Blasphamy! This is why Science is bad, it uses facts.

(seems a stretch)

We were all docents of a county park paleontological interpretative center. One of the docents was pretty passionate about the authenticity of the Calico Early Man site, but because of the skepticism that our resident paleontologist harbored I did not volunteer at the site, and did not learn much about it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calico_Early_Man_Site

I assume water navigation is out. I think it's too far back for the most recent ice age. Would they have traveled by foot during a previous ice age?

from the article:

Professor Dennis Stanford, of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, and Professor Bruce Bradley of the University of Exeter, the two leading archaeologists who have analysed all the evidence, are proposing that Stone Age people from Western Europe migrated to North America at the height of the Ice Age by travelling (over the ice surface and/or by boat) along the edge of the frozen northern part of the Atlantic. They are presenting their detailed evidence in a new book - Across Atlantic Ice – published this month.

At the peak of the Ice Age, around three million square miles of the North Atlantic was covered in thick ice for all or part of the year.

---------------------------

Very interesting article, especially if their theory turns out to be correct.

Stone Age people from Western Europe migrated to North America at the height of the Ice Age by travelling (over the ice surface and/or by boat) along the edge of the frozen northern part of the Atlantic. They are presenting their detailed evidence in a new book - Across Atlantic Ice – published this month.

At the peak of the Ice Age, around three million square miles of the North Atlantic was covered in thick ice for all or part of the year.

However, the seasonally shifting zone where the ice ended and the open ocean began would have been extremely rich in food resources – migrating seals, sea birds, fish and the now-extinct northern hemisphere penguin-like species, the great auk.

Using skin boats. This type of technology is probably quite ancient, and well within the capabilities of humans as far back as 20,000 years ago. Plus, humans have been in Australia for 40,000 years and they didn't swim there.

The people who made Clovis points are known as Paleoindians, which dates to after the last glacial maximum, and it was previously thought that they came down through an ice-free corridor over the Bering Land Bridge. But that theory is pretty much dead in the water in terms of considering who was first. We're almost certainly looking at a record of numerous migrations from different origination points over the millenia, with the folks who came via Siberia being the most successful in terms of genetic populations.

Is that people hugged the coasts all the way from Africa, probably walking and using boats too (the coasts were good because of the food available in the oceans). At the time, sea levels were lower and it would have been easier to 'island hop' to Australia once they got to SE Asia. When sea levels rose again, that would have removed much of the evidence of their long journey along the coasts.

which is becoming the predominant theory for human migration: they were capable of building seaworthy boats and simply went land mass to land mass around the rims of the oceans, probably the northern route via Iceland and Greenland the favored one, following fish.

One major characteristic binds the people who migrated out of Africa in successive waves: they all had itchy feet and few stayed put for long.

The lower the sea levels, which would leave more islands exposed. So that is certainly plausible.

Much of Europe was an icy desert then, and even the parts that were habitable were tundra-like. There is every reason to believe that the inhabitants of Western Europe may have taken to an almost Eskimo-like lifestyle, with plenty of use of offshore resources.

One thing which suggests this is that Ireland was settled very soon after the end of the Ice Age by people who came up the coast from northwestern Spain. It seems likely that they had already been in the habit of following the same route when things were still too frozen for permanent settlements. If they could get from Spain to Ireland that way, they could certainly have gone further.

These ideas have been around for a while, but mainly in the form of speculation. Now it seems there is finally solid evidence to back them up.

Very interesting, if it pans out.

But damn it, that means we'll have to rewrite our standard cultural contexts we stick in our archaeology reports!

long before Columbus and probably ever since humankind first appeared on the planet. There are buildings in Europe that were built before Columbus reached America that have carvings of corn on the walls. Corn didn't exist in Europe at the time. It was only native to America.

where are these carvings?

I grow an heirloom wheat...the most recent theory is that it was brought to the New World by Portuguese sailers before Columbus (they are finding genetic evidence of plants growing in the Americas from western Portugal) . This wheat and some melons as well. I guess these sailers came and just stayed? Or if they returned the history of their voyages were lost?

It sure looks like corn to me.

And our desire to explore everything, I personally think it's highly unlikely that this continent WASN'T visited many times before Columbus and by many different peoples.

but it doesn't look particularly like maize, either.

