Naked Science Forum

General Science => General Science => Topic started by: tedstruk on 13/03/2008 23:26:54

Title: Native American argument, discussion or fact?
Post by: tedstruk on 13/03/2008 23:26:54
I was just wondering...
...The migration theorys of american-hominidae

Why are scientists arguing about it, if there is no discussion on it?
 [:(!]
Maybe the answer lies in Ockhams Razor..... [^]

Maybe it's fact... [:I] naw.. too skin tingling... [?]


To be completely open with you..It's the fact that they are so much different...
Title: Native American argument, discussion or fact?
Post by: another_someone on 14/03/2008 03:04:44
Which migration theory? what difference? different to whom?

Is not difference in the eye of the beholder?  To most of the rest of the world, Europeans (or those of European descent) are a strange race, in that we have lots of different colour hair (anything from blond to black - everywhere else, the only colour hair is various shades of brown and black, except for the occasional albino), and the same goes for eye colouring.  We (Europeans) look at those differences and don't even see them as differences, but if you think about it, they are there.

So, you have to ask yourself what difference is significant, and why (apart from that which we are used to) would one difference be of greater significance than another.

This is not to deny that differences do exist, just why focus on one particular set, and what is it you are trying to prove by focusing on that?  It may be that what you are trying to show is relevant (if only you would make it plainer what that was), but simply saying "they are so much different" without being more specific, is not a very meaningful statement.
Title: Native American argument, discussion or fact?
Post by: JimBob on 14/03/2008 12:14:32
I think you misunderstood, George.

There are two (major) theories as to the first inhabitants of the species H. sapien, in the Americas. The oldest theory is that the first inhabitants of the Americas came across the Bearing land bridge and down a non-iced corridor though what is now Canada just east of the Rocky Mountains about 14,000 years ago. This has been debated (and cussed over) for a long time as the evidence for an ice-free corridor is rather slim to none during this period of time. There are also a couple of sites in the Argentine of South America that some anthropologists believe to be the first evidence of human habitation in the Americas that have carbon dates from the fire pits of 35,000 to 40,000 years ago. This is said by most anthropologist, all North American, to be spurious results, but I am not at all convinced. the paleoglyphs associated with these sites are Australian in nature. (See first reference, below.)It is possible that the Melanesian and Australians sailed this far east and established a culture in South America.

There is no dispute that about 10,000 years ago paleo-Indians came from Asia across Alaska and Canada and colonized all of the western hemisphere. BUT There is evidence - now considered rather valid, that the Americas were in habited as early as 17,000 years ago. The evidence also suggest a series of migrations from east to west.

The best example of these is th Clovis culture. Dated as early as 14,000 years ago, this culture, identified by its very distinctive fluted stone crafting of spear points found in Mastodon remains, is most closely related to the Solutrean culture of southern France and the Iberian peninsula. There are growing numbers of archaeologist that believe this to be the way the Clovis culture arrived in North America and spread to the west coast and as far south as Peru. It arrived 14,000 years ago (todays estimates) by hunters similar in nature to the Eskimo or Inuit culture, travailing in skin boats along the ice edge across the Atlantic from what is now the Basque region to island above sea level (which was 300-400 feet lower than today) on the Grand Banks of present Newfoundland, then into the Eastern United States. To date, the largest concentration of Clovis points is not in the western US but on the east coast of the US. New evidence may alter this but the earliest and most prolific sites are all either east of or in the Appalachian Mountains of the eastern US.

And if you really want to get into the discussion of the oldest Americans, see the last reference, that suggest a 50,000 year old inhabitant.

 
Early 1999 article - dates younger than current thinking

http://www.cabrillo.edu/~crsmith/firstamer.html

2006 Smithsonian Museum page:

http://www.nmnh.si.edu/rtp/students/2006/schedule06_anthropology_lecture_photo.html

2007:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/stoneage/about.html

2004;
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/11/041118104010.htm
Title: Native American argument, discussion or fact?
Post by: DoctorBeaver on 14/03/2008 13:59:37
Jim - I've heard of the Clovis people. Haven't some of their settlements (at least 1 fairly large 1) been found in Florida? I seem to recall something to do with dwellings on stilts.
Title: Native American argument, discussion or fact?
Post by: JimBob on 14/03/2008 16:15:06
I do not recall having seen this but I am not an archaeologist. The Florida cultures did include Clovis. MANY of the cultures had raised burial structures but if there ones in Florida I am not familiar with them. I was in Florida over the Christmas holidays and it is just like the rest of the southeastern US. Only the southernmost part - and only part of that area in total, is swamp land. Interestingly, only the Seminole Indians, the tribe that was in Florida when the Europeans came, remained unconquered by any army, including the US Army. A quote from their web site:

