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April 26, 2017 11:23 AM   Subscribe

Unknown humans may have been in California 130,000 years ago [SL Ars Technica] Date is a whopping 115,000 years earlier than previous findings of humans in the Americas.
posted by Celsius1414 (53 comments total) 33 users marked this as a favorite
 
Prehistory breaks my brain. And on a geological scale, it is, itself, an eye blink.
posted by Happy Dave at 11:34 AM on April 26, 2017 [2 favorites]


I feel like I'm going to have to see many more sites with this date before I'd believe it fully, but it *is* plausible. The ancestors of the aboriginal Australians could sail to Australia 75,000 years ago, so why not some group living off the coast of SE Asia? Could be people hopping the pacific Islands- Could be related to the Denisovans- we know so little about them. Lots of possibilities, but I'd really like to see the data they collected and an exact breakdown of their dating techniques, because this would upend a lot of settled science (which is great!) so the burden of proof is on them. Maybe this is evidence of my kin, the California Neanderthal. Not likely. But cool to think about.
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 11:42 AM on April 26, 2017 [8 favorites]




found something extraordinary buried below a sound berm next to the San Diego freeway in Southern California

Stuck on the 5 since the beginning of time
posted by wcfields at 12:28 PM on April 26, 2017 [47 favorites]


I'm instinctively doubtful. There were certainly tool-making Homo varieties in East Asia at that period, but no evidence that they anything like the technological sophistication to build boats, and the article specifies that it was a warm interglacial period so no potential coastal route on foot across Beringia and down the coast. It's a long way from the recent evidence that homo sapiens got here well before Clovis, and this.
posted by tavella at 12:49 PM on April 26, 2017 [1 favorite]


I am always surprised at the absolutely nopers. There is so much mysterious stuff still walking the world, right now. I was around what looks like a small herd of aurochs, in a canyon with a persistent spring on the Navajo reservation, they are wild. There was also a group of striped donkeys living near Halchita they were brown, but you could see the zebra like stripes in their fur. Well, they were living on a nuclear waste dump, but even so. There is a whole lot of human history that vanished sometime within the last 50,000 years, according to geneticists who say we were down to a population of around 1200 people at one point in that time span. Stuff happens and populations are missed by disaster, and flourish unbeknownst, while broad, populated areas are decimated by others. There is no absolute on this shifting planet, my mom had an incredible map from National Geographic, that showed the current placement of the continents, and undersea, mountain ranges, after mountain ranges, that look like those continents tarried a bit in one place and then moved over, again and again, the tracks are all over the bottom of the sea.

It is possible that all timelines are off, and that those early San Diego residents were just here, and did not come from anywhere. The Hopi claim to be the ancestors of us all.
posted by Oyéah at 1:52 PM on April 26, 2017 [6 favorites]


An explanation and summary of arguments for and against from National Geographic.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 2:06 PM on April 26, 2017 [4 favorites]


...And on the other side of the world, the primitive human remains found in Rising Star cave may only be 200,000-300,000 years old, potentially overlapping with Homo Sapiens. It's amazing to me how wonderfully mixed-up and nonlinear our understanding of human evolution has become...
posted by Esteemed Offendi at 2:18 PM on April 26, 2017 [4 favorites]


Oyéah, the continents don't leave tracks on the bottom of the sea. The bottom of the sea expands at mid-oceanic ridges, which is what pushes the continents around. And while you are right to be non-absolute, the dates of 130,000 suggest we are missing 115,000 years of archaeological evidence in the Americas, which is very unlikely if no other reason than on every other continent the old sites have been fairly numerous and easy to find. I mean, Neanderthals were found in the mid 19th century, after all. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but when it is overwhelming absence it is damn close.

Anyway, the SciAm article in the OP is good, it represents the views of many leading Americanist archaeologists, specifically ones who I know have an open mind about the timing of first people into the Americas. They are uniformly very skeptical and rightly so, this archaeological site fails at being a site first, regardless of where it is and how old it is. The mystery is how it passed peer review in Nature.
posted by Rumple at 2:24 PM on April 26, 2017 [10 favorites]


I'm not an absolutely noper, but I have also learned to never put any real faith in the initial breathless pop-science explosion over any new supposed discovery, and especially not in ones that would utterly shatter the existing structure of the field. I'm not saying it's completely out of the question, just that we're at least 5-10 years from the amount of scrutiny and study this sort of thing would require to stop being utterly baffling even in the best of circumstances.
posted by neonrev at 2:28 PM on April 26, 2017 [18 favorites]


