Re: Why are the sites in North and South America with claims for great age all on the East side?

Lee Olsen wrote:
On May 20, 6:43 pm, Matt Giwer <jul...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
....
And as I predict, now that it is acceptable to find sites that old people
will start finding them. This one was sort of a crap shoot digging as deep as
possible and then finding something. When one digs down to the right age why
waste time digging deeper instead of spreading out from first site? You "know"
there is nothing to find at a deeper level.

Genetic mutations are increasingly favoring a later, rather than earlier date for
occupation south of the ice sheets.

Archaeologists do not find as much initial evidence as erosion,
which is not depth specific.

Yes but a guy finding an arrowhead finds an arrowhead. Unless a pro sees it that is all it is. And before now simply dismissing it was the only thing to do.

How do you account for all the older other Pleistocene mammals that are found
by erosion, hikers, hunters, construction crews? There is no problem
finding these, why not human remains? Evidence of Pleistocene mammals
depends mostly on bones. Humans have bones plus lithics that can be
found. Lithics wash out of gullies, lakeshores and offshore deposits.
Archaeologists have little to do with that process, they couldn't stop
earlier finds from being found if they wanted to.

Human remains are rather more difficult to find unless the burial methods used encouraged preservation. An animal dying in a river is going to stay there and maybe be buried in the mud. Friends and family will recover a human and give it a proper burial or disposition which would not encourage preservation. Although burial is mostly a Christian custom only a few societies used methods aimed at preservation of the body.

But maybe some have been found and the implied age has just been put down to anomalous.

In Africa, just as here in the Great Basin, archaeologists survey
erosional areas,
and less out on the flats where sediments cover possible deposits. Why
search
out on the savanna, when places like Olduvai Gorge cuts a trench down
300 feet, and two million years, to bedrock. Olduvai is a free
backhoe service.

With 2 million years and a huge area being eroded naturally there are only a handful of finds. In the best case here we are talking about 30,000 years. If the finds per 100,000 years are at the same rate here as there we should have about 1/3 of one find so far.

It is sort of clear long term settlements have to be found so that human detritus buries old fires with and the once flat ground becomes a small hill over the centuries. Finding a chance campfire after tens of thousands of years probably can't be distinguished from a lightning strike fire even if it does manage to get buried and preserved.

I don't know when this Bering Straits idea got started but I read of it as a kid in the 50s. Looking back on it I see that since then Asia has been eliminated for the origin of humans in favor of Africa so I have no idea where the 15-20,000 years ago date came from. There have been generations of folks taught the recent arrival idea.

If it were not for C14 a claim that it is earlier would likely still be rejected. The good news about C14 is that it cannot be contaminated to look older than it is.

This is nothing unusual and it is the way science goes. There was a major in-flux in the traditional way at the traditional time so none of that has to be changed. There still seems to be a disconnect between the old and the new. While I am not big on the comet destruction idea yet there is still something major missing to explain why there was not a melding of two cultural traditions 10,000 years or so ago.

And then if we take the eastern arrivals as following seals and whales why did it stop? It is difficult to postulate a chance crossing with a large enough population to be able to reproduce. One generally does not find women and men hunting together so how did both wind up here at the same time? And then tribes marry from outside the tribe to avoid in-breeding problems so several different groups have to have arrived and found each other before they died out individually from in-breeding.

The idea delights the imagination but creates a whole raft of entirely new questions to be addressed.

--
Of all the ideas we have of what happens after death not a single one of
them has the dead interested in being remembered.
-- The Iron Webmaster, 4006
http://www.giwersworld.org a1
.

Quantcast