Guest “another paradigm bites the dust” by David Middleton
For quite some time it has been “settled science” that humans migrated into the Americas during deglaciation as ice-free passages opened. While there have been indications that humans may have arrived much earlier, we now have “rock solid” evidence that humans were already in New Mexico about 23,000 years ago.
Earliest evidence of human activity found in the Americas, researchers report
Date: September 23, 2021
Source: University of Arizona
Summary: Footprints at White Sands National Park in New Mexico confirm human presence over at least two millennia, with the oldest tracks dating back 23,000 years, say scientists.Footprints found at White Sands National Park in New Mexico provide the earliest unequivocal evidence of human activity in the Americas and provide insight into life over 23,000 years ago, scientists report.
The findings are described in an article in the journal Science.
Researchers Jeff Pigati and Kathleen Springer, with the U.S. Geological Survey, used radiocarbon dating of seed layers above and below the footprints to determine their age. The dates range in age and confirm human presence over at least two millennia, with the oldest tracks dating back 23,000 years.
This corresponds to the height of the last glacial cycle, during something known as the Last Glacial Maximum, and makes them the oldest known human footprints in the Americas.
It was previously thought that humans entered America much later, after the melting of the North American ice sheets, which opened up migration routes.
“Our dates on the seeds are tightly clustered and maintain stratigraphic order above and below multiple footprint horizons — this was a remarkable outcome,” Springer said.
The footprints tell an interesting tale of what life was like at this time. Judging by their size, the tracks were left mainly by teenagers and younger children, with the occasional adult.
“The footprints left at White Sands give a picture of what was taking place, teenagers interacting with younger children and adults,” said lead study author Matthew Bennett from Bournemouth University in England. “We can think of our ancestors as quite functional, hunting and surviving, but what we see here is also activity of play, and of different ages coming together. A true insight into these early people.”
“For decades, archaeologists have debated when people first arrived in the Americas,” said co-author Vance Holliday, a professor in the UArizona School of Anthropology and Department of Geosciences. “Few archaeologists see reliable evidence for sites older than about 16,000 years. Some think the arrival was later, no more than 13,000 years ago by makers of artifacts called Clovis points. The White Sands tracks provide a much earlier date. There are multiple layers of well-dated human tracks in streambeds where water flowed into an ancient lake. This was 10,000 years before Clovis people.”
[…]
ScienceDaily
Unfortunately, the paper is pay-walled, only the abstract is avaiable.
Early footsteps in the Americas
Despite a plethora of archaeological research over the past century, the timing of human migration into the Americas is still far from resolved. In a study of exposed outcrops of Lake Otero in White Sands National Park in New Mexico, Bennett et al. reveal numerous human footprints dating to about 23,000 to 21,000 years ago. These finds indicate the presence of humans in North America for approximately two millennia during the Last Glacial Maximum south of the migratory barrier created by the ice sheets to the north. This timing coincided with a Northern Hemispheric abrupt warming event, Dansgaard-Oeschger event 2, which drew down lake levels and allowed humans and megafauna to walk on newly exposed surfaces, creating tracks that became preserved in the geologic record. —AMS
Abstract
Archaeologists and researchers in allied fields have long sought to understand human colonization of North America. Questions remain about when and how people migrated, where they originated, and how their arrival affected the established fauna and landscape. Here, we present evidence from excavated surfaces in White Sands National Park (New Mexico, United States), where multiple in situ human footprints are stratigraphically constrained and bracketed by seed layers that yield calibrated radiocarbon ages between ~23 and 21 thousand years ago. These findings confirm the presence of humans in North America during the Last Glacial Maximum, adding evidence to the antiquity of human colonization of the Americas and providing a temporal range extension for the coexistence of early inhabitants and Pleistocene megafauna.
Bennett et al., 2021
This follows on the 2020 publication of evidence that humans were in Mexico between 26,500 and19,000 years ago, possibly pushing back human dispersal into the Americas to 33,000–31,000 years ago (Ardelean et al, 2020).
References
Ardelean, C.F., Becerra-Valdivia, L., Pedersen, M.W. et al. Evidence of human occupation in Mexico around the Last Glacial Maximum. Nature 584, 87–92 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2509-0
Bennett, Matthew R., David Bustos, Jeffrey S. Pigati, Kathleen B. Springer, Thomas M. Urban, Vance T. Holliday, Sally C. Reynolds, Marcin Budka, Jeffrey S. Honke, Adam M. Hudson, Brendan Fenerty, Clare Connelly, Patrick J. Martinez, Vincent L. Santucci, Daniel Odess. “Evidence of humans in North America during the Last Glacial Maximum”. Science, 2021; 373 (6562): 1528 DOI: 10.1126/science.abg7586
University of Arizona. “Earliest evidence of human activity found in the Americas, researchers report.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 23 September 2021. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/09/210923161340.htm>.
Nice posting, David. I have no idea why some of the first indigenous influx would spend much time in the White Sands area of New Mexico, there are far more attractive environments available now and then. The picture that accompanies the report shows bare footprints, no foot coverings (not to mention no Nikes, etc). Maybe the footprints are made by a group trying to get to the coastal areas, where the living was easy?
During the Pluvial, proglacial lakes and lacustrine environments farther afield were easy living. The Fort Rock, OR sandals were from such conditions.
