Re: How early were humans in America?
by BadgerJelly on October 31st, 2017, 12:04 am
I was looking more at the theme of some large flood being taken on to express moral stories. A fear of water in general seems reasonable considering how important it is for survival and how dangerous it is if you cannot swim.
We know a number of floods were well known such as at the Nile, Tigris and Euphrates, and no doubt the flooding of The Black Sea would have been a major event for the peoples of the region. Big enough to spread further afield.
In reference to South Americas I would imagine the evidence we have for the first humans there is likely some time after the actual first arrivals (unless by some miracle we've happened to stumble on evidence of the very first peoples to step foot in the Americas.
I am going to have to study more about the amazon. Many early reports of the area say there were large kingdoms along the amazon river. I would imagine if these cultures had not died out due to disease we'd have a slightly better understanding of the past in that region through their mythology.
mitch -
I remember an article a while ago I posted here (I think?) about the "exploratory gene". They showed that in the US those that lived in more remote areas had more propensity toward exploration. From this I can easily imagine that sheer curiosity would drive people to inhabit all the lands they could, and that challenge was something that people would take up as easily as they would steer away from it. People arriving in the Americas 100,000 bc seems more than a conservative estimate to me. If there were a few hundred people, and we can imagine form this the gene pool was driven in one direction (likely those that avoided the danger survived - the exploratory people survived), we could think about people traversing the globe quite quickly, say within a hundred generations? (which would amount to a minimum of around 1000-2000 years; if we're being more forgiving we could then suggest something more like 10,000 years - either way we're looking at people leaving Africa and possibly getting to the Americas in as little as 10,000 years.)
Also, the largest global cataclysm would have been Danau Toba (roughly 75,000 BC, and I would be surprised if such an event didn't produce some kind of cultural mark. Although the event may have simply been a trigger, or likely partial source, of bottlenecking many species, it was certainly felt. The problem is there are numerous possible explanations and it may well have been some disease that passed from apes to other species? Something certainly happened and many species were dramatically effected.
Basically I am suggesting that humans, given greater genetic diversity, could have burst out of Africa more quickly that we may think? I do think we're inclined to think about human movement around the globe with modern bias. With small populations need we assume mass competition? Life may well have been short and brutal, but I doubt outside inner social conflicts they'd be any need to fight over resources if they were so plentiful, and if so then I would imagine people would push further into the unknown. Was this gradual in some ways and explosive in others?
I am no expert in the field, just find the origins of humanity and its development fascinating.