[HN Gopher] Oldest footprints in North America push back human a...
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Oldest footprints in North America push back human arrival
Author : isaacfrond
Score : 47 points
Date : 2023-10-05 18:36 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.washingtonpost.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.washingtonpost.com)
| BMorearty wrote:
| I'm confused by this article. It says "New evidence adds to work
| showing people made these prints [in New Mexico] sometime between
| 21,000 and 23,000 years ago." It supposedly contradicts experts'
| belief for decades that "the first people in the Americas
| migrated from Siberia across the Bering Strait on a land bridge
| exposed during the last glacial maximum, sometime between 26,500
| and 19,000 years ago.
|
| How is that contradictory?
| diogenes4 wrote:
| I believe that "sometime between 26,500 and 19,000 years ago"
| is an appositive marking the beginning of the land bridge's
| accessibility, not the time of migration. What they _should_
| have said is that the broadly accepted conservative time frame
| for migration is somewhere between 14kya and 19kya, as the
| white sands footprints have dating issues that complicate
| accepting them at face value. The liberal interpretations of
| the evidence--especially in northern Canada and Alaska--can
| push evidence back to more than 33kya--I 've seen dating for
| 44kya, iirc, which is very contentious and not broadly
| accepted.
|
| That said I don't have a wapo subscription, so that's my best
| guess.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| You couldn't get from beringia to New Mexico during the last
| glacial maximum because of all glaciers in the way.
|
| The dates given for the LGM are (very roughly) when Beringia
| was accessible from Siberia. Pinning down when humans were able
| to access the rest of the continent is tricky, but current
| estimates for that are sometime between 20-18kya _at the
| earliest_ based on genetics. Dates based on material culture
| evidence are even later than that, which presents done obvious
| problems with the dating on these footprints.
|
| There are also pretty hard constraints on the other side for
| humans even arriving in that part of Siberia, since the
| immediate ancestor sites with sequencing at Yana and Mal'ta are
| from 32kya and 25kya respectively.
| bagels wrote:
| Why do some of the feet seem to have four or six toes?
| codetrotter wrote:
| Well, relatedly:
|
| The median number of legs for a human being is 2. The average
| is slightly less. So most people have an above average number
| of legs.
|
| But also, footprints with just four toes could also be because
| of one of the toes not carrying enough weight to make a legible
| print.
| permo-w wrote:
| relatedly, the average number of brains in the human body is
| just over 1, so most people have below average brains
| pinkmuffinere wrote:
| This is news to me -- can you elaborate? Is this a
| cannibalism joke?
| permo-w wrote:
| ever seen a pregnant woman?
| pinkmuffinere wrote:
| Ah, fair enough. I think I prefer it as a cannibalism
| joke though lol
| riley_dog wrote:
| Wouldn't the median be 1? Most folks have 2 legs, but some
| have 1 or even 0. The median would be 2 if some people had 4
| legs.
| pil0u wrote:
| No. To illustrate:
|
| [ 1, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2 ] ^^^
|
| The 5th element is the median.
| passwordoops wrote:
| [flagged]
| pc86 wrote:
| Say there's 8,000,000,000 on the planet, you line up
| starting at #1 with all the people with 0 legs, then all
| the people with 1, then all the people with 2, then all the
| people with more than 2.
|
| Person #4,000,000,000 has 2 legs.
| smegsicle wrote:
| will we ever find anything that humans haven't touched ???
| debatem1 wrote:
| Pretty sure we haven't touched the sun and I find that almost
| every day.
| p1necone wrote:
| We just gotta land there at night.
| thegabriele wrote:
| We actually "touch" nothing: https://www.quora.com/If-were-
| made-of-atoms-and-atoms-cant-t...
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Dinosaurs?
| irrational wrote:
| You've never touched a bird? Find someone with chickens and
| ask if you can touch their dinosaur.
| whatshisface wrote:
| Every dinosaur found was excavated by a human.
| jetrink wrote:
| Several dogs are credited with finding dinosaur fossils,
| but I will grant you that they were not allowed to perform
| the excavation.
| smegsicle wrote:
| they literally didn't let those poor dogs do their
| favorite part
|
| made them watch
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| The difficulty was getting the dog to part with the
| dinosaur bone once it had dug one up.
| smegsicle wrote:
| killed by them too
| User23 wrote:
| Perhaps not everyone realizes that every year thousands
| (millions?) of people go out to shoot dinosaurs, often of
| the duck-billed variety.
| Acrobatic_Road wrote:
| and often with guns of the long-ass variety
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| We're having dinosaur for dinner tonight.
| nickthegreek wrote:
| That's a fossilized remnant, not a dinosaur.
| diogenes4 wrote:
| skeleton of theseus etc
| informalo wrote:
| https://archive.ph/qbNbZ
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(page generated 2023-10-05 23:00 UTC)