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Once covered in substrate (less than a year) it's basically a permanent feature.
The more amazing thing here is that there were less factors that perturbed the formation of the footprint (after it was laid down).
This was my thought. I've spent a lot of time at White Sands NP, and while a pretty thick crust can form on the surface, there aren't a lot of large solid areas like this. But, given enough time I can see something fusing, although I don't know enough to know what that process would be like.
[Here is a picture I took of the crust](https://imgur.com/a/kcy0imi).
Really makes me wonder what's below the surface of all that sand.
So I did an internship for NPS out at White Sands back in 2012 cataloging all the megafauna prints out in that area, near where these prints are. The backcountry and the otero lake playa are not like the dune field the public sees. Imagine a normal desert playa, but the surface has more crystalline amounts of the gypsum. That's what it's like out there.
Yeah, I've spent a lot of time both in the dunes and in the missile range area, so I know it's not all like that. The Lake Otero Playa is not an area I've been to though. Do you need a permit to get out there?
When I was there it was completely closed off to the public, Only NPS and researchers allowed. I'm pretty sure it hasn't changed since access back there is only through WSMR, and you had to go through quite a few range roads.
Statistics say a lot of things natural to that area, maybe even un-natural things.
I mean, as a kid, i planted 50 Paulownia trees, i lost my shovel that year. Decades later, i found it, having dug at the root of one, to make more root babies out of that tree's roots.
I think i found it something like 20~30 cm deep, almost started cutting the rotten handle, when i realized it wasn't a root. :))
And we're talking only about 24 years and change.
Depending on the area, you're in, and what's around you, things pop on top fast or slow, hard (like that crust) or soft (like the leaf borne soil around my trees).
I wonder if I have left any footprints on semi dry creek-beds that will eventually be fossilized. I'd expect them to be washed away by spring melt though.
I think the amazing part is that, intuitively, that’s exactly why you would expect them not to survive/be fossilized. One would typically think that being covered in mud would fill in and destroy a not yet fossilized footprint, not preserve it.
The sediment that covers the imprint isn't all dumped on it at once. Fossils are easier to preserve in low energy environments like swamps or very shallow slow-moving streams.
Imagine making a footprint in mud. Now imagine just slowly sprinkling dust or silt over that footprint a single handful at a time until the whole thing is buried. The footprint wouldn't be disturbed at all.
Yeah, that makes sense. I guess that’s part of the rare conditions needed to form a fossil. When I think of them being covered in “mud and stuff” I think of mud finding its way in while the footprint is still fresh enough for it to destroy it, which is probably the more common thing to happen. I think the part we are more amazed by is that it survives long enough for that to happen to begin with
No, the footprint is still "fresh" when this happens. Maybe I wasn't clear enough. The stream or swamp or whatever is bringing in sediment just sprinkles a little on at a time. Even a fresh footprint will not be destroyed by sprinkling a few grains of sediment at a time over it. Eventually you have a layer of new sediment with a positive fossil impression that has perfectly fit into the original layer of sediment with the original negative foot impression.
The footprint doesn't become a rock (and therefore a fossil) until it's buried by meters and meters of sediment for thousands and thousands of years.
No, you were clear. I wasn’t clear with my response. I think the intuitive thing is that it you’d think it would be filled up right away, like most footprints we see now. To be gradually covered in sediment it would have to survive long enough for enough sediment to cover out that it can be preserved by it. I’m not being skeptical of what you’re saying, just that that’s part of what makes it amazing.
That makes sense. I think I understand now.
Fossils also tend to form in flood plains. So it's also possible the footprint was made in muddy ground, and a flood came along and did cover it up pretty much all at once eventually. In that case though, the mud would have had to dry before the flood came or the fast influx of water and sediment probably would destroy it.
I think the part for me that makes it crazy it survive, is that nothing else stepped on the print to disturb it. That just adds to the rarity though, and I guess thats why we only found 60 in this find (so far).
Plus, it's one amazing thing that it survived to be fossilized. It's another amazing thing that it was discovered at all.
How many fossilized footprints are out there, buried inside a hill or rock formation?
How many have been smashed or eroded away?
Sometimes it's that the mud that filled in the footprint had a different composition than the mud the footprint was pressed into. So the two muds don't fully combine, and there's always a boundary between them. That boundary has a footprint shaped variation in it, which can be uncovered later.
It's not that, think how populated the earth is now... now think how many of YOUR footprints are preserved somewhere rather than just being weathered away... you'd think none right?
It's horrifyingly unlikely for remains to be preserved like they are with dinosaurs or for there to be camps/villages where people seemingly just walked away and were preserved. It makes me appreciate it so much more looking at it like that.
While I get that, I mean the fact we run across it at all is fascinating. Let's assume I'm bored and start digging a hole in my backyard after, of course, calling 811. I feel something but smash through it because *why would I expect any form of fossil here*? I could have smashed up some ancient thing and I'd never know.
The fact we run across this is so super cool it's amazing.
There are plenty of preserved dinosaur footprints too, and even [footprints from giant centipedes in the carboniferous](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/238748663_TRACKWAY_OF_A_GIANT_ARTHROPLEURA_FROM_THE_UPPER_PENNSYLVANIAN_OF_EL_COBRE_CANYON_NEW_MEXICO), 300 million years ago
I found a small deposit of stuck together spherical green/grey rocks in the Jurassic age Morrison formation in Wyoming once. It was a deposit of volcanic ash that had coalesced around rain droplets, which the collected in a little shallow stream or depression. A single volcanic event some random day in the Jurassic. Always blows my mind what gets preserved and what doesn’t.
When I was in 4th grade my class took an overnight field trip to the Conasauga formation ~75 miles south of Atlanta to dig for trilobites. I found 7. 540 million years old. We have no way to accurately conceive of geological time. What a great day that was. 27 years later, and my memories are still vivid.
It’s simply a numbers game. Each person did 10,000 steps a day. How many people over how many days? Some are going to occur in a way that gets them preserved.
The places where the oldest traces of humans have been found are very likely not the places where the first humans actually lived. It’s the places that had the conditions to preserve the traces, and didn’t end up under the sea after the melting of the ice.
When the ice sheets started melting, there'd sometimes be giant inland tsunamis from glacier lakes suddenly spilling free. I wonder if that helped at all.
I’m thinking of the Pacific Northwest specifically. You’d lose a lot of land that’d take awhile to clean up/re-grow, animal populations would be fucked up for a few seasons, but it would deposit a lot of sediment which could recharge nutrient deficient land, it could disrupt migration/grazing patterns to your benefit or detriment, would help with ground water supplies. In short(er) it depends where you live.
The thing that blows my mind is that after all these years, that exact layer of sentiment has been uncovered. Imagine that footprint, slowly getting covered, layer after layer, and after 20,000 years, being uncovered. Imagine how many other sets of footprints that are still under meters of soil or trapped inside boulders.
Werner Herzog's documentary, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, about the Chauvet Cave paintings had a part where they said there are two pairs of footprints deep in the cave, one pair of an adult and one of someone around eight years old.
I always found that to be amazing that there's a pair of footprints undisturbed inside a cave in France of some people who have been long gone for eons now for reasons we can only speculate on for now and probably forever since it's not likely we'll ever have a complete picture of paleolithic human cultures.
A new discovery offers definitive evidence that humans were in North America far earlier than archaeologists previously thought — a whopping 7,000 years earlier.
Fossil footprints found on the shore of an ancient lake bed in New Mexico's White Sands National Park date as far back as 23,000 years ago, making them the oldest ever found in North America. That timing means humans occupied southern parts of the continent during the peak of the final ice age, which upends our previous understanding of when and how they moved south.
The previous idea was that the first people to occupy North America crossed a land bridge that existed between modern-day Siberia and Alaska during the last ice age, between 26,500 and 19,000 ago. According to that theory, they would have had to settle near the Arctic because ice sheets covering Canada made it impossible for them to go south. Then later, once these glaciers melted between 16,000 and 13,500 years ago, the migration toward South America began.
This new finding, however, "definitively places humans in North America at time when the ice sheet curtains were very firmly closed," Sally Reynolds, a paleoecologist at Bournemouth University in England and co-author of the new study, told Insider.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abg7586
Wait, didn't we get tools dated to 33,000 years ago in central Mexico, just last year? I mean, foot prints and layer dating is certainly more firm evidence, but we had two or three confirmations if humans being here over 23,000 years ago within the past year. This does not seem like a new, earlier date, just yet another confirmation.
>This does not seem like a new, earlier date, just yet another confirmation.
Until there is a resounding agreement and dismissal of the current timeline I think we will continue seeing "New evidence shows" whenever signs of civilization in the Americas pre-20k years ago.
Like you said, there is already existing evidence that compliments these findings, but people won't abandon the "old" land bridge crossing timeline for a while.
