https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/26/world/human-dog-migration-study-scn/index.html

https://www.pnas.org/content/118/6/e2010083118

(CNN) - Dogs have been following humans for thousands of years.

Archaeological and genetic data has revealed that dogs accompanied humans when they were migrating to the Americas from East Asia, according to a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Dogs were likely domesticated over 23,000 years ago in Siberia, said lead study author and archaeologist Angela Perri, a research fellow at Durham University's department of archaeology in the United Kingdom. Her team analyzed the genetic makeup of ancient dog remains to estimate when the domestication from wolves to dogs happened.
Archaeological evidence showed that the humans migrated over 15,000 years ago from Northeast Asia across the Bering Land Bridge, a piece of land that connected modern-day Russia to Alaska. The land crossing no longer exists due to rising sea levels.

Perri studied the lineage of American dogs outside the Arctic, which come from a different genetic ancestor than Arctic dogs, and traced it back to ancient Siberian dogs. This lineage has shown that humans brought their dogs with them when they migrated to the Americas, according to the study.
Many people have dogs as pets today and some wonder, "What is this animal and how did it go from a wild predator to curled up next to my bed?" Perri noted

Interesting.
Book of Mormon - Cureloms & Cumoms but no dogs.

Lehi was a cat person.

Very good!

There are no dogs in JoJu's heaven!

I'd rather worship any one of my mom's Chihuahuas over Mr. mormon ghawd...

I want to go wherever my beloved pets go. If there are not a whole lot of wagging and waving tails to greet me on the other side, I'll know that I messed up royally.

Wait until you see Jehovah scratch behind his ear with his big toe. Gods are very flexible. Just don’t let him lick your face.

Yeah, but were they Neanderthal dogs?

That breed is extinct. Just ask Schrodinger's cat.

It's actually both extinct and unextinct - and neither. It's quantum.

Love it!

got absorbed into the modern breeds. You might say the modern dogs saw them and made them their bitches.

You'd have to trace to mitochondrial DNA to see which way that process went!

Yet another nail in the Clovis First coffin.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/stoneage/clovis.html

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/stoneage/clov-01.html?epik=dj0yJnU9LU1Lc3hZdXdSRm1lZW5GSnBLcktFS0FRNkczamRYYkgmcD0wJm49cl92dEtQWjhMYzF4ZlJsNGxITGdWZyZ0PUFBQUFBR0FRc1lZ



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/26/2021 07:22PM by anybody.

I'm just seeing the 28 sites in North America; there are obviously other sites to the south. And I don't see anything about a "pulse," but assuming that refers to a series of small waves of migration it does make sense.

That and the probable fact that the Clovis culture originated in the Southeast of North America and then spread west and north. . .

I mean "pulse"in the sense that people came down the coast first in small numbers around 15,000 years ago and spread inland but the first big migration wave (relatively speaking) was the ice free corridor inland route with the people who had the Clovis points. Guess they were following mammoths or other big animals for food.


https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/08/most-archaeologists-think-first-americans-arrived-boat-now-they-re-beginning-prove-it



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 01/26/2021 07:42PM by anybody.

I think the "pulse" model is likely correct.

The idea that Clovis represented the first large-scale migration is plausible but has some problems. The first is that recent research indicates that the ice-free corridor opened 500 years too late for that; another is the probability that Clovis originated in the US southeast, which means that the culture existed well before the sites on which the dating is based. Then there is the genetic data as traced by Reich and the European group (whose name I forget), indicating that the migrations into the Americas started around 22,000 BCE. Surely it would make sense that there were a lot more people in the Western Hemisphere thousands of years before the Clovis dates.

For example, why would a people from Beringia race down to Chile if there were plenty of space available in North America? That would require multiple economic and cultural transformations as people adjusted to the American deserts, then the tropics, and then a much colder climate further south. The difficulty of such frequent adaptations raises the possibility that there were already significant numbers of people in North and Central America and that the Clovis culture arose from that milieu.

Why go inland if you eat seafood?

And there were probably only a few thousand at most in the Americas not hundreds of thousands or millions.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 01/26/2021 09:40PM by anybody.

Good point.

