This is sure to stir the pot, or, more likely, the hornets nest:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/new-evidence-suggests-stone-age-hunters-from-europe-discovered-america-7447152.html

I skimmed the article very quickly so I may have this wrong... seems to imply there was some early but not hugely populous migration from Europe, at a time of lower sea levels, but that the Eurasian migration either wiped them out or intermarried and overwhelmed, probably because the numbers migrating were much larger?

(Saying this based mainly on the comments in the article about very small amounts of European DNA markers found in some but not all Native American populations).

Adding "Solutrean" to my vocabulary and probably my automated searches. Thanks for the link!

That is how I was reading it also.

There's no problem here. The oldest skeletons in america seem to have caucasoidal traits as far as their shape goes. Some mongoloid peoples had caucasoid traits, but they might have come from europe instead.

As far as DNA of living descendents goes, it is almost all asian, except for a small percent of north american peoples (haplogroup-X). Research has showed that haplogroup-X shows similar mutation trends as the other haplogroups dating back to before the beringia migration, indicating that haplogroup-X probably mixed with the other groups prior to coming to america, supporting the asia-only theory.

However, this is not absolute, and there might not be living descendants of the solutreans any more.

Perhaps these were the Jaredites? And they lived 20,000 years ago as opposed to 3,000? And they were european, not babylonian? And the Lehites/Mulekites were asian, not hebrew? And they came 12,000 years before Christ, not 600?

I'm glad that science is filling in gaps that are so extensive in our understanding of paleo-indian america.

This still does not prove the BoM.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/01/2012 11:22AM by Richard the Bad.

I saw a television program (I think it was the discovery channel) which dealt with the same idea.
I'd say that evidence is still lacking.

From what I'm reading they are claiming new evidence. Here is another article on this;

http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/article/Radical-Theory-Of-First-Americans-Places-3372483.php

I look forward to reading the book myself. That said, I too remain skeptical.

Beware of freely using the word "Solutrean" in relationship with the term "North America."

That particular influence is still controversial and until more concrete confirmation (which might take years or decades) is discovered and acknowledged to fill in the gaps, it remains only a hypothesis.

Darrin Lowery has published only once, to my knowledge ("Archaeological survey of the Chesapeake Bay shorelines associated with Accomack County and Northampton County, Virginia." Richmond, VA : Virginia Dept. of Historic Resources, 2001). It would be sloppy scholarship (or agenda-pushing) on his part if he were rushing to the mainstream press before submitting his work to academic review.

The book in question:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0520227832/?tag=googhydr-20&hvadid=19957698707&ref=pd_sl_3j1nc3mktw_e

Isn't by Lowery. It is authored by Stanford and Bradley.

I realize that. Stanford & Bradley have been around for a while. The Solutrean hypothesis still needs more substantial evidence to be discovered before it can solidify its claims. These discoveries may add to that body of evidence or they may not.

I look forward to reading the book myself, but four or five discoveries is not a quantum leap forward without many scholars agreeing to place them within the context of acquired knowledge. Look how long it took the Clovis Culture to take its formally acknowledged place in history: 30-40 years. Stanford & Bradley's "very specific subset of the Solutrean who formed the parent group that adapted to a maritime environment and eventually made it across the north Atlantic ice-front to colonize the east coast of the Americas" (Bradley, Bruce; Stanford, Dennis "The Solutrean-Clovis connection : reply to Straus, Meltzer and Goebel" World archaeology 38:44, 704–714, Taylor & Francis, 2006) reads remarkably similar to Sorensen and Smith & Reynolds' "Limited Geography model" for the Book of Mormon. Such a claim needs collaborative confirmation from both sides of the Atlantic, not just one side. The question of from which direction humans arrived in this hemisphere has been debated for more than four hundred years now, and there are a lot of layers in that cake, frankly, which taste more like cultural bias than rigorous or even thoughtful anthropology. Stanford and Bradley have been arguing over it for more than half a decade already with Lawrence G. Straus, David J. Meltzer and Ted Goebel in the Taylor & Francis journal "World Archaeology." This volume is only the latest volley in the skirmish.

