New archaeological dating of ancient Chilean site reopens controversy of first human colonization of South America

Amazing stuff! How exact a science is stratigraphy?

"It is among the most hotly contested topics in archaeology: When did people first arrive in the Americas? A few decades ago, there was consensus that people began populating North America no earlier than about 13,000 years ago, as evidenced by well-dated spearheads with characteristic fluted bases known as Clovis points, named for the city in New Mexico near the archaeological site where they were first identified in 1929.

Then, in the 1970s, an archaeologist named Tom Dillehay claimed to have dated stone tools and other artifacts found at a site in southern Chile to 14,500 years ago—a time when much of North America would have still be covered in impassable glaciers.

Few gave the claims from that site, known as Monte Verde, much credence until an independent cadre of researchers visited it in 1997 and confirmed the dates . The result sent shockwaves through the archaeological community and overturned the so-called “Clovis first” paradigm in favor of a new “pre-Clovis” one. This interpretation spurred scientists to retool their hypotheses for how and when people entered the continent; a coastal migration hypothesis has since gained popularity in its wake. Several other sites throughout the Americas have since been dated to before 13,000 years, and the matter appeared settled. ...

A study published last week in Science saw one such “pre-Clovis” skeptic revisiting Monte Verde—or sites close to it, as the original dig site has since been destroyed—and redating the sediment layers from which the supposedly human made artifacts were said to have come.  ...

In the authors’ analysis, the key layers aren’t 14,500 years old, but instead only 8200 to 4200 years old. The confusion, they argued in the paper, was caused by younger sedimentary material being deposited below older layers by a river’s flow, which scrambled the region’s stratigraphy.

Why did it take so long to uncover this? “The simple answer is that the archaeological site is quite remote and was not visited by many archeologists, geomorphologists, or Quaternary geologists (studying the past 2.6 million years) who could have identified the prominent volcanic ash, the exposed wood bed that is the source for the 14,000-year-old radiocarbon ages, and identified that the site is situated on an abandoned floodplain that had to be younger than the landscape surface,” ...

Critically, these dates from Monte Verde have no impact on the other pre-Clovis sites that have been independently dated, but the brouhaha could lead to enhanced scrutiny and calls for their dates to be replicated. ..."

From the editor's summary and abstract:

"Editor’s summary

There is much debate surrounding the dates of human occupation in the Americas. One site that places South American timing in the pre-Clovis period is Monte Verde II in Chile. This site, however, was mostly only studied by a single group, meaning that replication of the dating has been lacking. Surovell et al. independently examined the site using current approaches and a broader scope and concluded that the site could not be older than 8200 years, significantly younger than the previously determined 14,500 years ...

Abstract

Our understanding of the timing of the human colonization of South America has been anchored by the Monte Verde II site in Chile, reported to date to ~14,500 years before the present (B.P.) and regarded as one of the most secure pre-Clovis archeological sites.

We report the first independent investigation of Monte Verde in the nearly 50 years since initial excavations. We argue that radiocarbon and luminescence dates from alluvial exposures, in combination with the identification of a tephra dated to 11,000 years B.P. stratigraphically underlying the archaeological component, suggest that Monte Verde cannot be older than the Middle Holocene (8200 to 4200 years B.P.). With colonization no longer anchored by Monte Verde, our revised chronology supports a more recent date of human arrival to South America."

ScienceAdviser

A later debut for humans (Perspective, open access) "Stratigraphic analysis resets the time of human arrival in Monte Verde, Chile"

A mid-Holocene age for Monte Verde challenges the timeline of human colonization of South America (open access)

Fig. 1. Map of the study area.

Fig. 2. Ages of geologic deposits and the Monte Verde site.

Exploring the medieval roots of romance

How romantic were the knights in shining armor?

How often are such stories provided before or on Valentines Day?

Exploring the medieval roots of romance | Stanford Report "Stanford historian Jenna Phillips discusses the influence of medieval customs on Valentine’s Day traditions, highlighting how 12th- and 13th-century poets and musicians shaped our modern understanding of love."

Fiction or reality?

Today, China, Russia, Myanmar, and Belarus still count for the world’s largest prison populations of journalists.

Just a reminder at the end of 2025 or the end of the first quarter of the 21st century!

"710 journalists spent time in prison this year, and more than 500 will be spending the end-of-year holidays there too, according to our latest figures."

