Human Migration to the Americas
When did humans first arrive in the Americas? The largest migrations, though not the first, to arrive in the New World crossed the Bering Strait land bridge some 13,500 to 11,000 years ago -- at the end of the 23,000 year-long Ice Age that reached its height 20,000 years ago. Within 800 years or so, they had populated both North and South America. Thus, within 36,000 years or so since the African Exodus, humans had reached the Americas.
It was once thought that the first migrators to the Americas were these “Clovis people,” named for the archeological site near Clovis, New Mexico where an ancient fluted spear point was discovered in the 1930’s.[1] But it is now clear that humans had migrated in smaller numbers thousands of years earlier along the Pacific rim and then spread east and south below the Ice Age glaciers. The Clovis spear point is a single stone, bifacial, or shaped on both sides, with a flute or groove, at its base. Its projectile point is also flaked on both sides. The Clovis points were hafted to short shafts, and then mounted into sockets on heavier wooden spear shafts, providing for reloadable spears. The spear could either be thrown by hand or with the aid of the atlatl (a word in the Nahuatl language meaning ‘spearthrower’). Also uncovered with the Clovis point was the skeleton of a mammoth, which the spear point had been used to kill. Scientists were able to date the bones adjacent to that point by radiocarbon dating, establishing the age of the particular Clovis, New Mexico spearhead as approximately 11,500 years old.
Clovis spear points have also been uncovered in each of the lower 48 states in the United States, as well as in Mexico, Belize, Costa Rica, in all kinds of environments. So many Clovis-type spear points found across the continent suggested a rapid expansion of this crucial weapon used by the Clovis hunters. By 11,000 years ago, when the Bering land bridge was reclaimed by the sea, native Americans had spread throughout North and South America. The nomadic Clovis people were expert big game hunters who pursued herds of mammoth, mastodon, horse, bison, and tapir during the close of the last Ice Age. Had there been no Ice Age and no land bridge before 11,000 years ago, it may well have proved impossible for canoes to cross the rough ocean waters of the Bering Strait. The great human migrations to the Americas depended on the land bridge created by the Ice Age. Without the Ice Age, no migration to the Americas. Again, this was no accident.
Convincing evidence establishes that some humans indeed traveled to the Americas even before these Clovis hunters arrived. [2] Between 24,000 and 13,000 years ago, the last great Ice Age covered large swaths of North America with glaciers up to two-miles thick. These giant ice sheets locked up vast quantities of seawater, causing sea levels to drop 350 feet below their current levels. Asia and North America became joined as one great continent by a land bridge more than 600 miles wide, known as Beringia. Although it was possible to travel from Siberia to Alaska during the Ice Age, two large Canadian ice sheets, the Laurentide and Cordilleran glaciers, barred entrance to the rest of the North American continent. Geological evidence shows that in the Ice Age, the southern boundary of the continental ice sheet, a terminal moraine, stretched down the center of Long Island, through all of New York City, across New Jersey and Pennsylvania to Southern Illinois and Missouri, then up the Plains States through Montana and Washington State. This prime real estate was deep under one to two miles of glaciers, making for a very chilly Big Apple and a real tenants’ market. Then, as the climate warmed, the glaciers melted and receded from these areas, opening up an ice-free corridor through the center of North America, and creating the Great Lakes, the world’s greatest fresh water lakes. The door had opened to the vast hunting grounds of the New World. It is at the end of the Ice Age when the Clovis hunters appeared in the lower 48 states.
Yet, archaeologists in the 1980’s have discovered some 28 pre-Clovis sites in the Americas, including the 12,500 to 14,500 year old Monte Verde site in Chile, the 12,000-18,800 year old Meadowcroft Rockshelter, Pennsylvania site near Pittsburgh, the 16,000-19,000 year old Cactus Hill, Virginia site, the 16,540 Sand Creek, Texas site, and sites in the Yukon Territory such as Old Crow and Bluefish Caves dated from 12,000 to 40,000 years ago (to name but a few) -- establishing that groups of humans reached the Americas many thousands of years before the great migration of Asians who rode their horses over or hiked from Siberia at the close of the last Ice Age. It has become clear that some humans, even during the massive glaciation of North America and before the large migrations at the end of the Ice Age, were able to travel along the Pacific coast rim which remained habitable. Vegetation, temperate coastal climate and bear survival along the coastal rim suggest this route to the Americas along the Alaska coast by sea even during the height of the Ice Age. During the Ice Age, native peoples exploited the bays and coves of the Channel Islands off California for thousands of years pre-Clovis.[3] In Arlington Canyon, for example, there are sea shell dumps eroding from the wall, ancient remains of meals of abalone, mussels and clams.