All I am saying is wait and see. This book's contents may or may not be enough evidence to put the hypothesis on the table for wider discussion.

informer Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I look forward to reading the book myself, but
> four or five discoveries is not a quantum leap
> forward without many scholars agreeing to place

I agree this is far from settled. And from what there is, it doesn't seem like the hypothesis contradicts in any way the existing consensus that most of the Native American population comes from the Eurasian migration thousands of years later. It's a matter of mild interest and if anything, simply piles on further evidence of the fictitious nature of Mormon beliefs about the history of humans in the pre-Columbian Americas.

(As background, I was attending Oberlin College around the time that a lot of the suggestive evidence was coming out about literary sources for the BOM, but I won't dwell on that, considering that Oberlin has a deserved reputation as a repository for a lot of rare documents, in particular early anti-Mormon propaganda and pamphlets. I may have been more aware of this than most, since one of my uncles was getting himself excommunicated at the time for digging into the documentary evidence surrounding Mormon beliefs about Blacks and the role that being barely tolerated newcomers to Missouri had, given this was the era leading up to the Civil War. And on the other side of the coin, I had the uncle who was Dean of Library Science at BYU, who had offered to put me up in their home if I had chosen to go to BYU instead.)

More of an interesting footnote and added complication to the overall picture, which is probably best looked at without any reference at all to the BOM unless one values blind faith over all else.

I loved the Soul Train Hypothesis! Too bad about Don Cornelius....

Sorry, I couldn't resist.

LOL! And I am glad you couldn't resist. I love a good pun, and that was a good one.

They still have yet to find any Jewish DNA though.

This assertion taken from the article is nonsense (the 8000 year-old skeletons were from a "wet site" in Florida known as the Windover Bog):

>Scientific tests on ancient DNA extracted from 8000 year old skeletons from Florida have revealed a high level of a key probable European-originating genetic marker.

The DNA findings were most likely the result of contamination since they couldn't be replicated.

http://public.wsu.edu/~bmkemp/publications/pubs/Kemp_et_al_2006.pdf

>While Hauswirth et al [55] claimed to have isolated both nuclear and mitochondrial DNA from a number of the Windover brains, their data is suspect as the mtDNA lineages are absent in all other prehistoric and contemporary Native American populations studied to date. Repeated attempts to extract DNA from these remains using many of the techniques to remove inhibition reported above, including BSA and serial dilution have failed [52] and unpublished data Smith Lab UC Davis).

https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/malhi/www/MalhiLab/downloads/Smith%20Malhi%20Eshleman%20Kaestle%20Kemp.pdf

>The characterization of one Windover sample as a member of haplogroup X is an interpretation by Smith et al. (1999) of one of eight HVS1 sequences reported by Hauswirth (1994). However, since none of the remaining seven sequences reported by Hauswirth exhibited CR sequences characteristic of any other Asian-derived haplogroup and might therefore reflect either contamination or sequencing errors, the assignment of one of those sequences to Haplogroup X was probably in error. Be-
cause haplogroup X is found in Europe at a frequency of about 3 percent, it is possible that contaminant DNA in the Windover sample was the source of this member of haplogroup X, which has otherwise not been reported from populations of southeastern North America (Malhi et al. 2001).

>Thus, assessment of haplogroup X without restriction analysis is problematic. None of the 12 Windover samples analyzed as part of the present study contained sufficient DNA for analysis.

The claim that there is no evidence for Siberian origins is equally without merit. Archaeologists may not have found it, but it is there nevertheless in Y-Chromosome and mtDNA within the inhabitants of the Altai region.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajpa.21614/full

>Taking into account that [Haplogroup] C4c is deeply rooted in the Asian portion of the mtDNA phylogeny and is indubitably of Asian origin, the finding that C4c and X2a are characterized by parallel genetic histories definitively dismisses the controversial hypothesis of an Atlantic glacial entry route into North America. Am J Phys Anthropol, 2012. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Quite simply, if there were Solutrean or other European DNA in Native Americans, it would've turned up by now. The claim of a relationship between the "X" haplogroup found in Europe and that found in Native Americans ignores the reality that the X2a line (found only in North America) split off from the X2b line early on, doubtless much earlier even than the Solutreans.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1180497/

>It is notable that X2 includes the two complete Native American X sequences that constitute the distinctive X2a clade, a clade that lacks close relatives in the entire Old World, including Siberia. The position of X2a in the phylogenetic tree suggests an early split from the other X2 clades, likely at the very beginning of their expansion and spread from the Near East.

