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.)
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
There were these early internet tribes called researchers ;)
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.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluefish_Caves]
[https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...]
[https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/jacques-cinq-m...]
> 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.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/23/science/ancient-footprint...
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.
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.
"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...
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?
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.
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?
The existing peoples wiped out the existing peoples in many cases.
What this all rotates around is a simplistic (and Victorian) view of 'peoples'. 'Red' = the Americas, 'White' = Europe, 'Black' = Africa, etc.
Truth is, a Navajo is not a Hopi, a Celt is not a Saxon is not a Norman. Most of these current fights are simply wordgames played to achieve political power or to suit some peoples' needs for self-flagellation.
Which is fine, I just thought your choice of wording was amusing.
I also used some higher-level stuff like telnet, FTP (sites mostly found via anonymous FTP lists), nntp, smtp, gopher, archie and veronica.
The parallels to the European genocide of Native Americans has significant consequences to two groups of people. The first is the white supremacists/edgelords who think an invasion from thousands of years ago means the actions of colonial Europeans as well as ongoing social justice issues with native Americans/reservations are somehow justified or deserved. The second is the far larger but far less dangerous group of people who think native Americans are somehow inherently morally superior and/or that European colonialism is responsible for all the world's problems. To them it's an article of faith that aboriginal peoples do not and cannot commit large-scale atrocities.
These two groups can make discussing and teaching American pre-history very difficult.
1. pre-Clovis people were so thinly spread that Clovis was able to just fill in the gaps
2. pre-Clovis people had actually essentially become extinct before Clovis arrived. It's not easy to see how that would be the case in a continent(s) of this size, but not actually implausible.
3. as a combination of the two, pre-Clovis culture was completely nomadic, and their constant migration kept them out of the way of Clovis until a point where their population was so diminished as to leave no descendants, even via inter-breeding.
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.
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).
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.
There was no consumer Internet in 1990.
However, TCP/IP was in use across a broad range of academic institutions and corporations, and it was possible for pretty much anyone to buy access to TCP/IP-based inter-networks.
Which, if you were a network engineer (and not for Novell or DEC) at the time, you would know.
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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.
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This also provides a good overview through a series of personal viewpoints:
https://web.archive.org/web/20170913022941/https://indiancou...
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.
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.
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).
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.
The boat would be hauled onto the ice and turned upside down to form a shelter in remote spots.
Fishing and hunting for seals would have provided the food as they went.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_history_of_Indigenous_...
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/dna-search-fir...
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.