Also, tavella, the Bering Strait dries out when sea level is only about 30 metres lower than today, which is much higher than the typical Pleistocene levels of 40-60 metres. Yes this site may be from a warm period but it is not likely to be the oldest site (if it is real), and it also sits in a >20,000 year bubble of dating uncertainty, so yes, the Bering Straits could have been dry. Not that these people weren't possibly to be able to make boats, but boats are much easier in warm water environments - see emerging evidence that Crete was occupied more than 100,000 years ago. I'd put the figure for Australia at closer to 60,000 max than 75,000 but who really knows where that debate will go - there's a new site on Sulawesi (never joins to Sunda) which is about 110,000 years old - that would have required boats.

Anyway, yes the Homo naledi dates and the new understanding of Homo floresiensis ("hobbits" )as more closely related to Homo habilis than to either Homo erectus or Homo sapiens shows we have a lot to learn. Which is good, keeps peoples' minds open.
posted by Rumple at 2:32 PM on April 26, 2017 [2 favorites]


Why couldn't a band of hominids have made it somehow across the ocean, stayed for a while, and then left? Or died off? Why do we presume that a campfire in California means that lots of them were here for a long time?

Nothing in their research suggests continuous habitation. Their research doesn't negate the longer, more established research that puts humans here in large numbers around 13-15,000 years ago.

Prehistory isn't a zero-sum process; it's a continuum.
posted by disclaimer at 2:38 PM on April 26, 2017 [5 favorites]


"Somehow across the ocean" is exactly the problem. That's a third of the earth's surface and is essentially impossible to cross by accident, not to mention the west to east current would originate in what is now Japan, be relatively cold, have no stepping stones to speak of, and there is little to no evidence for people in far east coastal NE Asia or Japan at this time.
posted by Rumple at 2:57 PM on April 26, 2017 [6 favorites]


Has anyone considered the Encino Man theory?
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 3:06 PM on April 26, 2017 [8 favorites]


Do we know anything about Pacific Ocean currents 130,000 years ago? Is a trip from Indonesia or China possible?

An if they did come from Asia during this period - if they did come at all and this isn't just a mistake - would they most likely be Homo erectus?
posted by clawsoon at 3:08 PM on April 26, 2017


Sorry for the multi-posts, but one of the peer reviewers is Dr Erella Hovers from Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who is a known paleolithic archaeologist but with no experience at all in the Americas or even Asia so far as I can tell. This is not necessarily bad, but Nature let her publish what amounts to be an op-ed (probably paywalled) on this site without identifying her as a peer reviewer of the article she is commenting on, which is extremely odd. In no way is this an independent assessment of the paper since her credibility, as a public peer reviewer is now on the line. Further, in that ope-ed, she sites Calico Hills as merely controversial (LOL), and cites Old Crow, a site which has been debunked for several decades (ROFLMAO). It's just really sloppy and surprising for a journal of Nature's quality and a scholar of her reputation.
posted by Rumple at 3:08 PM on April 26, 2017 [5 favorites]


The currents at 130,000 would be very similar as today, since the continental configuration is the same and the basic drivers of current (insolation, depth, coriolis force) would be the same. No doubt one could establish this via looking at forams or other sea core proxies.

They would probably have to be erectus, and if they were, AND in California, then there is no reason to think there wasn't a viable population of erectus in SW and W North America, merely one of the most ecologically-friendly corners of the planet. As a supremely successful species of Homo, there's no obvious reason why an established population of erectus would disappear in the absence of competition with Homo sapiens -- I mean, that didn't happen elsewhere so far as I know. And yet, disappear they did, with no other archaeological record left behind, and with no genetic signature, etc. It'd be odd, to say the least.
posted by Rumple at 3:14 PM on April 26, 2017 [5 favorites]


"where that bomb ass hemp be"?
posted by cashman at 4:20 PM on April 26, 2017 [1 favorite]


Does Nature list peer reviewers?

That's an interesting cultural difference, relative to my field.
posted by steady-state strawberry at 4:27 PM on April 26, 2017


Aliens. Alien Uber.

Why couldn't a band of hominids have made it somehow across the ocean, stayed for a while, and then left? Or died off? Why do we presume that a campfire in California means that lots of them were here for a long time?

