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The First Americans (Peopling Of The Americas)

Carbon dating of animal bones from a Mexican cave occupied in prehistoric times yielded a surprising age of circa 30,000 years BP. If credible evidence can be found to link these oldest bones with human activity it would push the estimated timeframe for initial human migration into the Americas back before the Last Glacial Maximum - in other words, circa 20,000 years earlier than the current prevailing estimate.
Unexpected Discovery of Ancient Bones May Change Timeline for When People First Arrived in North America

An unexpected discovery by an Iowa State University researcher suggests that the first humans may have arrived in North America more than 30,000 years ago – nearly 20,000 years earlier than originally thought.

Andrew Somerville, an assistant professor of anthropology in world languages and cultures, says he and his colleagues made the discovery while studying the origins of agriculture in the Tehuacan Valley in Mexico. As part of that work, they wanted to establish a date for the earliest human occupation of the Coxcatlan Cave in the valley, so they obtained radiocarbon dates for several rabbit and deer bones that were collected from the cave in the 1960s as part of the Tehuacan Archaeological-Botanical Project. The dates for the bones suddenly took Somerville and his colleagues in a different direction with their work.

The date ranges for the bone samples from the base of the cave ranged from 33,448 to 28,279 years old. The results are published in the academic journal Latin American Antiquity. Somerville says even though previous studies had not dated items from the bottom of the cave, he was not expecting such old ages. The findings add to the debate over a long-standing theory that the first humans crossed the Bering Land Bridge into the Americas 13,000 years ago. ...

... However, questions still remain. Most importantly, is there a human link to the bottom layer of the cave where the bones were found?

To answer that question, Somerville and Matthew Hill, ISU associate professor of anthropology, plan to take a closer look at the bone samples for evidence of cut marks that indicate the bones were butchered by a stone tool or human, or thermal alternations that suggest the bones were boiled or roasted over fire. He says the possible stone tools from the early levels of the cave may also yield clues. ...
FULL STORY: https://scitechdaily.com/unexpected...r-when-people-first-arrived-in-north-america/
 
Here are the bibliographic details and abstract for the published research report. The full report is accessible at the link below.

Somerville, A., Casar, I., & Arroyo-Cabrales, J. (2021).
New AMS Radiocarbon Ages from the Preceramic Levels of Coxcatlan Cave, Puebla, Mexico: A Pleistocene Occupation of the Tehuacan Valley?
Latin American Antiquity, 1-15.
doi:10.1017/laq.2021.26

Abstract
Archaeological studies at Coxcatlan Cave in the Tehuacan Valley of southern Puebla, Mexico, have been instrumental to the development of the chronology for the region and for our understanding of the origins of food production in the Americas. This article refines the Preceramic chronology of the Tehuacan Valley by presenting 14 new accelerated mass spectrometry (AMS) radiocarbon ages from faunal bone samples uncovered from early depositional levels of the rock shelter. Although bones associated with the El Riego (9893–7838 cal BP), Coxcatlan (7838–6375 cal BP), and Abejas (6375–4545 cal BP) phase zones of the cave yielded ages similar to those of the previously proposed chronology for the region, bones from the Ajuereado phase zones at the base of the cave yielded surprisingly old ages that range from 33,448 to 28,279 cal BP, a time prior to the Last Glacial Maximum. Because these early ages are many thousands of years older than current models estimate for the peopling of the Americas, they require reassessments of the artifacts and ecofacts excavated from these early zones.

FULL REPORT: https://www.cambridge.org/core/jour...acan-valley/F4C32FB10E73D660CB7D9B44E2C29A72#
 
Here are the bibliographic details and abstract for the published research report. The full report is accessible at the link below.