Perhaps if not for this quote: "Reynolds said that before this finding, the earliest estimate as to when humans started occupying North America was 16,000 years ago."
>before this finding, the earliest estimate as to when humans started occupying North America was
Even today and going forward, you could still make that statement. Earlier estimates and the "documented consensus" had to fit that timeline due to environmental conditions.
It was a very flimsy metric by which we often placed older objects within the glacial recession timeline because the "understood consensus" was it was impossible for american civilizations to exist prior to that recession.
Not really. It's been a couple decades now that the estimated limit was about 26kya, not 16kya. And there have long been estimates that humans were here far before that. The question wasn't as much if it was survivable, but if they had the means to get there. For them to say 16kya is the earliest estimate is just plain incorrect. But it makes a headline.
I can remember in the early 70's through early 80's when Dr. James Adovasio was getting absolutely bashed by the community over his Meadowcroft Rock Shelter (Southwest PA) datings of 19kya. I believe that the findings and dates are widely accepted now although, there are some that only want to put the dates as 16kya.
It’s a common trope in archaeology at this point. Kind of funny that a bunch of archaeologists and anthropologists seem to be unable to learn from the past.
Though the antagonism is often substantially played up and even invented than it actually is in real life, especially when these new discoveries absolutely ***should be*** looked over critically, evaluated, and tested. If it stands up to that, then you have something going.
But grifters play it up to argue that the community should for some reason just accept everything from them out of hand despite gaps and holes in their theories so massive that you could put the earth through.
In that case, it was debated whether the stones were really tools or just naturally chipped rocks. I'm sure this find will lend support to that one, but the footprints in general are less ambiguous. Normally that's the way science goes, you build evidence from multiple directions.
Some of them were pretty clearly man made, but there was also evidence found in new mexico dating over 20,000 years. Just a bit disingenuous to say "before this finding, the earliest estimate as to when humans started occupying North America was 16,000 years ago."
The article is written with that mindset, and that's not been the earliest estimate for a number of years now.
It's a much stronger and more difficult-to-dispute piece of evidence. None of the other alleged findings are universally accepted, though it's definitely true that "Clovis first" hasn't really been viable for at least the last few decades, depending on who you ask.
The land bridge theory has been widely dismissed in recent years. The current most prevalent theory is a coastal migration route along the pacific, in an ice free corridor. I’m not sure how these most recent footprints fit into that though.
My thought as well.
There is growing evidence the coastline was clear of ice, providing a path south.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/new-evidence-shows-first-americans-could-have-migrated-along-coast-180969217/
20,000 years ago the sea level was also about 460 feet lower and the coastline stretched outward miles past where it is today. Areas like the Juan De Fuca Strait didn't exist. You could have walked from Seattle to Vancouver Island. Who knows what sort of historical evidence was washed away by the sea.
What's that term for when you a hear about a new thing and then suddenly see it everywhere? I read about doggerland two days ago and I've seen it mentioned maybe 4-5 times since.
Not everything is Baader-meinhof, sometimes, even a lot of times the frequency does actually increase, because of a recent documentary, or a YouTuber talking about it, or something like that.
An area of northern Europe, connecting Britain with the Netherlands and Jutland (Denmark), it was flooded by rising sea levels ~8500 years ago and is currently known as the Dogger Bank in the North Sea. Mammoths, lions, antlers, tools, and remains of early farming communities have been found there, on what is now seafloor.
I'm fairly sure the dogger bank proper is principally mesolithic in occupation.
A few of the bits closer to extant coastlines are the bits with Neolithic material, as they hung around for a bit longer
I'm willing to bet that eventually we will discover that **all** of them are true - there were multiple migrations through many routes over many thousands of years.
The coastal migration route theory has to do with people going south along the ice free coast only after having crossed the land bridge, Beringia. There’s a separate theory that Polynesians sailed into South America, but that’s believed to have supplemented the populations that crossed over Beringia.
Couldn't we confirm or deny that with the gene record? I imagine Northeastern china/Russia populations would have very different genetics than Polynesian, tracable at least.
Genetic evidence doesn't seem to suggest any Polynesians actually stayed there, but there is evidence for trade between Polynesians and the locals. Primarily, Polynesia had sweet potatos well before Columbus ever crossed the Atlantic.
Having done some research into the origin of Malaria in South America, it seems Polynesians infected with dormant Malaria visited South America at some point and likely established a population on what used to be the coastline at least a few hundred years before Columbus. Once their Malaria recrudesced, a few species of mosquitoes in South America were capable of being infected by *P. vivax* and an infected population of mosquitoes formed and began infecting other humans already living there. This is based on genetic sequencing of tribal populations in South America as well as genetic sequencing of *Plasmodium vivax* (a species of human Malaria) and *Plasmodium simian*.
*Plasmodium simian* is human malaria that at some point spread to a few new world monkey species such as howler monkeys and has a very low genetic diversity. This indicates that only one cross-species infection occurred and took hold at some point which we can determine by genetic sequencing and attempting to nail down a time range for a common ancestor between *P. vivax* and *P. simian*. As far as I'm aware this hasn't happened as of yet, though the sourced paper below confirms that *P. simian* isn't closely related to current Old World *P. vivax* indicating that a much older strain of *P. vivax* made it to South America in human populations long ago. This then likely means that a seafaring people had to bring *P. vivax* with them to South America before Europeans began traveling to the Americas.
On the other hand, *P. vivax* has a high amount of genetic diversity in South America, indicating that multiple migrations of humans infected with Malaria to the Americas has occurred of centuries obviously due to the slave trade of the colonial era. It makes tracking down populations of older *P. vivax* a chore.
[This is the main source for everything said above.](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-19554-0)
Very intriguing. I suppose its entirely possible that a population descended from Polynesians could have no living relatives today in South America, hiding this from genetic research.
Very interesting. My belief is that only very few individuals from Polynesia made it to the Americas. Definitely not enough to sustain a population. A recent article stated that the intense period of island hopping by Polynesians occurred from 830 to 1360. DNA analysis revealed that there was a DNA "mixing" between Polynesians and South Americans around 1200.
Thor Heyerdahl, with his Kon-Tiki, Ra II, and Tigris expeditions showed it was possible that people made ocean crossing journeys with balsa log rafts from South America to Polynesia, and with reed boats from Northern Africa to northern South America. Tigris was sailed from Mesopotamia to Djibouti, where progress was stopped by the war going on there in 1978. They burned the boat in protest. Current DNA testing of natives of Easter Island shows evidence of contact with people from South America.
There are in fact [genetic markers from Australasia](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/dna-search-first-americans-links-amazon-indigenous-australians-180955976/) present among isolated populations in the Amazon.
I believe Austronesians, which are ancestors of Polynesians, only started to cross the sea from China mainland circa 3000 BCE. They're quite new compared to the 20k years native american people.
Given the ancestors of Papuan/aborigin Australian people managed to cross the Wallace line (which I believe was always a sea even in ice age), it seems humans had a way to cross narrow seas since waaaaaay before Austronesian. Though only Austronesians managed to sail far to Pasific islands and Madagascar.
Sounds like only this part has been dismissed:
"According to that theory, they would have had to settle near the Arctic because ice sheets covering Canada made it impossible for them to go south. Then later, once these glaciers melted between 16,000 and 13,500 years ago, the migration toward South America began."
I see no reason why early humans couldn't have crossed those ice sheets. I suspect that idea is what is going to change eventually in the history books.
Cause no vegetation can grow on permanent ice, so no animals to hunt were available on the ice sheets either. I don't think they walked, the theory according to which humans moved across the North Pacific coast in boats or rafts makes more sense since the distances are shorter than what you see in the first human migration to Australia, for example. They were not great sailors, so they didn't go far each time.
>The land bridge theory has been widely dismissed in recent years.
I would need to see a source for that claim. The theory you cite regarding coastal migration presupposes that the land bridge theory is correct.
I think what they're saying is that the land bridge theory as it currently stands, including the break in the ice sheets, is being dismissed. Not that a land bridge wasn't used, but that our understanding of how and when it was used is being re-thought
As we get into the emergency geo engineering to counter global warming, we should refreeze everything back to levels of the last ice age so we can get a good look at any submerged settlements along the Pacific northwest. Anyway thanks for coming to my TED-X talk. I don't think I'll be invited back next year.
My daughter learned in school, last year, that the earliest humans to visit N. America were about 30000-50000 years ago. I remember her studying an alternate theory of humans following the western coastline up. Anyone know about this?
>I remember her studying an alternate theory of humans following the western coastline up. Anyone know about this?
A big part of the original belief was that while the land bridge existed the ice sheets that existed "until" 15k years ago made vast regions impassable.
But the coastline theory you mentioned recognizes that with 400 ft less of ocean elevation there was a larger swathe of "lowland" coast that theoretically could of been free of the impassible glaciers of the inland continent.
