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.

  • novibe@lemmy.ml
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    8 days ago

    Except no. We lived with them for over 10,000 years without them going extinct. When before we thought they went extinct right after we arrived, thus concluded we hunted them to extinction.

    But if we lived with them for thousands and thousands of years, that is very unlikely.

    • iopq@lemmy.world
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      8 days ago

      The original people of the Americas were not ancestors of the Native Americans Alice today so they either died off or left long before 13kya

        • frezik@midwest.social
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          8 days ago

          DNA evidence sorta points that direction, but it’s complicated. There were likely waves of migration to North America from different groups. Most of the DNA in native people can be traced back about 13k years. The link in OP points to artifacts from 27k years ago.

          However, there is some evidence of mixing with a different group.

          https://www.science.org/content/article/ancient-dna-confirms-native-americans-deep-roots-north-and-south-america

          Just as mysterious is the trace of Australasian ancestry in some ancient South Americans. Reich and others had previously seen hints of it in living people in the Brazilian Amazon. Now, Willerslev has provided more evidence: telltale DNA in one person from Lagoa Santa in Brazil, who lived 10,400 years ago. “How did it get there? We have no idea,” says geneticist José Víctor Moreno-Mayar of the University of Copenhagen, first author of the Willerslev paper.

          This is an area of active research where a lot of old models are being thrown out over the past few decades. The idea of a single migration from Siberia, the one most of us were taught at school, is definitely wrong. Timing of the glacier movement is too convenient, and the migration would have to have happened far too quickly. What to replace it with is still up in the air.

      • novibe@lemmy.ml
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        8 days ago

        They were at least partially the ancestors of modern native people.