"No Surrender!
     By May 10, 1842, when a frustrated President John Tyler ordered the end of military actions against the Seminoles, over $20 million had been spent, 1500 American soldiers had died and still no formal peace treaty had been signed. [They were, however, driven into the swamps] The Seminoles began the 20th century where they had been left at the conclusion of the Seminole Wars - in abject poverty, hiding out in remote camps in the wet wilderness areas of South Florida." http://www.seminoletribe.com/

Clovis points have been found in all but the northwestern part of the country and in only the southern parts of California, not northern California. It seems that new arrivals dominated the landscape as the influx of Asiatic stock came in about 10,000 years ago, dominating all existing cultures.
Title: Native American argument, discussion or fact?
Post by: DoctorBeaver on 14/03/2008 19:07:41
Here's a good page about the Clovis people http://www.rinr.fsu.edu/winter2002/index.html (http://www.rinr.fsu.edu/winter2002/index.html)
Title: Native American argument, discussion or fact?
Post by: JimBob on 14/03/2008 20:52:49
Thanks for the reference, Eth.

I had lunch with the geologist who did the geological stratigraphy work on the Gault site today, Dr. Ernie Lundelius, Professor Emeritus of Vertebrate Paleontology at UT Austin. He has worked with many, many archaeologist as his main field of study is Pleistocene Fauna, fauna always associated with paleo-indians. The Gault site is also only 30, miles from here near Florence, Texas. We discussed this at length. There is a lot of evidence from many places that the Clovis population was a replacement culture of earlier peoples and that about 13,000 years ago when they first appeared they were highly stressed, probably due to competition with other cultures they were replacing. He and archaeologist Dr. Michael B. Collins have been doing CAT scans of human teeth found there that show a disease only found in a stressed populations. This is considered to possibly be because of conflict with existing cultures.

So in their minds "one of the most important Clovis sites in North America" is due to the replacement of an earlier society by the Clovis culture from Europe. Ernie also spoke of the European genetics of th Algonquin Indians. It is old mitochondrial DNA not from recent European interbreeding.

In the picture found on this page - http://www.texasbeyondhistory.net/gault/images/X1.html - Ernie Lundelieus is the bald guy in a white shirt whose head is the first one you hit if you bring a horizontal line down from the top of the picture. He is standing with his hands on his hips next to a man in a straw hat and a khaki short sleeve shirt behind the tape line. 

During our lunch, Ernie also cited a mathematical paper by a French archaeologist - The grand old man of Solutrean culture, I was told - who analyzed the sequence of steps needed to produce both Solutrean and Clovis points. The sequence of strokes is almost exactly the same and in his mind, is absolute proof that Solutrean was the precursor to the Clovis. The statistical chances that the over 400-stroke-sequences needed to make Solutrean and Clovis points evolved separately are almost infinitesimal. Ernie is convinced that the connection is proven - and as I said this guy is a Rhodes Scholar and one of the smartest men I have ever had the pleasure to know.

He also taught me how to have a blast while doing drudgery. We all would get in the lab, pick teeth from sandy sediments, and tell jokes, stories and have a grand time. Golly, I was 20 years old once!
 
I'm in there doing work for you guys - and having a wonderful French lunch at the same time. Ah, the crab-stuffed Mushroom caps!
Title: Native American argument, discussion or fact?
Post by: another_someone on 14/03/2008 21:08:23
Thanks for the clarification.  I had realised there were multiple migration to the Americas, and there was some debate about the dates, but had not realised there was any serious suggestion of a large scale westward migration before the 15th century, although there has always been some evidence of occasional ships getting lost across the Atlantic, or even Viking trade contacts in the 11th century, but not of a full migration.  Similarly, the debate about what sounds like a reverse Kon Tiki migration, although I think I had heard about some speculation, had not realised it was being taken seriously.
Title: Native American argument, discussion or fact?
Post by: DoctorBeaver on 14/03/2008 21:45:31
Jim - that's fascinating. So, Columbus gets pushed even further down the list.
Title: Native American argument, discussion or fact?
Post by: another_someone on 14/03/2008 22:26:43
Jim - that's fascinating. So, Columbus gets pushed even further down the list.

Columbus was an opportunist and nothing much else.

He knew the Portuguese were monopolising the Eastern route to India around Africa, and he knew the Spanish would love to open up a new route to India that would side step the Portuguese.  He probably also knew that the Basques were crossing the North Atlantic in search of whales, and that they had made land fall there (what we now know as Newfoundland).  So he sold the idea to the Spanish that the Basques must have found a route to the eastern shores of China, so if they could sponsor him to travel just a slightly more southerly route, he would get to India - so he got to the West Indies.

