Real ancient mysteries (not Atlantis) that we need to discuss!

[Kane999]

One of the reasons that I have always used in discounting the Over Kill hypothesis is that I have never thought the originators of the hypothesis ever considered the great danger to humans in attacking these very large and dangerous animals with pre-industrial weapons. Very young or weak individuals separated from the herd, yes, but healthy and with support from the herd, it just seems foolhardy to even try. A healthy adult even separated from the herd would be extremely hard to tackle with spears. Bringing it into modern times, a lone old bull Cape Buffalo would be difficult to bring down with spears without a great risk of injury or death for one or more of the hunting party. A band would have been severely weakened by losing only a few of its prime hunters/defenders. Why even take that risk with an abundance of much smaller game?

One of the ways that I have seen proponents of the Over Kill hypothesis try to get around the danger is to suppose that the animals were naive to the danger posed by humans and just stood there more or less. Its very hard to accept this supposition when so much mammalian behavior is learned. Mothers would have very quickly learned that humans were potential predators and imparted that knowledge to their offspring. I have always despised this hypothesis as much as I did the Clovis First one. Made worse because they were represented as intertwined with each other with little hard evidence linking them.

There is evidence of extreme environmental change including catastrophic flooding as Piney mentions. Trying to figure out what brought about these occurrences is why other hypothesis are brought forward like the YD impact idea. I understand that there are folks who find fault with a supposed YD impact but surely a lot of folks would agree the Over Kill hypothesis should be retired.

https://bigthink.com/hard-science/younger-dryas-impact/

Just a read I found interesting.

[cormac mac airt]

I think the Overkill idea is just so much trash as it attempts to place a “one size fits all” explanation onto what is really a more complex issue. Not even megafauna and their extinction occurred in a vacuum. And as Essan said humans were a contributor to their extinction NOT the sole reason for it. 
 

cormac

Edited October 5, 2022 by cormac mac airt

[Abramelin]

There's one thing I have to think of in connection with the YD event, and that is the eruption of the Laacher See volcano in presentday Germany:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/07/210701112613.htm

[Piney]

2 hours ago, Kane999 said:

One of the reasons that I have always used in discounting the Over Kill hypothesis is that I have never thought the originators of the hypothesis ever considered the great danger to humans in attacking these very large and dangerous animals with pre-industrial weapons. Very young or weak individuals separated from the herd, yes, but healthy and with support from the herd, it just seems foolhardy to even try. A healthy adult even separated from the herd would be extremely hard to tackle with spears. Bringing it into modern times, a lone old bull Cape Buffalo would be difficult to bring down with spears without a great risk of injury or death for one or more of the hunting party. A band would have been severely weakened by losing only a few of its prime hunters/defenders. Why even take that risk with an abundance of much smaller game?

One of the ways that I have seen proponents of the Over Kill hypothesis try to get around the danger is to suppose that the animals were naive to the danger posed by humans and just stood there more or less. Its very hard to accept this supposition when so much mammalian behavior is learned. Mothers would have very quickly learned that humans were potential predators and imparted that knowledge to their offspring. I have always despised this hypothesis as much as I did the Clovis First one. Made worse because they were represented as intertwined with each other with little hard evidence linking them.

There is evidence of extreme environmental change including catastrophic flooding as Piney mentions. Trying to figure out what brought about these occurrences is why other hypothesis are brought forward like the YD impact idea. I understand that there are folks who find fault with a supposed YD impact but surely a lot of folks would agree the Over Kill hypothesis should be retired.

https://bigthink.com/hard-science/younger-dryas-impact/

Just a read I found interesting.

Lot's Clovis has been found above the "black mats" which were formed by the never ending rain creating lots of greenage which then rotted from never ending rain. As for the geochemical signature. Meteors hit our atmosphere all the time. Eastern Iranian and Turkic tribes would wait for them and locate them for "sky metal" for top shelf weapons and religious items. 

Then there's the fact that some of the research leaders on the YDI outright lie and plant evidence.

I was on George Howard's "dream team". He's a liar who salts sites.

