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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."
There have been indications of this sort of thing for some time, but it's very politically contentious. Kennewick man is one example. There have been some ideas that the people in Tierra Del Fuego had different origins from other groups in South America (Indicating perhaps they were remnants of a previous group coming to the Americas that were displaced by later arrivals).
The main effect is to slow down either supporting or falsifying the ideas about earlier human groups in the western hemisphere.
It's an area where peoples sense of origin and cultural place are on the line, and that's often a very sensitive spot. This leads to a lot of questioning of motives of the scientists in doing the research (i.e. They're trying to say we were just another set of invaders), and of the native groups when they want remains turned over before study (i.e. They're trying to hinder our research.).
the Outback restaurant at the Indian casino makes sense. G'Day Kemosabe!
(Advance apologies to the cultures I just insulted)
Arrogance is Confidence which lacks integrity. -- me
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.
to all who think that DNA sequencing is going to solve the debate:
1. The DNA had to be extracted from bone. This is difficult, the DNA may be fragmented leading to incomplete or dubious sequences.
2. One way to look at population genetics is to look at mitochondrial DNA, which is transmitted maternally. All assumptions on dating changes in that DNA depend on assumptions about mutation rates which are increasingly turning out to be incorrect.
3. Another way to do it is to look at repetitive sequences in DNA. Here, the amount of change between population groups is used as a timer for divergence. Turns out that repetitive DNA attracts mutations, again screwing up timing estimates.
Add to this a nice mixture of ethnic pride, scientific pride and plain old human thickheadedness and we have ourselves a nice new long debate that isn't going to be solved anytime soon. Still, I like the idea. It's provocative and might actually help (in the long run) to rid the debate of who was there first of unconstructive emotions.
----- One learns to itch where one can scratch.
Although a song about a sheep=thieving hobo that commits suicide may seem to be appropriate, it's not the Australian national anthem. The correct national anthem is "Advance Australia Fair"... but it's nowhere near as interesting.
-ReK
md5sum -c reality.md5
reality: FAILED
md5sum: WARNING: 1 of 1 computed checksum did NOT match
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.
No seriously. I'm a scientist, and it's so ruthlessly political it's not funny. The idea sounds good - look at evidence, go where it takes you - and indeed that's the idea. As such, science is apolitical. But whenever you're depending upon agencies for funding, and their biases, it's impossible to keep science clean. It's political on both the large scale (if I publish this work that happens to support this political party's platform, I never get funding from this agency propped up by the other party) and on the small scale (if I don't kiss this scientist's ass in the intro to my paper, it ain't getting published - and if I question his work, I'll never get published again). I've been bitten by both so many times I can't count.
I'm glad people who aren't scientists think it's this glorious, nearly untainted objective field, but after the experiments are done, it's as political or more than other fields. And experiments done in a vacuum (figuratively, of course) do no good. And work banished to third-tier journals because its authors have been blackballed for whatever reason might as well not exist, because it doesn't get noticed. And so much of the interesting research that does get press is due to shameless self promotion, that research gets attacked viciously, and it ends up "debunked." The study in the story suffers from some of that effect. Always beware of science released in a press conference, newspaper, or magazine before it's published in a peer-reviewed journal. Also beware of the small-minded assholes who attack groundbreaking research because they didn't come up with it first.
I hate cronyism, and it's half the reason I'm not going into academics. Of course, I'll admit if I were a social scientist, I'd have committed suicide by now. That's a field where you're expected to know the outcome before you investigate, and where any politically incorrect answers aren't even allowed.
I think in my next life I'll be an electrician or something.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
The British had been transporting their criminals to the American colonies way before they had start to do so to Australia. It was the result of Independence that caused Britain to start using Australia.
One Man's Trash Is Another Man's Treasure.
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).