Over 500 journalists will spend the holidays behind bars (Reporters Without Borders (RSF))

Personal risk tolerance has sweeping implications for how societies evolve

So true! Who would argue with that? However, crude, primitive Marxism ideology has spoiled this research!

I am not sure I agree with the strong inductive biases of this study that asserts a rather static bifurcation in society between rich and poor. The term "vulnerable communities" is a give away!

Why should not e.g. less affluent individuals without social safety nets take more risk to advance their living standards etc.? The more open and free a society is the more opportunities for e.g. less affluent individuals.

"... a model for how a person’s resources and environment incentivize learning strategies that influence their personal proclivity toward risk. The model, published in Psychological Review, makes predictions that mirror many aspects of modern society, such as how wealth inequality leads vulnerable communities to rely on traditions to manage risk more [???] so than wealthier communities, which can make them slow to adapt when conditions change. This can help explain political polarization and why cautious attitudes persist for generations following shocks like recessions and wars.

“We’re basically linking short time scales — within a person’s lifetime — and generational time scales to gain an overall view of why people vary in their disposition toward risk,” ..."

From the abstract:

"We use cultural evolutionary models to examine how individual experiences and culturally inherited information jointly shape risk-taking behavior under environmental uncertainty.
We find that learning processes not only generate considerable variation in risk beliefs and behaviors, but also that conservative learning strategies—emphasizing the preservation of generational knowledge—excel in high-risk settings, promoting risk avoidance and long-term survival but limiting growth when conditions improve.

In contrast, exploratory learning strategies—leveraging juvenile exploration and peer influence—foster risk tolerant behaviors that thrive in affluent, low-risk settings where wealth buffers [???] and social safety nets [???] reduce the costs of miscalculations.

Introducing economic stratification to the model reveals how wealth disparities and interclass interactions reinforce these patterns, exacerbating differences in learning strategies and risk-taking behaviors within populations, and perpetuating socioeconomic inequalities [???] through the cultural inertia of excessive risk avoidance.
By uniting developmental, social, and evolutionary perspectives, our framework provides a novel lens on the cultural evolution of risk-taking behavior and its broader societal implications. ..."

Personal risk tolerance has sweeping implications for how societies evolve | Santa Fe Institute

The development of risk behaviors and their cultural transmission. (no public access)

A short history of pre-industrial marriage

Just a reminder on Valentine's Day!

"... But the truth is that people in the preindustrial past faced few possibilities when it came to marriage. The number of potential partners in one’s tiny village was low, and the few available choices might all be one’s cousins, increasing the risk of birth defects in any resulting children. Peasants “married fellow villagers and were so insular that local dialects were often incomprehensible to men living only a few miles away,” according to the historian William Manchester. Travel was rarer, and communities were more secluded than a modern person could easily imagine. By the 18th century, little had changed: “Most villagers married people from within 10 miles of home,” as the historian Kirstin Olsen noted.

The tiny pool of possible marriage partners often produced matches that might raise eyebrows today, such as consanguineous pairings (including plenty of first cousins) and couples with huge age gaps. Even in the 18th century, in England, grooms could legally be as young as 14 and brides as young as 12, although that was rare in practice, thankfully ...

Men [and women] were also often unhappy in marriage. An illustration from the mid-1600s depicts an alleged Dutch invention to help unhappy husbands: a windmill to transform ugly wives into beautiful ones. ..."

Marriage Wasn’t Always Happily Ever After

Husbands bringing their ugly wives to a windmill, to be transformed into beautiful ones. Engraving, ca 1650.

How Native Americans guarded their societies against tyranny. Really!

Interesting claims about democracy among American natives preceding the Democracy in America by the Founding Fathers and Mothers.

However, is this also again glorification of the Noble Savage or romanticizing of indigenous people? Summed up in one term: wishful thinking or embellishment. 

One issue is e.g. the lack of contact with other, external powers by the Native Americans as far as we know. E.g. they did not have to worry to much about invasions until the Europeans (other than Spaniards/Portuguese) came. Nature's abundance may have also helped to reduce warfare and strife.

The article also mentions the Little Ice Age (which only ended around 1850 CE) as one of the reasons why some large civilizations declined.

"When the founders of the United States designed the Constitution, they were learning from history that democracy was likely to fail – to find someone who would fool the people into giving him complete power and then end the democracy.

They designed checks and balances to guard against the accumulation of power they had found when studying ancient Greece and Rome. But there were others in North America who had also seen the dangers of certain types of government and had designed their own checks and balances to guard against tyranny: the Native Americans.

