Evidence of earliest humans in North America corroborated by second study

Dutch Uncle said:
Over-the-horizon sea navigation would be a difficult feat, but island hopping is much easier. Even if an island is just over the horizon, if large enough, clouds would form over it and be stationary thus identifying its existence.
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You're right, these ancient people must have had some strategy to make it across the water from southeast Asia to Australia.

Still took a lot of nerve though. I can't imagine boats 60k years ago were very sea worthy for open ocean journeys.
 
Cypress said:
You're right, these ancient people must have had some strategy to make it across the water from southeast Asia to Australia.

Still took a lot of nerve though. I can't imagine boats 60k years ago were very sea worthy for open ocean journeys.
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Not an expert, but dugout canoes seem to be a common level of tech. Maybe even a rudimentary sail.

Open ocean sailing seems to have started about 3000 years ago or less.

en.wikipedia.org

History of navigation - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
 
Cypress said:
Because this coincides with the Last Glacial Maximum, I guess these people hopscotched by boat down the Pacific coast, rather than traversing through western land routes.

It also seems to fill in a question I had. The earliest sites of human habitation in South America were older than the known habitation sites in North America. That didn't make sense. The fact this site pushes the North American date back almost ten thousand years makes the South American sites less curious.
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Argument from randU fallacy, Sybil. Making up numbers and using them as 'data' is a fallacy.
 
Cypress said:
The ancient Polynesians were the masters of long distance open ocean navigation.
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True, but not until about 3000 years ago. No doubt a few thousand years of colonizing Micronesia helped build the cultural skills to expand across the Pacific.

Speaking of 3000 years ago, that coincides with the end of the Bronze Age and, one of my personal favorites, the end of the Bicameral Mind. What piques my interest is how events in the Mediterranean would affect those over 8000 miles away in Micronesia.

Similarly, if Jaynes' theory was true, how did this apply to those in the Americas and in the Pacific?



Bicameral mentality - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
Jaynes theorized that a shift from bicameral mentality marked the beginning of introspection and consciousness as we know it today. According to Jaynes, this bicameral mentality began malfunctioning or "breaking down" during the 2nd millennium BCE. He speculates that primitive ancient societies tended to collapse periodically—for example, Egypt's Intermediate Periods, as well as the periodically vanishing cities of the Mayas—as changes in the environment strained the sociocultural equilibria sustained by this bicameral mindset.

The Late Bronze Age collapse of the 2nd millennium BCE led to mass migrations and created a rash of unexpected situations and stresses that required ancient minds to become more flexible and creative. Self-awareness, or consciousness, was the culturally evolved solution to this problem. This necessity of communicating commonly observed phenomena among individuals who shared no common language or cultural upbringing encouraged those communities to become self-aware to survive in a new environment. Thus, consciousness, like bicameral mentality, emerged as a neurological adaptation to social complexity in a changing world.
 
Dutch Uncle said:
True, but not until about 3000 years ago. No doubt a few thousand years of colonizing Micronesia helped build the cultural skills to expand across the Pacific.

Speaking of 3000 years ago, that coincides with the end of the Bronze Age and, one of my personal favorites, the end of the Bicameral Mind. What piques my interest is how events in the Mediterranean would affect those over 8000 miles away in Micronesia.

Similarly, if Jaynes' theory was true, how did this apply to those in the Americas and in the Pacific?



Bicameral mentality - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
Jaynes theorized that a shift from bicameral mentality marked the beginning of introspection and consciousness as we know it today. According to Jaynes, this bicameral mentality began malfunctioning or "breaking down" during the 2nd millennium BCE. He speculates that primitive ancient societies tended to collapse periodically—for example, Egypt's Intermediate Periods, as well as the periodically vanishing cities of the Mayas—as changes in the environment strained the sociocultural equilibria sustained by this bicameral mindset.

The Late Bronze Age collapse of the 2nd millennium BCE led to mass migrations and created a rash of unexpected situations and stresses that required ancient minds to become more flexible and creative. Self-awareness, or consciousness, was the culturally evolved solution to this problem. This necessity of communicating commonly observed phenomena among individuals who shared no common language or cultural upbringing encouraged those communities to become self-aware to survive in a new environment. Thus, consciousness, like bicameral mentality, emerged as a neurological adaptation to social complexity in a changing world.
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That's interesting. I don't remember hearing of that theory, and I'm not sure I completely understand it.

There definitely does seem to be a shift in human values and individual conscience starting in the Axial Age.

On the other hand if you go all the way back to the Epic of Gilgamesh, King Gilgamesh seems to engage in introspection and self-reflection, and there's no indication I'm aware of that human action and human introspection are operating independently on two completely different levels in the epic.
 
Cypress said:
That's interesting. I don't remember hearing of that theory, and I'm not sure I completely understand it.

There definitely does seem to be a shift in human values and individual conscience starting in the Axial Age.

On the other hand if you go all the way back to the Epic of Gilgamesh, King Gilgamesh seems to engage in introspection and self-reflection, and there's no indication I'm aware of that human action and human introspection are operating independently on two completely different levels in the epic.
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The Wiki link gives a synopsis but my take is that we all know what it's like to talk to ourselves. We know it's us so it's not a problem to sound things out in one's head or even out loud...although if done in public some people may move away from you. LOL

The theory is that, back during and before the Bronze Age, people thought with one voice and believed the other voice to be "from the gods" or other spirit. As the link points out, this "other" was mostly one's emotional state of mind. "Blind with rage", "overcome with emotion" and other strong emotions that took over one's mind and body were thought to be beyond one's control and, therefore, supernatural.

