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Coast Seafarers - Bering land bridge - Diverse Theories disputed United States

Submitted by coldrum on Tuesday, 22 June 2010  Page Views: 19291

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Country: United States Schoolchildren can recite the story of the first Americans.
About 12,000 years ago, prehistoric humans walked out of Siberia, trekked across the Bering land bridge and down an ice-free corridor into inner North America, where they hunted Ice Age elephants and peopled the new world.
Multiple studies now detract from this "single entrance" theory.

Michael Collins, an archaeologist with the Texas Archaeological Research Laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin:

For more than 20 years, Collins and other scientists have been digging up artifacts from Chile to Texas that convince them the first Americans didn't walk here at all, but came by boat, and arrived much earlier than previously thought.

"This has been hotly debated," Collins said. "That theory has held sway for 70 years or so. But a few of us for the last 25 years have come to seriously doubt that theory."

Collins was in San Antonio to talk about the shifting debate over the first Americans. Collins and archaeologist Robert Ricklis, who excavated a 7,000-year-old cemetery near Victoria, spoke in January at a Southern Texas Archaeological Association meeting at the University of the Incarnate Word.
More on the presentation by Collins and others can be found at scottnet.com .

Note: Multiple news stories on Human Migration into North America. See comments on attached for reports from multiple studies, including Results of Largest DNA Survey: Most indigenous Americans are descended from a single group of migrants, but later waves of people made important contributions.
Contributor Bio for coldrum: Based in Milkyway, contributing since 2002. Favourite site: Avebury.

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"Coast Seafarers - Bering land bridge - Diverse Theories disputed" | Login/Create an Account | 24 News and Comments
  
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Biggest DNA Survey Yet: New World Settled in Three Waves from Asia by bat400 on Thursday, 12 July 2012
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Previous genetic data have lent support to the idea that America was colonised by a single migrant wave.
An international team of researchers have published their findings in the journal Nature.
"For years it has been contentious whether the settlement of the Americas occurred by means of a single or multiple migrations from Siberia," said co-author Prof Andres Ruiz-Linares from University College London (UCL). "But our research settles this debate: Native Americans do not stem from a single migration. Our study also begins to cast light on patterns of human dispersal within the Americas."
The team analysed data from 52 Native American and 17 Siberian groups, studying more than 300,000 variations in their DNA known as Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms, or SNPs.
This allowed them to examine patterns of genetic similarities and differences between the population groups.

The second and third migrations have left an impact only in Arctic populations whose languages belong to the Eskimo-Aleut family and in the Canadian Chipewyan who speak a language that belongs to the Na-Dene family.
However, even these populations have inherited most of their genome (the DNA sequence contained in the nuclei of cells) from the earliest migration.
The second and third waves left their mark mainly in populations living in the Arctic Eskimo-Aleut speakers derive more than 50% of their DNA from what the researchers call "First Americans", and the Chipewyan around 90%. This reflects the fact that the two later streams of migration from Asia mixed with the populations descended from the first wave.
"There are at least three deep lineages in Native American populations," said co-author David Reich, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School.
"The Asian lineage leading to First Americans is the most anciently diverged, whereas the Asian lineages that contributed some of the DNA to Eskimo-Aleut speakers and the Na-Dene-speaking Chipewyan from Canada are more closely related to present-day East Asian populations."
Evidence from mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), the genetic information in the mitochondria that power cells, supports descent from a single founding group of colonisers, who crossed from Siberia into America across the Bering land bridge.
This natural bridge appeared during the last Ice Age when sea levels were lower, allowing hunters to trek between the two continents.

[b]But a three-stage migration has been proposed before, based on a controversial interpretation of language relationships and physical features of the teeth of Native American groups.[b/]
The team also found that once in the Americas, people expanded southward along a route that hugged the coast, with populations splitting off along the way.
After their divergence, there was little gene flow among Native American groups, especially in South America.

Two glaring exceptions to this simple dispersal were also discovered. First, Central American Chibchan-speakers have ancestry from both North and South America, reflecting a migration back from South America to Central America.
Second, the Naukan and coastal Chukchi from north-eastern Siberia carry distinctive "First American" DNA. Thus, Eskimo-Aleut speakers migrated back to Asia, bringing Native American genes.

The team's analysis was complicated by the influx into the hemisphere of European and African immigrants since 1492 and the 500 years of genetic mixing that followed.
To address this, the authors developed methods that allowed them to focus on the sections of peoples' genomes that were of entirely Native American origin.

For more, see http://www.bbc.co.uk.
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New deglaciation data suggests earlier migration opportunity for First Americans by bat400 on Monday, 25 June 2012
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From the Statesman-Journal.com:

A new study of lake sediment cores from Sanak Island in the western Gulf of Alaska suggests that deglaciation there from the last Ice Age took place as much as 1,500 to 2,000 years earlier than previously thought, opening the door for earlier coastal migration models for the Americas.