Although most Americans today don’t know it, there were large centralized civilizations across much of North America in the 10th through 12th centuries. They built massive cities and grand irrigation projects across the continent. Twelfth-century Cahokia, on the banks of the Mississippi River, had a central city about the size of London at the time. The sprawling 12th-century civilization of the Huhugam had several cities of more than 10,000 people and a total population of perhaps 50,000 in the Southwestern desert. ...

In the 13th century, though, a global cooling trend began, which has been called the Little Ice Age. In part because of that cooling, large-scale farming became more difficult, and these large civilizations struggled to feed their people. Elites began hoarding wealth. The people wanted change. ...

As they formed these new and more dispersed societies, the people who had overthrown or fled the great cities and their too powerful leaders sought to avoid mesmerizing leaders who made tempting promises in difficult times. So they designed complex political structures to discourage centralization, hierarchy and inequality and encourage shared decision-making.

These societies intentionally created balanced power structures. For example, the oral history [???] of the Osage Nation records that it once had one great chief who was a military leader, but its council of elder spiritual leaders, known as the “Little Old Men,” decided to balance that chief’s authority with that of another hereditary chief, who would be responsible for keeping peace.

Another way some societies balanced power was through family-based clans. Clans communicated and cooperated across multiple towns. They could work together to balance the power of town-based chiefs and councils.

An ideal of leadership

Many of these societies required convening all of the people – men, women and children – for major political, military, diplomatic and land-use decisions. Hundreds or even thousands might show up, depending on how momentous the decision was.

They strove for consensus, though they didn’t always achieve it. In some societies, it was customary for the losing side to quietly leave the meeting if they couldn’t bring themselves to agree with the others. ..."

How Native Americans guarded their societies against tyranny

Grim Old Days: Pat Thane's History of Old Age

It is probably one of the most remarkable achievements of Western civilization that old individuals can live rather fulfilling lives and don't have to worry much about the next day.

In times past, often older individuals were expected to die off and not hang around anymore and be a burden.

Caveat: I did not read the whole article.

"Summary: Pat Thane’s book explores the harsh realities faced by the elderly in pre-industrial societies, including early aging, high mortality rates, and widespread elder abuse. The book reveals that old age, often accompanied by physical disability and poverty, was generally marked by isolation, familial neglect, and societal contempt. Thane’s volume challenges the romanticized notion that the elderly were once universally respected, showing that industrialization brought both longer lifespans and improved intergenerational relationships."

Grim Old Days: Pat Thane's History of Old Age - Human Progress "He who has made himself dependent on his children for bread and suffers from want, he shall be knocked dead by this club."

How Chess Spread from India to the World with Palki Sharma

Recommendable!

One of the world’s oldest condiments: The history of ketchup

Enjoy!

How humanity got hooked on coffee

Recommendable! Except for some environmentalism overtones!

The Enlightenment: Stumbling in the Darkness

Recommendable! In particular, this video stresses the importance of coffee shops and citizen societies during the Enlightenment.

That some leading figures of the Enlightenment did not abolish slavery or even benefited from slavery does not really diminish the achievements of the Enlightenment. I also bet that other figures did their part to abolish slavery. The same goes for the mentioned white supremacy of some of the figures. It is very popular in our time to attach white supremacy to historical events and figures in hindsight.

Archaeologists uncover cluster of lost cities and roads in Ecuadorian Amazon rainforest built 2,500 years ago

Amazing stuff! This was one of the big archaeological stories of recent times!

Did you know that the Amazon rainforest extends all the way to Ecuador? I did not or had forgotten about it.

"Archaeologists have uncovered a cluster of lost cities in the Amazon rainforest that was home to at least 10,000 farmers around ..."

"Archaeologists once believed the ancient Amazon rainforest was an inhospitable place, sparsely populated by bands of hunter-gatherers. But the remains of enormous earthworks, pyramids, and roads from Bolivia to Brazil discovered over the past 2 decades have proved conclusively that the Amazon was home to large, complex societies long before European colonizers arrived. Now, there’s evidence that another human society—the oldest yet—left its mark on the region: A dense network of interconnected cities, now hidden beneath the forest in Ecuador’s Upano Valley, has been revealed by the laser mapping technology called lidar. The settlements, described today in Science, are at least 2500 years old, more than 1000 years older than any other known complex Amazonian society. ..."

