[maxander]

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."

[Will_Parker]

> 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.