How did they get here? Apparently not across the Bering land bridge.
It’s interesting to see how much “science” has been overturned since I was kid, about things like dinosaurs, space and human migration. I suspect that the same will occur in nutrition and climate.
Kind of a sloppy article, see this comment for clarification.
A little sloppy but the commenter missed the main thrust of the article that neither the Bering Land Bridge nor the Ice Free Corridor can explain the existence of humans prior to the dates accepted for when these two theories were possible.
The Western Stemmed Point could be older than Clovis, which wasn’t mentioned. This is the important part though,
The debate over when the first people came to the Americas distracts from discovering the real, and most likely, story about how people came to the Americas in waves from different migration routes.
Wodun,
The debate over when the first people came to the Americas distracts from discovering the real, and most likely, story about how people came to the Americas in waves from different migration routes.
This. Real history tends to be messy, complex, and downright fascinating.
~Jon
I like to believe in absolute truth but Asimov made the good point that our understanding approaches truth rather than usually achieving it.
He was also good at strawmen arguments but did them so well and entertainingly that ya didn’t mind.
Heresy, I know, but I’ve always questioned why we are convinced that humans started out in Africa.
Do you have an alternate theory that is consonant with the existing fossil record?
No. What I have is the fact that in barren Africa (like the Olduvai Gorge) is much easier to discover bones (the first ones were laying on the surface IIRC), than it is to locate similar bones in the jungles of South America after thousands of years of plant decay and dirt formation.
I’m not saying I believe – have proof – original humans came from South America. I’m saying it’s possible. Or even possible that similar strains emerged from South America in parallel.
I’m saying there’s a plausible alternative, and that I wouldn’t state that humans undeniably came form Africa.
I think the way I would put it is:
All the evidence *we have* indicates humans evolving out of Africa. But we are missing some data as to what, if anything, occurred in South America. We can only go by what we have, but we don’t have it all. There is a possibility of parallel evolution, of a sort, going on in South America. Maybe it died out; maybe invaders from African descendants out-evolved them on their own ground. After all, what attributes of South America preclude human evolution occurring there as well? What advantage would there be in Africa over SA? Equatorial South America is just as congenial to life as the Olduvai Gorge.
The problem here is that we have absolutely no evidence for a human presence before about 15,000 years ago. For example, if humans (not just modern humans) were in South America, say 20,000 years ago, then we have to explain not only how they got there, but why we haven’t seen their present all up and down the two Americas before the Clovis culture. All the Homo genus moves around a lot, unless there’s a better competitor (eg, a stronger tribe) locking them down in place.
After all, what attributes of South America preclude human evolution occurring there as well? What advantage would there be in Africa over SA? Equatorial South America is just as congenial to life as the Olduvai Gorge.
There could be a really awesome terraformed planet orbiting Alpha Centari right now that would be great for human habitation, but has no humans. What precludes human evolution occurring there is the lack of humans there.
Karl wrote:
“The problem here is that we have absolutely no evidence for a human presence before about 15,000 years ago. ”
Who is looking in places other than Africa?
How hard is it to find any evidence (if it exists) in South America as opposed to Africa?
“For example, if humans (not just modern humans) were in South America, say 20,000 years ago, then we have to explain not only how they got there, but why we haven’t seen their present all up and down the two Americas before the Clovis culture. ”
I wasn’t stipulating dates other than “contemporary” with the hominids found in Africa.
How they got there?
How did the African hominids get there?
AFAIK there are no big apes in South America. The only places where there are big apes is in Africa and Asia. The environment selection pressure simply wasn’t there. So I think odds of hominids evolving in South America or elsewhere on the Americas are pretty low.
You seem to be saying you find it plausible because there is no evidence to support it. I think you have that backwards.
All the oldest hominid skeletons are found there. That’s a pretty strong point in favor of the out-of-Africa idea. If we find one older than Lucy that isn’t in Africa, then we’ll have reason to question that idea.
It isn’t just fossils of human remains, which are incredibly rare and are in that way not definitive.
It is that 23 and Me thing, where DNA is used to construct a person’s heritage. You do that with today’s people in Africa and the other continents, construct an ancestral tree based on similarities/differences, and you come up with corroboration for Out of Africa.
It’s like this PBS documentary on the DNA ancestry tracing where they determined that this one guy, probably the “big man” in his community, living in a tent decorated with “Tabriz” rugs and tapestries, surrounded by his relatives and living in one of the Central Asian ‘Stans, had the ancestral DNA of the Caucasian race.
No, the guy wasn’t the direct descendent of the Father of the Caucasian race any more than me, Rand, or any you other Caucasians. It is just when they computed what the progenitor DNA would be like, this dude was closest to it.