The OP article specifically proposes this:
If we accept all this evidence, the question remains: what happened to those early Americans, and why haven't we seen more of their discarded stones and bones? Holen believes that these early mastodon hunters probably lived in very dispersed, small bands. The population was low. Plus, he noted, "It’s possible that the early population came in and did not make it. Humans could become locally extinct if the environment wasn't favorable for human adaptation in that area." So we may not ever find many of these people's tools because there were so few of them, or they simply died out before leaving much behind.
posted by XMLicious at 4:37 PM on April 26, 2017 [1 favorite]


Does Nature list peer reviewers?


It's an option for the reviewer to be anonymous or identified. Fairly common now in science in my experience.
posted by Rumple at 4:43 PM on April 26, 2017


"The cheese is old and moldy. Where is the bathroom?"
posted by kersplunk at 4:53 PM on April 26, 2017


Is there any other evidence for pre-Sapiens hominids anywhere else in the Americas at all?
posted by Joe in Australia at 5:01 PM on April 26, 2017


Well there is evidence that the Denisovans made it to America.
posted by domo at 5:09 PM on April 26, 2017


Isn't the evidence that Denisovans mated with Sapiens who made it to America, not that the Denisovans themselves did?
posted by clawsoon at 5:27 PM on April 26, 2017


Beringia, Beringia. Tired hangup. There have been ice advances and retreats for the past 750K years.
Each glacial advance tied up huge volumes of water in continental ice sheets ... resulting in temporary sea-level drops of 100 metres (300 ft) or more over the entire surface of the Earth. - WP
So only in the last one did human ancestors wander onto the continent?? Or maybe a few thousands of them wandered to NA and stayed. Ages and ages before 'Beringia'.

The trouble with being certain you've got the 'truth' is that it blinds you to other possibilities. That's a religious problem, not a scientific one. Whenever evidence is excluded, that's not science. And clearly, all the evidence is not in.
posted by Twang at 5:27 PM on April 26, 2017


I really wish Kage Baker was alive because I think she would have enjoyed this.
posted by jenfullmoon at 5:42 PM on April 26, 2017 [3 favorites]


As Rumple mentioned, the other unusually "old" archaeological site in southern California is Calico, which hasn't gained mainstream acceptance in the 40 years since it was declared to be evidence of human occupation a few hundred thousand years ago. It'll be interesting to see where this one goes.
posted by cosmologinaut at 8:31 PM on April 26, 2017


And perhaps more regular readers of Nature can enlighten me, what's the difference between a "Research Letter" (like this article) and, um, research?
posted by cosmologinaut at 8:39 PM on April 26, 2017


Because I'm an ignoramus, I never knew we could carbon date for things like tool marks. Is that really cut and dried? Am I an idiot for thinking what if the too marks were made much later by humans who discovered ancient tusks?
posted by Joseph Gurl at 9:22 PM on April 26, 2017


cosmologinaut - you can see the difference between "Letters to Nature" and other article forms here. The letter is described as "Letters are short reports of original research focused on an outstanding finding whose importance means that it will be of interest to scientists in other fields."

Joseph Gurl -- typically you can't date the tool mark as a separate event. And in this case, there are no "tool marks" in the sense of linear cut marks. However, the pattern of bone breakage is consistent only with fresh bone (so dead less than a year or two at most), and, this is the controversial bit, also only consistent with human agency in the form of hard-hammer (rock) percussion on the bone. In either case, the damage to the bone happens very close to the death of the animal, so dating the bone itself dates the modification to within a reasonable window of error.

Cut marks could indeed be put onto a bone once it is long dead and dry (though they may be different than fresh bone cuts) but that's not the case here. Here's an old blog post of mine which mentions a case of fossil tusk being re-worked at a later date.
posted by Rumple at 10:29 PM on April 26, 2017 [7 favorites]


Thanks, Rumple!
posted by Joseph Gurl at 10:29 PM on April 26, 2017 [2 favorites]


All I'll add to this is that just the other day I heard a talk from a tribal chair here in California, who said "archaeology has dated people to this region 15,000 years ago... of course we know we were here much longer, but sometimes it takes a while for scientists to catch up with indigenous knowledge about our own history. For now we'll just say it's been at least 15,000 years." I bet he got a kick out of this headline.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 12:44 AM on April 27, 2017 [2 favorites]


Findings like this are just as likely to be used to undermine claims to aboriginality or indigeneity asserted by contemporary Native people. "Oh you weren't really here first" has been an implication taken from speculative archaeological findings by anti-Native interests at least since the Kennewick Man incident. Watch it happen here.
posted by spitbull at 7:17 AM on April 27, 2017 [4 favorites]


This is an interesting bit of context - I decided to look up what's known about spiral fractures in large mammals, to see what other causes might exist beside hungry hominids bashing the rocks together.

