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Comment by soneca | Hacker News Reader

> ”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.

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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,

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.

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.

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