Ancient DNA points to additional New World migration

[Melvadius]

Science News report on recent research inot migration patterns which possibly impacts on the recent Future of Archaeology thread citing 12 archaeological 'predictions' for the next 10 years.

 

4,000-year-old Greenland man just entered the scientific debate over the origins of prehistoric populations in the Americas.

 

A nearly complete sequence of nuclear DNA extracted from strands of the long-dead man

Edited February 11, 2010 by Melvadius

[caesar novus]

The team’s new comparative analysis of Inuk’s previously sequenced mitochondrial DNA indicates that the Saqqaqs diverged from their closest present-day relatives, Siberian Chukchis, an estimated 5,400 years ago. That calculation implies that ancestral Saqqaqs separated from their Asian relatives shortly before departing for the New World and rapidly traversing that continent to reach Greenland. No land bridge connected Asia to North America at that time, so migrants probably crossed the Bering Strait from what’s now Russia to Alaska by boat, Willerslev speculates.

Groan. I thought it was widely understood that many Eskimo were recent immigrants, and that neither a long-disappeared land bridge or seafaring was needed to explain this. Think ice bridge, scholars, ice bridge! They lived and and traveled along the fringe of the ice, which at times bridged the top of the Pacific and even possibly the Atlantic.

 

Maybe the amazing trans-Atlantic simultaneous appearance of Clovis culture will be shown to have traveled FROM EUROPE by foot and occasional kayak along an Atlantic ice bridge, if only timid appeasers would stop giving away archeological remains to indian tribes who claim legal ownership of any old remains in North America.

Edited February 12, 2010 by caesar novus

[Melvadius]

The team