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Talked with a grad student about the Clovis First theory and now I'm not so sure
I was at a small talk at the university here in town about early North American sites. After, I got chatting with a student named Chloe who's working on her thesis. She was telling me about the White Sands footprints in New Mexico, the ones dated to like 23,000 years ago. I always figured the Clovis people were the first here, you know? That's what I learned in school. But she laid out the evidence, saying 'the ground itself tells a different story.' She showed me a picture of the trackway, and it just looked so... human. It hit different seeing that photo and hearing her explain the dating methods. It wasn't just a theory in a book anymore. It made me realize I was holding onto an old idea without really looking at the new stuff. Has anyone else had their mind changed by a recent find like that?
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lucas_grant831mo ago
My cousin got really into that stuff. He dragged me to a museum exhibit on the Monte Verde site in Chile. They had a replica of that preserved mastodon hide. You could see the cut marks from stone tools. It's one thing to read a date on a page, another to stand there looking at a piece of animal skin someone butchered 15,000 years ago. Changed how I saw the whole timeline.
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grant.jade1mo ago
The Monte Verde site is actually a big part of why Clovis First fell apart. That's the real game changer. White Sands is huge, but the Chile evidence broke the idea open decades ago. It proved people were south of the ice sheets way before Clovis tools show up. Seeing that stuff in person must have been powerful, but the science on it has been solid for a long time.
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