Charl said:
I can understand viewing the “Clovis First” paradigm as cultish, but, that is part of the nature of change in science. Any science, not just archaeology.
This doesn't flush, Charl. This is why: archaeology is a branch of anthropology (specifically sociology), which is devoted to studying human group behavior (Note: professional archaeology is a group endeavor). So
if any scholastic discipline has no excuse for being oblivious to its own irrational behavior, it is archaeology itself. But, in practice, it is a poster child example of group irrationality. Or, in other words, of operating (as I charged) as a cult, depending (as all cults do) on brainwashing (operant conditioning) to control its members.
To grasp this (Doublethink) as a practical fact, easily seen once familiar with the way it works:
George Orwell said:
To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself -- that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink.
You can hardly take ten steps in the world today without having this confront you. "Science" has long since proven that there is no such thing as "race" where humans are concerned. But at the same time, without missing a beat, every example of human inequality imaginable is being denounced as due to "
race-ism." This is not the behavior of rational human beings, able to evaluate their own attitudes and beliefs. It is the behavior of people rendered incapable of exercising independent judgement. Which is exactly what cults produce. They produce the kind of people who insist that anyone who picks up arrowheads is "looting" our cultural heritage, even if he's bringing the site that produced them to his own attention.
Charl said:
this summary is not the product of a cult
It is
exactly that, Charl. As I see things, only someone willingly blind to evidence of it could miss how obvious it is.
Our species, Homo sapiens, emerged in Africa hundreds of thousands of years ago . . . the first H. sapiens who entered the Americas went somewhere no member of the human family had ever gone before
You may have noticed, as I did 30 years ago, that these articles, whether for the popular press or not, always begin by reciting the US archaeological catechism. As this one does.
In point of fact, however, the allegation that modern humans emerged in Africa was shot down in flames, long ago; the evidence indicates they didn't. But that finding doesn't support the officially imposed narrative that we did, so it is simply ignored, as if the facts of the matter either don't exist, or aren't relevant.
Then we skip to the supposed human occupation of the Western Hemisphere for the first time by immigrants from Beringia around 20,000 years ago (give or take a few). In order to say this with a straight face, they have to ignore the proof, confirmed by multiple disciplines independently of each other, that people were making stone tools at Hueyatlaco around 300,000 years ago. (Not a misprint. Three hundred thousand years ago). Like that modern humans did not emerge in Africa, facts like this (it's not the only one) are simply left out of consideration. The same way that Doctor Gramly's proof that Cumberland is 3,000(+) years older than Clovis, since it can't be disproven, is simply ignored. The same way that Rick Donninger's huge Levallois assemblage from Indiana is ignored.
This is not the way science deals with facts.
It is the way a cult deals with information that threatens it. Attack it, ridicule it, ignore it and, if finally forced to acknowledge it, claim it had always been known but not considered important. As the professional community did in the wake of the Paleoamerican Odyssey having rubbished "clovis first." One actual quote I remember from a former opponent: "We've know that Clovis wasn't the first for ten years." Archaeology in this country changes its corporate opinion with the same uncanny, instant change of direction as a school of fish does.
Then the article passes on DNA. Which allegedly proves that all Native Americans are descended from the original colonizers (one group or several). As well as suppressing relevant information (like the skulls and brain tissue at Windover Bog that remain a deep secret to this day) this allegation is made on the shaky basis of maternal DNA. Why shaky ? Because the same analytical technique, if applied to the population of Mexico, would conclude that the Spanish Conquest was a myth, unsupported by evidence. (Conquering women do not breed with defeated men. But conquering men do take up with captive women, adding their MtDNA to their downstream gene pool).
I was going to go down the whole grocery list of cult characteristics, pointing out the ways that archaeology in this country demonstrates them too obviously to miss once pointed out. But that would be overkill, given how much space this preliminary consideration has filled.
IMO, all that professional archaeology in this country can truthfully say for itself where actually letting evidence override theory is concerned is:
Pogo said:
We have met the enemy, and he is us
