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.
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.
> 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.
It seems (though it is controversial) that some time during the last ice-age the brain (but not the visible anatomy) evolved to the point that there was a sudden explosion in culture (as visible to archaeology through art, burials etc.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Human_Revolution_(human_or....
Remember that many of the areas we know think of as ocean, were at that time dry land (Sundaland, Doggerland, etc) or covered in a mile of glacier. Even today fishermen will haul up old tools and bones from the Dogger banks off in the north sea. We may have had agriculture in many areas and times, but have not yet found the evidence for it, or the evidence is submerged and too hard to get to, or we built on top of it. Xenophon wrote of very ancient cities way back in ~400BC whose origins are attributed to legends and gods, possibly those cities were already thousands of years old.
Does that answer the question, though, or just change it to "Why did it take 185k years to discover agriculture, cities, and tool making?" Not to mention all the millennia of close human ancestors like Neanderthals who could have potentially stumbled upon them.
If the best explanation is "it just took a long time to discover," then I can believe it, but it's very odd that not even once (that we've discovered) in 185k years did anybody get the idea to build any kind of permanent stone structures or buildings or even rock formations like Stonehenge.
Also remember that a lot of the coastlines of yesteryears are now underwater, and coasts tend to be good for fishing and Homo habitation. So, there may be sites, just 200m down and buried in sediments. Also, humans tend to scavenge older sites and many places still may be the sites of current metropolises. Just as they were good places to settle way back when, they are good to settle now. Essentially, many theories are valid as there is not enough evidence to really support one side or the other. New techniques like geo-spatial mapping satellites may help, as will others that are not yet invented. Google Earth has been a (possible) asset to this and people may have found some new Egyptian sites using it : http://news.sky.com/story/two-new-pyramids-found-on-google-e...
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.
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.
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.
One area in the world where society may have evolved differently doesnt seem to be enough evidence to debunk the idea that the agricultural revolution gave rise to cities. Isn't this just an outlier... if it even does predate agriculture.
It's an outlier. That's not deniable. It doesn't disprove the fact that agriculture lead to cities in so many other places... technically agriculture may not have been a prerequisite to cities, because of this one exception... cool. To say that this exception disproves the idea entirely, is to assume that all places evolved identically, which is just dumb.
Agriculture allows higher population density - a nice alternative to starvation, war, infanticide. But agriculture is less pleasant than hunter-gathering, so you avoid it til you have serious population problems.
Alternatively, fishing also allows for high population density's. But, those city's are now under a lot of water.
Further, civilizations based on wood instead of stone may have vastly fewer remnants. Which creates bias as we assume civilizations started in areas without much wood.
Or, it's actually not food that's the limitation but rather something else like culture with farming going back much further.
So what? No one is claiming that prehistoric people couldn't build anything. But without agriculture you can't have dense cities or anything like civilization. The population that can be supported by hunting and gathering alone is tiny.
*Citation needed. Every source I've seen says that it is.
> But without agriculture you can't have dense cities or anything like civilization. The population that can be supported by hunting and gathering alone is tiny.
Göbekli Tepe says otherwise. It was a truly large-scale undertaking, requiring the highly-organised planning, engineering, and construction efforts of many hundreds, possibly thousands of people. And all the evidence points to these people being hunter-gatherers, not agrarians.
If true, it might not be agriculture that lead to all cities, but the abundance of food that did (which is more common in agriculture-backed societies). Maybe this was just a particularly good spot for hunting and gathering over a long period of time.
Seems to me that it could still be correct. It seems likely that humans were smart and well-equipped enough to build sites like Göbekli Tepe before the agricultural revolution, but the vast majority of them simply didn't have enough time to do so.
Your citation does not support the "decisively predates agriculture" claim, and in fact refers to early agriculture at the site as one of the competing interpretations.
Göbekli Tepe was built ~11,500 years ago, and it probably isn't a coincidence that early agriculture was developed in the same area -- about 1,000 years later. The early agriculture reference that you mention concerns the fact that the was abandoned as early agriculture started to take hold:
> Around the beginning of the 8th millennium BCE Göbekli Tepe ("Potbelly Hill") lost its importance. The advent of agriculture and animal husbandry brought new realities to human life in the area, and the "Stone-age zoo" (Schmidt's phrase applied particularly to Layer III, Enclosure D) apparently lost whatever significance it had had for the region's older, foraging communities.
