New discoveries from several archaeological sites in North and South America suggest that ancient people first arrived in the New World much earlier than scientists once thought.

  • Optional@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    For a long time, scientists believed the first humans to arrive in the Americas soon killed off these giant ground sloths through hunting, along with many other massive animals like mastodons, saber-toothed cats and dire wolves that once roamed North and South America.

    But new research from several sites is starting to suggest that people came to the Americas earlier — perhaps far earlier — than once thought. These findings hint at a remarkably different life for these early Americans, one in which they may have spent millennia sharing prehistoric savannas and wetlands with enormous beasts.

    “There was this idea that humans arrived and killed everything off very quickly — what’s called ‘Pleistocene overkill,'” said Daniel Odess, an archaeologist at White Sands National Park in New Mexico. But new discoveries suggest that “humans were existing alongside these animals for at least 10,000 years, without making them go extinct.”

    It’s true. There was a time before the Complete Fucking Assholes showed up.

  • grue@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    “Coexisted” with giant sloths and mastodons? Nah, now we’ve just got a better idea of what caused their extinction.

    • novibe@lemmy.ml
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      Except no. We lived with them for over 10,000 years without them going extinct. When before we thought they went extinct right after we arrived, thus concluded we hunted them to extinction.

      But if we lived with them for thousands and thousands of years, that is very unlikely.

      • iopq@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        The original people of the Americas were not ancestors of the Native Americans Alice today so they either died off or left long before 13kya

          • frezik@midwest.social
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            DNA evidence sorta points that direction, but it’s complicated. There were likely waves of migration to North America from different groups. Most of the DNA in native people can be traced back about 13k years. The link in OP points to artifacts from 27k years ago.

            However, there is some evidence of mixing with a different group.

            https://www.science.org/content/article/ancient-dna-confirms-native-americans-deep-roots-north-and-south-america

            Just as mysterious is the trace of Australasian ancestry in some ancient South Americans. Reich and others had previously seen hints of it in living people in the Brazilian Amazon. Now, Willerslev has provided more evidence: telltale DNA in one person from Lagoa Santa in Brazil, who lived 10,400 years ago. “How did it get there? We have no idea,” says geneticist José Víctor Moreno-Mayar of the University of Copenhagen, first author of the Willerslev paper.

            This is an area of active research where a lot of old models are being thrown out over the past few decades. The idea of a single migration from Siberia, the one most of us were taught at school, is definitely wrong. Timing of the glacier movement is too convenient, and the migration would have to have happened far too quickly. What to replace it with is still up in the air.

    • gedaliyah@lemmy.worldOPM
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      2 days ago

      The phrase “peaceful coexistence” implies the existence of a darker, “violent coexistence.”

  • Drusas@fedia.io
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    2 days ago

    Every time there is new research into this topic, we learned that people have been in the Americas for far longer than we had thought. Pretty cool.

    These artifacts from Santa Elina are roughly 27,000 years old — more than 10,000 years before scientists once thought that humans arrived in the Americas.

  • jollyrogue@lemmy.ml
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    2 days ago

    It still weirds me out thinking how mega fauna existed much more recently then we think. Like we could be chilling sloths, or, you know, running in fear, but now the largest animal I encounter on a regular basis is my neighbors fat cat.

    • Not_mikey@slrpnk.net
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      Not Netflix but pbs has a YouTube channel for shit like this called “eons”. Pretty good ~10 min videos about paleontolgy, archeology, pre-history etc.

    • icanred@lemm.ee
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      1 day ago

      There are already two seasons. It’s called “Ancient Apocalypse.”

  • paultimate14@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    Seems like every 6 months there’s a claim like this that gets media attention and then gets disproven later.

    I don’t care either way, just think it’s kinda funny.

    • justOnePersistentKbinPlease@fedia.io
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      Sorry, disproven? As far as I am aware(layman), the claims have only been disproven by evidence pushing it further back.

      One of the chief problems I am aware of is that the places they inhabited and the coastal path they likely took is now under a considerable amount of ocean.

      • vaultdweller013@sh.itjust.works
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        That and the Americas have changed quite a bit since those ancient times. Even mild environmental shifts can cause a shit tonne of damage to evidence, and if their population was spread out and small enough said evidence couldve been sparce already.

    • Krackalot@discuss.tchncs.de
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      I was gonna say that this can’t be new. I just saw a show on one of the history channel channels about the clovis people who lived side by side with mastodon and giant sloths. Of course, it’s just like the history channel to take something someone said with little or no evidence and make a show about it as if it were fact.

      • justOnePersistentKbinPlease@fedia.io
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        Well the clovis people were likely a significant factor in the extinction of most of North America’s megafauna and only arrived relatively shortly before the end of the ice age.

        What we are talking about is that they’re is mounting evidence of significantly older human activity(instead of 10-16k, we’re talking 40-100k)

      • paultimate14@lemmy.world
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        Oh wow I didn’t realize the history channel was still going. I hadn’t seen it there, probably just articles on Lemmy. May have been mentioned by Stefan Milo- an archeologist I watch on Nebula- but I could be misremembering.