RE: Curating the Internet: Science and technology micro-summaries for September 1, 2019
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Thanks for the feedback! That may have just been a misunderstanding on my part. Are you referring to the "and now", here?
Older settlements have been found in Chile, and now, also in North America.
The article didn't mention any pre-Clovis settlements (or I missed the mention) in N. America, so I assumed this was the first. I can remove that "and now" if there were already others.
The Clovis part was a small portion of the article. I'm not well informed on the topic, but my impression from that article was that the idea of Clovis people as the first humans in North America was already out of favor before this find, and this is just more evidence to the contrary. The main thrust of this article was the claim that people migrated to mid-latitude N. America before the opening of an ice-free corridor, which happened about 14,800 years ago, implying that they must have done it by boat.
American archeology is a rabbit hole of epic proportions, and insofar as you are not particularly familiar with it, your assumption that the cited article was more or less factual is understandable.
For most of a century, the Clovis First theory was jealously kept by gatekeepers that destroyed the careers of anyone that reported earlier evidence of human presence in the Americas. As a result American archeology is a case study in how scientific research is politicized and controlled via grants.
Many digs revealed much earlier human presence, such as Meadowcroft, and more than I can list here. Many scientists reporting factual evidence have had their careers destroyed, because well funded proponents of the Clovis First theory's funding was threatened by evidence it was false.
Meadowcroft was one of the first successful at breaking the stranglehold, due to the refusal of the embattled researchers to back down in the face of demonetization and the probative evidence dug. For some decades now the floodwalls of gatekeepers have been gradually broken down, and I was expressing surprise that the article seemed to claim this dig provided novel evidence of pre-Clovis human presence.
Actual research has shown that presence long ago, and the field seems to yet lag reality.
Now that you mention it, I think I just posted about one in Pennsylvania that was older than 13,000 years, not too long ago... Yep - Curating the Internet: Science and technology micro-summaries for August 21, 2019. 19,000 years - and it was Meadowcroft. Link
Totally slipped my mind when I was reading the article about Idaho, though.
Edited to add: Interesting that the Meadowcroft date not only predates Clovis, but it also predates the ice-free corridor, so the Idaho find doesn't seem to be novel on that front, either. Unless there's something else that I'm misunderstanding.