packyderms_wife
Neither here nor there.
Always..
SCI 14,000-year-old village discovered in Canada
- Thread starter Melodi
- Start date
Always..
Melodi
Disaster Cat
Yep, I couldn't find the specific article (so instead posted the on I did about the boat migration theory) but I've seen the guy on the history channel and read his work; he got really excited when he found evidence of human activity (fishing hooks etc) the very first time he found them, on his first (self-funded) dive that he picked from an underwater map of where the coast line should have been during the Ice Age.
You might say he got lucky, but he may also have discovered "why" many "migration paths" have not been found; both in the Americas and even in Europe/Asia because people like to travel by water and/or on the coast lines and the old coast lines sunk beneath the sea long ago; on the other hand some water preserves artifacts very well - there is a whole new area of archeology opening up in both the North Sea and the Black Sea; both of which were all (or in part) above the water and apparently inhabited before the last ice melted and drowned both areas.
Melodi
Disaster Cat
Very true, although today's stake is usually loss of tenure, salaried employment and being banned from main-stream publishing; people in this position either give up and go drive a cab or they revert to the more "woo-woo" circuit and continue to self-publish and advocate for their ideas.
Sometimes, like the scientist in the 1930's who proposed the great rock formations in Washington State were formed by massive flooding after the Ice Age they go "oh I'm very sorry" get quiet and go back to work with their head hanging; only to be vindicated decades after their death (again after the old geologists all died off and a new younger crowed with better technology came along to show the old theory was probably correct).
This is what is happening now with many of the older discoveries in American archeology (North and South) that were originally believed to be very old but then "deemed" not to be simply because - well "Clovis Only" and they simply "could not be that old" (except that some of them are)...
FaithfulSkeptic
Carrying the mantle of doubt
So long as archaeology or any other investigative science is conducted by humans, it will always be subject to the base human vices of self-preservation and greed, whether we live in a world of plenty or not.
ShadowMan
Designated Grumpy Old Fart
So very true! We always interpret others and past events through the culturally colored lenses of our own self understanding from our timeline, and time. "What would we do or be doing in that situation." It simply doesn't work that way. You have to bend your way of thinking to get inside someone else's mind and that is damn near impossible even today.
I love it when some "expert" tries to interpret how Neanderthals lived or thought, or believed. How in the hell can you do that? In all reality you really can't - no one knows how they thought, how they really lived, how they really interacted among themselves or any other species. Even the question about interbreeding between different humanoids....DUDE! I've seen sailors on liberty. Don't tell me what humans WON'T DO! SERIOUSLY!!
There are no absolutes in past human history. Anything IS possible and nothing is impossible. All we have with all our discoveries is tiny snippets of preserved time. Seconds within a millennium of lifetimes over hundreds of thousands of years. You really can't discern much of anything with such a small amount of evidence. It's like discovering a footprint preserved in sand. All you have is a footprint. Nothing more. You don't know what that person was doing. Where they were going or coming from. Who they were, what they believed, nothing. It's just a footprint. You only know that at some point in time someone was there. Nothing more. Nothing less.