But the DNA evidence indicates that there was a major inland population before Clovis. What appears to have happened is that two groups--the misnamed "First Americans" and "Population Y" traveled down the west coast around 15-16 KYA and then diverged when they entered South America. At that point Population Y moved far into the Amazon and also Mato Grosso and was displaced everywhere else leaving a genetic island in greater Amazonia. In Reich's words, "the only way this could have happened is if there had been a population that lived before Clovis and that gave rise to major Native American lineages."*

If it happened in South America, why wouldn't it have happened in North America? After all, there are plenty of pre-Clovis sites in the Midwest and the eastern parts of what is now the United States. So really we are arguing about the degree of the early settlement of the American heartlands--and of course whether the Clovis culture originated in the north and moved south or in the southeast and then moved north.



*Who We Are and How We Got Here, p. 160. Also pp. 174-185

> And there were probably only a few thousand at
> most in the Americas not hundreds of thousands or
> millions.

The evidence doesn't support that. A few thousand people adapted to cold coastal living would have had no incentive to spread all the way to Chile, deep into disease-infested Amazonia, and across North America to the Great Lakes and the east coast. The speed of population growth would presumably have been similar to the later expansion of people after the retreat of the ice sheets.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/26/2021 10:22PM by Lot's Wife.

https://www.pnas.org/content/114/22/5554

This estimate has around 50,000 people in Beringia.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/26/2021 10:45PM by anybody.

Oh yes, I agree with that. Where we (may) disagree is over how fast the migrants multiplied once they were south of the barrier. The Clovis First model posited very rapid population growth and expansion due to the abundance of food in the temperate zone. I think we could make the same assumptions for the pre-Clovis peoples.

Thousands or tens of thousands of people could have spread very fast in the conditions that prevailed. I'm just suggesting that that process started in the few thousands years before the usual Clovis date and that it would explain why the migrants traveled so far afield. I simply need a reason to believe that a few thousand people living on a rich and unpopulated coast would feel impelled to move to the dessicated inland Mato Grosso.

The date of 33,000 BP strikes me as unsustainable. The DNA indicates that the ancestors of the NA separated from their Siberian relatives ca 25-22,000 BP, which is generally assumed to be when the former established themselves in Beringia. The most plausible date, according to the DNA, for the NA ancestors' move down the coast (1st and 2nd pulse) was about 16,000 BP.

Now if you think the NA ancestors were south of the ice sheets much earlier than that--say at 20,000 or so BP--in coastal settlements whose remains are now underwater, I guess that the later climatic change may have resulted in a big expansion to the east. But in either case the expansion would have started about 15-16,000 BP and have been rapid enough to engender a sizeable population before 13,000 BP.

That was the point I was trying to make. Clovis was not the original civilization and probably emerged from earlier peoples. So our disagreement, if one exists, would be about when the first groups moved south from Beringia. On that your archaeological source says 33,000 BP, which is substantially earlier than the best genetic analysis of which I am aware, but the evidence on either side is probably sparse.

If there were people before that they were few in number.

Whatever happened, it must have been an epic story that we will never know.

Huge herds of horses, mammoths, and bison. Endless grassland. Inland seas. Cave lions. Sabretooth cats. Giant bears. Giant sloths. Armadillos the size of a VW.

And it's not the one in Book Of Mormon.



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 01/27/2021 01:15AM by anybody.

I think we will get a much better picture of things now that the cost of genetic analysis has dropped by, literally, a factor of one million. That is why the scale of the analysis has accelerated geometrically over the last decade. Indeed, there are vast libraries of unprocessed data sitting in museums and research institutions. Truly an embarrassment of riches.

I mean, consider the extent of our disagreement. You think the first NA arrived south of the ice 20,000 years or so ago; I think (the balance of evidence as I understand it) puts them there about 16,000 YA. In numerical terms we arrive at the same place by the latter date. I accept either scenario pending more precise data, which I think are going to come from the DNA more than from the archaeology.

So I'd bet we will get much closer to the truth over the next ten or twenty years. It was only in the late 2000s that Vajda proposed that Ket and other Yenisean languages were related to the main NA tongues. The DNA has now confirmed that observation, surprised us all by proving that the languages originated in Berengia and then moved into Siberia, and given us rough dates for when that occurred. The same techniques are what told us of the four waves of migration into the Americas and identified the Y People as distinct from the primarily Siberian First Americans.

Soon we will be drinking from a fire hydrant.

A few people went down the west coast of the Americas and some of them went inland.

But the big wave left Beringia as the climate changed and grassland grew up where the ice had been and they followed the animals going south searching for food during that time before the forests came.

My main thesis is this: Humans explore, but they follow food. Agriculture was still in the far future and the climate was too cold and dry. If game wasn't plentiful, they would go in search of it.