[Kane999]

4 hours ago, Abramelin said:

There's one thing I have to think of in connection with the YD event, and that is the eruption of the Laacher See volcano in presentday Germany:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/07/210701112613.htm

Interesting. I can't shake the idea that some black swan event occurred that we just haven't accumulated enough evidence for yet. About anything is worthy of consideration rather than Over Kill. I always felt that was a "just so" theory" to buttress Clovis First.

[Kane999]

3 hours ago, Piney said:

Lot's Clovis has been found above the "black mats" which were formed by the never ending rain creating lots of greenage which then rotted from never ending rain. As for the geochemical signature. Meteors hit our atmosphere all the time. Eastern Iranian and Turkic tribes would wait for them and locate them for "sky metal" for top shelf weapons and religious items. 

Then there's the fact that some of the research leaders on the YDI outright lie and plant evidence.

I was on George Howard's "dream team". He's a liar who salts sites.

I am slowly forming the opinion that you are no fan of those folks LOL. Seriously, salting sites would be about as serious scientific misconduct as I can imagine. Enough to ruin careers. If so and I have no reason to doubt you for you were there, not much different than Piltdown Man.

[Piney]

25 minutes ago, Kane999 said:

I am slowly forming the opinion that you are no fan of those folks LOL. Seriously, salting sites would be about as serious scientific misconduct as I can imagine. Enough to ruin careers. If so and I have no reason to doubt you for you were there, not much different than Piltdown Man.

 I was all for finding evidence, but there was nothing real and I noticed nothing other than a human population growth in the region in question. Then I started looking into impact stats and realized there has been a lot more than people realized. 

Then the lies started about megafauna graveyards, signs of massive fires and that I "verified" the Lenape Stone, which was a silly little fraud which portrays Indians hunting mammoths with bows and arrows (really?)

 

 

[SHaYap]

Something a learned old girl said to me while the boat we were on was bobbing on an island hop tour on the South China Sea... 

"too many research summary / conclusions these days are constructed with an eye for a Hollywood blockbuster deal... "

Says a lot about Hollywood nowadays too, that

~

[Thanos5150]

On 10/4/2022 at 3:10 PM, Thanos5150 said:

In the last megafauna extinction there were 47 species that got wiped out around the world- millions of animals.

Wow. Apparently there have been quite a few updates to this number which is corrected to be genera, not species i.e. many many more species. 38 genera in N. America, 50 in S. America,  24 in Sahul which doesn't include Eurasia and Africa (though the latter as apparently spared much of this fate.). 

Why Humans Aren’t to Blame

There are, however, many reasons to be skeptical of the claim that humans were responsible for the extinction of those 38 genera in North America.

1) It is estimated that when Clovis hunters arrived there were hundreds of millions of these large mammals on the landscape (1). Even so, there are only 16 occurrences in which humans killed or scavenged one of these animals (5, 11).

 

2) Only five genera are among those 16 kill−scavenging occurrences: mammoth, mastodon, gomphothere, horse, and camel. There is no archaeological evidence that any of the other 33 genera were preyed upon by Clovis hunters (5, 11).

 

3) That so few of the 38 genera appear to have been hunted may be because, so far at least, only 18 of them are known to have even survived up to the time Clovis people arrived in the Americas (12). Of the other 20 genera, 15 disappeared earlier, and 5 are undated. Many of those 20 taxa are rare in the fossil record, and dating of new finds might bring their last appearance closer to Clovis times. Or not. It is possible the reason some do not date to Clovis times is because they had already vanished. Extinctions were staggered by genera over the Pleistocene in other parts of the world, and there is no evidence to suggest North America was necessarily different (7, 12–16). That the majority of these animals may have disappeared by the time Clovis groups arrived would also explain why they so rarely appear in kill−scavenging sites.

 

4) There is compelling evidence that humans arrived in the Americas at least ∼1,000 y prior to Clovis times (17, 18). Despite this longer overlap between people and megafauna, there are no pre-Clovis age kill−scavenging sites (5). Overkill advocates either dismiss evidence of a pre-Clovis human presence or consider it irrelevant, assuming Clovis groups were the first big-game hunters (1, 2).

