I was just reading another report on this discovery here:

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-53486868

Adding a little to your posted article......

there is absolutely NO foundation for such a statement! Brutal and hard perhaps. No language or conscious thought process? That's just flat out wrong! Talk to your sociologist or anthropologist friends ....

Nice climate, plentiful food. Enough hunting skills to get food and protection.

I read a long time ago that hunter/gathers needed a grand total of 4 hours of hard work a day to thrive.

Check this book:

1491. Charles C. Mann

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1491:_New_Revelations_of_the_Americas_Before_Columbus
An update to what was thought in the 20th Century.


Humans developed beyond what you think long before you might imagine. Just sayin'.

Yeah, life would have been tough living in a world surrounded by mega-fauna, much of which had us on the menu.

But these people were Homo sapiens They were us. Just as intelligent. Same emotions. Certainly had languages. There is nothing suggesting we have evolved much in the last 20k years.

Look at the Iceman found frozen in the alps. He had amazingly sophisticated tools and gear for the period. It surprised even the researchers. I think he died around 8,000 years ago. Maybe further back.

Have a nice evening.

more greed and certainty deficit disorder (fear, authoritarianism, bigotry, patriarchy, misogyny, fear of nature). luckily there's some democracy going around, but not enough yet to save us from suicide by global warming.

I have no doubt the early humans were just as violent and prone to bad decisions than we are now.

And remember, evidence points to early Americans were responsible for killing off our mega-fauna.

Humans have never been saints.

The Ice Man I mentioned in my first post? He died a violent death killed by an arrow and having his brain bashed in.

People are people.

Homo sapiens has been homo sapiens for quite a while -- that's just fact. To imagine those that preceded us as either mindless club wielding brutes -- or on the other hand the unsullied "noble savage" are both hopelessly shallow (and misinformed) caricatures.

"Civilization" on the other hand (and all the changes encompassed there) -- has been undergoing some fairly rapid transformations.

right handed 100,000 years ago.

sex on the wrong brain theory suggests it makes a difference which side of the brain we associated sex with - which hand.

right hand to left brain increased greed, fear, and the need for certainty (absolutism, bigotry, patriarchy, suspicion, lack of empathy, etc) , and that was a an advantage in times of conflict as populations increased. in the last few thousand years as populations and 'civilizations' grew they began to delay the age of reproduction sex on the wrong brain got worse. (columbus meets the natives)

trump was a frustrated dipshit who could not get a date and had a prince's privacy and opportunity to develop sowb.

and I won't be spending any time trying to "educate" myself.

You are intent on mashing together dates as disparate as 100,000 years distant -- to 20,000BP (as discussed in the article) -- and Columbus meets natives -- with a theory that is -- of little or no value (to put it in the kindest of terms).

ancestors, long before those factors.

reproduction is right up there with hunger and thirst. you saying it wouldn't effect our evolution?

and the divided brain goes back farther than that, including to birds, for instance. the idea the it wouldn't matter what hand we masturbated with wouldn't make a difference is ridiculous. back then life was shorter and reproduction started earlier.

our societies have formed around the increased irrational need for certainty - caused by associating impatient satisfaction-demanding reproductive impulses with brain functions that need patience and objectivity. logic is satisfied with finality, conclusion - certainty. authoritarianism is sometimes measured with the uncertainty avoidance index (UAI). authoritarians use order, simplification, absolutism to simplify the world/nature and help them judge the world in black and white, good and evil, etc. we invented religion to ease our fear of uncertainty and help us manufacture certainty.

the right brain is generally more engaged in emotion, sex, orgasm - why associate sex with the side of the brain that has more to do with detail, math, logic?

it was a slight advantage over millions of years that got much worse in the last few thousand years as humans necessarily began to delay the age of reproduction. at some point authoritarian leadership may have recognized the best way to create an army was with sexual repression - to keep young men frustrated and jacking off - by default with the wrong hand. the koran left the secret of authoritarian power in, mandating that "man can only have sex with his wife and that which the right hand possesses..."

populations in different environments selected for particular sowb symptoms which eventually manifested as inherited susceptibilities for particular sowb symptoms. so descendants from european "old world" civilizations may be more susceptible than those from the 'new world', and it looks like trump got bad genes for a modern democracy, but perhaps not for a monarchy.

is the disparity in sow a source of bigotry, racism, sexism?

authoritarian societies have a built in defense - as joycelyn elders found out, even mentioning the word 'masturbation' is out of bounds.

As soon as we learned to cultivate crops and domesticated animals.

although I think the evidence here is a bit tentative (we'll see where peer review goes here)

But the cumulative evidence (even when tentative) would seem to be clearly pushing the dates backward from the previously accepted 14-16,000 years for human occupation.

(and part of the problem here is that, while exciting and very popular, anthropology is infused with more than it's fair share of wingnuts and crackpots -- which leads the rest of the profession towards a fallback reliance on caution and skepticism.)
--------- --- ---------

When I was a kid, it was estimated that this hemisphere had been occupied for ten thousand years. I didn't realize that I was that old. You have to wonder how many times the cave had to be renovated with 10,000 years of occupancy?

many, many times!
----- -- -----

Before that, men could get by with only 4 hours of work each day.

Barren and remote, Chiquihuite Cave in Mexico seemed an unlikely place for anyone to live. But stone objects recovered from deep inside the cave may tell another story.