Somerville, A., Casar, I., & Arroyo-Cabrales, J. (2021).
New AMS Radiocarbon Ages from the Preceramic Levels of Coxcatlan Cave, Puebla, Mexico: A Pleistocene Occupation of the Tehuacan Valley?
Latin American Antiquity, 1-15.
doi:10.1017/laq.2021.26

Abstract
Archaeological studies at Coxcatlan Cave in the Tehuacan Valley of southern Puebla, Mexico, have been instrumental to the development of the chronology for the region and for our understanding of the origins of food production in the Americas. This article refines the Preceramic chronology of the Tehuacan Valley by presenting 14 new accelerated mass spectrometry (AMS) radiocarbon ages from faunal bone samples uncovered from early depositional levels of the rock shelter. Although bones associated with the El Riego (9893–7838 cal BP), Coxcatlan (7838–6375 cal BP), and Abejas (6375–4545 cal BP) phase zones of the cave yielded ages similar to those of the previously proposed chronology for the region, bones from the Ajuereado phase zones at the base of the cave yielded surprisingly old ages that range from 33,448 to 28,279 cal BP, a time prior to the Last Glacial Maximum. Because these early ages are many thousands of years older than current models estimate for the peopling of the Americas, they require reassessments of the artifacts and ecofacts excavated from these early zones.

FULL REPORT: https://www.cambridge.org/core/jour...acan-valley/F4C32FB10E73D660CB7D9B44E2C29A72#
Interesting E.G. Very interesting.

Looking at the various phase zones of that area and their dating, and the intermittent local glacial maxima in the last 100K years of the Northern American continent, The pause between the El Riego phase of the strata, and the deposition strata of these dated rabbit and deer bones could correlate with the inadvisability of living in the Tehuacan area....Be aware that my opinion is an uneducated assumption.

But...There is an interglacial episode between the Tahoe2, and the Tioga 2-4 that could encourage the use of that area, at that elevation, in a more hospitable climate - in comparison to the coastal areas.

As I said this is all uneducated conjecture on my part...but it goes someway to explain some of the C14 dating much further south on the southern most end of the South American continent.
 
Earliest definitive proof that humans were in North America 7000 year earlier than previously thought.

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"Humans reached the Americas at least 7,000 years earlier than previously thought, according to new findings.

The topic of when the continent was first settled from Asia has been controversial for decades.

Many researchers are sceptical of evidence for humans in the North American interior much earlier than 16,000 years ago.

Now, a team working in New Mexico has found scores of human footprints dated to between 23,000 and 21,000 years old.

The discovery could transform views about when the continent was settled. It suggests there could have been great migrations that we know nothing about. And it raises the possibility that these earlier populations could have gone extinct."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-58638854
 
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Earliest definitive proof that humans were in North America 7000 year earlier than previously thought.
This is big news ... There's been indirect evidence of pre-Clovis human activities, but this discovery seals the deal by demonstrating the actual presence of humans prior to Clovis.
Earliest conclusive evidence found of humans in the New World

Fossilized human footprints found in New Mexico reveal that people dwelled in the Americas during the last ice age's peak — a discovery that researchers suggest is conclusive proof of early migration to the New World, a new study finds.

Although the newfound footprints are not the oldest evidence of humans' arrival in the Americas, they may be the first unequivocal proof that people were there during the last ice age, scientists noted.

The arrival of the first people in the Americas was a key step in humanity's expansion across the planet, but the precise timing of this milestone remains hotly contested. Based on stone tools dating back roughly 13,000 years, archaeologists had long suggested that people from the prehistoric culture known as the Clovis were the first to migrate to the Americas. ...

However, researchers recently unearthed a great deal of evidence of pre-Clovis artifacts. For example, last year scientists revealed that stone artifacts discovered in Chiquihuite Cave in central Mexico were at least 26,500 years old; computer models found the cave's location was so far inland in the Americas, and thus so distant from the Old World from which human migrants arrived, that it suggested that humans might have first entered the New World as early as 33,000 years ago. ...

Still, the earliest archaeological evidence of human settlement of the Americas remains highly controversial. ...

Now, 60 footprints embedded in an ancient lake bed in what is now White Sands National Park in south central New Mexico are strong evidence that humans occupied the New World between about 21,000 and 23,000 years ago. ...