I haven't seen any sources citing evidence for Göbekli Tepe post-dating agriculture, but there are many lines of evidence that it pre-dates it -- such as an absence of cultivated grains, granary structures, or other evidence that one sees as agriculture actually gets going. All the plant remains that have been found are wild varieties. Thus the mainstream assumption is that Göbekli Tepe was built by hunter-gatherers.
Perhaps I am going too far with my speculation, but GT strikes me on two aspects as being highly unusual, with regard to what I "know"[1] about hunter-gatherer societies.
1. The site seems to be built with a plan. Maybe they did not use paper and pencil, maybe they were using some kind of sand table[2]. And there was a number of people involved, who were quite good at stone cutting, and on a large scale. Just have a look at central obelisk and pedestal [3] - those sharp edges, those smooth surfaces. Now, getting good at something requires daily practice, for a long period of time during which one would rather not go around for hunting. So not only there was a population of proto-carpenters but also societal structure to support them, at least for times of learning and construction work.
2. Even more unusual, the site seems to have been abandoned (evacuated?) in planned manner. Great effort has been made to cover it up with huge mass of soil mixed up with broken stones, as if to make it tougher against elements. This, for me, really stands out. AFAIK the norm is, when supporting culture "loses interest" in site maintainance (like, when all its members are dead), the site is being taken over and/or decaying and/or reused by next wave of humans. But not this time.
Quite fascinating.
[1] what I know is subject to change as time goes by and I get updates
More specifically, what made societies around the world start building cities at roughly the same time? I suspect the answer will be that humans were a lot more mobile than we assume.
"Lake Toba is the site of a massive supervolcanic eruption estimated at VEI 8 that occurred 69,000 to 77,000 years ago, representing a climate-changing event. It is the largest known explosive eruption on Earth in the last 25 million years. According to the Toba catastrophe theory [2], it had global consequences for human populations; it killed most humans living at that time and is believed to have created a population bottleneck in central east Africa and India, which affects the genetic make up of the human worldwide population to the present."
~12k thousand years ago is when it appears we first started to form together into large communities, Göbekli Tepe is a good example. More here https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Göbekli_Tepe
From the link :
> This corresponds well with an ancient Sumerian belief that agriculture, animal husbandry, and weaving were brought to mankind from the sacred mountain Ekur, which was inhabited by Annuna deities, very ancient gods without individual names
We find the first evidence of cultivation around 11.5k years ago not so far away in the Levant. Aggrecuture appears to have been the major change which kickstarted civilisation as we know it off.
Though people are suggesting the answer to your question is agriculture...I'd say it was likely writing (accounting/contracts) and in today's terms writing disrupted the existing systems of agriculture and city planning/building/management.
As far as technology goes...one day there was spoken word the next voices/thoughts could be communicated without a person and through time - that is magic.
Writing doesn’t show up in a vacuum. It’s a product of needing scribes to manage complicated supply chains, tax collection, property boundary recording, dispute adjudication, and most of all debt tracking.
Those come along with population density, social stratification, inherited wealth, etc., which are part of feedback loops that start with agriculture and permanent settlement.
For instance in Mesopotamia, cuneiform writing started out as a shorthand representation of little piles of clay tokens representing various stored goods (grain, beer, etc.)
>Those come along with population density, social stratification, inherited wealth, etc., which are part of feedback loops that start with agriculture and permanent settlement.
I agree writing doesn't show up in a vacuum. The cuneiform clay tablets from Mesopotamia are the oldest record of "written language" but certainly not the oldest form of writing.
At least according to the current historical record argiculture dates to 12,000bc while written numbers (tallies made of wood and bone) date back 25,000-35,000 years. So unless there is some as of yet discovered agricultural civilization(s) - I think very likely - there is a problem with your feedback loop compared to the historical record: writing(numbers)came long before agriculture.
