November 27, 2025 • 43 mins
Did human beings first reach the continents we call North and South America by traversing a land bride across what's now known as the Bering Strait? That's been the most prominent theory about early human migration, and it's the one many children learn about in school -- but what if there's more to the story? Join the guys as they dive into the story of early human migration... as well as new evidence that may revolutionize every thing we thought we knew about humanity's journey to the Americas.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Fellow conspiracy realists. Happy Thanksgiving to all who celebrate, and
we are celebrating too. In place of our typical weekly
listener mail program, we have a classic We dug through
the archives and we were thinking, what sort of speaks
to Thanksgiving and American history? And by gosh, by golly,
(00:20):
by gum, I think we found the frozen tundra. Yes.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
Yeah, In fourteen ninety two Columbus sailed the Ocean Blue.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
And he also kind of and just like George Washington
famously said, I cannot bear a straight that's a weird level.
That's a weird level to that one. We'll keep it in.
There's more hidden the history ahead. But back in twenty
twenty five years ago, now, guys, more than five years ago,
we asked a question that has been bugging the heck
(00:52):
out of experts for so long. When did human beings
actually reach what we call the America right.
Speaker 3 (01:00):
One of the most prominent theories about early human migration
and one that kids, I think still are taught in
school to this day. But we pause it. Maybe there's
something more to the store.
Speaker 1 (01:13):
Was it Vikings, was it the old Mechs? Was it
a Polynesian expansion? And George. Sorry about that burying straight joke.
We didn't think through the levels of the wordplace. He's
rolling in his grave right now, Ben, he sure is well.
Cherry trees aside, we hope that you are having some
(01:33):
wonderful R and R with your family and your loved ones.
Happy Thanksgiving again to those who celebrate. Here's our classic
episode and we'll be back later this week.
Speaker 4 (01:44):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies, history is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn this stuff they don't got you to know. A
production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
Welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my
name is Noel.
Speaker 1 (02:11):
They call me Ben. We are joined as always with
our super producer, Paul Mission controlled Decant. Most importantly, you
are you. You are here, and that makes this stuff
they don't want you to know. We're diving into some
hidden history today. We're diving into as hon as the
phrase may sound something new about history, because Faulkner was right.
(02:36):
Of course, the past isn't even the past yet. History
is never over. It's an ongoing conversation. Most people living
on the continents of North and South America are comparatively
recent arrivals. Right, While many people living in both South
(02:57):
and North America have a long family hitty here, if
you look at the larger scheme of human migration across
the planet, human beings are kind of a new thing
for these two continents. We know roughly, we know ballpark
the story of humanity. Ancestral primates evolved on the African continent,
(03:23):
and from there our species spread around the globe. However,
even today, in twenty twenty, on August seventh, twenty twenty,
as we record this, our species still gets bogged down
in the details, especially when we get to the timeline.
So today's question, when did human beings actually reach the
(03:46):
American continents? Here are the facts.
Speaker 2 (03:49):
Most experts within the fields, the various fields of science, anthropology,
and the like. They agree that the story of the
continents of South and North America, at least as we
understand them now, they didn't begin with humans on them,
or humans were not there very early. These land masses
were home to a lot of creatures, a lot of animals,
(04:10):
a lot of flora and fauna well before human beings arrived.
And of course, if you're taking the really long look
at the Earth. There are millions and millions of years
where humans weren't here, but there were other creatures. But
the big question for today is how did humans specifically
get here on to North and South America.
Speaker 3 (04:32):
Well, the most common theory is this idea that involves
Clovis culture and the Bearing Land Bridge. By about fourteen
thousand years ago. Now, the first human beings to reach
the Americas came by crossing the Bearing Strait, which was
this land bridge between the far northeastern part of Siberia
(04:54):
and the western the farthest most western part of Alaska.
In this theory, known as the Bearing land Bridge theory,
is the one many of us grew up listen hearing about,
you know, in school. It actually makes a lot of sense.
It's the closest connection between Asia and North America and
it only opens when ice is locked up on land
(05:17):
and then sea level drops.
Speaker 1 (05:19):
Yeah, there is a logic here. If we're talking about
early human migration, then we're talking about people basically walking
right and probably following sources of food, maybe other animals
that they rely on for sustenance. So it makes sense
that they would be able to walk to North America
(05:45):
from literally the only walkable path, which is this bearing
land bridge across the street that you're describing, nol.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
And all of this is based on the idea that
early humans were unable to craft some kind of boat
or ship that would be able to traverse the Pacific
or Atlantic oceans in the way that we know began
to be able to do as technology developed. Just remember that,
that's why scientists always focus on that land bridge because
(06:16):
of the walkability. As Ben said, Yeah, yeah, that's.
Speaker 1 (06:20):
A good point, Matt. And you know, let's get in
front of the obvious question that many of us are
going to immediately ask, which is why can I not
walk across that bridge today? Why do I have to
take a boat or a flight, or why do I
have to go on a doomed mission to swim the
Pacific to reach Asia from the Americas. Well, that's because
(06:44):
we are living in a different time. Back when, according
to this theory, people walked from Asia to North America,
they were doing so during something called the Last Glacial
Maximum or LG. If this comes up so often in
conversation that you don't have time to say the whole.
Speaker 2 (07:04):
Thing, also known as the previous ice age. Yes, the
most recent ice.
Speaker 1 (07:09):
Age, the most recent ice age, Yeah, the one before
the next one, which maybe we'll be around to see.
Who knows, it's twenty twenty. I can't rule anything out
at this point. So back when people were traversing the
land in this way, much more of Earth's water was
(07:31):
existing in solid form in glaciers. And now the difference
between then and now is that the sea levels have risen,
so the bridge and the land these people walked is underwater,
meaning also that much of the evidence of their migration
(07:52):
is going to be lost to time, as the conventional
wisdom goes. By this time, I'm fourteen fifteen thousand years ago,
humans had migrated across the breadth of South and North America.
You go up to modern day Alaska, you got humans.
(08:13):
Go down to Chile, you got humans. The West coast
is riddled with them. You go to northeastern Canada, you
got people everywhere. You go down to Florida, boom, same thing,
people plus gators this time. So what we're telling you
right now is the official, most often told story. And
(08:34):
I want to pause here for you guys. Does this
track with what with Noel Matt? Does this track with
what you learned or were taught growing up about human migration.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
Basically, yeah, yeah, this is precisely what what I recall
from world history classes, both in high school and in college.
Essentially what we've just described here, the Clovis, the closet hunters,
and the evidence that we have found of their lives
(09:06):
back in those days. And it was a long time ago.
But you know, when you look at the span of
what we know about humanity and the evidence that we found,
it wasn't it wasn't that long ago.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
Yeah, yeah, that's a good point. I think this story
is going to be familiar to many of us because
you grow up in elementary school, middle school, high school,
as you said, Matt, you go to college and you'll
still hear some version of this. But the problem here
(09:40):
is pretty apparent. With every single new discovery about the
ancient past and the story of humanity's migration from one
place to the next, we find this story gets less
and less clear cut. We don't have we don't have
specific points of time and shifts of patterns, right, we
(10:05):
don't have the origin story of humanity. And this is
something that has baffled us on this show since before
Oh gosh, we like we were doing this show when
science discovered new mixtapes of early humanity. Right, Dennis Ovans,
(10:25):
what was the other Homo flori floriensis.