The footprints are of kids and teenagers, so no surprise without footwear. Especially in lake shore sand and mud. Also, their flat feet suggest habitual lack of sandal or shoe wearing.
You get flat feet not walking barefoot…
Exactly.
Flat feet are also hereditary
Here are some of the prints. There seem to be hundreds of them when you go to images
David, maybe you want to add an image
I think the “teenagers” mention a little non-sciency. I understand our ancient ancestors had a life expectency of 25yrs or so. Probably 11-12yr old were bearing children.
I doubt that they had gone through puberty at that age.Poor nutrition delays puberty. Also life expectancy figures include child mortality which was very high in all pre modern societies. Also deaths due to inter-tribal violence could be very high, but male oriented.
“Poor nutrition” and “inter-tribal violence” seem speculative. A lake environment provides abundant wildlife and greenery. Additionally, a low population base and hunter-gatherer lifestyle would limit tribal development.
Why would a hunter-gatherer lifestyle limit development?
Because larger groupings of people use up local resources much faster. IIRC, human (tribal) settlements required agriculture to support them.
Hey, why not post us a Climate Poem?
I think a lot of the claims are typical archeological horseshit. If you look at the SI: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abg7586
Most of these foot prints are very crude and damaged, yet the paper estimates the age with a ludicrous level of uncertainty, eg. 15.18 +/-0.15 years !!
Yeah right, you have no idea what kind of pre-historic beast this was but you are sure it’s human ( despite many prints with only four toes ) and you know exactly how old it was to within a few weeks, from how deep the print was. ( This implies knowing how hard the mud was to estimate the weight and then knowing enough of the physiology to work out height and age from the weight.
No seriously, I’ve hear young Earth creationists come up with far more convincing science than that.
Then you start to pretend you know the marks were made on the same day at that same time and that the individuals were “playing”. This is pure science fiction.
The dating was not based upon the rock footprints but rather carbon dating of plant seeds located just above and just below the footprints. Carbon dating is very reliable at up 50 KYA. They never claimed precision to within a few weeks but a range of 21 to 23 KYA.
You’re commenting stupidly.
Not, not at all. Ancient humans routinely reached passed 50, if you survived passed 5.
Correct, illustrating another danger of using an average to describe a bimodal process.
Yes, you are correct.
There is biological age expectancy, and there is statistical life expectancy – two very different concepts. Even the great apes in the wild tropical rain forests can easily live many decades. But statistically speaking, both wild apes and prehistoric humans often suffered death at an early age due to interactions with dangerous wildlife, diseases with zero medical care, a very strenuous lifestyle based upon hunting and gathering, etc. etc.
I think you might be misunderstanding how life expectancy works.
This is the average age at death, not the age where people expected to die.
The low number is because that prior to relatively recent generations, getting successfully through childhood was very hard. Children and infants died at a rate that would most likely sicken most of us if we studied it closely.
The point is that if you didn’t die in childhood you had a reasonable chance of living to a half decent age. You probably had picked up your herd immunity from the common viruses and enough common sense to stop you from teasing sabre tooths for fun. You were still in what we would describe as a very dangerous environment and inside a culture that didn’t really have age care. Getting killed while hunting was real, and if you got too old and frail you might be ‘asked’ to take one for the tribe and just wander off into the snow one day.
(semi tangent – there is an argument that people who live in ‘cities’ are statistically stupider than people who live in semi traditional ‘jungle’ (for want of a better word) cultures. It is not education, for education and intelligence are different words, but modern society protects the stupid. Do something stupid in a city and they rush you to hospital and make you promise not to use TicTok every again. Do something stupid in the jungle and you die. Hence stupid city dwellers get to live to go back onto TicTok and lick doorknobs while ‘less advanced’ people look at their dead friend and realise that Mr Snake is not to be teased and grow up wiser. It is a theory. Feel free to discuss.)
Open to discussion but I would hazard that puberty was still early teen and children were a few years later. Don’t assume they were knuckle dragging grunt grunt people. Through long experience they would have a fair idea when a young woman was old enough to ‘safely’ birth and possible enforce a minimal age.
We have not been living in cities with effective medicine long enough for any major ‘negative cull’ based on “protecting the stupid”. It takes at least 4-500 years of very strong & consistent selective pressure to increase the incidence of one SNP in a small human population. (25 gens x 17 ~ Age of first reproduction) = 425 [# from lab experiments]. Even the bubonic plague in Europe barely moved the immunity meter out of local populations and that killed roughly 50% of the population. Likewise for lactose tolerance (a SNP) found some members of pastoral tribes who drank milk into adulthood.
Intelligence likely has a very complex genetic cause and effect, not a single loci polymorphism. Plus there are always plenty of stupid people who survive certain death without medical help.
I was just about to ask if there were any pictures of the prints.
Gary, are these some of the prints to which the article is referring?
Were they uncovered? They don’t seem to to be very eroded.
They were excavated from several layers down a meter or more. Hundreds of them in lower layers were casts of footprints.
Thanks.
So they were turned to stone before they were covered.
No. The theory of the researchers is that the footprints likely dried out intact, then silt blew in to cover them, and over time as they were buried deeper and deeper in sediments, compressed into relatively soft rock – siltstone or sandstone.
Some photos in the SI : https://www.science.org/doi/suppl/10.1126/science.abg7586/suppl_file/science.abg7586_SM.pdf
Though I don’t see the one used to head this article.
