The evidence of much earlier human habitation in the Americas has been around for decades, yet has always been shoved aside in favor of a hypothesis with all ends tidied up and bound with a neat bow. Humans traveling over ice sheets from eurasia to the americas never made a huge amount of sense when they could skirt it's resource-rich edges - and traveling by water is much faster, and much less calorically intensive than traveling by land. You also have your food readily available.
... No-one is suggesting people traveling over ice sheets? In fact, the primary reason for the conventional chronology is that it avoids any ice sheets.
During the last glacial maximum, the sea level was low enough that the entirety of Beringia was above sealevel. It was also not covered by ice, and it was one of the richest places for hunter-gatherers to live north of the tropics. Think less of a land bridge and more of a continent. This allowed access to western and central Alaska, but the way forwards was blocked by the Laurentide ice sheet, both on the continent and extending significantly over the ocean. For someone to cross from Alaska to the southern part of the continent, they would have to sail over 2000km without access to anything but deep ocean and floating ice.
There are too many examples of oral history matching historical events for me to bother being your Google here.
Very little weight has been given to the accuracy of these oral histories until recent times. Meanwhile tribes have been saying “that’s not how it happened” to the Clovis hypothesis the entire time.
I probably don't need to tell someone like you who's intimately familiar with them, but for others reading oral histories don't work like the literary histories we're all familiar with from textbooks. What's preserved has some fairly consistent modifications that take place on the journey from the top of the hourglass to the bottom of the hourglass and into deep time histories.
1) Events become omitted, repeated, or conflated to support the narrative purpose of the tradition
2) Elements of the narrative that support the narrative purpose are emphasized or modified to better suit that purpose, sometimes at the expense of modern ideas of historical accuracy
3) Elements from other narratives that support the narrative purpose may be incorporated, or supplant other elements within a tradition of parallel narratives.
4) Elements that are dramatic and narratively meaningful are the ones that survive
These are more or less basic knowledge by anyone working with deep time stories, but if you insist on an indigenous source here's a paper by Roger Echo-Hawk saying the same thing much more eloquently: https://doi.org/10.2307/2694059
So, to use these stories in academic work we typically have to find some way of matching the narrative echos of the real historical events to the things that are visible archaeologically. That's incredibly difficult beyond a few hundred years, and tends to center around dramatic events like natural disasters and geographic features. Well, we don't have many of those for the LGM. Past work has usually centered around identifying either "Dark World" motifs with Beringia Standstill populations (the BSH is incompatible with the White Sands timeline), or Diving Bird myths, which are shared with many Eurasian groups. I'm not aware of any feature of Diving Bird myths that would allow a timeline for the initial peopling, hence the question.
> In conceptual terms, scholarship on the past should revisit the bibliocentric assumptions of “prehistory,” and pursue, instead, the study of “ancient American history”-an approach that treats oral documents as respectable siblings of written documents.
Though, in that same vein is another semantic paper called something like "Rehumanizing Pleistocene People", can't remember the author with bad Internet.
Edit: Also thousands of historical written documents that are disputed or tossed aside.
The issue is that there is clear genetic evidence that the current indigenous population of the Americas arrived onto the continents around 14KYA-15KYA, and all their various land claims and special rights / privileges fundamentally derive from the argument that "They were here first."
Whoever the people leaving footprints at White Sands were, the genetic evidence is clear that they weren't the ancestors of North America's current indigenous population. They were a genetically distinct people group (My suspicion is they would have been more closely related to Australian Aborigines) and are in fact the ones "Who were here first." Accepting that there were already people in the Americas when the current indigenous population arrived, would undermine the land claims of the current North American indigenous populations, and would force them to reckon with the fact they too are colonizers / settlers who displaced an earlier population, likely through violence and possibly even outright genocide, as apart from some isolated groups in the Amazon, there's no genetic evidence the current indigenous population of the Americas meaningfully intermixed with any other populations once they arrived onto the continent as we would expect were the existing population absorbed into the new population through interbreeding.
This is in large part why so many indigenous groups are adamantly opposed to participating in genetics studies, or allowing archaeologists to conduct digs in their "Traditional territories" as a great many indigenous groups actually have "Oral traditions" that there were already people in the Americas when their ancestors arrived, and they know that further study will contradict the narrative that "They were here first," and could eventually invalidate their "Blood and soil" based land claims.
Not exactly. The leading explanation is the "Kelp Highway" theory - the complex coastal geography of SE Alaska and ocean currents could have created a small pockets of ice-free land and given access to rich marine resources. You could effectively island hope down the inland passage until you hit the Columbia river. Having made it to Australia 50kya, we know at least some prehistoric humans had the maritime technology to pull it off.
My take is, it seems likely that at least some of the Beringians made it south of the ice wall during the glacial maxima. If the ice wall was indeed impenetrable 25kya (ie the kelp highway theory is wrong) , the White Sands footprints must have come from people who migrated even earlier.
gametorch•7mo ago
From my reading of the article, the dating of these footprints (~20k years ago) precludes the idea that humans arrived at that time. They must have arrived much earlier, because the northern part of the content was impassable due to glaciers.
...Unless they travelled down the Pacific coast of North America and then moved east.
Ccecil•7mo ago
Explains the Cooper's ferry evidence in Idaho [1].
I hear there is oral tradition from the coastal and Oregon tribes about the glacial "Missoula floods" which took place repeatedly between 10k-20k years ago.
[1] https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/artifacts-in-idaho...
gametorch•7mo ago
Very cool.
You can still see the ripples from the proglacial lake in Missoula today. [1]
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glacial_Lake_Missoula#/media/F...
Ccecil•7mo ago
One spot, Chilco mountain, if you look towards the trench it is all flat and if you look the other way it is all mountain/river valleys. This wall separated the floods from the non flooded area. Lots of exposed rimrock here too. Also the reason we have such a good aquifer here (Rathdrum aquifer) which supplys Spokane/Coeur d'alene.
edit: https://iafi.org/ice-age-floods-videos/
hungmung•7mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willamette_Meteorite
gametorch•7mo ago
jjulius•7mo ago
I have nothing to add, but want to acknowledge that Nick Zentner is a goddamned national treasure.
ChrisMarshallNY•7mo ago