During observational fieldwork in undisturbed ranges of free-rooming bison and moose, I have identified approximately 8% of surface bones as spirally or green-fractured due to documented carnivore activity, and 5% as spirally or green-fractured due to trampling or dust wallowing by bison. The bones of smaller species suffer up to 50% breakage. Bone modifications by wild wolves and bears are briefly described, as are characteristics of fractures caused by trampling and wallowing.

Which means the report comes down to either being a unique example of early human presence or evidence of a common occurrence we can observe today.
posted by Devonian at 7:38 AM on April 27, 2017 [1 favorite]


Devonian, that's a good point, usually archaeologists would look at a package of spiral fracture + cut marks +other bone modification / missing body elements, etc to make a case for human agency in the absence of stone tools or other definite artifacts.

The odd thing about this claimed site is that the "butchered" mastodon is amongst the remains of many other megafauna such as giant sloth and dire wolf, which are not butchered. On the other hand, the authors claim that the presence of large rocks (including hammer and anvil stones) is a sign of human intervention -- since it is a silty deposit the large rocks must have come from somewhere, and they say there isn't enough energy to deposit the rocks without messing with the mastodon remains. Yet some agency, apparently NOT humans, deposited those other fauna there.

So it seems there is a logical break here to me: either it was a low energy environment and human agency is implicated in moving the rocks (in which case, how did those other fauna just happen to be there?), or, if the mastodon is not cultural, it may be a higher energy environment than they think, and the same forces which broke the rocks and bones also brought together this large assemblage of megafauna. Ignoring the other fauna just raises questions they avoid about how the entire assemblage came to be together.
posted by Rumple at 2:35 PM on April 27, 2017 [3 favorites]


initial breathless pop-science explosion over any new supposed discovery

Just to be clear, the bones were first found in 1992. They took a long, long look at them before this week's announcement.
posted by Mo Nickels at 2:38 PM on April 27, 2017 [1 favorite]


Rumple, as an anthropologist I'm appreciating your contributions to this thread a lot.
posted by spitbull at 5:44 PM on April 27, 2017 [1 favorite]


of course we know we were here much longer, but sometimes it takes a while for scientists to catch up with indigenous knowledge about our own history. For now we'll just say it's been at least 15,000 years."

Under any other context, "this is what SCIENCE says" *wink* *wink* *nudge* *nudge* is something that no one around here would approve of.
posted by steady-state strawberry at 6:36 PM on April 27, 2017


"Oh you weren't really here first" has been an implication taken from speculative archaeological findings by anti-Native interests at least since the Kennewick Man incident. Watch it happen here.

Yeah, if this particular finding doesn't fall apart under scrutiny, it'll probably play out exactly the way Kennewick Man did -- if this is found to have been an earlier hominid species, then it'll be shown that this species disappeared in competition with modern humans, which implies that modern Native people were the ones who displaced this species. Which, exactly, says "you weren't really here first."

I may have sounded flip last night, but I really am curious to know how Native people, especially Native scholars, are reacting to this study, especially since I know a few indigenous archaeologists who have been arguing for years that new finds will push back estimates of the earliest human occupation in North America. The context here isn't so much "this is what SCIENCE says," wink wink, as it is "Native people's accounts of their own history are treated as unreliable by default, and can only be validated by a mode of knowledge production that places all the authority in the hands of the colonizing powers." In that context, any find like this has potentially enormous significance to indigenous scholars and activists, even if it (like anything) can and probably will be be leveraged against them.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 8:23 PM on April 27, 2017 [3 favorites]


Findings like this are just as likely to be used to undermine claims to aboriginality or indigeneity asserted by contemporary Native people.

The Washitaw sovereign citizens: where the Baton Rouge gunman found a home

A group of black sovereign citizen types who claim to be the descendants of original inhabitants of the Americas that were around for millions of years, since Pangaea separated, and that consequently Native Americans are very recent invaders and trespassers on their land.
In the mid-1990s she and Umar traveled to Geneva, to lobby for recognition at a meeting of indigenous peoples. During their stay, they twice entered meetings held by Native American tribes. At one point, Verdiacee took a seat at the head of a great table.