Looks like the game Twister was invented way before Hasbro.
I thought I scheduled this for today at 6:00 PDT… I wasn’t quite finished with it.
Ron,
The seasonal migration of megafauna would have provided ample opportunities for large kills, and the numerous lakes along the Rio Grande rift zone would have had large quantities of birds and smaller game to supplement hunter/gatherer diets. The paleo climate in the area seems to have been much wetter so there would have been herbs and forbs available for early humans and their prey as well. Competition for good hunting and fishing along the coast and rivers would have led some to try their hand in other, unihabitated areas. Apparently, ‘Ramblin’ Man’ would have been a most appropriate theme song for early humans!
David, slightly OT but a fascinating one, have you read about the tree-shaped mantle plume located under Southern Africa and the western Indian Ocean? I’ll bet a lot of WUWT readers would enjoy a well educated analysis of the findings!
I believe most of the “great” deserts of the world expand during peak glaciations.
However, the research suggests the Sonoran Desert was actually wetter during those periods. Perhaps the White Sands area had a similar wetter climate during that time period?
That fact that the prints are there also suggest a wetter environment😃.
Jet stream that wets the Pacific northwest now much further south then.
There seems to be a general trend to assume that humans only existed where human remains can be found in the present day. Archaeology tends to select areas of interest with the survivability of remains uppermost in mind.
Dry and arid regions like deserts preserve bones, whereas tree roots in forests tend to smash and scatter remains over a large area.
Everybody, I actually worked in the field in the White Sands area, working in the Jarilla Mountains SW of Almagordo, on a copper-gold prospect, on the south border of the White Sands Test Range. The lush Rio Grande River/Valley is about a hundred miles to the west. None of our ancestors would intentionally live anywhere in the White Sands area if the Rio Grande environment were available.
Unless, as someone else suggested, the white sands area was a regularly used migration route between, say, the coast and another region? Aside from the footprints, have they found much settlement activity?
That is today … not 23KYA when the climate, including rainfall and wind patterns and flora and fauna were extremely different than they are today. After all, that was during the peak of the last glaciation.
Areas of the US southwest were populated as late as the 13th century. There was a major drought in the late 1st century that drove the people away but when that abated they returned and stayed until the climate changed and dried up to conditions like they’ve apparently been ever since.
Archaeology is based entirely on the study of physical artifacts. Archaeologists do not make assumptions of anything unless they have artifacts. Until you find artifacts in a particular place of a particular age, we simply do not know where and when.
For example, there are few if any artifacts more than 5,000 years old in Florida. We do know that the artifacts we have found of that age and younger in Florida tend to be concentrated in the coastal margins, where the humans tended to live on fish and shellfish, including oysters from which they built huge shell mounds.
We also know that during the last glaciation that sea levels were several hundred feet lower than now. Consequently the theory, not an assumption, is that humans in Florida before 5KYA most likely also lived along the coastal margins, but that rising seas covered them, not only with water but also with thick deposits of sediment. Therefore we may never find those earlier artifacts … at least not before the next glaciation uncovers thise artifacts long in the future.
Until that happens we simply don’t know how long humans have lived in Florida.
“Archaeologists do not make assumptions of anything unless they have artifacts.”
Archaeolo(l)gists, the one that get in the news, regularly extrapolate into ancient culture and religion based on their own personal biases.
The prints are from the mud on the margins of a shallow lake, and date from about 22-21 ka BP. The radiocarbon ages are derived from the remains of Ruppia (a common aquatic plant in alkaline lakes) in the mud layers, and are supported by an age on a charcoal fragment, and OSL estimates.
The intriguing element in this finding, as far as migration corridors are concerned, is that both the coastal and interior corridors were open at that time. Parts of the northwest coast that were overridden by ice a few millennia later supported “montane forest” communities, and the Laurentide and Cordilleran ice sheets had not yet coalesced. So it throws the discussion amongst archaeologists that’s been on-going for the last 50 years (did the first migrants come down the coast, and spread inland, or through the ice-free corridor), and which seemed to have been settled in favour of “coast”, wide open again.
I saw a program a few days ago that was suggesting the earliest migrations of humans to North America took place by boat, where the explorers traveled along the coast, and the program noted several locations up and down the western coast of North and South America where they have found human remains dating around the period of these footprints.
The “coastal corridor” archeologists (and Quaternary geologists) have focused on identifying and dating glacial refugia that might have provided safe havens for people migrating down the coast, paddling along what came to be known as the “kelp highway”. The central question that they were trying to answer (before 2015) was “how can we get people all the way to southern Chile by 14.5 ka BP?”.
Deglaciation on Kodiak Island began at about 17.5 ka BP, on the coast of SE Alaska at about 17 ka BP, and about 18.5-18 ka BP on the outermost coast of British Columbia. So there was potentially plenty of time for people to migrate all the way to southern South America and camp at the Monte Verde site in southern Chile by 14.5 ka BP. But in 2015 Tom Dillehay published the results of further excavations at the Monte Verde site, and identified an earlier component dating to 18.5 ka BP. That suggests that people must have migrated prior to the LGM, not during, or immediately afterwards. The human footprints at White Sands appear to predate Monte Verde by several millenia, so the over-riding question for archaeologists on the northwest coast has now become: “is there any evidence of human presence prior to the last major ice advance?”.
