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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.
probably a gated community, too.
Native Native Americans wiped out by Native Americans. This will be a fine discussion...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
4000 years ago isn't that ancient. The clovis people were around in the americas 12,000 years ago
Although it isn't widely taught about in North American schools and even colleges due to it being a politically sensitive topic, anyone who looks into the matter in more depth is sure to learn about the Clovis culture that existed in North America prior to the arrival of the ancestors of what are today called "Native Americans".
It's likely that the ancestors of today's "Natives" may have helped contribute to the elimination of the Clovis people.
So it is in fact quite hypocritical of today's "Natives" to complain about the actions of Europeans centuries ago, when they themselves very likely engaged in the same sort of behavior when they arrived some time earlier.
~80% of current Native Americans are direct decedents of Clovis people.
http://www.npr.org/2014/02/13/...
http://news.ku.dk/all_news/201...
SJWs are the new boogeyman. -Me
Ah, yes! The "Both Sides Do It" argument comes to archaeological discussion.
Why shouldn't it?
As a physicist, I think it's critical for all of the facts to be on the table, even if they may be deemed politically incorrect.
This is what separates real science from the so-called social sciences.
Real scientists stand for nothing less than the absolute truth, or as close as we can possibly come to it. Social scientists, and I use the term 'scientist' very lightly here, tend to only want to consider the facts that don't hurt people's feelings, or facts that don't further their political ambitions. What they engage in is not science; it's politics, if not outright propaganda.
The real scientific facts are beginning to show that the ancestors of today's Amerindian population were not as innocent as they've often been portrayed by so-called social scientists and politicians. Thus the special treatment and benefits that today's Amerindian population receive are not deserved, are without basis, and should in all fairness be taken away. They should be treated as any other Eurasian-descended individual is treated.
Not that you are a physicist or stuff.
Real ones abide by the doctrine that science doesn't take sides.
You're a fake and a rabid right wing European Invasion denier.
Go to hell.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
A non-violent mass die-off could suggest something along the lines of a population's first exposure to a new disease (as in one nobody in the population has any immunity for) of some sort, perhaps several. Slightly more modern examples include native american populations that essentially disappeared during the early days of European exploration and settlement of north america.
-- That grumpy BSD guy - http://bsdly.blogspot.com/
I live around three or four major reservations and have visited others. Poverty among the people governed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs is far, far worse than the poverty of just about any other group, and in part it stems from the policies of the BIA.
There's a little known fact that if land granted to individuals is not worked, lived on, or otherwise improved by those individuals, being effectively unclaimed the BIA auctions it off, and anyone, not just Indians, can bid. The buyer can't necessarily open-sell that land, but given that it's rural farming or ranching land they can profit through its use, and it can be inherited. Worse, the BIA doesn't assign contiguous chunks to family groups, The father's land may be one area, the mother's another, and the childrens' bits spread out. The land not-worked eventually becomes a patchwork of non-native land among the native land in the reservation.
So, first we take away their use of their original lands so we can have them. Then we slaughter large numbers of them them and confine them to 'reservations', then we start taking away the reservations. Yeah, they're so getting special treatment and benefits...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
There is a lot of scientific reasons to doubt the Solutrean hypothesis, and very little scientific reason to back it. For instance, the lack of DNA or linguistic similarities. As of now, it is a theory mostly supported by the Discovery channel and such.
40 thousand years of contact, with no evidence to show for it? It seems very unlikely. There's been pretty good written records in Europe for more than 2,000 years, surely if there was constant contact with the New World there would have been some kind of record. And monopolization of the East-West trade didn't cause exploring. The lack of Mongolian monopolization was the reason for the push. Pre-Roman civilization simply wasn't complex enough or sea-going enough to travel across the Atlantic.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
"Social scientists, and I use the term 'scientist' very lightly here, tend to only want to consider the facts that don't hurt people's feelings"
Or perhaps those things you call facts simply aren't actual facts.
80 percent of the original population of the americas was not resistant to euroasiatic diseases.
At the time they migrated to the Americas, the people in Eurasia were not resistant either. They became resistant when they started keeping herds of animals.
There is a marked non-scientific warpath to discredit the solutrean hypothesis.
The problem with the hypothesis is that "Asian" people not only replaced "Caucasian-like" people in North America, but that the same thing happened in Northeast Asia. The original aboriginal people of Northeast Asia were similar to Europeans in facial structure and hair color/texture. There are still living remnants of these populations, such as the Ainu people in Hokkaido and Sakhalin, and remains of vanished tribes, such as the Tarim Mummies. So it is more plausible that if "Caucasian-like" people lived in America 15,000 years ago, they came from Northeast Asia, not Europe, and they were wiped out (or assimilated) by the same wave of "Asians" that wiped them out in NE Asia. So, in the absence of other supporting evidence, the Solutrean Hypothesis does not pass Occam's Razor.
There is a lot of scientific reasons to doubt the Solutrean hypothesis, and very little scientific reason to back it. For instance, the lack of DNA or linguistic similarities. As of now, it is a theory mostly supported by the Discovery channel and such.
40 thousand years of contact, with no evidence to show for it? It seems very unlikely. There's been pretty good written records in Europe for more than 2,000 years, surely if there was constant contact with the New World there would have been some kind of record.
Leaving the Solutrean hypothesis aside for a minute some of these 'crazy' ideas that our ancestors were more mobile than we give them credit for have been stigmatized by the great egos in the scientific community in the past to the point where putting serious effort into investigating them was the equivalent of professional suicide. Even so sometimes, not always, but sometimes, they deserve better than to be ignored. In fact there is a written record that goes back at least a thousand years about contact between Europe and N-America:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saga_of_Erik_the_Red
These records have been well know for a long time but nevertheless until the discovery of L'Anse aux Meadows was rubbed in their faces some scientists thought accounts of Viking travel to the Americas were folk tales that should not be taken seriously. Since then Native American DNA has been found in Icelanders and that DNA is thought to be the result of pre-Columbian contact. Basically there is now genetic evidence that at least one Native American woman was brought to Iceland where she married a local man resulting in a group of living descendants:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/11/101123-native-american-indian-vikings-iceland-genetic-dna-science-europe/
This is not really so surprising if you think about it. If the Vikings, who count among the greatest navigators and seafarers in history, could find America. Why is it unthinkable that some Native Americans could not have gone back with them to Europe? There is no mention of this in the Sagas or contemporary annals but does that mean it didn't happen? The DNA seems to tell a different story. Another good example is that there is a growing body of evidence that Native Americans had pre Columbian contact with Polynesians which was considered laughable not so long ago. In retrospect it seems pretty ridiculous to think that scientists once considered it obvious a people who are arguably the greatest navigators on earth and who were capable of sailing for thousands of miles over open ocean between tiny islands with primitive technology would have missed what are by far the two biggest islands in the Pacific but that's sicentists for you. In the end they are only human and it takes a change of generations for the thinking to change.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
All this reminds me of the Lake Mungo skeletons in Australia.
Despite having no genetic link to modern Aborigines, these skeletons were returned to the Aborigines and are not allowed to be "studied" nor any new remains studied.
DNA showed them to be unrelated to Aborigines and more "European" looking, especially at 6'5" and slender.
It is a total travesty that we are unable to properly investigate their part in evolution.
Their existence threatened the idea of Aborigines being the "first" Australians and hence were "removed" from further research.
After all these years, did he, or did he not get satisfaction? The double negative raises doubts, these decades on.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear