When I consider stuff like this I look back on my own experiences in life and it is easy enough to see that an ordinary person or group of people can cover a lot of ground in a short period of time on foot.
From the west coast of Alaska to the east coast in Maine it is about 5500 miles. Moving 10 miles a day it only takes 18 months. Even if you only lived for 30 years back then there is plenty of opportunity for a single individual to have made the entire journey on foot allowing lots of opportunities for seasonal pauses or to delay progress because they liked the new digs better than the last place they stopped.
A reasonably adventurous person could easily have seen most of the continental US in a lifetime especially when you consider that boats were part of their skill sets. Even moving as a group you could easily traverse the continent settling for short periods wherever things looked promising.
I will have to look up the Vail site as I am not familiar with that one. I know there is the Buttermilk site in central Texas (Gault site) that has yielded dates in the 16000-21000 yr range as near as I remember.
Note, this isn't generally true. The low average life expectancy in those ages is skewed down by infant mortality and conflict. In a way, human life span follows a bathtub curve so reducing infant mortality in our (modern) age has massively increased the average life expectancy, but it doesn't mean people in those days didn't live past 40.
Or, exaggerating mildly: nobody lived for 30 years back then; half the population didn't make it past their first birthday, the other half lived for 60 years.
Yes. I agree with the lifespan information you've laid out.
There has been a misconception amongst laymen that our lifespans have become longer for a number of reasons because it is usually framed in a way that bolsters the notion that all those who came before had shorter lifespans than we are likely to enjoy.
That isn't really the case because obviously if someone mentions an average lifespan or a median lifespan then that is the number that sticks in the memory and most people whiff on the fact that with any average or median, around 50% of the people lived longer and 50% of the people did not live as long. No upper bound is given and the lower bound is intuitively occupied by those who didn't survive infancy.
In hindsight, I should've framed that differently. I was attempting to illustrate that it doesn't take much time at all to cover a lot of ground and if you are motivated by the need to feed yourself or your family or if you just feel the unshakable need to see what is over that distant hill then a short lifespan still offers plenty of opportunity to see the world and scratch those itches.
I spent several months when I was younger living on the road and in the back-country. I knew every morning that my primary goal needed to be locating drinkable water for myself, my traveling partner, and our horses and my secondary goal was finding food. We carried our shelters and implements that we would need to keep all our gear in order but water and food were paramount concerns. We were young and totally not clued in to all the planning that would normally be involved in undertaking a multi-week, multi-state trip so inaccurate assumptions were made about accessibility, cost, and availability of necessities. We had fun, we survived our own incompetence and we moved on with new skill-sets and an enhanced appreciation for how the real world really works.
I agree a man can travel a whole lot just by taking small steps on a regular basis.
However, I am not sure it was that easy.
- It will be easy if the map was laid out, they unlikely had any sense of where they were going those days, so to cover a hypothetical straight-ish line distance of 5500 miles they probably had to travel 10000 or maybe many many more miles
- It will be easy if there were roads like now, they unlikely had very rough terrain - much denser forests, way uneven land, wild animals
- They probably had to fend for food on a daily basis which would distract from an orderly journey of 10 miles a day
This is not to say it could not be done, obviously it seems like it was done, and the journey probably took closer to the higher end of the extremes mentions (18 months vs 30 years) and that too mostly by happenstance.
From the west coast of Alaska to the east coast in Maine it is about 5500 miles. Moving 10 miles a day it only takes 18 months. Even if you only lived for 30 years back then there is plenty of opportunity for a single individual to have made the entire journey on foot allowing lots of opportunities for seasonal pauses or to delay progress because they liked the new digs better than the last place they stopped.
A reasonably adventurous person could easily have seen most of the continental US in a lifetime especially when you consider that boats were part of their skill sets. Even moving as a group you could easily traverse the continent settling for short periods wherever things looked promising.
I will have to look up the Vail site as I am not familiar with that one. I know there is the Buttermilk site in central Texas (Gault site) that has yielded dates in the 16000-21000 yr range as near as I remember.