The geological evidence from the Olympic Peninsula and southern British Columbia indicates that there were a series of ice advances and recessions in the period from about 27 ka BP to 21 ka BP. Each of the recessions may have been substantial enough (one of them allowed forests to recolonize coastal areas) to permit human groups to paddle (or walk?) along the coast.
The other possibility opened up by the White Sands footprints, however, is that megafauna hunters migrated down the “ice-free corridor” through modern Alberta prior to LGM, because the Laurentide and Cordilleran ice sheets didn’t coalesce until about 22 ka BP.
You cannot look at today’s climate and regional flora and fauna and assume that it was just the same thousands of years ago as today. For example, what is now the Sahara Desert was a hospitable savannah as recently as 5000 BCE. Glaciation and inter glaciation of course had a huge impact on the entire earth’s climate, not just temps but wind and precipitation patterns too.
I don’t know that anyone now knows what it was like in what is now White Sands back 23KYA, but it was likely to be very different than it is today.
I know I’ve seen maps that show the area of what is now New Mexico as being temperate scrub and woodland suggesting that area was much wetter during the later Pleistocene.
Humans were in Siberia before 40 Ka. During the same interstadial in which Moderns invaded Europe, we might have spread into Beringia, then coastwise to south of the ice sheets.
The father in law of a friend of mine was a North American archaeologist at WA State who argued for 45 Ka before Before Clovis was cool.
There’s also the Solutrean School, arguing for trans-Atlantic settlement from Europe during the LGM, when the North Atlantic behaved like today’s Arctic Ocean, ringed by permanent ice and freezing over in winter.
I still wonder why Polynesians(and their ancestors) are often ignored in terms of pre colombus .
They were able to find the most faraway and isolated tiny islands but somehow (officialy)failed to find 2 huge continents in front of their noses that even Biden couldn’t miss .
They should have populated some parts of the west coast 1000-2000 years ago as natural result of their navigation skills.
Think of it as the other way around.
See, “Kon Tiki and Thor Heyerdahl“
Nor should one forget that the Polynesians found and colonized Hawaii and it’s surrounding islands.
A feat that implies Polynesians also visited North and South America.
That is conjecture for which there is no archaeological evidence. At least, not yet.
It is equally logical that Polynesians stopped at Hawaii and Rapa Nui to the south.
The prevailing winds and currents are a major hindrance for anyone trying to sail east or northeast from Hawaii. Even if a Polynesian crew first sailed north, through the dead air of the Hawaiian High, and then hitched a ride on the North Pacific Drift, it would likely take close to a month to reach North American shores. So, rather than dying of thirst on a boat somewhere in mid-Pacific, here’s a better idea … just go surfing.
I don’t think they are ignored. There’s quite a bit of discussion about Easter Islanders striking the coast of Chile, and thence distributing the sweet potato across Polynesia.
Discussion is not evidence. It is just a theory. Evidence in the form of artifacts is necessary.
It is theoretically possible that Polynesians made it to the Americas, but there is as yet no archaeological artifacts to prove that. Perhaps some day such will be discovered.
There is a South American ceramic bowl that was uncovered in China, which had been buried in China for 1500 years at least. It is in a museum in Dalian, Liaoning. It was about 2000 years old So trade existed between the Chinese mainland and the western side of South America for a long time before Europeans discovered the continent existed. There is a vague similarity between the appearance of South American written characters and Ancient Chinese characters. I am sure more evidence will emerge. Finding Chinese porcelain in South American would be “interesting”.
I misread that as “Soultrain School”
As I lived near the Nottaway River in Virginia where Solutrean or Clovis points have been found, I got very interested in this idea. There are several sites in the east, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina, discovered so far. The objections to this migration route seem to come mostly from the oldsters who have built their careers on the Asian migration theories and are quite adamant.
And if these Solutrean people from the east did arrive on the east coast of North America, there was no reason why they could not have just continued on west, walking, and left evidence of their existence in Clovis, NM. The finds on the east coast date to before 13,000 ya.
There is a fire site in the East that is >20,000 years old.
Aye!
Several digs that proved human occupation well before 8,000 years were refused by the then current archaeological experts who refused to even visit the dig sites.
They also refused to visit most of the old West Coast human occupation dig sites.
Much as current climate scientists block or impede inconvenient research, so did those oldsters block or impede both the research or students from studying older occupation sites.
Far in the future, when the seas again recede, we’ll gain access to the submerged human occupation sites.
Wouldn’t it be fun to be around for that? Too bad my time machine is on the fritz….
A Portuguese/Northern Spanish settlement was established in Nova Scotia in about the year 1300. Their descendants moved West leaving (among other things) stove carvings in New Hampshire in the 1300’s. From what i read, it seems possible they move as far west as the lower Niagara. When European explorers met them in the early 1500’s, they had crossbows, a weapon that is unlikely NOT to have come from prior settlement.
The Free Masons knew very well that North America was there in the early 1400’s. Their “temple” in Scotland has carvings on the frieze work showing cobs of maize, and it was completed decades before Columbus sailed.
There’s absolutely no reason why both theories can’t be correct. The Polynesian people were ocean dwellers whose culture, beliefs and entire way of life centred around the ocean – for them; crossing thousands of miles of ocean using stars, currents and knowledge of the ocean was perfectly feasible, not to mention accurate. For most of the group’s populating Europe and through into North America, the ocean was largely unknown; their culture and way of life seems to be centred around the land not the ocean primarily. Given the differences in patterns, I think there are 2 different cultural groups that arrived at roughly the same end point but using vastly different routes.
