A 14,000-year-old campsite in Argentina | Hacker News Reader

A 14,000-year-old campsite in Argentina

arstechnica.com

For more than a decade, evidence has been piling up that humans colonized the Americas thousands of years before the Clovis people.

It's actually been longer than that. The site at Monte Verde [1] in Chile seems to have been widely accepted as a pre-Clovis site nearly 20 years ago (1997 according to Wikipedia [2]). Awareness of the site, at least among the archaeological community predates that (1989 [3]). The first radiocarbon dates indicating a pre-Clovis origin for the site go back to 1982[4].

The idea that Clovis was not the earliest culture in the Americas, and the commensurate theory that the earliest colonists must have been traveling by boat [5] goes back decades. I know I've been reading about it (in the popular press no less) since the 1990s. It seems like every article I read about it makes it seem like some new and revolutionary idea. The only conclusion I can draw is that archaeological science operates on time scales only slightly shorter than those the archaeologists study.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Verde

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Verde#Acceptance

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Verde#Diffusion

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Verde#Discovery (third paragraph)

[5] I'd like to give you a citation for this, but this theory, as far as I can tell has no official name.

Adds up very well with almost contemporary evidence from Monte Verde in Chile http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.... so "mystery" is a non sequitur. But that's the headline.

The original research paper is worth a read (open access FTW).

Yeah, I came here to say the same thing. I think the use of "mystery" in the headline was clickbait.

Ok, we took that out of the title above.

When I was at university (UBC) "pre-Clovis" was an almost forbidden word in some classes. I saw a very heated debate in a geology class discussing land bridges. Many First Nations students took issue with any suggestion that their nations, their cultures, were not "first". Why that matters I don't know (politics) but they were adamant supporters of the Clovis First hypothesis. It has taken many years to etch away at the underlying land bridge assumptions and properly credit the resourcefulness of ancient peoples.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clovis_culture#Clovis_First_.2...

>Why that matters I don't know (politics) but they were adamant supporters of the Clovis First hypothesis.

I imagine that it's less about "being first," and more about not wanting a history of hideous exploitation to be washed out under the excuse of you weren't first.

I try to imagine what it must be like to only have had my family's history recognised in any meaningful way in very modern times - and then to have people tell me "no no no, actually that's all changed, this is your narrative now."

Rightly or wrongly, I think I'd be on the defensive as well.

>Many First Nations students took issue with any suggestion that their nations, their cultures, were not "first".

We've every reason to suppose that contemporary Native American people are every much descendants and inheritors of the legacy of any pre-Clovis people, as they are of the Clovis culture. It's all part of their heritage.

I can see how drawing artificial distinctions like that could be used as derogatory arguments against them though. A slur doesn't have to be valid to still be hurtful. Still, it seems a shame to feel forced into a position in which you feel compelled to denigrate or denying the legacy of people, some of which are almost certainly your own ancestors.

> The Clovis, who are the early ancestors of today's Native Americans,

Emphasis added. One badly chosen word in an otherwise decent article. What we know of pre-Clovis people clearly supports the idea of them also being 'early ancestors to today's Native Americans.'

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