It's a case where an extraordinary claim should require unambiguous evidence, something more than making people say "hmm, maybe it was humans?" when they can't explain exactly what they see.
If you postulate pre-Clovis settlements, now you need to explain why they weren't able to quickly expand to fill what was very fertile land for hunting, the way the Clovis people did. And how they managed to get so far south without having populations large enough to leave any unambiguous artifacts.
These "upending" discoveries of pre-Clovis sites remind me of the frequent news articles that were being written about the EM Drive which purported to revolutionize space travel by violating the fundamental law of conservation of momentum.
Saying "just use common sense" is very pat and appealing in cases where we have direct apprehension about the domain in question- such as in plane geometry- but in cases where we have no direct access to a question aside from experiment and abstract reasoning (such as deep history or physics,) how do you distinguish "common sense" from simple conservatism?
I'd imagine there's plenty of possible reasons pre-Clovis Americans wouldn't have been as numerous or left as much evidence as Clovis-people did; most obviously, that the continent was much colder, and therefore supportive of much smaller populations, than it was in the Clovis culture era- particularly in the northern regions, where it's often objected that they "should" have left remains. Obviously, this isn't an argument that there were pre-Clovis settlers, but an example of why the idea can't be objected out-of-hand through "common sense."
Will_Parker|7 years ago
If you postulate pre-Clovis settlements, now you need to explain why they weren't able to quickly expand to fill what was very fertile land for hunting, the way the Clovis people did. And how they managed to get so far south without having populations large enough to leave any unambiguous artifacts.
From the outside, I like Jared Diamond's article about it: https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27111
These "upending" discoveries of pre-Clovis sites remind me of the frequent news articles that were being written about the EM Drive which purported to revolutionize space travel by violating the fundamental law of conservation of momentum.
maxander|7 years ago
I'd imagine there's plenty of possible reasons pre-Clovis Americans wouldn't have been as numerous or left as much evidence as Clovis-people did; most obviously, that the continent was much colder, and therefore supportive of much smaller populations, than it was in the Clovis culture era- particularly in the northern regions, where it's often objected that they "should" have left remains. Obviously, this isn't an argument that there were pre-Clovis settlers, but an example of why the idea can't be objected out-of-hand through "common sense."