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Earliest Americans Arrived In Waves, DNA Study Finds
NotSanguine writes "Nicholas Wade of the New York Times has written an article about a new DNA study that suggests the earliest Americans arrived in three waves, not one. 'North and South America were first populated by three waves of migrants from Siberia rather than just a single migration, say researchers who have studied the whole genomes of Native Americans in South America and Canada. Some scientists assert that the Americas were peopled in one large migration from Siberia that happened about 15,000 years ago, but the new genetic research shows that this central episode was followed by at least two smaller migrations from Siberia, one by people who became the ancestors of today's Eskimos and Aleutians and another by people speaking Na-Dene, whose descendants are confined to North America.' The study, published online (paywalled), investigated geographic, linguistic and genetic diversity in native American populations."
Kinda old news. I thought the 'single wave' theory had been abandoned decades ago, though some tribes have been lobbying to rewrite history since their mythology mandates they were the 'first' ones there, so waves conflict with doctrine.
Not as old, about 9000 years.. but it seems Caucasian people from Europe made their way to North America long, long before even the Vikings are known to have done so. Genetic material from the burials was sequenced by scientists back in the 1990s. It isn't (as far as I know) thought that any ancestors from this group of people survive today. They died out somewhere along the way.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ancient/americas-bog-people.html
www.thescienceforum.com/history/27178-pre-columbian-american-european-contacts.html
The only thing I question is they are still sticking by the Clovis dogma and insisting that the two other waves were later. Why this has always been an issue is the oldest bones found were always very far south. It seemed South America and the southern US were populated before the Clovis migration. Even Clovis itself is questionable since Asians never made that type of point the only other place they were made was Europe. They are ignoring the likelihood that there were migrations earlier that have no decendants. Just look at things like native american long houses. They are the same as Viking ones. Odds are there were multiple migrations from Europe that were wiped out. There have been skeletons found that were potentially European but the local indian groups have always fought testing. Look at another one the Mound Builders. That definitely started in the UK and it coincidentally showed up later in the Eastern US. There are simply too many coincidences related to the northeast and Europe.
It depends on the definition of "native" I guess:
- if it means "first humans to inhabitate a certain territory", then they are.
- if it means "first humans to be born in a territory", then almost no human but a small fraction of Africans is native to anywhere.
In a related announcement from Ottawa, Canadian Aboriginals will henceforth be known as "First, Second and Third Nations Peoples".
The earliest immigrants arrived in waves, more recent immigrants arrived in boats...
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Animals: What the heck are those thing...OHSHI-*thump* ARRRGH! *dies from rock to head*
First Wave: Who they heck are those gu...OHSHI-*thunk* ARRGH! *dies from fire-hardened spear to the guts*
Second Wave: Who the heck are those gu...OHSHI-*THOCK!* ARRGH! *dies from Clovis point to the chest*
Third Wave: Who the heck are those gu...OHSHI-*BOOM!* ARRGH! *dies from musket ball*
Makes you wonder what the next wave for us is going to look like?
Probably something like: "What's that in the sk*FLASH! sizzle-pop*
[End Of Line]
...but they also behaved like particles.
There are people who will continue to believe that Native Americans are one of the lost tribes of Israel.
One of them wants to be President.
You are welcome on my lawn.
It's a U.S. paper. While Eskimo is offensive in Canada and Greenland it isn't in the U.S. including Alaska.
A migration from Siberia 15,000 years ago? I'm calling bullshit. If it happened, it would be in the Bible. And as if the Earth even existed 15,000 years ago!
In conclusion, Jesus.
I am never ceased to be amazed at seeing Scientists make "amazing discoveries" of what should be COMMON SENSE principals.
"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen." Albert Einstein.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
At least we could hear the Harley people coming from a few continents away.
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
You're kidding right? It's a poke at the Mormon candidate: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamanites
Actually, there are examples of "one off" events in early human history, such as the migration out of Africa by a subset of the ancestral human population some 50,000 years ago.
According to Nicolas Wade's fascinating book "Before the Dawn" (yes, the same Nicolas Wade from TFA), all the genetic evidence points to a single band of maybe 150 people leaving the rest of the ancestral human population behind in Africa, and populating all the rest of the world. Of course, the natural question is, why didn't other waves follow them in all the millennia since then?