"The White Sands footprints provide unequivocal evidence of early occupation," study lead author Matthew Bennett, an ichnologist at Bournemouth University in England, told Live Science. "There are several proposed early sites, such as Chiquihuite, but they are all disputed by someone. The footprints are the first unequivocal data point in this debate." (Ichnologists study trace fossils, such as fossilized footprints and tracks.) ...

"It is not the oldest site, but it is a site which has unequivocal evidence, and that is its importance," Bennett said. ...

"Also, we believe they were there [for] much longer than the two millennia we are currently able to say," Bennett said. ...
FULL STORY: https://www.livescience.com/earliest-conclusive-evidence-found-of-humans-in-the-new-world
 
Here are the bibliographic details and abstract for the published research report ...


Evidence of humans in North America during the Last Glacial Maximum
Matthew R. Bennett, David Bustos, Jeffrey S. Pigati, Kathleen B. Springer, Thomas M. Urban, Vance T. Holliday, Sally C. Reynolds, Marcin Budka, Jeffrey S. Honke, Daniel Odess
SCIENCE 24 Sep 2021, Vol 373, Issue 6562, pp. 1528-1531
DOI: 10.1126/science.abg7586

Abstract
Archaeologists and researchers in allied fields have long sought to understand human colonization of North America. Questions remain about when and how people migrated, where they originated, and how their arrival affected the established fauna and landscape. Here, we present evidence from excavated surfaces in White Sands National Park (New Mexico, United States), where multiple in situ human footprints are stratigraphically constrained and bracketed by seed layers that yield calibrated radiocarbon ages between ~23 and 21 thousand years ago. These findings confirm the presence of humans in North America during the Last Glacial Maximum, adding evidence to the antiquity of human colonization of the Americas and providing a temporal range extension for the coexistence of early inhabitants and Pleistocene megafauna.

SOURCE: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abg7586
 
Recent analyses of dental morphological features and DNA indicates the earliest Americans were not descended from the Japanese Jomon people, as had been previously proposed in some scholarly circles.
Analysis of ancient teeth questions theory that Native Americans originated from Japan

Native Americans may not have originated in Japan as previous archaeological evidence has suggested, according to a new study of ancient teeth.

For years, archaeologists had predicted that the first people to live in North America descended directly from a group called the Jomon, who occupied ancient Japan about 15,000 years ago, the same time people arrived in North America around 15,000 years ago via the Bering Land Bridge, a strip of land that previously connected Russia to North America before sea levels rose above it. This theory is based on archaeological similarities in stone tools, especially projectile weapons, found in Native American and Jomon settlements.

However, the authors of the new study say this scenario is highly unlikely because the biological evidence "simply does not match up" with the archaeological findings, according to a statement from the researchers. ...

"The Jomon were not directly ancestral to Native Americans," lead author G. Richard Scott, an anthropologist at the University of Nevada, Reno, told Live Science. "They [the Jomon] are more aligned with Southeast Asian and Pacific groups than with East Asian and Native American groups."

Instead, the researchers suspect that Native Americans descended from a different group living somewhere in East Asia, although a lot of uncertainty remains about exactly where and when those ancestors lived. ...

In this study, Scott and his team compared 25 dental morphology traits in around 1,500 sets of ancient teeth from Native American and Jomon people dating back over 10,000 years, as well as other ancient groups from East Asia, Southeast Asia and the Pacific.

This analysis of tooth traits and DNA within the teeth revealed that the Native Americans were not closely related enough to the Jomon people to consider them ancestors but that they may have descended from another unknown group from East Asia, Scott said.
FULL STORY: https://www.livescience.com/native-american-origin-theory-debunked

PUBLISHED REPORT:
G. Richard Scott, Dennis H. O’Rourke, Jennifer A. Raff, Justin C. Tackney, Leslea J. Hlusko, Scott A. Elias, Lauriane Bourgeon, Olga Potapova, Elena Pavlova, Vladimir Pitulko & John F. Hoffecker (2021)
Peopling the Americas: Not “Out of Japan”
PaleoAmerica
DOI: 10.1080/20555563.2021.1940440

SOURCE / FULL REPORT: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/20555563.2021.1940440
 
This is big news ... There's been indirect evidence of pre-Clovis human activities, but this discovery seals the deal by demonstrating the actual presence of humans prior to Clovis.

... Or maybe not ... The inference that the Chiquihuite site's chipped stones represent human-made tools is being challenged.
'Tools' Suggesting Humans Reached Mexico 30,000 Years Ago May Not Be What They Seem

Exactly when and how our species reached the Americas remains a messy historical conundrum. A heated debate has now ensued amongst archeologists in the face of conflicting evidence between archaeological finds and genomic data.

Possible stone tools, reported earlier this year, spurred excited headlines suggesting humans may have arrived in this region as early as 30,000 years ago – before the last ice age.

Autonomous University of Zacatecas archaeologist Ciprian Ardelean and colleagues examined 1,930 limestone shards found at the Chiquihuite Cave site in Zacatecas, Mexico, concluding they were stones chiseled into tools by human hands.

They also tested surrounding environmental DNA, and while they did find some genetic traces of humans, it was not enough to draw firm conclusions.

Another team of researchers, led by archaeologist James Chatters from the private company Applied Paleoscience, has since argued that the stones in question could have been shaped by natural processes.

"In the high-energy cliff-face environment where Chiquihuite Cave is found, falling and tumbling rocks strike one another and drive off shards, which often have some of the features of rocks broken by people," Chatters told Gizmodo.

"A stone striking a stone can produce similar looking products regardless of how the force is initiated."

The patterns of flaking on the stones are not consistent with those seen in stone tools from other archaeological sites, where they're flaked on both sides. Nor is there any evidence of impact fractures to show they'd been used as tools, the researchers said.
FULL STORY: https://www.sciencealert.com/tools-...hed-mexico-30-000-years-ago-may-just-be-rocks
 
Here are the bibliographic details and abstract from the published research report.


James C. Chatters, Ben A. Potter, Anna Marie Prentiss, et al. (2021)
Evaluating Claims of Early Human Occupation at Chiquihuite Cave, Mexico
PaleoAmerica
DOI: 10.1080/20555563.2021.1940441

ABSTRACT
Archaeologists working in Mexico recently claimed evidence for pre-Last Glacial Maximum human occupation in the Americas, based on lithic items excavated from Chiquihuite Cave, Zacatecas. Although they provide extensive array of ancillary studies of the cave's chronostratigraphic and paleoenvironmental record, the data they present do not support their central argument, that these lithic items are anthropogenic and represent a unique lithic industry produced by early human occupants. They give limited consideration to the most plausible alternative explanation: that the assemblage is a product of natural processes of disintegration, roof fall, and mass movement of the cave fill, and thus the lithic materials are best explained as geofacts. We assess the evidence by considering the alternative hypotheses (1) that the observed phenomena are artifacts or (2) that they result from natural processes. We conclude that hypothesis 2 is more strongly supported and that Chiquihuite Cave does not represent evidence for the earliest Americans.

SOURCE: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/20555563.2021.1940441
 
Newly published research results strongly suggest the earliest migrations into the Americas could not have occurred within the Beringia land bridge and must have occurred along the coastline.

Massive ice-wall may have blocked passage for first Americans

An icy barrier up to 300 stories high — taller than any building on Earth — may have prevented the first people from entering the New World over the land bridge that once connected Asia with the Americas, a new study has found.

These findings suggest that the first people in the Americas instead arrived via boats along the Pacific coast, researchers said. ...

A major factor influencing the way in which the first Americans arrived were giant ice sheets that once blanketed North America. Previous research suggested that an ice-free corridor between the margins of these ice sheets may have enabled travel from Beringia down to the Great Plains. ...

Based on stone tools dating back as much as 13,400 years, archaeologists had long suggested that people from the prehistoric culture known as the Clovis were the first to migrate from Asia to the Americas. ...

However, scientists have recently unearthed a great deal of evidence of a pre-Clovis presence in North America. ...

Recent estimates suggested the ice-free corridor did not open until about 14,000 to 15,000 years ago, which would mean that the earliest Americans may have relied on a coastal route instead of an overland one. ...

To help solve this mystery, researchers sought to pinpoint when the ice-free corridor opened. They investigated 64 geological samples taken from six locations spanning 745 miles (1,200 kilometers) along the zone where the ice-free corridor was thought to have existed. ...

The new findings suggest that the ice-free corridor did not fully open until about 13,800 years ago, and the ice sheets "may have been 1,500 to 3,000 feet (455 to 910 m) high in the area where they covered the ice-free corridor," study lead author Jorie Clark, a geologist and archaeologist at Oregon State University, told Live Science. ...
FULL STORY: https://www.livescience.com/first-americans-ice-wall

PUBLISHED REPORT: https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2118558119
 
Proving that they really are members of a First Peoples Tribe.

When Spanish priests arrived in what is now California almost 250 years ago, they established a string of missions stretching from San Diego to the hills north of San Francisco—all built by forced Indigenous labor. Tens of thousands of Native Americans died from disease, malnourishment, and maltreatment during the mission period, which lasted until the 1830s.

By then, California’s Indigenous population had been devastated—including the Ohlone, or Costanoan, people, whose lands once included much of the San Francisco Bay Area. More than 8000 Ohlone perished between 1776 and 1833; from a precolonization population of approximately 30,000, there were fewer than 100 Ohlone left by the 1920s.

In the century that followed, the tribe was written off as vanished. In 1925, University of California, Berkeley, anthropologist Alfred Kroeber wrote that the Ohlone were “extinct for all practical purposes.”

But the Ohlone survived. Today, the tribe has about 500 members. Since 1989, they have been fighting for federal recognition, using genealogy to trace their family histories back to the Spanish mission period and legal documentation to show a long history of tribal presence in the Bay Area.

Now, they’re getting help from genetics. In a new study, researchers have used ancient DNA from two archaeological excavations to identify the Ohlone’s genetic signature and link ancient individuals, some buried nearly 2000 years ago, to their modern-day descendants. “This is fascinating work,” University of Kansas, Lawrence, paleogeneticist Jennifer Raff, who studies the early peopling of the Americas, wrote in an email. “If other tribes are interested in using genetics to investigate histories, they may be encouraged by the fact that some researchers are doing this work in a careful way.”

In 2016, archaeologists working as part of a construction project identified two Indigenous village sites near Fremont, California. Radiocarbon dating showed one site was occupied between 490 B.C.E. and 1775 C.E. and the other between 1345 and 1850 C.E., the latter overlapping with the Spanish colonial era in the region. ...

https://www.science.org/content/art...help-california-tribe-get-federal-recognition
 
It might not be an official thing but to me the people of Greenland both look and sound rather mongolian.
 
From Asia, sure. However I was thinking of Mongolia specifically.
 
This thread is fascinating. I also saw the BBC documentary, referred to several pages back, which suggested common ancestry between the "original" Americans and the Australian Aboriginals, and also that a more aggressive technologically advanced tribe (the ancestors of today's Native Americans) pushed them further and further down the continent until only a tiny group remained in Tierra del Fuego.

The Selk'nam, Ona or Onawo people people?

Claimed to have been photographed by Austrian missionary Martin Gusinde in 1918, by which time their population had been reduced to a few hundred:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selk'nam_people

My limited knowledge is that these ceremonial costumes were emulations of certain spirits (see below).

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This page from this book (which I have not read--social media find):

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Edit: From Link Above:

Selk'nam male initiation ceremonies, the passage to adulthood, was called Hain. Nearby indigenous peoples, the Yahgan and Haush, had similar initiation ceremonies.