I don’t think we need to limit ourselves to only two theories. There have been numerous waves of human migration over the millennia and I doubt just one type was responsible for establishing human beach heads everywhere except Antarctica.
Not everyone in Waterworld wants to buy into seeking DryLand. Some say it’s a myth.
So… 2 cultures, and one is essentially — for all practical intent — Waterworld.
The early vehicle navigation system, Etak, took its name and methodology from how Polynesians found their way between islands. They navigated by the stars, imagining their boat as staying still while the sky moved. That’s why the Etak system (which used inputs from the speedometer, rotation sensors on the wheels, and a digital compass) had its indicator for the vehicle stationary in the center of the screen while map rotated around and scrolled past it. When GPS came along the receivers with graphical displays copied the Etak method. Etak was bought by News Corp in 1989 (The Fox Trax hockey puck tracking system for NHL was an Etak development), by Sony in 1996, then finally was bought by TeleAtlas in May 2000, which soon after killed off the Etak brand. TeleAtlas wanted Etak’s map data, didn’t care about GPS or other hardware.
Have a look at the Bluefish Caves in the Yukon, fairly reliably dated to 25kya
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/yukon-first-humans-north-america-1.3936886
I live along the Guadalupe River in Texas, near areas where Guadalupe Biface tools have been found. These tools are quite crude, much less detailed than Clovis Points. They were hand held, and seemed to be used for tasks like scraping hides. Just based on this, it seems like they would have been made quite a number of years before the Clovis Points.
Clovis did seem a bit doctrinaire. If, as it seems likely, Neanderthals had boats, the ability for Paleo-Indians to work their way down the Pacific coast seems much more likely.
After all, people were in Australia some 40 thousand years ago, which definitely involved some seamanship.
The consensus is that they walked down the land bridge that existed because of lower sea levels.
Highly unlikely any seamanship was involved. The straits attaching Australia to Papua New Guinea are pretty shallow and it is widely accepted they walked across when the sea levels were lower. Some evidence also that Aborigines were here 60K years ago. The best thing they had since then if they did use boats seem to have been a form of bark canoe. They were a remarkable people to learn to live in Australia which would not have been easy but seafarers they were not.
Its the straits between Asia and Sahul (the Australian/PNG glacial-age single continent) the humans had to cross to get into Australia – not the Torres Strait. These straits are very deep and something like 80km wide. This almost certainly requires ocean going vessels or some damn good luck to cross.
Ocean-going canoe and deer paintings from Bradshaw Art in Northern Australia.
whoops wrong pic
Some dated with a fossil bee hive. They sailed there allright, at least 25,000 years ago. Their head and wrist ornamentation match those found near Lake Chad.
And the ¨Olmec¨ statues at La Venta :
later, but also imply open ocean sailing.
As do some of the Nazca Lines art, including depicting a whale:
Then there are Chile’s Atacama rock art depicting people using boats to hunt large fish, likely whales.
The last estimate of first migrants to Australia was announced about five years ago from excavations in caves in the Kakadu National Park east of Darwin in Northern Australia, the stone tools and other evidence found dates back 60-70,000 years.
The migration routes appear to be two, one via what is now the islands of Indonesia and the other via Papua New Guinea, and including pygmies related to pygmies in PNG – see the book Cape York, The Savage Frontier for details.
Had modern Hom Sap even left Africa 70,000 years ago?
Yep, around then, AFAIK.
Yes. H. Sap. were throughout Europe and into Southern England about 150,000 yrs ago at least. The origins of H. Sap. have been pushed back further by recent discoveries which indicates about 300,000 yrs give or take.
Dennis,
Accepting that Australian Aborigines have been here for some 60,000 to 70,000 years, it raises the interesting question of how they survived the last glaciation around the continent say,some 25,000 years ago.
Unlike the Northern hemisphere where an ice sheet some kilometre deep stretched from the Pole south to an area beyond what is now Paris, London, Dublin, New York, San Francisco etc.there was no similar ice sheet stretching across the Great Southern Ocean to Australia from Antarctica.
Nevertheless conditions were such that Aborigines must have survived in limited congenial pockets around the Continent and their fire sticks must have been working overtime along with initiated bushfires.
Any further archeological information on this topic would be welcome.
You need to look up the Wallace Line.
Bingo! The Wallace Line, that is the name I could not remember for the deep trench that needs to be crossed to get from Asia to Australia.
Well sir ,
maybe they came by boat but some serious climatic changes(couldn’t resist) lowered their living standards significantly and forced them to move away from the coast and made life so hard that advanced knowledge was lost and culture was reduced to basics.
That’s happening right now.
But then how did they get to New Guinea, if not by sea?
Haven’t you seen that little gold plane replica that they show on the History channel all the time?
We constantly underestimate the resourcefulness of humanity. Same reason we worry about catastrophic climate change in an era where we’re no longer using stone tools.
I stopped doubting the intelligence of early humans a long time ago. The art they produced in European caves is the equal of anything created by people today. There are buried tombs in Portugal with rock paintings over 6000 years old and the colors are still brilliant, especially the red. True red is not an easy color to get from nature, I am in awe of what these ancestors were able to do.
https://youtu.be/MxLwQcBfOeg
I have to disagree with you, Pamela; early human art is not equal to today’s. The evidence is the lack of religious icons in containers of piss. Additionally, their murals didn’t honor thugs and criminals.