The Sanak Island Biocomplexity Project, funded by the National Science Foundation, also concluded that the maximum thickness of the ice sheet in the Sanak Island region during the last glacial maximum was 70 meters – or about half that previously projected – suggesting that deglaciation could have happened more rapidly than earlier models predicted. (Published: Quaternary Science Reviews.)

The study, led by Nicole Misarti of Oregon State University, is important because it suggests that the possible coastal migration of people from Asia into North America and South America – popularly known as “First Americans” studies – could have begun as much as two millennia earlier than the generally accepted date of ice retreat in this area, which was 15,000 years before present.

“It is important to note that we did not find any archaeological evidence documenting earlier entrance into the continent,” said Misarti, a post-doctoral researcher in Oregon State’s College of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences. “But we did collect cores from widespread places on the island and determined the lake’s age of origin based on 22 radiocarbon dates that clearly document that the retreat of the Alaska Peninsula Glacier Complex was earlier than previously thought.”

“Glaciers would have retreated sufficiently so as to not hinder the movement of humans along the southern edge of the Bering land bridge as early as almost 17,000 years ago,” added Misarti, who recently accepted a faculty position at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks.

Wrote the researchers in their article: “While not proving that first Americans migrated along this corridor, these latest data from Sanak Island show that human migration across this portion of the coastal landscape was unimpeded by the APGC after 17 (thousand years before present), with a viable terrestrial landscape in place by 16.3 (thousand years before present), well before the earliest accepted sites in the Americas were inhabited.”

For much more, research based on sediment and pollen studies, see http://community.statesmanjournal.com/blogs/science..
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Re: Coast Seafarers - Bering land bridge - Diverse Theories disputed by Anonymous on Wednesday, 07 July 2010
new studies debunk micheal colins, they found out that the Bering Strait was dry 16000 years ago now and thats were the "natives"
came from, also that they speak a language simular to a siberian town callt kemp or kemt or sometyhing like that it escapes me.
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    Siberian - North American Language connection by bat400 on Monday, 25 June 2012
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    (Although this is an old posting...)
    I don't think either the "early de-glaciation" or "shore migration" theories "debunk" Michael Collins, whose finds at the Gault site support a pre-Clovis population in central Texas. His interpretation is not, I think, contradictory to any theory except "Clovis First".
    I think the poster is ref the similarity of Na-Dene languages to the Siberian Yeniseian language family. These language studies have been written about by Edward Vajda
    (Center for East Asian Studies, Western Washington University, Bellingham) and Merritt Ruhlen
    , anthropologist (Stanford University, California).
    [ Reply to This ]

Skulls show New World was settled twice: study by bat400 on Tuesday, 22 June 2010
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Submitted by coldrum --

Two distinct groups from Asia settled in the New World and not one single migration as suggested by previous genetic studies, experts said Monday after comparing the skulls of early Americans.

Paleoanthropologists from Brazil, Chile and Germany compared the skulls of several dozen Paleoamericans, dating back to the early days of migration 11,000 years ago, with the more recent remains of more than 300 Amerindians.

"We found that the differences between Early and Late Native American groups match the predictions of a two-migration scenario far better than they do those of any other hypothesis," they said.

"In other words, these differences are so large that it is highly improbable that the earliest inhabitants of the New World were the direct ancestors of recent Native American populations."

Their landmark research found differences in the cranial morphology that could only be explained by the fact that the last common ancestor of the Early and Late Native American groups came from outside the continent.

The experts agreed the differences were best explained by a scenario in which a first wave of settlers came across the Bering Strait from Northeast Asia followed by a second group from East Asia much later via the same route.



For more, see news.yahoo.com.
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New 'Molecular Clock' Aids Dating Of Human Migration History by coldrum on Thursday, 18 June 2009
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New 'Molecular Clock' Aids Dating Of Human Migration History

Researchers at the University of Leeds have devised a more accurate method of dating ancient human migration – even when no corroborating archaeological evidence exists.

Estimating the chronology of population migrations throughout mankind's early history has always been problematic. The most widely used genetic method works back to find the last common ancestor of any particular set of lineages using samples of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), but this method has recently been shown to be unreliable, throwing 20 years of research into doubt.

The new method refines the mtDNA calculation by taking into account the process of natural selection - which researchers realised was skewing their results - and has been tested successfully against known colonisation dates confirmed by archaeological evidence, such as in Polynesia in the Pacific (approximately 3,000 years ago), and the Canary Islands (approximately 2,500 years ago)....

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Native Americans Descended From a Single Ancestral Group, DNA Study Confirms by coldrum on Wednesday, 17 June 2009
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For two decades, researchers have been using a growing volume of genetic data to debate whether ancestors of Native Americans emigrated to the New World in one wave or successive waves, or from one ancestral Asian population or a number of different populations.