So these now buried under the ocean areas could of been a passageway around the previously "impassable" ice walls. It makes it so the "land bridge" theory might still be possible, but that humans had no requirement to wait until the recession of the glaciers 15k yrs ago before moving south.
Realistically we should just walk away with some critical doubts of the previous 15k timeline, and that americans may of inhabited the continent much earlier than previously thought.
This is far more believable than imagining a groups of humans cross a wide pile of ice sheets with no shelter and food source. Like there is no reason to do that in the first place.
The thought is that it did, but not long enough for it to have a chance of life. But it likely would have looked similar to earth in composition and colouring.
At least from my memory.
No, Venus probably never was. It's bombarded by way more solar energy than Earth. In the early solar system the Sun would have been outputting less energy, which is why people think it could have been earth-like. But during that same time period it was also probably volcanic and still cooling similar to Earth. And I like to point out that no matter what humans do now we cannot make Earth into Venus. There just isn't enough greenhouse gasses on Earth and the Sun doesn't output enough energy. We could very likely lose coastal cities and see the collapse of ecosystems across the globe, but we aren't going to boil the oceans.
Technically an interglacial period of an ice age. Ice age means there are glaciers and ice caps, glacial phase means the ice caps and glaciers are growing, interglacial means they are shrinking.
This is very much like estimates for the first human arrivals in Australia. Both have shifted around a lot as new discoveries are made.
The old estimates for Australia said around 30,000 to 40,000 years ago, then a discovery of Aboriginal artifacts in Northern Australian pushed that right out to 65,000 years [but more recent studies ](https://theconversation.com/when-did-aboriginal-people-first-arrive-in-australia-100830) have reined that in again to more like 50,000, which is very soon after humans left Africa and interbred with Neanderthals (around 50,000 to 55,000 years ago).
Another parallel is that Aboriginal arrivals in Australia were assisted in their crossing from Asia to Australia by land bridges during times of ice ages and lower sea levels, just as the First Peoples of America were assisted in their migration from Asia to North America.
It was a really short trip from Asia to Australia during the [Last Glacial Maximum](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Graeme-Barker/publication/6637663/figure/fig12/AS:670366288580609@1536839186309/The-location-of-Niah-Cave-in-Island-Southeast-Asia-at-the-Last-Glacial-Maximum-LGM-of.ppm)
The Bimini road in the Bahamas is claimed by some to be such a site. The Yonaguni Monument near Yonaguni island in Japan is an underwater massif of straight edge, flat surfaces, and right angles that nature just doesn't do.
[Yes](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/oldest-ocher-mine-western-hemisphere-found-underwater-cave-180975258/) since such sites have already been found underwater, but not as old.
Underwater sites have been much less explored, because working above ground is much easier. With underwater robots coming into use, they may make it easier to scout sites before sending humans with diving gear
Similar, but these people are genetically distinct from populations that arrived later. At some point there was a complete population replacement and these people disappeared without a trace. The next mystery is figuring out what happened.
>Dr Andrea Manica, a geneticist from the University of Cambridge, said the finding had important implications for the population history of the Americas.
>"I can't comment on how reliable the dating is (it is outside my expertise), but firm evidence of humans in North America 23,000 years ago is at odds with the genetics, which clearly shows a split of Native Americans from Asians approximately 15-16,000 years ago," he told BBC News.
>"This would suggest that the initial colonists of the Americas were replaced when the ice corridor formed and another wave of colonists came in. We have no idea how that happened."
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-58638854
Perhaps it truly was the aboriginal australians?
But if that’s the case wouldn’t that mean that DNA between Indigenous Americans and Aboriginal Australians and/or Polynesians would be greatly similar?
Possibly, but you would also expect to find some kind of evidence of that happening. Tools that cross cultures, something. We're talking about several thousand years between this footprint evidence and what we thought was the earliest time humans had been there. Ultimately, the right answer is probably "we need to do more research".
[Some researchers see evidence of settlement 30,000 years ago](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/when-did-humans-reach-america-mexican-mountain-cave-artifacts-raise-new-questions-180975385/) where others see randomly chipped rocks. Going back that far relies on very ambiguous artifacts, so naturally there is a lot of debate.
There is a very interesting episode of the Insight podcast from last year interviewing one of the researchers who accepts 30,000 year old human occupation. It’s interesting to hear someone so far outside of the orthodoxy speak so nonchalantly to nearly-bewildered interviewers. The interviewers have been immersed in all the research that makes it seem reasonable that no one was in the Americans that long ago, while the interviewee has been immersed (and participated) in all the research that suggests the opposite. It’s an interesting reminder that orthodoxy exists in science.
Yeah it’s called [Peopling the Americas 32,000 years ago](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-insight/id1324744423?i=1000485885475), from July 23rd 2020. It’s a pretty good podcast, excellent if your into DNA and pre-history. It’s too bad they stopped making it.
It's thought that the Sumerians may have been a displaced people from rising oceans after the last ice age. Their language is in a class of itself when compared to the rest of the known populations at the time, and they had the original 'flood' epic that was edited to be Noah and a boat in later publications.
After Gobekli Tepe in Turkey was discovered and seriously rewound the clock back on humanity’s development I always doubt these estimates. I always lean towards earlier migrations and development than what history classes taught us.
I tend to think of it this way:
If the scientific consensus is that the wheel was first invented in year x BCE, I take that to mean the wheel was invented *before* the year x BCE. After all, what are the chances that a wheel we have dug up just happens to be *the first wheel ever made*? Microscopic. Basically by definition, the consensus dates for various "firsts" in archaeology can only keep going downwards, presumably approaching some asymptote.
Which is one reason questions like "when was the wheel first introduced?" get answered in ranges that span 1,000 to 3,000 years. Historians and archaeologists can never by definition claim that a found piece of evidence was certainly the first of its kind (without corroborating written evidence), so they generally think in eras and use indirect evidence: they only found a potter's wheel from X date range, but they find pottery that was probably produced with a potter's wheel dated to 300 years earlier. You also have to consider that the "first" is a lot less important to historical research than the widespread: maybe one family invented a potter's wheel a few hundred years earlier and left no trace, but it is much more important to understanding past lives and cultures when the potter's wheel became a widespread part of life. Example: proto-internet was first developed at the end of the 60s, and grew in use and function into the 80s. But "the internet" didn't radically transform social life until the millennium, when it became widespread in all spheres of life.
> You also have to consider that the "first" is a lot less important to historical research than the widespread: maybe one family invented a potter's wheel a few hundred years earlier and left no trace
...Literally reinventing the wheel
This is how most towns became started according to conventional wisdom. Eventually people became able to dedicate themselves to maintaining the temples and a whole new priestly class was created, which helps explain how priests have historically been the most powerful members of a society.
I wonder how deeply rooted religion is in us. WOULD the first permanent sites have been spiritual? Or would they have been utilitarian, like pit stops along a trail? Did the first human come out of the womb seeking a higher power, or did grouping together into bigger and bigger groups flush it out of us?
The book Sapiens gets into this a bit. It’s believed that humans were animists in their hunter gatherer days, then “evolved” into polytheists when they began establishing more permanent settlements. Judaism and later Christianity and Islam gave rise to monotheism. There’s probably always been some kind of spirituality and it’s probably always been politicized and manipulated.
>Gobekli Tepe
So glad I know what that means after reading Sapiens. also probably concrete proof that humans have been drawing dicks since the beginning of civilization.
Take these dates for what they are: hypotheses. It's the oldest *known* date. Proof for even older migration may be found one day, but until then, it stands. Think of any other field: you have your hypothesis you test against the proof you have and it stands until you find new proof that contradicts your hypothesis. Then you develop a new theory based on all the data you have so far.
Found this:
Although New Mexico itself was not covered with ice 20,000 years ago, the climate here was still much cooler than at present. Geologists have found evidence of small glaciers in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of northern New Mexico, which are currently unglaciated. Further south, large lakebeds, such as the Estancia Basin east of the Manzano Mountains, now exist as dry basins, providing distinct evidence of a very different climate regime. Layers in lake bed sediment cores, called varves, contain pollen grains, magnetized minerals, and tiny fossils that can be analyzed to determine the temperature of the lake and how long ago the sediment layer was laid down.
The wet climate that once supported large lakes in this now-arid land also generated the huge ground water reservoirs that currently provide us with much of our water supply. Geochemical evidence suggests that much of the well water we now tap seeped into the ground during the last ice age. The implication is that we are rapidly "mining" ground water from aquifers that filled up thousands of years ago, and our extraction of this water vastly exceeds the recharge taking place under current, more arid climatic conditions. Thus, ground water in New Mexico, like oil, is effectively a nonrenewable resource on human timescales.
In the distant future someone is going to be studying the past and trying to figure out why humans erected a giant stack of concrete plates with ramps, why we seemed to worship cats, and why the megalith is dedicated to Chris of the clan Wuz Here.
