We're really something, aren't we?
A related Wikipedia link led to an article on the "problems" with the Clovis Culture model, highlighting the apparent implausibility of those first humans making it to Tierra del Fuego in only a thousand years. That might seem remarkable only if you assume that we're talking about the spread of fixed settlements across the hemisphere. But that seems the wrong assumption to make about a group of hunter-gatherers encountering a virgin territory. Food would be plentiful, and there'd be little incentive to settle down. Rather, the hunter-gatherer lifestyle would keep people constantly moving.
From that perspective, the question isn't how they got there so fast, it's what took them so long. A thousand years implies a rate of travel a couple of orders of magnitude slower than humans can walk. The migration of the Clovis people looks more like a casual stroll than a sprint.
That's the remarkable thing: We just meandered around at a moderate rate, with no particular destination in mind, and in a relatively few years humans filled up the world.
That walker/explorer-settler gene needs expression in Solar System exploration. We're getting stale and more than a little fidgety pinned down in one place the way we are these days. This is not the natural lifestyle of homo sapiens considered as a species. Individuals may be content to settle down, but not humanity as a whole.
Space/Science » in reply to I did a little research...
"Now THAT'S 'walking'"
The whole thread (41 posts)
- Back to the Moon, Moonrush way
- yes agreed
- Frontiers and settlement
- There are intangibles that are important in human space exploration
- re: Back to the Moon, Moonrush way