The cute thing is that the crew collecting this data called the guy and his family together to break some important news regarding this DNA test, and at first the dude seemed worried that he was going to be told of some illness or genetic abnormality.
The subtlety of the explanation of how a today person can be a match to the racial ancestor was kind of lost in the translation, but when they communicated that the test results indicated that he was “father of the Caucasian race”, there was a kind of look of satisfaction regarding something he had long suspected about himself, and in his own language he said something like, “Cool!”
“All the oldest hominid skeletons are found there. ”
1) They were (initially) easy to find. The Leakey’s found them lying on the surface of the ground IIRC.
2) Who is looking in South America? People being what they are, if you find a rich vein in Africa that’s where most if not all the future efforts will go.
This is a case of the old “Absence of Evidence is not Evidence of Absence” and I would think it’s much harder to locate bones in South America.
What if they are older than Fred and Ethel?
Because hominid fossils are found in Africa that predate those found anywhere else.
Including the only Australopithicines, the earliest Homo Habilis, the earliest Homo Erectus, and the earliest Homo Sapiens.
What I find more interesting is that we have two completely different groups of people that we call Indians.
During the early human migrations a holy man convinced a group of tribes to set out for a place he called India, which we know as the Americas. Along the way the leader of one of the groups developed a foot infection and decided to stop somewhere around Mumbai, and he turned to his followers and said “This is India!”
They believed him and stayed put, while the other groups continued on into what European explorers later and erroneously named the Americas, even though the Americas were actually India the whole time. This is why the Americas were populated with Indians.
Little by little Hindus and Sikhs figure out their ancestors got conned by a crippled shaman and get on a Boeing and fly over to the real India, finally settling in LA, Miami, and Chicago, completing the journey their ancient ancestors had signed on for.
Yes, and everyone knows that the ancestral land of the Italian people is New Jersey, from where they migrated to New York, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island.
A quick look at a globe will tell you that the Dutch must have migrated from the Dutch East Indies to the Netherlands, wiping out the original Nethers. Along their sea journey they must have stopped off in England and left some coconuts, which were later used by English knights as they galloped. The African swallow theory of English coconut origins just doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.
An illuminating insight on the Nether regions. Thanks.
where they migrated…
Florida!
Don’t forget the six Zindi races! They were obviously the first Zindians.
This would shoot down the consensus idea that the first male to enter the Americas was a heterosexual, known by all historians as the Bering Straight.
1) Since the first Americans are now known, genetically, to be Siberian, they did too take advantage of the Beringia (1000-mile-wide) “land bridge” to get to America: they just skirted its edge coastally rather than striking down the center of it via a (not yet open) corridor between the continental ice sheets.
2) Re e.g. South America as an origination point for humans: It isn’t just the lack of hominin fossils, it’s the fact that South America had been an isolated island continent for dozens of millions of years, since the breakup of the Gondwana supercontinent, until the formation of the Panamanian land bridge a few million years back brought it back into the family of continents — and like somewhat similar Australia in this regard, South America carried aboard it during this insular stage mostly marsupial mammals, and certainly no advanced (placental) primates such as apes — much less hominins — at all. Given those particular constraints, how could it plausibly be the origin of a kind of ape (which we humans are)? And if there, why not Australia?
It is tough to say for sure because while all of the evidence certainly supports current views of a braided stream of evolution starting in Africa, we also don’t know much about Denisovans, Neanderthals, and that mystery 3rd contributor to DNA. I only bring it up to point out the uncertainty, not draw any links to great apes in South America.
The current human inhabitants of South America might all be “recent” arrivals but could there have been other hominids? There are no fossils but there are archeological sites that show that current knowledge doesn’t explain everything. The climate there isn’t conducive to the preservation of fossils and who knows how monkeys got to SA? If a monkey could somehow raft across the ocean why not something larger and smarter?
And what lies on the bottom of the oceans that used to be the shoreline? I think the only thing we can say for sure is that we will learn more in the future.
I remember when I was working in the Alaskan Bush – so, twenty-plus years ago – there was discussion at the time that, while Eskimos and Inuits were believed to come from Siberia, DNA evidence suggested that the rest of Native Americans, including interior Alaskan and Aleuts, were Polynesian in origin. At first glance, this would seem to bear this out – and also not be terribly new thinking.
Science Magazine story
Live Science story
Native Americans seem to be a snapshot of the DNA in east Asia (Siberia) from about 23,000 years ago, which is a genetic mix that stretched into Europe.
Soviet archeologists also discovered an ancient abandoned wagon (wheels hadn’t been invented yet, which is probably why the wagon was abandoned) that said “India or bust!” Obviously it was built by ancient Indians heading to Las Vegas to open a casino.