I don't buy humans killing all the megafauna. I think climate change and habitat depletion were the main factors and the Americas were populated because people were constantly moving looking for food,

> A few people went down the west coast of the
> Americas and some of them went inland.

Yes. The question is when that happened. You put the date a few thousand years before the DNA evidence suggests.


----------------------
> But the big wave left Beringia as the climate
> changed and grassland grew up where the ice had
> been and they followed the animals going south
> searching for food during that time before the
> forests came.

Yes, but it's easy to overstate the case. We know that there was a wave at 16,000 BC comprising two separate groups: the standard Siberian "First Americans;" and Population Y, which includes the modern American Surui, Karitiana, and Xavante tribes in Brazil and further south, who have genetic markers shared with New Guineans, Australian aborigenes, and the Andamanese. Population Y used to be widespread in both American continents but were subsequently squeezed into Amazonia and some regions further south. Their presence so far afield indicates that there likely was competition for food before the Clovis events. (The Clovis being predominantly First American stock that now accounts for about 80% of the total.)


-------------
> My main thesis is this: Humans explore, but they
> follow food. Agriculture was still in the far
> future and the climate was too cold and dry. If
> game wasn't plentiful, they would go in search of
> it.

Agreed. I simply think you are drawing too definite a line between the pre- and post-opening patterns. A few thousand people would not have driven migration so far into American deserts and the Amazonian jungle for, as you said above, they liked sea food.


-----------------
> I don't buy humans killing all the megafauna. I
> think climate change and habitat depletion were
> the main factors and the Americas were populated
> because people were constantly moving looking for
> food,

Agreed.


------------------
Different question: are you following the recent DNA analysis? I ask because it is providing a ton of new information. The connection between Population Y and Southeast Asia, for instance, and the timing of the migrations and the reason that western Europeans and Native Americans share certain DNA markers--in this case the intrusion of a North Eurasian ghost population that interrupted the pre-existing ecumene across all of Northern Eurasia after the proto-NA had moved into Beringia.

I suspect you'd also be interested in the analysis of population replacement. The general pattern is that the irruption of a new people into a settled group has a gender-based effect whereby the local mitochondrial DNA continue but the local Y-chromosome DNA is replaced by the immigrants'. What this means is that the intruding men monopolize the local women. It's a pattern that characterizes almost all popular movements, including the Corded Ware culture and the Indo-European migrations into the subcontinent but interestingly not the expansion Bell Beaker culture.

It's great stuff.

“I simply need a reason to believe that a few thousand people living on a rich and unpopulated coast would feel impelled to move to the dessicated inland Mato Grosso.”

Maybe they wanted to practice polygamy.

Remember, the American Deserts as we know them today did not exist at the end of the Pleistocene. It was much wetter. The Great Basin contained numerous large shallow lakes. And much of the Sonoran and Mojave desert areas were grasslands/savannah. So they didn't present the obstacle that they do today.

I was hoping you would join the discussion.

Some questions.

1) What timetable do you think probable? When would you put the Beringian "standstill?" And when do you think the movement south started? 20,000 BP, 16,000 BP, or 13,000 BP?

2) Why do you think the first peoples to venture south spread so far so fast? Was it population pressure or something else?

3) How big would you put the NA population south of the ice sheets on the eve of the opening of the corridor?

3) Did Clovis emerge from the population that was already established or from the wave of migration that came through the corridor?

4) If North America was more salutary than today, what about the jungles? Wouldn't those have been a bigger barrier than today? And why would the early peoples go so far into that inhospitable region rather than just stay along the coasts to which they were already comfortable?

5) Are you paying much attention to the emerging genetic research and if so, what interests you most?

Thanks.

I think that we are pretty much on the same page on these questions.

I think that the Beringian Standstill was well established by around 35Kbp, with people starting to venture south by ~22kbp.

Given the speed they travelled south along the coasts, they must have had maritime skills as postulated by the Kelp Highway hypothesis. Which I tend to lean towards. Regarding the speed though, it needs to be kept in perspective. If the southern movement began at 22kbp, and were at Monte Verde by 18.5kbp, that gives them 3.5k years to make the trip. Which is hardly a mad dash, but still incredible. Particularly if the 50/500 establishing population rule is accurate (this rule states that an establishing population must have 50 breeding age individuals to avoid inbreeding, and 500 breeding age individuals to avoid rabid genetic drift). This means that in order to become established, these weren't willy nilly migrations with just a few individuals striking out on their own.