Snort! We are on the same page Dave. I hate to see Federal Arts money wasted on such drek.
I hate to see Federal Arts money …
Captain climate: “We constantly underestimate the resourcefulness of humanity. ”
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Today, most people equate education with intelligence and they are not the same thing.
Education (knowledge) is a great boost to someone with intelligence. But people with little intelligence can be educated, not that it does a lot of good; trained seals or something like that.
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Up until not too long ago, the stupid were eliminated from the gene pool early on. Of late, the stupid can be protected from their mistakes and so they live long and procreate.
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Our earliest forebears were very intelligent, or they didn’t live long. Darwinism plainly expressed.
I know someone who has a 190 IQ but can’t follow the instructions on a box of cake mix and is incapable of operating a motor vehicle.
There’s such a thing as being ‘smart’ but being smart doesn’t always equate to being highly intelligent or ‘educated’ in modern terms.
You are describing the difference between being schooled and being educated.
Exactly! Crossing down to Australia involved crossing a deep trench, boats were necessary. Early visitors to Australia were not able to wade across from Asia. Boats are not that difficult to visualize and a lot of early people figured out the technology early on.
Most of the current “great barrier reef” was grassy coastal plains less than 20K years ago.
Woops! There go the land claims. So who were these First, first nations? Were they from Asia, Europe, Africa or Atlantis?
Was their land legally acquired or was it simply taken from earlier inhabitants? How was the mechanism for establishing land ownership valid if the land was already occupied?
“Caucasoid” Kennewick Man died with an Archaic point in him.
Sorry, they did a DNA analysis of the remains and determined that he was a native American. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kennewick_Man
I’ve corresponded with some on the team who fought through the courts to have the proper research done on K. The DNA work was intended to “prove” that he was not different.
I have written a short essay on “K”, whom researchers determined had lived on the Coast all his life, and may have come from Alaska.
Fladgate writes that the Ainu on the Kurile Islands became “maritime” some 20,000 years ago.
And that K was similar to the Ainu of 10,000 years ago. That’s according to body, head shape and dentition. There are other dicoveries of K people in the West.
Culturally, the K people wove a fabric out of strips of skins in a manner seen with the ancient Ainu.
And not made by any other tribes in North Anerica.
Human footprints in beach sands on the Olympic Peninsula date to 13,000 years ago.
In 1813, Alexander Ross set up a trading post at the junction of the Columbia and Okanagan Rivers.
His journal recorded the local legend of their origen.
They came from “White Man’s Island”, whose people were led by a tall white woman. A young couple was banished and spent so much time at sea that their skin turned dark.
And they were the origin of all the natives.
In other fields of scientific endeavor, like climate for instance, people who publish inconvenient findings are severely punished. As Ed Fox points out, this research is a bit of a fly in the ointment for some folks. It will be interesting to see if there’s any push back.
In the late 60s my college friend worked with Richard Leakey at Calico in California where Leakey found evidence of man dating back to 70k years. I know that from then on Leakey became denounced as a kook by the paleontologist establishment.
Had modern Hom Sap even left Africa 70,000 years ago?
See the reply I made above. Basically H. Sap were throughout Europe and as far as Southern England (if not further) about 150,000 years ago. Remains in caves in England date to around 150,000 yrs, remains in Europe to about 170-210,000 yrs but these are from a few sites here and there – more finds may push the dates even further back. Recent remains in South Africa put the emergence of H. Sap. back to over 300,000 yrs so far, further than previously thought. What complicates matters is that there may have been different groups moving around at different times, either in distinct ‘waves’ of migration or as a gradual incremental push which we only have scattered fragmental remains of. It’s complicated!
Add to that the movements of early H. Sap. groups such as H. Sap. Neanderthalensis, Heidelbergensis, Denisovan and at least 3-4 others, including the pre-cursor of modern H. Sap. Sap. – Cro-Magnon man and things get even more complicated. I think that, as we get more information, we’ll find that the interbreeding between all of the H. Sap. groups was likely far more significant in the rise of modern H. Sap. Sap. than we currently realise.
The evidence of interbreeding can be seen on the faces of some modern men with quite prominent brow ridges.A couple of examples. Jared Padalecki. This guy https://www.pinterest.com/pin/551268810628202425/ And this guy https://www.pinterest.com/pin/467811480026107455/
You would be interested in the Mungo Man DNA fiasco.
Oh, for sure it was all tied up smartly with the correct ribbons and legal imprinteur … never underestimate the initiative of lawyers to be on the job.
With an estimated life span topping out at ~35 years and a variable, hunter-gatherer diet, I wonder how one can tell an adult from a teenager from only footprints — adults would have been quite small on average compared to modern people.
From experience, taking a mixed group of children and adults to White Sands today will result in a larger ratio of child to adult footprints. Should be no surprise.
25kya White Sands would have been at or in a freshwater lake within a really good hunting and fishing region. It has probably been periodically a wetland area every couple centuries. A nice day at a pretty beach.
Bluefish Caves 23.000 years ago. Another grim story for science https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/jacques-cinq-mars-bluefish-caves-scientific-progress-180962410/
Thanks for the link – I somehow missed that…. That was decadeds before the Woke Epoch, but after 1970.