Still, the great Asian migrations of the Chukchi hunters or other Asians into North America that resulted in the widespread population of the Americas, awaited the re-opening of the North American ice-free corridor southward in the period some 13,500 years to 11,000 years ago as a result of the melting of the great glaciers. This corridor allowed large numbers of these peoples to move down into the lower 48 states. This was the Great Migration that populated the Americas, and lasted for more than a thousand years. Within only a few thousand years, fluted weapons technology had spread the length of North and South America. By 10,000 years ago, human migration had reached Tierra del Fuego at the tip of South America, the last continental region to be inhabited by humans.
Studies of Y-chromosomal data confirm these archaeological conclusions. Of particular significance is the polymorphism known by geneticists as the M242 mutation. The estimated age of this mutation is approximately 18,000 years ago -- which establishes a solid upper bound of time of first entry of any humans across from Asia and down into the Americas[4] (excluding the Yukon Territories).
Query, how was it that hunters throughout North and South America used the Clovis fluted spearpoint simultaneously, when these natives had no possible means of communicating with each other? That is, how was it possible for Clovis hunters in Minnesota, Florida and Texas to use the precisely same weapons technology? After all, these hunters had no Internet or chat rooms. Any ideas?
Respectfully, the hypothesis that the Solutrean culture in Spain and France, dating between 24,000 and 16,500 years ago during the height of the Ice Age, may have managed a transatlantic Solutrean migration as Dr. Dennis Stanford has proposed[5] is highly intriguing but untenable, notwithstanding the exciting resemblance of the Solutrean fluted spear points technology with the Clovis point technology and earlier Cactus Hill/Meadowcroft technology developed by the native Americans. The search for a Solutrean “Christopher Columbus” is a dry hole. Putting aside the possibility of a tiny Pacific island-hopping migration to South America post-Clovis migration of 13,500 years ago – the peoples who migrated to the Americas came through the Bering Strait land bridge, although not at the same time. Geneticists analyzing mt-DNA of living Native Americans have found four distinctive lineages, A, B, C and D, all sharing common human ancestors in Siberia and northeast Asia.[6] Three of the four main ancestral groups A, C and D, separated from their Asian ancestors at least 20,000 years ago, evidence of a huge time gap in these migrations, and suggesting passage into North America even before the Ice Age took hold. These mt-DNA studies demonstrated that the first Americans crossed over from Asia in at least four separate waves of migration. In fact, it was likely numerous separate migrations if one counts small groups of hunters that ventured across the Bering Strait and possibly back again. The first small migration to the Americas occurred some 20,000 to 30,000 years ago from Asia and settled in the Yukon or followed the Pacific coast rim of North America. These early genetic studies themselves tend to refute the hypothesis that the Solutreans brought over Clovis spear point technology from Europe some 20,000 years, who had somehow managed, on that speculation, to cross thousands of miles of Atlantic Ocean to reach America.[7] The human race did not possess such Viking-like seafaring skills and ships capable of transatlantic passage so long back, notwithstanding the brave passage to Australia some 50,000 years ago in canoes, following the African exodus of Homo sapiens. But that passage was less than 100 miles back then -- not 3,000 miles of Atlantic Ocean. Dugouts and rafts could navigate the former if they had extremely good luck over the open seas, but never the latter. Eskimo-style boats of wood, sealskin and whale oil did not exist in the Solutrean culture.
