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New archaeological evidence from Mexico provides the earliest dated evidence for human presence in the Americas—at 33,000 years ago! https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-53486868
*As an important note, this is archaeology, which is a Western framework. Indigenous peoples from these regions have their own stories about their origins. I’m still grappling, as someone who works in the past, with how we integrate these perspectives and decolonize our science.
I have an important meeting, so I need to step away from this thread for a bit, but this point isn’t up for debate. Thanks!
Okay, so, I clearly shouldn’t have said “stories” here, because that seems to be implying to a lot of folks that I’m talking about fiction or mythology. If you look up “story,” it just means an account of past events.
But if you automatically equate indigenous perspectives with myths or fictions, or think “other ways of knowing” is some new age term, please think again. Western science is a largely academic discipline. It’s not the only form of acquiring and transmitting empirical data.
Indigenous peoples have a wealth of empirical knowledge of ecology, geography, math, chemistry, medicine, astronomy, etc. that weren’t gathered or transmitted using academic pathways. There are indigenous scientists, yes, but also indigenous knowledge acquired in other ways.
If it upsets you that a white scientist acknowledges the value of non-Western academic knowledge production, ask yourself why you’re uncomfortable. Is it because you use “science” to support ideas about your superiority, and have a vested interest in keeping it on a pedestal?
I ask because every time I discuss the ways science is flawed, limited, or even has a problematic history regarding race, people come out of the woodwork to defend it as the one true source of objective, empirical truth. This only happens with race, interestingly.
I’m a scientist. I gave up more than you could know to do this work. I love science. I want everyone else to love it as much as I do.
But I also know that science has problems. It’s a human endeavor with human flaws, often used to hurt other humans.
Both are true.
But I also know that science has problems. It’s a human endeavor with human flaws, often used to hurt other humans.
Both are true.
I’m sorry to digress from a really interesting study. But as a paleoecologist, I reconstruct landscapes that people lived in. Sometimes, we even tell stories about what people did on those landscapes. I can’t in good conscience pretend their descendants don’t matter.
