In my last two posts, I mentioned two Siberina sites that are over 400,000 years old, one is Diring Yuirakh, the other is Karama, both had been originally dated at over 1.5 million years (My), an age that was later revised to a more recent 400 to 800 kya.
These people were not modern humans, our lineage originated 300,000 years ago. They were either Denisovans (who lived in East Asia), Neanderthals on their easternmost reaches, or the predecessor of both groups, Homo heidelbergensis, the tools discovered at both sites are primitive cobble sytle stone tools, older than the Acheulean used by Homo erectus and the Mousterian of the Neanderthals (We don't have tools used by Denisonvans), these Siberian tools resemble the Oldowan industry used in Africa over 2 My ago. These sites could also have belonged to H. erectus, who arrived in Eurasia around 2 My ago.
The sites, located in Siberia, in a cold and harsh region suggest that those who lived there were well adapted to the tough climate. They must have mastered fire, used warm clothes, built decent shelters, and had a good knowledge of their environment. They could have survived futher east and north, all the way to Bering Strait, and beyond.
Could they have advanced and reached America?
In my post on Diring Yuriakh and its age, I mentioned the work of John D. Janssen et al., 2024 (Redrawing early human dispersal patterns with cosmogenic nuclide, EGU24-4168, updated on 08 Mar 2024. https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu24-4168 EGU General Assembly 2024) which dated the site using a method known as cosmogenic dating. It found its was ancient: "417 ± 82 ka, which is at least 300 kyr earlier than the previously documented earliest human presence north of 60 degrees."
Unsurprisingly, John Janssen is well aware of the implications of this finding regarding the occupation of Siberia at an early date, and the possibility that these people reached Beringia, crossed Bering Strait, and populated America 400,000 years ago. Janssen considers it feasible, and mentions it, as you can see in this video (starting at 21:50 min), where he presentatst the paper at the EGU 2024 conference. The following image is a still from the Video, and its text is "DIRING YURIKAH, Arctic Siberia, •61°N, limits of homo erectus? •early entry to North America?"
In this video, Janssen describes his work on dating ancient sites in Eurasia using the cosmogenic method (that measures the concentrations of rare isotopes that are produced when cosmic rays hit rocks on the surface of the soil. The longer they are exposed, the higher the concentration, which serves as an indicator of its age).
But, at 25:27, the video gets interesting, when discussing the Siberian sites, so close to the Arctic, and America, Janssen states that:
"at the second site Diring we find humans very far north very much earlier than previously thought now nothing older than about 45,000 years ago has been reported from a range of Arctic sites closer to the Arctic Ocean and we see two dimensions to this. Firstly once Out of Africa around about 2.5 million years, say, humans moved Eastward remarkably quickly people were already at Shang Shen as you can see there in the map on the L Plateau by around 2.1 million and they reached Java in the tropical southeast Asia by around 1.5 million years ago now by this time humans were colonizing vast areas of mid to low latitude Eurasia and exploiting habitats as diverses temperate grasslands and tropical rainforests but then it took another million years or more quite a bit more for people to move as far north... and the other point to note here is that while of course there was still around 2,000 km from the Bering Strait it remains possible that people crossed in into North America well before the earliest widely accepted timing which at this point is still around about four 14,000 years ago now I should add there's there's not yet any genomic support for this early colonization idea so it seems that if any very early groups did cross uh into North America they failed to leave a genetic Trace in other words they they must have gone extinct. So what could have motivated these intrepid people to migrate into the chilly Arctic around 400,000 years ago here's one explanation of course earth's climate is always fluctuating and we think humans exploited a time of extraordinary warmth in the Arctic during what we call Super interglacial stage 11 that's this gray band shown in the plot there 9 and as shown by the green spike in the biological productivity in the Arctic there was really no better time in the past 1 million years to do so and this timing is also very interesting for another reason 400,000 years ago coincides with the suggested split in the neander and denisovan lineages. Denisovans are another yet another kind of archaic human and it's been shown by others that there probably exists a super archaic species known not from fossils but from DNA found in the sediments at the basal sediments of the Denisova cave in in the Altai. So I said before that we don't really know, uh, who these people were but there is an intriguing possibility that the Diring migrants were actually a group of archaic humans, uh, predating the Denisovans whose ancestry we only know thanks to work on the denisovan genome."
I am thrilled that a mainstream scholar suggested that Homo erectus people moved across Bering and entered America around 400,000 years ago. The lack of genetic imprint in the current Amerindians may not mean that they went extinct. Perhaps they left their admixed genes in the Native Americans but the "Great Dying" wiped this signal away when over 90% of the natives died following the contact with Europeans after 1492.
Other Scholars Who Have Suggested an Early Peopling of America
My research into Siberian sites led me to discovering some Russian academics and archaeologists mostly unknown to Western mainstream media. Sure, Western specialists in this field must know them, but I haven't seen them cited in the papers I have read about the subject, so maybe they are dismissed.
