Post: #1

So there has occasionally been controversy about the date of arrival of Native Americans. Traditionally the idea was that sometime from 13,000-15,000 years ago they came over via Siberia, on foot, or on boat. There has been however some archeological evidence of human activity in the Americas much earlier, leading some to speculate there may have been people here before those who came from Siberia. It turns out that may very well be the case.

This is a new study that dropped today:

"Genetic studies have consistently indicated a single common origin of Native American groups from Central and South America1, 2, 3, 4. However, some morphological studies have suggested a more complex picture, whereby the northeast Asian affinities of present-day Native Americans contrast with a distinctive morphology seen in some of the earliest American skeletons, which share traits with present-day Australasians (indigenous groups in Australia, Melanesia, and island Southeast Asia)5, 6, 7, 8. Here we analyse genome-wide data to show that some Amazonian Native Americans descend partly from a Native American founding population that carried ancestry more closely related to indigenous Australians, New Guineans and Andaman Islanders than to any present-day Eurasians or Native Americans. This signature is not present to the same extent, or at all, in present-day Northern and Central Americans or in a ~12,600-year-old Clovis-associated genome, suggesting a more diverse set of founding populations of the Americas than previously accepted."

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vnf...14895.html

Commentary from Razib Khan:

"Recently had a discussion with a reporter at a major publication about genetic genealogy, and how genomics and ancient DNA has changed everything about what we know about the human. Though I did put in the caveat that it seems the New World has a mildly simpler history that aligns with what we’d somewhat expected or seen. I was wrong. It turns out that indigenous people of the Amazon have a few percent of ancestry derived from a population with the closest affinities to those of Australasia."
http://www.unz.com/gnxp/amazonians-may-h...-admixture

Post: #2

Stuff like this is so interesting. There are so many forgotten episodes in human history. The stuff we "remember" as a species barely goes back 12,000 years.

There are various theories about trans-pacific migration of humans to the Americas during the Ice Age. I remember seeing a documentary a while ago, about indigenous people in South America with Japanese DNA (this was long before the modern immigration of Japanese to SA).

Post: #3

This reminds me of a book read, Kon-Tiki.

It's the journal of a Norwegian who built a raft based on Spanish descriptions of native rafts with the same indiginious and primitive materials and sailed that raft from Peru to some islands in French Polynesia. He did so in order to prove his theory that Easter Island was settled by South Americans who built the famous statues on the island. He thought this based on similarities between those statues and others in South America, as well as the fact that the features of the statues are more similar to South Americans than to Polynesians.

Regardless, he proved it was very possible for primitive South American and Polynesian cultures to travel between one another. I wonder if this is further evidence that it actually occurred.

Nice find.

Post: #4

Beau, I had heard the opposite theory, that Polynesians were thought by some to have settled in the Americas. However the above studies mention nothing of Polynesians, but Australasians, who are distinct.

Obviously Polynesians were amazing seamen, and got to Easter Island from Asia, so there seems to be no real reason they couldn't theoretically have made it to South America.



That said, this does not show that this necessarily happened. The population in question are not Polynesians. Australasians are very distinct from Polynesians. Australasians are supposed to have originated in Taiwan and to have spread throughout the South Pacific.

They were later in many areas wiped out by other waves of human migrations. In many parts of South East Asia there still exist remnants of the previous Australasian inhabitants, such as the "negrito" people found in Malaysia and the Philippines:

Post: #5

This wikipedia article is a nice summary of various theories about pre-columbian contact with America, highly interesting and recommended.
Chinese, Japanese, Polynesian, African and European, there you have it all:
Pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact theories

One very simple but convincing theory that establishes the fact that Polynesians visited South American populations and/or vice versa is this:

Quote:The sweet potato, which is native to the Americas, was widespread in Polynesia when Europeans first reached the Pacific. Sweet potato has been radiocarbon-dated in the Cook Islands to 1000 CE, and current thinking is that it was brought to central Polynesia c. 700 CE and spread across Polynesia from there. It has been suggested that it was brought by Polynesians who had traveled to South America and back, or that South Americans brought it to the Pacific. It is unlikely that the plant could successfully float across the ocean by natural means. Phylogenetic analysis supports the hypothesis of at least two separate introductions of sweet potatoes from South America into Polynesia, including one before and one after European contact.

Quote:Dutch linguists and specialists in Amerindian languages Willem Adelaar and Pieter Muysken have suggested that two lexical items may be shared by Polynesian languages and language of South America. One is the name of the sweet potato, which was domesticated in the New World. Proto-Polynesian *kumala (compare Easter Island kumara, Hawaiian ʻuala, Māori kumāra; apparent cognates outside Eastern Polynesian may be borrowed from Eastern Polynesian languages, calling Proto-Polynesian status and age into question) may be connected with Quechua and Aymara k’umar ~ k’umara.

Australasians might have travelled to South America with Polynesians or on their own, or might have migrated to America in an earlier, separate movement via the land brigde that used to be where the Bering Strait is now. The previously assumed isolation of America is a erroneous concept, it is highly likely that people from the Western as well as Eastern hemisphere reached it on various occasions much earlier than Columbus and his expedition. For example, notice the direction of the oceanic currents between East Asia/Polynesia and America on this map:

Post: #6

Modern history continuously under estimates pre-historic man's accomplishments. Pharaohs from BC left mummies with traces of coca and tobacco in their mummies, indicating pre-Columbus trading between the hemispheres. Great book called The Gods from the East, it supposes that Buddhist missionaries from the 500 BC period sailed to SA and gave the Mayans the advanced solar calendar that at the time was not known outside of mainland China. Certainly not by a culture without the written word, metallurgy, the wheel or algebra and calculus. The hemispheres have traded, fought, fucked long before 1492, just in much smaller numbers.