As settlements grew along the coasts, the migration speeds would have accelerated as people began "leapfrogging". Stopping at established settlements to trade, find spouses, and get the basic lay of the land, before moving on to establish a new settlement.

I don't think the pre-corridor populations were that great, but as coastal settlements became established, interior exploration would have expanded. There is a gradual change in interior sites from the paleo to later times. The Lindenmeier Folsom Site in Colorado is a good example. Late paleo sites like this tend to be in highly visible locations. You want other people to see you so that you can mingle and trade because you don't run into other groups very often. As time passes sites become less visible, or more defensible, as more people made resources more competitive. But I digress.

And yes, I think that Clovis was a technological development within an existing population. There is no Clovis in Alaska, or north of the corridor. At least that has been found at this time. There is a hypothesis that states that the majority of artifacts are found near the place of their invention (sorry, I can't think of it's name). If this is true it developed in the SE of the continental US and spread from there.

As far as the tropics at the terminal Pleistocene/early Holocene, I have no clue as to what those environments looked like. Sorry. But as to why people would go there? Why not?

Yes, there are abundant resources along the coast. But Optimal Foraging Theory discounts a few major things that makes humans human. Curiosity, the drive for adventure, and a desire for prestige and praise. The Makah didn't have to go whale hunting, but they did. The Nez Pierce didn't have to cross the Rockies to hunt buffalo, but they did.

Right now I think the most exciting genetics are coming out of Alaska and the northern reaches. The findings at the Upward Sun River site are fascinating.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/27/2021 05:13PM by Richard the Bad.

This is great.

The DNA (Reich) evidence differs a bit on the early timing. It puts the isolation of the Beringians later, at about 25,000 BP. But the two theories are compatible: the Beringians could have been in place, still mixing with some other peoples, until the genetically stable mixes were established around that later date. The other contradiction is between your belief that the movement south started around 22,000 BP whereas the DNA indicates movement from around 16,000 BP. My view is that trickles probably started early, as you suggest, and that perhaps it is just the earliest surviving genetic evidence that points to the latter date. In either case, the real action started around 16,000 BP.

The vulnerability I see in that story is genetic and linguistic. Both of those are time-sensitive ways of checking the archaeology and it will be interesting to see whether new evidence leads to more precise dates for the standstill, the separation of peoples, etc. An important point is that the linguistic connections between various groups (including the Yenisei) are only detectable to about 10,000 BP, so languages would seem to suggest a later separation.

On the tropics as an obstacle. My analogy here is to the 19th century European colonization of Africa. The Europeans lacked genetic immunity to a lot of sub-Saharan diseases, which meant that a lot of the explorers died and the tropical regions retained their independence much longer than most of the continent. The same would have happened to Beringians as they moved eastward into Amazonia: the mortality rate would have been very high.

On the genetics, please keep us posted on what you are reading. I've been following the Harvard (Reich) and Max Plank work closely and find it fascinating--the realization, for instance, that there was an ancient North Eurasian ghost population that tied Western Europeans and Native Americans together and was vindicated by the discovery of the Mal'ta child; also the identification of the Population Y haplogroups as related to the Andamanese and New Guineans dating to the first wave of migration into the Americas.

Of course, the First Americans (misnomer) and the equally "first" Population Y were only one wave. There were also the Paleo-Eskimos ca 5,000 BP and the Neo-Eskimos ca 1,000 BP; and the backmigration into the Yenisei watershed.

This stuff is a blast.

<<My analogy here is to the 19th century European colonization of Africa. The Europeans lacked genetic immunity to a lot of sub-Saharan diseases, which meant that a lot of the explorers died and the tropical regions retained their independence much longer than most of the continent. The same would have happened to Beringians as they moved eastward into Amazonia: the mortality rate would have been very high.>>

Not necessarily. Sub-Saharan diseases evolved along side humans. South American diseases did not. But maybe.

And yes, I tend to go a little early on my dates. I hope I live long enough to have more answers than speculation.

We live in a fascinating period. To see geneticists date the various couplings of various hominins, identify ghost populations from modern DNA and then discover the remains of those populations in Mal'ta, Denisova, etc., and to recognize how very similar the various hominins were: it's a different world than even ten years ago.

I've not heard the Clovis Culture North American origin theory before.

Besides the genetic evidence, don't forget the rapidly changing climate.

I've read that Clovis culture only lasted around 300-400 years and disappeared around 13,000 KYA.

http://www.sci-news.com/archaeology/clovis-culture-age-08982.html

Sea level rise due to isosatic rebound was very fast -- fast enough for people to notice each new year. That might be a factor in migration.