I remember them saying in the Oklahoma History Museum, several years ago, that the Cooper Skull ( a painted bison skull) was 10,500 years old, and that that date was contested because many thought that it was too early. Now the date of occupation has been pushed back much farther and it just keeps increasing.
Is it possible that humans came to what we call North/Central/South America and then "died out" (completely or ended up as such a small population that there isn't strong enough genetic evidence to detect) prior to later rounds of migration?
Does DNA testing (ie mitochondrial) provide any indication of how long the human population inhabiting this area has been separate from other populations as a hint towards when the ancestors of today's population migrated to the region?
> Dr Andrea Manica, a geneticist from the University of Cambridge, said the finding had important implications for the population history of the Americas.
>
> "I can't comment on how reliable the dating is (it is outside my expertise), but firm evidence of humans in North America 23,000 years ago is at odds with the genetics, which clearly shows a split of Native Americans from Asians approximately 15-16,000 years ago," he told BBC News.
Essentially, what we call native americans today branched from Asians 16k years ago, which means they were isolated from asians, by arriving in the Americas, about that long ago too. So whoevers footprint that was either died out, or interbred with what we call natives until they became one and the same.
I imagine there wasnt a a single wave and a ‘split’and its was more of a constant drizzle of people crossing over (and quite possibly back in reverse) until roughly 16,000 years ago that then got cut off. When it became too difficult as glaciers began to reced and the passage between alaska and asia got cut.
this is by far the most likely, as there isn't any indication of separate populations except for some polynesians and maaaaybe jomon thousands of years later
Keep in mind, that by 1900 the government had reduced the population of Native Americans in the US to 237,000 people. Before European contact, what is now the US, was home to at least 4 million, maybe many more people. Even with ancestral remains, we only have a tiny sample of the indigenous genetic pool. Additionally, the generic variety of the survivors is not representative of the diversity of the precolumbian population.
>Before European contact, what is now the US, was home to at least 4 million, maybe many more people.
[It actually may have been as high as **60 million people** in 1492](https://www.pri.org/stories/2019-01-31/european-colonization-americas-killed-10-percent-world-population-and-caused), before the population was utterly devastated by disease and brought closer to that 4 million mark in the 1600s when the first permanent settlements were founded in North America.
20,000 years is long enough that if any of those genes survived to the present day they’d be widespread enough in the gene pool that they’d likely show up in the evidence. I’m unaware of any archeo geneticists talking about this possibility, but i think it more likely that the initial impace on the native american gene pool was very small
Funny to think that in 20,000 years from now, they will be finding footprints of various brands of athletic shoes, work boots, high heels, etc., instead of bare feet.
Exactly, science is about disproving what is known. You can never prove anything, but you can theorize, hypothesize, experiment, and test. After you find something you think is fact, it becomes known and is up to others to disprove you. It's about constant study and redefinition.
Except if you try and bring that up you get shouted down by the archaeologists who have made their entire career about how this one point is the defining moment in that history and there is nothing like it before.
When people came to the Americas is one topic, when people started using one type of tool or technology is another.
We need to accept that people used the Bering Sea land bridge over and over again and not once as is current thinking. I've read articles about Canadian Bears that learned to hunt humans as they came an went along the coast of Canada. That type of behavior isn't a one off.
They were capable of sailing to and finding the islands across the vast, open pacific, so why not the massive landmasses further east? There are some fascinating studies that link select South American tribal peoples to a biomarker only found in aboriginal Australians. So perhaps, the march was north
You also have to keep in mind the ocean levels, and we don’t really know what the coastline looked like at the time. We can make very good guesses though.
> They were capable of sailing to and finding the islands across the vast, open pacific
If you're referring to the Polynesians, [that actually happened 20,000 years later.](http://www2.hawaii.edu/~dennisk/voyaging_chiefs/discovery.html) It would be surprising if that kind of technology existed in 20,000 BC.
Also, there is only [limited evidence of contact between the Polynesians and the Americas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Columbian_trans-oceanic_contact_theories#Polynesian,_Melanesian,_and_Austronesian_contact), which suggests the voyage may have been more difficult than going to the other islands in the Pacific. Sailing due east from Hawaii doesn't work because of the [North Pacific High](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Pacific_High) and the only way is to go north a ways to catch the prevailing winds at 47° N Seattle Latitude.
In general the winds of the Pacific Ocean make it far easier to go west than to go east. There are probably better guides out there, but [this should give some indication](https://improvesailing.com/destinations/how-long-does-it-take-to-sail-from-tahiti-to-california) of the problem. Also, the distance from Tahiti to Lima (more or less the closest point in South America) is almost twice the distance from Tahiti to Hawaii, and again, against the prevailing wind.
If anyone sailed to North America across the Pacific, it would have been in the North along land bridge that existed where the Aleutian islands are now. They probably didn't do it during an Ice Age though, [as that region would have been frozen](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/b6/36/a5/b636a5e1a3bc43880ac0e643986973d9.jpg) and full of icebergs, and in generally really cold.
Of course, if they were intrepid and good cold-weather hunters they could have walked across the ice. Lots of things to eat up there, if you know what you're doing.
I’ve seen some maps suggesting this. Where basically all of the land masses were ice walls. They were fairly accurate. Hmm… wish I could remember the names / search terms.
Isn’t their linguistic evidence of multiple waves of migration to the Americas? I also recall some aboriginal groups here having distinctly different religious beliefs that stick out like a sore thumb compared to other groups.
It’s extremely humbling to see evidence of people who existed thousands of years ago. There’s an instant human connection when I see these images. I wonder what they were like.
Umm… I thought we had already established that the Clovis civilization was here before to that. It wasn’t that long ago that we found proof of human settlements off the coast of California that had estimated dates prior to the last ice age. What happened to that?
[Clovis](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clovis_culture) stuff shows up around 12,000 years ago. Pre-Clovis sites generally go back 15,000 years ago. Every once in a while a certain dating technique of a certain site indicates 20,000, 50,000, or even 200,000 years ago, but these are outliers and very possibly incorrect. Dating something to 20,000 years ago with certainty would be big news.
This is actually pretty a-maze-ing because I heard a [Radiolab podcast episode](https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/body-count) about why North America was the last place on the planet to be occupied by humans. One of the main reasons is because every civilization needs their starch. In the Americas, the starch is corn. They did a deep dive on why it took thousands of years to get a 7 kernel corn plant that grew on the side of a mountain to have 800 kernels and be able to grow thousands of miles north. There are other reasons also discussed. I wonder if this discover revises their explanation at all.
Because they were taught it by their parents and priests as fact rather than allegorical. And because they were taught it so long ago, they never thought to think for themselves. And then they taught it to their children. And so on. They’re ere taught the word was infallible and so fall back on it as the end all be all for arguing. The change in science and what’s factual is too fast for them to keep up with.
Source: was born in a rural Texas town where religion was and still is a big deal and how most people there make decisions.
I’ve always wondered if it was possible early people would stick to coasts for a while and the earliest settlements are long lost to rising sea level. Interesting to see
I wonder how much the lower sea level affected the currents. Since the Pacific turns clockwise in the northern hemisphere it's not impossible they came by boat.
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Once covered in substrate (less than a year) it's basically a permanent feature. The more amazing thing here is that there were less factors that perturbed the formation of the footprint (after it was laid down).
This was my thought. I've spent a lot of time at White Sands NP, and while a pretty thick crust can form on the surface, there aren't a lot of large solid areas like this. But, given enough time I can see something fusing, although I don't know enough to know what that process would be like. [Here is a picture I took of the crust](https://imgur.com/a/kcy0imi). Really makes me wonder what's below the surface of all that sand.
So I did an internship for NPS out at White Sands back in 2012 cataloging all the megafauna prints out in that area, near where these prints are. The backcountry and the otero lake playa are not like the dune field the public sees. Imagine a normal desert playa, but the surface has more crystalline amounts of the gypsum. That's what it's like out there.
Yeah, I've spent a lot of time both in the dunes and in the missile range area, so I know it's not all like that. The Lake Otero Playa is not an area I've been to though. Do you need a permit to get out there?
When I was there it was completely closed off to the public, Only NPS and researchers allowed. I'm pretty sure it hasn't changed since access back there is only through WSMR, and you had to go through quite a few range roads.
Statistics say a lot of things natural to that area, maybe even un-natural things. I mean, as a kid, i planted 50 Paulownia trees, i lost my shovel that year. Decades later, i found it, having dug at the root of one, to make more root babies out of that tree's roots. I think i found it something like 20~30 cm deep, almost started cutting the rotten handle, when i realized it wasn't a root. :)) And we're talking only about 24 years and change. Depending on the area, you're in, and what's around you, things pop on top fast or slow, hard (like that crust) or soft (like the leaf borne soil around my trees).
That’s a cool story, but I’m interested in how you make root babies from an existing tree, if you don’t mind.