Speaker 2 (10:29):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (10:33):
The point I'm making here is that we have been
taught a story. We have been sold a narrative in
a very authoritative way, but everything we are learning as
a species indicates that story is not as accurate as
(10:55):
we are led to believe it is when we are
children in school. So that's the question, when did human
beings actually arrive in the Americas?
Speaker 2 (11:08):
Before we jump in, Ben, I just want to dovetail
off what you were saying there. We have been sold
this essentially and told this all of our lives. Everyone
listening right now, I would say, just to make it
a little more positive, because it's it's the best picture
we've been able to paint with the information we've had
up to this point. Right. And the problem, I think
(11:33):
the biggest problem that we're going to be tackling today
that we have to address, is that once that picture
is painted, anytime new information, these new discoveries that you're
talking about, Ben, come through, it becomes more and more
difficult to convince the painters of that picture that there
needs to be some revisions, right, because especially if it's
(11:56):
a single point or discovery in one place, or a
discover you know, one person's one team's discovery rather than
three or four in an area. That's kind of the
biggest problem.
Speaker 1 (12:08):
I see what you're saying. And it's important because we're
we're talking about discovering single points of information, right, single instances,
and what are single instances or examples against a larger
body of thoughts, you know what I mean?
Speaker 3 (12:27):
Oh yeah, And I mean those high school textbooks aren't
like infinitely long. They got to figure out how to
tell a version of the story that is as close
to the likely scenario as possible and teaches you something
about the history of you know, life. But you're right,
it is problematic. It can be, for sure, because who
(12:47):
you know, there's so much cantankerousness and science too, of
people making one discovery and then another crew making something
that conflicts with that narrative, and then there's this kind
of beef as to how it really happened. But there's
a lot of policy takes wrapped up in it and
all of that. So it's interesting, for sure to see
the way these things kind of take on a life
of their own, especially, like I said, once the badger's
out of the bag, as Ben would say.
Speaker 1 (13:09):
Yeah, that's the issue here. We want to be very clear.
We're not accusing your history textbook publishers of purposely lying
to you, and we are certainly not accusing your favorite
history teachers from grade school of lying to you. Teachers
work incredibly hard. They are some of the most important
(13:34):
people on the planet in my opinion, and they're not
out to beguile and deceive you, hopefully they're not supposed
to be. However, they're working with the information they have, right,
And when we look at the realm of science and
how science is communicated or disseminated to the population, we
(13:58):
see that to your point, met, sometimes people cling to
a thing because it is the established fact. Now that
that is indicative of a lack of skepticism or a
lack of critical thinking, it's also a very human understandable
thing psychologically speaking, right, I don't I don't want to
(14:23):
seem as though we are being dismissive or derogatory toward
the many people who have spent their entire academic careers
studying various incredibly specific aspects of clovist theory or the
current official story of human migration. But I will say
(14:44):
in the past, I am sure there are people who
spent decades researching one thing and published about it, and
then there and then new evidence was discovered that disproved
or challenged their life's work, and so they just kind of,
you know, played it to the left. What am I
(15:05):
going to do after forty five years in the game
change my mind to be a better world if people
did that, but they often don't.
Speaker 2 (15:13):
Yeah, It's it's another situation where once you have this
established fact, you have to go far and beyond to
prove that you're that that fact needs to be altered
or negated, right you. That's why it becomes so difficult
to make these big changes to existing stories. And they
(15:36):
are stories. Don't don't don't kids yourself. These are stories
that we are constructing based on the things that we
have found. And as we tackle this big question today,
when did humans arrive in the Americas, we're going to
realize that this thing is much more complicated than we expected.
And we'll tell you all about it. Right after a
(15:57):
word from our sponsor.
Speaker 1 (16:05):
Here's where it gets crazy. You see the timeline is
shifting on us. The things we treated with such certitude
turned out to be much less absolute than we had imagined.
And it again, it goes back to the timeline. I
think that's a big part of what the three of
(16:26):
us are talking about today.
Speaker 3 (16:27):
Yeah, that's right. I mean you may recall that we
only said human beings were spread across the continents by
fourteen to fifteen thousand years ago. For authors like Craig Childs,
this shows that humanity by this point was most likely
already pretty well spread throughout one or more areas of
(16:51):
the continents before this, and there are several major theories
that explain this. So let's start with a theory that
we sort of talked about at the top of the show,
the Clovis first theory. This is the idea that the
first human migration happened after the last glacial maximum, which
is exactly what it sounds like, and this migration later
(17:12):
went into decline, only to be followed up by, you know,
subsequent waves of humans from other parts of the world.
So this connects all of these first inhabitants of the
Americas with the Clovis culture, which is something called a
prehistorica paleo American culture that's named for the distinctive stone
(17:35):
tools that were found in Clovis, New Mexico in the twenties.
This also rolls into that bearing Land Strait idea which
we've talked about in previous episodes and or at the
top of this one.
Speaker 1 (17:47):
So this is your I guess. In the UK they
would call it your bog standard explanation for how human
beings ended up on these continents is because this concept
existed for a very long time, despite the fact that
there were so many questions about it. If you look
(18:09):
at the Clovis Culture, the Clovis people, you'll find an
historical mystery. It's as if they appeared out of nowhere
and then suddenly disappeared. Radiocarbon dating tells us that what
we regard as the people of the Clovis culture appeared
(18:31):
in modern day America around nine thousand, two hundred BCE,
and then five hundred years later they vanished. So the
important distinction there that you're bringing up no is the
idea that these folks came over after that glacial maximum,
(18:54):
after that ice age. Around the decline of that ice age,
they were able to traverse the siege perilous of the
Bearing Strait, and they were from there able to spread
throughout the continent. But of course this theory did not
exist in a vacuum. There are many other theories about
(19:17):
early humans arriving on these continents, and for centuries, people
have argued back and forth about this, even before they
could find solid evidence. What I mean by this is,
even before we had scientific standards for collecting, cataloging, and
contextualizing evidence and information, we had many, many beliefs in
(19:43):
civilization about humanity's origin story. On this continent. You will
find numerous religions that argue some version of an original
person springing out of whole cloth or in some cases
being created by a divine entity on these continents. And
(20:06):
then you will also see further research that's admittedly more secular,
that kind of forensically traces what we know about people
on the planet on other continents. Right like this is
let's just say it coastal migration. Could people have gotten
(20:27):
here by boats? Because if you can build a boat,
that seems at least a little bit it seems a
little bit easier to travel to this new land via
watercraft than to walk through the frozen wastelands of the
Bearing Strait.
Speaker 4 (20:45):
Oh.
Speaker 2 (20:46):
Absolutely. And note here that we're talking about coastal migration,
and that sounds exactly like you imagine it to be.
That is following along a coast at you know, some
distance far enough away from it, but essentially following the
water along a coast on a boat of some kind.
(21:06):
That doesn't mean going straight out into the ocean or
the way you can with larger ships and more reliable ships.
Now it's very different. So there are a lot of sources,
there are a lot of people institutions, and there's some
research that suggests that this may be a possibility coastal migration.
