Re: Equids
WIlliam C. Wilson (Wildbill@ilhawaii.net)
29 Dec 1994 08:16:15 GMT
> While that may have been the case perhaps a decade ago, I have not read
> a recent book, article, paper or report, which does not mention the
> growing body of evidence and albeit begrudging, acceptance of it,
> that there are at least 30 well known, reasonably secure, carbon dated,
> sequentially stratified, sites for mans habitation in the Americas
> at 25,000 plus BC. Deal with it.
Why hasn't the majority of the anthrpology community accepted it then?
I'ld love to accept it, it would help solve a lot problems with humans
in the americas. But it still doesn't affect our discussion. Man
was here by 11,000 BC the (official) fossil record shows the horse
disapears by 8000BC and it isn't domesticated until @6500BC in
Europe. Relict populations aren't a very effective way to keep the horse
around till 1500AD; if the Spanish horse spreead as fast as it did
then why didn't the relict populations do the same? If the Peruvians
could domesticate the llama and alpaca why didn't the north american
indians have any domestic animals (other than the dog)?
> > 3)Proto-Amerindian tool cultures undergo a change to smaller
> > spear.arrow points at the same time.
> > This atleast suggests that the large easily hunted animals
> > had been eliminated.
>
>
>
> My sources say domestication of herd animals, from whom nomads have
> probably been getting milk and meat for some time, occurs when the
> nomads get tired of carrying around their, bedrolls, cooking pots and
> tents. Some great domesticators of herd animals have never attempted
> agriculture to this day, but get all their needs from their herds of
> animals and some gathering. The Lapps and Mongols for example.
If they are tame enough to milk and stay around for the slaughter
haven't they already been domesticated? We are talking about the first
taming of these animals first and the riding of them second. I'll
grant that second came very shortly after the first but the first is
the real problem.
> The domestication of the horse is accomplished by taking mares and
> tethering them to be mounted by wild stallions. Obviously if you can
> hunt an animal you can capture its pregnant females when they foal.
> If you feed the foals until they learn to depend on you for food
> you have domestic horses.
Have you ever tried to do these "easy" things withwild mustangs and
do it without mounts of any sort? Yes you can run them down and trap
them into pens or box canyons and slowly gentle them, but even this
isn't as easy as it sounds.
> Why can't I turn around and with every bit as much
> justification, assume that if man could enter the Americas from Siberia
> he could enter Siberia from the Americas?
You could just don't ask me to buy it, fossils show man in asia
for at least 500,000 years, in the americas for only 12,000 (or
25,000, or 40,000 depending on which claim you accept) if he didn't
come from asia originally where did he come from?
> I would really like to go one step beyond sources and propose some new
> studies, which don't begin by making assumptions which exclude some
> possibilities. I would also like to be aware of all the existing data,
> but I don't see that it is as yet sufficient to shut the door on
> further inquiries.
Fine by me, how do we do the digs in the Bering sea or on the
submerged castal plains where the best evidence probably is/was?
> One thing I am really curious about is that all of the coastal
> areas show many tribes in possession of relatively smaller territories.
> When you get to the plains, suddenly there are a few huge empires
> controlling areas the size of Texas or Ontario.
I believe Science News had a report in the last 2 months on this-
it suggested that for at least part of that time the central great
plains were not grasslands but actual deserts with sand dunes etc.
High productivity areas have concentrated populations with limited
areal controls for each group, low productivity areas have large
areas of control for small populations. The plains are dry and may
have been even dryer I suspect water is/was the controling factor
for control of the plains. That certainly seems to be the story
as far as I can tell from the "official" history (Coronado, La Salle,
etc.).
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