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First Americans May Have Been Australian
DarthVeda writes "There are some surprising new findings that suggest the first inhabitants of America may have come from down under rather than Siberia. The research is based off of 'distinctive' skulls that predate known Native American skulls. The researchers intend to use extracted DNA to help prove their findings."
Lets finally establish proof that the first Americans were not the Clovis peoples and that they may not be Siberian Asians. End this tyranny of tribal political favoritism such as that which is preventing research on Kennewick man and other anthropological finds. An elementary statistical analysis (binomial statistics) will show that with the average tribe lasting say 100 years (disease, genocide, slavery, warfare, etc. being their demise) the statistical chance that any tribe can lay claim to 9,000 year old remains (Kennewick man) is near zero. Only tools like DNA analysis can establish genetic inheritance. Also end the purely political games played by American aborigines that every discovery on their claimed tribal lands is sacred. Notice how the location of sacred sites is not known before hand yet the mere mention of a possible find the site is declared as a known sacred site. Can you be more transparent! The anthropological evidence has already established that there have been at least two migration waves to the Americas of which the Clovis is the last. The history of human migration and civilization development is an inheritance that belongs to all of us. When explorations of the lands that were exposed during the last ice age begin we will discover new peoples and civilizations. This human journey is our greatest story. It cannot continue to be contaminated by political special status spoils that unfortunately American aborigines have descended into. Lorenz H. Menke, Jr.
There is an accompanying problem that coastal wave action will have mangled most of the evidence of human expansion in the period when sea levels were rising after the peak of the last glaciation. But in the fullness of time we should at least be able to produce an accurate history of sea level change over that period and usably model related costal storm dynamics so as to narrow in on the most promising candidate submarine sites.
We need to clear our mind of what we know of our modern world in order to see that in very many circumstances through prehistory, a primitive boat would have been the most productive means of expanding into new territory. By comparison, travelling overland in the wild tropics is a particularly tortuous process. So it becomes unsurprising that those cultures which saw the seas as their highways would have spread further and faster.We are still one species, so all those stories should be seen as parts of our story, not as something to be appropriated by a particular subculture. And we will only start to really appreciate the wealth of human prehistory when we let go of our speciest blinders and learn to respect and admire the different achievements of other critters with whom we share this ball of rock.
-- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.
I'm no [insert anything here]ogist, but something tells me no society had boats capable of open ocean travel 12000 years ago.
It's also been claimed that Chinese or Japanese seafarers settled all over the pacific coast between California and Chile between 1500 and 1000 years ago, which from a technology standopint is far more believeable. There is evidence to suggest that these people sailed all the way around South America and back northward, reaching most of the Brazilian coastline (to map the movements of the stars, no less, proving that the Earth revolved around the sun).