Discovery of Ancient Spearpoints in Texas Has Some Archaeologists Questioning(trunc)

Full Title: Discovery of Ancient Spearpoints in Texas Has Some Archaeologists Questioning the History of Early Americas

Archaeologists have discovered two previously unknown forms of spearpoint technology at a site in Texas. The triangular blades appear to be older than the projectile points produced by the Paleoamerican Clovis culture, an observation that’s complicating our understanding of how the Americas were colonized—and by whom.

Clovis-style spear points began to appear around 13,000 to 12,700 years ago, and they were produced by Paleoamerican hunter-gatherers known as the Clovis people. Made from stones, these leaf-shaped (lanceolate) points featured a shallow concave base and a fluted, or flaked, base that allowed them to be placed on the end of a spear.

New research published today in Science Advances describes the discovery of two new spearpoint technologies at the Buttermilk Creek Complex of the Debra L. Friedkin archaeology site in Bell County, Texas, which date to between 13,500 and 15,000 years ago. Because these spearpoints pre-date Clovis culture, they may have inspired the development of subsequent projectile point styles, including those made by the Clovis people

could be weather events. Consider the NC/SC storm surge. Flooding in Texas, tornados, volcanos from NM to the Pacific.
Or could be virus: European settlers to the Americas caught Hemorragic fever. The Indians also suffered from it; some populations may have built some level of herd immunity over time and some not. Carried by varieties of mice/rats drawn to subsistence farms/homes. Or, maybe some other virus/carrier. T-rex?

http://www.infectionlandscapes.org/2013/02/american-hemorrhagic-fevers.html

and,
“the epidemic of 1576 which killed 45% of the entire population of Mexico”

http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/health/pathogens/acuna-soto_hemorrhagic_fever_ancient_mexico.html

You really wouldn’t have to wipe out everyone. You just have to wipe out the producers, i.e., young men. Women could struggle along but no way to reproduce. Old and too young die of starvation. Dark Ages of few and far between people and not a lot of populating going on.

The first “wave” over the Bering, were no more than 70 people. Probably groups of the same size moving up along eastern South America. So maybe 40 or 50 get to Cuba or Texas, or islands/land that’s sunk or 30ft down. The last hurricane to hit Hawaii sunk East Island. Atolls have been depopulated by cyclones. Earthquakes reshaped Japan and Malaysia’s coastlines. Pacific coast to NM was one hot mess of volcanoes, earthquakes, upheavals and landslides.

There were only a million or a few million AIs through all of N and S America by 1600. Not a whole lot considering 15,000 years. And certainly not a whole lot when you compare the population explosion of Africa just over the last 200 years. Either the entire population was one murderous riot, or there was rampant disease, or both. Consider the Mayan Bat God - feared because he could wipe out entire civilizations unless he received human sacrifices. Similar to the flying heads of the Iroquois. Or the Cheyenne, who raided down to Mexico in the winter months, and their legend of cannibals. Rather extreme legends have some basis. And then there’s huge populations of cold and warmblooded maneaters. And t-rexes. We’ve found some of those fossils, but nowhere near representative of the numbers estimated to exist. Same with evidence of humans. Roanoke Island lost colony. Poof.

I recently saw the proposition that something like 20,000,000 people were in North America before 1492, and most of then died subsequently from diseases brought from Europe/Asia. Europeans had been winnowed for millenia by diseases carried west from Asia. NA did not have that degree of disease spread and survivors immunity and was much more vulnerable.

We should check the DNA of Cherokees and coastal Mexican Indians to see if there is some residual European DNA. Of course after 6 generations you are down to 1/1000th trace of one ancestor’s DNA, so it will be hard to find. If I remember correctly, the first Spaniard to travel down the Amazon from the Andes was surprised to discover some white people among the population. It also would appear that the large settlements he saw were pretty much wiped out after he passed through. Probably disease.

The population estimate in the millions used in the leftie text, "The Invasion of America", was based on the sizes of native villages that had been abandoned. Epidemics were, of course, nothing new in the Americas either, but the only major illness that appears to have entered the wider world from the Americas thanks to Columbus is syphilis (still a lively debate going on about that, of course). Talk about Montezuma's Revenge.