A young woman whispered to her: “Ma’am, you are sitting in the chief’s seat.”

Verdiacee refused to move. “I am the empress over all of you,” she announced. The tribes canceled their meeting, and left her sitting at an empty table.

...

The whiff of legitimacy was enough to bring other sovereign groups out of the wilderness and to the empress’ door. She had a shot at international recognition, and they wanted a piece of it.

Skinheads. Militias. Neo-Nazis. Paleo-Nazis. White supremacists. White nationalists. People who would have slit her throat previously came bearing gifts for the woman they now called “empress”.
These other groups have evidently been avid to franchise the Washitaw identity in the belief that it confers onto them the same fictitious claim to paramount indigeneity.
posted by XMLicious at 9:24 PM on April 27, 2017 [2 favorites]


Yeah because 10-15,000 years (vs. 500 and change) ain't squat and somehow an even older layer of habitation erases the genocide committed by Europeans against Native Americans who were here for millennia before Columbus discovered his own ass just a few centuries ago. Sigh. I'm taking the pulse of Native colleagues on this story and may report back.
posted by spitbull at 11:16 PM on April 27, 2017 [1 favorite]


The context here isn't so much "this is what SCIENCE says," wink wink, as it is "Native people's accounts of their own history are treated as unreliable by default, and can only be validated by a mode of knowledge production that places all the authority in the hands of the colonizing powers."

"Native people's accounts of their own history" from 15,000+ years ago?

In a different world, I might be sympathetic. But this is a world where we've been cutting science funding to the bone and where tons of people think that their own accounts of the world being created 5,000 years ago ought to be taught in school.

This sort of 'other ways of knowing' crap can go and die in a fire.

And, having said that, I'm defollowing this thread, because this pisses me off *that* much.
posted by steady-state strawberry at 4:50 AM on April 28, 2017


Came for the science, left because of the politics?

Me too. Perhaps I'll stick to astrophysics. Harder to derail.
posted by Devonian at 9:52 AM on April 28, 2017


Has anyone considered the Encino Man theory?

I'm thinking about Battlestar Galactica myself.
posted by ZeusHumms at 11:09 AM on April 28, 2017


Archaeology is inherently political. The past only exists in the present.

This find will live or die on its merits, but there's no question the echo of this will live on in people's minds. It will stir up the crazies and it may piss off some Indigenous people. So right or wrong, this claim will have legs. Hence he importance of being. It just right, but sensitive to what your claims mean once they escape from the lab.
posted by Rumple at 11:57 AM on April 28, 2017 [2 favorites]


This sort of 'other ways of knowing' crap can go and die in a fire.

Science is not apolitical, no matter how much people want it to be. Like everything else in the world, it operates in a social and political context that influences how it operates and what it finds. We think of scientific facts as if they're these free-floating things that wait patiently until someone shines a light on them, but it's worth considering how much scientists and the world they live in actively shape facts. That doesn't mean they're wrong, but it doesn't mean that they're the god's-eye view of things, either. What makes it especially complicated is when science is used as a tool against people.

In the mid 19th century, it was widely accepted that there were five races of humans. Samuel Morton at the University of Pennsylvania filled a number of skulls from the five races with millet seeds to measure their cranial capacity, and showed that skulls from Europeans had the largest capacity, and the other races could be ranked below that in a hierarchy. It was widely accepted that cranial capacity was influential on intelligence. It was therefore simply a fact that Black people and Native people were less intellectually capable than Europeans.

The key thing is that Morton wasn't operating outside the methodology of science. He had a testable hypothesis, he carefully collected his data, and he drew conclusions based on widely accepted knowledge. We can look back at Morton now and see a little more clearly the social and political environment in which he was operating. We can look at the social status of Blacks and Natives and see how Morton's findings were used to justify the ways those groups were treated. Stephen Jay Gould famously argued in the 70s that Morton had, intentionally or unintentionally, manipulated his samples and methodology in order to fit a preconceived notion -- but there are still people who argue that Morton's findings were essentially correct, even if the conclusions he drew from them were flawed. (Penn still puts out PR celebrating the legacy of Morton).

