pre clovis america

[john]

time for some fresh air.

been pondering the americanski question. by all conventional arugments, was last continent populated by homo possibly sapiens, and they walked from siberia to tierra del fuego. only two problems, the land bridge among the glaciers most likely didn't exist, and the was no supporting culture of backpackers in siberia. so, dang, how come monte verde. did they fly? also, heaviest concentration of clovis points located in se north america.

so i'll throw out an argument to all comers. the americas were populated by a seabridge, not a landbridge. and it goes back way further than presently accepted theory.

there are too many actual, physical remains showing up on the west coast which relate to australo or ainu genotypes.

what puzzles me is who built the clovis points.

the solutrean connection has been suggested by some pretty wise heads. certainly, the existence of an extremely sophisticated and unique flint knapping technology in two very separate places must be considered.

and as all of this occurred well before god hisself built everything in six days, then rested on the seventh, no biblical references need apply.

john

[Minimalist]

At certain periods during the Pleistocene Epoch, the temperatures turned cold enough to freeze much of the Earth’s water into ice. The sea level dropped as much as 90 m (300 ft) and the shallow Bering Strait between Alaska and Siberia became a natural land bridge on which grazing animals, and the humans who stalked them, passed. Most archaeologists and anthropologists believe that Native Americans descend from Asian peoples who moved into North America by way of this land bridge.

So it seems that there probably was a land bridge but the failure to detect any remains of travellers in Siberia heading towards it remains a telling argument against large scale use of it. Also, it would mean that people were deliberately walking towards the glaciers which is possible but I do not think our ancestors were inherently stupid enough to do it on a scale large enough to populate 2 continents.

It would seem that there were numerous points of entry to the Americas stretching out over an immense span of time. Included in these points of entry are Europeans, Africans and Polynesians in addition to Asians.

[Beagle]

There was only a brief preiod of time when there was a corridor through the glaciers.

The Monte Alban culture is thought to be Polynesian/Australian by some people - disputed though.

[Beagle]

Jeez! Change above post to read Monte Verde.

[Barracuda]

Or all of the above...

There are several competing theories these days with the Bering land bridge theory. I think most of them are true. I think the Americas were populated by different peoples, from different regions, including from Siberia.

I think the Bering land bridge theory gets so much play it is supported by the most physical evidence. This is only because such a migration route could support a large number of people, where overseas travel would be small groups that did not leave much evidence behind, and were probably assimilated later down the line before Europeans came here in strength.

And the odds were better that people would survive the land journey than the ocean journey.

Perhaps some peoples just migrated along the existing coastlines of the northern Pacific and northern Atlantic, but I can not see anyone doing an open water crossing of the Pacific, if they had any choice, but perhaps they did not have a choice. The losing party in island warfare would have no where to go but the open ocean.

Or like Easter Island, perhaps they deleted the local resources, and had no choice but to starve or take their chances on the open ocean.

[stan]

Somebody posted this notiion a while bacK:
It takes x number of people to start a genetically viable population in
a new area...

It seems that the population of the americas must have taken place over a long time by small undetermined groups (who were nonethless very determined people!) Has anyone seen/done statistical studies to explain how long it might have taken to reach a tipping point or explosion in population large enough to lead to the early civilizations of meso and south america?

[Guest]

It takes x number of people to start a genetically viable population in
a new area

couldn't that number already be in existence and they migrated together or in spurts to support populating a new area?

[Minimalist]

Bingo!

But that's the same problem I have with the whole Out of Africa story.

If we are talking about hunter/gatherer groups we know they tend to be small.

It's just hard to imagine a likely scenario for established groups to suddenly pick up and move....especially when they had no idea who or what was waiting for them beyond the next hill.

[stan]

couldn't that number already be in existence

yes, but when and where was "already?"

And let's say there were a series of small groups that blended, or whatever, there must have been a population explosion at some kind
that figured into the establishment of early populous civilizations.

[john]

Bingo!

But that's the same problem I have with the whole Out of Africa story.

If we are talking about hunter/gatherer groups we know they tend to be small.

It's just hard to imagine a likely scenario for established groups to suddenly pick up and move....especially when they had no idea who or what was waiting for them beyond the next hill.

paradigm shift here. it keys on the shift from hunter gatherers to the neolithic peoples. primary things being from hunting crops and animals to growing (domestic crops and animals). this has been linked, logically, to the acceleration of human population density. stable food source = increased population growth. i'm not going to get into the later industrial/wealth curve, here, which stripmines and outstrips the capacity of the planet to provide for either human or animal populations.

so back to pre-clovis. there were, i think two waves. one wave of hunter-gatherers lasted from -35k to perhaps 7-9k bc. they were the sea bridge, from both the atlantic and pacific. remember that the standing ocean ice and pack ice extended far further south, the seaways were much smaller in dimension. and perhaps there were nomadic people skilled in moving along the edges of those seaways in small boats, or on land, depending on the terrain, taking advantage of the high density populations of wildlife that tend to congregate on the edges of the ocean and/or ice. also remember that the sealevel was much lower, so the kind of seasonal, shoreline encampments typical of this way of life are now buried under the ocean. it is, i think, characteristic of hunting-gathering groups, that they moved with the availability of of the resource rather than returned to some fixed sense of home ground. a final point is that the viccisitudes of their way of life necessarily limited their population to the size of group which could maintain in a given range of hunting/gathering ground. Environmental population control, in short.

