"Rewrite the history books again - that Bering Land Bridge..." Topic

An international team of researchers led by Eske Willerslev from the Natural History Museum of Denmark has concluded that, although the corridor opened up around 14,000 to 15,000 years ago, it remained free of vegetation and animals for thousands of years. Consequently, it was not able to sustain human migrants until much later, around 12,600 years ago. That presents a chronological problem for archaeologists because humans were already in the Americas by that time; evidence shows that humans were present in South America as long as 14,700 years ago…

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What's so hard about a walk across the ice sheet?

No fish to fish?

I don't think there is anything new here; the use of the Pacific coast has been a theory for some time.

True, Joe, but there's still controversy about that. And ruling out the possibility of the trek across Beringia is something new. Although. Paleos might still have migrated from Siberia to Alaska along the shore of the land bridge, fishing and hunting marine mammals.

I was just reading Frank Waters' The Book of the Hopi. Waters says the Hopi elders told him that the Hopis' ancestors migrated to South America across the Pacific, through a series of four previous 'worlds', each of which in turn was destroyed and sunk in the ocean.

You mean rewrite the prehistory books.

Just another ploy to keep the Research Grant Money Train rolling for the academic publish-or-perish crowd.

These "new" findings will require new research projects.

Zippy, you might find this interesting:

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I guess that means the ancient astronaut people are right after all.

Thanks for the link Joe. Lot's of interesting articles on that site, I've bookmarked it for further reading.

Yes, it's well accepted that Paleos were on the California coast in the late Pleistocene, and that they probably got there via the north Pacific coastal route.

One question outstanding is whether other people were also arriving via Beringia and the ice-free corridor through the Yukon. If not…then the coastal Paleos must have ginned up Clovis culture de novo, transforming from fishers and whalers to land-lubbing mammoth and caribou hunters and exploding across the hemisphere in a frenzy of big game hunting once they got south of the ice edge. I could more easily believe that the hunters walked here via the land bridge.

The big controversy is the sites in South America that appear to be much older than Paleo. If those dates prove true, how did those people get there so early? Could mesolithic Austronesians have made a trans-Pacific crossing? Seems unlikely…but I still wonder.

Aliens, yeah, why not Spider Woman?

DNA evidence suggests the plausibility of your theory.

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Native Americans living in the Amazon bear an unexpected genetic connection to indigenous people in Australasia, suggesting a previously unknown wave of migration to the Americas thousands of years ago, a new study has found.

"It's incredibly surprising," said David Reich, Harvard Medical School professor of genetics and senior author of the study. "There's a strong working model in archaeology and genetics, of which I have been a proponent, that most Native Americans today extend from a single pulse of expansion south of the ice sheets--and that's wrong. We missed something very important in the original data."

It's not impossible, 75,000 years is a long time:

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ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIANS ARE descendents of the first people to leave Africa up to 75,000 years ago, a genetic study has found, confirming they may have the oldest continuous culture on the planet.

Professor Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen, who led the study, says Aboriginal Australians were the first modern humans to traverse unknown territory in Asia and Australia. "It was a truly amazing journey that must have demanded exceptional survival skills and bravery," he says.

A century-old lock of hair, given by a West Australian indigenous man to an anthropologist, has led to the discovery that ancestors of Aboriginal Australians reached Asia at least 24,000 years before another wave of migration that populated Europe and Asia.

Aboriginal people had Siberian ancestors

To make the link between the Denisovans and indigenous Australians, the study looked at two Aboriginal populations, one of which was from the Northern Territory. The researchers concluded that Denisovans interbred with modern humans in South-East Asia 44,000 years ago, before Australia separated from Papua New Guinea.

"This paper helped fill in some empty pieces in the evolutionary puzzle that began after early humans left Africa, and reinforces the view that humans have intermixed throughout history," say the scientists behind the research in a summary of the findings.

"The study also confirms controversial claims that the ancestors of all living Eurasians interbred with the Neandertals, while past Asians/Oceanians also mated with the mysterious ancient humans from Denisova cave[s] in Siberia," comments Darren from UNSW. "This is clear and independent validation of DNA work on both these extinct humans [the Neanderthals and the Denisovans], confirming today's other big announcement about their deep connections to Australians and other indigenous people in our region."