The only other scenario for Solutrean transit from Europe would have required these brave folks back 20,000 years ago to hike across the Arctic tundra. Though adventuresome humans during that age may have ventured far north towards the brutal Ice Age Arctic, there was no return for these stragglers, and they either froze to death or died from starvation even before reaching the Circle. No caribou furs could protect a man from such harsh Arctic conditions on foot over snow and ice or in open paddle boats, even if bundled up as tightly as was the 5,300 year old “Ice Man” discovered in 1991 on a barren Alpine pass in Italy near the Austrian border, as shown in a mock-up exhibit at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.. Such a journey through the Arctic was impossible in the Solutrean day and age.
No, Native Americans all derive from Asians who crossed over from Siberia (putting aside a small few Pacific island-mariners post-Clovis) in multiple waves of widely spaced migrations. Still, there is an uncanny resemblance between the Clovis spear points in America and the spear points of the Solutreans in Europe, both made from a similar technique. It is furthermore noteworthy that the Clovis spear point in North America was nothing like the spear points of Asia and Siberia made from small razor-like flints called micro-blades embedded in a bone handle, though a fluted bifacial point was discovered at Uptar in northeastern Siberia from 8,260 years ago.[8] But the dissimilarity of weaponry between the Siberian and Clovis hunters does not signify that the Clovis people did not cross over from Siberia. They did. What it means is that these Chukchi hunters who migrated to North America were enormously innovative and developed a killer weapon that could tear through the hide of even the toughest mammoth. This weapon permitted mankind to populate both North and South America within the space of a thousand years. Peoples in Europe also figured out the same general weapons technology, but did so independently.
Simultaneous development in different parts of the globe should not be so surprising if it is kept in mind that Providence guided the human migrations and, frankly, much of human activities. Consider the fact that painted hand stencils or spray-painted hands appear in early cave paintings in Cueva de las Manos (“cave of the hands”) in Argentina, Patagonia region as they do in the caves of Roucadour in France and Australia. But that similarity does not suggest that the hand-stencil artists came from the same culture, only that they both had the same idea. Humans are like that.
On the other hand, the prospect that a handful of Pacific island-dwellers surrounding Australia or the Polynesians Islands, at some point in time, traveled over to South America on small boats remains open. But it is impossible that such Pacific island-hoppers made the trip to South America in pre-Clovis days (11,500 B.P.) or that they possessed the seafaring skills or canoes to make the enormous trans-Pacific journey, before 4,000 to 5,000 years ago. For even two islanders to cross thousands of miles of Pacific seas during that age in a canoe or catamaran boat would have been utterly miraculous. But it was possible, and this author is of the view that it did happen thousands of years ago post-Clovis, but all in all only in extremely small numbers, under 10 individuals, prior to the last thousand years. Such island voyagers to the Americas would have likely left their genetic imprint.
The Polynesians' primary voyaging craft in later years was the double canoe made of two hulls connected by lashed crossbeams. The two hulls gave their craft stability over the rough oceans and the capacity to carry heavy loads of families and their supplies and equipment; a central platform laid over the crossbeams provided the needed working, living, and storage space. Sails made of plaited leaves drove this ancient forerunner of the modern catamaran swiftly through the waters of the Pacific. Long steering paddles enabled Polynesian sailors to stay on course. These mariners developed a highly sophisticated navigation system based on observations of the stars, the ocean swells and currents, the flight patterns of seabirds and other natural signs to find their way over vast stretches of open ocean. And, as they moved farther away from the centers of Southeast Asia and New Guinea and finding familiar flora and fauna diminished, they developed a portable agricultural system whereby plants and animals they had domesticated were carried along in their canoes for transplantation onto new shores.
[1] “America’s Stone Age Explorers,” PBS television, NOVA Series, November 9, 2004.
[2] “Coming Into America,” Scientific American Frontiers Program #1406PBS television, July 20, 2004 (Alan Alda, narrator)
[3] Id.
[4] M. Seielstad, N. Yuldasheva, N. Singh, P. Underhill, P. Oefner, P. Shen and R. S. Wells, “A Novel Y-Chromosome Variant Puts an Upper Limit on the Timing of First Entry into the Americas.” Am. J. Hum. Genetics, 73:700 (2003).