ok. second wave. these people were, truly, asiatic, and followed the siberian land bridge sometime after the major glacial retreat about 12k years ago. they were also at least partially neolithic, i.e. skilled in domestic crops and animals which meant that as they established themselves in n and s america, their populations grew exponentially quickly. because they were not subject to the environmental population control of hunter- gatherers. they also displaced/absorbed the previous population of hunter-gatherers. we know them as the n and s american "indian" cultures. obviously there is a major shift zone from say 7k bp to 3k bp about which we know effectively nothing. anyway, perhaps as early as 3k bp the neolithic culture, and population, simply exploded in the americas.

this lasted until the european/russian invasion. which resulted in the decimation of 60 to 90 percent of the indigenous populations. which is another story.

i'll reiterate that i'm not throwing any kind of established dogma out here, but food for discussion.


john

[john]

Bingo!

But that's the same problem I have with the whole Out of Africa story.

If we are talking about hunter/gatherer groups we know they tend to be small.

It's just hard to imagine a likely scenario for established groups to suddenly pick up and move....especially when they had no idea who or what was waiting for them beyond the next hill.

paradigm shift here. it keys on the shift from hunter gatherers to the neolithic peoples. primary things being from hunting crops and animals to growing (domestic crops and animals). this has been linked, logically, to the acceleration of human population density. stable food source = increased population growth. i'm not going to get into the later industrial/wealth curve, here, which stripmines and outstrips the capacity of the planet to provide for either human or animal populations.

so back to pre-clovis. there were, i think two waves. one wave of hunter-gatherers lasted from -35k to perhaps 7-9k bc. they were the sea bridge, from both the atlantic and pacific. remember that the standing ocean ice and pack ice extended far further south, the seaways were much smaller in dimension. and perhaps there were nomadic people skilled in moving along the edges of those seaways in small boats, or on land, depending on the terrain, taking advantage of the high density populations of wildlife that tend to congregate on the edges of the ocean and/or ice. also remember that the sealevel was much lower, so the kind of seasonal, shoreline encampments typical of this way of life are now buried under the ocean. it is, i think, characteristic of hunting-gathering groups, that they moved with the availability of of the resource rather than returned to some fixed sense of home ground. a final point is that the viccisitudes of their way of life necessarily limited their population to the size of group which could maintain in a given range of hunting/gathering ground. Environmental population control, in short.

ok. second wave. these people were, truly, asiatic, and followed the siberian land bridge sometime after the major glacial retreat about 12k years ago. they were also at least partially neolithic, i.e. skilled in domestic crops and animals which meant that as they established themselves in n and s america, their populations grew exponentially quickly. because they were not subject to the environmental population control of hunter- gatherers. they also displaced/absorbed the previous population of hunter-gatherers. we know them as the n and s american "indian" cultures. obviously there is a major shift zone from say 7k bp to 3k bp about which we know effectively nothing. anyway, perhaps as early as 3k bp the neolithic culture, and population, simply exploded in the americas.

this lasted until the european/russian invasion. which resulted in the decimation of 60 to 90 percent of the indigenous populations. which is another story.

i'll reiterate that i'm not throwing any kind of established dogma out here, but food for discussion.


john

ps

on the atlantic side, the solutrean point flaking technique is so incredibly specialized that its hard for me to believe - statistically - that it just happened to appear in se north america just a few thousand years after the solutrean cultured disappeared from the european horizon. so perhaps it took the solutrean forbears a few k years to travel the atlantic arc to n america?


j

[Minimalist]

Possibly the wrong place for this, however, when even a Congressman seems to get the message that you have to know that progress is being made.

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/280 ... ick10.html

YAKIMA -- A federal law governing protection of American Indian graves would be amended to allow scientific study of ancient remains discovered on federal lands if the remains have not been tied to a current tribe, under a bill proposed by Rep. Doc Hastings, R-Wash.

The bill marks the latest step in a dispute sparked by the 1996 discovery of Kennewick Man, one of the oldest and most complete skeletons ever found in North America.

If nothing else, this legislation would give science the right to study ancient remains without the presupposition that they were someone's grandfather. Too many people are far too ready to "bury" anomalies in this debate.

[Barracuda]

this lasted until the european/russian invasion. which resulted in the decimation of 60 to 90 percent of the indigenous populations. which is another story.

This would have reduced genetic diversity, maybe wiping out any traces of earlier groups

[Beagle]

The fossil evidence is pretty clear, that small groups of hunter/gathers followed their food source onto Beringia, which was full of vegetation for grazing animals. That progress was generally stopped by large glaciers on the American side.

But twice, a large ice-free corridor appeared and animals and man followed the vegetation southward.

Although that much is clear, it does not help us with the pretty obvious migrations by sea. Even though man would haved come ashore and lived in temporary dwellings, those sites are now under water. Only in a very few instances when they ventured inland might we find fossil evidence.

Kennewick man may be one. The Topper site may be another.

[Barracuda]

Let us ask this question. Who was around more than 14,000 years ago who would might have had the capabilities of crossing open oceans in mid latitudes, or covering many miles of coastlines in colder latitudes?

We know the original Australians came to that continent by sea about 60,000 years ago.

When did the Polynesian people migrate to the Pacific Islands by sea from Asia? As I recall, it is not really a pre-clovis time period, but I might be wrong.