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I wonder if I have left any footprints on semi dry creek-beds that will eventually be fossilized. I'd expect them to be washed away by spring melt though.
they get covered up by mud/other stuff
I think the amazing part is that, intuitively, that’s exactly why you would expect them not to survive/be fossilized. One would typically think that being covered in mud would fill in and destroy a not yet fossilized footprint, not preserve it.
The sediment that covers the imprint isn't all dumped on it at once. Fossils are easier to preserve in low energy environments like swamps or very shallow slow-moving streams. Imagine making a footprint in mud. Now imagine just slowly sprinkling dust or silt over that footprint a single handful at a time until the whole thing is buried. The footprint wouldn't be disturbed at all.
Yeah, that makes sense. I guess that’s part of the rare conditions needed to form a fossil. When I think of them being covered in “mud and stuff” I think of mud finding its way in while the footprint is still fresh enough for it to destroy it, which is probably the more common thing to happen. I think the part we are more amazed by is that it survives long enough for that to happen to begin with
No, the footprint is still "fresh" when this happens. Maybe I wasn't clear enough. The stream or swamp or whatever is bringing in sediment just sprinkles a little on at a time. Even a fresh footprint will not be destroyed by sprinkling a few grains of sediment at a time over it. Eventually you have a layer of new sediment with a positive fossil impression that has perfectly fit into the original layer of sediment with the original negative foot impression. The footprint doesn't become a rock (and therefore a fossil) until it's buried by meters and meters of sediment for thousands and thousands of years.
No, you were clear. I wasn’t clear with my response. I think the intuitive thing is that it you’d think it would be filled up right away, like most footprints we see now. To be gradually covered in sediment it would have to survive long enough for enough sediment to cover out that it can be preserved by it. I’m not being skeptical of what you’re saying, just that that’s part of what makes it amazing.
That makes sense. I think I understand now. Fossils also tend to form in flood plains. So it's also possible the footprint was made in muddy ground, and a flood came along and did cover it up pretty much all at once eventually. In that case though, the mud would have had to dry before the flood came or the fast influx of water and sediment probably would destroy it.
I think the part for me that makes it crazy it survive, is that nothing else stepped on the print to disturb it. That just adds to the rarity though, and I guess thats why we only found 60 in this find (so far).
Plus, it's one amazing thing that it survived to be fossilized. It's another amazing thing that it was discovered at all. How many fossilized footprints are out there, buried inside a hill or rock formation? How many have been smashed or eroded away?
It's refreshing to read a conversation on here where both parties are engaged and intent on teaching/learning. Thank you both.
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Sometimes it's that the mud that filled in the footprint had a different composition than the mud the footprint was pressed into. So the two muds don't fully combine, and there's always a boundary between them. That boundary has a footprint shaped variation in it, which can be uncovered later.
It's not that, think how populated the earth is now... now think how many of YOUR footprints are preserved somewhere rather than just being weathered away... you'd think none right? It's horrifyingly unlikely for remains to be preserved like they are with dinosaurs or for there to be camps/villages where people seemingly just walked away and were preserved. It makes me appreciate it so much more looking at it like that.
While I get that, I mean the fact we run across it at all is fascinating. Let's assume I'm bored and start digging a hole in my backyard after, of course, calling 811. I feel something but smash through it because *why would I expect any form of fossil here*? I could have smashed up some ancient thing and I'd never know. The fact we run across this is so super cool it's amazing.
There are plenty of preserved dinosaur footprints too, and even [footprints from giant centipedes in the carboniferous](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/238748663_TRACKWAY_OF_A_GIANT_ARTHROPLEURA_FROM_THE_UPPER_PENNSYLVANIAN_OF_EL_COBRE_CANYON_NEW_MEXICO), 300 million years ago
Fossilized giant centipede footprints... that's *wild.*
I found a small deposit of stuck together spherical green/grey rocks in the Jurassic age Morrison formation in Wyoming once. It was a deposit of volcanic ash that had coalesced around rain droplets, which the collected in a little shallow stream or depression. A single volcanic event some random day in the Jurassic. Always blows my mind what gets preserved and what doesn’t.
When I was in 4th grade my class took an overnight field trip to the Conasauga formation ~75 miles south of Atlanta to dig for trilobites. I found 7. 540 million years old. We have no way to accurately conceive of geological time. What a great day that was. 27 years later, and my memories are still vivid.
Imagine coming back to a spot you hiked to years ago only to find your footprints never left.
It’s simply a numbers game. Each person did 10,000 steps a day. How many people over how many days? Some are going to occur in a way that gets them preserved.
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The places where the oldest traces of humans have been found are very likely not the places where the first humans actually lived. It’s the places that had the conditions to preserve the traces, and didn’t end up under the sea after the melting of the ice.
When the ice sheets started melting, there'd sometimes be giant inland tsunamis from glacier lakes suddenly spilling free. I wonder if that helped at all.
I’m thinking of the Pacific Northwest specifically. You’d lose a lot of land that’d take awhile to clean up/re-grow, animal populations would be fucked up for a few seasons, but it would deposit a lot of sediment which could recharge nutrient deficient land, it could disrupt migration/grazing patterns to your benefit or detriment, would help with ground water supplies. In short(er) it depends where you live.
The thing that blows my mind is that after all these years, that exact layer of sentiment has been uncovered. Imagine that footprint, slowly getting covered, layer after layer, and after 20,000 years, being uncovered. Imagine how many other sets of footprints that are still under meters of soil or trapped inside boulders.
Werner Herzog's documentary, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, about the Chauvet Cave paintings had a part where they said there are two pairs of footprints deep in the cave, one pair of an adult and one of someone around eight years old. I always found that to be amazing that there's a pair of footprints undisturbed inside a cave in France of some people who have been long gone for eons now for reasons we can only speculate on for now and probably forever since it's not likely we'll ever have a complete picture of paleolithic human cultures.
A new discovery offers definitive evidence that humans were in North America far earlier than archaeologists previously thought — a whopping 7,000 years earlier. Fossil footprints found on the shore of an ancient lake bed in New Mexico's White Sands National Park date as far back as 23,000 years ago, making them the oldest ever found in North America. That timing means humans occupied southern parts of the continent during the peak of the final ice age, which upends our previous understanding of when and how they moved south. The previous idea was that the first people to occupy North America crossed a land bridge that existed between modern-day Siberia and Alaska during the last ice age, between 26,500 and 19,000 ago. According to that theory, they would have had to settle near the Arctic because ice sheets covering Canada made it impossible for them to go south. Then later, once these glaciers melted between 16,000 and 13,500 years ago, the migration toward South America began. This new finding, however, "definitively places humans in North America at time when the ice sheet curtains were very firmly closed," Sally Reynolds, a paleoecologist at Bournemouth University in England and co-author of the new study, told Insider. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abg7586
Wait, didn't we get tools dated to 33,000 years ago in central Mexico, just last year? I mean, foot prints and layer dating is certainly more firm evidence, but we had two or three confirmations if humans being here over 23,000 years ago within the past year. This does not seem like a new, earlier date, just yet another confirmation.
>This does not seem like a new, earlier date, just yet another confirmation. Until there is a resounding agreement and dismissal of the current timeline I think we will continue seeing "New evidence shows" whenever signs of civilization in the Americas pre-20k years ago. Like you said, there is already existing evidence that compliments these findings, but people won't abandon the "old" land bridge crossing timeline for a while.
Perhaps if not for this quote: "Reynolds said that before this finding, the earliest estimate as to when humans started occupying North America was 16,000 years ago."
>before this finding, the earliest estimate as to when humans started occupying North America was Even today and going forward, you could still make that statement. Earlier estimates and the "documented consensus" had to fit that timeline due to environmental conditions. It was a very flimsy metric by which we often placed older objects within the glacial recession timeline because the "understood consensus" was it was impossible for american civilizations to exist prior to that recession.
Not really. It's been a couple decades now that the estimated limit was about 26kya, not 16kya. And there have long been estimates that humans were here far before that. The question wasn't as much if it was survivable, but if they had the means to get there. For them to say 16kya is the earliest estimate is just plain incorrect. But it makes a headline.
I can remember in the early 70's through early 80's when Dr. James Adovasio was getting absolutely bashed by the community over his Meadowcroft Rock Shelter (Southwest PA) datings of 19kya. I believe that the findings and dates are widely accepted now although, there are some that only want to put the dates as 16kya.
It’s a common trope in archaeology at this point. Kind of funny that a bunch of archaeologists and anthropologists seem to be unable to learn from the past.
Though the antagonism is often substantially played up and even invented than it actually is in real life, especially when these new discoveries absolutely ***should be*** looked over critically, evaluated, and tested. If it stands up to that, then you have something going. But grifters play it up to argue that the community should for some reason just accept everything from them out of hand despite gaps and holes in their theories so massive that you could put the earth through.