(21:32):
So we know for sure that in places like Japan
and parts of Korea South Korea, there have been amazing
archaeological discoveries that have found that humans during the Ice
Age were able to navigate coastal waters even though it
was so frigid and there's ice in many places, they
(21:53):
were able to do that, and they were essentially navigating
the Northern Pacific coast hosts of what is now modern
or what we would consider modern day Japan and Korea
and come Chaka with boats. So it's really no stretch
to imagine that humans at some point perhaps were able
(22:14):
to reach the America's by boat using coastal migration. And
here's why it makes sense, because you could right at
the end of the ice age there where we're imagining
that people were physically walking across that bearing straight perhaps
they were on boats just previous to the end of
(22:36):
that glacial maximum, or during the maximum, or even after it,
taking boats and following that coast, because you'd end up
in Alaska, you'd get to British Columbia, then down south
to Washington, to Oregon, all along the Pacific coast of
what is now the United States. And it's pretty incredible
(22:58):
that humanity, even during an ice age, was able to
both survive and prosper and even migrate.
Speaker 1 (23:08):
It's strange to think about the world in that way,
to imagine a contiguous coast. And I like the point
you're making that about the watercraft involved, because you know,
these aren't cargo ships. These aren't megayachts or schooners or
brigtines or pontoons or I'm just naming boat boat words. Now,
(23:31):
does anybody else have a boat? What's that one? You like?
Nold frigate frigate.
Speaker 3 (23:34):
Yeah, yes, friggin frigate.
Speaker 1 (23:38):
These were none of those things.
Speaker 2 (23:39):
These were boat okay, sorry.
Speaker 1 (23:41):
Tugboat yes, these these were not even tugboats. They were
they were small coastal craft, right, like brown water Navy
kind of stuff. They weren't meant to go into the
open ocean. They were just kind of tracing along the
line of the co But if that coast is never ending,
(24:04):
so they're just sort of following a thing, and it's
like a video game wherein that you know there is
a larger world out there. You have a rough idea
of the parts of the map you've seen, but everything
else is obscured.
Speaker 4 (24:18):
You know what I mean.
Speaker 1 (24:18):
So you may as well imagine that you are just
always on the same coast of a thing you call
the land. Who knows if there's anything other than the land,
and then you know, the water.
Speaker 2 (24:33):
What is compelling about that to me is what what
spurred that movement? And you know, we discussed we discussed
the migration of animals that we used for hunting, right
for food for the populations, as a possible reason to
just continue down the coast. If fish populations, maybe because
(24:54):
it's obvious that those boats were would be used for
fishing purposes, for catching food. You know, I wonder if
there was something. This is completely just off the top
of my head, but I wonder what the thing was
that spurred whichever group, however large or small, it was,
(25:16):
to continue down that coast and just to keep going
to see what's what's next. Oh I wish I knew.
Speaker 1 (25:24):
I mean, necessity, I would imagine possible.
Speaker 2 (25:27):
But I wonder if it wasn't.
Speaker 1 (25:29):
I wonder if it was a spiritual belief.
Speaker 2 (25:31):
Or or something that's deep inside. I think all of
us to just find out, Well, there's something over there.
Let's let's find out.
Speaker 1 (25:39):
That's inspiring, you know, especially now as the next big
step in space exploration may occur within our lifetimes. On
one other thing that may have happened just environmentally is
people may have just been following the recession of the ice.
(26:01):
Depending on where you put them in the timeline, people
may have just been going further along the coast because
they were able to see more of the coast. I'm
not being dismissive. I'm just saying, like it the environment
appears to change so slowly that you might not be
(26:21):
fully aware of how far you're migrating because you know
your grandparents were miles away or kilometers away for the
rest of the world, and then you two generations later,
still feel like you're by the edge of the ice,
but the ice itself has moved.
Speaker 3 (26:43):
So I think we're going to take one more quick
break and then we're going to get into some new
discoveries when we return. So there have been some, it's
recently some research that's kinda put this traditional narrative on
(27:05):
its head a bit, and that includes some stuff very
very recently published just in the last month. In a
paper known called the Timing and Effect of the Earliest
Human Arrivals in North America, Loreena Bassera Valdiva and Thomas
Hyam look into a pretty awesome and bizarre discovery. What
(27:27):
they found was a piece of limestone from this very
specific cave, the Chickwahite Cave in north central Mexico, that
could potentially prove that humans actually first arrived in the
continent much much earlier than that narrative would have us believe,
the one we know from school.
Speaker 1 (27:48):
Yes, ah, I've waited for this, Okay, So, like many
of our fellow listeners, we grew up, I don't want
to speak for everybody. Let me clear. I grew up
convinced that there was hidden history everywhere, you know, and
I was I was certain, probably just because I was
(28:09):
a jerk, that human beings had all these ancient civilizations
and that they had a much longer time on these
two continents specifically, and without getting into the weeds on
all the crazy stuff that's out there, this is different
(28:30):
because this is proof. This is quantitative proof that the
first people, if people built these tools you're mentioning, no,
arrived on North and South America, like thirty three thousand
years ago. That's nuts, just to put, just to put
(28:52):
in perspective how much time that is. I hope no
one gets mad at me for bringing this up. Nineteen
eighty was forty years ago, right, So, like I think
that's going to hit people when you think about thirty
three thousand years.
Speaker 2 (29:10):
Yeah, I mean, let's just pretend that humans live one
hundred years, right, that's three hundred and thirty human like human.
Speaker 1 (29:20):
Cycles, iterations.
Speaker 2 (29:23):
Versions.
Speaker 1 (29:24):
Yeah. Yeah, it's a very very long story. And you know,
for quite a while there would be various people propagating
what was essentially some narrative without proof they would say,
you know, I have had a spiritual awakening and I
realized that the true story of insert usually specific brand
(29:46):
of people here is that they came to modern day
South or Central America or North America, like after the
fall of Atlantis or the sinking of Lemuria or something.
And the problem is they didn't have proof. This is different,
because this is not tinfoil hat territory. Archaeologists in this
(30:12):
cave discovered specifically three deliberately shaped pieces of limestone. They
discovered a pointing stone and two cutting flakes. Right now,
pending new discoveries, these are the oldest human made tools
(30:34):
discovered on these continents. They absolutely do not fit that
timeline we were all taught in school. Also, they're also
just one of several discoveries in this cave. Because this
cave is like an episode of Hoarders where the hoarder
is just collecting sediment. The archaeologists spent a lot of
(30:55):
arduous time digging carefully through various layers of sediment. It's
kind of like a time capsule time machine. And these
tools they found are in like the very back of
the cave, in the deepest layer of the random rocks
and pebbles and bits of sediment that have accumulated there
(31:17):
over time. This is important because when we know the
layer in which they were found, we have an enormous
head start on figuring out when they were left in
that layer. And these things were here way before the
last glacial maximum, way before the last ice age that occurred,
(31:40):
like what between twenty six thousand and nineteen thousand years ago,
which means before that, someone was in this cave and
they had made tools, and they they forgot them. So
if you think about it, because somebody did the equivalent
of forgetting their keys at home, we are up the
(32:00):
story of human history thousands of years later.
