Been reading with interest so far. You’ll have to pardon my ignorance (but if you don’t you probably don’t enjoy many of my threads), but wouldn’t the debate about languages be conclusively settled by genetics? After all, a brother and sister could speak Basque and Japanese or I could speak Nahuatl and it wouldn’t mean Moctezuma was my uncle.
Incidentally Xhosa is a fascinating language and jolly good fun to pronounce, been going on a YouTube trail over its vowels and such.
I don’t understand the questions. Languages and genes are indirectly related in certain ways, but one does not correlate to the other exactly.
Well, yeah, that’s what I thought - that if genetics proved group x was closely related to group y even though their languages were as close as Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo is to Shoah then regardless of linguistics we could say that in the great family of humanity the two are still close. In other words, I don’t get the importance of language when we have genetics to go on.
I don’t think anyone was arguing differently. Someone made a parenthetical comment that two groups distant genetically both spoke click languages; a minor thread-hijack then occurred.
Perhaps as much as 50000 years, almost certainly 20000.
http://news.discovery.com/human/life/first-south-americans-dined-on-giant-sloths-131119.htm
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/when-did-humans-come-to-the-americas-4209273/?page=2
For extremely almosty values of “almost” perhaps. (Or very small values of 20000.) I clicked only your 2nd link and immediately saw:
None of your cites supports “almost certainly 20,000” years ago. The first cite reports some very tenuous evidence (bones with marks on them that “might” have been made by humans). The second cite says maybe 18,000 years ago. The third cite mentions a date of 33,000 years ago, but even the author says he’s not sure if it’s correct.
I would say that the present consensus view for the colonization of the Americas is as that article says around 16,000 years before the present, up to around 18,000 years ago. Although claims have been made for much older dates, anything significantly older older than that remains highly controversial. Few anthropologists would say humans have “almost certainly” been in the Americas (outside of Alaska) before 20,000 years ago.
Gosh, since we were using round numbers*, I* rounded. * Sue me. Still, 18000 is much older than 10000. Even 16000 is well older than 10000.
Three people jump all over me for rounding from 18000 to 20000, but no one else thinks to correct the much more wrong figure of 10000?:rolleyes:
Well, if you’re going to take it upon yourself to “correct” someone, you should be sure that your correction is correct, or else others will correct you. Live by the nitpick, die by the nitpick.
When “rounding” results in a greater than 10% error in a post where you say the number is “almost certainly” 20,000, then you bet your ass I’m going to correct you. In this business, it’s big news every time the date is pushed back even 1,000 years. Your error was on the order of 2,000 years. And, as Colibri noted, the 18,000 number is a best case scenario. The date that most responsible scientists would use is closer to 16,000 years ago, which is a difference of 4,000 years.
Best be more careful stating dates in the future rather than getting all bent out of shape when your errors are corrected. Or, don’t use words like “almost certainly”.
Clovis man has been dated to 13,500 years ago. So, the other guy was off by 3500 years just for Clovis man, and other peoples at least 16000 years ago, So the poster I was correcting was off by 6000 years- at least. But you ignored his post entirely and jumped on my “error” of 2000 years, which was simple rounding. He used 10000 years (which is wrong even for Clovis man) and I used 20000. So, why didn’t you tell HIM to “be more careful stating dates”? Like it or not, even with the very conservative date of 16K, 20K is closer than 10K is. Why the obsession for showing *me *'wrong"? :dubious:
Not to mention, the date is being pushed back earlier and earlier as new discoveries come in.
From my first cite “Giant sloths were eaten by a population living in Uruguay 30,000 years ago, suggesting humans arrived in the Americas far earlier than previously thought, according to a new study.”
And here:
Sorry if I am unable to correct all the errors on this MB. I do what I can.
Look. You made an error. Why not just admit and move on instead of casting aspersions on people who are fighting ignorance and making an effort to set the record straight? This isn’t an ego contest.
One note on click languages - we do have a substantial dataset for what it looks like when neighbouring people take on click languages by assimilation - one thing is, that they only take on a very reduced set of the clicks, and this falls off with distance/remoteness from the click-speakers - Xhosa has taken up 18 of the 40+ click sounds, Zulu has 15 but uses them in a lot less actual words, Ndebele even less, and so on. I’m not familiar with Sandawe but it should be relatively easy to tell if it follows an original or assimilationist pattern by seeing how many click consonants it retains.
We know the Khoisan must have had trade/cultural links with the rest of Africa because their cattle came from there, as they had cattle herds at least a couple centuries before the actual Bantu population influx, and several centuries after adopting sheep herding (which the Southern African Bantu didn’t do, substituting goats)
As I said, any date older than about 18,000 years is extremely controversial and generally not accepted by mainstream archaeologists. One question is how people could have been present in two continents teeming with game for 10,000+ years while leaving so little evidence behind.
This interactive website, A genetic atlas of human admixture history, seems like it would be relevant to this thread. I’m not sure how to interpret the sizes and colors of the circles, though.
It also doesn’t have any data for Australian Aboriginal groups, but maybe they will add more data if it becomes available.
Article about the website is on Science Daily here.
I think it would be more correct to say ‘most distantly related’ than ‘most unrelated’.
It appears, if you read the recent articles on the recent discoveries, that it has been hypothesized that the first wave were *possibly *coastal hugging fishing & coast gatherers. Their settlements, etc would be under quite a bit of seawater.
http://archaeologybriefs.blogspot.com/2009/07/early-americans-sought-in-underwater.html
http://mai.mercyhurst.edu/new-world/news/adovasio-new-frontier/
As you know the sea level has risen quite a bit in the last 10000-20000 years or so. **ABOUT **18000 years ago, the sea level was **ABOUT **120 meters lower around here and one could walk to the Farallon islands, it appears. In fact there was no SF bay, as we know it. The shoreline was ABOUT 19 or so miles out.
http://science.kqed.org/quest/2010/09/02/the-importance-of-studying-the-history-of-sea-level-change-in-san-francisco-bay/
http://geosci.sfsu.edu/courses/geol103/labs/estuaries/partII.html
And, another question might be how people could have hunted to extinction many very large mammalian species - while leaving so little evidence behind. 
I’m quite familiar with the idea that some old sites have been submerged by postglacial sea level rise. Note that Adovasio’s research is focused on the Meadowcroft site, which as mentioned dates to about 16,000 years ago, not to 20,000 to 30,000 years ago, which is your claim. (I’ve been in touch with Adovasio with respect to an exhibition I’m working on with a section on the earliest colonization of the Americas.)
From your cite:
From that cite:
I didn’t see any reference to human migration to the Americas in that cite.
Nor in that cite.
We are not disputing that humans might have been present in the Americas earlier than 16,000 years ago. What we are saying is that there is no generally accepted evidence that they were.