 

5) In contrast to the dearth of kill−scavenging occurrences of the extinct genera, there are, from the same period overkill is said to have occurred, ∼90 kill−scavenging occurrences of six extant large herbivores, including bison, elk, moose, and deer (11). Thus, where we have abundant archaeological evidence of large mammal hunting in the Late Pleistocene, it is of genera that survived to the present, while the supposed continent-wide slaughter of 38 extinct genera left scarcely an archaeological trace. Particularly telling is the record of bison. They were hunted starting in Clovis times (19), and, among the many hundreds of bison kill sites known from the subsequent ∼12,000 y, are sites where hundreds (20), and, in some sites, thousands (21), of these animals were slain. That long record of Indigenous hunting was capped by the slaughter of millions of bison by late 19th century Euro-American commercial hide hunters (22). Yet, bison survive today, even after millennia of intensive human predation.

 

6) Large mammal extinctions were not the only significant change that took place on the Late Pleistocene landscape as Earth emerged from the grip of an Ice Age. Lost as well were multiple species of mammals whose genera survived in North America or elsewhere (e.g., the dire wolf, Canis dirus, and Dasypus bellus, the beautiful armadillo), some 20 genera of birds, several tortoises, a snake, and even a species of spruce (12, 14, 23–25).

 

7) Nor did the extant large herbivores emerge unscathed. Bighorn sheep, bison, and elk decreased in size through the Late Pleistocene and into the Holocene; ultimately, a new bison species arose (26, 27). Other animals underwent sometimes-extensive range shifts (caribou and muskox no longer live in the southeastern United States, as each had in the Pleistocene), changes in abundance, and extirpation (14, 24, 28, 29). Ancient DNA evidence shows there were population bottlenecks and declining genetic diversity in the Late Pleistocene among a number of extant and extinct taxa, in some instances, beginning well before the first appearance of humans in North America (30–35).

 

Large mammal extinction at the end of the Pleistocene thus cannot be treated as an isolated phenomenon warranting its own unique explanation (4, 14, 24). Extinctions were not restricted to large animals, not all large animals went extinct, and the sweeping and complex changes that took place in animals, plants, and biotic communities indicate strong selective pressures in the Late Pleistocene environment. Those pressures were well beyond the influence of newly arrived human predators.

Edited October 6, 2022 by Thanos5150

[Thanos5150]

14 hours ago, Essan said:

That's not quite what I said    Humans were a contributory factor.   The extra straw that hadn't existed during previous rapid post-glacial climate change periods.

This is not the argument being made and is not true regardless. While modern populations may contribute to this there is no evidence or even logic that would suggest the same would be true of Pleistocene populations if only directly and completely to the contrary.  

Quote

And the fact is, outside of Africa, many extinctions do coincide with the arrival of humans (more especially so on islands) - for a variety of reasons (not just hunting)

Which would not apply to the Pleistocene. Quoting Piney:

Quote

 

To put it in scale for readers the entire Clovis population of Southern New Jersey, including the exposed shelf might of been 6 people. 

The Archaic hunting band in the same territory about 8,000 years later might of been 25 people.

@Thanos5150 We've found mammoth remains, none butchered. But lots and lots of elk, which didn't become extinct in New Jersey until the mid to late 1800s.

 

Humans contributed nothing to the extinction of the animals during this period and were lucky to survive themselves.  It's bonkers. 

Edited October 6, 2022 by Thanos5150

[Alchopwn]

On 8/4/2022 at 3:24 AM, Abramelin said:

Maybe it was used for burning incense?

Incense burners are typically religiously themed and far more attractively decorated than this jar.  This is a utilitarian object.  It isn't decorative.    I wouldn't be surprised it it were used for drying things out.  You put the item in the jar, and then put them in an oven. 

[Piney]

7 hours ago, Thanos5150 said:

This is not the argument being made and is not true regardless. While modern populations may contribute to this there is no evidence or even logic that would suggest the same would be true of Pleistocene populations if only directly and completely to the contrary.  

Which would not apply to the Pleistocene. Quoting Piney:

Humans contributed nothing to the extinction of the animals during this period and were lucky to survive themselves.  It's bonkers. 

It always struck my autistic systemizing  mind that if overkill was involved Africa's megafauna would be gone first.

