
New Evidence Suggests Humans Arrived in the Americas Earlier Than Thought - el_duderino
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/04/26/525628056/new-evidence-suggests-humans-arrived-in-the-americas-far-earlier-than-thought
======
Retric
It's only 50 miles by sea from Eurasia to the Americas. People got to
Australia around 40,000–60,000 years ago by boat so it seems unlikely that
people needed a land bridge to get to the Americas.

Remember, the globe also looks like this:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eskimo#/media/File:Inuit_conf_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eskimo#/media/File:Inuit_conf_map.png)

PS: I suspect the Americas where well known in the 1700's, but nobody was
talking to the Russian Far East when map making.

~~~
Balgair
Also, Beringia went through many cycles of land and sea coverage[0]. Our
climate has been pretty up and down since homo sapiens came onto the stage.

Aside: The land-bridge was not just a passing point, it was actually a nice
place to sit and stay, due to the wind, sea, and glacial climatic issues.
Also, the coastal-migration idea states that we just skimmed the coast all the
way to at least Chile. The issue with that idea is that all those coast lines
and settlement areas are about 200m under water now and were likely destroyed
by wave action, so it's hard to prove. Beringia is a really cool place to
study, pardon the pun, and helps change some ideas about how humans came to
be. It seems like we've been pretty smart for a long long time. There are
civilizations all over the globe that rose, fell, and died, and we will never
ever know of them. The idea of 'civilization' is ancient, it seems.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beringia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beringia)

~~~
jlarocco
> It seems like we've been pretty smart for a long long time. There are
> civilizations all over the globe that rose, fell, and died, and we will
> never ever know of them. The idea of 'civilization' is ancient, it seems.

I've wondered about that a lot, actually. If homo sapiens have been around for
~200k years (according to wikipedia), what were we doing for the first 185k
years? What changed ~15k years ago that we started building cities,
constructing tools, etc., and why did it take 185k years to happen?

On a larger time frame, how many species have lived and died and had every
trace of their existence crushed and melted down by plate tectonics?

It's fascinating to think about, and a little sad that we'll never know the
answer.

~~~
pmalynin
"What changed ~15k years ago that we started building cities, constructing
tools, etc., and why did it take 185k years to happen?"

Old question, the answer is: Agricultural Revolution

~~~
nkoren
That's the traditional answer, but it's wrong. Göbekli Tepe[1] decisively pre-
dates agriculture. Although it wasn't inhabited, it displays a level of
technology and social organisation on par with city-building. But agriculture
definitely had nothing to do with it.

Not saying that I've got a good answer for what _did_ happen -- just that
agriculture wasn't it.

1:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe)

~~~
simonh
If it wasn't permanently inhabited, then it's not a city. There are the
remains of massive camps in Russia built out of Mammoth bones and tusks that
held many thousands of people, made possible by massive culls of migrating
herds, but these are not permanent settlements either.

Living permanently in the same place on a large scale is a completely
different way of life compared to living a mainly nomadic life and gathering
at special sites from time to time, even if you make a permanent mark on those
sites.

~~~
Balgair
Permanent populations are not a sign of civilization. Many religious sites
today are sparsely populated except for once/twice a year, but we still have
civilization. The Mongols were civilized even when they were raiding the
entire old-world and establishing many dynasties. They had writing, religion,
generals and well-organized armies, a bureaucracy, laws and customs, tariffs,
etc, just not a single plot of land they went to sleep on every single night.
Heck, even NYC doubles in population daily [0], those people may be daily
commuter nomads, but they are 'civilized' people.

[0][https://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/03/commuters-
near...](https://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/03/commuters-nearly-
double-manhattans-daytime-population-census-says/?_r=0)

~~~
simonh
>Many religious sites today are sparsely populated except for once/twice a
year, but we still have civilization

Yes, but we don't have civilization because of those religious sites.

~~~
Balgair
How do you know?

------
tzs
Given

1\. a site that appears to have been used by humans to do some kind of
processing of bones, and

2\. very old (130k) bones at that site that have been processed,

how would you rule out the possibility that the site was made and the bones
processed by people that came much later (say, 15k years ago) who _found_ a
bunch of 115k year old bones from animals that died from natural deaths and
used them?

~~~
astine
I'm pretty sure that they would have been fossilized by that point. Broken
rock is different than broken bone.

~~~
simonh
Fossilisation takes much longer and very different conditions over millions of
years.

------
meri_dian
Notice that the article states the bones themselves are from 130kya, not that
they were discovered in a layer of sediment deposited 130kya. This means that
the age of the bones says nothing about the tools scattered around them at the
site, or the ancient users of those tools.

