Oldest Petroglyphs in North America!

Forgive my lack of precision. I include all watercraft in the name "boat."

Don't forget that much of this travel occurred during an ice age. With so much of the earth's water trapped in glaciers and polar caps, sea level drops hundreds of feet, so the space between land masses is much narrower, and furthermore islands pop up that are submerged during a warm period. This is how our ancestors made their first successful journey out of Africa 60KYA, arriving in Australia. Navigating through the East Indies was much easier than today.

There was no magic. Infant mortality was 80%, as it was right up to the end of the 19th century. People had as many children as they could, just so the tribe would survive. As for the women, they underwent experiences that seem unbelievable to us. Even in the 17th and 18th centuries, when more than 99% of humans were still subsistence farmers working 120-hour weeks, it was merely unusual, but not remarkable, for a woman to be working in the fields on the very day that labor started.

Anyone who believes that women are "the weaker sex" needs a quick trip back in a time machine. The strength of women always was, and still is, incredible. The secret to my long and happy life is that I have tried very hard to NEVER get on a woman's bad side. As a result, most of my friends have always been female. I am really blessed.

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Remember: Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did. But she had to do it BACKWARDS while wearing HIGH HEELS.

The llama, alpaca, guanaco and vicuña are all New World camelids. Llamas even spit like camels. Unfortunately female llamas produce so little milk that it's a miracle their own babies survive. So the Andean people did not have the advantage of being able to invent dairy farming like the people in the Old World. This would surely have accelerated their Paradigm Shift from the Paleolithic to the Neolithic Era (agriculture), then from farming villages to Stone Age cities, then finally to the Bronze Age.

An equally onerous problem the people on both American continents had was no decent, nutritious grains. All they had was corn ("maize" to you Brits), which by our modern dietary standards is nearly worthless as a source of protein.

Both the North and South Americans eventually did progress into the Bronze Age, but so late that they never made the transition to the Iron Age. This made it pathetically easy for the Christian invaders to destroy their cultures.

And as noted, there were no draft animals in North America. The largest domesticated animal was... the turkey! To be sure, there are several nice large herbivore species on our continent, but to this day no one has domesticated the moose or the mountain goat, and the bison was only domesticated recently. Give the Olmecs a big round of applause for building a civilization with only human labor.

Of course we do have reindeer up north, although we call them "caribou." But for reasons which, AFAIK, are not understood, our Arctic people never tried to tame them.

And by the way, please try to remember that Europa is one of Jupiter's moons. The name of the continent you refer to is, in English, Europe.

The Sahara was a breadbasket around 10KYA.

The majority of the scholars I've read say it's 99.99% certain that the Atlantis myth is merely the actual history of Thera, a major island in the eastern Mediterranean that was devastated by an earthquake and the tsunami it caused, around 1500BCE. It was the largest site of the Minoan civilization outside of their home island of Crete, particularly their navy, and its destruction was followed immediately by their collapse. This political vacuum resulted in a major realignment of the cultures in the region. Thera is now known as Santorini, and an aerial view clearly reveals the devastation.

We have to remember that Paleolithic ("Early Stone Age," as opposed to Neolithic or "Late Stone Age") people had a much simpler lifestyle. No houses to maintain, no crops and herds to tend. All they had to do was hunt and gather, cook and make clothes and weapons. And with the clever stone-and-wood tools they had invented, they were extremely efficient, successful hunters and gatherers. It's been estimated that they worked a 20-hour week!

You should read the Clan of the Cave Bear series by Jean Auel. She spent many years doing research into Paleolithic societies before she started. She knows more scholars personally than I've ever met, and she spent an entire winter all alone in a cave in Alaska! Her accounts of their psychology, religion and family relationships include a lot of suppositions and sheer storytelling, but when it comes to Paleolithic technology, she's got it down cold.

You can accomplish a hell of a lot with wood and stone!

Don't forget that the Americans had dogs. The first wave of migrants could not have had them because they had not been domesticated in Asia yet, but the second wave (the Navajo and other Na-Dene-speaking tribes who now live in the western USA and Canada) and the third wave (the Eskimo-Aleuts) arrived after dogs had been introduced to all of Eurasia and Africa, so they would surely have brought them with them. Dogs in the New World are not descendants of wolves in the New World. Like all other dogs, their DNA clearly descends from one single pack of domesticated wolves in Mesopotamia around 10,000BCE, the Dawn of Agriculture. (The first dogs were lazy wolves who decided to give up hunting and just eat our incredibly huge piles of garbage.)

Dogs were in fact used as beasts of burden, although their capacity is obviously limited. The North Americans had invented the travois, a triangle lashed together from sturdy branches, criss-crossed by smaller sticks to make a platform. You attach two corners to your shoulders and drag the third corner on the ground. Dogs were trained to haul smaller versions. This modest increase in carrying capacity made journeys a little bit easier. The men and dogs hauled travois while the women carried babies and looked after the children who were old enough to walk.

They're way ahead of you. This is how they verified the Solutrean migration--Cro-Magnon people crossing the Atlantic to eastern North America around 16KYA. Their villages are 20 miles offshore in the Atlantic. This puts them here a millennium or two before the Asians came across Beringia and settled the Pacific coast. Unfortunately (AFAIK), like many early colonizations, theirs seems to have been unsuccessful. There is no European DNA in the Native American tribes--except, obviously, as a result of the much more recent Christian conquest.

But you also don't match him for racism, sexism and homophobia. So please carry on with my blessing.

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Indeed. The Christian invasion of the Western Hemisphere was a tragedy that can never be forgiven. They burned the Aztec libraries and melted down the Inca art. This is not something that can ever be atoned for. Civilization only arose spontaneously on this planet six times. They destroyed one-third of them!

It did not vanish. When the Olmecs declined, the Maya stepped in and took over their civilization. Then when they declined, the Aztecs took over. They continued to use the Olmec artifacts, and even their written language. It wasn't until the Christians arrived that they began destroying everything because it was all "pagan."

That doesn't make sense. The Bronze Age was two Paradigm Shifts advanced from the Paleolithic Era. Bronze Age societies had cities, money, the wheel, multi-level governments, written language and draft animals. They had relatively modern art tools and supplies, and they didn't hang out in caves.

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The Bronze Age began around 3500BCE.

Indeed. They lived in the Paleolithic Era, long before the invention of the twin technologies of farming and animal husbandry, which comprise agriculture. They did indeed live in caves.