[HN Gopher] Fossil footprints reveal humans in North America ear...
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Fossil footprints reveal humans in North America earlier than
previously thought
Author : mvgoogler
Score : 80 points
Date : 2021-09-24 13:28 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.usgs.gov)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.usgs.gov)
| changoplatanero wrote:
| No picture of the footprints?
| missinfo wrote:
| NYT has photos here:
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/23/science/ancient-footprint...
| pomian wrote:
| Cool. You get to see the image and even save it, before the
| pay wall appears. And an image is truly worth a 1000 words.
| 230149dsad232jj wrote:
| I guess since you are unwilling to pay for NY Times
| journalism, the image is worth 1000 * 0.
|
| Which is fine, I just thought your choice of wording was
| amusing.
| pvaldes wrote:
| (I wonder how much had paid NY Times to the scientists
| that discovered the footprints. If you want support
| science shouldn't you see the photos and read it in the
| scientific journal instead?)
| Ajay-p wrote:
| What are the conditions under which these footprints were made,
| and how have they managed to survive undisturbed for so long?
| joelhoffman wrote:
| USGS describes the site as a "large playa," and the Science
| abstract says they were "stratigraphically constrained and
| bracketed by seed layers" so I interpret that to mean they were
| made in wet sand and buried under layers of more sand.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| From the NYT article about this:
|
| > The footprints were formed when people strode over damp,
| sandy ground on the margin of a lake. Later, sediments gently
| filled in the prints, and the ground hardened. But subsequent
| erosion resurfaced the prints. In some cases, the impressions
| are only visible when the ground is unusually wet or dry --
| otherwise they are invisible to the naked eye. But ground-
| penetrating radar can reveal their three-dimensional structure,
| including the heels and toes.
| lkrubner wrote:
| My dad used to make this argument: of all the millions of
| footprints that humans made, after arriving in North America,
| what is the likelihood that we found the very first of those
| footprints?
|
| The point is, whatever evidence we find, it's unreasonable to
| think that evidence we've found is the first evidence that
| existed, so we have to assume the real arrival was a bit before
| that. When we had evidence of humans arriving 17,000 years ago,
| it was reasonable to assume humans really arrived 21,000 years
| ago. When we have evidence of people arriving 23,000 years ago,
| you have to assume people really arrived 25,000 years ago.
|
| There may come a point, centuries from now, when our evidence
| feels comprehensive, at which point the error estimate can
| shrink. But modern archeology is barely 100 years old and most
| subject areas are still under-studied, so error estimates need to
| remain large, for now, especially for the prehistoric era.
| (Obviously error estimates are much smaller for the historic era,
| where we have a relative abundance of evidence.)
| lenzm wrote:
| This is similar to the German Tank Problem - given you have
| found N numbered tanks, how many total tanks are there?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem
| tpmx wrote:
| Variation: given you found N numbered C64s, how many were
| really sold?
|
| https://www.pagetable.com/?p=547
| Stevvo wrote:
| Clovis first persisted for almost the entirety of that 100
| years despite large and ever growing amounts evidence to the
| contrary.
|
| There is no need for "error estimates to remain large". The
| field just needs to acknowledge the actual numbers the evidence
| gives, instead of ignoring things when the show up because they
| are older than expected and don't fit with the existing
| narrative.
| kwonkicker wrote:
| Technically true but wrong. If your oldest Facebook post is
| from 2015, how likely is it that you've been using the internet
| before 2005?! Archeologists are very smart people in their own
| right, some are much smarter than we are. They do consider
| everything that we think they haven't. Let's give some benefit
| of the doubt to our fellow researchers.
| neffy wrote:
| Some background on this, there is a long standing back to the
| late 20th century - and to those of us outside the field
| darkly funny - controversy within this particular scientific
| community on when the first humans arrived, which can be
| broadly googled by searches for "Clovis man controversy".
|
| Sure archeologists are very smart people, and like all other
| very smart people, can still be caught on the wrong side of
| history as new evidence piles up against existing theories.
| User23 wrote:
| > If your oldest Facebook post is from 2015, how likely is it
| that you've been using the internet before 2005?!
|
| Who knows. It could be that person has been using the
| Internet for a very long time and is thus a late adopter of
| Facebook due to preferring to do things the old way. It could
| also be a person who started using the Internet in 2015. GP's
| point that we really can't conclude anything beyond a lower
| bound isn't falsified by your example
| SantalBlush wrote:
| >They do consider everything that we think they haven't.
|
| This can be said of almost any observation made about a
| particular field of research. Outsiders aren't familiar
| enough with the current state of research and they often
| assume experts haven't considered some rather obvious things.