North America was very different. Very dry, cool,not much rainfall, and most of the forests we see now did not yet exist. Much of the continent was covered in tundra, grasslands, or mammoth steppe.

https://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/nercNORTHAMERICA.html

The big animals were dependent on this environment - which grazing animals helped shape. Then something happened.

There are all kinds of theories about storms, asteroid impacts, wildfires natural or man-made, etc. We do know that the climate was unstable from 11,000 KYA to 8,000 KYA and all the big animals died off and so did the Clovis Culture. No more megafauna to hunt.

A warmer, stable climate made agriculture possible in Asia Minor and the Fertile Cresent, but not in the Americas until much later.



Edited 5 time(s). Last edit at 01/28/2021 02:40AM by anybody.

The first Clovis sites were found in the West, obviously New Mexico, in part because that's where the archaeologists were looking. Since those sites were just south of the corridor, people assumed that it was the migrants who came through that region who engendered the Clovis culture. But that appears to have been a misreading of the evidence, most of which was not then known.

If you today look at a map of Clovis sites, you come away with a different impression. To begin with, there are no Clovis sites above the ice sheets or in the Corridor, which suggests that the migrants did not bring it. In fact, there is an early annd dense concentration in the Southeast of the United States and increasingly sparse remains as you move west and north. Shorn of the preconceptions, the intuitive inference is that the culture started in the east and moved west.

Why that is relevant to your and my discussion is that there must have been a large enough cluster of people in temperate America before the Corridor people arrived to have developed a Clovis culture that was adopted by some or many of the newcomers. The DNA evidence admits this possibility, for it shows that there were significant numbers of people in North America before the sheets parted.

Otherwise you have to explain why a culture that developed in the north left no trace above or in the corridor and very few south of the corridor but then exploded in the southeastern United States. Occam's razor indicates that the cultural movement was in the opposite direction.

Correct me if I am wrong, Richard.

But how many people?

Question: has anyone looked at the relationship between clovis sites and the local terrain and plants? People hunt were the big animals were and the big animals are going to be were they eat plants and/or other animals.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 01/28/2021 02:49AM by anybody.

I find this conversation really fascinating. Please don't stop.

Interesting, for sure, but ...

Who put the ram in the ram a lam a ding dong?

That's what all of us want to know!

Brother Clovis stood at the western edge of the land bridge. He whistled for his dog, then turned to Sister Clovis and said, "Come let us go down!"

OT:
Dear "anybody": Have you ever seen the movie "Ferrace Bullier's
Day 0ff"? It's a hoot. :)

Smoot-Hawley Tarriff
https://youtu.be/uhiCFdWeQfA

Were dogs in The Garden of Eden?

Yes but they didn't have legs until God gave them the snakes' appendages.

Ah just so? That is how they acquired the urge to raise their legs.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/27/2021 04:27PM by Elder Berry.

They were ecstatic. With four legs it was considerably easier to chase cars around Eden than slithering on their bellies had been.

And butts are so much easier to sniff. Now if only someone would give them fruit of that tree so they can discern good holes from evil ones.

An insight that few of us would have achieved without your expert guidance.

One blushes.

All dogs go to heaven. Butt sniffing and kissing is probably a requirement.

Some time ago you posted a link to a map of Clovis sites/finds that showed the concentration of that technology in the southeast of North America. I spent some time yesterday trying to dig that up since it was such a powerful graphic.

Do you still have that and, if so, could you post it in this thread as well?

Here's a link to fluted points in N. America at 13kbp. Of course not all fluted points are Clovis. https://pidba.org/content/fluted.JPG

This is good.

You had another one, though, a black and white map if I recall, that must have measured some other Clovis phenomenon. I remember a big cluster in Appalachia/Southeast with a couple or three branches reaching out towards the west. Both maps work; both indicate the probability that the technology originated in the East and spread back towards the ice corridor.

I'm anxious to learn what is known about population densities in the millennia before Clovis. Genetics could help with that although the Americas, like Africa and and other places, have not yet been "blessed" with a lot of research.

But thank you.

I don't think so, but these two maps make the point admirably.

Pardon my ignorance, this is a subject I know next to nothing about, but couldn't the artifact density on the map represent areas of abundant resources rather than the spacial and temporal flow of technology and culture? Is there additional evidence suggesting that the origins were in the east? Dating perhaps?