Hacker News Reader

Comment by mbgerring | Hacker News Reader

Indigenous people in North America have always disputed the academic consensus on how and when humans first got there, and archeologists keep making discoveries supporting their position.

View on HN

Indigenous peoples of North America have a range of positions, not just one. All the way from saying maybe migration should be pushed back some X number of millennia before Clovis, to holding that the Creator created their tribes right where they are and it is offensive to claim they migrated from Asia.

I'd further say that even people from the same tribe will have differing views on this sort of thing. Indigenous people don't have homogeneous beliefs.

It's sort of like saying "Europeans believe the Garden of Eden was in Missouri".

The academic consensus, incorrect as it may be, is based on scientific evidence of human existence in the Americas. Is there similar evidence that academia has ignored but indigenous peoples are aware of? Or are you referring to oral tradition?

The academic consensus is usually reached through a social process, so who wields authority within the discipline also influences what the consensus is.

An example from mathematics: the shunning of Georg Cantor for his proof that the real numbers are uncountably infinite.[1]

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

Sure, but that doesn't mean consensus is wrong by default. If there's evidence that mainstream academia is ignoring without good reason, that's another matter, but to my knowledge that's not the case.

I don't think people are suggesting it is wrong by default, just that it's not correct by default, and is in this case the theory it has arrived at is deeply underdetermined by the evidence.

My understanding is that the theory made sense given the evidence we had, and now that we have new evidence, it calls that theory into question — isn't this the nature of scientific progress? And, regardless, what does any of this have to do with indigenous knowledge?

A lot of theories make sense given the evidence we have.

I don't know what your point is.

If a lot of theories made sense given the evidence we had, why would we need new evidence in order to call the theory into question? The theory was never not in question.

.. and therefore a Native Americans' belief that they were always here is equally valid, because social yada yada yada?

Nonsense.

There are more than two statements that can be made about the world. The statement that you are claiming that I made I did not make.

but that IS something that native peoples typically believe, and they do reject the notion that their ancestors migrated from Siberia. Despite overwhelming DNA evidence.

So what was your point, then?

Parent said that the academic consensus is based on scientific evidence. My point was that the academic consensus can also reflect authority rather than evidence. Evidence for pre-Clovis human presence has been known for a while but its validity has been questioned by consensus opinion.

I did not say anything about the beliefs of indigenous people. I also did not question the available DNA evidence nor historical migration from Siberia.

So your point is: scientific consensus isn't 100%? Ok. So what?

Academics is entirely different depending on the field.

In the case of archeology, it's almost always spoken in terms of "here's the earliest evidence we have of humans in an area".

I don't think any archeologist will say "Oh, humans were not here earlier than X date" but rather "Here's the evidence we have of humans being at this location at this date. Digging through their refuse, it appears this is what they ate.".

A field like mathematics has historically had a large degree of philosophy in it. There's not exactly a bunch of empirical evidence you can bring in to prove math one way or another (hence things like irrational numbers creating cults).

That is true, mathematics is different in the substance of the debate.

In archeology, to my cursory understanding as a non-archeologist, the debate has been about whether the evidence for pre-Clovis human habitation in the Americas can be accepted as valid. There is a wide gray area where acceptance comes down to subjective views, and if it is so, then authority affects what consensus is reached.

If enough evidence is amassed, then we presumably shift out of the grey area and authority becomes unimportant in the consensus.

> ”academic consensus”

This should probably be qualified as US academic consensus. Academics in Brazil have disputed the 13k yo date for America occupation for some time already.

To wit, the Luzia woman was found to be ~12 thousand years-old in South America, so it puts the 13 thousand date in question

Disclaimer: I know absolute nothing about this topic and this is from my recollection of reading wikipedia and soft-science articles

As I understand it, it should have taken a lot of time for full migration from North to South America; and while a thousand years seems more than enough for travel, apparently migration takes a long, long time - and the odds are that a fossil comes from a migrated population, virtually impossible to be from an odd outlier that traveled ahead (for whatever reason)

I know very little too, but just happened to listen to an interview about this topic.

Here is a paper suggesting that the region of where is Mexico had populations 30k years ago.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2509-0

> apparently migration takes a long, long time

if we take a generation to be 20 years, and the grown children move 20 miles away so as not to compete for resources and/or find fresh ones, then we get about 1 mile per year. 1000 years == 1000 miles of migration,

Any reason to assume they would move in a consistent direction?

If you have a settlement of 100's, some of them will move in almost every direction.

Weren't people hunter-gatherers at this point in time?

They would be highly mobile and actively looking for new, richer ground.

.. and so? they'd spread less than a mile per year? Or more?

Typical mobility numbers for North American lithic and archaic groups are in the hundreds of miles/kilometers annually, generally decreasing over time. Those estimates come from groups many thousands of years after the dates being discussed here, but they're the best we have.

So: I estimated 365 miles/year and you had "hundreds of miles/kilometers annually." I don't see anything to argue about, specifically, especially no one really knows.

Your response above is 1 mi/year, but in any case I'm not really responding to argue. Just stating what a reasonable mobility is in North American archaeology, around ~500km/yr.

Beat me to it. It occurred to me that I had one mile per year, not per day, and I was about to delete that post.

I believe there was another recent study that found some pre-Clovis ancient DNA and concluded that modern Native Americans shared little in common, implying that pre-Clovis people were largely wiped out and thus are not ancestors of modern Native Americans.

Also not sure that the academic consensus has been that Clovis was the earliest settlement for maybe a decade.

Do you have any more details than that? The only purported preclovis sequencing I'm aware of are the paisley caves coprolites, for which the genetics didn't indicate that, had a much more complicated story, and aren't even this old.

And claimed what, instead? Stating they've "always been here", rode on a giant bird from "another world", or that they emerged from the Earth's navel just aren't things a scientist expects to find evidence for...

Well what is the Native American perspective on it?

Here's an interview.

https://srslywrong.com/podcast/252-the-indigenous-paleolithi...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com