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by doodlebugging
988 days ago
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I appreciate you taking time to read all that and compose a well thought out reply. I understand the challenges these people would've faced dealing with local environmental issues common to the seasons they experienced. I wish we had more examples of the tools and technologies available to them so that we could write accurate stories about how they survived and prospered or simply endured. The important thing though is that we know they dealt with all their challenges and survived. These people were resilient. I think the large collection of footprints at White Sands tells us that it is not necessary for a viable population of humans to make the journey, only for a single small group. The fact that there are multiple levels of tracks of humans and extinct land animals together supports the conclusions one could draw from the materials used in dating of the tracks and implies that those who made the journey went on to occupy the region for generations. It's a fascinating subject and there will be more debate over the years but I think archaeologists will come around to the notion that modern man found his way into the interior of North America a long time before or at some point during the LGM and they found a home where there was a mild climate supporting plenty of game and shelter and they took advantage of that. That is the reality of the tracks at White Sands. Some people took an opportunity to go south and once they completed that challenge they found themselves in a land of plenty and they made themselves at home. Whether they built a boat and sailed icy seas hoping for the best, or followed local game south overland across thawing tundra during a warm spell is something we will need to study. Maybe they just picked a leader like our Dads who couldn't find his way to the grocery store without a map and would never admit to being lost
and eventually, after following this guy for months they found themselves south of the ice and the end morraines in an area with abundant game and at that point they composed their first songs and oral histories to tell the tale of their survival and rebirth in a new land of plenty. As a historical novel it would be great. |
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However that begs the question of where those people went, genetically. It's much less interesting if they aren't ancestral to modern native Americans, so I'll ignore that. If they are, there should be a fairly clear genetic evidence of the divergence, rather than the known divergence long after these footprints are dated. You can make a handwavy argument that the southern population was so small that a later migration overwhelmed their genetic contribution, but then why was their population so small, given the abundant resources? Similarly, we don't see late quaternary extinctions meaningfully start until at least the end of the LGM. There's arguments you can make to vaguely explain this, but none of them really fit with the idea we have from earlier with these people being highly adaptable, high technology hunters. We'd also expect things like charcoal (admittedly LGM records are sparse), environmental DNA (quite possibly no one has looked at the appropriate layers in the right areas with this, but the ones I've seen have not detected human presence), floral changes, etc.
These sorts of incongruities continue everywhere we try to reconcile these dates. Of course, we could ditch the narrative angle and simply say "here's a disparate collection of dates and facts", but that's not very useful as theory.
That's why I'm still on the conservative side of "we need more data", because the dates really do look good, but they're currently very hard to reconcile with what's known from independent lines of evidence.