this post was submitted on 20 Dec 2024
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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.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 hours ago

Makes sense. There is evidence that 21k years ago there were people in Argentina eating basically anything that moved

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C-tceWbJxIm/

[–] [email protected] 2 points 12 hours ago

The Fediverse is old

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 day ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 12 hours ago (2 children)

dire wolves

Wait, dire wolves were real?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 hours ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 hours ago

End boss, fucking unit.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 hours ago

Yes, and a few other fantastical-sounding creatures GRRM put in there, like Zorses.

[–] Reverendender 5 points 13 hours ago (3 children)

And then the Republicans showed up, I assume

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 hours ago

Well . . . yes

[–] Corkyskog 4 points 13 hours ago

"Giant welfare sloths eating up all our fields of lavender!!"

[–] [email protected] 45 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Bro, coexisting with giant sloths and mastodons sounds pretty fucking cool not going to lie.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 day ago (3 children)

Giant sloths were terrifying. Built like a tank and had hands strong enough to claw through literal bedrock to make their caves.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 12 hours ago

Yeah but maybe I could make friends with one and he'd protect me and we'd go on adventures and solve mysteries

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago

I wonder how long it took them to do so.

[–] ChaoticCookie 5 points 1 day ago

Why don’t we do that?

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 day ago (3 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 11 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] -5 points 13 hours ago (3 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 hours ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 hours ago

Alice? Who the fuck is Alice?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 hours ago

They were at least partially the ancestors of modern native people.

[–] loonsun 2 points 12 hours ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] loonsun 2 points 10 hours ago

Thank you for providing reasonable citations and adding to the discussion, you are appreciated

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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

[–] vaultdweller013 8 points 1 day ago

Violent coexistence is what the Greeks and Turks currently have.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago

And dire wolves!

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 day 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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day 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.

[–] Reverendender 10 points 1 day ago (2 children)

When is the Netflix series please?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 hours ago

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

[–] [email protected] 8 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 15 hours ago

Stefan Milo on youtube is also a great channel on discussing these types of papers