Taking this into account, I think a more plausible explanation is that ancient
humans - Clovis ancient (13kya) or perhaps older (20kya) - discovered these
bones and kept them, used them, then discarded them or lost them with the
other stone tools from the site.

~~~
icc97
The video in the middle of the story [0] says that they were found in a silt
layer (which I'm guessing is aged at 130kya)

[0]:
[https://youtu.be/HyfSsgCrjb0?t=1m21s](https://youtu.be/HyfSsgCrjb0?t=1m21s)

~~~
restalis
It pains me to see these scientists handling those ancient bones with bare
hands. That's not a good practice.

------
Will_Parker
For a skeptical point of view, see the second half of Jared Diamond's article:
[https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27111](https://www.edge.org/response-
detail/27111)

~~~
jcranmer
The problem with that argument is that you can use it to attack, well,
anything, so long as the countervailing viewpoint is threatening to your own
worldview. One could very well have applied the same objection to the null
result of the Michelson-Morely experiment: since it showed that the Earth was
acting weirdly with respect to the lumeniferous aether, obviously there must
be something more pedestrian at work than "the aether doesn't work like we
thought it did."

In Diamond's case, he's dismissing all claims of pre-Clovis settlement of the
Americas. For most mainstream anthropologists, the case is settled: Clovis was
not the first group of humans to settle the Americas, and the Americas were
settled perhaps ~20kya, not ~13kya, probably via coastal migrations (whose
sites are now underwater) rather than via the interior route blocked by the
Laurentide. The biggest problem with the traditional Clovis + ice-free
corridor hypothesis is that the Laurentide opened up about a 1000 years too
late.

For someone like Jared Diamond, I suspect the main resistance to accepting
earlier habitation of the Americas is that it throws major wrenches into the
hypothesis that the mastodons were hunted to extinction by early humans.

~~~
btilly
Do you have a reference supporting "For most mainstream anthropologists"?

Do you have an explanation for why pre-Clovis humans didn't leave a ton of
remains everywhere?

~~~
jcranmer
No, I don't have a specific reference supporting "for most mainstream
anthropologists." Rather, this comes from most of my reading of books,
websites, and various forums, and the general consensus I've gotten from it
all is that there's few people trying to defined Clovis-First. See
<[https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3kmwfq/clovi...](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3kmwfq/clovis_culture_and_the_first_people_in_america/cuysjut/?context=3>)
for an example of such a commentary.

------
peatmoss
A slightly more skeptical look at the claims:
[https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ancient-bones-
spa...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ancient-bones-spark-fresh-
debate-over-first-humans-in-the-americas/)

Still, I love any evidence that the world may be more complicated and strange
than we previously thought. This is definitely a story that sparks the
imagination.

------
takk309
More coverage of this can be found on ArsTechnica. A few more details are
given that the NPR report omits.

[https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/04/unknown-humans-
were-...](https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/04/unknown-humans-were-in-
california-130000-years-ago-say-scientists/)

------
goodcanadian
You can count me firmly in the skeptics category. However, it is interesting,
and human beings have been around a long time. It would be a bit surprising if
no one ever made it to the Americas until "recent" times.

~~~
FullMtlAlcoholc
I'm skeptical of this finding however it seems ludicrous to mean that
scientists accept on its face that humans reached Australia like 50000 years
ago, crossing over 55 miles of water but a 50-mile wide Bering Strait would
pose huge problems.

~~~
jcranmer
Sea-levels were not the same 50kya as they were today; they were about 120m or
so lower. At that level, a lot of the seas in Southeast Asia and Australia
just simply cease to exist, and so the ultimate water gaps are only a few km
wide--very likely, you could see the other shore at times. Of course, at the
same time, the Bering Strait didn't exist for similar reasons.

By comparison, Madagascar, which is ~400km from Africa, was never settled by
African tribes (they were settled from Austronesians from Indonesia). Malta,
about 80km from the closest land in Italy, was apparently settled only around
7kya.

------
theprop
New theory: they were a Hominid people (but not Homo Sapien or human) that
came to America to escape marauding communities of humans attacking them.

~~~
restalis
That was pretty much my conclusion too. Homo Sapiens got out of Africa around
130-90k years ago. Here they found bones broken by tools. Those bone-breakers
might have been humans (as Homo genus) but definitely not our species. _Our
species_ got in Americas much, much later.

------
vivekd
So lets look at the evidence:

OUTLIER DATE:

This site is an outlier among archaeological sites in terms of the date. The
date given for Californians according to this research is 130 000 year ago.

As far as I am aware, the earliest recorded human site outside of Africa is
one in China 120 000 years ago.

And even that site is an outlier because human migration into the middle east
began happening 120 000 -100 000 years ago, 60 000 years ago into Asia, and
and 45 000 years into Europe.

Now that in itself is not conclusive, maybe there are older sites that we
haven't found and this discovery pushes back human migration. Except there are
other problems here.