Young males were called to a dark hut. There they would be attacked by "spirits", who were people dressed as supernatural beings. The children were taught to believe in and fear these spirits at childhood and were threatened by them in case they misbehaved. Their task in this rite of passage was to unmask the spirits; when the boys saw that the spirits were human, they were told a story of world creation related to the sun and moon. In a related story, they were told that in the past women used to be disguised as spirits to control men. When the men discovered the masquerade, they, in turn, would threaten women as spirits. According to the men, the women never learned that the masked males were not truly spirits, but the males found out at the initiation rite.

The contemporary ceremonies used this interplay in somewhat of a joking way. After the first day, related ceremonies and rituals took place. Males showed their "strength" in front of women by fighting spirits (who were other males but the women supposedly did not know it) in some theatrical fights. Each spirit was played with traditional actions, words and gestures, so that everyone could identify it. The best spirit actors from previous Hains were called again to impersonate spirits in later Hains.

Apart from these dramatic re-enactments of mythic events, the Hain involved tests for young males for courage, resourcefulness, resisting temptation, resisting pain and overcoming fear. It also included prolonged instructional courses to train the young men in the tasks for which they would be responsible.

Before European encounter, the various rites of the Hain lasted a very long time, perhaps even a year on occasion. It would end with the last fight against the "worst" spirit. Usually Hains were started when there was enough food (for example a whale was washed onto the coast), a time when all the Selk'nam from all the bands used to gather at one place, in male and female camps. "Spirits" sometimes went to female encampments to scare them, as well as moving around and acting out in ways that related to their characters.

The last Hain was held in one of the missions in the early 20th century, and was photographed by missionary Martin Gusinde. It was a shorter and smaller ceremony than they used to hold. The photos show the "spirit" costumes they created and wore. Gusinde's The Lost Tribes of Tierra Del Fuego (2015) was published in English by Thames & Hudson, and in French and Spanish by Éditions Xavier Barral.


Edit:

In 1964, Chapman was invited to join the team of archaeologist Annette Laming-Emperaire on a project in Tierra del Fuego, Argentina. Although not an archaeologist by training, Chapman accepted for the opportunity to meet Lola Kiepja and Ángela Loij, some of the last few living Selk'nam (Ona) of Tierra del Fuego. After finishing the archaeology project, Chapman met with Lola and recorded her speaking and singing in Selk'nam, as well as her memories of life as a Selk'nam. Although Lola died in 1966, Chapman was able to continue working with the remaining Selk'nam in Tierra del Fuego. In 1976, she co-produced a film about the Selk'nam along with Ana Montes, The Onas: Life and Death in Tierra del Fuego. In 1985, she expanded her fieldwork to include the remaining Yahgans in Tierra del Fuego, Chile.

Source:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Chapman

 
The oldest tools.

Lethally sharp projectile points found along the banks of a river in southwestern Idaho, dated to nearly 16,000 years ago according to a study published today, could represent the oldest evidence of the first tool technology brought to the Americas.

Apparently deposited into a series of shallow pits by an ancient group of hunter-gatherers, the points are examples of “stemmed point technology,” which allowed people back then to fashion spear tips from a wide range of available materials. Based on the objects’ similarities to earlier artifacts, their discoverers argue, the blueprint for making them may have come from East Asia.

A lot more work will need to be done to prove that point, as it were, notes Heather Smith, an archaeologist at Texas State University who wasn’t involved in the study. But “at face value,” she says, “it looks like a really interesting agenda to pursue.”

The site where the points were unearthed a few years ago is on the banks of Idaho’s Salmon River. The Nez Perce people, who have inhabited the region for thousands of years, refer to it as Nipéhe, for an ancient village there. In English, it became known as Cooper’s Ferry.

Sixteen thousand years ago, the river sat in an ice-free corridor inside a glacial amphitheater left by the tailend of an ice age. At the time, an overland route into the North American continent from the Bering Strait would have been blocked by massive ice sheets. But some researchers have proposed that the earliest migrants from Siberia could have boated along the ice-covered Bering Strait’s shores and down the Pacific coast.