[5] “America’s Stone Age Explorers,” PBS television, NOVA Series, November 9, 2004; “Stone Age Columbus,” BBC Television, November 21, 2004. See generally Dennis J. Stanford, “Researching the First Americans/Update,” Anthropology Explored 2d ed., edited by R. O. Selig, M.R. London and P.A. Kaupp, Smithsonian Books, 2004.
[6] “America’s Stone Age Explorers,” PBS television, NOVA Series, November 9, 2004, citing the work of Geneticist Doug Wallace and his team at the University of California at Irvine.
[7] A caveat is that geneticist Wallace studying mt-DNA samples from a Native American tribe, the Ojibwa, discovered a fifth source of mt-DNA, i.e., Haplotype X. Unlike A, B, C and D, he was not yet able to find this type in Siberia or eastern Asia. Instead, Wallace believed that it was similar to a mitochondrial lineage predominantly found in Europe. Haplotype X, present in North America native groups including Ojibwa, Nuu-Chah-Nulth, Sioux, and Yakima, has not yet been seen in any East Asian population, but a distantly related mtDNA type has been reported recently in European populations (e.g., Finns, Italians, and Druze)" (Fiedel 2000). Somehow it got to the Great Lakes region of the Americas some 14,000 to 15,000 years ago. However, haplotype X may have been introduced in Europe as a result of Turko-Mongol invasions or other migrations of Uralic peoples in more modern times. Alternatively, Professor Fiedel suggests it could be the result of an Upper Paleolithic admixture of Caucasoids and Mongoloids prior to any Berginia migration. Fiedel , Stuart J. 2000 “The Peopling of the New World: Present Evidence, New Theories, and Future Directions,” Journal of Archaeological Research, Vol. 8, No. 1 39-103. Respectfully, the hypothesis that Europeans managed to cross the Atlantic Ocean or hike across the Arctic Circle some 20,000 years ago is not correct. All of the waves of migrations to the Americas were from Asia.
[8] Andrew L. Slayman, “Siberian Fluted Point,” Archeology, vol. 49, no. 6 November/December 1996. [Excerpt from Creation: Towards a Theory of All Things, Copyright John Umana 2005] http://www.booksurge.com/author.php3?accountID=GPUB02608&affiliateID=A000932
It was once thought that the first migrators to the Americas were these “Clovis people,” named for the archeological site near Clovis, New Mexico where an ancient fluted spear point was discovered in the 1930’s.[1] But it is now clear that humans had migrated in smaller numbers thousands of years earlier along the Pacific rim and then spread east and south below the Ice Age glaciers. The Clovis spear point is a single stone, bifacial, or shaped on both sides, with a flute or groove, at its base. Its projectile point is also flaked on both sides. The Clovis points were hafted to short shafts, and then mounted into sockets on heavier wooden spear shafts, providing for reloadable spears. The spear could either be thrown by hand or with the aid of the atlatl (a word in the Nahuatl language meaning ‘spearthrower’). Also uncovered with the Clovis point was the skeleton of a mammoth, which the spear point had been used to kill. Scientists were able to date the bones adjacent to that point by radiocarbon dating, establishing the age of the particular Clovis, New Mexico spearhead as approximately 11,500 years old.
Clovis spear points have also been uncovered in each of the lower 48 states in the United States, as well as in Mexico, Belize, Costa Rica, in all kinds of environments. So many Clovis-type spear points found across the continent suggested a rapid expansion of this crucial weapon used by the Clovis hunters. By 11,000 years ago, when the Bering land bridge was reclaimed by the sea, native Americans had spread throughout North and South America. The nomadic Clovis people were expert big game hunters who pursued herds of mammoth, mastodon, horse, bison, and tapir during the close of the last Ice Age. Had there been no Ice Age and no land bridge before 11,000 years ago, it may well have proved impossible for canoes to cross the rough ocean waters of the Bering Strait. The great human migrations to the Americas depended on the land bridge created by the Ice Age. Without the Ice Age, no migration to the Americas. Again, this was no accident.