This piece isn't about making a link to Europe but focuses on the evidence of an extremely early nautical culture in New England and Labrador.

http://forum.treasurenet.com/index.php?topic=102549.0;wap2

Previously, Smithsonian scientists thought native people from <Vermont> had reached northern Labrador 4,000 years ago. In 2004 Loring experienced a breakthrough leading to a different hypothesis. He determined that the Vermont point was at least 10,000 years old and fashioned from "Ramah chert," a volcanic rock found only on the coast of Labrador.

"That's 1,600 nautical miles," Timreck notes. "The theory is that Paleolithic people brought the Ramah chert here by boat when Lake Champlain was still a sea."

The frozen configurations of the last Ice Age mean these ancestors "had to adapt to hunting Arctic animals," he adds, "so developing full Arctic maritime capability was essential. A culture that could do that is, by implication, a gee-whiz phenomenon." . . .

Loring surmises that the Ramah chert point may have been the business end of a harpoon for hunting walruses, seals and whales in the salty Champlain Sea, according to Timreck. (If this sounds absurd, check out the skeleton of a 12,000-year-old beluga whale -- dubbed Charlotte for the Chittenden County town where it was unearthed in 1849 --that's exhibited at the University of Vermont's Perkins Geology Museum in Delehanty Hall.)

Originally thought to be of European decent, some think he was Polynesian in origin. In the end, does it matter who "discovered" the Americas since they were fully occupied prior to the post 1492 European conquest/genocide when recorded history favors those who wrote it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kennewick_Man

There have been real controversies about the re-internment of archaeological remains based on claims of historical connections between the remains and existing cultures.

There are no easy answers here. The connections may be real, in which case, there is a lot to be said for respecting the wishes of the people of a given culture, but if the claims are spurious (made so as to give the culture a greater perceived connection to a certain locality and history) the advancement of archaeology is being needlessly hindered.

Polynesians in those catamaran sail canoes were really good navigators.

They made it to South America and eventually as far north as Oregon
and Washington states.

http://archaeology.about.com/b/2010/04/25/polynesian-seafaring-to-the-american-continents.htm

Possible Polynesian-American Contact Topics

Was There Pre-Columbian Contact between Polynesia and America?
Bottle gourd (Lagenaria siceria), Asian domesticate found in pre-contact Americas
Sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas), American domesticate found in pre-contact Polynesia
Chicken (Gallus domesticus), Asian domesticate, found in pre-contact Chile
El Arenal-1 (Chile) where pre-contact chickens have been discovered
Chumash and Polynesian Canoes, possible links between canoe styles and fishhooks
Mocha Island (Chile), where possible Polynesian skeletal material has been identified

It's the equivalent of Norse or Irish voyages to the east coast - less than 2000 years ago.

This has been speculated on for decades and accepted as probable by a number of people. These finds may just convince some of the hold-outs who wouldn't budge from a pre-clovis mindset without more physical evidence.

America's Stone Age Explorers
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/3116_stoneage.html

worth reading (or watching) the entire show

"Perhaps this is the birth of an intriguing new theory for the peopling of America: the first Stone Age explorers arrive on this continent more than 20,000 years ago, much earlier than scientists ever imagined. They come from Asia, and maybe even Europe, by land and by sea. "

Here's a review of a book called The Broken Stones, published in 1976.

It claims that early man was in California much earlier then commonly assumed.

Two sites in San Diego on the south side of Mission Valley, Texas St. and Buchanan Canyon, have produced artifacts with possible dates of 50,000 yrs. old.

I have personally collected identical artifacts of the same material in a canyon about three miles southeast of these sites.

http://escholarship.org/uc/item/029400n2#page-1

Not sure why this is getting regurgitated. Its 20 year old old news. The Europeans were wiped out by the ice dam breaking (earth WARMING) and it killed the Gulf Stream, just like the Gulf oil slick did a few years ago. When the Gulf Stream died, cold weather followed, it just froze everything on the coast.

The Younger Dryas impact hypothesis

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas_impact_hypothesis

It's an acronym and it stands for "I just made this shit up because it conforms to my prejudices, so don't bother asking me to back it up."

I guess you're new to DU since you didn't know that. So welcome.



[font color="yellow"]I'm Batman![/font]

However, by saying "promoting," I assumed you meant those in the community of archaeology and anthropology. People promoting this theory there, I think, have no racist motivations.

Any white supremacists who do will be sorely off the mark, as it is not only the case that race doesn't exist in scientific terms, but rather cultural terms, and even the ancestors of those cultures described as "white" weren't in those parts of Europe 25,000 years ago.

