Old American theory is 'speared' (BBC) {Clovis wasn't here first}

[eppur_se_muova]

By Jonathan Amos
Science correspondent, BBC News

An ancient bone with a projectile point lodged within it appears to up-end - once and for all - a long-held idea of how the Americas were first populated.

The rib, from a tusked beast known as a mastodon, has been dated precisely to 13,800 years ago.

This places it before the so-called Clovis hunters, who many academics had argued were the North American continent's original inhabitants.

News of the dating results is reported in Science magazine.

In truth, the "Clovis first" model, which holds to the idea that America's original human population swept across a land-bridge from Siberia some 13,000 years ago, has looked untenable for some time.
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more: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15391388

[sakabatou]

1. Would that make it Paleo-Indian?

[RaleighNCDUer]

9. Certainly - the question is, who were the Paleo-Indians? nt

[postulater]

2. That's 7800 years before God put them here!

Holy Mastodon!

[RaleighNCDUer]

3. Interestingly, the clovis points found more closely resemble points

found in France than anything in Asia from the same time period.

One day we will find that the Americas were settled several times from several directions at least as far back as 20,000 years ago.

[AverageJoe90]

4. My bet's on the South Pacific, especially for the Southwest Native Americans.

[Odin2005]

8. There is no evidence of that genetically, archeologically, or linguistically.

The farthest reaches of Polynesia were not settled until AD 1000, in any case.

[RaleighNCDUer]

10. That's true, but there are ways around that.

Imagine the world 15,000 years ago. Sea levels are much lower. This enabled Australia to be settled 25,000 years earlier, so that is well established. Adventurers out of Micronesia discover New Zealand, but not until 1000 years ago. Hawaii, OTOH, much further away from the home islands of Micronesia, was settled 1700 years ago, as was Rapa Nui (Easter Island), the remotest spot on earth. Obviously it was not a matter of 'island hopping'. Settlement across the Pacific was scattershot. Suppose adventurers/settlers set out from Australia and went south, skirted the edge of Antarctica, and fetched up on Tierra del Fuego, then followed the coast up Chile. There are excavations of sites in Chile that have been suggested to be 16-20,000 years old. With the lower sea levels the continental shelves would have extended the land from all the continents out hundreds of miles, making the gaps between Tasmania and Antarctica, and Antarctica and South America, much narrower, and that is actually where the settlements would have been - at sea level, when sea level was 180' lower.

There is much more evidence out there than is acknowledged - in the cutthroat world of science, the worst possible fate is to publish and be wrong, so there are many people sitting on finds that contravene the popular theories until they can get sufficient incontrovertable proof (such as this find) to safely release it.

IOW, there is no proof, until there is proof.

(on edit)
As for them reaching the American SW, I don't know, but it is doubtful. But colonization from the southern Pacific is conceivable.

[Odin2005]

11. Such a trek is simply impossible with the boat technology of the time.

You are saying that people in rafts and canoes would survive in the open waters of the stormy Southern Ocean? Impossible. These would not be Polynesians with their quite advanced ships, we are talking rafts and canoes.

[RaleighNCDUer]

12. The Polynesians had canoes. Very big canoes, but still, just canoes

with outriggers. And that is hardly high tech. Hand carved out of logs. Just because we have not found large boats from pre-history does not mean they did not exist. If you can cross 130 miles from New Guinea to Australia, why could you not cross 500 miles? If you can cross 500, why not a thousand? If a thousand, why not 5,000?

Progress is not a steady line. Technologies are developed, and then sometimes lost - it took us until 1850 to rediscover the formula for a form or concrete used by the Romans in the 1st century BCE. There could have been a maritime culture from 20,000 years ago that was technologically equal to the Polynesians which used their same resources - stone and shell and wood - that did not survive the end of the ice age, and all sign of them disappeared beneath the rising water.

As an aside, how do you know the open waters of the Southern Ocean of 15,000 or 20,000 years ago were anything like they are today? Wouldn't the ice age have a certain affect on the climate, the winds, the tides? Do you really have any idea what that effect might have been to that specific area?

Thing is, we're trying to guess the picture of a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle based on the 25 pieces we've found. We don't know a hell of a lot more than we know - but we have reason to believe that S America was colonized long before Clovis, and coming along that southern route is not really out of the question.

[Odin2005]

13. As I mentioned earlier, there is no genetic evidence for it.

If the hypothesis is true we would expect Australian Aboriginal genetic markers in the Americas, we don't. We find East Asian and Siberian markers, indicating many waves of settlement from NE Asia.

I concede your points about boat technology, but not your point on climate. Storminess on the Southern Ocean would have been the same, if not worse, than now. The reason the Southern ocean is so stormy is because the Antarctic Ice Sheet creates a very strong temperature gradient that powers very strong low pressure systems

[14thColony]

6. You refer to the Solutrean Hypothesis

There seems to be some interesting evidence for this, including the presence of an ancient form of Haplogroup X (a European lineage) among northeastern coastal Amerinds, exactly where the Solutreans would have been most likley to enter the continent. That, and the Clovis technology is nearly indistinguishable from the Solutrean technology, but neither look anything like the alleged founder technology used in northeast Asia at the time.

I agree with you: it's going to turn out it was a millenia-long free-for-all to get to the New World. My bets include paleo-Polynesians crossing in the central and south Pacific,, West Africans into Central and South America, Solutreans from the north Atlantic route, and northeastern Asians (Siberians, proto-Jomon/Ainu, Kamchats) coming via land and sea across the northern Pacific routes. Some groups probably stayed more or less genetically intact, others probably got mixed up like crazy. Would also explain the bewildering quiltwork of native languages as well.

[xchrom]

5. recommend

[Odin2005]

7. Clovis is way to late to account for the diversity of Amerindian language families.

If the Clovis-first hypothesis is correct that would mean a linguistic time-depth of about 12,000 years, which is the same as the language families of Northern Eurasia, many of which (including Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic, and Eskimo-Aleut) seem to be related. We don't see this in the Americas, which is much more linguistically complex and indicates a time depth of 20,000 years, IMO.

IMO there were several waves of immigration from NE Asia from 20,000 years ago onward, the last two waves, the Eskimo-Aleut wave and the Athabaskan wave, are the only ones visible linguistically.

I will speculate that the first people in the Americas were coastal peoples that did not go inland until about 15,000 years ago, which is why we can't find anything that early, it's under water now. It also explains why the highest diversity of languages in the Americas are on the west coast.