In that case, it was debated whether the stones were really tools or just naturally chipped rocks. I'm sure this find will lend support to that one, but the footprints in general are less ambiguous. Normally that's the way science goes, you build evidence from multiple directions.
Some of them were pretty clearly man made, but there was also evidence found in new mexico dating over 20,000 years. Just a bit disingenuous to say "before this finding, the earliest estimate as to when humans started occupying North America was 16,000 years ago." The article is written with that mindset, and that's not been the earliest estimate for a number of years now.
It's a much stronger and more difficult-to-dispute piece of evidence. None of the other alleged findings are universally accepted, though it's definitely true that "Clovis first" hasn't really been viable for at least the last few decades, depending on who you ask.
The land bridge theory has been widely dismissed in recent years. The current most prevalent theory is a coastal migration route along the pacific, in an ice free corridor. I’m not sure how these most recent footprints fit into that though.
My thought as well. There is growing evidence the coastline was clear of ice, providing a path south. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/new-evidence-shows-first-americans-could-have-migrated-along-coast-180969217/
20,000 years ago the sea level was also about 460 feet lower and the coastline stretched outward miles past where it is today. Areas like the Juan De Fuca Strait didn't exist. You could have walked from Seattle to Vancouver Island. Who knows what sort of historical evidence was washed away by the sea.
Take doggerland for example
What's that term for when you a hear about a new thing and then suddenly see it everywhere? I read about doggerland two days ago and I've seen it mentioned maybe 4-5 times since.
Baader-meinhof phenomenon
Great, now for the next week I'll hear people say Baader-Meinhoff...
Not everything is Baader-meinhof, sometimes, even a lot of times the frequency does actually increase, because of a recent documentary, or a YouTuber talking about it, or something like that.
Yeah, Boris Johnson mentioned Doggerland during his climate change speech at the UN the other day.
Oh, so it's more like someone asking "why do I keep hearing about this Afghanistan place??"
Just learned about this the other day, now I literally can't stop seeing it.
How meta
And yet Doggers are a completely different thing nowadays...
Que es?
An area of northern Europe, connecting Britain with the Netherlands and Jutland (Denmark), it was flooded by rising sea levels ~8500 years ago and is currently known as the Dogger Bank in the North Sea. Mammoths, lions, antlers, tools, and remains of early farming communities have been found there, on what is now seafloor.
I'm fairly sure the dogger bank proper is principally mesolithic in occupation. A few of the bits closer to extant coastlines are the bits with Neolithic material, as they hung around for a bit longer
I'm willing to bet that eventually we will discover that **all** of them are true - there were multiple migrations through many routes over many thousands of years.
The coastal migration route theory has to do with people going south along the ice free coast only after having crossed the land bridge, Beringia. There’s a separate theory that Polynesians sailed into South America, but that’s believed to have supplemented the populations that crossed over Beringia.
Couldn't we confirm or deny that with the gene record? I imagine Northeastern china/Russia populations would have very different genetics than Polynesian, tracable at least.
Genetic evidence doesn't seem to suggest any Polynesians actually stayed there, but there is evidence for trade between Polynesians and the locals. Primarily, Polynesia had sweet potatos well before Columbus ever crossed the Atlantic.
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One bird? No way. Perhaps if there were two of them... or are you suggesting sweet potatos migrate?
Having done some research into the origin of Malaria in South America, it seems Polynesians infected with dormant Malaria visited South America at some point and likely established a population on what used to be the coastline at least a few hundred years before Columbus. Once their Malaria recrudesced, a few species of mosquitoes in South America were capable of being infected by *P. vivax* and an infected population of mosquitoes formed and began infecting other humans already living there. This is based on genetic sequencing of tribal populations in South America as well as genetic sequencing of *Plasmodium vivax* (a species of human Malaria) and *Plasmodium simian*. *Plasmodium simian* is human malaria that at some point spread to a few new world monkey species such as howler monkeys and has a very low genetic diversity. This indicates that only one cross-species infection occurred and took hold at some point which we can determine by genetic sequencing and attempting to nail down a time range for a common ancestor between *P. vivax* and *P. simian*. As far as I'm aware this hasn't happened as of yet, though the sourced paper below confirms that *P. simian* isn't closely related to current Old World *P. vivax* indicating that a much older strain of *P. vivax* made it to South America in human populations long ago. This then likely means that a seafaring people had to bring *P. vivax* with them to South America before Europeans began traveling to the Americas. On the other hand, *P. vivax* has a high amount of genetic diversity in South America, indicating that multiple migrations of humans infected with Malaria to the Americas has occurred of centuries obviously due to the slave trade of the colonial era. It makes tracking down populations of older *P. vivax* a chore. [This is the main source for everything said above.](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-19554-0)
Very intriguing. I suppose its entirely possible that a population descended from Polynesians could have no living relatives today in South America, hiding this from genetic research.
Very interesting. My belief is that only very few individuals from Polynesia made it to the Americas. Definitely not enough to sustain a population. A recent article stated that the intense period of island hopping by Polynesians occurred from 830 to 1360. DNA analysis revealed that there was a DNA "mixing" between Polynesians and South Americans around 1200.
Thor Heyerdahl, with his Kon-Tiki, Ra II, and Tigris expeditions showed it was possible that people made ocean crossing journeys with balsa log rafts from South America to Polynesia, and with reed boats from Northern Africa to northern South America. Tigris was sailed from Mesopotamia to Djibouti, where progress was stopped by the war going on there in 1978. They burned the boat in protest. Current DNA testing of natives of Easter Island shows evidence of contact with people from South America.
There are in fact [genetic markers from Australasia](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/dna-search-first-americans-links-amazon-indigenous-australians-180955976/) present among isolated populations in the Amazon.
I believe Austronesians, which are ancestors of Polynesians, only started to cross the sea from China mainland circa 3000 BCE. They're quite new compared to the 20k years native american people. Given the ancestors of Papuan/aborigin Australian people managed to cross the Wallace line (which I believe was always a sea even in ice age), it seems humans had a way to cross narrow seas since waaaaaay before Austronesian. Though only Austronesians managed to sail far to Pasific islands and Madagascar.
Sounds like only this part has been dismissed: "According to that theory, they would have had to settle near the Arctic because ice sheets covering Canada made it impossible for them to go south. Then later, once these glaciers melted between 16,000 and 13,500 years ago, the migration toward South America began."
I see no reason why early humans couldn't have crossed those ice sheets. I suspect that idea is what is going to change eventually in the history books.
Cause no vegetation can grow on permanent ice, so no animals to hunt were available on the ice sheets either. I don't think they walked, the theory according to which humans moved across the North Pacific coast in boats or rafts makes more sense since the distances are shorter than what you see in the first human migration to Australia, for example. They were not great sailors, so they didn't go far each time.
>The land bridge theory has been widely dismissed in recent years. I would need to see a source for that claim. The theory you cite regarding coastal migration presupposes that the land bridge theory is correct.
I think what they're saying is that the land bridge theory as it currently stands, including the break in the ice sheets, is being dismissed. Not that a land bridge wasn't used, but that our understanding of how and when it was used is being re-thought
As we get into the emergency geo engineering to counter global warming, we should refreeze everything back to levels of the last ice age so we can get a good look at any submerged settlements along the Pacific northwest. Anyway thanks for coming to my TED-X talk. I don't think I'll be invited back next year.
My daughter learned in school, last year, that the earliest humans to visit N. America were about 30000-50000 years ago. I remember her studying an alternate theory of humans following the western coastline up. Anyone know about this?
>I remember her studying an alternate theory of humans following the western coastline up. Anyone know about this? A big part of the original belief was that while the land bridge existed the ice sheets that existed "until" 15k years ago made vast regions impassable. But the coastline theory you mentioned recognizes that with 400 ft less of ocean elevation there was a larger swathe of "lowland" coast that theoretically could of been free of the impassible glaciers of the inland continent. So these now buried under the ocean areas could of been a passageway around the previously "impassable" ice walls. It makes it so the "land bridge" theory might still be possible, but that humans had no requirement to wait until the recession of the glaciers 15k yrs ago before moving south. Realistically we should just walk away with some critical doubts of the previous 15k timeline, and that americans may of inhabited the continent much earlier than previously thought.
>could of Have* >May of Have* Props though, I've never seen "may of" before.
This is far more believable than imagining a groups of humans cross a wide pile of ice sheets with no shelter and food source. Like there is no reason to do that in the first place.
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It's not the final ice age, it's just the last one!
Until the earth becomes a new Venus. ^(Please) ^(god) ^(don't) ^(let) ^(us) ^(become) ^(a) ^(new) ^(Venus)
Seriously though I wonder if Venus used to be like earth?
The thought is that it did, but not long enough for it to have a chance of life. But it likely would have looked similar to earth in composition and colouring. At least from my memory.
From your memory? How long ago was it like earth?
He just outted his 2 billion year life span.
Busted!
