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Comment by mmooss | Hacker News Reader

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mmooss·

> the dates seem AWFULLY close to Columbus

What would that matter? Columbus was nowhere near Alaska.

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Suppose that beads became a hot trade item. How fast could they have been traded from the Caribbean to Alaska?

It seems like 30 years is a reasonable time for that.

In that case, I'd expect to find a few beads in the middle.

Maybe we will.

That's the opposite of evidence; there's a very good reason it has no standing in science.

It took a while to find this one. Absence of evidence is not exactly evidence of absence. That’s the point.

You've misunderstood. It's hard to prove a negative, which is the point. But made-up things are lies - evidence is the only currency of the realm.

I took their meaning to be that we should keep looking into the whole matter since, either way, there might be more evidence to find. I don’t think they were dismissing this theory or its implications for political/ideological reasons—since they mentioned it seems plausible—but I could be naive.

In any case, clearly the prevailing understanding is wrong in one way or another, and that should be reflected in curriculums alongside this new evidence.

Yeah, although again, the error bars are too large to say with certainty this was pre-Columbus.

But it really wouldn’t surprise me. As others pointed out, the Inuit traveled across the Bering Strait into what is now Russia many times pre-Columbus, so the idea they may have brought beads back with them is plausible.

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