My deceased sister always said the overkill theory was something just to justify or downplay the environmental destruction the Europeans caused in the Americas. I'm not saying Indians were saints. Cahokia was a enviromental disaster and during the 14-1500s many tribes were destroying whole areas with intense corn farming. 

If the settlers never came over farming corn would of created another environmental disaster in inner North and Southeast of NA. 

 

 

[Essan]

10 hours ago, Thanos5150 said:

Humans contributed nothing to the extinction of the animals during this period and were lucky to survive themselves.  It's bonkers. 

If you say so.

I'm not getting into an argument.    But when 2 or more competing hypothesises exist to explain something (especially when proponents of each argue exclusivity) I defer to the likelihood of a more complex series of events, rather one simple explanation.  ie it was probably both, and more besides.  

(I am also conscious of an innate human desire to show that humans are innocent - whilst being guilty myself of being a raving misanthropist )

And the idea that humans have some culpability in some megafaunal extinctions is by no means dead

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-07897-1

https://www.iflscience.com/humans-back-to-being-suspects-in-mammoths-extinction-61623

[Thanos5150]

5 hours ago, Piney said:

It always struck my autistic systemizing  mind that if overkill was involved Africa's megafauna would be gone first.

Which ironically never even happened in Africa during the late Pleistocene. To explain this overkill proponents say: 

The African “anomaly” is typically explained by long-term coevolution of megafauna with humans such that the prey and predator are matched evenly, thereby creating trophic equilibrium. By contrast, the extra-African megafauna are characterized as completely naive to the human predator and therefore vulnerable to overkill and the disintegration of food webs (8, 15).

Can't make this stuff up. 

Quote

 

My deceased sister always said the overkill theory was something just to justify or downplay the environmental destruction the Europeans caused in the Americas. I'm not saying Indians were saints. Cahokia was a enviromental disaster and during the 14-1500s many tribes were destroying whole areas with intense corn farming. 

If the settlers never came over farming corn would of created another environmental disaster in inner North and Southeast of NA. 

 

  The idea was first proposed in the 1960's by geologist Paul Martin. 

[Thanos5150]

2 hours ago, Essan said:

If you say so.

With reason. 

Quote

I'm not getting into an argument.   

There is nothing to argue about. We disagree and I have provided information to support my position. 

Quote

But when 2 or more competing hypothesises exist to explain something (especially when proponents of each argue exclusivity) I defer to the likelihood of a more complex series of events, rather one simple explanation.  ie it was probably both, and more besides.  

I do not rely on the conclusion of hypothesis but rather the facts used to propose them and make up my own mind. In this case it was readily apparent to me long ago, starting with common sense, the overkill hypotheses was nonsense. 
 

Quote

(I am also conscious of an innate human desire to show that humans are innocent - whilst being guilty myself of being a raving misanthropist )

So...you are suggesting the idea it was not humans, instead of the facts and common sense, was borne of "an innate human desire to show that humans are innocent."...?  And what Freudian reason might there be for suggest it was humans? 

Quote

And the idea that humans have some culpability in some megafaunal extinctions is by no means dead

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-07897-1

https://www.iflscience.com/humans-back-to-being-suspects-in-mammoths-extinction-61623

I never said it was dead. I said it was: "Hands down the most unapologetically stupid theory to receive such widespread mainstream support I have ever seen." 

[Piney]

2 hours ago, Thanos5150 said:

Which ironically never even happened in Africa during the late Pleistocene. To explain this overkill proponents say: 

The African “anomaly” is typically explained by long-term coevolution of megafauna with humans such that the prey and predator are matched evenly, thereby creating trophic equilibrium. By contrast, the extra-African megafauna are characterized as completely naive to the human predator and therefore vulnerable to overkill and the disintegration of food webs (8, 15).

Can't make this stuff up. 

  The idea was first proposed in the 1960's by geologist Paul Martin. 

That's outright silly. 

[Oniomancer]

On 8/3/2022 at 1:18 PM, jethrofloyd said:

26. Holey jar, what was it used for?

Here is an seemingly simple archaeological mystery to answer:

The holey jar, the only one found so far, dates back to Roman Britain (the part of Britain under Roman rule from about A.D. 43 to 410). The question is what was it used for? Researchers speculate that it may have been used as a lamp or as a kind of animal cage for either mice or snakes. However, these possible uses are really just educated guesses, according to archaeologists.