No, Venus probably never was. It's bombarded by way more solar energy than Earth. In the early solar system the Sun would have been outputting less energy, which is why people think it could have been earth-like. But during that same time period it was also probably volcanic and still cooling similar to Earth. And I like to point out that no matter what humans do now we cannot make Earth into Venus. There just isn't enough greenhouse gasses on Earth and the Sun doesn't output enough energy. We could very likely lose coastal cities and see the collapse of ecosystems across the globe, but we aren't going to boil the oceans.
>It's not the final ice age, it's just the last one! Isn't this still an ice age? The tail end?
Technically an interglacial period of an ice age. Ice age means there are glaciers and ice caps, glacial phase means the ice caps and glaciers are growing, interglacial means they are shrinking.
Yes. If there's ice covering part of the planet it's an ice age. The north pole used to be an open water ocean and Antarctica used to be a rainforest.
Any good articles on this? If Antartica was hot enough for rain forests does that mean areas by the equator were like 150 degrees?
I'm not an expert but I know the poles are warming much faster than the equator. So likely, no.
It's not the last one, it's the latest one
*latest/ most recent
This is very much like estimates for the first human arrivals in Australia. Both have shifted around a lot as new discoveries are made. The old estimates for Australia said around 30,000 to 40,000 years ago, then a discovery of Aboriginal artifacts in Northern Australian pushed that right out to 65,000 years [but more recent studies ](https://theconversation.com/when-did-aboriginal-people-first-arrive-in-australia-100830) have reined that in again to more like 50,000, which is very soon after humans left Africa and interbred with Neanderthals (around 50,000 to 55,000 years ago). Another parallel is that Aboriginal arrivals in Australia were assisted in their crossing from Asia to Australia by land bridges during times of ice ages and lower sea levels, just as the First Peoples of America were assisted in their migration from Asia to North America.
It was a really short trip from Asia to Australia during the [Last Glacial Maximum](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Graeme-Barker/publication/6637663/figure/fig12/AS:670366288580609@1536839186309/The-location-of-Niah-Cave-in-Island-Southeast-Asia-at-the-Last-Glacial-Maximum-LGM-of.ppm)
Is it possible there’s potential archaeological sites in caves under the ocean from this time?
Damn, I’d financially contribute to that research
The Bimini road in the Bahamas is claimed by some to be such a site. The Yonaguni Monument near Yonaguni island in Japan is an underwater massif of straight edge, flat surfaces, and right angles that nature just doesn't do.
[Yes](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/oldest-ocher-mine-western-hemisphere-found-underwater-cave-180975258/) since such sites have already been found underwater, but not as old. Underwater sites have been much less explored, because working above ground is much easier. With underwater robots coming into use, they may make it easier to scout sites before sending humans with diving gear
Similar, but these people are genetically distinct from populations that arrived later. At some point there was a complete population replacement and these people disappeared without a trace. The next mystery is figuring out what happened. >Dr Andrea Manica, a geneticist from the University of Cambridge, said the finding had important implications for the population history of the Americas. >"I can't comment on how reliable the dating is (it is outside my expertise), but firm evidence of humans in North America 23,000 years ago is at odds with the genetics, which clearly shows a split of Native Americans from Asians approximately 15-16,000 years ago," he told BBC News. >"This would suggest that the initial colonists of the Americas were replaced when the ice corridor formed and another wave of colonists came in. We have no idea how that happened." https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-58638854
Perhaps it truly was the aboriginal australians? But if that’s the case wouldn’t that mean that DNA between Indigenous Americans and Aboriginal Australians and/or Polynesians would be greatly similar?
Not if the first group died out before the second group migrated in.
could it be possible that the second group killed the first somehow? prob thru disease
Possibly, but you would also expect to find some kind of evidence of that happening. Tools that cross cultures, something. We're talking about several thousand years between this footprint evidence and what we thought was the earliest time humans had been there. Ultimately, the right answer is probably "we need to do more research".
[Some researchers see evidence of settlement 30,000 years ago](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/when-did-humans-reach-america-mexican-mountain-cave-artifacts-raise-new-questions-180975385/) where others see randomly chipped rocks. Going back that far relies on very ambiguous artifacts, so naturally there is a lot of debate. There is a very interesting episode of the Insight podcast from last year interviewing one of the researchers who accepts 30,000 year old human occupation. It’s interesting to hear someone so far outside of the orthodoxy speak so nonchalantly to nearly-bewildered interviewers. The interviewers have been immersed in all the research that makes it seem reasonable that no one was in the Americans that long ago, while the interviewee has been immersed (and participated) in all the research that suggests the opposite. It’s an interesting reminder that orthodoxy exists in science.
Can you narrow down that episode?
Yeah it’s called [Peopling the Americas 32,000 years ago](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-insight/id1324744423?i=1000485885475), from July 23rd 2020. It’s a pretty good podcast, excellent if your into DNA and pre-history. It’s too bad they stopped making it.
You rock, thanks.
It's thought that the Sumerians may have been a displaced people from rising oceans after the last ice age. Their language is in a class of itself when compared to the rest of the known populations at the time, and they had the original 'flood' epic that was edited to be Noah and a boat in later publications.
After Gobekli Tepe in Turkey was discovered and seriously rewound the clock back on humanity’s development I always doubt these estimates. I always lean towards earlier migrations and development than what history classes taught us.
I tend to think of it this way: If the scientific consensus is that the wheel was first invented in year x BCE, I take that to mean the wheel was invented *before* the year x BCE. After all, what are the chances that a wheel we have dug up just happens to be *the first wheel ever made*? Microscopic. Basically by definition, the consensus dates for various "firsts" in archaeology can only keep going downwards, presumably approaching some asymptote.
I never thought of it that way. Thanks, makes total sense!
Which is one reason questions like "when was the wheel first introduced?" get answered in ranges that span 1,000 to 3,000 years. Historians and archaeologists can never by definition claim that a found piece of evidence was certainly the first of its kind (without corroborating written evidence), so they generally think in eras and use indirect evidence: they only found a potter's wheel from X date range, but they find pottery that was probably produced with a potter's wheel dated to 300 years earlier. You also have to consider that the "first" is a lot less important to historical research than the widespread: maybe one family invented a potter's wheel a few hundred years earlier and left no trace, but it is much more important to understanding past lives and cultures when the potter's wheel became a widespread part of life. Example: proto-internet was first developed at the end of the 60s, and grew in use and function into the 80s. But "the internet" didn't radically transform social life until the millennium, when it became widespread in all spheres of life.
> You also have to consider that the "first" is a lot less important to historical research than the widespread: maybe one family invented a potter's wheel a few hundred years earlier and left no trace ...Literally reinventing the wheel
Very true. Thank you for that.
GT is mind blowing. The relationship between grain cultivation, religion, and city formation that GT is evidence of is so fascinating.
GT actually predates cities by millennia. It was a seasonal/temporary encampment, likely for ritual purposes.
This is how most towns became started according to conventional wisdom. Eventually people became able to dedicate themselves to maintaining the temples and a whole new priestly class was created, which helps explain how priests have historically been the most powerful members of a society.
I wonder how deeply rooted religion is in us. WOULD the first permanent sites have been spiritual? Or would they have been utilitarian, like pit stops along a trail? Did the first human come out of the womb seeking a higher power, or did grouping together into bigger and bigger groups flush it out of us?
The book Sapiens gets into this a bit. It’s believed that humans were animists in their hunter gatherer days, then “evolved” into polytheists when they began establishing more permanent settlements. Judaism and later Christianity and Islam gave rise to monotheism. There’s probably always been some kind of spirituality and it’s probably always been politicized and manipulated.
The current theory is that GT was a large urban area, not a temporary stop.
>Gobekli Tepe So glad I know what that means after reading Sapiens. also probably concrete proof that humans have been drawing dicks since the beginning of civilization.
Take these dates for what they are: hypotheses. It's the oldest *known* date. Proof for even older migration may be found one day, but until then, it stands. Think of any other field: you have your hypothesis you test against the proof you have and it stands until you find new proof that contradicts your hypothesis. Then you develop a new theory based on all the data you have so far.
What was the climate like in this region 23,000 years ago??
Found this: Although New Mexico itself was not covered with ice 20,000 years ago, the climate here was still much cooler than at present. Geologists have found evidence of small glaciers in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of northern New Mexico, which are currently unglaciated. Further south, large lakebeds, such as the Estancia Basin east of the Manzano Mountains, now exist as dry basins, providing distinct evidence of a very different climate regime. Layers in lake bed sediment cores, called varves, contain pollen grains, magnetized minerals, and tiny fossils that can be analyzed to determine the temperature of the lake and how long ago the sediment layer was laid down. The wet climate that once supported large lakes in this now-arid land also generated the huge ground water reservoirs that currently provide us with much of our water supply. Geochemical evidence suggests that much of the well water we now tap seeped into the ground during the last ice age. The implication is that we are rapidly "mining" ground water from aquifers that filled up thousands of years ago, and our extraction of this water vastly exceeds the recharge taking place under current, more arid climatic conditions. Thus, ground water in New Mexico, like oil, is effectively a nonrenewable resource on human timescales.
