300,000-years-old palaeo remains found in Bering Strait Island

[TylerDurden]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-6066691/How-Palaeolithic-man-conquered-Arctic-en-route-America.html

A while back, some scientists claimed to have found evidence of Neanderthal colonisation of the Americas c.115,000 years ago. The above evidence makes it clear that so-called "apemen" had already colonised the Americas much earlier than that, certainly ever since the advent of Homo Erectus. I don't see how it is possible for ancient humans to just visit a couple of islands in the Bering Strait without also going further as well. Well, it proves that the "long, slow" interpretation of evolution is a more likely possibility, and it also shows that we have greatly underestimated the mental/physical abilities of  past hominids.

[sabertooth]

After a 100,000 or so odd years of chasing mega-fauna through the arctic circle it seems feasible that at least a few small bands of intrepid bipeds would of roved over the ice frontier into the North American continent.

These bands would have remained fairly small in the harsh new world and may have never established permanent settlements. Having to continually follow the herds they would have needed to traveled light, and left not much of a trace behind living upon the constantly shifting glacial ice...before being wiped out by the same event that extincted all the mega Fauna.

[TylerDurden]

Except that the megafauna are mostly believed to have been wiped out by humans, with hard evidence in favour of that. Plus, a rather more likely explanation is that the Native Americans simply interbred with the hominids already present in the Americas. They did after all interbreed with some Polynesians in South America.

[sabertooth]

I would like to see this hard evidence?? Mainstream reports don't even mention the biblical flood event, and draw conclusions about the globe wide extinction, based on vague correlations about without any concrete evidence.

Perhaps there is room for a little crossover between these seemingly opposing theories?

The alternative theory is that the North American Ice sheet was hit by an asteroid and created an extended nuclear winter in which all the megafauna and Bipedal hominids died out in a short period of time....the other side of the world was a little more protected but was affected enough to begin to starve out and weaken the megafauna herds to the point where ravonius and famished hominids hunted the rest to extension....except in some parts of africa and india where elephants and Rhinos where isolated far enough away from the chaos to manage to survive.

[TylerDurden]

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/what-happened-worlds-most-enormous-animals-180964255/

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/01/what-killed-great-beasts-north-america

Granted, gradual climate change may also have been a co-factor.