Posted on 03/28/2014 9:09:21 AM PDT by Theoria
Niede Guidon still remembers her astonishment when she glimpsed the paintings.
Preserved amid the bromeliad-encrusted plateaus that tower over the thorn forests of northeast Brazil, the ancient rock art depicts fierce battles among tribesmen, orgiastic scenes of prehistoric revelry and hunters pursuing their game, spears in hand.
“These were stunning compositions, people and animals together, not just figures alone,” said Dr. Guidon, 81, remembering what first lured her and other archaeologists in the 1970s to this remote site where jaguars still prowl.
Hidden in the rock shelters where prehistoric humans once lived, the paintings number in the thousands. Some are thought to be more than 9,000 years old and perhaps even far more ancient. Painted in red ocher, they rank among the most revealing testaments anywhere in the Americas to what life was like millenniums before the European conquest began a mere five centuries ago.
But it is what excavators found when they started digging in the shadows of the rock art that is contributing to a pivotal re-evaluation of human history in the hemisphere.
Researchers here say they have unearthed stone tools proving that humans reached what is now northeast Brazil as early as 22,000 years ago. Their discovery adds to the growing body of research upending a prevailing belief of 20th-century archaeology in the United States known as the Clovis model, which holds that people first arrived in the Americas from Asia about 13,000 years ago.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
I was at Red Rock Canyon outside Las Vegas yesterday and they have some rock art that is only about a thousand years old. It is still very interesting to see the hand prints on the walls of the rock and imagining these people’s carving out a life in the desert. The geology of the area is very fascinating as well. Thanks for the post!
I think that’s where I tracked that down. :’)
Prevailing non-scientific beliefs are the result of biased people repeating the same things over and over.
You might be a little hard on the Africans. First, you can’t separate the Egyptian Civilization from Africa, particularly because it seems the Egyptians came in large measure from the Sahara as it dried out. Also, you have the Nubian, Ethiopian, Kushan and West African Cultures. The Nok, Bantu, Ghanan and Benin cultures in West Africa began about 900 BC growing from agricultural settlements. The Sahara was their “ocean”. The impact of the spread of Islam which leveled cultures out to a Muslim pattern certainly had its impact in Africa and in the trade routes moving gold, copper, ivory, etc. North across the Sahara to the Mediterranean. European colonialism was a further blow to African civilizations already savaged by Islam and an expanded slave trade.
“Monkeys, including large extinct forms, have been in South America for 35 million years,” Dr. Fiedel said. He added that the Clovis model was recently bolstered by new DNA analysis ancestrally connecting indigenous peoples in Central and South America to a boy from the Clovis culture whose 12,700-year-old remains were found in 1968 at a site in Montana.’
The only monkeying around here are by those die-hards who persist in believing that humans could never have appeared here prior to Clovis when overwhelming evidence indicates they populated the rest of the workd well before the Clovis date.
“This is a problem of human nature and institutional corruption that has nothing to do with the validity of the scientific method as Dr. Thorne implied.”
Except...
When the practitioners invalidate scientific method by refusing to hold to the practice in order to puff their own egos and finances, the method isn’t about actual science.
I like this lady. She’s got moxie. No Clovis groupie is gonna push her around.
I’ve not quite finished it, but was impressed that there weren’t a bunch of faux-thoritative talking heads passing sentence, as there once would have been in an article about something like this.
I accept the Beringia route, but I don’t accept it as one time thing, or as a one-way street. And I wholeheartedly agree, just like the rest of the planet, people came in from all different directions at different times.
There was a PBS show years ago, “Lost Red Paint People” (hmm, probably it’s been uploaded to one of the vid sites) which was I think also mentioned how the small megaliths (oxymoron alert) they’d erected were the same as those found in the European and Asian Arctic Circle. Of course, the show throws monkey crap all over the idea that anyone could possibly have crossed open water.
Which is weird, because people have crossed the same batches of open water, reaching at least Greenland from the west, repeatedly over thousands of years.
Anyway, some links that are half-assed related:
https://journals.uair.arizona.edu/index.php/radiocarbon/article/viewFile/994/999
This book looks interesting:
http://books.google.com/books?id=IE6cAgAAQBAJ&dq=first+migrants&source=gbs_navlinks_s
http://www.freerepublic.com/tag/maritimearchaic/index
http://www.freerepublic.com/tag/redpaintpeople/index
Although questionable in the minds of most anthropologists, some linguistic evidence might point toward the Iberian Peninsula. In the 1960's, the Morris Swadesh in the Handbook of Middle American Indians, claimed he found a connection between the Nadene (Athasbascan) linguistic family of North America and the Basque linguistic isolate. This connection, he argued, dated back thousands of years. Basque is the only European language to have survived the influence of proto-Indo-European, which entered the Basque region more than 5,000 years ago. One can infer then that Basque language is at least 5,000 years old, and some argue it is far older. The Basque themselves contend they have survived in their homeland for tens of thousands of years. Though Swadesh has been criticized as a lumper when it comes to linguistic correlations, the claim is nonetheless intriguing under the circumstances. It should be noted that linguist Merritt Ruhlen recently reported to have located a language related to Nadene in Asia. Ket, the only remaining member of the Yeniseian family of languages, shares common words like "birch bark" with some Nadene languages. Ket is spoken by about 550 people (out of a total population of 1,100) who live along the Yenisei River in central Siberia (Lysek 2000).
It’s particularly strange, when one considers that the same joker who said monkeys could have made the tools denies that humans failed to cross a narrow waterway by boat for 1,990,000 years.
I agree. And this doesn’t even take into account Phoenician/Carthaginian colonies (”Periplus of Hanno”) and circumnavigation of Africa (Herodotus); the Romans, who relied on very deep trade routes to supply their games with exotic animals (for that matter, the Romans depicted what is clearly an Orangutan, which is only found on Borneo SE of Asia); and Hindus and Tamil at least as long ago as classical times.
Speaking of water, this region of Brazil is pretty close to the Canaries.
People value what is rare. Knowledge is prized when educational opportunities are few and far between.
Now that the knowledge of the entire world is available 24/7 in the palm of the hand, ignorance is king. Why have even a basic knowledge of anything when “you can just Google it” (and then go vote demoncrat). :(
When they’re not practicing it, they aren’t practitioners, and obviously there isn’t a way to “invalidate” it by failing to use it.so.
> This Basque folktale shows not only the Basque attachment to their orphan language, indecipherable to the rest of the world, but also their tie to the Atlantic cod, Gadus morhua, a fish that has never been found in Basque or even Spanish waters. The Basques are enigmatic. They have lived in what is now the northwest corner of Spain and a nick of the French southwest for longer than history records, and not only is the origin of their language unknown, but the origin of the people themselves remains a mystery also.
http://freerepublic.com/focus/chat/3028316/posts?page=19#19
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