To add to this, pyromancy, specifically scapulimancy, may be some of the earliest forms of writing, and that was mostly used for divination and other 'religious' rituals, we think. I couldn't find the exact source, but some samples in ...China?... may be scapulimantic symbols used for fortune telling and the like that predate the cuneiform tablets. Again, conjecture and I can't find the source.
Writing developed very late, about 5-6kya in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and China, and around 2-3kya in Mesoamerica. Even in the Americas, the large empires of the Aztecs and the Inca, as well as large complexes like the Mississippian culture, developed without writing (although the Incan quipu seems to have some sort of non-numeric data encoded that may strain our definition of writing system, and the Aztecs did have some form of proto-writing).
I don't believe the Bering Strait area was subject to any recent (within the timeframe we're discussing) glaciation.
And there is always a leading edge of the glacier where all that ground-up goodness ends up. Many dynamic biomes are found on the boundaries of extreme and hostile environments.
Take a look at the wiki page linked above. Beringia was never really covered in ice due to the wind and sea currents near it when it existed. The area was a 'refugium' of steppe grasses and light forests. It is thought that people may have moved there, stayed there, and then moved back into Asia as time went on, as well as into the Americas. As for using the area to farm, the very short summer growing season of higher latitudes is not well suited for agriculture.
We know Russian explorers first sailed to America in the 1700s, but they didn't really explore or land enough to call it "well known" until the early 1800s.
In 1725, Emperor Peter the Great ordered navigator Vitus Bering to explore the North Pacific for potential colonization. The Russians were primarily interested in the abundance of fur-bearing mammals on Alaska's coast, as stocks had been depleted by overhunting in Siberia. Bering's first voyage was foiled by thick fog and ice, but in 1741 a second voyage by Bering and Aleksei Chirikov made sight of the North American mainland.
> People got to Australia around 40,000–60,000 years ago by boat
It's generally accepted that over 80,000 years ago people crossed the land bridge over the Torres Strait before it was submerged https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torres_Strait
> People got to Australia around 40,000–60,000 years ago by boat so it seems unlikely that people needed a land bridge
Maybe, maybe not. Living for days on an open raft or equivalent is going to be a lot tougher when you're nearly in the Arctic Circle than it is in the sunny South Pacific.
> PS: I suspect the Americas where well known in the about in the 1700's, but nobody was talking to the Russian Far East when map making.
That's an interesting thought. If you use Reddit, might be a good one for /r/AskHistorians
I don't think it's unreasonable to hypothesize that a community that starts out fishing in nearby waters using rudimentary boats would, over the span of maybe dozens of generations, learn something about travelling longer distances over open water.
A dude recently crossed the Atlantic on a stand-up paddle board. Which is insane, but it proves you be a prolific seafarer with very basic watercraft.
"Hokulea is a performance-accurate full-scale replica of a... Polynesian double-hulled voyaging canoe. Launched on 8 March 1975 by the Polynesian Voyaging Society, she is best known for her 1976 Hawaii to Tahiti voyage completed with exclusively Polynesian navigation techniques. The primary goal of the voyage was to explore the anthropological theory of the Asiatic origin of native Oceanic people, of Polynesians and Hawaiians in particular, as the result of purposeful trips through the Pacific, as opposed to passive drifting on currents, or sailing from the Americas."
"Since the 1976 voyage, Hokulea has completed nine additional voyages.... On May 18, 2014, Hokulea and her sister vessel, Hikianalia embarked from Oahu for 'Malama Honua', a three-year circumnavigation of the earth. The journey will cover 47,000 nautical miles with stops at 85 ports in 26 countries."
"Polynesian navigation used some navigational instruments, which predate and are distinct from the machined metal tools used by European navigators.... Polynesian navigators employed a whole range of techniques including use of the stars, the movement of ocean currents and wave patterns, the air and sea interference patterns caused by islands and atolls, the flight of birds, the winds and the weather."
>Polynesian navigators employed a whole range of techniques including use of the stars, the movement of ocean currents and wave patterns, the air and sea interference patterns caused by islands and atolls, the flight of birds, the winds and the weather.