Convincing evidence establishes that some humans indeed traveled to the Americas even before these Clovis hunters arrived. [2] Between 24,000 and 13,000 years ago, the last great Ice Age covered large swaths of North America with glaciers up to two-miles thick. These giant ice sheets locked up vast quantities of seawater, causing sea levels to drop 350 feet below their current levels. Asia and North America became joined as one great continent by a land bridge more than 600 miles wide, known as Beringia. Although it was possible to travel from Siberia to Alaska during the Ice Age, two large Canadian ice sheets, the Laurentide and Cordilleran glaciers, barred entrance to the rest of the North American continent. Geological evidence shows that in the Ice Age, the southern boundary of the continental ice sheet, a terminal moraine, stretched down the center of Long Island, through all of New York City, across New Jersey and Pennsylvania to Southern Illinois and Missouri, then up the Plains States through Montana and Washington State. This prime real estate was deep under one to two miles of glaciers, making for a very chilly Big Apple and a real tenants’ market. Then, as the climate warmed, the glaciers melted and receded from these areas, opening up an ice-free corridor through the center of North America, and creating the Great Lakes, the world’s greatest fresh water lakes. The door had opened to the vast hunting grounds of the New World. It is at the end of the Ice Age when the Clovis hunters appeared in the lower 48 states.
Yet, archaeologists in the 1980’s have discovered some 28 pre-Clovis sites in the Americas, including the 12,500 to 14,500 year old Monte Verde site in Chile, the 12,000-18,800 year old Meadowcroft Rockshelter, Pennsylvania site near Pittsburgh, the 16,000-19,000 year old Cactus Hill, Virginia site, the 16,540 Sand Creek, Texas site, and sites in the Yukon Territory such as Old Crow and Bluefish Caves dated from 12,000 to 40,000 years ago (to name but a few) -- establishing that groups of humans reached the Americas many thousands of years before the great migration of Asians who rode their horses over or hiked from Siberia at the close of the last Ice Age. It has become clear that some humans, even during the massive glaciation of North America and before the large migrations at the end of the Ice Age, were able to travel along the Pacific coast rim which remained habitable. Vegetation, temperate coastal climate and bear survival along the coastal rim suggest this route to the Americas along the Alaska coast by sea even during the height of the Ice Age. During the Ice Age, native peoples exploited the bays and coves of the Channel Islands off California for thousands of years pre-Clovis.[3] In Arlington Canyon, for example, there are sea shell dumps eroding from the wall, ancient remains of meals of abalone, mussels and clams.
Still, the great Asian migrations of the Chukchi hunters or other Asians into North America that resulted in the widespread population of the Americas, awaited the re-opening of the North American ice-free corridor southward in the period some 13,500 years to 11,000 years ago as a result of the melting of the great glaciers. This corridor allowed large numbers of these peoples to move down into the lower 48 states. This was the Great Migration that populated the Americas, and lasted for more than a thousand years. Within only a few thousand years, fluted weapons technology had spread the length of North and South America. By 10,000 years ago, human migration had reached Tierra del Fuego at the tip of South America, the last continental region to be inhabited by humans.
Studies of Y-chromosomal data confirm these archaeological conclusions. Of particular significance is the polymorphism known by geneticists as the M242 mutation. The estimated age of this mutation is approximately 18,000 years ago -- which establishes a solid upper bound of time of first entry of any humans across from Asia and down into the Americas[4] (excluding the Yukon Territories).
Query, how was it that hunters throughout North and South America used the Clovis fluted spearpoint simultaneously, when these natives had no possible means of communicating with each other? That is, how was it possible for Clovis hunters in Minnesota, Florida and Texas to use the precisely same weapons technology? After all, these hunters had no Internet or chat rooms. Any ideas?
