I read this in an article in National Geographic back in 2007:
“'I think we’re moving toward understanding that the peopling of the Americas was not a singular event like the Clovis-first model would have us believe,” Waters said.
“Instead it ‘was a process with people probably arriving at different times and taking different routes and potentially coming from different places.’”
I admit I’m intrigued because this revolving door theory seems more realistic to me than people following kelp or game and just happening to bump into a previously unknown continent, but I haven’t been able to find any further information…plenty of stuff on Clovis and Topper, but nothing else. I don’t know if that’s because there’s nothing to substantiate this theory or what.
What I’d really like is a website that delves into this in more detail, but I’d take any information. Anybody?
To be honest, you won’t get much. It’s a theory, but there’s almost no evidence for exactly how long ago the Americas were first peopled, by whom, and how many may have come later. There’s some very limited evidence for some very early settlement and various waves of migration via Siberia, as well as the possibility of contact from Ireland and the certainty of contact from the Vikings. But beyond that, we have no hard evidence and few sources.
I think the updated theory might disappoint you too. As I understand it, the people are still following kelp or game and just happen to bump into a continent. The different in the new theory is that they may have done so on several occasions and in different places.
There are those nuts who talk about Pharaohs smoking tobacco, but I don’t think there’s any credible theory of “revolving door” round trips.
Ooh, let’s not forget the popular hack/quack Gavin Mezies, who came up with some of the most ridiculous excuses for theory I’ve ever heard. Basically, he found some “evidence” which no one else particularly saw and decided that obviously, the Chinese had landed in America.
It did not go well. ANd I’ve seen rmoe than a few nuts do the same.
There is the Solutrean hypothesis, although that’s just an alternative Clovis origin. Still it’s from a different direction than over the Bering Strait/Beringia.
Personally, I don’t put much credence in pre-Columbian contact between the New and Old Worlds (except of course the Norse) in the last four or five thousand years. If there had been significant contact, New World plants would have been imported to the Old World and Old World animals imported to the New.
From my conversations with archeologists familiar with the controversy, and my own review of the literature, the “Clovis first” theory of the colonization of the Americas has pretty much been discounted. In fact, