ANCIENT HUMANS IN AMERICA: WHY A DISCOVERY IN NEW MEXICO CHANGES EVERYTHING

[Judi Lynn]

Our species began migrating out of Africa around 100,000 years ago.

OUR SPECIES BEGAN MIGRATING OUT of Africa around 100,000 years ago. Aside from Antarctica, the Americas were the last continents humans reached, with the early pioneers crossing the now-submerged Bering land bridge that once connected eastern Siberia to North America.

At times throughout the Pleistocene ice age, which ended 10,000 years ago, large ice sheets covered much of Europe and North America. The water locked in these ice sheets lowered the sea level, allowing people to walk the bridge from Asia through the Arctic to Alaska. But during the peak of the last glacial cycle, their path south into the Americas was blocked by a continental-wide ice sheet.

Until now, scientists believed humans only traveled south into the Americas when this ice barrier began to melt – at the earliest, 16,500 years ago. But together with our colleagues, we have discovered a set of fossil footprints that suggest humans first set foot on the continent thousands of years earlier.

These footprints, unearthed at White Sands National Park in New Mexico, were made by a group of teenagers, children, and the occasional adult, and have been dated to the height of the last glacial maximum, some 23,000 years ago. That makes them potentially the oldest evidence of our species in the Americas.

More:
https://www.inverse.com/science/fossil-footprints-ancient-humans

[empedocles]

1. TY

[Goonch]

2. ;-{)🖖

[niyad]

3. Thank you for this fascinating find.

[paleotn]

4. The great debate. Now new evidence. Thanks!

[mountain grammy]

5. Amazing!

[stopdiggin]

6. evidence has been pointing to earlier and earlier dates

with relative consistency. (not all that evidence has met with approval or consensus, but that's science) The evidence presented here seems to be fairly solid - or at least great effort has been made to shore it up. We'll see what the community has to say.

Back in the dark ages (roughly coinciding w/ my schooling) they were still teaching Clovis - and that's water long passed under the bridge.

Thanks, JudiLynn. Interesting stuff as always.

[SheltieLover]

7. Wow!

Ty!

[H2O Man]

8. Recommended.

In his 1957 book "Traces of Early Man in the Northeast," NYS archaeologist William Ritchie stated humans had been in North America for 5,000 years. By the 1960s, he went with the generally accepted post-Wisconsin glacier theory of 12,000 years. By the 1970s, others had put forth three other theories, of 20,000, 40,000, and 60,000 years. Very few professionals thought these theories had merit. But now there is rock-solid evidence.

[CaptainTruth]

9. Wow! Thanks for posting!

[calimary]

10. I LOVE this stuff!

Just absolutely fascinating!

[Evolve Dammit]

11. Very cool. Hope they find more types of evidence to add to the finding.

[burrowowl]

12. WOW! K&R!

[czarjak]

13. Science.

[ymetca]

14. Those time-travelers

were careful not to wear their Nikes!

[wnylib]

15. So, if modern humans were in

North America as early as 21,000 years ago, and possibly 30,000 years ago, I wonder if any Neanderthals, or even Homo Erectus ever made it from Asia to the Americas. There is no evidence that either one did, but I wonder if it's possible and we just haven't found the evidence yet.

Leaky thought that he had found evidence of stone tools in Montana going back more than 100,000 years. His finds were rejected as natural rock formations and the idea that there were human-made tools that long ago in America was ridiculed. But could it have happened? The only evidence that would be acceptable would be if there was a scraper with animal residue on it that could be dated, or actual human remains.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

17. For what it's worth, DNA evidence shows Neanderthal DNA in

almost every human being whose ancestors left Africa all those many years ago.

Those whose ancestors stayed in Africa, have no Neanderthal in their DNA.

Apparently, Neanderthals made their way east, and people in the far east, meaning China, have even more Neanderthal in their DNA than the rest of us.

[wnylib]

18. I am aware of Neanderthal DNA distribution

outside of sub Saharan Africa, but I wonder what your source is for saying that there is more Neanderthal DNA in the east than elsewhere.

Denisovans were closely related to Neanderthals and existed primarily in the east. The people of southeast Asia have more Denisovan DNA than any other region. Is that what you're referring to? Southeast Asians have a mix of Neanderthal, Denisovan, and Sapiens DNA. Although Neandethals and Denisovans were related, they were not the same.

But I was wondering if any Neanderthals or Homo Erectus had made it to Notth America prior to the evolution of Sapiens, or at least prior to the spread.of Sapiens into Asia.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

19. I think we may be miscommunicating.

I honestly don't know enough about Denisovans to make a sensible comment on them.

My statement about Neanderthal DNA is based on various thing, which you can readily research on Google. Here's one:

East Asians seem to have the most Neanderthal DNA in their genomes, followed by those of European ancestry. Africans, long thought to have no Neanderthal DNA, were recently found to have genes from the hominins comprising around 0.3 percent of their genome.

You can do a Google search on "Neanderthal DNA" to find out all kinds of things.

[wnylib]

20. Thanks for the info on HN DNA in the East.

But I am still wondering about the same thing as my original post - whether they ever made it to North America prior to the evolution of Sapiens (us) or at least prior to the arrival of Sapiens in Asia.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

16. I recall reading a very long time ago,

as in several decades ago, that researchers looking into people coming into this continent were discourage very strongly from looking at all past the Clovis level, given that it was established that supposedly there were no humans before that point. The piece I heard on NPR suggested very strongly that the claim was very strong that no one had gotten here before the accepted dates. Except, as this piece made very clear, there was a lot of evidence that humans had made their way onto this continent a very long way before the officially accepted dates.

Humans have been roaming around this planet since day one, meaning at the very beginning of our being homo sapiens.

A lot of our ancestral migration is currently unknown. But it's real. We are all descendants of that migration. Except, perhaps, those whose ancestors never left Africa, our collective and important ancestral homeland.

[wnylib]

21. One of my anthropology professors

told us that the reason why the Clovis theory was so strongly, even rigidly, held onto was to discourage the fantasy origin beliefs about Native Americans being descendants of the lost tribes of Israel or survivors from Atlantis. They wanted to adhere to only what could be established by strict scientific methods.

That was back in the mid-1980s, before DNA analyses and the knowledge of haplogroups, before the human genome had been mapped. At that time, though, the Meadowcroft Rock Shelter site in Western PA had already shown reliable dates back to 14,000 years ago and possibly earlier, so he told us that future findings were likely to upend the Clovis theory. He also believed that we would someday find evidence of Neanderthal and Sapiens interbreeding.

He passed away before the discoveries of evidence that he anticipated.

I try to follow findings as they develop, but miss some of them, which is why I was unaware of the higher incidence of Neanderthal DNA in east Asia until you mentioned it.

So I looked up more articles on it and one of them mentioned some of the hypotheses proposed for explaining it. Today's eastern Asians in Japan and China show lower levels of Denisovan DNA than southeast Asia, but have higher levels of Neanderthal DNA than elsewhere. Yet the Philippines have the highest level of Denisovan DNA in the world.

So one hypothesis was that, since Neanderthal and Denisovan were related and likely shared a common ancestor, the higher rates of Neanderthal DNA in Japan and China might have come into the population from traits that Neanderthal and Denisovans shared, in addition to Neanderthal/Denisovan crosses as well as from Neanderthals themselves.

What surprised me in that article was that it said that there was a high degree of Denisovan DNA in Iceland! Who knew? Denisovan Vikings? Talk about our ancestors traveling!