LACK OF HUMAN REMAINS OR HUMAN ARTIFACTS

So the scientists say the rocks have markings that look like they had been
used as a hammer and anvil and there are some mastodon bones near it.

Now no actual human bones were found near this site. Which is certainly not
impossible for these kinds of sites. More problematic is that there were no
obvious stone tools other than rocks with markings that look like they'd been
hit.

With ancient humans, especially ones capable of hunting mastodons, you would
expect them to make sharp stone points by flaking (hiting one stone against
another). This should leave flakes and tools on the ground. Yet, at this site,
there were no stone tools of this sort found anywhere at this site.

LACK OF CUT MARKINGS ON BONES

Further, once ancient humans killed the mastodon, you would expect them to cut
pieces of flesh off with a stone knife so that it could be eaten. This process
would leave marks on the bones where the flesh had been cut. The article tells
us that no such markings were found on these bones.

> Yet there were no cut marks on the bones showing that the animal was
> butchered for meat.

AVAILABILITY OF ALTERNATIVE EXPLANATIONS

None of these factors itself is fatal, but all three combined, the outlier
date (way to early considering the mainstream evidence shows that our species
were just getting set up in the middle east at this time,) the absence of
human tools nearby, the absence of cut marks on the bones, the absence of any
human skeletons or remains in the area. All of these lead me to think there
must be another explanation.

It's not impossible that the bones of dead mastodons can get trampled or
broken. Under the right circumstances, it's not impossible that trampling can
cause rocks to smash against one another or leave marks on the rock. Maybe
there was a cliff in the area many years ago and the bones and the rocks took
a deep fall. In any event, there are alternative explanations and it is not
inconceivable that this happened through natural means. This is hardly smoking
gun evidence of human in California 130 000 years ago.

USE OF WEAK EXPLANATORY MECHANISMS

And I think the weakness of this evidence is belied by the unusual explanatory
leaps made by the discoverers. When pointed out that there is no evidence that
the remains had been butchered for meat, he responds:

"The suggestion is that this site is strictly for breaking bone, to produce
blank material, raw material to make bone tools or to extract marrow."
Seriously? Why would they break bones without butchering the meat and eating
it? Why would you have a separate site just for bone marrow? That makes no
sense.

EVIDENCE THAT IS ANYTHING BUT CLEAR LABELED AS CLEAR

>He says the rocks showed clear marks of having been used as hammers and an
anvil.

Really, I mean they have pictures of the rocks on the site. It doesn't seem
that clear to me that they were hammer and anvil stones. Are they clear to
anyone else? They could just easily be old worn rocks. I would expect humans
that could make it from Africa or wherever all the way to California 130 000
years ago to be somewhat advanced enough that they have tools more advanced
than just two random pieces of rock to bang together. This was the age where
humans had started molding rocks for suited purposes by flaking them. Why they
would just use two natural rocks instead of created rocks is questionable. If
you type in acheulean tools into google, you can see the sophisticated flaked
tools (sharp looking leaf shaped blades) our ancestors were making 1.7 million
years ago . . . yet ones that traveled all the way to California and kill
mastodons are still stuck banging random un-molded rocks against each other
for marrow- why?

I have nothing against pushing back migration to Americas, but this site is
probably more wishful thinking on part of its founders than legitimate
discovery.

~~~
gregn
What bothers me is that nowhere in both articles I read do they once mention:
"what if it wasn't what we are postulating it is." That tact of reasoning is
never explored. The entirety of their position is foregone conclusion. I'm not
saying they are wrong or right, but first of all, it seems entirely unlikely
due to everything we already know. Second of all there are no human remains,
just some rocks that _kind_of_ resemble tools and some broken bones that they
can date. It is closer to flight of fantasy that proven fact. I wish they
would approach it as such while chasing their hypothesis. I would feel much
easier about it. But I suppose people who don't brandish brazen egos are much
less likely to get the front-page stories.....

~~~
acdha
The questioning you claim to be looking for starts in the second paragraph of
the NPR piece and continues throughout the article. Trying reading it through
and counting each time one of the scientists quoted says something like “if
true”, “it's an outlier”, etc. or talks about the additional evidence they'd
like to see or challenges yet to be explained.

------
xHopen
[http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13166597-beyond-the-
blue-...](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13166597-beyond-the-blue-horizon)

------
WalterBright
I think it was Nova a while back that suggested that clovis technology came
from a stone age french tribe, and that there were traces of them in the genes
of eastern native americans.

~~~
enceladus_ice
I recently watched a NOVA documentary from last year that refutes the
Eurocentric theories of Clovis origins.

Great Human Odyssey:
[http://www.pbs.org/video/2365856257/](http://www.pbs.org/video/2365856257/)

Geneticists sequenced the DNA from a young boy's 13,000-year-old bones found
in Montana. His DNA matches a specific combination of Eastern Asian and
Siberian DNA that is found in all North and South American native populations,
and only in these populations. This lends to the theory that the first people
to permanently settle the America's (Clovis) were made up of groups from
Siberia and Eastern Asia combining and crossing the Bering Strait.