“If you’re coming south along the Pacific coastline entering North America … the first major lefthand turn south of the ice is the Columbia River, and if you head upstream, you can get to Cooper’s Ferry,” says Loren Davis, an Oregon State University, Corvallis, archaeologist who led the new study. ...

https://www.science.org/content/art...ound-idaho-could-be-first-american-made-tools
 
All bugaboos made up to scare women.

(If they were ever much impressed; gets the men out of the house...)

This one is called Shoort.

You have to be a tall guy to play Shoort.

(any DNA studies done on the Ona or Yaghans?)
 
How horses helped transform life for Great Plains Pawnees.

Scattered across the prairie east of the Colorado Front Range are rings of ancient stones. The rings were used to anchor tipis, and they measure barely 2 meters across. Matt Reed, the Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma’s tribal historic preservation officer, says that tiny footprint comes as a surprise to modern Pawnee, whose traditional tipis are big enough to fit whole families.

The change, Reed explains, resulted from the introduction of the horse. For millennia, the Pawnee had relied on dogs to haul their belongings on bison hunting trips; when they acquired horses, the impact was immediate and dramatic. “They allowed us to carry more gear, pull more food, have bigger tipis,” Reed says. “It’s so hard to imagine our culture without horses, it boggles your mind.”

For Native peoples on the Great Plains grasslands that stretch from the Rocky Mountains to the Missouri River, horses took on a central economic and military role, enabling bison hunting on a large scale and raiding across vast distances. “The introduction of this technology, of horses, changed Great Plains cultures,” says Carlton Shield Chief Gover, a member of the Pawnee Nation and an archaeologist at the Indiana University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. “It’s the equivalent of the airplane. It shrank the world.” Knowing when that happened is critical, he says. A new study today in Science, of which Shield Chief Gover is a co-author, offers a startling answer. ...

https://www.science.org/content/art...orming-native-american-life-startlingly-early
 
Maybe it was a Werebear.

Sometimes you need to make sure you know what you're looking at before its scientific value is made clear – and that's the case with a 3,000-year-old piece of human bone initially thought to have come from a bear.

The remains were discovered in Lawyer's Cave in Southeast Alaska. The cave is on the mainland, east of Wrangell Island, and in the Alexander Archipelago, in an area inhabited by the Indigenous Tlingit people.

In cooperation with the Wrangell Tribe that now lives in the area, the ancient individual whose remains were found was named 'Tatóok yík yées sháawat' (TYYS for short). It translates as 'Young lady in cave'.

"We realized that modern Indigenous peoples in Alaska, should they have remained in the region since the earliest migrations, could be related to this prehistoric individual," says evolutionary biologist Alber Aqil from the University at Buffalo in New York.

After a detailed genetic analysis of the bone fragments, the researchers discovered that TYYS is closely related to the region's current inhabitants, in genetic terms – the modern coastal Pacific Northwest tribes Tlingit, Haida, Nisga'a, and Tsimshian.

This evidence of genetic continuity passed through the female line over the course of at least three millennia backs up the Tlingit declaration that they have been custodians of this part of Alaska since "time immemorial".

There aren't many other remains in this part of the world dating back thousands of years that have been discovered to date, but there are a few. Researchers compared them with TYYS to better understand how populations would have spread across this region.

https://www.sciencealert.com/ancient-bear-bone-reveals-a-hidden-truth-about-native-american-ancestry


 
They came from China.

Ice age groups in the ancient northern coast of China helped make up the first wave of people to settle the New World, a new DNA study suggests.

The ancient groups may have also migrated to Japan, potentially helping explain similarities in Stone Age artifacts in the Americas, China and Japan, according to the study, published Tuesday (May 9) in the journal Cell Reports(opens in new tab).