Speaker 2 (32:03):
We truly are. And we're going to tell you more
about how this discovery was occurred. But I want to
jump to another recent article from Nature that was published
in July of this year, twenty twenty, and it is
titled evidence of human occupation in Mexico around the Last
Glacial Maximum, and I'm going to read a quick quote
(32:24):
from the abstract of it just to give you an
understanding what's happening here. It's pretty incredible because not only
did they find those limestone artifacts that we're talking about,
there are those tools. There was a lot more and
there is a lot more still being found right now.
So from this article, it states the site yielded about
(32:47):
one thousand, nine hundred stone artifacts within a three meter
deep stratified sequence, revealing a previously unknown lithic industry that
underwent only minor changes over millennia. More than fifty radiocarbon
and luminescence dates provide chronological control and genetic, paleo, environmental,
(33:08):
and chemical data that document the changing environments in which
the occupants lived. Now, that is when you're talking about
finding proof right that you could be able to show
to another scientist, to fellow sciences and say, hey, look
at all of this data we've collected from these things.
(33:28):
You're talking about several different ways in which they are
testing this stuff with luminescence testing, with radiocarbon testing. I mean,
it's pretty incredible stuff here, and it really does show
that humans were in that cave, as Ben said, way
before that ice age. And these researchers and scientists who
are there in that cave are continuing and they're going
(33:51):
to keep digging and they're going to keep looking, and
who knows what else we're going to discover. But the
reason why it took so long to find this stuff,
and it will take a long long time to probably
find more, is because of how difficult it is to
reach this location.
Speaker 1 (34:05):
This is kind of a sunk cost for those poor archaeologists.
The lead author of one of those studies is very
very clear about how much of a pain in the
keyster it is to get to this cave at all.
He said that once they got there. Cyprian Arduine, by
the way, lead author of that you're mentioning, Matt, he
(34:28):
said that once they got there, they just had to
live there. It takes the whole day to get there
from the nearest town, and part of that day is
a continuous five hour climb. He called it a logistical nightmare.
So it's one of those things where have you ever
been in a very unusual place or a place that
was very difficult to get to and you just thought,
(34:50):
you know, while I'm here, I'm gonna do everything I can.
That's what they're doing in this cave. They're saying, Okay,
while we're here, let's get all of the information that
we can find. This is a logistical nightmare. But the
nightmare has paid off because it appears that this cave
was not used once. It is tremendously important distinction. This
(35:16):
cave was not something that an early human being accidentally
happened to spend the night in right and then left
their tools and went on their merry way. This cave
was used over thousands of years by various people. It
was kind of it was like a Trogloditic version of
(35:39):
a hotel. It's use Trogoladitic again, yes, last time. But
what we mean here is was a long It was
a longstanding known temporary refuge for some sort of nomadic people,
and they must have communicated knowledge of this cave to
(36:00):
later generations, possibly via oral history. Maybe enough time passed
that that oral history became legend.
Speaker 2 (36:08):
You can imagine that it might have been some kind
of religious pilgrimage of some sort or something. I mean
again that's me completely making it up, but you can
imagine that something like that could be the scenario. Because
of what they've been finding. There could be a very
special cave for one reason or another that we just
don't know yet.
Speaker 1 (36:28):
Yeah, we don't know. That's the thing. The history is
so thin here because of all the time that is
passed what we do know is that the conventional story
many people were taught needs some revision. It needs to
be updated. It's astonishing because most of North America was
(36:49):
covered with ice during that ice age. So if people
were leaving tools in this cave at this time, and
if they were raiding coastally right or however they got here,
it means that they got here before that ice age began,
or that means it's possible they did. So this means
(37:13):
that despite everything a lot of people were taught in
grade school. It appears that at least very small numbers
of human beings lived in North America and possibly other
parts of these two continents, Central and South America during
and immediately after the last Ice Age, And what we
(37:33):
thought was the first migration is actually a second or
subsequent wave. The human population grew larger after this period
of abrupt kind of global warming that started fourteen to
fifteen thousand years ago. So don't call it a comeback.
(37:53):
They've always been here, right, It's strange.
Speaker 3 (37:55):
Yeah, yeah, And I think that study also suggested that
some people had entered the America as before four twenty
nine thousand years ago, and that's possibly along the Pacific Coast.
And one final note, anthropologist Matthew de Lauriers of California
State in San Bernardino raises a really important question to
kind of leave you with. How could ancient people who
(38:17):
had been in the Americas for more than twenty five
thousand years have remained quote archaeologically invisible for over ten
thousand years?
Speaker 2 (38:27):
And he has an answer, he does, But his big
question there is raised from the fact that in other
places like Australia, in Japan, archaeologists have had no difficulty
in finding evidence of human occupation from that same time period.
They've been able to dig down and find oh wow, yeah,
(38:49):
this is from twenty thirty thousand years ago. Why haven't
American archaeologists found that? Or you know, South American North
American archaeologs, why haven't we found the same things? And
his statement to that idea is, quote, archaeologists in the
Americas have either been doing things very wrong for the
(39:09):
last ninety years, or we have here an anomaly that
must be accounted for. It makes a lot of sense
to me. It's an anomaly either way. I would say,
it feels like an anomaly that must be accounted for.
Right and that's not the only big discovery, though this
(39:30):
one I'm gonna mention here isn't as recent. It goes
back to the turn of the millennium, back in two
thousand and even before that. There's a place in Brazil.
It's a national park called Sarah de Capivara. There are
several sites there. I think there are four hundred or
something archaeological dig sites in this national park and in
(39:53):
a few of them there have been paintings, these amazing
cave paintings as well well as other evidence of human
life in that area. That appears to go back twenty
two thousand years and perhaps even further in Brazil. So again,
that's humanity in South America in Brazil a long time
(40:17):
before the history books would would say that we are.
But that is a whole different story for another day.
Speaker 1 (40:24):
And also a listeners will note that's pretty far from
the Pacific coast.
Speaker 2 (40:29):
It is, it really is, so both sides, it appears
of the continents we're being visited by humans, at least visited,
if not lived upon.
Speaker 1 (40:41):
So what do you think, folks, when did the first
human beings actually reach the American continents? Let us know,
we'd love to hear your thoughts. You can find us
all sorts of places on the Internet.
Speaker 2 (40:54):
And also, do you think we've got anything wrong when
it comes to the history of humans on the planet.
Do you think there's something being hidden from us? Do
you think there's something we just haven't discovered yet? Anything
along those realms we'd love to hear from you. You
can find us on Facebook and Twitter where we're Conspiracy Stuff.
On Instagram we're Conspiracy Stuff Show.
Speaker 3 (41:16):
You can join our Facebook group Here's Where It Gets Crazy,
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gotta do is search for Here's Where It Gets Crazy
and then name one or all three a super producer
or two, and then you're in and you can join
in the conversation with fun memory and just good old
(41:38):
conspiracy chit chat, some of which are episode suggestions. Never
a dull moment at Here's where It Gets Crazy.
Speaker 1 (41:45):
And if you are not particularly over the moon about
social media, we of all people get it. But if
you're a little more old school, you can give us
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Speaker 2 (42:00):
Yes it is one eight three three st d WYTK.
You can give the number a call, leave a message.
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You don't have to take your earbuds out. I'm talking
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(42:20):
We'd love to hear from you. Anything you want to say.