 

Thanks for the bump on this Alchopwn.

Since this was posted, I happened to be going through some of my antiques books, one of which was The Spinning Wheel Complete Book Of Antiques, reprinted from Spinning Wheel Magazine.. There's an article in it entitled Oddities In Early American Pottery that illustrates four somewhat similar objects. 2 are listed as used in pickling for brining, Another was described as a strainer or colander, in this case for straining whey in cheesemaking. The fourth, differing from the others, was a jug stand used for keeping jugs upright in a stream to cool. None of the objects are ovate like this but all have similar perforations.

Also, Looking this up to see if it had a bottom or not and it seems the proposed usage for animals is a bit more complex than just pet cages, not to the age and origin:

https://www.ancient-origins.net/artifacts-other-artifacts/roman-holey-jar-mystery-0011227

[Kane999]

4 hours ago, Piney said:

That's outright silly. 

It's worse than silly. Perhaps if you combined willful ignorance with a hardheaded determination to defend a hypothesis with little evidence, said hypothesis itself dependent on a hypothesis (Clovis First) based more on dogma than evidence, that might get closer to my description of it. Just as one point missing in that assertion and I am sure there are others, Neanderthals, Denisovans, Erectus and others? inhabited Eurasia for hundreds of thousands of years alongside megafauna. I would think it logical to postulate that in more Northerly climes, these species were if anything more carnivorous than our own species. Its advocates can always argue for tech improvements, but no matter how well-crafted the spearhead, I just don't see hunters being foolish enough to even attempt bringing down megafauna save in unusual circumstances. A big male Grizzley thinks twice and then backs down before it takes on a healthy bull buffalo even if the bull is not with the herd. Common sense tells me that I would rather go fishing or make some snares and nets than play macho man with a mammoth. On occasion with buddies, elk, deer and more reasonably sized game, sure. As for the naive angle, I mentioned that foolishness earlier. Mammals are smart. They learn quickly not only through their own experiences but by others teaching them. Advocates tried to get around that problem by trying to suggest that it was a blitzkrieg in the Americas and further down the rabbit hole we go.

I am aware that small islands can have different dynamics especially with flightless birds but extrapolating those phenomena to continents and large mammals is lazy thinking.

[Piney]

21 minutes ago, Kane999 said:

It's worse than silly. Perhaps if you combined willful ignorance with a hardheaded determination to defend a hypothesis with little evidence, said hypothesis itself dependent on a hypothesis (Clovis First) based more on dogma than evidence, that might get closer to my description of it. Just as one point missing in that assertion and I am sure there are others, Neanderthals, Denisovans, Erectus and others? inhabited Eurasia for hundreds of thousands of years alongside megafauna. I would think it logical to postulate that in more Northerly climes, these species were if anything more carnivorous than our own species. Its advocates can always argue for tech improvements, but no matter how well-crafted the spearhead, I just don't see hunters being foolish enough to even attempt bringing down megafauna save in unusual circumstances. A big male Grizzley thinks twice and then backs down before it takes on a healthy bull buffalo even if the bull is not with the herd. Common sense tells me that I would rather go fishing or make some snares and nets than play macho man with a mammoth. On occasion with buddies, elk, deer and more reasonably sized game, sure. As for the naive angle, I mentioned that foolishness earlier. Mammals are smart. They learn quickly not only through their own experiences but by others teaching them. Advocates tried to get around that problem by trying to suggest that it was a blitzkrieg in the Americas and further down the rabbit hole we go.

I am aware that small islands can have different dynamics especially with flightless birds but extrapolating those phenomena to continents and large mammals is lazy 

Not to derail. But I had a half Lenape fellow logger and firefighter associate named Frank Kane who's now deceased and I cohabitate with his widow and work for her logging company.

Also Kane is a very big family among 6 Nations member tribes around Grand River and related to my family, the Josephs so your username "wait whatted?" me.

 

[Kane999]

46 minutes ago, Piney said:

Not to derail. But I had a half Lenape fellow logger and firefighter associate named Frank Kane who's now deceased and I cohabitate with his widow and work for her logging company.