One of these scientists is Yuri A. Mochanov. I came across a review of his book Archaeology, the Paleolithic of Northeast Asia, a Non-Tropical Origin for Humanity, and the Earliest Stages of the Settlement of America, that he coauthored with Svetlana A. Fedoseeva, Richard L. Bland, and Roy L. Carlson. The review can be accessed in the Canadian Journal of Archaeology (Reviews, Vol. 32, No. 2 (2008), pp. 285-288. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41103634). The reviewer, Christy G. Turner II, mentions that "In 2001, I was much impressed, but not convinced, by Mochanov's arguments for a much earlier colonization of the New World than Clovis-era people. This discussion lasted long into the night in an Irkutsk hotel room, with Olga Pav- lova translating and Svetlana Fedoseeva, Mochanov's wife, offering frequent comments... Mochanov and Fedoseeva's work at Diring was the first to demonstrate that hominids were in Siberia long before Neandertals and modern humans arrived. Various dates for Diring and the chopper-chopping tool nature of the Diring artifacts hint at groups of East Asian Homo erectus roaming far north of those whose remains were found at the Lower Cave of Zhoukoudian near Beijing, China (about 40° N latitude)."
Feidel S., 2000 cites Mochanvov and then elaborates on his hypothesis of an early peopling of America:
"Yuri Mochanov, have been regarded skeptically, but thermoluminescence dates now suggest an age between 260,000 and 370,000 B.P.for this site, at 61°N latitude (Waters et al., 1997). If Middle Pleistocene hominids were capable of survival so far north, what would have prevented them from crossing Beringia and entering the Americas at a comparably early date (Butzer, 1991, p. 140)? Perhaps Homo erectus did get into the New World, but there is no acceptable archaeological evidence of a mid-Pleistocene human presence. However, Bryan (1978) photographed and described a poorly provenienced H. erectus-like cranium that subsequently disappeared from the Brazilian museum, where it had been stored. [see my post on this skull and also an article by Bryan, 1984, with pictures of the skull] Also in Brazil, a few alleged pebble tools have been reported from Level IV of Esperança Cave, associated with fossil bones dated to ca. 295,000 B.P. by the uranium–thorium method (de Lumley et al., 1988; see Lynch, 1990, for a skeptical assessment). If 250,000-year-old human occupation sites exist in the Americas, they should be as recognizable and recoverable as Old World sites of this age... there has been little controversy about Australian sites with relatively crude toolkits dating earlier than 30,000 years ago, Beaton (1991, p.213)..."
Regarding this final comment, I must point out that archaeologists in America are skeptical about ancient sites, they don't look for them, and ignore them or consider the tools geofacts or made by monkeys (see Coutouly, 2021 as an example). This has been pointed out by archaeologists like Boëda, 2014 who notes that "All sites predating 13,000 years ago are rejected, including by the discoverers themselves. This rejection applies equally to sites in North and South America, with arguments that the artifacts are not of human origin and/or that the stratigraphy is inconsistent and/or that the dating is insufficient, etc. The paradigm is all-powerful. Perhaps most surprising is that the scientific criteria required to validate the oldest remains are far from being as systematically applied to more recent sites. Similarly, upon reading these criticisms, it appears that some of them stem more from a principled opposition to the dominant model than from a scientific discussion presenting arguments and counter-arguments." (I have already posted about the opposition by Clovis-first supporters against older sites and an early peopling of America).
Regarding the remark by Beaton, 1991, his work compares the peopling of Australia and America, the attitudes of archaeologists in both regions, and discusses the different populating strategise. He is an inmpartial observer, not influenced by the Clovis notions, he is critical in his observations, and remarks that "The idea of truly Early Man in the Americas is an exciting one, as it would imply immigration of pre-sapiens Homo and the very strong likelihood of failed colonization and the first evidence for the extinction of Homo on a continental-sized land mass. For the uncommitted observer, however, as interesting as such biogeographic phenomena might be, they do not in themselves make a case for Early Man in America, and the presentation of evidence in support of Early Man is itself not convincing." I agree, strict methodology, and structuring the evidence is critical in supporting and building the case for a very early peopling of America. Borrero, 2015 admits that "Sadly, information for South America is still not always efficiently produced. Ambiguous but ambitious claims from places like Arroyo Vizcaíno, in Uruguay, or Vale da Pedra Furada in Brazil, are still prominen."
Beaton also puts forward an intelligent question that is thought provoking: "Australia and the Americas... were the recipients of the last continental colonizations. This occurred at roughly the same time in human history, and the source for the colonists was roughly the same. Yet, in the space of 40 (or so) thousand years, these continents became the stages for the playing out of very different cultural evolutionary trajectories. It is not a trivial question to ask how this came about.
In the Americas, archaeologists appear to take cultural differentiation at face value and do not
question how it might be that in the space of a few hundred miles Great Basin hunters remained so
apparently distant in cultural morphology from the fishers of the northwest coast. While the answer
might seem terribly obvious that living in a high desert is quite a different matter from living on a
very wet coast, Australianists could point to equally wet-dry environment zones, of equal nearness, where no such cultural differentiation occurred. Australianists might view their prehistoric record as indicating distinctive regional cultural differences, but the scale of these differences is intracontinental and takes on a very different coloration when compared with complexities in cultural morphologies in the Americas.
