Posted on 05/20/2008 6:57:41 PM PDT by blam
Did Humans Colonize the World by Boat?
Research suggests our ancestors traveled the oceans 70,000 years ago.
by Heather Pringle
Jon Erlandson shakes out what appears to be a miniature evergreen from a clear ziplock bag and holds it out for me to examine. As one of the world’s leading authorities on ancient seafaring, he has devoted much of his career to hunting down hard evidence of ancient human migrations, searching for something most archaeologists long thought a figment: Ice Age mariners. On this drizzly late-fall afternoon in a lab at the University of Oregon in Eugene, the 53-year-old Erlandson looks as pleased as the father of a newborn—and perhaps just as anxious —as he shows me one of his latest prize finds.
The little “tree” in my hand is a dart head fashioned from creamy-brown chert and bristling with tiny barbs designed to lodge in the flesh of marine prey. Erlandson recently collected dozens of these little stemmed points from San Miguel Island, a scrap of land 27 miles off the coast of California. Radiocarbon dating of marine shells and burned twigs at the site shows that humans first landed on San Miguel at least 12,000 years ago, and the dart head in my hand holds clues to the ancestry of those seafarers. Archaeologists have recovered similar items scattered along the rim of the North Pacific, and some have even been found in coastal Peru and Chile. The oldest appeared 15,600 years ago in coastal Japan. To Erlandson, these miniature trees look like a trail left by mariners who voyaged along the stormy northern coasts of the Pacific Ocean from Japan to the Americas during the last Ice Age. “We haven’t published the evidence for this hypothesis yet, and I’m kind of nervous about it,” he says.
(Excerpt) Read more at discovermagazine.com ...
Folks got to Australia 60,000 years ago, why not here too.
Well of course they did, at least during various periods of pre-history.
They may have:
The concept makes more sense than some of the southern migration does, and I will check it out further...in fact, coastal migration is how Spain, France and other countries first came here, after of course some previous tribes.
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[newer repeat]
Did Humans Colonize the World by Boat?
Discover Magazine | 5-20-08 | Heather Pringle
Posted on 05/28/2008 4:14:50 AM PDT by Renfield
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/2022359/posts
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