[HN Gopher] Clues to the lives of North America's first inhabita...
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Clues to the lives of North America's first inhabitants are hidden
underwater
Author : Brajeshwar
Score : 59 points
Date : 2023-03-29 16:12 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.smithsonianmag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.smithsonianmag.com)
| user3939382 wrote:
| Somewhat related. It's super weird walking around the desert in
| Palm Springs, over an hour from the ocean/LA, and there are
| seashells all over the place mixed into the sand. It's very rare
| that I've experienced something so anachronistic, it made me feel
| the passage of time on a scale that was very unusually large.
| poulsbohemian wrote:
| We used to find seashell fossils _in Iowa_ where I went to
| college just out on the ground surface. Mind blowing stuff for
| sure.
| daveslash wrote:
| I was listening to an archaeology professor not long ago. He was
| challenging the long-standing hypothesis that human migration
| came across the Bering straight and then moved inland early on,
| populating the inner North American continent.
|
| He postulated that the migration initially moved down along the
| West Coast quite a ways before moving inland. He suggested that
| we initially thought inland because that's where we find so many
| artifacts. But we forget that the coastline of the time period
| may have been as much as 400ft lower than today, thus so much of
| the archaeological artifacts are either lost or unknown to us
| today. Because we only have access to what was _not_ submerged
| below sea level rise, we have an incomplete (and, apparently
| misguided) impression of what really happened.
|
| Some of the oldest human remains ( _possibly the oldest_ ) in
| North America are actually on Santa Rosa Island, one of the
| Channel Islands off Santa Barbara, California. [0]
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arlington_Springs_Man
| ravenstine wrote:
| The Chumash people, who lived both on the mainland and on Santa
| Rosa island, had a myth, if I remember correctly, that their
| people had come from somewhere else across a rainbow bridge. Of
| course I don't believe that there was a literal rainbow bridge,
| but I interpret it as a cultural subconsciousness of having
| originally come across the ocean. Their seafaring practices and
| boat construction were actually fairly advanced in contrast to
| other tribes on the west coast. If the Polynesians traveled as
| far through the Pacific as they did, it doesn't seem farfetched
| that humans could have reached the Americas without crossing
| the Bearing Strait. Just my hypothesis.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| The chumash are genetically very close to other American
| Indian peoples, who are collectively related to historic
| groups that populated Northeast Asia. Both land and sea
| voyages from Asia to the Americas are reasonable mainstream
| hypotheses given current evidence, but they're both commonly
| called "crossing the Bering strait".
|
| A transpacific voyage from somewhere like southeast Asia may
| have been theoretically possible, but there's no actual
| evidence that the first settlers of the Americas came that
| way and quite a lot of evidence that they didn't.
| jcranmer wrote:
| That's not exactly avant-garde; the coastal migration
| hypothesis has been the dominant hypothesis among
| anthropologists since the early 90s.
| sampo wrote:
| > Some of the oldest human remains ( _possibly the oldest_ ) in
| North America are actually on Santa Rosa Island
|
| There are several sites indicating human presence in North
| America 20 000 - 30 000 years ago, inferred from campsites and
| broken animal bones. And in one case, human footprints:
|
| https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/fossil-fo...
|
| And then there is this:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerutti_Mastodon_site
|
| But none of these very old sites contain remains of human
| bones.
| BigCryo wrote:
| And don't forget whatever hominin was responsible for the
| cerrutti Mastodon site near San Diego... Almost certainly
| this hominin live near the coast and the evidence of it is
| almost all gone now
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| It's incredibly unlikely that any hominins were responsible
| for Cerutti. McNabb [1] wrote a good article looking at
| what hominins could plausibly have created the site given
| what's known from elsewhere and the evidence that's been
| presented. The short answer is that there weren't any
| plausible candidates and most of the technologies necessary
| wouldn't be invented until modern humans did so long after
| the site is dated. The academic consensus on the original
| paper is is that it presented a genuinely ambiguous site
| where the authors simply overstated the strength of their
| argument because they were unfamiliar with modern
| analytical methodologies at the time.
|
| [1] https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2019.52
| Baeocystin wrote:
| The shell midden I'm linking to is much, much more recent,
| but I do wonder if something like a buried-in-sediment
| offshore midden of similar type is the sort of evidence
| that would could theoretically find (relatively) easily if
| we started looking at submerged historic coastline in
| earnest.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whaleback_Shell_Midden
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| I was convinced of that, when that guy(?) went down the west
| coast in a kayak one summer, starting in alaska and ending in
| Baja California. If he could do it, then early Americans could
| do it.
|
| And the next summer, after finding an entire uninhabited
| paradise with plentiful game and oysters and beautiful rivers,
| bring the spouse and start a family.
|
| Who wouldn't?