|
| That's not to say that outsiders shouldn't participate in the
| discussion, but they should acknowledge that there is a good
| chance their ideas have already been considered.
| [deleted]
| haroldp wrote:
| I first joined facebook in 2009, but have been on the
| internet since 1991.
|
| You might counter that facebook only started in 2004, and
| didn't get much traction until 2006. But I was invited before
| that and simply didn't care to join, preferring to occupy
| other parts of the `net.
|
| Likewise, Clovis artifacts all date from after the peak of
| the last ice age, when glaciers were melting, land routes
| were opening, and sea levels were rising to obliterate any
| coastal artifacts from any previous waves of migration.
|
| Clovis-first has been debunked for decades. This is just
| another - particularly solid - nail in that theory's coffin.
| It is worth asking why it has persisted so doggedly. I don't
| think it is because archeologists aren't very smart people.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| you were using what network protocol stack in 1991 ? Banyan
| "vines" or token-ring ?
| SECProto wrote:
| > If your oldest Facebook post is from 2015, how likely is it
| that you've been using the internet before 2005?!
|
| My Facebook account dates back to 2015, but I have been using
| the internet since the mid 90s. (As far as I'm aware, there's
| no evidence of the previous account I had from 2006-2010ish)
|
| > Let's give some benefit of the doubt to our fellow
| researchers.
|
| Agree here
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| This is actually how archeologists estimate their ranges for
| human habitation in an area, just with math instead of guesses.
| This paper isn't about that (try timing papers like [1]
| instead), it's about the actual radioisotope boundary dates for
| an actual site.
|
| Part of the problem these LGM dates keep running into is that
| it's not obvious how people got here in the first place. After
| about 48kya, the ice free corridors close up and the ice sheets
| encompass most of the coastal islands as well until about 22kya
| when humans can get to Alaska again and 18kya when humans can
| easily get down the coastal routes. What would have been
| possible in the middle is very much still in the ??? grey area.
|
| [1] https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2491-6
| irrational wrote:
| I assume they built boats. It isn't exactly surprising after
| 20k years that we can't find any proof of these boats, but
| how else would then have come across? Fly?
| ajross wrote:
| > I assume they built boats
|
| There was a land bridge due to lower sea levels during the
| last glaciation. _HOW_ people from Asia populated the
| Americas is not really the question.
| irrational wrote:
| But now they are saying that people were here before the
| land bridge was usable or existed, right? So, maybe they
| came some way other than the land bridge. Or, earlier
| peoples came via some other route (hence the current
| footprints) and then a later migration came via the land
| bridge.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Actually, that absolutely is the question.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| We know that humans had boats by that point due to their
| presence in Australia and the current dominance of the
| coastal migration hypothesis. The problem is that our
| current understanding of the climate is that the coast was
| too ice-locked by glaciers for coastal foraging. If there's
| something this old, either they were doing some _very
| impressive_ and unexpectedly long distance nautical
| journeys, or there are gaps in the details of our
| paleoclimate models.
|
| It's not that either is impossible or even improbable, it's
| just that it forces us to revisit everything again to try
| and work out the routes if these (and other similarly early
| dates that have been proposed in the last couple years)
| hold up under review.
| tzs wrote:
| One point in favor of a water route is you can carry a
| lot more stuff that way. Most of the migrations into the
| Americas were before animals other than perhaps dogs were
| domesticated and before the wheel was invented.
|
| So anything you wanted to bring with you on a land route
| had to be carried by humans, dogs, or pulled on sleds by
| humans or dogs.
|
| On a water route you could tow another boat or raft
| behind full of your stuff. (Rope was invented long before
| any migration to the Americas).
| irrational wrote:
| Coastal foraging? Why can't they just fish? There are
| lots of fish in those northern reaches today, I assume
| there would have been even more back then. And fish
| doesn't necessarily have to be cooked, so no requirement
| to stop to make fires.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Note that the phrase "coastal foraging" typically implies
| fishing and the exploitation of other littoral/marine
| resources.
|
| Anyway, the current understanding of the paleoclimate is
| that entire region between approximately Valdez and
| Vancouver Island was entirely covered by glaciers out to
| the edge of continental shelf until ~18kya. Lesnek et al
| has some good diagrams [1]. Living exclusively off deep-
| sea marine resources in an iceberge minefield without
| fire for over a thousand miles in one of the coldest,
| most dangerous oceans in the world without landing
| suggests an unprecedented level of both nautical
| technology and experience. Where did that come from? We
| have no good answers right now.
|
| [1] https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aar5040
| irrational wrote:
| What is the reasoning for thinking they came from the
| top? You've said they had already reached Australia via
| boat. Couldn't they have reached some other part of the
| Americas by boat, maybe South America via Africa or
| Easter island?
| miniwark wrote:
| Mainly because both Americas where inhabited way before
| the pacific islands. For example Easter Island is
| estimated to have been inhabited around 300 to 1200 CE.
| This is also confirmed by genetics, with an origin of the
| Amerindians located around central Siberia.
|
| See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_history_of_Indi
| genous_...