Seconded: many thanks.
Just swap CliSciFi for archeology and you have the same story.
The Monte Verde site in Chile is at least as early as 18,500 BP, although charcoal there has been dated to 33,000 BP. Archaeologists have been squabbling about these dates for over 40 years. Of interest are gomphothere remains in the campsite.
The “ice-free corridor” between the Laurentide and Cordilleran ice sheets was probably not open before 13,000 BP, so that migration route was unlikely to have been used by pre-Clovis peoples. The so-called coastal route is now favored, but the coast was no picnic either. Another theory is that humans used oceanic currents to sail or drift across the Pacific from and to places south of the ice sheets, such as Japan to Panama for instance.
Once here, travel from North to South America and inland could have been very rapid. Many folks today traverse the Pacific Coast Trail from Canada to Mexico in 3 months or less. Kayak hopping down the coast is even faster.
Mike,
Long before the kayak was developed, hide covered boats shaped like a coracle would have been used for hunting, fishing and travel. All you have to do to come up with the concept is not adequately tie down your hide covered wickiup and have a wind gust blow it into a nearby body of water! Seal and walrus hides made very durable and flexible coverings for more recent Eskimo boats; perhaps mammoth and other megafauna hides were used as well.
The Pacific Coast Trail is the most difficult way to get from Canada to Mexico. Exceptional hikers can do it in 3 months, but that’s totally irrelevant for this discussion.
Hunter-gatherers roaming around on foot would be in very good physical shape. They didn’t have the luxury of sitting around doing nothing for long periods of time, with food just a few steps away in a fridge.
Speaking of another paradigm bites the dust here’s Peter Ridd completely vindicated for standing up to and calling out the Groupthink doomsters-
https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/other/great-barrier-reef-experiencing-record-high-levels-of-coral-coverage/ar-AAOPn8l
Do watch the video for the polite scorn poured on a bunch of shuckster taxeaters. I’m getting woke and into cancel culture so how dare they abuse James Cook’s name on that miserable excuse for a university. Change it now to Greta Thunberg Finishing School.
“a picture of what was taking place, teenagers interacting with younger children and adults”
For crying out loud. Did they or did they not eat their offspring?
deleted, answer was in abstract.
I’m thinking that if you want to find the evidence for the very earliest occupation of the Americas, you should quit looking on dry land and start excavating underwater out where where the coastline used to be when the oceans were at their lowest levels.
I don’t think that’s going to happen and the ancient coastal sites have most likely been destroyed by storms and currents.
There’s an underwater site off the coast of India (I think I read about it here on WUWT) that was engulfed by rising sea levels. The site has buildings and walls and IIRC, they have retrieved some artifacts.
Why shouldn’t there be something similar off the coasts of the Americas where the old coastline was?
I don’t hold out much hope for finding anything. Just like a beach area today can be wiped clean by a hurricane, so also those possible earliest settlements must have been obliterated by the storms of those times, and the sea has dispersed the rest.
So anything found on today’s dry land should be a starting point for estimating when people first settled along the earlier coastlines. The first arrivals most likely (IMO) had to start at the coast and work their way inland.
‘Earliest Arrival’ is a fascinating topic. It’s easy to speculate but devilishly hard to find evidence.
If it exists it will be in the Channel Islands of California
See : https://archaeologyonline.net/artifacts/cambay
Even here underwater archaeologists go ballistic when a paradigm breaks.
British Empire colonies being more advanced, with open ocean navigation long before Cook – preposterous!
Hey, thanks, bonbon!
That’s the article I was remembering. It was either the basis for an article here or was linked in comments as you have done.
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That’s what underlies my opinion above that anything ‘oldest’ we find on land in the interior is not the oldest or earliest.
Here is a video from Donald Trump’s latest rally. In it he read out the reusts of the Arizona Audit. Worried about Climate Change? I put my best thought with Donald J Trump!!!!
President Trump Rally in Perry Georgia 9/25/2021. – YouTube
President Trump Rally in Perry Georgia 9/25/2021. – YouTube
STATE SENATE HEARINGS OF FORENSIC AUDIT RESULTS OF ARIZONA 2020 ELECTION
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/state-senate-hearings-of-forensic-audit-results-of-arizona-2020
President Trump Rally in Perry Georgia 9/25/2021. – YouTube
The best antidote for globalwarming!!
A prehistoric walk in the park
Can’t beat a sweeping and unsubstantiated comment. How do they know they were playing?
The fossilized soccer balls were a tipoff? 😜
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Really though Andrew. I read about amazing finds and then the archeologists have to just make stuff up. Usually it seems that everything found is somehow “a religious object or symbol.”
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and sometimes the decorative object found was just something that looked pretty. It’s the same as we buy pretty stuff today, just because we like it.
You’re right about them attributing everything to religion. I saw one archeology program on TV claim that a curving entrance way to an excavated building was to “represent the rebirth of the deity” (or some such rubbish). Completely evidence free speculation.
No, no – you’ve got the terminology wrong. The correct word is ‘ritual’ – which in archaeological jargon means ‘nobody knows’. As in ritual artefacts, ritual plank of wood, ritual shapeless lump of rock, etc.
I just read an article about the Anasazi cliff dwellings in the US southwest, and going by that, about 75% of what they built was used in religious rituals. <eyeroll>
I’m surprised they had time to do anything else their says were so full of waving talismans around and sacrificing things to the gods.