~~~
red_hairing
but given political considerations, can that particular science be trusted?

~~~
Steko
If you're going to object to their science, let's hear the actual objections
and not just handwavey notions that somehow the science is bad because you
don't favor the conclusions.

------
nickjarboe
The journal article in Nature can be found here[1]. The abstract is publicly
accessible with the article behind a paywall. I'm not familiar enough with the
dating method to comment on the possible problems of the age determination,
but it was calculated by the complicated method of "230Th/U radiometric
analysis of multiple bone specimens using diffusion–adsorption–decay dating
models indicating a burial date of 130.7 ± 9.4 thousand years ago."

[1][https://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v544/n7651/full/nature...](https://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v544/n7651/full/nature22065.html)

------
cucucfudud
That cant be right. Humans didnt leave africa until 100 thousand years ago.

If this is real there should also be more evidence of them. Not just the this
one find.

~~~
tzs
Homo sapiens mostly didn't leave Africa until about 100k years ago, but when
dealing with these things there is always a fair amount of uncertainty so some
_could_ have left much earlier.

There are also other early human species besides Homo sapiens that could in
theory be responsible for something like this.

Homo erectus was galavanting around the world perhaps up to 2 million years
ago, and they were tool users. Homo heidelbergensis was on the move around
600k years ago. Homo neanderthalensis was out of Africa around 300k years ago.

~~~
red_hairing
maybe there was a form of homo erectus already in america, using stone tools
etc, having arrived 130k yrs or more ago, and then the indians wiped them out
when they arrived much later--that would explain indian tales of having wiped
out primitive cannibal tribes (a movie called bone tomahawk was inspired by
these tales)...of course the political considerations would tend to suppress
this idea.

~~~
aetherson
Come on, you can't take legends from circa 1500 AD to be evidence of anything
that happened somewhere between 11,000 and 20,000 years earlier, especially
without writing. It's far more likely that primitive cannibal tribes were made
up wholesale than that societies carried the memory of them for more than
10,000 years.

~~~
jnicholasp
The Klamath Native American tribe has legends of the eruption of Mt. Mazama
that formed Oregon's Crater Lake - which happened in ~5677 BC [1]. If oral
legends that reflect real events can last seven and a half thousand years, is
there any reason to think they couldn't last 15ky, or 20ky? It seems to me all
that's needed is a continuous cultural line.

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

------
aaron695
I really wish I could bet against this XKCD style its quite a sure thing.

It doesn't make sense plus we know there are competing issues at play as
people try to get get know in their fields by finding 'the oldest'

Extrodinay claims need extrodinay evedence here they seem to have fit a theory
that would lack provable evedence as a explanation.

------
redsummer
There's a lot of Sasquatch stories among Native Americans.

Homo Floresiensis overlaps with the Ebu Gogo myth:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebu_gogo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebu_gogo)

~~~
WalterBright
It's hard to believe a story can persist for 15,000 years by verbal
transmission.

~~~
obelos
Hard to believe, but it happens. Australian Aboriginal story telling, for
example, conveys historical events from 10k+ years ago:
[http://theconversation.com/ancient-aboriginal-stories-
preser...](http://theconversation.com/ancient-aboriginal-stories-preserve-
history-of-a-rise-in-sea-level-36010)

~~~
drowned
You may find this interesting: The town of Carencro, Louisiana takes its name
from an American Indian legend about a mastodon that died there. The name has
been interpreted as either "carrion crow" for wake of vultures that feasted
upon its carcass, or "carnero"\--"bone pile"\--for the bones of the creature
itself. The fossil was discovered in the 18th century. Oral cultures have a
long memory.

~~~
WalterBright
Mastodons used to be everywhere. Finding a mastodon's bones is not that
unusual, so is not compelling proof of the veracity of the legend.

~~~
drowned
As far as I remember the story was regarding a fairly specific segment of
Bayou Carencro where the creature was said to have drowned, and is where the
fossils were found. That makes it a bit more compelling than some Mastodon
being unearthed in the general region.

~~~
WalterBright
That is some good evidence. But consider that if there are 1000 stories, and 1
turns out to have supporting evidence, does that mean the other 999 are
reliable, too?

It's like the psychic who correctly predicted the last 7 presidential
elections. One doesn't hear about the other psychics whose predictions didn't
pan out.

------
julienchastang
ECREE. "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." -Carl Sagan