Respectfully, the hypothesis that the Solutrean culture in Spain and France, dating between 24,000 and 16,500 years ago during the height of the Ice Age, may have managed a transatlantic Solutrean migration as Dr. Dennis Stanford has proposed[5] is highly intriguing but untenable, notwithstanding the exciting resemblance of the Solutrean fluted spear points technology with the Clovis point technology and earlier Cactus Hill/Meadowcroft technology developed by the native Americans. The search for a Solutrean “Christopher Columbus” is a dry hole. Putting aside the possibility of a tiny Pacific island-hopping migration to South America post-Clovis migration of 13,500 years ago – the peoples who migrated to the Americas came through the Bering Strait land bridge, although not at the same time. Geneticists analyzing mt-DNA of living Native Americans have found four distinctive lineages, A, B, C and D, all sharing common human ancestors in Siberia and northeast Asia.[6] Three of the four main ancestral groups A, C and D, separated from their Asian ancestors at least 20,000 years ago, evidence of a huge time gap in these migrations, and suggesting passage into North America even before the Ice Age took hold. These mt-DNA studies demonstrated that the first Americans crossed over from Asia in at least four separate waves of migration. In fact, it was likely numerous separate migrations if one counts small groups of hunters that ventured across the Bering Strait and possibly back again. The first small migration to the Americas occurred some 20,000 to 30,000 years ago from Asia and settled in the Yukon or followed the Pacific coast rim of North America. These early genetic studies themselves tend to refute the hypothesis that the Solutreans brought over Clovis spear point technology from Europe some 20,000 years, who had somehow managed, on that speculation, to cross thousands of miles of Atlantic Ocean to reach America.[7] The human race did not possess such Viking-like seafaring skills and ships capable of transatlantic passage so long back, notwithstanding the brave passage to Australia some 50,000 years ago in canoes, following the African exodus of Homo sapiens. But that passage was less than 100 miles back then -- not 3,000 miles of Atlantic Ocean. Dugouts and rafts could navigate the former if they had extremely good luck over the open seas, but never the latter. Eskimo-style boats of wood, sealskin and whale oil did not exist in the Solutrean culture.
The only other scenario for Solutrean transit from Europe would have required these brave folks back 20,000 years ago to hike across the Arctic tundra. Though adventuresome humans during that age may have ventured far north towards the brutal Ice Age Arctic, there was no return for these stragglers, and they either froze to death or died from starvation even before reaching the Circle. No caribou furs could protect a man from such harsh Arctic conditions on foot over snow and ice or in open paddle boats, even if bundled up as tightly as was the 5,300 year old “Ice Man” discovered in 1991 on a barren Alpine pass in Italy near the Austrian border, as shown in a mock-up exhibit at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.. Such a journey through the Arctic was impossible in the Solutrean day and age.
No, Native Americans all derive from Asians who crossed over from Siberia (putting aside a small few Pacific island-mariners post-Clovis) in multiple waves of widely spaced migrations. Still, there is an uncanny resemblance between the Clovis spear points in America and the spear points of the Solutreans in Europe, both made from a similar technique. It is furthermore noteworthy that the Clovis spear point in North America was nothing like the spear points of Asia and Siberia made from small razor-like flints called micro-blades embedded in a bone handle, though a fluted bifacial point was discovered at Uptar in northeastern Siberia from 8,260 years ago.[8] But the dissimilarity of weaponry between the Siberian and Clovis hunters does not signify that the Clovis people did not cross over from Siberia. They did. What it means is that these Chukchi hunters who migrated to North America were enormously innovative and developed a killer weapon that could tear through the hide of even the toughest mammoth. This weapon permitted mankind to populate both North and South America within the space of a thousand years. Peoples in Europe also figured out the same general weapons technology, but did so independently.
Simultaneous development in different parts of the globe should not be so surprising if it is kept in mind that Providence guided the human migrations and, frankly, much of human activities. Consider the fact that painted hand stencils or spray-painted hands appear in early cave paintings in Cueva de las Manos (“cave of the hands”) in Argentina, Patagonia region as they do in the caves of Roucadour in France and Australia. But that similarity does not suggest that the hand-stencil artists came from the same culture, only that they both had the same idea. Humans are like that.
