Can it get any more contentious?
Posted: Mon Dec 07, 2020 7:00 am
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
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