Now, after painstakingly comparing DNA samples from people in dozens of modern-day Native American and Eurasian groups, an international team of scientists thinks it can put the matter to rest: Virtually without exception the new evidence supports the single ancestral population theory.

“Our work provides strong evidence that, in general, Native Americans are more closely related to each other than to any other existing Asian populations, except those that live at the very edge of the Bering Strait,” said Kari Britt Schroeder, a lecturer at the University of California, Davis, and the first author on the paper describing the study.

“While earlier studies have already supported this conclusion, what’s different about...

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Re: Migrants settled New World in tandem by Anonymous on Thursday, 19 February 2009
In Trying to figure all of this out, there was an article about a meteor crash that would have wiped out the megafauna and most human populations about 12,000 years ago, i.e. the"Clovis"culture. Than we have a Genome project, that states a date of 17,000 years ago for a Beringian population
in North, Central and South America, and a site in the Carolinas called Topper, and another in Brazil i.e. Pedra Furada which reports a pre-Clovis date at 50,000 years ago. I think one would wish that these people get together and try to figure out what was going on here. There seems to be much more to the migration of ancient peoples to the Americas than most are willing to concede.
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Migrants settled New World in tandem by bat400 on Thursday, 19 February 2009
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Submitted by coldrum ---

Diversity ruled among the first American settlers. Within a relatively short time span, at least two groups of people trekked across a land bridge from Asia to Alaska and then went their separate ways, one down the Pacific Coast and the other into the heart of North America, a new genetic study suggests.

A team led by geneticist Antonio Torroni of the University of Pavia in Italy estimates that these separate migrations into the New World occurred between 17,000 and 15,000 years ago.

Even more populations with distinct genetic signatures and languages may have crossed a now-submerged strip of land, known as Beringia, that connected northeastern Asia to North America within that relatively narrow window of time, the scientists also contend in a paper published online January 8 and in the Jan. 13 Current Biology.

“Whereas some recent investigators had thought that a single major population expansion explained all mitochondrial DNA variation among Native...

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Re: Beringia: Humans were here by Anonymous on Monday, 18 August 2008
Now that there is a claim to finding a "Bigfoot Corpse", Which could prove a link to pre-hominids, I'm waiting for the skeptics to explain this one, see www.searchingfor bigfoot.com
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    Bigfoot, my big --- foot. by bat400 on Tuesday, 19 August 2008
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    *sigh* Try to focus. The skeptics don't need to explain the tales of guys making hoax You Tube videos and their Las Vegas promoter. If they can come up with more than the DNA of a opossum, then let's talk again. Press conference link from the San Jose Mercury News.
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    Re: Bigfoot, my big --- foot. by Anonymous on Wednesday, 20 August 2008
    I couldn't agree more, the whole thing was a deliberate HOAX, Just can't understand why two officials would try to pull this off, didn't they think people would find out ???
    A rubber Halloween costume no less !!!!
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    Re: Beringia: Humans were here by Anonymous on Saturday, 23 August 2008
    I'm sure that the need to bring another cryptid into study can be a poweful incentive, and so many of us would either like to see the question settled, or as skeptics get rid of the phonies. I'm hoping charges are brought against the perpetrators of this hoax, and an example is made of their devious folly. As this hinders and embarasses those who have taken the time to file valid reports. and continue serious research.
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Beringia: Humans were here by bat400 on Sunday, 17 August 2008
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Originally sent by colrum:

It was an extraordinary ancient land filled with fantastic creatures and intrepid people.

ALEX ROSLIN, Special to The Gazette, May 17, 2008.

Beringia is thought by a handful of renegade scientists to be a prehistoric homeland for aboriginal people who later spread across the Americas and the key to one of archeology's greatest Holy Grails - figuring out how humans first got to this continent.

This July, Jacques Cinq-Mars, a renowned archeologist living in Longueuil, is heading to Beringia - a vast territory that once spanned the Yukon, Alaska and Siberia - in hopes of resolving a controversy he unleashed nearly 20 years ago when he chanced upon a curious-looking cave in the Yukon's Keele Mountain Range, perched on a ridge high above the Bluefish River.

Here, at a site known as the Bluefish Caves, Cinq-Mars's team discovered something that would turn archeology on its ear and has fuelled debate ever since - a chipped mammoth bone that appeared to have...