From the editor's summary and abstract:

"Editor’s summary

When intact, the Amazonian forest is dense and difficult to penetrate, both on foot and with scanning technologies. Over the past several years, however, improved light detection and ranging scans have begun to penetrate the forest canopy, revealing previously unknown evidence of past Amazonian cultures. Rostain et al. describe evidence of such an agrarian Amazonian culture that began more than 2000 years ago. They describe more than 6000 earthen platforms distributed in a geometic pattern connected by roads and intertwined with agricultural landscapes and river drainages in the Upano Valley. Previous efforts have described mounds and large monuments in Amazonia, but the complexity and extent of this development far surpasses these previous sites. ...

Abstract

A dense system of pre-Hispanic urban centers has been found in the Upano Valley of Amazonian Ecuador, in the eastern foothills of the Andes. Fieldwork and light detection and ranging (LIDAR) analysis have revealed an anthropized landscape with clusters of monumental platforms, plazas, and streets following a specific pattern intertwined with extensive agricultural drainages and terraces as well as wide straight roads running over great distances. Archaeological excavations date the occupation from around 500 BCE to between 300 and 600 CE. The most notable landscape feature is the complex road system extending over tens of kilometers, connecting the different urban centers, thus creating a regional-scale network. Such extensive early development in the Upper Amazon is comparable to similar Maya urban systems recently highlighted in Mexico and Guatemala."

Archeologists uncover cluster of lost cities in Ecuadorian Amazon | AP News

Laser mapping reveals oldest Amazonian cities, built 2500 years ago Neighborhoods, farms, and roads are 1000 years older than previous discoveries

Two thousand years of garden urbanism in the Upper Amazon (no public access)

Google maps of Upano Valley

Aging societies more vulnerable to collapse - A study covering between 2000 BCE and 1800 CE

Many empires and societies have come and gone before in history!

In my opinion, one of the biggest contributors the demise of empires or once successful societies over time is political and economic stagnation combined with overconfidence plus arrogance (e.g. ancient China). It appears the articles below do not really reflect this aspect very well.

The postulated "growing economic inequality" hypothesis as a trigger or mechanism  is quite dubious if applied to Western open liberal societies!

The parallels drawn here between human aging and aging societies are also rather dubious. These two aging processes better should not be conflated!

How biased and prejudiced were these authors? Too much!

"“As our society enters a climate and ecological crisis [????] of our own making [????] the evidence that it is getting less resilient just increases the systemic and existential risks we are facing,”"

"Societies and political structures, like the humans they serve, appear to become more fragile as they age, according to an analysis of hundreds of pre-modern societies. The study, which holds implications for the modern world, provides the first quantitative support for the theory that the resilience of political states decreases over time.
Triggers of societal collapse have been well studied and vary from conquest and coups to earthquakes and droughts. This new study shows that pre-modern states faced a steeply increasing risk of collapse within the first two centuries after they formed. The research identifies several mechanisms that could drive these aging effects. Some of the mechanisms, like environmental degradation and growing economic inequality, are still at work today.  ...
In this study, the researchers looked at this question from a new angle, by analyzing longevity in 324 pre-modern states spanning five millennia. ...

In humans, the risk of dying doubles approximately every 6-7 years after infancy. As that exponential process compounds with great age, few people survive more than 100 years. The authors show that it works differently for states. Their risk of termination rises steeply over the first two centuries but then levels off, allowing a few to persist much longer than usual.

They found a similar pattern all over the world from European pre-modern societies to early civilizations in the Americas to Chinese dynasties. ..."

From the significance and abstract:

"Significance

Humans become increasingly fragile as they age. We show that something similar may happen to states, although for states, the risk of termination levels off as they grow older, allowing some to persist for millennia. Proximate causes of their demise such as conquest, coups, earthquakes, and droughts are easy to spot and have received significant attention. However, our results suggest that unraveling what shapes resilience to such events is equally important if we are to understand state longevity and collapse. Risk of termination rises over the first 200 y, inviting a search for mechanisms that can undermine resilience at this timescale.

Abstract

How states and great powers rise and fall is an intriguing enigma of human history. Are there any patterns? Do polities become more vulnerable over time as they age? We analyze longevity in hundreds of premodern states using survival analysis to help provide initial insights into these questions. This approach is commonly used to study the risk of death in biological organisms or failure in mechanical systems. The results reveal that the risk of state termination increased steeply over approximately the first two centuries after formation and stabilized thereafter. This provides the first quantitative support for the hypothesis that the resilience of political states decreases over time. Potential mechanisms that could drive such declining resilience include environmental degradation, increasing complexity, growing inequality, and extractive institutions. While the cases are from premodern times, such dynamics and drivers of vulnerability may remain relevant today."