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(42:41):
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Speaker 1 (42:54):
We are conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (43:17):
Stuff they don't want you to know is a production
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Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Fellow conspiracy realists. Happy Thanksgiving to all who celebrate, and
we are celebrating too. In place of our typical weekly
listener mail program, we have a classic We dug through
the archives and we were thinking, what sort of speaks
to Thanksgiving and American history? And by gosh, by golly,
(00:20):
by gum, I think we found the frozen tundra. Yes.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
Yeah, In fourteen ninety two Columbus sailed the Ocean Blue.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
And he also kind of and just like George Washington
famously said, I cannot bear a straight that's a weird level.
That's a weird level to that one. We'll keep it in.
There's more hidden the history ahead. But back in twenty
twenty five years ago, now, guys, more than five years ago,
we asked a question that has been bugging the heck
(00:52):
out of experts for so long. When did human beings
actually reach what we call the America right.
Speaker 3 (01:00):
One of the most prominent theories about early human migration
and one that kids, I think still are taught in
school to this day. But we pause it. Maybe there's
something more to the store.
Speaker 1 (01:13):
Was it Vikings, was it the old Mechs? Was it
a Polynesian expansion? And George. Sorry about that burying straight joke.
We didn't think through the levels of the wordplace. He's
rolling in his grave right now, Ben, he sure is well.
Cherry trees aside, we hope that you are having some
(01:33):
wonderful R and R with your family and your loved ones.
Happy Thanksgiving again to those who celebrate. Here's our classic
episode and we'll be back later this week.
Speaker 4 (01:44):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies, history is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn this stuff they don't got you to know. A
production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
Welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my
name is Noel.
Speaker 1 (02:11):
They call me Ben. We are joined as always with
our super producer, Paul Mission controlled Decant. Most importantly, you
are you. You are here, and that makes this stuff
they don't want you to know. We're diving into some
hidden history today. We're diving into as hon as the
phrase may sound something new about history, because Faulkner was right.
(02:36):
Of course, the past isn't even the past yet. History
is never over. It's an ongoing conversation. Most people living
on the continents of North and South America are comparatively
recent arrivals. Right, While many people living in both South
(02:57):
and North America have a long family hitty here, if
you look at the larger scheme of human migration across
the planet, human beings are kind of a new thing
for these two continents. We know roughly, we know ballpark
the story of humanity. Ancestral primates evolved on the African continent,
(03:23):
and from there our species spread around the globe. However,
even today, in twenty twenty, on August seventh, twenty twenty,
as we record this, our species still gets bogged down
in the details, especially when we get to the timeline.
So today's question, when did human beings actually reach the
(03:46):
American continents? Here are the facts.
Speaker 2 (03:49):
Most experts within the fields, the various fields of science, anthropology,
and the like. They agree that the story of the
continents of South and North America, at least as we
understand them now, they didn't begin with humans on them,
or humans were not there very early. These land masses
were home to a lot of creatures, a lot of animals,
(04:10):
a lot of flora and fauna well before human beings arrived.
And of course, if you're taking the really long look
at the Earth. There are millions and millions of years
where humans weren't here, but there were other creatures. But
the big question for today is how did humans specifically
get here on to North and South America.
Speaker 3 (04:32):
Well, the most common theory is this idea that involves
Clovis culture and the Bearing Land Bridge. By about fourteen
thousand years ago. Now, the first human beings to reach
the Americas came by crossing the Bearing Strait, which was
this land bridge between the far northeastern part of Siberia
(04:54):
and the western the farthest most western part of Alaska.
In this theory, known as the Bearing land Bridge theory,
is the one many of us grew up listen hearing about,
you know, in school. It actually makes a lot of sense.
It's the closest connection between Asia and North America and
it only opens when ice is locked up on land
(05:17):
and then sea level drops.
Speaker 1 (05:19):
Yeah, there is a logic here. If we're talking about
early human migration, then we're talking about people basically walking
right and probably following sources of food, maybe other animals
that they rely on for sustenance. So it makes sense
that they would be able to walk to North America
(05:45):
from literally the only walkable path, which is this bearing
land bridge across the street that you're describing, nol.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
And all of this is based on the idea that
early humans were unable to craft some kind of boat
or ship that would be able to traverse the Pacific
or Atlantic oceans in the way that we know began
to be able to do as technology developed. Just remember that,
that's why scientists always focus on that land bridge because
(06:16):
of the walkability. As Ben said, Yeah, yeah, that's.
Speaker 1 (06:20):
A good point, Matt. And you know, let's get in
front of the obvious question that many of us are
going to immediately ask, which is why can I not
walk across that bridge today? Why do I have to
take a boat or a flight, or why do I
have to go on a doomed mission to swim the
Pacific to reach Asia from the Americas. Well, that's because
(06:44):
we are living in a different time. Back when, according
to this theory, people walked from Asia to North America,
they were doing so during something called the Last Glacial
Maximum or LG. If this comes up so often in
conversation that you don't have time to say the whole.
Speaker 2 (07:04):
Thing, also known as the previous ice age. Yes, the
most recent ice.
Speaker 1 (07:09):
Age, the most recent ice age, Yeah, the one before
the next one, which maybe we'll be around to see.
Who knows, it's twenty twenty. I can't rule anything out
at this point. So back when people were traversing the
land in this way, much more of Earth's water was
(07:31):
existing in solid form in glaciers. And now the difference
between then and now is that the sea levels have risen,
so the bridge and the land these people walked is underwater,
meaning also that much of the evidence of their migration
(07:52):
is going to be lost to time, as the conventional
wisdom goes. By this time, I'm fourteen fifteen thousand years ago,
humans had migrated across the breadth of South and North America.
You go up to modern day Alaska, you got humans.
(08:13):
Go down to Chile, you got humans. The West coast
is riddled with them. You go to northeastern Canada, you
got people everywhere. You go down to Florida, boom, same thing,
people plus gators this time. So what we're telling you
right now is the official, most often told story. And
(08:34):
I want to pause here for you guys. Does this
track with what with Noel Matt? Does this track with
what you learned or were taught growing up about human migration.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
Basically, yeah, yeah, this is precisely what what I recall
from world history classes, both in high school and in college.
Essentially what we've just described here, the Clovis, the closet hunters,
and the evidence that we have found of their lives
(09:06):
back in those days. And it was a long time ago.
But you know, when you look at the span of
what we know about humanity and the evidence that we found,
it wasn't it wasn't that long ago.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
Yeah, yeah, that's a good point. I think this story
is going to be familiar to many of us because
you grow up in elementary school, middle school, high school,
as you said, Matt, you go to college and you'll
still hear some version of this. But the problem here
(09:40):
is pretty apparent. With every single new discovery about the
ancient past and the story of humanity's migration from one
place to the next, we find this story gets less
and less clear cut. We don't have we don't have
specific points of time and shifts of patterns, right, we
(10:05):
don't have the origin story of humanity. And this is
something that has baffled us on this show since before
Oh gosh, we like we were doing this show when
science discovered new mixtapes of early humanity. Right, Dennis Ovans,
(10:25):
what was the other Homo flori floriensis.