Post: #7

(07-23-2015 04:45 PM)Natural Born Gyalist Wrote:  Modern history continuously under estimates pre-historic man's accomplishments. Pharaohs from BC left mummies with traces of coca and tobacco in their mummies, indicating pre-Columbus trading between the hemispheres.

I had forgotten about this, heard this some years ago but nothing in detail. Does the book you mentioned go into good detail about this?

I wonder if there could have been some other plants, now extinct, that had similar chemistry to coca or tobacco that could possibly account for this, or if it is 100% definitely traces of coca and tobacco.

Coca and Tobacco are native to the Americas, for anyone not up on their pre-columbian agriculture.

Post: #8

If I recall, I read that in national geographic. The book I refer to only deals with the Chinese sailing to South America and the evidence available to support their theory.

Post: #9

A post from Peter Frost on the subject:

http://www.unz.com/pfrost/guess-who-firs...o-america/

Quote:
Semang from the Malayan Peninsula

Before the Europeans came, the Americas were settled by three waves of people from northeast Asia: the oldest wave beginning some 12,000 to 15,000 years ago, which gave rise to most Amerindians, and two later waves, which gave rise respectively to the Athapaskan and Inuit peoples of northern Canada and Alaska. That’s the conventional view.

But the story doesn’t end here. There seems to have been another people before the Amerindians and even before the older and more European-like Kennewick humans. A recent study has looked at the gene pool of Native Americans from the Amazon. Not surprisingly, most of it closely matches that of Northeast Asians. But a tiny portion is like what we see in the natives of Australia, Papua New Guinea, and Melanesia (Skoglund et al., 2015)...

It would be easy to dismiss this finding as a fluke, were it not for other evidence of a very different people who once lived in the Amazon basin 16,000 to 9,000 years ago (Roosevelt et al., 1996). While overlapping in time with the Clovis culture, they show none of its emphasis on big game hunting, as seen in the well-known Clovis projectile point and other hunting tools. In fact, they were much like tropical foragers of central Africa or Papua-New Guinea. And their earliest remains precede the Clovis culture by at least three thousand years, even though the Amazon rain forest should have been one of the last areas to be penetrated by former denizens of the Arctic....

This shouldn’t be too surprising. Here and there in Southeast Asia we find relic groups of small, dark-skinned, and woolly-haired hunter-gatherers: the Andamanese of India, the Semang of Malaysia, and the Aeta of the Philippines. They used to predominate throughout that region as late as four thousand years ago. Farther back in time, in prehistory, they may have also lived farther north, perhaps at one point the entire East Asian littoral … and from there into the Americas. This would be before the last ice age, and probably before another wave of modern humans moved into northern Eurasia.

The past is another country, just as the future is another country. We unthinkingly assume that a place has always been home to a people who look a certain way, behave a certain way, and organize their lives a certain way. This is as untrue for the Americas as it is for anywhere else. Going back in time, we see people who look more and more ancestral not only to Amerindians but also to Europeans and East Asians. Eventually, those ancestral Eurasians disappear and we meet a very different sort of human.

What happened to those first inhabitants of the Americas? Did they go peacefully into the night when the newcomers arrived, retreating farther and farther into more remote areas? Or did the two groups fight it out? There was probably a range of scenarios—perhaps small numbers of newcomers initially worked out a modus vivendi with the natives, which later broke down as they became more and more numerous. In any case, the process matters less than the result. Those first Americans went into the night, peacefully or not.

Post: #10

I think the Chinese, and Asian people in general, traveled more widely, and at earlier times, than generally thought. All over the world.

A lot of early Anthropologists were confused when they arrived in Southern Africa and saw that the San people had epicanthic fold's, and initially thought there must be some connection to people in the East. The prevailing opinion then became that they must have evolved separately because there were no records of Far East Asians in Southern Africa. There's a great story of a San tribe meeting a Chinese Anthropologist for the first time and getting very excited, using the term "person" for her, whereas the term used for the others was more vague.

Anyway, there is some chance that they do in fact have some Asian ancestry as a result of prior Chinese expeditions, all records of which have disappeared. Very interesting stuff, but I am not sure what modern genetic testing shows. The San are extensively tested since they are essentially the "oldest" humans still alive, so you'd think if they found any Asian connection it would have been mentioned.

Post: #11

^ There is plenty of genetic evidence about the Koi-San people, and no, their eyes are not that way because of Chinese admixture. You can read about this on GNXP, Dienekes, or Eurogenes.

The Koi-San are not the "oldest" humans alive, everyone still alive is a modern human.

They did diverge from the rest of humanity at an earlier date than any other extant population (as far as I know) and have been relatively (though not completely) genetically isolated. If you were to divide all of humanity into two groups by genetic relatedness, one one side would be the Koi-San and on the other side would be everyone else alive.

Post: #12

(08-03-2015 02:38 PM)Sonsowey Wrote:  ...

They did diverge from the rest of humanity at an earlier date than any other extant population (as far as I know) and have been relatively (though not completely) genetically isolated. If you were to divide all of humanity into two groups by genetic relatedness, one one side would be the Koi-San and on the other side would be everyone else alive.

Yep, this is what I meant. They are very interesting people, and some of them have maintained a nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle even to the present day. I also think they have a much lower disease load than other hunter-gatherers, maybe because they live in desert or near desert, rather than the tropics.