https://youtu.be/UNuWnh2pWcw

Oo, there are so many problems here...

Not necessarily with him, though I do have my issues with
the guy he mostly does explain the dynamics, and we do
have to keep in mind that it is a Youtube video meant for
mass consumption. I mean, he has to keep it short &
sweet. But...

CALICO EARLY MAN SITE

Biggest issue with this one is that if you moved it, and many
other "finds that rewrite history, to Africa, nobody would argue
with you. This already has happened. Find any rocky outcrop
near anyplace that early man is already believed to have
existed near and these people HAVE claimed billions -- literally
BILLIONS & BILLIONS -- of "tools" strewn about the place.

...because why make a tool if you're not going immediately
throw it away. And they certainly never would have picked one
of those billions up the next time they needed one, not one they
could spend countless hours making new ones.

Right?

So one super duper major problem with the politics that
pretends to be a science is NOT that the evidence in the
Americas sucks but, much of the evidence sucks and
people are used to dealing with AND ACCEPTING shitty
evidence so, hey, why not?

Okay, so besides crappy evidence there's another major
problem, at least for me:

WHAT "SETTLING" MEAN?

I mean, I imagine I'm far from alone here when I say that I
find it extremely easy to believe that people were reaching
the Americas long before Clovis. Long before. Looooong
before Clovis.

Very easy to believe.

When the oceans were smaller, the islands were larger &
more numerous, after Homo learned to make water
crossings, ANYTIME starting them there had to be at least
the occasional "Cast Away" settling on our humble shores.

Right?

And that's coming from Europe or Africa,

Imagine a Neanderthal from Gibraltar taken far out to sea
by storm before finally touching land in the Americas?

I for one don't really count this as "Settlement."

Talking the Rule v. Exception thing, that would be an
example of an exception. I think what matters here is the
rule.

Rule: People settled in the America

Exception: Random castaways living out their remaining
days here.

I kind of think of very early arrivals in much the same way
as I do Europeans who traveled to Virginia, New England
and parts of Canada before the permanent colonies...

But do they have to be? I mean, could there have been
permanent "Prior" settlements?

LET'S LOOK AT THE WEST COAST

The same "Land Bridge" that allowed Clovis culture to walk
here certainly existed at the beginning and the end of every
single glacial period during the Quaternary.

Like I pointed out elsewhere: The mammoths migrated here
from Asia, evolved and then crossed BACK! All this supposedly
said & done before any "Clovis Culture" came about...

The present interglacial period, the Holocene, the interglacial
whose arrival produced the conditions that allowed the Clovis
people to stroll on in, isn't the first. Nor the second. Third. Fifth.

They could have gotten here. They could have gotten here in
large numbers.

I don't think so but it is a possibility. And this leads me to a
third and my personal favorite possibility, the one I think most
probable:

THE THRESHOLD

In this model people have been arriving here just as soon as
they could, starting when genetics/range/technology (lack
thereof) allowed the trip. But in very small numbers, small
groups.

Small groups, large continent... isolation.

I think it was Clovis that finally crossed a population
threshold where the population was big enough so that
formerly isolated groups could have outside contact.

Maybe not without a lot of movement, migration or
simple "Wander lust," but it could happen.

Under this model the Clovis and later people genetically
swamped everyone else. They didn't kill them all, though
they may have brought disease with them, they out bred
the prior inhabitants.

There might've been cultural difference too. Like the
children of Clovis & after produced with descendants
of prior populations were seen as belonging to the
Clovis (and later) group.

This sort of dynamic is common in even modern people.
Obama, for example, has a white mother but is identified
as black -- belonging to the "African American" group.

Thoughts? Criticisms? Screechings?

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https://jtem.tumblr.com/post/681683323967373312