Speaker 2 (10:29):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (10:33):
The point I'm making here is that we have been
taught a story. We have been sold a narrative in
a very authoritative way, but everything we are learning as
a species indicates that story is not as accurate as
(10:55):
we are led to believe it is when we are
children in school. So that's the question, when did human
beings actually arrive in the Americas?
Speaker 2 (11:08):
Before we jump in, Ben, I just want to dovetail
off what you were saying there. We have been sold
this essentially and told this all of our lives. Everyone
listening right now, I would say, just to make it
a little more positive, because it's it's the best picture
we've been able to paint with the information we've had
up to this point. Right. And the problem, I think
(11:33):
the biggest problem that we're going to be tackling today
that we have to address, is that once that picture
is painted, anytime new information, these new discoveries that you're
talking about, Ben, come through, it becomes more and more
difficult to convince the painters of that picture that there
needs to be some revisions, right, because especially if it's
(11:56):
a single point or discovery in one place, or a
discover you know, one person's one team's discovery rather than
three or four in an area. That's kind of the
biggest problem.
Speaker 1 (12:08):
I see what you're saying. And it's important because we're
we're talking about discovering single points of information, right, single instances,
and what are single instances or examples against a larger
body of thoughts, you know what I mean?
Speaker 3 (12:27):
Oh yeah, And I mean those high school textbooks aren't
like infinitely long. They got to figure out how to
tell a version of the story that is as close
to the likely scenario as possible and teaches you something
about the history of you know, life. But you're right,
it is problematic. It can be, for sure, because who
(12:47):
you know, there's so much cantankerousness and science too, of
people making one discovery and then another crew making something
that conflicts with that narrative, and then there's this kind
of beef as to how it really happened. But there's
a lot of policy takes wrapped up in it and
all of that. So it's interesting, for sure to see
the way these things kind of take on a life
of their own, especially, like I said, once the badger's
out of the bag, as Ben would say.
Speaker 1 (13:09):
Yeah, that's the issue here. We want to be very clear.
We're not accusing your history textbook publishers of purposely lying
to you, and we are certainly not accusing your favorite
history teachers from grade school of lying to you. Teachers
work incredibly hard. They are some of the most important
(13:34):
people on the planet in my opinion, and they're not
out to beguile and deceive you, hopefully they're not supposed
to be. However, they're working with the information they have, right,
And when we look at the realm of science and
how science is communicated or disseminated to the population, we
(13:58):
see that to your point, met, sometimes people cling to
a thing because it is the established fact. Now that
that is indicative of a lack of skepticism or a
lack of critical thinking, it's also a very human understandable
thing psychologically speaking, right, I don't I don't want to
(14:23):
seem as though we are being dismissive or derogatory toward
the many people who have spent their entire academic careers
studying various incredibly specific aspects of clovist theory or the
current official story of human migration. But I will say
(14:44):
in the past, I am sure there are people who
spent decades researching one thing and published about it, and
then there and then new evidence was discovered that disproved
or challenged their life's work, and so they just kind of,
you know, played it to the left. What am I
(15:05):
going to do after forty five years in the game
change my mind to be a better world if people
did that, but they often don't.
Speaker 2 (15:13):
Yeah, It's it's another situation where once you have this
established fact, you have to go far and beyond to
prove that you're that that fact needs to be altered
or negated, right you. That's why it becomes so difficult
to make these big changes to existing stories. And they
(15:36):
are stories. Don't don't don't kids yourself. These are stories
that we are constructing based on the things that we
have found. And as we tackle this big question today,
when did humans arrive in the Americas, we're going to
realize that this thing is much more complicated than we expected.
And we'll tell you all about it. Right after a
(15:57):
word from our sponsor.
Speaker 1 (16:05):
Here's where it gets crazy. You see the timeline is
shifting on us. The things we treated with such certitude
turned out to be much less absolute than we had imagined.
And it again, it goes back to the timeline. I
think that's a big part of what the three of
(16:26):
us are talking about today.
Speaker 3 (16:27):
Yeah, that's right. I mean you may recall that we
only said human beings were spread across the continents by
fourteen to fifteen thousand years ago. For authors like Craig Childs,
this shows that humanity by this point was most likely
already pretty well spread throughout one or more areas of
(16:51):
the continents before this, and there are several major theories
that explain this. So let's start with a theory that
we sort of talked about at the top of the show,
the Clovis first theory. This is the idea that the
first human migration happened after the last glacial maximum, which
is exactly what it sounds like, and this migration later
(17:12):
went into decline, only to be followed up by, you know,
subsequent waves of humans from other parts of the world.
So this connects all of these first inhabitants of the
Americas with the Clovis culture, which is something called a
prehistorica paleo American culture that's named for the distinctive stone
(17:35):
tools that were found in Clovis, New Mexico in the twenties.
This also rolls into that bearing Land Strait idea which
we've talked about in previous episodes and or at the
top of this one.
Speaker 1 (17:47):
So this is your I guess. In the UK they
would call it your bog standard explanation for how human
beings ended up on these continents is because this concept
existed for a very long time, despite the fact that
there were so many questions about it. If you look
(18:09):
at the Clovis Culture, the Clovis people, you'll find an
historical mystery. It's as if they appeared out of nowhere
and then suddenly disappeared. Radiocarbon dating tells us that what
we regard as the people of the Clovis culture appeared
(18:31):
in modern day America around nine thousand, two hundred BCE,
and then five hundred years later they vanished. So the
important distinction there that you're bringing up no is the
idea that these folks came over after that glacial maximum,
(18:54):
after that ice age. Around the decline of that ice age,
they were able to traverse the siege perilous of the
Bearing Strait, and they were from there able to spread
throughout the continent. But of course this theory did not
exist in a vacuum. There are many other theories about
(19:17):
early humans arriving on these continents, and for centuries, people
have argued back and forth about this, even before they
could find solid evidence. What I mean by this is,
even before we had scientific standards for collecting, cataloging, and
contextualizing evidence and information, we had many, many beliefs in
(19:43):
civilization about humanity's origin story. On this continent. You will
find numerous religions that argue some version of an original
person springing out of whole cloth or in some cases
being created by a divine entity on these continents. And
(20:06):
then you will also see further research that's admittedly more secular,
that kind of forensically traces what we know about people
on the planet on other continents. Right like this is
let's just say it coastal migration. Could people have gotten
(20:27):
here by boats? Because if you can build a boat,
that seems at least a little bit it seems a
little bit easier to travel to this new land via
watercraft than to walk through the frozen wastelands of the
Bearing Strait.
Speaker 4 (20:45):
Oh.
Speaker 2 (20:46):
Absolutely. And note here that we're talking about coastal migration,
and that sounds exactly like you imagine it to be.
That is following along a coast at you know, some
distance far enough away from it, but essentially following the
water along a coast on a boat of some kind.
(21:06):
That doesn't mean going straight out into the ocean or
the way you can with larger ships and more reliable ships.
Now it's very different. So there are a lot of sources,
there are a lot of people institutions, and there's some
research that suggests that this may be a possibility coastal migration.
