human activity in north America much earlier then previously thought?

[gunsmith]

I have always suspected this.
http://www.cnn.com/2017/04/26/health/new-human-discovery-north-america-trnd/

These are some of the Mastodon bones found at the excavation site.
The study, to be published this week in the science journal Nature, said the numerous limb bones fragments of a young male mastodon found at the site show spiral fractures, indicating they were broken while fresh.
The scientists say they found what appear to be hammerstones and stone anvils at the site, showing that ancient humans had the manual skill and knowledge to use stone tools to extract the animal's marrow and possibly to use its bones to make tools.

[230RN]

Like you, I am not surprised at all.

Somehow, to many people, humans just popped into existence at the point where we started to record things in writing.  Or knot-tying.  Or cave-painting.  Or poking patterns into wet clay with a stick.

I amuse myself by thinking about 5000 years from now, after another "break" in human history, civilization has been re-established, and some future anthropologist finds evidence that there was indeed (as suspected) human communication by scratching lead rods on flat sheets of plant fibers.

And he (or it) opines that the partially reassembled fragments of a porcelain toilet bowl found in one of our midden piles obviously formed an item of religious significance.

It might even be the basis for his (or its) whatever-a-doctoral-thesis-is 5000 years from now.

:D

Terry, 230RN

[MechAg94]

I think people don't realize how fast things would disappear or get buried if the earth was suddenly depopulated.  Memory of the recent past could fall away very easily. 

On the other side, once it is generally accepted that certainly things happened a certain way or at a certain time, researchers tend to be pretty stubborn about changing.

[KD5NRH]

And he (or it) opines that the partially reassembled fragments of a porcelain toilet bowl found in one of our midden piles obviously formed an item of religious significance.

I've often thought that the "earth mother" figures assumed to be prized religious icons might just be prehistoric porn.  I mean, without paper, the only portable whacking material they could really manage would be small statues.

[HankB]

Unless the screaming beards succeed in demolishing them, the Pyramids will still exist 5000 years from now - though rather more eroded.

[grampster]

The science is settled.  All else is nonsense and denial.

[Ben]

Elizabeth Warren disagrees with this study.

[AJ Dual]

There are some sticking points. DNA drift between Native Americans and North-Asian Siberians, and their bones lines up well with the rough "23,000 years" number thrown about for N. American settlement.

One possibility is that it was a previous migration, maybe even Neandertals, one that had died out before the more recent Bering Strait land-bridge migration happened, or one that was much smaller in population and got killed/interbred with the 25,000 year old ice-age migration. (shrug)

100,000 years also puts whoever these humans or hominids were in the path of a few big climate change events, volcanoes, earthquakes/tsunamis etc. so dying out before what would become the Native Americans arrived seems like a distinct possibility.

Or maybe someone's new dating method is bunk, or got contaminated.

[KD5NRH]

100,000 years also puts whoever these humans or hominids were in the path of a few big climate change events, volcanoes, earthquakes/tsunamis etc. so dying out before what would become the Native Americans arrived seems like a distinct possibility.

Or maybe their society got advanced enough to be taken over by liberals, and died off when the vanilla lattes ran out.  Making everything biodegradable would explain the lack of evidence of their advancement.

[RoadKingLarry]

The science is settled.  All else is nonsense and denial.

That's the problem with modern science when it comes to anything historical. Once the books have been written it gets damn hard to change.

We know L'Anse aux Meadows  was occupied by "Vikings" 500+ years before that Columbus fellow "discovered" America. Yet it is still not widely accepted. If they made it that far how much farther would they have explored?

Thor Heyerdahl proved it was possible for people to have sailed from Africa to the Americas in a boat made of reeds thousands of years ago. He also proved it was possible to so sail from South America to Polynesia on a log raft.

I think a big component of the resistance to even exploring the possibilities that prehistoric humans weren't just a bunch of drooling savages comes from a Eurocentric view of what entails "civilization". If it isn't just like ours it isn't worth having.

People have had the ability to navigate the oceans of the world long before there was durable written records. I'm of the opinion that if a thing can be done someone has probably done it.

 

[Perd Hapley]

That's the problem with modern science when it comes to anything historical. Once the books have been written it gets damn hard to change.

We know L'Anse aux Meadows  was occupied by "Vikings" 500+ years before that Columbus fellow "discovered" America. Yet it is still not widely accepted.

As I've mentioned before, it actually IS widely-accepted that the Norse visited North America before Columbus. Just as an example, The Oxford History of the American People (written in the 1960s) said it was settled fact. That was fifty years ago.

Also, while there are some thing academics don't like to have questioned, they are constantly questioning (some) established viewpoints. That's how they make a name for themselves. That's how they get published. Controversy sells.

[just Warren]

 I do like this site: http://ancientamerica.com/ I don't know how much is crankery or undistilled lunacy but I like that it opens up questions.

We know people traveled quite a bit so why couldn't there be a trade route from the Andes to up the Mississippi?

I know from a book I have on European commercial contacts and contracts that folks were traveling from western Europe to at least the west coast of India and meeting with Chinese merchants as early as the seventh century. And that Chinese irrigation designers were working in Baghdad around the same time. And if either group could make it that far then why wouldn't there be regular contact between far Asia and western Europe?

This directly contradicts what I was taught in grade school through high school that people didn't start really getting around until the 1300s-1400s. 

So yeah, the idea that folks lived in some kind of stasis and didn't travel much doesn't hold up to scrutiny.

Also the thing about peasants not traveling much distance away from their home villages also doesn't make sense since going on pilgrimages and visiting fairs were routine activities for all classes. Maybe not everyone went, but enough did to make the idea that they were home-bound travel-phobes a lie.

[grampster]

My dad always claimed that the Mandans of upper Minnesoty and North Dakoty were remnants of Vikings.