http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20071127/ts_al...pologymigration



oops...sorry...didn't intend this to be in the Film/Audio section....can a moderator shift it over to Research & Investigation?

That is not unreasonable. Given the northern location of the land-bridge, the people migrating across it should probably be expected to be pretty well equipped and used to living under harsh polar conditions.



Interesting. Wondering what forced them to move from Sibiria. Competing migration? Expansion of the own tribe?

Doesnt' preclude the possibility that there was travel from across the Atlantic, does it? Once people have aclimated and adapted to life in the arctic and hunting the ice edge it made no difference which direction they would travel to follow their vital resources, whether using the super abundance of fish, birds and marine mammals that are drawn to the ice's edge or hunting across the vast and inviting plain that was Beriingia back when the sea-level was lower (keep in mind that the word "bridg"e in Bering Land Bridge was approx 1000 miles wide...not exactly a bottleneck). In contrast to today's climate which supports the boreal forests and taiga here in the Holocene, back 10kya much of it would have been a semi-arid windblown environment dominated by sparse grasses and other forbes in the forelands of the continental glaciers...and the equally vast herds of animals that exploited that environment, including our ancestors, could find a contiguous opportunity to exploit in a nearly complete circumpolar zone that exists while the continents are in glacial maximum.

Translation: Back then, given the circumstances, I can see that occurring.

Love your posts Dog!

Here's a link to the full paper: link to PDF of original manuscript

I'm not the least bit surprised by this, but I'm disappointed that their study didn't include any tribes from Ameria. Having worked with DNA and our collection of human remains, I know that there is a huge database of information from California, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington. You'd think they'd like to include tribes closer to Siberia!

That's quite interesting.. the fact that it indicates that it was pretty much one group that made it across and populated the New World makes it seem like the crossing was not an easy one, or you'd have many more waves of immigrants from Asia.

What's even more interesting are the aboriginal tribes of melanisians in S. America.

http://www.gnxp.com/MT2/archives/003784.html

That's interesting - i don't know nearly enough to know how these two different findings fit together, but I would generally think that genetic evidence trumps skeletal morphological evidence, since one is more or less indisputable while the other has lots of wiggle room for interpretation etc.

It's of course possible that certain early groups were overrun by a later wave of immigrants.

I don't have a link handy but I remember this being a show on the Discovery channel a few years ago. I think they did the genetic tests that proved it. Just a little 'hearsay' for you Robo.

They got word that there was a Starbucks in Seattle - and the rest is history!

I believe both articles are correct.

We think a first "wave" of people (as represented by Kenniwick Man and the human remains found down in South America) made it across the land bridge and for whatever reason, died out (in as much as their genetic material is not found anywhere in the Americas today). These people are probably what we refer to a the Clovis people...and their demise may have coincided with the die-off of the megafauna.

A later wave (represented by current Native American populations) entered (when? we don't know) and were very successful (maybe due to the bow and arrow?).

We don't know enough to know if the populations ever met or if the earlier population was already gone when it was repopulated. We have large gaps in the archaeological record which suggests no one was around at certain points, but we also have very clear indications of huge population movements/replacements several thousand years ago. I suspect highly that there were dozens of waves of people and that the bridge wasn't the only thing crossed!

Really appreciate that perspective, thanks. But just curious, Hairy Man; that recent research that documented a significant cometary expolsion/impact event at 13KYA which they propose initiated the end of the last ice-age and the extinction. Clovis or Kennebunk or Meadowcroft...all of those dating sequences seem to pre-date it and then nothing until woodland indians..is that correct? Does there seem to be some sort of discontinuity in the archaeological record around that time? Just curious about how you interpret its impact on the big picture being presented in a general sense?
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/200...u-rts092407.php

A companion article: arjournals.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev.genom.5.061903.175920

I just want to stress that in no way am I comparing aboriginal Americans to sasquatches, and honestly, while this is an interesting subject, why is it on a bigfoot message board?.

I hadn't read that article before. I would suspect that although the event may have been traumatic, it probably wasn't completely devastating as there is a pretty healthy representation of Clovis sites from 13,000-10,000 ya. It could have easily killed enough though to start the megafauna and people on a decline. The peopling of the Americas can easily be summarized in one of my favorite sayings...the more we know, the less we know.