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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
~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
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.
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