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| We've definitively established that Clovis populations
| and all modern Native Americans are genetically related
| to Beringian populations out of Eurasia. It's reasonable
| to suspect pre-clovis populations probably came from much
| the same area, especially given that suggested pre-clovis
| lithics so closely resemble clovis traditions.
|
| Additionally, the farthest east that we've found evidence
| of Australasian populations is the Solomon islands, some
| 7,000+ mi from South America. There's no evidence of
| habitation on the intervening islands until Austronesian
| peoples show up much later. As for Africa, we simply have
| no evidence for it whatsoever.
| satronaut wrote:
| tbh they were probably way more advanced than we give, or
| want to give, them credit for
| tejtm wrote:
| And possibly more raw intelligence as we have mainly been
| selecting for "smarter than grass" since beginning this
| experiment in agriculture 10k - 20k years ago.
| esalman wrote:
| White Sands National Park is absolutely gorgeous, I'd highly
| recommend visiting that place to anybody touring the southwestern
| USA.
| Causality1 wrote:
| Expect this to get messy. There are powerful interest groups
| whose self-identity relies on Clovis culture and its descendants
| being the first peoples of the Americas.
| ArchStanton wrote:
| That's a good point.
|
| Generally, I'd say that any group of Native Americans (or folks
| who profit from them either emotionally or financially) wants
| to be thought of as the 'first' people who ever lived on that
| piece of land. Perhaps they popped up from the earth like the
| skeletons in Jason and the Argonauts.
|
| There's a legitimacy angle here that's become super important
| in the last decade or so. Then there's the argument about
| 'nobody lived here when my people moved in' that's allowed for
| some people, not for others.
|
| It isn't like the Sioux or the Navajo have been in their
| current location all that long. It's all so tiresome.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > It isn't like the Sioux or the Navajo have been in their
| current location all that long. It's all so tiresome.
|
| Are there particular reasons that you use the Sioux or the
| Navajo in this? Is this a general claim that "no populations
| stay in a particular location for more than X years", or
| something more specific?
| _3u10 wrote:
| They are likely alluding to the trail of tears.
| jcranmer wrote:
| Neither the Sioux nor the Navajo were on the Trail of
| Tears, which affected the tribes who lived in the US
| Southeast, most notably the Cherokee, but also the
| Muskogee, Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw.
| jcranmer wrote:
| Various Sioux tribes were pushed west of the Mississippi
| around 1600-1700 by various wars that took place between
| natives at the time. It's probably the most well-known pre-
| contact migration of Native American tribes (at least those
| that live in US/Canada; the Mexica migration into the
| Central Mexico Valley is probably even more well-known, as
| it's a _very_ key part of their own histories).
| UncleEntity wrote:
| The introduction of horses by the Europeans significantly
| changed their cultures.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Who are these interest groups? My understanding is that pre-
| Clovis is completely established beyond any semblance of
| reasonable doubt, so they're 30+ years behind the times.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| From what my archaeologist friends in North America tell me,
| the interest group is modern native Americans. They are the
| direct descendants of the Clovis culture.
|
| Clovis-Americans have certain unique rights based on legal
| theories that their ancestors were the first human occupants
| of the land, which would be weakened or voided if substantial
| scientific evidence established that they simply replaced a
| prior human culture. Due to a perverse set of incentives,
| native American interest groups use these unique rights to
| actively interfere with archaeological research that might
| undermine their claims to being the first occupants of the
| land. While it has not stopped pre-Clovis research, it has
| greatly impeded it.
|
| While the scientific evidence strongly suggests a pre-Clovis
| people, the legal theories and legislation that presume this
| is not the case are still active. These are evaluated on a
| case by case basis currently.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > Clovis-Americans have certain unique rights based on
| legal theories that their ancestors were the first human
| occupants of the land
|
| Please point to these rights and legal theories. Do you
| just mean NAGPRA?
|
| As far as I know, whatever legal rights any native American
| people have in the Americas at this point in time are based
| purely on them _being here_ when Europeans arrived near the
| start of the 16th century.
