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posted by chromas on Friday July 24 2020, @05:05AM   Printer-friendly

Earliest humans stayed at the Americas 'oldest hotel' in Mexican cave:

A cave in a remote part of Mexico was visited by humans around 30,000 years ago—15,000 years earlier than people were previously thought to have reached the Americas.

Painstaking excavations of Chiquihuite Cave, located in a mountainous area in northern Mexico controlled by drugs cartels, uncovered nearly 2000 stone tools from a small section of the high-altitude cave.

Archaeological analysis of the tools and DNA analysis of the sediment in the cave uncovered a new story of the colonisation of the Americas which now traces evidence of the first Americans back to 25,000-30,000 years ago.

[...] "For decades people have passionately debated when the first humans entered the Americas. Chiquihuite Cave will create a lot more debate as it is the first site that dates the arrival of people to the continent to around 30,000 years ago—15,000 years earlier than previously thought. These early visitors didn't occupy the cave continuously, we think people spent part of the year there using it as a winter or summer shelter, or as a base to hunt during migration. This could be the Americas oldest ever hotel."

The find provides more evidence to challenge the accepted theory that the Clovis people were the earliest in the Americas 15,000 years ago.

Journal Reference:
Ciprian F. Ardelean, Lorena Becerra-Valdivia, Mikkel Winther Pedersen, et al. Evidence of human occupation in Mexico around the Last Glacial Maximum [$], Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2509-0)


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 24 2020, @05:27AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 24 2020, @05:27AM (#1025673)

    ...cave is insufficient evidence? Sometimes they get the dates wrong

  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Friday July 24 2020, @07:12AM (1 child)

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Friday July 24 2020, @07:12AM (#1025692) Journal

    Yeah, there's a problem with verifying dates. You have to take most of this stuff with a grain of salt. I mean, they can't carbon date the stone tools, so they are scraping the cave floor for DNA to date. Who is to say that the DNA they found actually goes with those stone tools?

    Still, there is ample evidence that man and his near kin had spread to Australia, the Arctic, all of Europe, Asia, and Africa, and they sailed the Pacific ocean. I suspect that one day, evidence will be found that men were here long before Clovis man.

    I don't understand those people who defend the idea that Clovis was "first". Why does it matter? Is it just the tourist dollars spent in the Clovis area?

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 24 2020, @09:21AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 24 2020, @09:21AM (#1025704)

      I don't understand those people who defend the idea that Clovis was "first". Why does it matter? Is it just the tourist dollars spent in the Clovis area?

      Academia, a bone of contention is a great source of papers..and they do so love to collect published papers with their names on them, so they keep these lively debates going. In the case of the global spread of the various branches of humanity/proto-humanity, there are so many gaps in their knowledge and the hard evidence is so scant that their theories, rather profitably in terms of paper generation, will always be open to challenge.

      One thing is fairly obvious though, our remote ancestors were a hell of a lot more capable and were more globally mobile than previous generations of archeologists thought...it's a pity they were then so bloody dogmatic when they started putting dates on events based on theories derived from limited evidence and then treating them as gospel whilst neatly ignoring any data from the limited evidence which they deemed 'anomalous' and which would have upset said current gospel.

      Sadly, I expect the UFOnuts will be along real soon now to take advantage of this and say something along he lines of 'see, ancient astronuts seeding humans around the globe, the archeologists can't explain the anomaly of humans being there 15,000 years before they should be..'