There are two leading models as to how people first migrated to the Americas. The older idea suggests that ancient Siberians made this journey when the Bering Land Bridge — the landmass that once connected Asia with North America — was relatively free of ice. More recent evidence argues that multiple waves of humans journeyed to the Americas from various parts of Eurasia, perhaps on watercraft along the Pacific coasts of Asia, the Bering Land Bridge and North America. ...

https://www.livescience.com/archaeo...o-americas-came-from-china-dna-study-suggests
 
Whats interesting is that we now have solid evidence that humans reached the Americas earlier than used to be thought before Pre-Clovis was proved.
But we still don't really know why we don't have the same sort of populations we saw in the Old World around the same time.
One of the problems with Pre Clovis sites is they're each unique. It's part of why they were historically hard to identify compared to Clovis.
These different migrations came here but didn't leave much material evidence compared to their relatives. The different Pre-Clovis sites seem to show they didn't interact with each other. And just sort of faded into the background until the Clovis culture arrived.
Could just be there's more find of course. But it's still a mystery.
 
I never understood the long-standing Clovis-first theory that the Americas were only peopled when they became accessible via the land bridge. Australia was peopled tens of thousands of years earlier, and no-one walked there.
 
I never understood the long-standing Clovis-first theory that the Americas were only peopled when they became accessible via the land bridge. Australia was peopled tens of thousands of years earlier, and no-one walked there.
At the base it was just lack of real evidence. Clovis first replaced another theory placing human settlement much earlier.
There were diehards in some places, definitely. But at the same time there was difficulty establishing solid results of Pre-Clovis sites.
Part of it was the technology, part of it was methods not being up to par for the much more fragmentary evidence compared to what we get from the Clovis culture.
Prevailing wisdom explained the lack of Pre-Clovis sites on the ice sheets blocking travel. The conditions would have been extremely harsh.
By comparison if you look at sea levels around the time australia was settled :aquaterramain.jpg
You can see that it was much closer to the other landmasses and plenty of island chains to hop along before settling in the continent proper.
Now we know the ice sheets weren't the major barrier we thought, because we have evidence of settlements. Even so the very earliest reliable dates are still much earlier than Australia. 20,000 years compared to 50 or more.
Genetics bear this out too.
 
"Even so the very earliest reliable dates are still much earlier than Australia. 20,000 years compared to 50 or more."


??
 
At the base it was just lack of real evidence. Clovis first replaced another theory placing human settlement much earlier.
There were diehards in some places, definitely. But at the same time there was difficulty establishing solid results of Pre-Clovis sites.
Part of it was the technology, part of it was methods not being up to par for the much more fragmentary evidence compared to what we get from the Clovis culture.
Prevailing wisdom explained the lack of Pre-Clovis sites on the ice sheets blocking travel. The conditions would have been extremely harsh.
By comparison if you look at sea levels around the time australia was settled :View attachment 66281
You can see that it was much closer to the other landmasses and plenty of island chains to hop along before settling in the continent proper.
Now we know the ice sheets weren't the major barrier we thought, because we have evidence of settlements. Even so the very earliest reliable dates are still much earlier than Australia. 20,000 years compared to 50 or more.
Genetics bear this out too.
As I understand it, Australia was reached by boat about 50000 years ago, but the Clovis culture reached the Americas about 13000 years ago, which gave plenty of time for people to have arrived via the sea previously.
 
"Even so the very earliest reliable dates are still much earlier than Australia. 20,000 years compared to 50 or more."


??
Australia was settled between 50 to 65 thousand years ago. Currently the oldest definite dates for humans in North America are around 20,000 between genetic evidence and the white sands footprints. With the important caveat being that people didn't just cross over and make a beeline for the white sands area.
 
As I understand it, Australia was reached by boat about 50000 years ago, but the Clovis culture reached the Americas about 13000 years ago, which gave plenty of time for people to have arrived via the sea previously.
Sure but the issue is is just being possible doesn't mean it happened. And the route to Australia was much easier than the route to the Americas.
The issue for awhile was there was no real evidence of Pre-Clovis sites. Now there are a good number of sites that have been known since the 90s, and genetic evidence backing up those earlier dates. But there's a real lack of anything much earlier.
If there were people here even earlier they left less material evidence behind than Australian aborigines and any genetics weren't picked up in this study.
 
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