On the other hand, the prospect that a handful of Pacific island-dwellers surrounding Australia or the Polynesians Islands, at some point in time, traveled over to South America on small boats remains open. But it is impossible that such Pacific island-hoppers made the trip to South America in pre-Clovis days (11,500 B.P.) or that they possessed the seafaring skills or canoes to make the enormous trans-Pacific journey, before 4,000 to 5,000 years ago. For even two islanders to cross thousands of miles of Pacific seas during that age in a canoe or catamaran boat would have been utterly miraculous. But it was possible, and this author is of the view that it did happen thousands of years ago post-Clovis, but all in all only in extremely small numbers, under 10 individuals, prior to the last thousand years. Such island voyagers to the Americas would have likely left their genetic imprint.
The Polynesians' primary voyaging craft in later years was the double canoe made of two hulls connected by lashed crossbeams. The two hulls gave their craft stability over the rough oceans and the capacity to carry heavy loads of families and their supplies and equipment; a central platform laid over the crossbeams provided the needed working, living, and storage space. Sails made of plaited leaves drove this ancient forerunner of the modern catamaran swiftly through the waters of the Pacific. Long steering paddles enabled Polynesian sailors to stay on course. These mariners developed a highly sophisticated navigation system based on observations of the stars, the ocean swells and currents, the flight patterns of seabirds and other natural signs to find their way over vast stretches of open ocean. And, as they moved farther away from the centers of Southeast Asia and New Guinea and finding familiar flora and fauna diminished, they developed a portable agricultural system whereby plants and animals they had domesticated were carried along in their canoes for transplantation onto new shores.
[1] “America’s Stone Age Explorers,” PBS television, NOVA Series, November 9, 2004.
[2] “Coming Into America,” Scientific American Frontiers Program #1406PBS television, July 20, 2004 (Alan Alda, narrator)
[3] Id.
[4] M. Seielstad, N. Yuldasheva, N. Singh, P. Underhill, P. Oefner, P. Shen and R. S. Wells, “A Novel Y-Chromosome Variant Puts an Upper Limit on the Timing of First Entry into the Americas.” Am. J. Hum. Genetics, 73:700 (2003).
[5] “America’s Stone Age Explorers,” PBS television, NOVA Series, November 9, 2004; “Stone Age Columbus,” BBC Television, November 21, 2004. See generally Dennis J. Stanford, “Researching the First Americans/Update,” Anthropology Explored 2d ed., edited by R. O. Selig, M.R. London and P.A. Kaupp, Smithsonian Books, 2004.
[6] “America’s Stone Age Explorers,” PBS television, NOVA Series, November 9, 2004, citing the work of Geneticist Doug Wallace and his team at the University of California at Irvine.
[7] A caveat is that geneticist Wallace studying mt-DNA samples from a Native American tribe, the Ojibwa, discovered a fifth source of mt-DNA, i.e., Haplotype X. Unlike A, B, C and D, he was not yet able to find this type in Siberia or eastern Asia. Instead, Wallace believed that it was similar to a mitochondrial lineage predominantly found in Europe. Haplotype X, present in North America native groups including Ojibwa, Nuu-Chah-Nulth, Sioux, and Yakima, has not yet been seen in any East Asian population, but a distantly related mtDNA type has been reported recently in European populations (e.g., Finns, Italians, and Druze)" (Fiedel 2000). Somehow it got to the Great Lakes region of the Americas some 14,000 to 15,000 years ago. However, haplotype X may have been introduced in Europe as a result of Turko-Mongol invasions or other migrations of Uralic peoples in more modern times. Alternatively, Professor Fiedel suggests it could be the result of an Upper Paleolithic admixture of Caucasoids and Mongoloids prior to any Berginia migration. Fiedel , Stuart J. 2000 “The Peopling of the New World: Present Evidence, New Theories, and Future Directions,” Journal of Archaeological Research, Vol. 8, No. 1 39-103. Respectfully, the hypothesis that Europeans managed to cross the Atlantic Ocean or hike across the Arctic Circle some 20,000 years ago is not correct. All of the waves of migrations to the Americas were from Asia.
[8] Andrew L. Slayman, “Siberian Fluted Point,” Archeology, vol. 49, no. 6 November/December 1996. [Excerpt from Creation: Towards a Theory of All Things, Copyright John Umana 2005] http://www.booksurge.com/author.php3?accountID=GPUB02608&affiliateID=A000932
posted by John Umana @ 7:34 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home