cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/23360555
New discoveries from several archaeological sites in North and South America suggest that ancient people first arrived in the New World much earlier than scientists once thought.
Born too late to coexist with giant sloths and mastodons, born too soon to coexist with giant sloths and mastodons.
Born just in time to coexist with a giant sloth furry on Mastodon
That also means that humans were in the Americas before horses went extinct there as well. That means the oral histories of several native groups that describe horses are true and were passed on for thousands of years.
Ground sloths sound absolutely amazing! Until you see how big their claws were. I wonder if they had moss and things growing in their fur like modern tree sloths do.
So, ~30kya? It makes sense actually, given the diversity of the languages in the Americas.
The main current hypothesis (10k~15kya) feels fishy. Around those times, around the globe, Proto-Afro-Asiatic was being spoken; and you still do see a few family features in its descendants, like the feminine suffix (typically -t), that “consonant roots, vowel infixes” world building template, or even the “emphatic” series. You don’t see anything remotely similar in the languages of the Americas, even if you give the founder effect some leeway and say that the Americas were initially settled by speakers of, say, five or six unrelated languages.
These artifacts from Santa Elina are roughly 27,000 years old — more than 10,000 years before scientists once thought that humans arrived in the Americas.
Very cool.
