Archaeologica.org

I don't think it's perfect and I question the timeline sometimes too, but it's probably the best we have at the moment given the evidence collected to date. Do you have an alternative theory? I'd be interested to hear about it.

Min - here's a good site for some of this stuff (Donna if you are reading this thread you may be interested too).

http://www.handprint.com/LS/ANC/evol.html

[quote="oldarchystudent"]I don’t believe there is a single event causing a single migration, nor is there any decision to “head north”. Even the use of the word migration is misleading in my opinion.

HG groups use specialized camps for different purposes – kill sites, seasonal gathering sites etc, and may stay there for months at a time before moving on to the next. If you find a better site for berries than your old site, you incorporate that into the cycle. That changes your route, and perhaps you run into a nice spot for hunting, which changes your annual route etc etc. It’s not a beeline to the north, it’s more of a gradual expansion over many generations.[/quote]

Wouldn't that kind of go with the old saying about the grass being greener? I think that even way back then young people had the urge to explore something just because it was there. If you had, say, annual gatherings for hunting or some such. Young people could have gotten together and formed new bands and went exploring to see what was on the other side of the hill or river, or maybe find a way to that little island they could see just off shore. Couple this urge to even a small population explosion which would mean that resourses were not as abundant and we are on the move.

"Theory?" No. That implies some sort of evidence and I just have what seems to be a disconnect of logic.

One needs to start with the idea that these were modern humans, just like us, physically and psychologically. While it is true that individuals can do things which are insane on the surface, entire societies rarely do. As the generals know, a council of war rarely recommends an attack.

Physically similar yes. Can we assume psychologically similar? Can we assume that our idea of common sense was shared by our remote ancestors? We can't even agree on that in the present century. I don't think we can go beyond the basic survival motivators (food, water, shelter etc) in trying to unravel a population for which we have such scanty artifactual evidence, all of it utilitarian in nature. If we had some art, some totems it might be a clue but nothing of that nature remains from the migration period as far as I know.

Jim

Technically, we can't assume that they were psychologically similar or different based on evidence...which leaves us back at square one and working from the hypothesis that they were mainly driven by those basic survival needs. Food, water, shelter, sex, rock 'n roll.

That was a nice site, I saved it to favorites. I did pick up one bad vibe from it. He mentions that HSS developed in Africa around 120,000 BC and spread to Siberia by 14,000....a rate of one mile every 8 years. However, that also implies that the first humans hit the ground and said "Let's Get Out of Here," which does not seem realistic.

As I said, some timeline interpretations don't always sit that well with me either. Not sure if a bad 14C date has clouded the issue somewhere along the way or what has happened. Maybe they really did expand that quickly (maybe easier in a landscape where you are caught between the sea on one hand and mountains on the other), We need more archaeology!

That would help.

Some timeline interpretations don't always sit well with me either, oas, and you're right that C14 dating is a big problem, too many unknowable assumptions in its methodology.

AMS 14C dating is far more accurate than earlier methods and is very reliable. I wonder if all the old samples have been redated using AMS?

When they throw out a sample, which they thought was a good sample until the date result comes back, how do they decide why the sample is "actually a bad sample?"

Genesis Veracity wrote:When they throw out a sample, which they thought was a good sample until the date result comes back, how do they decide why the sample is "actually a bad sample?"

If a sample is obviously contaminated (somebody threw a piece of cardboard in the bag with the artifact, for example) - then it's a bad sample. If a single date from a sealed deposit is wildly out of sync with other dates returned from the same stratigraphic layer, it's probably a bad reading.

Before you or anyone asks, No - it is not determined by decideing if the date fits your paradigm of what the site is expected to be telling you.

Oh sure.

Genesis Veracity wrote:Oh sure.

On what basis do you dismiss this? Ever work in a lab? Ever been on a dig?

No, but if a level is thought to be from, say, 3500 B.C., but what looked like a good sample comes back with a date of 2200 B.C., you bet your boots they'll find a way to explain why "it's really a bad sample."