Perhaps OT, but these discoveries never seem to actually "upend our understanding of human history", they just refine it by changing our previous assumptions about various timelines.
Discovering that we were put here by aliens 6000 years ago would be an upending.
It's a case where an extraordinary claim should require unambiguous evidence, something more than making people say "hmm, maybe it was humans?" when they can't explain exactly what they see.
If you postulate pre-Clovis settlements, now you need to explain why they weren't able to quickly expand to fill what was very fertile land for hunting, the way the Clovis people did. And how they managed to get so far south without having populations large enough to leave any unambiguous artifacts.
These "upending" discoveries of pre-Clovis sites remind me of the frequent news articles that were being written about the EM Drive which purported to revolutionize space travel by violating the fundamental law of conservation of momentum.
Saying "just use common sense" is very pat and appealing in cases where we have direct apprehension about the domain in question- such as in plane geometry- but in cases where we have no direct access to a question aside from experiment and abstract reasoning (such as deep history or physics,) how do you distinguish "common sense" from simple conservatism?
I'd imagine there's plenty of possible reasons pre-Clovis Americans wouldn't have been as numerous or left as much evidence as Clovis-people did; most obviously, that the continent was much colder, and therefore supportive of much smaller populations, than it was in the Clovis culture era- particularly in the northern regions, where it's often objected that they "should" have left remains. Obviously, this isn't an argument that there were pre-Clovis settlers, but an example of why the idea can't be objected out-of-hand through "common sense."
> most obviously, that the continent was much colder, and therefore supportive of much smaller populations,
Okay, but we're assuming a population capable of migrating as far as San Diego, and capable of hunting mammoths. You'd need enough population to sustain the many hundreds of years of generations it would take to get that far, and just exactly the sort of population balance where they wouldn't leave any obvious traces? And given they made it halfway down the continent, and through the most inhospitable places, why didn't they go further south where they could have immediately flourished in lush lands full of megafauna who hadn't evolved to fear us? Humanity's record seems full enough of such population explosion incidents after all, including the Clovis-people themselves.
Off: I chuckle everytime I’m misled like this when skimming through HN titles. Yesterday there was a piece about Kafka (the writer, not the event stream) and now this Mastodon stuff.
When I've seen mastodon in one of the titles for the first time here I was surprised, because I thought that one of my favorite bands are being discussed here.
The title seems inline with the quotes from experts:
> “My first reaction on reading this paper was ‘No. This is wrong. Something’s wrong,'” said stone tool expert John McNabb of the University of Southampton in Britain. “If it does turn out to be true, it changes absolutely everything.”
And
> “This discovery is rewriting our understanding of when humans reached the New World,” Judy Gradwohl, president and CEO of the San Diego Natural History Museum, said in a statement.
Those quotes were probably cherry picked and a little out of context, but when experts in the field use such strong language, I think it's justified for reporters to do the same.
I believe the original comment was referring to being misled / confused about the decentralized social network Mastodon (https://joinmastodon.org/), not being misled as to the significance of the finding.
And when Indians say that the Ramayana & Mahabharata episodes are over 30,000 & 10,000 years old, some people call them fake. Some others say they occurred within the last 3000 years because how could anything be more than 5000 years old before the biblical god created the universe.
Idea for a research project: find as many "...could upend our understanding..." and similarly titled papers as possible, that are at least a few years old, and see what percentage of them actually do, in fact, upend our understanding of the field in question. I'm thinking, uh, less than 50%.
previous research cited in this article says "The oldest widely accepted site for the first Americans dates to just 13,000 years ago." this coincidences well with the 12,800 years ago Younger Dryas event.
Professional archaeologist checking in. I hate to spoil the party, but the argument this represents evidence of human occupation of North America 130 thousand years ago doesn't hold water.
First, there isn't even consensus that Homo sapiens left Africa by that time. Additionally, the preponderance of evidence shows humans didnt occupy fully glacial environments until 80+ thousand years later, which would be necessary to make it to NE Asia and North America. The claim they were in North America by 130 thousand years ago is inconsistent with all available archaeological and genetic evidence (a whole other topic).
Second, the argument that the "tools" and bone modification seen at this site were made by people doesn't hold up either. There are many natural processes that can mimic these types of breakage. There are diagnostic features of stone tools and broken bones produced by humans, but none of them are present on the objects Holen et al. point to.
Holen has a long history of making similar claims with no real evidence. He consistently fails to rule out obvious natural processes at sites he works at. I have personally seen him pick up a piece of naturally fractured fossil bone from a flood deposit and say "see, people." This is science by press release at it's worst, and there is good reason no other archaeologists accept his arguments. Unfortunately flashy headlines with extraordinary claims grab the press.
Don't get me wrong, I would LOVE for this to be true. Finding evidence for a much earlier occupation of North America would be super exciting. But as a responsible scientist, I have to go with the evidence.
Hmmm, looking through the comments it looks very much like no one has read the article as the comments assume that the humans were Homo Sapiens. In fact the article speculates that the humans where either neanderthals or Denisovans.
The earliest neanderthals date to 400k years ago. And the high arctic at the time of this find 130k years ago was pretty much one cold dry circumpolar ecosystem as ocean levels were much lower than today. Given all of this context it's not really insane to think this could have happened though of course more evidence is needed.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/02/debate-heats-up-over...
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