One research problem that would appear to benefit greatly from an intercontinental perspective
is that of colonization. Questions relating to foraging patterns, colonizing strategy, population
history, and cultural evolution may be better phrased, and ultimately understood, for each continent
with consideration of the other."
Beaton points out the incongruences: "Australianists will be equally impressed by the lack of credible pre-13,000-15,000 B.P. sites in the Americas. But if claims for sites of such an age are to be preferred by the "Early Man" and "pre Clovis" schools, then does this imply Homo erectus in the New World and extinctions of some early colonists? And how can it possibly be that so many of the claims for early dates come from sites in South America? Australianists might also be interested to hear from the American conservative school on the subject of how it is that in the space of only 13,000-15, 000 years the Americas, at the continental scale, have witnessed such extraordinarily high degrees of cultural experimentation and differentiation. What factors might account for this? Population, environment, unrestrained social vitalism?"
This criticsm prods both Clovis-firsters and those supporting a pre-Clovis peopling of America to up their game, improve their methods, strategies, and review or revamp their hypothesis.
The diversity of languages is a great point (See my posts on this matter), how did America develop such a variety in such a short span of time?
Regarding pre-sapiens presence, almost all genetic studies are below par. They usually include proxies for genuine Amerindians with people of mixed origins like a Peruvian from Lima (PEL), Colombian from Medellin (CLM), Mexican from Los Angeles (MXL), or a Puertorican (PUR) which also carry European and African admixture. Some studies ignore America altogether considering it recently populated. Neanderthal and Denisovan introgression is assumed to have been brought from Asia. The alternative, that Neanderthals or Denisovans reached America and admixed there with modern humans is not even considered. Conclusions are therefore based on limited data, tainted data, or prejudiced hypothesis. Every paper about Amerindians, their genetics, and diseases always points out their recent origin and European and African admixture. I doubt that any scientist has tried to identify markers that could have introgressed into genuine Amerindians before the European discovery of 1492, and the slave trade from Africa that began shortly after. If we can pinpoint bases in our DNA strands inherited 30,000 years ago from Denisovans, that in turn added some bases they got from mating with H. erectus, how can't we distinguish between recent and ancient European or African admixture?
And when it comes to the sites themselves, just one look at the scale of excavations undertaken in Siberia at the Diring Yuirakh site, moving several meters of topsoil, or the deep bit dug at Karama, I insist, once again, that nobody digs deep enough to find Early Pleistocene sites in America.
Mental blocks and prejudice also damage the cause of an early peopling of America. For instance, take the folliwng comment by Borrero, 1991: "ancient Korean industries have been invoked to justify the morphology of the material recovered in northeastern Brazil. The argument maintains that "The cobble industries that persisted in East Asia for more than a million years reflect original technological solutions" (Boéda et al. 2013: 446) and that the case of Boqueirão in Brazil is similar. One problem with this argument is that it was not Homo sapiens who produced the cobble industries throughout that period, which implies a completely different reality (Dennell 2009; Rabett 2012). Ultimately, the comparison with Korea is irrelevant." As you can appreciate Borrero does not admit that cobble-making non-sapiens people could have reached America and used this lithic industry in Brazil. So, yes, the comparison with Korea is relevant.
Returning to Butzer, 1984 he admits that it was "techincally" feasible for humans to have moved "from Asia into more productive regions of the New World for tens of millennia prior to 30,000 B.P." so the idea itself is acceptable. The problem is the evidence: "But the coeval record of prehistoric settlement in eastern and northern Asia is poor (Aigner 1981, 1984; Wu and Olsen 1985; Ikawa-Smith 1978; Aikens and Higuchi 1982; Larichev et al. 1987), and there still is no convincing record of such antiquity in Canada or the United States." He goes on, accepting the possibility of a Mid-Wisconsinan (~50-25 kya) entry into America "Human groups, physically less advanced than modem Homo sapiens peoples and with an unsophisticated middle Paleolithic (Mousterian) technology, settled the European tundra to within close proximity of the ice fronts in both western and eastern Europe (e.g., Butzer 1986; Hoffecker 1987). Several late Acheulian sites were already located in tundra environments. Sites of such age have been found in caves, in the former floodplains of small streams, as well as in valley-margin deposits of colluvial loess. Unless we are unwilling to ascribe similar mental and cultural capacities to East and North Asian peoples during early and mid-Wisconsinan time, it is possible, even plausible, that they did penetrate the New World under harsh climatic conditions."
Butzer offers many interesting tips on locating older sites, and calculates how scarece they are. It is an interesting paper that is worth reading.
Closing comments
It is encouraging to see that the tide is changing. An early presence of humans (Denisovans or even Homo erectus) in Siberia half a million years ago shows that they were capable of living in the harsh and freezing conditions of the northeastern limits of Eurasia. At that time, America and Asia were linked (during the successive ice ages) by viable land bridges with fauna that would have enabled them to walk across it and, leaving Asia, enter America.
The high prevalence of a Denisovan genetic imprint in Amerindians may be a sign of their survival over hundreds of thousands of years in the New World, and their intermingling, within the Americas, with the Homo sapiens latecomers.
My next post will look into this possibility
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