Not me! As an atheist, I only by objects that have strong religious meanings.
Hedging your bets?
Or do you just appreciate the religious symbolism of a bottle of 20-year old single malt scotch? 😜
A bottle of 20-year old single malt scotch is a religious icon in itself. It should be worshiped until its empty, then replaced promptly.
Swear there ain’t no heaven. Pray there ain’t no hell. 😉
Actually there is evidence of humans in the Americas from 130,000 years ago…. Archeology suffers from the same form of group think idiocy as does “climate science”
Graham Hancock illustrates this with copious references and evidence in his latest book: America Before. Here is a most intriguing interview he did on the subject:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAXIWnzGLnw
(I’d skip the London Real sales pitch from 2:00 until 5:30)
Not only is the subject matter riveting, but the parallels between the dogma of archeology and the dogma of climate catastrophism are telling. Seems this arena called “science” is rife with the kind of garbage we all witness with the climate scam…. Evidence is ignored, people trying to present evidence and findings contrary to the accepted narrative are ostracized and tarred and feathered, etc.
This video is steeped in half truths the guy uses to sound not as crazy as Velikovsky\
The same thing can be said of Willy Soon, or any number of Climate skeptics – if you don’t bother to check out their footnotes and references to actual peer reviewed papers….
Hancock does his homework and cites sources for all of his evidence.
I am a fan of the Solutrean Pre-Clovis hypothesis, and a minor contributor to the Topper dig in Aiken, SC.
A denier’s blanket statement that the Solutreans were NOT blue-eyed led me off to learn about eye coloring physiology and genetics. The genetics of uncolored (blue) eyes and uncolored skin, and colored dark eyes and colored skin are linked.
That reinforced my prejudice that the Solutrean ‘frenchmen’ were more likely the first Americans AND blue-eyed.
The American aborigines controversy is RASSISSM rewritten.
They even didn’t need boats, just follow the ice border across the Atlantic.
Yes, my guest for the weekend, and who introduced me to the Topper site and sponsors, and I were just discussing just that.
I averred that they may have ‘walked’ around the ice with a lifestyle much like modern ‘Eskimos’, living off of the rich blubber fauna ecology. No boats needed, but skin coracles would have been well within their skills.
This has long been my theory as well. Coracles would have been helpful but probably not necessary. But, is there any DNA evidence of this Solutrean migration? I have a bit of Neanderthal DNA in my mix as do most people of European ancestry. In what groups should we be looking for Solutrean DNA and how would we recognize it?
I think modern DNA testing can determine the color of the subject’s eyes now.
Is any of that Solutrean DNA available for testing?
Is that map to scale? Or does it perhaps use an unusual projection? I ask because Iceland looks far too close to Greenland.
Boats along the shoreline from Asia?
Yes, I saw a tv program speculating that people from Japan and nearby areas sailed along the edge of the northern ice and all the way down to South America.
It makes sense. A rudimentary boat and knowledge of how to live in that environement at the edge of the ice, and a sense of adventure would be all one would need. Eventually, you would get to greener pastures just following the coastline.
Those footprints look a little contrived to me. Having walked in the mud a time or two, I just don’t remember the toe marks being all that clear. Those are also very long toes, and don’t seem to match the front of the foot in the middle impression.
You mean Bigtoe made them? Not humans? Or maybe Aliens made them to fool us?
Gosh! 22,000 year old human ‘carbon footprints’. };>)
Good article, David!
Thanks to Mark Twain, we can verbalize what we observe here in the comments and their quotes: There is much speculation to be had from such a small investment in science.
Language analysis states that new world was populated in 3 waves. Clovis only theory was stating one wave only. Looks like linguists were right…
“We can think of our ancestors as quite functional, hunting and surviving, but what we see here is also activity of play, and of different ages coming together. A true insight into these early people.”
Fricking archeologists will find a single bone and embroider an entire empire myth around it.
The dates are +/- a few thousand years, but they are certain they were made on the same day at the same time and those made them were “playing”.
Sorry, but HS on that one.
There’s evidence of human activity in Mexico 50,000 years ago.
Globally sunken cities- lost civilisations.
I read some time ago that the lower sea level in the last glacial age opened up a forested plain along the continental margin of Alaskan and Canadian west coast. The authors proposed that it was, therefore, not necessary for the interior path to be deglaciated before humans and animals could migrate. While the footprints found seem to support this notion, it is puzzling that not much other evidence of human occupation has been found. This might be explained by the vast majority being coastal cultures that lived on land now flooded.
Footprints of the first snowbirds!
I guess “The Science” is never settled, no matter the field.
“The Science” is only ever “the best we know at the moment”.
If it’s not open, truly open, to suggestions or alternative explanations of observable facts, it ain’t “Science” anymore. It’s an ideology.
Karl Popper’s point.
The science is only settled for those who want to stop the conversation.
Back in 1969, while in high school, I spent the occasional weekend shoveling chalcedony onto metal grates in search of artifacts at a dig near Barstow, California that had been championed by Louis Leakey, who believed he’d found evidence of pre-Clovis human habitation on the shore of an ancient lake there. His claim was met with great skepticism and the site was eventually abandoned, but perhaps this new discovery lends credence to Leakey’s ideas about early human presence in the Americas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calico_Early_Man_Site