Technically true but wrong. If your oldest Facebook post is from 2015, how likely is it that you've been using the internet before 2005?! Archeologists are very smart people in their own right, some are much smarter than we are. They do consider everything that we think they haven't. Let's give some benefit of the doubt to our fellow researchers.
I first joined facebook in 2009, but have been on the internet since 1991.
You might counter that facebook only started in 2004, and didn't get much traction until 2006. But I was invited before that and simply didn't care to join, preferring to occupy other parts of the `net.
Likewise, Clovis artifacts all date from after the peak of the last ice age, when glaciers were melting, land routes were opening, and sea levels were rising to obliterate any coastal artifacts from any previous waves of migration.
Clovis-first has been debunked for decades. This is just another - particularly solid - nail in that theory's coffin. It is worth asking why it has persisted so doggedly. I don't think it is because archeologists aren't very smart people.
WTF is this? I was at university and I assure you we were connected to the internet. I got a login and an email address from the physics department in `91 because I was working on a project on their network. I used Elm for email, which had been out since the 80s. I was happy to upgrade to Pine (Pine is not elm) in 1992 and actually kept using Pine until like 1999. By `92 pretty much everyone else at my university was using the internet. I could dial up from home via modem, and check my email. NCSA Mosaic came out in `93.
>ure, but I was a network engineer at the time and your TCP/IP was very, very niche.. you know very well that there was no "Internet" in 1990
There was no consumer Internet in 1990.
However, TCP/IP was in use across a broad range of academic institutions and corporations, and it was possible for pretty much anyone to buy access to TCP/IP-based inter-networks.
Which, if you were a network engineer (and not for Novell or DEC) at the time, you would know.
direct dial to BBS, at least that was the "internet" for me at that stage. The disparate nodes of bulletin boards wasn't what I would call an internet. And it was very cliquish.
Some background on this, there is a long standing back to the late 20th century - and to those of us outside the field darkly funny - controversy within this particular scientific community on when the first humans arrived, which can be broadly googled by searches for "Clovis man controversy".
Sure archeologists are very smart people, and like all other very smart people, can still be caught on the wrong side of history as new evidence piles up against existing theories.
> If your oldest Facebook post is from 2015, how likely is it that you've been using the internet before 2005?!
Who knows. It could be that person has been using the Internet for a very long time and is thus a late adopter of Facebook due to preferring to do things the old way. It could also be a person who started using the Internet in 2015. GP's point that we really can't conclude anything beyond a lower bound isn't falsified by your example
>They do consider everything that we think they haven't.
This can be said of almost any observation made about a particular field of research. Outsiders aren't familiar enough with the current state of research and they often assume experts haven't considered some rather obvious things.
That's not to say that outsiders shouldn't participate in the discussion, but they should acknowledge that there is a good chance their ideas have already been considered.
> If your oldest Facebook post is from 2015, how likely is it that you've been using the internet before 2005?!
My Facebook account dates back to 2015, but I have been using the internet since the mid 90s. (As far as I'm aware, there's no evidence of the previous account I had from 2006-2010ish)
> Let's give some benefit of the doubt to our fellow researchers.