Aging societies more vulnerable to collapse | Santa Fe Institute

The vulnerability of aging states: A survival analysis across premodern societies (open access)

2024 could be the biggest global election year in history

Wow! Elections have consequences! Choose carefully!

"The coming year will be one of seismic political shifts. Over 4 billion people will head to the polls in countries including the United States, Taiwan, India, and Indonesia, making 2024 the biggest election year in history." (Source)

18th century lost love letters read for first time

Recommendable!

Abrahamic Religions Each Share Their Own Decalogue

I did not have time to read the whole article, but nobody should underestimate the immense and paramount importance of the Ten Commandments in the history of human civilization!

These Ten Commandments plus some other attempts of ancient civilizations at codification and the rule of law (e.g. Code of Hammurabi, Edicts of Ashoka) are some of the central tenets of human civilization! Without them we would still be more like the great apes!

Abrahamic Religions Each Share Their Own Decalogue – OpEd – Eurasia Review

Social media amplify tribalism, misinformation, censorship, silencing, superstition and more!

Social media are a great invention thanks to human ingenuity! The positive function/effects have significantly outweighed the negative ones.

However, there is also a considerable dark side to social media as we have learnt over the years! They offer many echo chambers for millions of users! In the worst case, major achievements of human civilization could suffer or have already suffered a setback. Propaganda and demagoguery can easily be disseminated daily!

How do you distinguish a so called influencer from a demagogue? Social media are an ideal medium for demagogues!

There is a pervasive censorship and silencing of minority or opposing opinions going on!

Mob rule and tyranny of the majority come to mind! Or how very active minorities and individual zealots try to dominate discourse and much more!

Then there is the amplification of narcissism on a grand scale! The craving for those few minutes of fame and remuneration.

100 Years of Fashionable Womenswear in England: 1830s – 1930s | V&A

Very recommendable!

Rare severe drought coincided with Hittite Empire collapse

So called climate change is not a new phenomenon! It certainly predates the industrial age!

Maybe we should get our climate data from archaeologists instead of Global Warming hoax and Climate Change religion propagandists and demagogues! Just wondering!😊

"The collapse of the Hittite Empire in the Late Bronze Age has been blamed on various factors, from war with other territories to internal strife. Now, an interdisciplinary collaboration used tree ring and isotope records to pinpoint a more likely – and prescient – culprit: three straight years of severe drought in an already dry period. ..."

From the abstract:

"The potential of climate change to substantially alter human history is a pressing concern, but the specific effects of different types of climate change remain unknown. This question can be addressed using palaeoclimatic and archaeological data. For instance, a 300-year, low-frequency shift to drier, cooler climate conditions around 1200 BC is frequently associated with the collapse of several ancient civilizations in the Eastern Mediterranean and Near East. However, the precise details of synchronized climate and human-history-scale associations are lacking. The archaeological–historical record contains multiple instances of human societies successfully adapting to low-frequency climate change. It is likely that consecutive multi-year occurrences of rare, unexpected extreme climatic events may push a population beyond adaptation and centuries-old resilience practices. Here we examine the collapse of the Hittite Empire around 1200 BC. The Hittites were one of the great powers in the ancient world across five centuries, with an empire centred in a semi-arid region in Anatolia with political and socioeconomic interconnections throughout the ancient Near East and Eastern Mediterranean, which for a long time proved resilient despite facing regular and intersecting sociopolitical, economic and environmental challenges. Examination of ring width and stable isotope records obtained from contemporary juniper trees in central Anatolia provides a high-resolution dryness record. This analysis identifies an unusually severe continuous dry period from around 1198 to 1196 (±3) BC, potentially indicating a tipping point, and signals the type of episode that can overwhelm contemporary risk-buffering practices."

Rare drought coincided with Hittite Empire collapse | Cornell Chronicle

Severe multi-year drought coincident with Hittite collapse around 1198–1196 BC (open access)

Extended Data Fig. 1: Map of East Mediterranean-Near East indicating the major ancient empires (Hatti = Hittites, Egypt, Mitanni, Assyria, Babylonia), several other main political entities sometimes within, sometimes on the margins of, the Hittite Empire

The Neolithic baby formula that ensured our survival

Amazing stuff! Some form of baby formula may have been used as far back as 7,500 years ago.