Not news but - Canoes older than the pyramids in America??

[rickymouse]

When I was a boy scout, we went to Boy scout camp for a week most years, it cost around forty bucks for the week back then for food.  They also had a concession stand where a twelve ounce bottle of coke was seven cents, the same price as stores.  They also had the licorice for a penny or two each, the big diameter ones were a foot in the jars, and the rolls of the red spaghetti like licorice was three feet long.... plus other snacks.

They had a rifle range, where I spent half of my time at, ten twenty two shells for a quarter.

But they had lots of canoes there, maybe fifteen or more.  That is what relates it to this thread.  I got my canoe merit badge there along with most others.  So since we were doing the same thing Indians did, I am sure they had training at some ceremonial sites with canoes. 

I wonder if they had concession stands back then?  I am sure they had archery classes like the scouts did.

[Byrd]

I was surprised really.

So much effort has been diverted from the archeology beneath the US citizens' very feet that I still find it "news" to be reminded that the people here were impressively capable masters of their environment.

I didn't expect that some ancient canoes uncovered in Wisconsin has been dated that far back.  

Archaeologists Found 16 Ancient Canoes Beneath a Wisconsin Lake, Some Older Than the Pyramids

Reportedly, the canoes were part of 'fleet' of canoes - the area was a 'marina' of sorts... in use for an amazingly long time...
 

Nice.

Humans had  been in the Americas since around 25,000 BCE (not 2500), so there's all manner of things here that are older than Giza.

[BeyondKnowledge]

When I was a boy scout, we went to Boy scout camp for a week most years, it cost around forty bucks for the week back then for food.  They also had a concession stand where a twelve ounce bottle of coke was seven cents, the same price as stores.  They also had the licorice for a penny or two each, the big diameter ones were a foot in the jars, and the rolls of the red spaghetti like licorice was three feet long.... plus other snacks.

They had a rifle range, where I spent half of my time at, ten twenty two shells for a quarter.

But they had lots of canoes there, maybe fifteen or more.  That is what relates it to this thread.  I got my canoe merit badge there along with most others.  So since we were doing the same thing Indians did, I am sure they had training at some ceremonial sites with canoes. 

I wonder if they had concession stands back then?  I am sure they had archery classes like the scouts did.

I don't think they had classes as such. They just grew up with all the outdoors stuff as everyday life. The better ones at archery or other weapons were probably taught advanced methods for and by the tribes by going on hunting parties. Most were just taught by their families as they grew up. Making the canoes, farming, things like that were probably like family businesses.

[rickymouse]

I don't think they had classes as such. They just grew up with all the outdoors stuff as everyday life. The better ones at archery or other weapons were probably taught advanced methods for and by the tribes by going on hunting parties. Most were just taught by their families as they grew up. Making the canoes, farming, things like that were probably like family businesses.

Well, I was digging on our land we own....actually we lease because if we don't pay the taxes we don't own it anymore.  I found old artifacts made of stone...ground and chipped to make them look like animals or parts of animals.  Now there are varying degrees of artistic in the ground stones which means various levels of expertise are present.  Some look like something kids worked on and others look like someone older worked on.  Plus, it looks like a kid with small hands got his/her hand in some kind of coloring and made a small hand shape on a stone and baked it on...sort of looks like a pottery glaze on it.  There was a big lake across the road from our land which the mine decided to drain about a hundred twenty years ago...so since there were little islands in the area I would bet there were canoes out here long ago.  The reason I found out about this is because the mine wanted to refill the lake to make a turboelectric dam...buying out all the land here.  So I went to the mine office and a guy showed me a survey of the old lake.  But they abandoned that idea, a lot of newer homes would have to be bought by the mine to make the dam again, plus parts of the road after our house would be under water...an inconvenience to reroute a new road plus extra espense to connect it farther down...lots of camps and houses would need access past the lake. So the scrapped the lake and built a natural gas power plant instead.

According to what the native americans here told me about all the rocks I found, and the rows of carved rocks sort of lining a path a few feet under the ground, they guessed it was an old ceremonial site, a place where tribe people met and did ceremonies.  I like the flattened rock that had the mosiaced turkey on it....never knew they did that kind of stuff like gluing rocks together.  I asked what kind of glue it probably was, most had fallen off and were in the loam, but there was some marks on the rock to help guide me to figure it out.  The one guy who worked with ancient tool making told me it was possibly made of clay or maybe even some type of fish scale glue...don't know what fish scale glue is though.  They said that this site probably predates their tribe being here, because they knew where most of their sites were, I guess a different tribe of Indians was in this area about five to  six hundred years ago.

Now, even though the shapes of the rocks are similar to what they made, there are differences in each culture...but usually they were depicting animals in nature.  The traditional tool maker they had at NMU is the one I spoke about this with.  I also was asked if I was part Indian, because white people cannot see these things.  I told them no...now I find I have a tiny bit of paternal Inuit genetics in me...mostly metabolism oriented...but that is sort of Eskimo genetics, not native American genetics.  I have no clue where that genetics came from, nothing in my family history aligns with that, but at one point seven percent, it would have probably been a thousand years ago...I cant even track down farther than two hundred years ago...

But according to some of the native elders, this is definitely not a burial ground which makes me feel a little better, although, we have buried a lot of pets in the pet cemetery area.   I make them oak coffins.  It is also supposed to be bad luck to sell any artifact I find, some of the stuff I find is in groups of three or four.  Those supposedly align with the four directions, and there were four...but some were possibly made of bone so I found three a lot  Those were buried, and I found them about a foot to two feet under the ground in the clay layer.  So they were probably around the same timeframe.  They have some big rocks here that were shaped too.  They had piles of stones made of quartzite too, rub two of them together and they make red sparks, I took dried moss and got it smoking but did not get fire at all, only one with flint that was sort of box shaped with some burnt marks on it...don't know where they got the flint, it is not found around here but there is lots down state.

So, if you see some out of place crystal like rocks on a rock hill, they might be fire starting rocks...even the Indians knew it was best to put a fire on rock outcrops so it would not catch anything on fire.

I wish I knew more about the tribe that was here back then, I think they said it was probably the algonquins or something like that sounding word.

[Runespider]

There's some reasoned speculation that as far back as homo erectus people were using boats. Now that it's known that people got here earlier than Clovis one of the ideas is that early Americans reached the Americas along the kelp highways.