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Re: First Americans Pacific Coast Seafarers by Anonymous on Monday, 21 April 2008
Why can't each of the theories be correct. They came by boat and they came by land. The sea was lower because so much water was frozen in the ice sheets, so any number of different routes may have been possible. There is even some evidence that people came by boat to the east coast. So there were multiple migrations, perhaps some during similar time periods. I think it's evident that the 12,000 years ago date is not early enough.
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Re: First Americans Pacific Coast Seafarers by Aluta on Friday, 18 April 2008
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Yes, the word "first" creeps into these reports to sully otherwise good research. People came by boats to the Pacific coast. That's useful information. But what proof is there to show they were the first? We just don't have all of the facts yet.
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Re: First Americans Pacific Coast Seafarers by Anonymous on Friday, 18 April 2008
Check out "Atlantis in America" by Zapp and Erikson. Look beyond the word Atlantis in the title, because this is a serious scientific study of evidence pointing to very early visitations by people of the South Pacific to several areas along the Pacific coasts of South and Central America.

As for the East Coast, Drs. Greg & Lora Little, Bill Donato and others believe that a maritime civilization inhabited the Bahamas as early as 15,000 years ago. A growing body of physical evidence indicates a connection to the very early Phoenicians of the Mediterranean.

There's no doubt there was a migration across the Bering land bridge, but to think that the entire "new world" was settled via this route is to ignore some pretty compelling evidence to the contrary.

A blog on this subject is at http://www.TheMegaBlog.com.
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Re: First Americans Pacific Coast Seafarers by Anonymous on Friday, 18 April 2008
This is a;; very interesting but where did the East coast (particularly Newfoundland) prehistoric peoples come from and how long ago?
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Re: First Americans Pacific Coast Seafarers by Anonymous on Tuesday, 15 April 2008
We're just waiting for the explorations along the Atlantic Coast of submerged sites to come to light, than I'd like to see what the "Clovis First experts" have to say, OR NOT !!!
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Re: First Americans Pacific Coast Seafarers by sem on Sunday, 13 April 2008
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Paradigm is the problem. If yours fits it then OK, if it doesn't .. tough.
Quote Louis Leakey (he of Olduvai Gorge fame), "The artifacts...satisfy me... that toolmaking man was here 50,000yrs ago." He was talking about Calico in California.




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First Americans Pacific Coast Seafarers by bat400 on Saturday, 12 April 2008
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Originally submitted by coldrum ---
Rapidly a new paradigm for the settlement of America seems to be taking hold: By land and sea.

A team of U.S. researchers has proposed a new "working model" for when and how humans came to the New World, suggesting that ancient seafarers, traveling by boat along the ice-fringed British Columbia coast, launched the peopling of the Americas about 15,000 years ago.

According to a report from Canwest News Service, a team led by Texas A&M University anthropologist Ted Goebel has proposed the theory.

It challenges a long-held view that the earliest newcomers to North America were big-game hunters who arrived about 12,000 years ago from Siberia, pursuing mammoths and other ice age prey across the dried-up Bering Strait to Alaska and the Yukon.

They then eventually spread south to warmer parts of North America through an ice-free corridor in present-day Alberta.

It appears, the U.S. researchers concluded, that both streams of migration occurred.

Bu...

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    Re: First Americans Pacific Coast Seafarers by bat400 on Sunday, 13 April 2008
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    Originally submitted by coldrum -- A different story on the same work by Texas A&M.

    A team led by two Texas A&M University anthropologists now believes the first Americans came to this country 1,000 to 2,000 years earlier than the 13,500 years ago previously thought, which could shift historic timelines.

    The team's findings are outlined in a review article in the journal Science entitled "The Late Pleistocene Dispersal of Modern Humans in the Americas," which synthesizes new data suggesting the migration from Alaska started about 15,000 years ago.

    This theory is supported by not only archaeological evidence, but also from genetic evidence from living and ancient populations, says Ted Goebel, an anthropology professor at Texas A&M and associate director of Texas A&M's Center for the Study of the First Americans. He conducted the research with Michael R. Waters, a fellow anthropology professor at Texas A&M and director of the Center for the Study of the First Americans, and...

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Study of Dates Doubts Clovis First Model by bat400 on Friday, 23 February 2007
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Another study, this one being a careful examination of dates of Clovis finds, is published in the journal Science today.

"In recent years, some scientists have pieced together evidence from archaeological sites, DNA and languages that challenges this long-held view, dubbed "Clovis-first" because the wanderers' distinctive spear points first were found near Clovis, N.M.

"Now, a Texas A&M University researcher may have gone a step further, finding evidence that shatters the Clovis-first hypothesis and raises anew questions about who first came to the Americas, when they came and how they got here.

"Waters and Thomas Stafford, a colleague who invented a new technique for dating collagen found in bones, obtained material from 30 archaeological sites in the Americas, most of them associated with Clovis technology, and re-dated the material."

Their study shows the Clovis culture to have been a relatively short lived phenomena, perhaps indicative of the discovery and intensive...

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Re: Bering land bridge theory disputed by Aluta on Thursday, 01 February 2007
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Oh, this is SO sweet!
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