The answer is, in part, that the first migrants already blocked the exits. The original departure from Africa was less a migration than it was an expansion... individuals tended to live in roughly the area they were born, and it was only the ever-growing population numbers that drove the advancing wave of modern humans through Asia and Europe generation after generation. The modern humans had a strong advantage (probably language) over the archaic hominids already occupying the new lands, but the human population in Africa had no such advantage over their brethren once the first wave spread out past the Red Sea. Hence, the migration out of Africa appears to have been a one-time event of the type you so quickly derided as nonsense.
Procrastination Man strikes again!
Ya where I live you can't mention this because the whole mytho thing. Very annoying science is science.
I recall reading (maybe 20-30 years ago) that blood types were significantly different between North American and South American natives. According to these maps, South and Central Americans are almost exclusively blood group O, while blood group A exists in North America, especially in arctic and subarctic regions. FYI, native Americans and East Asians often have Diego positive blood, whereas the rest of the world is exclusively Diego negative.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
What term do you propose? Not all Eskimos outside Canada are Inuit, and this very item underlines the need for a term grouping Inuit and Yupik peoples, on genetic and linguistic grounds.
In hist book, Before the Dawn, he describes the mutations in the parasite body louse (different from head louse) that lives of humans. From it you can build a tree of migration of human bands. You can also look at the mutations in Y chromosome. Or the mito-chondrial DNA. Or the language families and their inheritance traits.
The most significant finding is that, all these lines of evidence agree. They don't contradict each other. And they are not very broad either so the concordance is significant. Other interesting things are, we started wearing clothes 75000 years ago. Body louse can live only in clothing, it split off from head louse 75000 years ago. There was a Y chromosome Adam, last common ancestors to all living humans about 75000 years ago. There was a mitochondrial eve, last common female ancestor who lived in Africa some 130000 years ago.
I think he mentioned that dogs were domesticated in East Asia/Siberia some 20000 years ago. Did Amerindians have domesticated dogs? That would be a very interesting marker.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
He couldn't be any worse than the Muslim one.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Have the possibilities of an early European people moving east and then over Bering been ruled out? After all, Caucasians have been found everywhere from western Europe, to southern India, and Xinjiang.
It is a possibility, but it is one best confirmed with an archeological/anthropological find, not one via haplotypes. The reason for this, and using haplotype X as an example, is as follows (a pausible theory):
Some population X (called so because they carry haplotype X) at some point migrated somewhere in Asia, and from there split into several groups, of which two survived long enough for their genetic contribution to persist to the present day. One moved Westward and contributed their version of haplotype X into what would constitute the "European" gene pool. The other moved Eastward and contributed their own version of haplotype X into "some" of the Siberian immigrants that would survive and become "some" of the Paleo-Indians.
Other splinter and distinct populations from the original population X might have existed across Eurasia and the Americas, with their generic contribution nixed off the generic pool.
For all we know, haplotype X could have originated from, say, a splinter group of Australoids that went North, separated from the rest who were on their way to South Asia and eventually Australia. And the splinter group developed haplotype X (or haplotype X became extinct among the other Australoids.) The splinter group then became intermixed with some of the Eurasian population that would give birth to the the so-called "Caucasian" and "Mongoloid" populations. I'm pulling this out of my ass, but this would also be possible.
Heck, what if haplotype X is of Neanderthal or Denisovan stock. The former is almost certain to have intermixed with early Eurasians (before the Caucasian-Mongoloid split), or at least with the European/Middle Eastern precursors. The later is known (via DNA analysis) to have left a genetic heritage among the Melanesian people.
Or what if haplotype X were to come from a yet undiscovered hominid (neither Neanderthal or Denisovan)?
So the point of all this speculative soup is that we cannot ascertain a Caucasoid/European origin to haplotype X just by looking at the haplotype alone. You will need:
I for one find the Solutrean hypothesis of Ice Age people migrating from Europe into Eastern North America (by walking/kayaking their way along the North Atlantic Ice Sheet) very tantalizing. Hey, it could be feasible (if people were able to boat their way to Australia 50-60K years ago, why not this?) But it is one that needs archaeological evidence.