BY KRISTIN ROMEY
PUBLISHED JULY 22, 2020

WHEN RESEARCHERS FIRST arrived at a cave high in the desert mountains of north-central Mexico, they hoped to learn what the environment was like there thousands of years ago. But the unexpected discovery of what they believe is an ancient projectile point led to a decade-long excavation that could rewrite the history of the Americas.

According to a paper published today in the journal Nature, the site, known as Chiquihuite Cave, may contain evidence of human occupation that places people in North America around 30,000 years ago—roughly twice as early as most current estimates for when the first humans arrived on the continent.

The question of when people first arrived in the Americas has been debated for more than a century. For much of that time the reigning theory put the arrival around 13,500 years ago. But archaeologists are now exploring sites that keep pushing the date farther back, including some who have reported finding signs of human presence beyond 30,000 years ago. The evidence supporting those claims is hotly contested, and this latest discovery is already stirring more controversy.

. . .


New find suggests humans in North America pre-date the last great ice age.

The earth’s Last Glacial Maximum ended 19,000 years ago. During this time, vast ice sheets covered land and sea level was about 400 feet lower than today’s. Previous models for explaining the arrival of Homo sapiens to North America supposed that migration into the continent came after glaciers retreated. But a new discovery of stone tools in a Mexican cave indicate human arrival possibly occuring thousands of years earlier.

More:
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/2020/07/surprise-chiquihuite-cave-discovery-mexico-double-peopling-americas/

opinions from other researchers and they aren't even close to convinced about the dating. The stone comes from outside the cave which is of interest but the possible artifact doesn't sound real promising. If they find human or animal DNA in the small crevices of the stone, then that would indicate, with confidence, that it was a tool.

This is one of the first written articles that gets the terminology correct. We hypothesize about what we don't know and haven't proven mostly, but we draw conclusions from known proven theory. We do not theorize, we hypothesize about what we haven't proven. We theorize if it's based on something already proven or based on scientific laws or theory.

That was beautifully written. I was captivated by every word.

When sea level was 400’ lower how much early early evidence is covered with water and silt waiting for discovery 200 yards off shore?

when people arrived in the Americas has been the assumption that land travel had to be the only means.

Several years ago I visited the Arch/Anthro institute at Mercyhurst University in Erie, PA. The director at that time was James Adovasio, the archeologist who led the excavation of Meadowcroft Rockshelter north of Pittsburgh, where dates went back to 14,000 years ago and earlier.

I talked with Dr. Adovasio's assistants about arrival timing and how it happened. They discussed not just a water route, but a maritime culture extending from eastern Asia to western North America, which would look like an upside down horseshoe shape on a map.

I was skeptical then, but not any more. We know now that modern humans have been in Australia for over 50,000 years. Even accounting for exposed land during glaciation, there are still about 70 miles of open water they would have crossed to reach Australia. They knew how to "sail" or jyst drift on rafts that long ago.

DNA studies of human migrations out of Africa show that some groups of people hugged coastlines of India and southeastern Asia for millennia during expansion into Asia. Homo sapiens adapted to marine cultures very early. Water became roadways, not obstacles.

There are numerous islands off the coast of northeastern Asia. There are the Aleutian Islands extending out from southern Alaska almost to Asia. A maritime culture could live off of fish and marine and land animals. They could use wood and stone from the islands for tool making, as well as animal bones, skin, and sinew.

Beringia did not emerge overnight. Centuries of glacial expansion caused land to appear gradually, connecting some islands to mainland Asia and to other islands, or narrowing the distance. As less Arctic waters seeped into the Pacific while Beringia was developing, the climate was a little less severe.

Following Asian islands to the Aleutians and down the Pacific coast of North America, a marine culture could have skirted the glaciers and the bogs of Beringia. Once on the Pacific coast of North America, there were options to settle North American islands (now submerged), continue down the coast to even warmer climates, or take water routes (rivers, lakes) inland into North America, south of the glaciers.

Inland, the regions on the southern borders of the glaciers were rich with seasonal meltwater and the plants that grew there as well as animals attracted to watering holes. People could expand inland to the east in North America fairly quickly.

Or, follow the western coast of North America to Central and South America.

Early dates for people in the Americas are not confined to the limits in time of Beringia and glaciers. They can be as old as the evidence from scientific dating methods indicate. Follow the evidence and then figure out what happened instead of assuming what happened and then discounting evidence that doesn't support the assumptions.

Yep. Read about one some years ago, where they followed the west coast south.

is currently pretty open to new ideas about dispersal and inhabitation -- if it tracks with the evidence as it is known. (the old Paleo culture theory -- which was maybe a bit entrenched for a time -- is now far in the distance -- at least a generation past.)

And currently -- DNA study and modeling of dispersal, migration, integration and displacement -- stands ready to inject an entirely new layer of evidence to the discipline. Exciting times.

to let go of the old Clovis theory than they were a generation ago. Dr. Adovasio was so frustrated with their rigid refusal to accept his findings and the lengths they went to in trying to discount his work that he referred to them as the "Clovis Mafia."

The path across Beringia and later down an ice-free corridor into North America never did sound right to me. But one reason why it was held to so strongly by archaeologists in the past is that it offered a science based explanation for the peopling of the Americas instead of popular nonsense about lost tribes of Israel, or survivors from Atlantis being the source of the Native populations of America.