Posted by:
SL Cabbie
(
)
Date: January 27, 2012 12:18AM
I'm not optimistic this will amount to a "trend," but there is that possibility. I'm hopeful maybe a few archaeologists, anthropologists, and molecular biologists embarrassed some people who needed to be embarrassed. A lot of impressionable children watch this channel.
Sadly, one of the "shameless" is Dennis Stanford of the Smithsonian who apparently won't let go of his "Solutrean Silliness."
http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520227835>Supplying archaeological and oceanographic evidence to support this assertion, the book dismantles the old paradigm while persuasively linking Clovis technology with the culture of the Solutrean people who occupied France and Spain more than 20,000 years ago.
This is the sort of statement I would expect from John L. Sorenson and not somebody who should know better. I'll address the DNA evidence on that issue shortly.
Moving on, I first heard of the "Altai Connection" from Simon Southerton (who's out of his office until the end of the month). This study builds on that information. Simon doubtless has access to far more sources than we non-scientists... Whoops! I just got an e-mail from him in reply to my query... Along with the original from the Journal of Human Genetics (which I couldn't access. I'll read that and perhaps comment further). Here's a better summary of it than the History Channel report:
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-01/uop-pac011912.php>A tiny mountainous region in southern Siberia may have been the genetic source of the earliest Native Americans, according to new research by a University of Pennsylvania-led team of anthropologists.
>Lying at the intersection of what is today Russia, Mongolia, China and Kazakhstan, the region known as the Altai "is a key area because it's a place that people have been coming and going for thousands and thousands of years," said Theodore Schurr, an associate professor in Penn's Department of Anthropology. Schurr, together with doctoral student Matthew Dulik and a team of graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, collaborated on the work with Ludmila Osipova of the Institute of Cytology and Genetics in Novosibirsk, Russia.
>Among the people who may have emerged from the Altai region are the predecessors of the first Native Americans. Roughly 20-25,000 years ago, these prehistoric humans carried their Asian genetic lineages up into the far reaches of Siberia and eventually across the then-exposed Bering land mass into the Americas.
By contrast, the only possible known link between Stanford's Solutreans and Native Americans is in the "X" chromosome of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA). However, the evidence on that one clearly demonstrates that "European X's" and and Asian and Native American X's only have a distant common ancestor, and the Asian and Native American varieties are more closely related.
Simon writes, "Here's the paper you were chasing. It seems they found a few more individuals with X lineages but they haven't found one yet that is directly ancestral."
They're still searching for the "ancestral X," but it's worth noting that the other four mtDNA haplogroups, A,B,C, & D can all be shown to be present in both Siberia and the New World with the "ancestral forms" in Asia. BTW, there was also an "M" found in some ancient bones in Canada; M is another old lineage, traceable to Asia, but not Europe.
Simarly, there are only two Y-Chromosome haplogroups, C3 and Q3, believed to be found among pre-Columbian Native American men. All the others, such as "R" can reasonably be shown to be the result of European contact after 1492.
To tie up a few odds and ends, I see Lulu quoted the History Channel site which noted:
>“Some people are proposing that the Clovis feature might be the first American autonomous culture as opposed to representing the first colonists.”
Either of these views is entirely reasonable; the latter of course is offered as a summary of the "Clovis First" paradigm that "held sway" among mainsteam archaeologists for two generations. Of course if Clovis was first, then it had to have come from somewhere or else there were others here before if it wasn't. There's probably no current consensus on "Clovis Origins," only Stanford noting, "If the Solutrean points were found in Russia, there would be no argument." However, they weren't...
Many archaeologists have been striving mightily and noisily to establish conclusively that there were those others...
And the debate rages as to who those others were... I have no firm opinions, and I'm not a scientist, just a writer with an aptitude and an interest in that direction. Unfortunately, what I see is a whole lot of politics--which I am familiar with--and scientists who appear to be in denial although it's not clear who is and who isn't (and denial is another subject I know a bit about).
Lastly, the History article ends with this note:
>While Siberia emerged as the leading contender for Native Americans’ ancestral home many decades ago, alternative hypotheses offer starkly different models. According to one, Southeast Asians traveling by boat reached North America some 20,000 years ago. Another suggests that Europeans traversed ice sheets covering the North Atlantic during the last glacial maximum.
The DNA evidence effectively refutes both of these suggestions. And as far as evidence Native Americans originated near Siberia, well...
http://www.wunderground.com/wximage/viewsingleimage.html?mode=singleimage&orig_handle=habataku&orig_number=916&handle=habataku&number=916&album_id=291#slideanchor