Should probably point out though, that the hijacking of science by right-wing demagogues is by no means a new thing in America........in fact, it was going on long before the start of the last century, likely even before the Civil War started!

I always get a chuckle that people assume the old inhabitants of Europe were what we'd refer to as "white." Odds are they looked exactly nothing like modern Caucasians. The remains of cro-magnons certainly don't resemble modern Europeans to any great degree... Nor do they resemble anyone, truth be told. We're looking at a period of time well before the development of most, if any of our modern racial categories.

It wouldn't surprise me if some humans did come from Europe to the Americas. No more than coming from Asia would surprise me. Or, for that matter, Australia (there's some very interesting finds in South America that hint at that possibility)

But as pointed out elsewhere, this is often taken as a flag to try to claim that Native Americans have no claim to the continents.

Hasn't the 'Solutrean' hypothesis been debunked all to hell anyway?
If these tools were even there they were either not actually of European origin(even if they may have been similar) or perhaps a few of them washed up on the shore somewhere.
Not to mention the known fact that there has been a colossal amount of evidence showing that the Natives were here much earlier than 12,000 B.C., not only that but more recently, some evidence has begun to surface perhaps not even a majority of the Natives came thru Alaska(this makes a lot of sense when you really think about it, especially in the case of the Navajo and the Meso-Americans from Mexico to Argentina.)

Not "buying" into this science is no less lofty than not "buying" evolution.

This is evidence that supports, as you suggest, that people (you say "the Natives," but who does that mean?) were in the Americans before 12,000 years ago, which also means before a land route was open through the northwest.

The point isn't that the tools themselves came from Europe, but that the culture that produced them did.

As I possess a Solutrean point my grandmother found in Warrenton, VA.

post the image or send it to me - director@pmop.org
thanks, Doug

Linguistically, we have AT LEAST four waves and Nahuatl is just scary with the amount of indoeuropean in it. And some people have noticed that east coast "natives" don't look very Asian. Seen a portrait of Pocahontas?

When the Younger Dryas impact occurred. Almost all of the arrow or spear points which are linked to Europe were discovered on the east coast.

For linguistics, this is WAY too far back to definitively trace anything. Even tying together languages that diverged a few thousand years ago is tough.

Genetically, there are some things which support this. There are some genetic markers which exist in Native American populations which could not be accounted for if the Americas were populated from one (though long and continuous) wave from Asia. That being said, people have moved an awful lot over the past 25,000 years, and there's very little to say that any current Europeans are descended from people living in Europe at that time.

I'm just continually fascinated by this stuff - I think learning about our human origins is incredible - and I can't wait for more discoveries.

Radical theory of first Americans places stone-age Europeans in Delmarva 20,000 years ago
By Brian Vastag, Wednesday, February 29, 2:19 PM

When the crew of the Virginia scallop trawler Cinmar hauled a mastodon tusk onto the deck in 1970, another oddity dropped out of the net: A dark, tapered stone blade, nearly eight inches long and still sharp.

Forty years later, this rediscovered prehistoric slasher has reopened debate on a radical theory about who the first Americans were and when they got here.

Archaeologists have long held that North America remained unpopulated until about 15,000 years ago, when Siberian people walked or boated into Alaska and down the West Coast.

But the mastodon relic turned out to be 22,000 years old, suggesting the blade was just as ancient.

More:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/radical-theory-of-first-americans-places-stone-age-europeans-in-delmarva-20000-years-ago/2012/02/28/gIQA4mriiR_story.html

Things haven't changed much here since the Stone Age, so how can they tell?

Texas A&M researchers have been saying for a while they have a dig older than the Clovis culture by a couple thousand years. Could these newly found east coast cultures be ancestral to the Texas culture?

Pretty obvious that Loki and the Raven/Trickster are the same mythological entity, but the distribution of the myth in the Americas argues it's been here since way before the Vikings came.

Then there's that 2000 BC Mycenaean-looking place in New Hampshire called Mystery Hill.

And the really old maps Columbus used.

And the cocaine residue in Egyptian mummies.

Being able to read the Aztec calendar with a glossary of indoeuropean roots.

The list goes on and on.

Oh, and the intensity of interest in the stars. Stars are nautical devices. You need them if you come by boat, not on foot.

over the years to prove Europeans reached America first, that I am now very suspicious of claims that they did. This whole European vs. Asiatic discovery seems more a racial competition than science.

How do we know prehistoric European artifacts were not planted in America?

Jeez, Louise. The land bridge dating NEVER worked.