Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Unsettled Science...

This is fascinating stuff that I've been following for a few weeks now, as the news dribbles out.  It's beginning to look like archaeologists have a solid case for Europeans having been the first to colonize North America:
New archaeological evidence suggests that America was first discovered by Stone Age people from Europe – 10,000 years before the Siberian-originating ancestors of the American Indians set foot in the New World.

A remarkable series of several dozen European-style stone tools, dating back between 19,000 and 26,000 years, have been discovered at six locations along the US east coast. Three of the sites are on the Delmarva Peninsular in Maryland, discovered by archaeologist Dr Darrin Lowery of the University of Delaware. One is in Pennsylvania and another in Virginia. A sixth was discovered by scallop-dredging fishermen on the seabed 60 miles from the Virginian coast on what, in prehistoric times, would have been dry land.

The new discoveries are among the most important archaeological breakthroughs for several decades - and are set to add substantially to our understanding of humanity's spread around the globe.
The general question of when did humans first make it to the Americas, and which humans were they, has had about 10 different “consensus” answers just in my lifetime.  It's clearly far from a settled question even now. Various series theories put forth include several variations of migration across the Bering Straights, landings by Polynesian explorers, Egyptians, Africans, the Vikings, and (now) even earlier Europeans. 

One of these fine days, I wouldn't be a bit surprised to read that humans originated in the Americas!

Climatology could learn a thing or two from archaeology about how science is actually supposed to work...

No comments:

Post a Comment