2d ago

New research says people arrived in Americas much earlier and co-existed with giant sloths and mastodons

www.pbs.org New research says people arrived in Americas much earlier and co-existed with giant sloths and mastodons

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.

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Bro, coexisting with giant sloths and mastodons sounds pretty fucking cool not going to lie.
- Giant sloths were terrifying. Built like a tank and had hands strong enough to claw through literal bedrock to make their caves.
  
  I wonder how long it took them to do so.
  
  Yeah but maybe I could make friends with one and he'd protect me and we'd go on adventures and solve mysteries
  
  Why don’t we do that?

For a long time, scientists believed the first humans to arrive in the Americas soon killed off these giant ground sloths through hunting, along with many other massive animals like mastodons, saber-toothed cats and dire wolves that once roamed North and South America.
But new research from several sites is starting to suggest that people came to the Americas earlier — perhaps far earlier — than once thought. These findings hint at a remarkably different life for these early Americans, one in which they may have spent millennia sharing prehistoric savannas and wetlands with enormous beasts.
“There was this idea that humans arrived and killed everything off very quickly — what’s called ‘Pleistocene overkill,'” said Daniel Odess, an archaeologist at White Sands National Park in New Mexico. But new discoveries suggest that “humans were existing alongside these animals for at least 10,000 years, without making them go extinct.”
It’s true. There was a time before the Complete Fucking Assholes showed up.
- dire wolves
  Wait, dire wolves were real?
  
  Always have been.
  
  Yes, and a few other fantastical-sounding creatures GRRM put in there, like Zorses.
- And then the Republicans showed up, I assume
  
  "Giant welfare sloths eating up all our fields of lavender!!"
  
  Well . . . yes

"Coexisted" with giant sloths and mastodons? Nah, now we've just got a better idea of what caused their extinction.
- 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.
  
  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
- The phrase "peaceful coexistence" implies the existence of a darker, "violent coexistence."
  
  Violent coexistence is what the Greeks and Turks currently have.
- And dire wolves!

Every time there is new research into this topic, we learned that people have been in the Americas for far longer than we had thought. Pretty cool.
These artifacts from Santa Elina are roughly 27,000 years old — more than 10,000 years before scientists once thought that humans arrived in the Americas.

When is the Netflix series please?
- Not Netflix but pbs has a YouTube channel for shit like this called "eons". Pretty good ~10 min videos about paleontolgy, archeology, pre-history etc.
  
  Stefan Milo on youtube is also a great channel on discussing these types of papers
- There are already two seasons. It’s called “Ancient Apocalypse.”

It still weirds me out thinking how mega fauna existed much more recently then we think. Like we could be chilling sloths, or, you know, running in fear, but now the largest animal I encounter on a regular basis is my neighbors fat cat.

I'm pretty sure there was some interbreding with the giant sloths as well
- I see you, too, have met my cousin...
  
  It's all relative in the Western hemisphere.

Makes sense. There is evidence that 21k years ago there were people in Argentina eating basically anything that moved
https://www.instagram.com/reel/C-tceWbJxIm/

I thought this was obvious: avocado seeds are large because they were eaten by giant sloths. It would surely be much more difficult for an avocado tree to reproduce without the involvement of an animal, and giant sloths are not around anymore, so at some point humans must have taken over from the giant sloths, so there was probably some place where humans and giant sloths lived at the same time.

The Fediverse is old

Seems like every 6 months there's a claim like this that gets media attention and then gets disproven later.
I don't care either way, just think it's kinda funny.
- Sorry, disproven? As far as I am aware(layman), the claims have only been disproven by evidence pushing it further back.
  One of the chief problems I am aware of is that the places they inhabited and the coastal path they likely took is now under a considerable amount of ocean.
  
  That and the Americas have changed quite a bit since those ancient times. Even mild environmental shifts can cause a shit tonne of damage to evidence, and if their population was spread out and small enough said evidence couldve been sparce already.
- I was gonna say that this can't be new. I just saw a show on one of the history channel channels about the clovis people who lived side by side with mastodon and giant sloths. Of course, it's just like the history channel to take something someone said with little or no evidence and make a show about it as if it were fact.
  
  Well the clovis people were likely a significant factor in the extinction of most of North America's megafauna and only arrived relatively shortly before the end of the ice age.
  What we are talking about is that they're is mounting evidence of significantly older human activity(instead of 10-16k, we're talking 40-100k)
  
  Oh wow I didn't realize the history channel was still going. I hadn't seen it there, probably just articles on Lemmy. May have been mentioned by Stefan Milo- an archeologist I watch on Nebula- but I could be misremembering.
- https://youtu.be/5z3DbmOuaFI

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