(21:32):
So we know for sure that in places like Japan
and parts of Korea South Korea, there have been amazing
archaeological discoveries that have found that humans during the Ice
Age were able to navigate coastal waters even though it
was so frigid and there's ice in many places, they
(21:53):
were able to do that, and they were essentially navigating
the Northern Pacific coast hosts of what is now modern
or what we would consider modern day Japan and Korea
and come Chaka with boats. So it's really no stretch
to imagine that humans at some point perhaps were able
(22:14):
to reach the America's by boat using coastal migration. And
here's why it makes sense, because you could right at
the end of the ice age there where we're imagining
that people were physically walking across that bearing straight perhaps
they were on boats just previous to the end of
(22:36):
that glacial maximum, or during the maximum, or even after it,
taking boats and following that coast, because you'd end up
in Alaska, you'd get to British Columbia, then down south
to Washington, to Oregon, all along the Pacific coast of
what is now the United States. And it's pretty incredible
(22:58):
that humanity, even during an ice age, was able to
both survive and prosper and even migrate.
Speaker 1 (23:08):
It's strange to think about the world in that way,
to imagine a contiguous coast. And I like the point
you're making that about the watercraft involved, because you know,
these aren't cargo ships. These aren't megayachts or schooners or
brigtines or pontoons or I'm just naming boat boat words. Now,
(23:31):
does anybody else have a boat? What's that one? You like?
Nold frigate frigate.
Speaker 3 (23:34):
Yeah, yes, friggin frigate.
Speaker 1 (23:38):
These were none of those things.
Speaker 2 (23:39):
These were boat okay, sorry.
Speaker 1 (23:41):
Tugboat yes, these these were not even tugboats. They were
they were small coastal craft, right, like brown water Navy
kind of stuff. They weren't meant to go into the
open ocean. They were just kind of tracing along the
line of the co But if that coast is never ending,
(24:04):
so they're just sort of following a thing, and it's
like a video game wherein that you know there is
a larger world out there. You have a rough idea
of the parts of the map you've seen, but everything
else is obscured.
Speaker 4 (24:18):
You know what I mean.
Speaker 1 (24:18):
So you may as well imagine that you are just
always on the same coast of a thing you call
the land. Who knows if there's anything other than the land,
and then you know, the water.
Speaker 2 (24:33):
What is compelling about that to me is what what
spurred that movement? And you know, we discussed we discussed
the migration of animals that we used for hunting, right
for food for the populations, as a possible reason to
just continue down the coast. If fish populations, maybe because
(24:54):
it's obvious that those boats were would be used for
fishing purposes, for catching food. You know, I wonder if
there was something. This is completely just off the top
of my head, but I wonder what the thing was
that spurred whichever group, however large or small, it was,
(25:16):
to continue down that coast and just to keep going
to see what's what's next. Oh I wish I knew.
Speaker 1 (25:24):
I mean, necessity, I would imagine possible.
Speaker 2 (25:27):
But I wonder if it wasn't.
Speaker 1 (25:29):
I wonder if it was a spiritual belief.
Speaker 2 (25:31):
Or or something that's deep inside. I think all of
us to just find out, Well, there's something over there.
Let's let's find out.
Speaker 1 (25:39):
That's inspiring, you know, especially now as the next big
step in space exploration may occur within our lifetimes. On
one other thing that may have happened just environmentally is
people may have just been following the recession of the ice.
(26:01):
Depending on where you put them in the timeline, people
may have just been going further along the coast because
they were able to see more of the coast. I'm
not being dismissive. I'm just saying, like it the environment
appears to change so slowly that you might not be
(26:21):
fully aware of how far you're migrating because you know
your grandparents were miles away or kilometers away for the
rest of the world, and then you two generations later,
still feel like you're by the edge of the ice,
but the ice itself has moved.
Speaker 3 (26:43):
So I think we're going to take one more quick
break and then we're going to get into some new
discoveries when we return. So there have been some, it's
recently some research that's kinda put this traditional narrative on
(27:05):
its head a bit, and that includes some stuff very
very recently published just in the last month. In a
paper known called the Timing and Effect of the Earliest
Human Arrivals in North America, Loreena Bassera Valdiva and Thomas
Hyam look into a pretty awesome and bizarre discovery. What
(27:27):
they found was a piece of limestone from this very
specific cave, the Chickwahite Cave in north central Mexico, that
could potentially prove that humans actually first arrived in the
continent much much earlier than that narrative would have us believe,
the one we know from school.
Speaker 1 (27:48):
Yes, ah, I've waited for this, Okay, So, like many
of our fellow listeners, we grew up, I don't want
to speak for everybody. Let me clear. I grew up
convinced that there was hidden history everywhere, you know, and
I was I was certain, probably just because I was
(28:09):
a jerk, that human beings had all these ancient civilizations
and that they had a much longer time on these
two continents specifically, and without getting into the weeds on
all the crazy stuff that's out there, this is different
(28:30):
because this is proof. This is quantitative proof that the
first people, if people built these tools you're mentioning, no,
arrived on North and South America, like thirty three thousand
years ago. That's nuts, just to put, just to put
(28:52):
in perspective how much time that is. I hope no
one gets mad at me for bringing this up. Nineteen
eighty was forty years ago, right, So, like I think
that's going to hit people when you think about thirty
three thousand years.
Speaker 2 (29:10):
Yeah, I mean, let's just pretend that humans live one
hundred years, right, that's three hundred and thirty human like human.
Speaker 1 (29:20):
Cycles, iterations.
Speaker 2 (29:23):
Versions.
Speaker 1 (29:24):
Yeah. Yeah, it's a very very long story. And you know,
for quite a while there would be various people propagating
what was essentially some narrative without proof they would say,
you know, I have had a spiritual awakening and I
realized that the true story of insert usually specific brand
(29:46):
of people here is that they came to modern day
South or Central America or North America, like after the
fall of Atlantis or the sinking of Lemuria or something.
And the problem is they didn't have proof. This is different,
because this is not tinfoil hat territory. Archaeologists in this
(30:12):
cave discovered specifically three deliberately shaped pieces of limestone. They
discovered a pointing stone and two cutting flakes. Right now,
pending new discoveries, these are the oldest human made tools
(30:34):
discovered on these continents. They absolutely do not fit that
timeline we were all taught in school. Also, they're also
just one of several discoveries in this cave. Because this
cave is like an episode of Hoarders where the hoarder
is just collecting sediment. The archaeologists spent a lot of
(30:55):
arduous time digging carefully through various layers of sediment. It's
kind of like a time capsule time machine. And these
tools they found are in like the very back of
the cave, in the deepest layer of the random rocks
and pebbles and bits of sediment that have accumulated there
(31:17):
over time. This is important because when we know the
layer in which they were found, we have an enormous
head start on figuring out when they were left in
that layer. And these things were here way before the
last glacial maximum, way before the last ice age that occurred,
(31:40):
like what between twenty six thousand and nineteen thousand years ago,
which means before that, someone was in this cave and
they had made tools, and they they forgot them. So
if you think about it, because somebody did the equivalent
of forgetting their keys at home, we are up the
(32:00):
story of human history thousands of years later.
Speaker 2 (32:03):
We truly are. And we're going to tell you more
about how this discovery was occurred. But I want to
jump to another recent article from Nature that was published
in July of this year, twenty twenty, and it is
titled evidence of human occupation in Mexico around the Last
Glacial Maximum, and I'm going to read a quick quote
(32:24):
from the abstract of it just to give you an
understanding what's happening here. It's pretty incredible because not only
did they find those limestone artifacts that we're talking about,
there are those tools. There was a lot more and
there is a lot more still being found right now.