My understanding is that all the mental illnesses mentioned in the DSM-V exist within all normal human beings but become illnesses when taken to an extreme. Similarly, with the Bicameral Mind, a person who believes that one voice is themselves and the other voice or emotion is something external might be considered to be schizophrenic.

While bones and mummies can help determine human physiology thousands of years ago, measuring psychology is harder, hence why Jaynes theory is more theory than fact. Some clues about how people thought can be measured in writings such as the Homeric writings, something else mentioned in the link.

Getting back to the OP and colonization of both Australia and the Pacific, they were all well outside of Greece and the Bronze Age. How their thoughts and psychology figure into Jaynes' theory seems problematic. When Western Civilization ran into the cultures of the Americas, there should have been some hint of Bicameral Minds.

Bicameral mentality - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
Eric Robertson Dodds wrote about how ancient Greek thought may have not included rationality as defined by modern culture. In fact, the Greeks may have known that an individual did things, but the reason they did things was attributed to divine externalities, such as gods or daemons.[7] Bruno Snell in 1953 thought that in Homeric Greek psychology there was no sense of self in the modern sense.[8] Snell then describes how Greek culture "self-realized" the modern "intellect".[9] Arthur William Hope Adkins [de], building on Snell's work, wrote about how ancient Greek civilization developed ego-centered psychology as an adaptation to living in city-states, before which the living in Homeric oikos did not require such integrated thought processes.[10]
 
Dutch Uncle said:
The Wiki link gives a synopsis but my take is that we all know what it's like to talk to ourselves. We know it's us so it's not a problem to sound things out in one's head or even out loud...although if done in public some people may move away from you. LOL

The theory is that, back during and before the Bronze Age, people thought with one voice and believed the other voice to be "from the gods" or other spirit. As the link points out, this "other" was mostly one's emotional state of mind. "Blind with rage", "overcome with emotion" and other strong emotions that took over one's mind and body were thought to be beyond one's control and, therefore, supernatural.

My understanding is that all the mental illnesses mentioned in the DSM-V exist within all normal human beings but become illnesses when taken to an extreme. Similarly, with the Bicameral Mind, a person who believes that one voice is themselves and the other voice or emotion is something external might be considered to be schizophrenic.

While bones and mummies can help determine human physiology thousands of years ago, measuring psychology is harder, hence why Jaynes theory is more theory than fact. Some clues about how people thought can be measured in writings such as the Homeric writings, something else mentioned in the link.

Getting back to the OP and colonization of both Australia and the Pacific, they were all well outside of Greece and the Bronze Age. How their thoughts and psychology figure into Jaynes' theory seems problematic. When Western Civilization ran into the cultures of the Americas, there should have been some hint of Bicameral Minds.

Bicameral mentality - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
Eric Robertson Dodds wrote about how ancient Greek thought may have not included rationality as defined by modern culture. In fact, the Greeks may have known that an individual did things, but the reason they did things was attributed to divine externalities, such as gods or daemons.[7] Bruno Snell in 1953 thought that in Homeric Greek psychology there was no sense of self in the modern sense.[8] Snell then describes how Greek culture "self-realized" the modern "intellect".[9] Arthur William Hope Adkins [de], building on Snell's work, wrote about how ancient Greek civilization developed ego-centered psychology as an adaptation to living in city-states, before which the living in Homeric oikos did not require such integrated thought processes.[10]
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Thanks for the explanation of the theory.
I'm not sure I buy it. We do have surviving literature from the Bronze Age, and the characters in the epic poems do not give me the impression that their moments of introspection and self reflection are operating on a level coincident with the spirits or gods.

You're right, I've seen no indication that western Explorers perceived a bicameral mind in indigenous Americans
 
Cypress said:
Thanks for the explanation of the theory.
I'm not sure I buy it. We do have surviving literature from the Bronze Age, and the characters in the epic poems do not give me the impression that their moments of introspection and self reflection are operating on a level coincident with the spirits or gods.

You're right, I've seen no indication that western Explorers perceived a bicameral mind in indigenous Americans
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The first link below gives an excellent list of evidence for the bicameral mind theory and, in some cases, alternate theories. It does touch upon primitive societies, children and schizophrenics. Specifically in terms of auditory hallucinations.

The part about children was very interesting to me. Just as we can see the evolution of mankind in the development of a fetus, notably gill arches and a tail, the evolution of the mind in mankind may be seen in children. As the link notes, children can have imaginary friends or other auditory hallucinations that they believe are real. The alternate explanation is "vivid imagination" but offers no evidence nor explanation.

FWIW, I never had an imaginary friend and only recall one visual hallucination when I was 5 or 6; I crawled up into the attic of the large base-housing apartment building and saw a red devil-like creature coming out from behind a beam causing me to run back downstairs. LOL


Summary of Evidence for the Bicameral Mind Theory - Julian Jaynes Society

A summary of evidence for Jaynes's theory of origin of consciousness and the bicameral mind, including relevance to the theory and ...
www.julianjaynes.org www.julianjaynes.org




stages-of-human-fetal-development-schematic-vector-8147635.jpg
 
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