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I wasn't aware this was even controversial. The question
| highlights how one can choose to answer on the basis of data
| or on the basis of reasoning.
|
| In this and many other areas it seems that people place a
| priority on data driven answers opposed to logic driven ones.
| Part of the challenge has to do with scientific publishing.
| These days database results are much more likely to be
| published then well thought out but entirely conceptual
| results
| causality0 wrote:
| For a good few years people who were personally offended at the
| idea the Clovis culture wasn't North America's first
| inhabitants wielded a great deal of power in the scientific
| community. Thankfully that's basically over.
| sammalloy wrote:
| This is the answer, IMO, and we are still dealing with the
| last of their generation for the next ten years or so.
| lacrosse_tannin wrote:
| https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/nebraska/9781496202178/ may
| or may not interest yall
| genocidicbunny wrote:
| I find it interesting that as a child, some of the books that I
| read about human colonization of the Americas distinctly
| mentioned this, and a few of these books were from the 1960's.
| So at least some Soviet historians had this idea quite a while
| ago.
| [deleted]
| jmyeet wrote:
| Let me introduce you to the Laurentide ice sheet [1]. It was
| similar to the ice sheets that now cover Greenland and Antarctica
| and was up to 2 miles thick in places, extending far south into
| what is now the US.
|
| After being around for ~2.5 million years it melted about 20,000
| years ago. Prior to then sea levels were ~130 meters lower than
| they are now. Think about that. There was still various land
| bridges that allowed migration. We see direct evidence of this.
| It's why, for example, we find archaeological sites under the
| English Channel (eg [2]).
|
| So our ancestors like migrated along and settled on coasts and
| rivers. Obviously we have a lot of evidence along rivers because
| they weren't inundanted by 130m of water but the coasts were. So
| that means a lot of that evidence was simply erased. We always
| have to take that gap into account (eg an inland people from
| Siberia migrating to North America will have had all of its
| coastal history erased so the first we'll see of them is when
| they advanced to the point of settling inland).
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurentide_Ice_Sheet
|
| [2]: https://www.livescience.com/1759-stone-age-settlement-
| englis...
| undersuit wrote:
| I just played around with https://www.floodmap.net/ and it's
| pretty crazy what -130 meters looks like. Argentina and China
| have massive coastal growth and the Sea of Japan becomes
| landlocked. How much history is 100 miles off China's modern
| day coast line?
| splitstud wrote:
| [dead]
| karaterobot wrote:
| > Dated to at least 12,200 years ago, it's the earliest
| documented site of human activity in the southeastern U.S.
|
| Kinda weird referring to these people in the southeast as being
| America's first inhabitants when there were already people living
| on the continent for thousands of years before that. I suspect
| that people may forget that there was not one single wave of
| migration by one single group of people who remained a coherent
| group for two hundred centuries or so.
|
| cf. https://www.pnas.org/post/podcast/peopling-americas
| peteradio wrote:
| Why is human history so interesting?
| sacnoradhq wrote:
| A non-rhetorical A to a rhetorical Q: Narcissistic
| anthropocentrism.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| Because it's about us, which in an of itself is going to be
| reason enough for some people.
| hprotagonist wrote:
| Europe, too.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland
| sacnoradhq wrote:
| It's impossible to rule out all possibility of one-of human semi-
| circumnavigation in pre-history, either through boatmaking or
| unique natural circumstances. H. sapiens neanderthalensis may
| have even beat us h. sapiens sapiens to water transportation.
|
| Mass migration, OTOH, needs motivating factors such as curiosity,
| opportunity, or existential threat, and is more difficult to
| navigate the young, old, infirm, and the naive through dangerous
| travels.
| mabbo wrote:
| Also relevant: Beringia[0]. The huge area of land between Russia
| and Alaska that has since been covered in water. When people talk
| about a land bridge between the two, it's not like it was a small
| narrow bit above the waves that you quickly crossed. It was the
| size of a country!
|
| > Commencing from c. 57,000 YBP, steppe-tundra vegetation
| dominated large parts of Beringia with a rich diversity of
| grasses and herbs. There were patches of shrub tundra with
| isolated refugia of larch and spruce forests with birch and alder
| trees. It has been proposed that the largest and most diverse
| megafaunal community residing in Beringia at this time could only
| have been sustained in a highly diverse and productive
| environment.
|
| There are archeological treasures down below those waters that
| could tell us so much about the history of the first peoples to
| come to North America.
|
| [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beringia
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(page generated 2023-03-29 23:01 UTC)