Finally, even the linguistics claim in the article is specious:

>There are also a tiny number of isolated Native American groups whose languages appear not to be related in any way to Asian-originating American Indian peoples.

The only link--which was only discovered recently--between any Native American Languages and Siberian ones was that uncovered by Edward Vajda. To suggest that languages "appearing" is evidence of anything at all is an unwarranted stretch. Languages that are not written--and therefore "fixed"--undergo rapid evolution, particularly in isolated small and migratory populations.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1993449/posts

It remains to be seen whether the "knife found in Virginia" and claimed to be made of French flint will withstand extensive analysis.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/02/2012 12:46AM by SL Cabbie.

I'd be lost without your summaries (and the obvious work behind them) as my university degree in French and English language and literature strangely included no genetics ;-).

(not forgetting other clever folks like Jesus Smith, Simon Southerton, etc., who also understand enough to bring it down to a level which I can understand)

Archeology, though is another matter, as my Dad is a trained archeologist and I was 'brought up in it'.

Reading around yesterday, the archeological context of the flint knife seems difficult to establish unequivocally, so cannot be held to be proof as such...

Wishing everyone a nice weekend!

Tom in Paris

And did a chunk of a Master's in English... That's what allows me to translate the stuff I learned in some pretty advanced high school classes back before they even learned to sequence DNA... Learning that stuff was a reaction to what the Mormons were tossing at me as well...

I'm also regularly in touch with Jesus Smith (he's working pretty hard right now, but I expect he'll pop in at some point), and Simon left a note in my e-mail last night...

And your insights are most welcome as well... I've come to learn it's incredibly rude among archaeologists--in public at least--to holler that some data might've been manufactured or an artifact is possibly fraudulent, at least until after a person is dead (see Hibben, Frank). But the cussing that obviously goes on in private...

Beware the salesmen masquerading as scientists...



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/02/2012 01:39PM by SL Cabbie.

<<Beware the salesmen masquerading as scientists...>>

Indeed. One thing is for certain though, this is going to have the academics going at it tooth and nail. It should be entertaining.

There are a couple of other things that concerned me in the article. The first is the dates. I would like to know how sound they are. And I am always skeptical about anything that shows up in a dredge. For instance, european paleolithic tools have turned up in dredge buckets in the Ohio River. What often happened, particularly during the 1800's was that they had been ship ballast, loaded in Europe, and then dumped in the river to make room for cargo.

This does get better. I had the idea of ballast in the back of my head yesterday but I didn't want to shoot from the hip. That's exactly the "provenance" of the flint knife...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/radical-theory-of-first-americans-places-stone-age-europeans-in-delmarva-20000-years-ago/2012/02/28/gIQA4mriiR_story.html?hpid=z5

>When the crew of the Virginia scallop trawler Cinmar hauled a mastodon tusk onto the deck in 1970, another oddity dropped out of the net: a dark, tapered stone blade, nearly eight inches long and still sharp.

Stanford has obviously been sitting on this stuff for a while; I see his protegé Lowery is out on point on this one. And I noted before that while Stanford was featured in one of the "diffusionist" videos I skewered last year, he apparently declined, unlike Ohio archaeologist Brad Lepper and others-- including Alice Kehoe who does have diffusionist tendencies--to take the producers of the "documentaries" to task for their misrepresentations.

I've also read other archaeologists grumbling that Michael Collins "sees boats" where others don't, but I like this bit from Meltzer:

>Meltzer is among those still skeptical of the Solutrean hypothesis, citing the scant evidence. “If Solutrean boat people washed up on our shores, they suffered cultural amnesia, genetic amnesia, dental amnesia, linguistic amnesia and skeletal amnesia. Basically, all of the signals are pointing to Asia” as the origin of the first Americans.

You want some zingers, Richard?

"Dr.Stanford, I see you've managed to recreate Joseph Smith's story of the Book of Mormon in Pleistocene times. Are you planning on starting a religion as well?"

And for Bradley:

"The Piltdown Man story persisted for years because English anthropologists assumed the first human beings were Englishmen. Now they're making the claim the first Americans were Europeans."

Okay, I guess I can spend the afternoon reading the comments and maybe making a contribution. Way easier on the blood pressure than arguing history with Internet Mormon mishies...



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/02/2012 02:29PM by SL Cabbie.