The archaeological evidence known by the mid-1970s (and the body of evidence has probably increased at least twofold since then) indicatess at least four major population peaks, followed somewhat closely by massive urban collapse, in Central/Middle America, with a population reaching perhaps 50 million (!) each time, a figure the region didn't reach again until the late 19th or early 20th century at the earliest (Mexican census figures were problematical back when I was a young 'un and taking L.Am history; this was due to the 60 years of off-again, on-again civil war in Mexico). Bernal Diaz reported that their ships were met by thousands of belligerent tribesmen in cotton armor, and armed with bows arrows spears etc. The Cortez expedition finally made a landing near modern Veracruz, and managed to find allies who were interested in the downfall of their Aztec enemies.

On the way into Tenochtitlan, the expedition encountered or observed huge populations in many villages and towns. During their hasty flight back, some of those very same places were empty of living people. Anecdotally, that could be interpreted as meaning the European diseases spread quickly among the dense populations of various ethnic groups with which they came in contact

No way was population of the Americas that large

There’s little evidence of that

So called scholars who wish to emphasis the white genocide of natives have pushed estimates in the PC era from less than ten million in early 1900s to as much as 150-200 million estimates today

Europeans so bad

The science surrounded this civilization threads is so politicized

It’s why i just can’t trust em

Give me a 1950 Britannica over 2018 Harvard dept of anthropology

20MM is poppycock. As is the argument that Europeans lived in large groups and so had more herd immunity. Bottom line is, we all derived from SouthAsia/EastEurasian and CentralAsia/EastEurasian about the same time -19,000-15,000 years ago (also the time the blue eyed blond genes appeared). Who, in turn, derived from the cradle of civilization populations. The Siberians weren’t magically ‘purified’ of disease by walking across water.

Bering crossers brought all the ancient stuff with them. Each ‘wave’ bringing more carriers and more varieties of disease. Malaria is estimated to be 300,000 years old and some say it killed The Khan. Other pathogens in steppe populations included flu, staph, strep, salmonella/typus, rickets, leprosy, parasitic worms, syphilis (non sexual and the mutated sexual contact version), tuberculosis, leukemia, mumps, tetanus, cancers, and the aforementioned hemmoragic fevers. American syphilis was pretty gruesome - body pustules, death in a few months. Heart disease was prevelant in the Pacific NW, far from initial European contact. So was arthritis. Hippocrates discussed mumps back in 5BC. You name it, populations carried it.

In many places in America today there are local ‘valley fevers’ that come from the soil, along with hoof and mouth disease. There was also mange, transference of mammal parasites such as Kissing Bugs/trypanosome, hunta viruses, equine encephalitis, (t-rex encephalitis?), Lyme disease, etc. The practice of scalping and cannibalism - not brought or taught by modern Europeans - enabled disease transference from contact with blood and organs, especially in those cultures that ate livers and/or brains/blood of their captives (or of animals).

The second wave of Siberians across the Bering, the Inuits, completely wiped out the descendants of the original 70 travelers. They could have killed them all but the more likely scenario is they brought disease with them. As the third wave did, and so on and so on. And, to be noted, some of those diseases or their mutations carried back to Europe as a result of back-migration. The Bering route wasn’t just a one-way street and neither was disease. And it wasn’t just limited to brown-eyed people.

As an aside, ‘albino’ africans have long been persecuted in Africa and in some regions actually hunted for religious ceremony. Not that all of those folk were true albino, but light-skinned throw-backs to the European slaves brought by the hundreds of thousands to Africa to be sold on the trade routes (an original sin Africa has yet to publically acknowledge). Perhaps that mindset carried through to early Siberians, who, in turn, would have persecuted any ‘albinos’ that successfully migrated into the Americas, or, since slavery was a common practice in indian communities, were brought along as captives? By the time of the Inuit wave, there was at least 7,000 years of light skin, blue-eye gene expression. Which makes it a bit hard to believe that only darker-skinned people traveled over the Bering.

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