Since the 90s especially, archaeology as a field has been more and more concerned about needing to consult with and work alongside the people who are directly affected by its findings. Archaeological claims are used all the time to undermine the interests of Native people. Not just archaeology -- DNA testing is in some ways completely reshaping Native ethnic identity. The Kennewick Man controversy gave us both -- and it was positioned as scientists who wanted to uncover truths about human history vs. Native people who simply wanted the truth to be buried like an ancestor. Again and again in situations like this, Native people are denied the right to make claims about their own identity and territory. It's not enough that a foreign nation invaded and stole land, they need to also completely dictate the terms by which you are allowed to define your own self-history and self-identity.

It's not Native people who are cutting funding to science. Acknowledging the social and political context of archaeological claims that affect the historical narratives of Native people doesn't put you on a slippery slope to agreeing that the world is only 6000 years old. It just means scientists, and archaeologists especially, can't pretend they're the only true objective viewpoint unaffected by politics and society.

I'd write more, but I've got a raging migraine. But the anthropology of knowledge production is a big part of what I study, and the way people tend to talk about science sometimes frustrates me to no end.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 1:54 PM on April 28, 2017 [4 favorites]


Also, it's not just racially-charged stuff that's affected by the outside world. Bruno Latour uses the story of the structure of DNA to illustrate how seemingly apolitical facts are also subject to social and political factors. The short of it (limited by my migraine brain) is that Linus Pauling proposed a triple helix model. Crick and Watson noticed a mathematical error in Pauling's model, and figured they had about a month before Pauling and the rest of the world would notice the error and correct it. So they worked day and night, basically, to come up with a model that made more sense mathematically, and what they came up with was the double helix.

Linus Pauling was the world's premier chemist at the time. He had considerable authority. Had 50 years gone by before anyone had noticed his error, we could have been living in a world where we knew DNA was a triple helix. You can object to this and say "but they spotted the error," and it's true that they did in this case. But this sort of narrative plays out all the time in science and medicine. Sometimes we find out years later that data was falsified or misleading (see: Harvard's studies on sugar). Sometimes it's just that the studies that get funding are the ones of interest to key groups, while other studies never get off the ground. Sometimes mistakes go unnoticed, or theoretical models are refined years later. This is all deeply tied in with contemporary politics, with the status of some scientists and institutions, and so on. It just happens that I can give more examples related to race, but that's only because I study anthropology and those are the things I've read about.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 2:53 PM on April 28, 2017 [3 favorites]


This sort of 'other ways of knowing' crap can go and die in a fire.

Or maybe some poison blankets and tuberculosis and a little genocidal massacring will do the trick? Plenty of dying by fire has been imposed on Indigenous ways of knowing the world for the last 500 years by supposedly scientific and enlightened colonial powers.

Seriously this is all kinds of bullshit bro. Native people didn't ask you to approve of their oral histories or cosmologies or to compare them to supposedly neutral "science." We are looking right here at "science". (barely in my opinion) that proves nothing and allows no conclusive results at all, but if anything that seems to jibe with some Indigenous histories that assert longer residence in the Americas than prior "science" concluded.

As Rumple correctly points out, all archaeology (indeed all human science) is political to its core. Your idealized "science" was and remains a technology of imperialism and genocide just as much as it has supported liberation or enlightenment.
posted by spitbull at 5:54 PM on April 28, 2017 [2 favorites]


Also being Indigenous is not dependent on being "first" in some absolute sense. Once your ancestors go back 10-15,000 years in one place you have a stronger claim than any settler colonialist ever could make.
posted by spitbull at 5:58 PM on April 28, 2017


Also h/t shapes that haunt for saying it more calmly.
posted by spitbull at 6:01 PM on April 28, 2017


Sometimes, I just like discussing interesting science. This story is particularly interesting on two points - that there may have been very early humans in NA, and that the methodology behind the story is questionable. It's not interesting for its potential political side, not because such things aren't worth discussing but because any story about prehistoric human archaeology in NA specifically (and any story about science, or indeed any story involving humans...) has that aspect.

(Aside: what is the mean number of anthropologists a chap should know? I find I know quite a few, which makes me wonder...)

Yrs,
Subject D.




I
posted by Devonian at 5:28 AM on April 29, 2017


Perhaps a representative of the nation famed for dismembering an aboriginal Tasmanian and absconding with the body parts "for science" and commissioning Italian circus performers to plunder tombs and hauling off all manner of archaeological and cultural treasures is not the best advocate for ignoring the aspects of science that are merely immaterial local matters of "politics".

Plus you built a car park on top of one of your kings
posted by XMLicious at 7:16 AM on April 29, 2017


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