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DNA Reveals History of Vanished "Paleo-Eskimos"
An anonymous reader writes The earliest people in the North American Arctic remained isolated from others in the region for over 4,000 years before vanishing around 700 years ago, new analysis shows. The study also reveals that today's Inuit and Native Americans of the Arctic are genetically distinct from the region's first settlers. "A single founding population settled, and endured the harsh environmental conditions of the Arctic, for almost 5,000 years — during which time the culture and lifestyle changed enough to be represented as distinct cultural units," explained Dr Maanasa Raghavan, first author of the new paper.
Since 90 percent of native americans were wiped out by european diseases this basically says that 80 percent of the original population of the americas was not resistant to euroasiatic diseases. There is a marked non-scientific warpath to discredit the solutrean hypothesis. The extremes to which modern historians go to discredit the solutrean hypothesis actually reduce the entire discipline to a pseudoscience. Please realize that there was most likely a constant low level genetic drift between the continents for the past 40 thousand years. I am fairly confident that the bronze age atlantic civilization was in sporadic contact with the new world. The massive push for colonization of the new world / pursuit of new paths of commerce to asia brought about by the fall of constantinople and monopolization of the east west trade coupled with the resurgence of written history in europe in no way sheds doubt on the ability of ancient mariners to traverse the globe.