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This is the seventeenth Q&A for History of Mankind. Paying subscribers received an email asking for questions; and those are right below the paywall.
Like I’ve said before, perhaps, don’t forget that my book ”Emperor Whisperers: a comparative history of ancient Western and Chinese philosophy” is free for all paid subscribers of A History of Mankind, who get an electronic copy. What I haven’t said before (because I hadn’t noticed) is that you can listen to my posts on the Substack app! Yes, like a podcast! You need to click on a small icon on the right corner of the app’s screen. Here, I marked the icon on yellow:
It’s easy to miss! The narration comes with a nice, calming, non-robotic voice that reads very well in the Atlantic accent preferred by CNN presenters. I think it’s really cool that we have that. No flying cars yet, true, but that is still pretty nice.
Today I’ll have a look at a recent archeological discovery that pertains to an older post. This time, we’re moving back all the way to the Americas’ prehistory, a time of some controversy among historians because, as I wrote a long time ago in the third post of A History of Mankind…
The first arrivals into the Americas almost certainly crossed the Beringian land bridge, since the oldest sign of human habitation in the continent is footprints from around 21,000 BC, the tail end of the previous cold snap. These footprints were formed in soft mud on the margins of a then-shallow lake in the White Sands region of New Mexico[1]. The people who left them may have been part of isolated and marginal groups, since the land bridge became progressively wetter and narrower, dominated by marshlands and very windy lowlands, and probably disappeared for a time in the centuries during which the climate got warmer soon thereafter, after 20,000 BC.
Perhaps the main impulse for the migration eastwards was the chase of the mammoth, which would be hunted in Siberia to extinction in 10,000 BC, and also survived for long in North America.[2] The most natural route was down the North American coast. A tolerance for cold and a taste for fish had to be developed to survive such a trek, and those seem to have been characteristics of the inhabitants of the earliest confirmed settlement in the Americas, Monte Verde in central Chile, a long way south from Beringia, which had a permanent, albeit fairly small, population around 12,500 BC.
Several other archeological sites[3] indicate other groups perhaps related to the White Sands pioneers made a pretty decent living in the Americas before a larger, more technologically advanced group of mammoth hunters made it past Beringia and into North America around 11,500 BC: the people of the Clovis Culture[4]. Their arrival is one of the turning points of American history, as it was closely followed by one of the greatest catastrophes in human history: the change in course for the Lake Agassiz's basin around 10,800 BC.
Now, this picture has been upended by yet another discovery: in “Evidence of artefacts made of giant sloth bones in central Brazil around the last glacial maximum,” (Proceedings of the Royal Society, 12.7.2023) Thais R. Pansani et al bring to our attention that, even before humans were found walking across New Mexico (which is pretty far away from the Beringian land bridge), they were making pendants out of the bones of sloths in central Brazil — which is not only further away, but also practically impossible to reach on foot, even now, given the difficulty in crossing the Darién Gap in modern Panama.
As Pansani and her colleagues explain, the evidence was found in two Pleistocene archaeological layers in the Santa Elina rock shelter in Central Brazil. They include rich lithic industry associated with remains of the extinct giant ground sloth Glossotherium phoenesis. The remains include thousands of osteoderms (dermal bones), three of which were human-modified.
Quite simply, this is another confounding factor that we must keep in mind while trying to create a map of the human colonization of the Americas. The only thing that is clear now about the subject is that it was a far, far messier process than experts thought even as little as a decade ago.
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