Early Americans May Have Arrived Earlier Than We Thought!
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2008/05/08/seaweed-monte-verde.html
This is so cool! I love how evidence is pushing early human migrations further and further back. I think it just makes sense - scientists don't spend a lot of time thinking about cultural evolution, but that takes a really long time. The fact that we have so many distinct cultures and languages (and language groups) and art forms indicates (to me, at any rate) that people have been pursuing uniqueness for tens of thousands of years.
This view was only solidified by my studies of Aboriginal culture in Australia. Oddly enough, given that I'm a scientist, I found our cultural studies by far the most fascinating aspect of that trip, and my life was changed irrevocably by my encounters with Aborigines. I never would have expected that going into it - I'm anything but politically correct and tended not to pay too much attention to native cultures in today's society. That all changed in four short months, when I realized that those ways of life are far too precious, and even holy, to sacrifice on the altar of modernization.
So my interest in early humans and their cultures has only grown, and this article is very cool!
This is so cool! I love how evidence is pushing early human migrations further and further back. I think it just makes sense - scientists don't spend a lot of time thinking about cultural evolution, but that takes a really long time. The fact that we have so many distinct cultures and languages (and language groups) and art forms indicates (to me, at any rate) that people have been pursuing uniqueness for tens of thousands of years.
This view was only solidified by my studies of Aboriginal culture in Australia. Oddly enough, given that I'm a scientist, I found our cultural studies by far the most fascinating aspect of that trip, and my life was changed irrevocably by my encounters with Aborigines. I never would have expected that going into it - I'm anything but politically correct and tended not to pay too much attention to native cultures in today's society. That all changed in four short months, when I realized that those ways of life are far too precious, and even holy, to sacrifice on the altar of modernization.
So my interest in early humans and their cultures has only grown, and this article is very cool!