|
| Whether they had been the occupants for 400 years or 40,000
| years wouldn't make any difference to the treaties that
| were signed (and generally abrogated).
| imbnwa wrote:
| This whole digression seems like a weird snipe at
| "identity politics" when in this particular case, its
| pretty clear cut.
| beenBoutIT wrote:
| As of 1995 more than 50% of people who identified as
| Indigenous preferred the term "American Indian".[0]
|
| It's interesting how people outside of a group can erase
| that group's identity just by taking away the name that
| they use to define themselves. Any politically correct
| American has to say "Native American" or use the even
| more generic term "Indigenous People" while the majority
| of the people being referred to understand themselves to
| be "Indians" or "American Indians". Hundreds of years
| being known as Indians and having that taken away by
| scholars and academics. It's a sad final twist on an
| exceptionally sad story.
|
| 0.https://www.census.gov/prod/2/gen/96arc/ivatuck.pdf
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| This is perhaps a better take on the things (from
| https://americanindian.si.edu/nk360/faq/did-you-know)
|
| ----------
|
| What is the correct terminology: American Indian, Indian,
| Native American, or Native?
|
| All of these terms are acceptable. The consensus,
| however, is that whenever possible, Native people prefer
| to be called by their specific tribal name. In the United
| States, Native American has been widely used but is
| falling out of favor with some groups, and the terms
| American Indian or indigenous American are preferred by
| many Native people.
|
| -----------------
|
| This also provides a good overview through a series of
| personal viewpoints:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20170913022941/https://indian
| cou...
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| I'm a (formerly working) archeologist. Native American land
| claims are horrifically complicated and way beyond my
| knowledge, but I'm not aware of anything that's legally
| based on the scientific consensus about the earliest
| inhabitants of a specific area. Instead, the term you'll
| commonly find used is "aboriginal title", which basically
| just means "we've been here a long time". It's as
| deliberately vague as it seems and isn't affected by pre-
| Clovis at all.
|
| NAGPRA has run into complex issues with ownership being
| unclear when we've found ancient remains, but that doesn't
| mean people are rejecting the concept of pre-Clovis. It's a
| separate set of issues entirely.
|
| I'll mention that many indigenous belief systems do
| incorporate aspects of "we've always lived here" when
| that's clearly not what the archaeology says. Most such
| people accept both sides as belonging to separate things in
| my experience. It's not all that different from Christians
| who believe Exodus happened for example. The scientific
| consensus isn't really relevant to that belief and that's
| fine.
| quercusa wrote:
| e.g., with regard to Kennewick Man:
|
| _" From our oral histories, we know that our people have been
| part of this land since the beginning of time," a leader of the
| Umatilla tribe wrote in a statement at the time. "We do not
| believe that our people migrated here from another continent,
| as the scientists do."_
|
| https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2016/05/05/476631934...
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| This is actually a different claim that one in the comment
| you're replying to.
|
| Being "the first humans to migrate to the Americans" is quite
| different from "we didn't migrate from anywhere at all, we've
| been here forever".
|
| I've never understood human cultures that use oral histories.
| The oral history of the US from 6 months ago is completely
| unreliable. Who could possibly put much stock in an oral
| history of several thousand years ago, and why?
| ajross wrote:
| I hesitate to try to engage in this nonsense, but it's worth
| pointing out that the Kennewick remains were 9k years old. He
| was all but certain a clovis descendant, just like modern
| native americans.
| ajross wrote:
| Uh... who? I mean, yes, it's true that almost all native
| americans (the exceptions being the Inuit and their relatives
| who are more recent immigrants) are descendants of a single
| wave of population motion out of asia about 12kya that
| coincides closely with the Clovis culture.
|
| But hints that there were people here before that have been
| around for a long time, starting with the Monte Verde work in
| Chile a few decades back.
|
| And I don't recall any particular "mess" from indigenous
| americans.
|
| I mean, scientifically there's definitely a big question of why
| the population density of the earlier settlers seems to have
| been so low (vs. clovis, which basically exploded onto the
| scene and went everywhere on the continent very fast), or why
| they are not identifiable in contemporary DNA (which very
| closely supports the "clovis only" hypothesis).
|
| But there's no politics at work here. Stop it.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Just to clarify: you're saying that genetic analysis appears
| to rule out current natives being (at least partially)
| descended from a pre-clovis population?
| ajross wrote:
| I'm not an expert. But yes, that's my understanding. The
| pre-clovis americans seem to have died out and not
| integrated.
| antiquark wrote:
| Is it just me, or do those footprints look fake? As if, they were
| sculpted by an artist?
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