georgerm Posted yesterday at 04:01 PM Author Posted yesterday at 04:01 PM On 1/4/2026 at 4:54 PM, MIB said: The first Native Americans did not bring Clovis technology with them. We know that there were settlements like Rimrock Draw cave in Oregon that predate Clovis by a good margin. I know a photographer from the dig. As of now they have solid dates to 18500 BP and there is a smattering of deeper material that hasn't been dated yet. The fossilized trackway at White Sands, NM goes back to about 23,000 BP. There are other sites being excavated that may prove older than either. Nothing, though, in the way of settlement residuals that exceed 30K years and certainly nothing matching the proposed / purported mammoth bones said by some to be human-affected dated to 130K years. For the moment, it looks like Clovis did not derive from Solutrean technology from Europe as proposed, it really was near-parallel development. If Clovis tech were descended from Solutrean tech, we have another problem because there is no DNA in any existent Native American population dating from the same rough time, none. This means that somehow the Asian-descended "Native" tribes would have had to have understood and adopted the Solutrean technology yet killed every single European -sourced person so that there is ZERO DNA passed along. If Clovis technology was imported, it was into a continent already peopled by those using other technologies. Possible. Also possible it was derived in place .. that improbable but not impossible parallel evolution idea. South America is a different puzzle. One piece interesting to me is the yam / sweet potato. Apparently it is indigenous to the south pacific islands. I is maybe reasonable that some could have washed up on South America and taken root, but if so, why do the south American natives use exactly the same word as the south pacific islanders for it? This points to earlier contact than we currently think possible. We could ask why the Olmec heads' features appear sub Saharan African. Coincidence of artistry or .. familiarity with people from continents that shouldn't theoretically have been able to contact each other. We have to be a bit cautious about timelines though. A friend years back was sure that South American and African people migrated back and forth overland before the mid Atlantic Ridge took over. Hah hah, missed by a couple hundred million years. Oops. read it once and thanks... will read it again and thanks for the details... "NM goes back to about 23,000 BP..." What does 23,000 bP stand for and how does it relate to the Clovis culture? 2
Incorrigible1 Posted yesterday at 04:14 PM Posted yesterday at 04:14 PM 1 minute ago, georgerm said: read it once and thanks... will read it again and thanks for the details... "NM goes back to about 23,000 BP..." What does 23,000 bP stand for and how does it relate to the Clovis culture? 23,000 Before Present (now). "Science" actively discouraged speculation of human activity in N America prior to approximately 13,000 Before Present (Clovis culture). Such speculation led to careers being damaged, and was suppressed. The confirmation that the White Sands fossil footprints at 23,000 BP helped dash the stranglehold of the "None Before Clovis" dogma. Real science freed to pursue discovery of prehistoric N American human activity. 1 1
MIB Posted yesterday at 05:03 PM Moderator Posted yesterday at 05:03 PM 2 hours ago, georgerm said: read it once and thanks... will read it again and thanks for the details... "NM goes back to about 23,000 BP..." What does 23,000 bP stand for and how does it relate to the Clovis culture? BP is "before present". (a quick edit: for "BP" time, year 0 is 1950, so 200BP would be 1750.) The earliest Clovis points date to about 13,000 years ago. Having sites in North America 10,000 years before Clovis nullifies the whole "Clovis first" paradigm. Along with that idea was populating North America through an ice free corridor in the Cordilleran ice sheet. There was no ice free corridor 23,000 years ago. This more or less forces the populating of N.A. to have been by boat along the coast following the "kelp highway" rather than overland. Most of the artifacts from that route are under hundreds of feet of seawater today since the melting of the continental glaciers has pushed sea levels up that much. There were at least 4 periods in the pleistocene where there was a Bering land bridge rather than open water but we don't have any generally accepted evidence of human occupation going back to those earlier 3 periods. For now, the suggested, speculative very early "stuff" (100K years BP) seems to stand alone with no supporting evidence and most likely is wishful thinking, not evidence of human occupation. Possibility of 30K years could be inferred though. The important part is that Clovis technology was NOT the earliest in North America, people were here before Clovis technology was developed. Most likely, also, since there were already people here, Clovis, despite having strong similarity to Solutrean technology, is probably a North American development. With people already here, there should be strong genetic connection if the technology were imported. 1 2
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