Also Kane is a very big family among 6 Nations member tribes around Grand River and related to my family, the Josephs so your username "wait whatted?" me.

 

Perhaps distantly related to you. The Indian blood in me is Cherokee and they were originally much further North than here. Here being the Great Smoky Mountains where I grew up. Cherokee women figure in both my maternal and paternal lines. I was told when I was young that I qualified to enroll in the tribe but never did so. As an aside, the only one who's name that I remember off hand is Aggie Lossiah. Out of curiosity, I asked about her one day with some of the older Cherokee. They remembered her and told me that her Cherokee name meant "she who kills with kindness". I guess that you could take that several different ways. The Scots in my heritage worked their way down the mountain ranges from the North a very long time ago. Good records don't really exist for them. My family name is Cabe, but I am familiar with the Kane surname as well. Both being septs of Scottish clans and them of course also intermarrying with each other.

[Kane999]

To continue the list. When did humans begin using boats?

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/new-species-ancient-human-discovered-luzon-philippines-homo-luzonensis

https://www.science.org/content/article/ancient-humans-settled-philippines-700000-years-ago-new-fossils-reveal

These findings to go along with the "hobbits" on Flores Island may start to change the paradigm of when humans became capable of crossing deep waters. May eventually have some impact on discussions on the timeline of first settlement of the Americas. I never felt comfortable with the idea that humans had to walk across the Bering Land Bridge.

[Harte]

37 minutes ago, Kane999 said:

To continue the list. When did humans begin using boats?

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/new-species-ancient-human-discovered-luzon-philippines-homo-luzonensis

https://www.science.org/content/article/ancient-humans-settled-philippines-700000-years-ago-new-fossils-reveal

These findings to go along with the "hobbits" on Flores Island may start to change the paradigm of when humans became capable of crossing deep waters. May eventually have some impact on discussions on the timeline of first settlement of the Americas. I never felt comfortable with the idea that humans had to walk across the Bering Land Bridge.

Depends on what you mean by "boats."
Primates reached the New World from Africa without building a boat.
More Than 30 Million Years Ago, Monkeys Rafted Across the Atlantic to South America | Science| Smithsonian Magazine

Harte

[Kane999]

I understand that rare events like rafts of vegetation with animals on it perhaps due to tsunamis can occur given long enough stretches of time. However, repeated discoveries of this nature in the Pacific could well lead to an alternate hypothesis being rationally considered. Once sure, twice ok, but as discoveries proceed and I think that they will, an alternative hypothesis becomes easier to consider.

[Piney]

2 hours ago, Kane999 said:

To continue the list. When did humans begin using boats?

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/new-species-ancient-human-discovered-luzon-philippines-homo-luzonensis

https://www.science.org/content/article/ancient-humans-settled-philippines-700000-years-ago-new-fossils-reveal

These findings to go along with the "hobbits" on Flores Island may start to change the paradigm of when humans became capable of crossing deep waters. May eventually have some impact on discussions on the timeline of first settlement of the Americas. I never felt comfortable with the idea that humans had to walk across the Bering Land Bridge.

 

1 hour ago, Harte said:

Depends on what you mean by "boats."
Primates reached the New World from Africa without building a boat.
More Than 30 Million Years Ago, Monkeys Rafted Across the Atlantic to South America | Science| Smithsonian Magazine

Harte

And we have both discussed, and believe that Homo Erectus or related hominids such as Denisovans constructed some form of watercraft. 

[Harte]

13 hours ago, Kane999 said:

I understand that rare events like rafts of vegetation with animals on it perhaps due to tsunamis can occur given long enough stretches of time. However, repeated discoveries of this nature in the Pacific could well lead to an alternate hypothesis being rationally considered. Once sure, twice ok, but as discoveries proceed and I think that they will, an alternative hypothesis becomes easier to consider.

Theoretically, rafting like that would need to occur multiple times for a population large enough to be genetically viable.
Can't be just a one-off.
With species of homo, it wouldn't be a stretch to suppose they just used a log or two once the idea to do it was known.

Obviously, it could get more and more sophisticated as time passed.

Harte