He almost certainly already knew that there was a continental land mass there even before he set sail, because the Basque whalers knew it.  He just got his geography totally mixed up.
Title: Native American argument, discussion or fact?
Post by: JimBob on 15/03/2008 03:42:27
This is about the southern limit of the Atlantic Ice sheet about 15,000 years ago.

(https://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi38.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Fe111%2Fgeezer69%2FNorthAtlantic.jpg&hash=4ddf752dc2df21bcc8911efc0a7e8f14)
Title: Native American argument, discussion or fact?
Post by: another_someone on 15/03/2008 04:08:12
Interesting - is that winter or summer ice cover?  If that is summer ice cover, then what happened to all the large mammals that supposedly lived north of that line (e.g. mammoths - they may have been woolly, but they still needed to feed, and for that you needed vegetation, not merely ice).
Title: Native American argument, discussion or fact?
Post by: DoctorBeaver on 15/03/2008 07:46:39
As Kerry Katona might say "That's why Mammoths go to Iceland"  [:D]

(Jim won't understand that)

Seriously, though, George has raised a good point. Did the animals move south and then return with the thaw?
Title: Native American argument, discussion or fact?
Post by: JimBob on 15/03/2008 14:59:20
Get out'a da way. Here come the ice, here come the ice. 

This is ice cover due to glaciation at the time the Clovis Culture - or pre-Clovis Solutrean culture - came to the Americas. It was the same in the summer as well as the winter - it was the southern limit of Würm glaciation between 24,000 to 13,000? years ago.

That is why where I live in Texas some of the most common bones of Pleistocene fauna are mammoth bones, horse bones and bison bones. (Bison are new-comers to America. They are probably the reason that the horse died out in America as bison are more efficient grazers.)
Title: Native American argument, discussion or fact?
Post by: DoctorBeaver on 15/03/2008 20:12:04
Are you talking about prehistoric horses? I thought that the horse as we know it today was introduced into the Americas by the Spaniards.
Title: Native American argument, discussion or fact?
Post by: JimBob on 15/03/2008 23:51:40
Horses evolved in the Americas.

The horses that existed when bison came into North America were almost identical to those of today. The Genus Equus was contemporaneous to the pre-Clovis cultures and predation is known to have occurred. These were pony-sized, one toed and hoofed precursors of the horse as we know it today. The final evolution of the horse was in the Asian Steps. But all horses began in the Americas, from the tiniest Hyracotherium to a horse we would recognize today. By two million years ago horses would be identifiable if you saw one standing in your pasture and were spread all over Asia, Africa, the Americas and Europe. The gap in the presence of horses in the Americas is only about 10-20,000 years.
 
Title: Native American argument, discussion or fact?
Post by: DoctorBeaver on 16/03/2008 08:21:24
Quote
The final evolution of the horse was in the Asian Steps.

That's what I thought. I didn't realise they had started in the Americas. Thank you for enlightening me.
Title: Native American argument, discussion or fact?
Post by: another_someone on 16/03/2008 12:45:19
Quote
The final evolution of the horse was in the Asian Steps.

That's what I thought. I didn't realise they had started in the Americas. Thank you for enlightening me.

The difference was that it was in Asia that Horses developed a symbiotic relationship with mankind, and so obtained the protection of man.

Now, in the age of the mechanical horse, the real horse is to some extent ofcourse suffering.
Title: Native American argument, discussion or fact?
Post by: ukmicky on 16/03/2008 15:20:57
A few words from someone who knows nothing on the subject who would like to butt in as i'm now getting confused 

Looking at your diagram showing the southern most edge of the ice sheet i noticed it extends far beyond England, however i thought the fossil record showed  that the european ice sheet could only have extended down as far down as london.

I also heard that in europe and southern regions of England many sites have been found where wooley mammoth bones from the ice age have been found along side hippopotomus and other animals and plant life usally associated with warmer climates, showing that they were were co-existing at the same time in the same regions during the ice age . How could this be if the ice sheets extended down as far as your diagram shows.
Title: Native American argument, discussion or fact?
Post by: JimBob on 16/03/2008 22:15:48
The glacial age, which we are still in, is compose of four major glacial events - advances and retreats - over the last 680,000 years -  and then even further back in time during the Pleistocene. During the interglacial periods, these animals (and hominids) could very well have existed in The UK.

OK - found one of the proposed limits - not too far off from what I drew.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/19/CLIMAP.jpg

Also see:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_glaciation