The novel "The Navigator" by Morris West talks about this, some. In fact, the whole theme of the book is about a voyage that a motley group of people take, from Hawaii, to find a lost Polynesian island, that is talked about by the old Polynesian navigators, and where they go to die. There are lots of other sub-plots in the story, like about human relationships, power, etc., so the whole book is not about the navigation stuff, but overall, the book was very good reading, IMO.
Also, IIRC, the National Geographic Society had done a study of these navigation techniques many years ago. They had sent a team - scientists, sailors, photographers, etc. - to various Polynesian islands, and interviewed some of the still-living navigators, took boat rides between islands during which the navigators used their ancient techniques, etc. It describes many of the kinds of things that you say they used - stars, currents, wave patterns, air and sea patterns, birds, winds, etc. They published an article or series about it in NatGeo magazine. I was lucky to read it as a kid. Very interesting article.
I wouldn't be surprised if climate affected our adventurousness, though, which this projection doesn't capture. I find ice cold seas a lot more forbidding.
At this point I assume only that we've found evidence showing humans got to Australia 40-60k years ago. I suspect they (we?) arrived earlier in smaller numbers that we haven't detected yet.
An isolated population seed, yes. But a sub-population that can be re-seeded by the main one, no. Homo Erectus has been discovered as far as SE Asia 1 or 2 million years ago.
Also typically a population grows depending on birth-death rates which reach quick limits in places of low resources. This is self-evident from different population sizes in different geographic habitats. Instead human populations mushroomed only in select places. See Guns, Germs and Steel by Diamond for more.
Impenetrable deserts aren't known for their abundance of fresh water. Just having resources available isn't everything either, you have to know how to extract those resources, this is a massive barrier to a primitive (excuse the term) culture landing on an alien continent, separated for millions of years.
Living off the ocean is also incredibly dangerous.
"Typically a population either grows exponentially or vanishes."
That is, if there don't arise artificial limiting factors, like a cult/religion rule or system that takes control over population's dynamics. When that happens, it may enter in a stable state until an occurring external disruptive change.
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?
"The bone fragments, some from a mastodon’s stout thigh, were scarred with marks and notches that are hallmarks of a violent blow on fresh bone. Old bone, the scientists say, shows different fracture patterns."
Do bones maintain whatever properties they're exploiting thousands of years after the animal's death? I'd expect they'd have different wear or fracture patterns if they were very old when worked.
You'd also expect a mixture of ages in close proximity. Even if all the bones being processed were old at the time, they presumably would have a mixture of 100kya, 50 kya, etc. bones jumbled together.
Found an answer to this in the Reddit discussion [1] on /r/science. Fresh bone breaks in a different pattern than old bone. The breaks on the bones at this site are the kind that indicate the bone was fresh when it broke.
You know what? I have no idea. I have a pretty strong prior that any archeologist could tell you though. I suppose it won't surprise me if one or two pop up here to tell you, but have to imagine there are more efficient ways to find out.
found a bunch of 115k year old bones from animals that died from natural deaths
I can think of things that might kill a whole herd of animals at once, but I'm having trouble picturing their bones just lying there intact for 100,000 years before people came along.
Seemingly not applicable in this case, but bones can stay intact for thousands of years in caves, without being buried under layers of sediments. People may later find them and find them useful to whatever purpose. (Then later another bunch of humans may find everything again and draw whatever conclusions!)
At a guess, where the bones are in the ground. If they're in a layer that is 100k years old, unless there's evidence of disturbance, there's a decent argument that they were left that way at that time.
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.
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.
> it throws major wrenches into the hypothesis that the mastodons were hunted to extinction by early humans.
Why would some small settlements ~20kya be a problem for this hypothesis? Regardless of whether previous settlements at a smaller scale existed, the Clovis people were the first to have the technology and culture to be able to rapidly explode across the continent, and the time they did this coincides with the time of extinction pretty well, doesn't it?
One of the pieces of evidence that proponents of human overhunting of megafauna point to is the seeming correlation between "arrival of humans" and "extinction of megafauna" on most continents. Drawing that out by a few thousand years on one continent in particular weakens the correlation dramatically.
How could some human settlements exclusively on and around the Pacific shore kill all megafauna on a whole continent?
