Posted on 02/19/2006 9:08:52 PM PST by anymouse
ST. LOUISThe first humans to spread across North America may have been seal hunters from France and Spain.
This runs counter to the long-held belief that the first human entry into the Americas was a crossing of a land-ice bridge that spanned the Bering Strait about 13,500 years ago.
The new thinking was outlined here Sunday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
The tools dont match
Recent studies have suggested that the glaciers that helped form the bridge connecting Siberia and Alaska began receding around 17,000 to 13,000 years ago, leaving very little chance that people walked from one continent to the other.
Also, when archaeologist Dennis Stanford of the Smithsonian Institution places American spearheads, called Clovis points, side-by-side with Siberian points, he sees a divergence of many characteristics.
Instead, Stanford said today, Clovis points match up much closer with Solutrean style tools, which researchers date to about 19,000 years ago. This suggests that the American people making Clovis points made Solutrean points before that.
Theres just one problem with this hypothesisSolutrean toolmakers lived in France and Spain. Scientists know of no land-ice bridge that spanned that entire gap.
The lost hunting party
Stanford has an idea for how humans crossed the Atlantic, thoughboats. Art from that era indicates that Solutrean populations in northern Spain were hunting marine animals, such as seals, walrus, and tuna.
They may have even made their way into the floating ice chunks that unite immense harp seal populations in Canada and Europe each year. Four million seals, Stanford said, would look like a pretty good meal to hungry European hunters, who might have ventured into the ice flows much the same way that the Inuit in Alaska and Greenland do today.
Inuit use large, open hunting boats constructed from animal skins for longer trips or big hunts. These boats, called umiaq, can hold a dozen adults, as well as several children, dead seals or walruses, and even dog-sled teams. Inuit have been building these boats for thousands of years, and Stanford believes that Solutrean people may have used a similar design.
Its possible that some groups of these hunters ventured out as far as Iceland, where they may have gotten caught up in the prevailing currents and were carried to North America.
You get three boats loaded up like this and you would have a viable population, Stanford said. You could actually get a whole bunch of people washing up on Nova Scotia.
Some scientists believe that the Solutrean peoples were responsible for much of the cave art in Europe. Opponents of Stanfords work ask why, then, would these people stop producing art once they made it to North America?
I dont know, Stanford said. But youre looking at a long distance inland, 100 miles or so, before they would get to caves to do art in.
Themselves?
Some nerve, eh? ;')
Buncha bleepin' vegans!
Ancient People Followed 'Kelp Highway' To America, Researcher Says
Live Science | 2-19-2006 | Bjorn Carey
Posted on 02/20/2006 6:32:34 PM EST by blam
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1582387/posts
LOL! That's really funny!
Thanks for posting that. Where did you find it as when I did a Google Search it didn't come up with any Siberian Points?
I studied the subject about three years ago, and printed out the page. Couldn't believe it today when I found the link still works.
This one is a beauty:
http://www.eki.ee/books/redbook/introduction.shtml
See Aleuts for example, on the left, Index.
The article postulates that the Europeans came over in the process of hunting seals. Meaning that their boats would have stayed close to the Northern ice. Paddle for a while, find a seal colony on an ice floe, hunt some seal, eat some seal, paddle west some more. Ice is fresh water -- don't need barrels. Eskimos have been surviving just fine for millenia on a diet of seals and fish (no fruit grows in the polar regions)
One view is that Siberians came to Norfth America by following ther fringe of the icepack. Why couldn't Europeans do the same?
Big difference between what you said and what I said. I said the best system of government and justice.
Coastal Navigators:Supporting this conclusion, paleontologists have found no animal bones dating between about 21,000 to 11,500 years ago in the region formerly believed to have been the ice-free corridor. This evidence demonstrates fairly conclusively that the ice-free corridor did not exist during the last Ice Age. And it precludes a mid-continental route for human entry before about 11,000 years ago. Deglaciation along the Northwest Coast of North America had begun by about 14,000 years ago (16,800 cal BP) and was sufficiently advanced to enable humans using watercraft to colonize coastal areas by 13,000 years ago (15,350 cal BP). The remains of land and sea mammals, birds, and fish dating to this time have been discovered along the Northwest Coast, demonstrating sufficient resources existed along the coast for people to have survived.
The First Americans May Have Come by Water
by Brad Lepper
Discovering Archaeology
February 2000
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Just updating the GGG info, not sending a general distribution. |
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