Can it get any more contentious?

[circumspice]

Oh brother! Anthropological pissing contests are sooo boring!

Okay... we may never know with any degree of certainty, but there IS the possibility that a group of hominins wandered into the North American continent in a far more distant past than is currently accepted. That doesn't mean that they survived and/or thrived long enough to have 'colonized' this continent. It just means that they made it here at some time in their travels. Why would that possibility be contentious? There were probably literally hundreds of failed journeys worldwide, before a successful colonization event ever occurred anywhere. There are lots of reasons why a colonization event can fail. Maybe their group was too small to provide a viable community. Maybe they encountered hardships that caused an unsustainable attrition rate. Diseases maybe? A natural disaster? A hard winter that the group didn't survive? Who knows?

The only way to unequivocally PROVE a date that early is to find the fossilized remains of some hominins, preferably associated with tools & extinct fauna remains. We should by now understand how very rare it is to find fossilized hominin remains. Think about it... The entirety of fossilized hominin remains can be contained in the bed of a short wheelbase pickup truck, with some species not even filling a shoebox. The Denisovan remains would probably only fill a box the size of a jeweler's ring box. We would have identified those Denisovan remains as Neanderthal remains if the DNA results hadn't proved that they were a previously unknown sister species...

In my opinion, it's just as wrongheaded to declare that it could never have happened as it is to declare that it did happen but showing no reliable evidence that it did...

And... WTF... "First settlers"? Nothing more than click bait.


https://www.sciencenews.org/article/sto ... t-settlers

[Minimalist]

To generalize, Circ, I find that the Early Entry ( to coin a phrase) group is the one that is out there looking for evidence while the Clovis-First crowd is mainly concerned with denying any evidence that is presented.

The first Clovis Points were found in the 1920's when even C14 dating did not exist. Science does not stand still and now we are using DNA genomes, mass spectrometry, and electron microscopes among other toys. Waving a rock around and saying this is "proof" without advanced scientific examination seems like a rather primitive way of doing things now. Although, there have been times when even that has worked against the Clovis-Firsters.

https://www.history.com/news/oldest-wea ... ints-texas

[circumspice]

Wouldn't it be cool to find remains with lithics? Even better, maybe lithics embedded in some remains like Kennewick Man or Oetzi? That would certainly be truly unequivocal.

I tire of all the verbal diarrhea concerning the subject. I say: If you don't know why speculate? It's more productive to look for evidence than to sit around talking about it.

However, your linked article concerns a far younger site than the mammoth site.

[Simon21]

And on the subject of evidence - Rio Tinto "apologises" for deliberately blowing up two ancient rock shelters associated with Koories 40 to 45,000 years ago, and says it will restore them.

So that's all right then.

[Minimalist]

However, your linked article concerns a far younger site than the mammoth site.

But older than Clovis, which was the issue.


As I recall didn't Kennewick man have evidence of spear point in his hip? And there have been kill sites where broken spear points were found in the remains of the animal. At some point it must have been easier for these early hunters to fashion a new point rather than dig around for an old one that was buried in a carcass.

[circumspice]

Yes he did. From what I recall, it was an old, healed over wound. And Oetzi's wound was apparently a fatal wound, one that eventually did him in.

[circumspice]

Welcome Alex!

[circumspice]

Old world paleoanthropology references, but still the same ole head butting & name calling.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/22/book ... eakey.html

[Resident42LE561]

That isn't really going to get it.

You see any homonin is just like anyother hominin that is to say, we all share the same traits and habits. Assuming you realize that the only foundation the theory has is in the fact that they have been performing studys on african pithecanthropus for hundreds of years, simply to build the time line....BECAUSE.... Africa was the only place that the fossils existed...AND....The conjectures of geography said that the land masses were shifting fast enough to support the thoery. NOW... the study that they ultimately came up with said that mans conquestss repeat themselves, that is to say the Africans came to America numerous times and in many different geographical eras.

The last posted theory to end all theorys was the CLOVIS theory introduced by some AACA members that were having problems explainig why there were these older artifacts at their digs... Clovis was smarter, had finer crafted artifacts and was ultimately the worst guy anyone would want to meet in a dark alley...

I say.... Evolution is not well respected in religious circles, so we all evolved parallel to each other on the continents we each came from, and today we are all products of a mogor race that survived the last glacial caused by an event that was recorded in stone about 18,000 years ago.