do a little more digging.

Portland Oregon and Sapporo have had a sister-city relationship for about
sixty years. It would be an interesting coincidence if it turned out that
their native inhabitants were more closely related than previously thought.

------
ademup
Very sparse on details. Artifacts in Texas also point to possibly 15500 years
ago. A northern origin might put Idaho even earlier.
([https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21436451](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21436451))

That said, I'm always extra cautious with claims out of Idaho and Utah given
the density of people with very high desire to find ancient civilization. Eg
the ongoing search and occasional "Discovery" of Nephilim Giants.