So from this article, it states the site yielded about
(32:47):
one thousand, nine hundred stone artifacts within a three meter
deep stratified sequence, revealing a previously unknown lithic industry that
underwent only minor changes over millennia. More than fifty radiocarbon
and luminescence dates provide chronological control and genetic, paleo, environmental,
(33:08):
and chemical data that document the changing environments in which
the occupants lived. Now, that is when you're talking about
finding proof right that you could be able to show
to another scientist, to fellow sciences and say, hey, look
at all of this data we've collected from these things.
(33:28):
You're talking about several different ways in which they are
testing this stuff with luminescence testing, with radiocarbon testing. I mean,
it's pretty incredible stuff here, and it really does show
that humans were in that cave, as Ben said, way
before that ice age. And these researchers and scientists who
are there in that cave are continuing and they're going
(33:51):
to keep digging and they're going to keep looking, and
who knows what else we're going to discover. But the
reason why it took so long to find this stuff,
and it will take a long long time to probably
find more, is because of how difficult it is to
reach this location.
Speaker 1 (34:05):
This is kind of a sunk cost for those poor archaeologists.
The lead author of one of those studies is very
very clear about how much of a pain in the
keyster it is to get to this cave at all.
He said that once they got there. Cyprian Arduine, by
the way, lead author of that you're mentioning, Matt, he
(34:28):
said that once they got there, they just had to
live there. It takes the whole day to get there
from the nearest town, and part of that day is
a continuous five hour climb. He called it a logistical nightmare.
So it's one of those things where have you ever
been in a very unusual place or a place that
was very difficult to get to and you just thought,
(34:50):
you know, while I'm here, I'm gonna do everything I can.
That's what they're doing in this cave. They're saying, Okay,
while we're here, let's get all of the information that
we can find. This is a logistical nightmare. But the
nightmare has paid off because it appears that this cave
was not used once. It is tremendously important distinction. This
(35:16):
cave was not something that an early human being accidentally
happened to spend the night in right and then left
their tools and went on their merry way. This cave
was used over thousands of years by various people. It
was kind of it was like a Trogloditic version of
(35:39):
a hotel. It's use Trogoladitic again, yes, last time. But
what we mean here is was a long It was
a longstanding known temporary refuge for some sort of nomadic people,
and they must have communicated knowledge of this cave to
(36:00):
later generations, possibly via oral history. Maybe enough time passed
that that oral history became legend.
Speaker 2 (36:08):
You can imagine that it might have been some kind
of religious pilgrimage of some sort or something. I mean
again that's me completely making it up, but you can
imagine that something like that could be the scenario. Because
of what they've been finding. There could be a very
special cave for one reason or another that we just
don't know yet.
Speaker 1 (36:28):
Yeah, we don't know. That's the thing. The history is
so thin here because of all the time that is
passed what we do know is that the conventional story
many people were taught needs some revision. It needs to
be updated. It's astonishing because most of North America was
(36:49):
covered with ice during that ice age. So if people
were leaving tools in this cave at this time, and
if they were raiding coastally right or however they got here,
it means that they got here before that ice age began,
or that means it's possible they did. So this means
(37:13):
that despite everything a lot of people were taught in
grade school. It appears that at least very small numbers
of human beings lived in North America and possibly other
parts of these two continents, Central and South America during
and immediately after the last Ice Age, And what we
(37:33):
thought was the first migration is actually a second or
subsequent wave. The human population grew larger after this period
of abrupt kind of global warming that started fourteen to
fifteen thousand years ago. So don't call it a comeback.
(37:53):
They've always been here, right, It's strange.
Speaker 3 (37:55):
Yeah, yeah, And I think that study also suggested that
some people had entered the America as before four twenty
nine thousand years ago, and that's possibly along the Pacific Coast.
And one final note, anthropologist Matthew de Lauriers of California
State in San Bernardino raises a really important question to
kind of leave you with. How could ancient people who
(38:17):
had been in the Americas for more than twenty five
thousand years have remained quote archaeologically invisible for over ten
thousand years?
Speaker 2 (38:27):
And he has an answer, he does, But his big
question there is raised from the fact that in other
places like Australia, in Japan, archaeologists have had no difficulty
in finding evidence of human occupation from that same time period.
They've been able to dig down and find oh wow, yeah,
(38:49):
this is from twenty thirty thousand years ago. Why haven't
American archaeologists found that? Or you know, South American North
American archaeologs, why haven't we found the same things? And
his statement to that idea is, quote, archaeologists in the
Americas have either been doing things very wrong for the
(39:09):
last ninety years, or we have here an anomaly that
must be accounted for. It makes a lot of sense
to me. It's an anomaly either way. I would say,
it feels like an anomaly that must be accounted for.
Right and that's not the only big discovery, though this
(39:30):
one I'm gonna mention here isn't as recent. It goes
back to the turn of the millennium, back in two
thousand and even before that. There's a place in Brazil.
It's a national park called Sarah de Capivara. There are
several sites there. I think there are four hundred or
something archaeological dig sites in this national park and in
(39:53):
a few of them there have been paintings, these amazing
cave paintings as well well as other evidence of human
life in that area. That appears to go back twenty
two thousand years and perhaps even further in Brazil. So again,
that's humanity in South America in Brazil a long time
(40:17):
before the history books would would say that we are.
But that is a whole different story for another day.
Speaker 1 (40:24):
And also a listeners will note that's pretty far from
the Pacific coast.
Speaker 2 (40:29):
It is, it really is, so both sides, it appears
of the continents we're being visited by humans, at least visited,
if not lived upon.
Speaker 1 (40:41):
So what do you think, folks, when did the first
human beings actually reach the American continents? Let us know,
we'd love to hear your thoughts. You can find us
all sorts of places on the Internet.
Speaker 2 (40:54):
And also, do you think we've got anything wrong when
it comes to the history of humans on the planet.
Do you think there's something being hidden from us? Do
you think there's something we just haven't discovered yet? Anything
along those realms we'd love to hear from you. You
can find us on Facebook and Twitter where we're Conspiracy Stuff.
On Instagram we're Conspiracy Stuff Show.
Speaker 3 (41:16):
You can join our Facebook group Here's Where It Gets Crazy,
which you can find on Facebook Surprise, Surprise. All you
gotta do is search for Here's Where It Gets Crazy
and then name one or all three a super producer
or two, and then you're in and you can join
in the conversation with fun memory and just good old
(41:38):
conspiracy chit chat, some of which are episode suggestions. Never
a dull moment at Here's where It Gets Crazy.
Speaker 1 (41:45):
And if you are not particularly over the moon about
social media, we of all people get it. But if
you're a little more old school, you can give us
a call. We have a phone number.
Speaker 2 (42:00):
Yes it is one eight three three st d WYTK.
You can give the number a call, leave a message.
You might end up on one of our new weekly
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You don't have to take your earbuds out. I'm talking
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(42:20):
We'd love to hear from you. Anything you want to say.
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(42:41):
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Speaker 3 (42:48):
And if you don't want to do any of that stuff,
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Speaker 1 (42:54):
We are conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (43:17):
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