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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_grant8341m 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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