Alaska Clovis

[kbs2244]

From the news page a few days ago.

Have we talked about this before?
Basically, they have found the oldest human sites in Alaska.
They have Clovis style points in them.

But they are younger than the Clovis sites further south in N A.

This would indicate that the Clovis technology moved from south to north.
And that would upset the whole east to west to south migration concept.

http://bionews-tx.com/news/2013/11/01/t ... h-america/

[Minimalist]

The Solutrean Hypothesis begins to look better and better.

[uniface]

It's been noted already that the people who currently inhabit Eastern Beringia are more than likely the descendants of the Americans who followed the camels over into Siberia :

http://archaeologica.boardbot.com/viewt ... f=9&t=3392

Which, among other rammifications, makes the multitude of DNA studies supposedly "proving" that people came to the Americas from there because the genetics match pretty transparent examples of fallacious reasoning.

Those people show up in Beringia after a long hiatus in the archaeological record . . .

The Siberian side was, as a generalisation, cold & dry -- supporting very little in the way of even larger animal life, while the American side was warmer and damper.

Clovis in Alaska is, by now, pretty clearly seen to have been a late backwash from the lower 48, and not the first people to have lived there by any means.

[Ernie L]

exciting times....

[kbs2244]

"The Siberian side was, as a generalisation, cold & dry -- supporting very little in the way of even larger animal life, while the American side was warmer and damper. "

I like that logic.
Except I would not say "was."
"Still is" would be more accurate.
This is true through out the Northern Hemisphere.

The east side of large bodies of water are warmer and wetter.

I live on the west side of Lake Michigan.
WI is colder and dryer than MI.
BC is warmer and wetter than Korea.
Britain has palm trees growing on the southern shore.
Try that in Quebec!

[Minimalist]

http://web.utk.edu/~dander19/clovis_continent_647kb.jpg

Ironic that the point bears the name of a site in New Mexico, isn't it?


I tried to post this as an image but it kept coming out in its Zoomed In status and thus way too big.

[shawomet]

I was just reading about this. Here's the full article...

http://www.centerfirstamericans.com/cfs ... 7-2640.pdf

[uniface]

Past tense because everything changes. Things got better for a while, and mammoths, people &c. lived there.

[Cognito]

This would indicate that the Clovis technology moved from south to north.
And that would upset the whole east to west to south migration concept.

Camels ... and horses. Two species that originated in the Americas and traveled west to populate Eurasia. Apparently, they were not paying attention to the ONE WAY sign posted in Beringia at the time. And then, there is the North America to Europe mammoth migration:

http://eurogenes.blogspot.com/2013/09/t ... -from.html.

As the article reads: "... what I'm wondering is whether any Paleo-Siberian and indeed Paleo-Amerindian hunters followed these giant mammals into Northern Europe?" Dr. Michael Hammer of the University of Arizona believes migration from east to west genetically makes sense:

http://olafscorner.nathab.com/2012/02/f ... onnection/.

From the article: "Hammer and Karafet state that while future studies are needed to better understand the relationships of Native American and Siberian populations (especially Inuit populations living on both sides of the Bering Strait), the genetic marker found in Siberian peoples is better explained by back-migration of males from North America to Siberia, with subsequent gene flow across Asia."

[shawomet]

Seems bizarre that the original source paper would not include photos or illustrations of the actual fluted points in question! So here they are...

http://www.archaeology.org/news/1498-13 ... nts-clovis

[kbs2244]

Wow!
All this to disprove some Spanish priest’s well meaning claim that South American natives were humans and not animals.
It just goes to show how a wrong idea, repeated often and loud, can become accepted as an “obvious” truth.
Does anyone want to weigh in on what weighs more, a ton of sand or a ton of feathers?

[uniface]

In the new paper, the researchers show that a new archaeological site at Serpentine Hot Springs in Alaska’s Bering Land Bridge National Preserve, contains fluted points in a stratified geologic deposit dating to no earlier than 12,400 calendar years ago, and that these results suggest that Alaska’s fluted-point complex is too young to be ancestral to Clovis, and that it instead represents either a south-to-north dispersal of early Americans or transmission of fluting technology from temperate North America, which in turn suggests that peopling of the Americas and development of Paleoindian technology were much more complex than traditional models predict.

“The evidence from Serpentine supports the second theory – that either Paleoindian people or technologies were moving in a reverse migration pattern, from south to north, or more specifically, from the high plains of central Canada in a northerly direction into Alaska,” says Dr. Goebel, adding that the recent findings show new possibilities about when and from where the early settlers of the Bering land bridge arrived.

“Not all of Beringia’s early residents may have come from Siberia, as we have traditionally thought,” he notes. “Some may have come from America instead, although millennia after the initial migration across the land bridge from Asia. If the fluted points do not represent a human migration, they at least indicate the surprisingly early spread of an American technology into Arctic Alaska.”

http://www.sitnews.us/1113News/110913/1 ... oints.html

Fluted spear points have not been found in neighboring Chukotka, in Russia, suggesting that the people who made the fluted tips never made it further west than the Seward Peninsula, the release said.

By 12,000 years ago, the land bridge was becoming swamped by the rising Bering and Chukchi seas, according to the release.

http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas ... ?cmpid=htx