Postulating that the first settlement is more important than the time of a population explosion seems to lack the kind of common sense that Jared Diamond is talking about, to me.
Or maybe there was an event that led us to over hunting. We could have been fine for thousands of years until another food supply was exhausted and what had to hunt mega-fauna more. They weren't stupid, they didn't hunt large animals unless they had too.
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... for an example of such a commentary.
> If there really had been pre-Clovis settlement, we would already know it and would no longer be arguing about it.
I do like Jared Diamonds' books, I read... a lot of them, perhaps all of them.
But his reasoning - quoted above - is just plain wrong. He fails at grasping at how the basic logic works.
Example: "We did not find it so far" - which, according to Jared, rests the case -- does not mean "it does not exist".
As per that logic, the discovery of Denisovans and Homo Florensiensis can be ignored, because they came up after
the Jared's decree that "we did not find it so far".
Or they are like the Norsemen-sure they made it early, but with 100,000 missing years of continuous habitation until Clovis, et al, they died out and didn't contribute anything.
The Norseman had one small colony that was attacked by people already inhabiting North America. They settled the Eastern tip of Canada then departed. These people, if they existed, would have colonized all the way from Western Alaska to California, meaning they would have had numerous settlements, and in an uninhabited continent.
Not to mention, the difference in known human technology and capability from 130k years ago to 50k years ago is not small.
Using something like Bayesian reasoning, I find it more plausible that this is experimental error than a one-off revelation that humans had technology to cross the Pacific 130kya.
Previously: "the article mentions the previous earlier evidence as being from 115K years ago" (edit, oops, misread, this is way before anything we've heard about thus much less certain, forget about it).
Is there really evidence from before 20kya that is taken seriously by anyone these days?
According to Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settlement_of_the_Americas "Available scientific evidence indicates that humanity emerged from Africa over 100,000 years ago, yet did not arrive in the Americas until less than 20,000 years ago."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.....
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.
I agree with your criticisms. It doesn't seem clear that these rocks were used for what they claim. I recently found what I believed was an arrowhead. It is symmetrical and sharp on both edges, but it is not an arrowhead. It is a rock that looks like an arrowhead and my wishful thinking pushed it the rest of the way. If I were that researcher I would have claimed that I found the real thing.
We're in the age of disruption and with your cold reason you've just crushed an attempt for disruption in history itself! How dare you wiping California off the middle paleolithic map?
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
There is a competing hypothesis of Recent African origin that states humans evolved over 2 millions years in Eurasia and Africa.
> Multiregional evolution holds that the human species first arose around two million years ago and subsequent human evolution has been within a single, continuous human species
The suggested date for this puts it the other side of a genetic bottleneck [1]. Whatever was the cause for this, there is evidence that human population numbers reduced at some point.
Paleontology is built up out of the most tenuous of evidence. Whole pages of children's dinosaur books are extrapolated out from one or two fragmentary skeletons of unfortunate creatures that just happened to die in places where their corpses were covered up by preserving sediments, instead of being picked apart by scavengers.
Archaeology is a little better, just because it's more recent, and there's more stuff that has managed to survive, but in the absence of ceramics, metals, or large-scale use of stone, almost everything that primitive humans would use is extremely perishable, with the exceptions being where we just happen to have found bodies and graves in extremely preservative conditions, like bog people, or the Peruvian desert cave mummies, or frozen in glaciers. I've an uncle who is an archaeologist specializing in post-contact Native American sites, and the vast majority of the time, the only identifying aspects of a site will be that he's stumbled onto an ancient trash heap, full of discarded and broken mollusk shells.
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.
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.
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.
Wikipedia is filled with speculative cryptozoological connections to extinct animals, the notes are more of an acknowledgement that such speculation exists as a cultural artifact connected to that animal, rather than that the speculation is valid or well-supported.
Alongside the comments about Aboriginal legends, a copy of my comment from elsewhere in the thread:
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.
Remember, the globe also looks like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eskimo#/media/File:Inuit_conf_...
PS: I suspect the Americas where well known in the 1700's, but nobody was talking to the Russian Far East when map making.