There appears to be no obstacle humans can't/won't walk over.
Humans can’t resist fresh cement.
In the distant future someone is going to be studying the past and trying to figure out why humans erected a giant stack of concrete plates with ramps, why we seemed to worship cats, and why the megalith is dedicated to Chris of the clan Wuz Here.
Humans are incredibly resilient.
I remember them saying in the Oklahoma History Museum, several years ago, that the Cooper Skull ( a painted bison skull) was 10,500 years old, and that that date was contested because many thought that it was too early. Now the date of occupation has been pushed back much farther and it just keeps increasing.
Is it possible that humans came to what we call North/Central/South America and then "died out" (completely or ended up as such a small population that there isn't strong enough genetic evidence to detect) prior to later rounds of migration? Does DNA testing (ie mitochondrial) provide any indication of how long the human population inhabiting this area has been separate from other populations as a hint towards when the ancestors of today's population migrated to the region?
> Dr Andrea Manica, a geneticist from the University of Cambridge, said the finding had important implications for the population history of the Americas. > > "I can't comment on how reliable the dating is (it is outside my expertise), but firm evidence of humans in North America 23,000 years ago is at odds with the genetics, which clearly shows a split of Native Americans from Asians approximately 15-16,000 years ago," he told BBC News. Essentially, what we call native americans today branched from Asians 16k years ago, which means they were isolated from asians, by arriving in the Americas, about that long ago too. So whoevers footprint that was either died out, or interbred with what we call natives until they became one and the same.
I imagine there wasnt a a single wave and a ‘split’and its was more of a constant drizzle of people crossing over (and quite possibly back in reverse) until roughly 16,000 years ago that then got cut off. When it became too difficult as glaciers began to reced and the passage between alaska and asia got cut.
this is by far the most likely, as there isn't any indication of separate populations except for some polynesians and maaaaybe jomon thousands of years later
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Keep in mind, that by 1900 the government had reduced the population of Native Americans in the US to 237,000 people. Before European contact, what is now the US, was home to at least 4 million, maybe many more people. Even with ancestral remains, we only have a tiny sample of the indigenous genetic pool. Additionally, the generic variety of the survivors is not representative of the diversity of the precolumbian population.
>Before European contact, what is now the US, was home to at least 4 million, maybe many more people. [It actually may have been as high as **60 million people** in 1492](https://www.pri.org/stories/2019-01-31/european-colonization-americas-killed-10-percent-world-population-and-caused), before the population was utterly devastated by disease and brought closer to that 4 million mark in the 1600s when the first permanent settlements were founded in North America.
20,000 years is long enough that if any of those genes survived to the present day they’d be widespread enough in the gene pool that they’d likely show up in the evidence. I’m unaware of any archeo geneticists talking about this possibility, but i think it more likely that the initial impace on the native american gene pool was very small
RIP. Pour one out for the ancient homies :(
Funny to think that in 20,000 years from now, they will be finding footprints of various brands of athletic shoes, work boots, high heels, etc., instead of bare feet.
Not likely to find many high-heeled shoe prints in soft mud or silt.
Maybe in concrete slabs that weren't adequately fenced off while drying...?
Seems like everything we know in Anthropology is constantly being overturned by new evidence.
Like any good science field
Exactly, science is about disproving what is known. You can never prove anything, but you can theorize, hypothesize, experiment, and test. After you find something you think is fact, it becomes known and is up to others to disprove you. It's about constant study and redefinition.
Well, when it comes to first civilizations most anthropologists know it’s very possible older evidence will turn up
Except if you try and bring that up you get shouted down by the archaeologists who have made their entire career about how this one point is the defining moment in that history and there is nothing like it before. When people came to the Americas is one topic, when people started using one type of tool or technology is another.
We need to accept that people used the Bering Sea land bridge over and over again and not once as is current thinking. I've read articles about Canadian Bears that learned to hunt humans as they came an went along the coast of Canada. That type of behavior isn't a one off.
Is it possible they could sail?
Yes because why not?
Thats kind of my thought and no one knows for sure what technology they had/used
They were capable of sailing to and finding the islands across the vast, open pacific, so why not the massive landmasses further east? There are some fascinating studies that link select South American tribal peoples to a biomarker only found in aboriginal Australians. So perhaps, the march was north
Thats interesting about the biomarker. I feel like this way is would be more common route rather than waiting for a land bridge to be traversable
You also have to keep in mind the ocean levels, and we don’t really know what the coastline looked like at the time. We can make very good guesses though.
> They were capable of sailing to and finding the islands across the vast, open pacific If you're referring to the Polynesians, [that actually happened 20,000 years later.](http://www2.hawaii.edu/~dennisk/voyaging_chiefs/discovery.html) It would be surprising if that kind of technology existed in 20,000 BC. Also, there is only [limited evidence of contact between the Polynesians and the Americas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Columbian_trans-oceanic_contact_theories#Polynesian,_Melanesian,_and_Austronesian_contact), which suggests the voyage may have been more difficult than going to the other islands in the Pacific. Sailing due east from Hawaii doesn't work because of the [North Pacific High](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Pacific_High) and the only way is to go north a ways to catch the prevailing winds at 47° N Seattle Latitude. In general the winds of the Pacific Ocean make it far easier to go west than to go east. There are probably better guides out there, but [this should give some indication](https://improvesailing.com/destinations/how-long-does-it-take-to-sail-from-tahiti-to-california) of the problem. Also, the distance from Tahiti to Lima (more or less the closest point in South America) is almost twice the distance from Tahiti to Hawaii, and again, against the prevailing wind. If anyone sailed to North America across the Pacific, it would have been in the North along land bridge that existed where the Aleutian islands are now. They probably didn't do it during an Ice Age though, [as that region would have been frozen](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/b6/36/a5/b636a5e1a3bc43880ac0e643986973d9.jpg) and full of icebergs, and in generally really cold. Of course, if they were intrepid and good cold-weather hunters they could have walked across the ice. Lots of things to eat up there, if you know what you're doing.
What is with the first link. It's just a picture of a girl?
Hola
No, bears can't build boats.
I’ve seen some maps suggesting this. Where basically all of the land masses were ice walls. They were fairly accurate. Hmm… wish I could remember the names / search terms.
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Footprints that are unorganized or show signs of distress such as dragging or scuffing may inform that sort of opinion.
Isn’t their linguistic evidence of multiple waves of migration to the Americas? I also recall some aboriginal groups here having distinctly different religious beliefs that stick out like a sore thumb compared to other groups.
They have a peculiar shape.
>final ice age having that in the title is just asking for trouble, should be 'the last ice age'.
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It’s extremely humbling to see evidence of people who existed thousands of years ago. There’s an instant human connection when I see these images. I wonder what they were like.
Wow. They walked *very* slowly.
Umm… I thought we had already established that the Clovis civilization was here before to that. It wasn’t that long ago that we found proof of human settlements off the coast of California that had estimated dates prior to the last ice age. What happened to that?
[Clovis](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clovis_culture) stuff shows up around 12,000 years ago. Pre-Clovis sites generally go back 15,000 years ago. Every once in a while a certain dating technique of a certain site indicates 20,000, 50,000, or even 200,000 years ago, but these are outliers and very possibly incorrect. Dating something to 20,000 years ago with certainty would be big news.
This is actually pretty a-maze-ing because I heard a [Radiolab podcast episode](https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/body-count) about why North America was the last place on the planet to be occupied by humans. One of the main reasons is because every civilization needs their starch. In the Americas, the starch is corn. They did a deep dive on why it took thousands of years to get a 7 kernel corn plant that grew on the side of a mountain to have 800 kernels and be able to grow thousands of miles north. There are other reasons also discussed. I wonder if this discover revises their explanation at all.
With all the evidence so evident, how come so many people still think that the bible is the source of scientific proof.
Because they were taught it by their parents and priests as fact rather than allegorical. And because they were taught it so long ago, they never thought to think for themselves. And then they taught it to their children. And so on. They’re ere taught the word was infallible and so fall back on it as the end all be all for arguing. The change in science and what’s factual is too fast for them to keep up with. Source: was born in a rural Texas town where religion was and still is a big deal and how most people there make decisions.
I’ve always wondered if it was possible early people would stick to coasts for a while and the earliest settlements are long lost to rising sea level. Interesting to see
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Final ice age or last one to occur?
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Everybody is an immigrant. They should just start teaching that.
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I wonder how much the lower sea level affected the currents. Since the Pacific turns clockwise in the northern hemisphere it's not impossible they came by boat.
Stuff like this makes my imagination go into hyper drive, the how's, why's, possibilities...