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."

Comments

A bit more in an existing debate:

[Hartree]

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.).

Re:A bit more in an existing debate:

[damiangerous]

Seriously, scientists found evidence and are investigating, because that's their job. Science doesn't start with a conclusion and work backwards (except "creation science")

You are naive if you believe that. "Scientists" are people too, and they have their own beliefs and biases. Science is just as political a field as any other. There's no shortage of scientists who decide what they want to prove ahead of time, and there's no shortage of sound but unpoplar science "shouted down" for no other reason that it's unpopular.

Re:A bit more in an existing debate:

[Alomex]

Science is just as political a field as any other.

Pfftt. While science does have politics, it is the least political field known to mankind. For every 'cuz I don't like your face' you encounter in the hard (real) sciences you find 20 such stans in the humanities and 400 in artistic endeavours. That is why so much more progress has been made in the hard sciences as compared to the soft social sciences.

Suddenly...

[GOD_ALMIGHTY]

the Outback restaurant at the Indian casino makes sense. G'Day Kemosabe!
(Advance apologies to the cultures I just insulted)

A word of caution..

[InternationalCow]

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.

Wrong song...

[ReKleSS]

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

Coast hugging sailors were more mobile

[ynotds]

When explorations of the lands that were exposed during the last ice age begin we will discover new peoples and civilizations.

Archaeology is in a state of understandable denial about the importance of looking for evidence on the drowned margins of land masses, in a large part for the same reason that we have allowed marine ecosystems to become so much more degraded by our economic imperatives ... because we do not so easily see what lies beneath the sea.

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.

This human journey is our greatest story.

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.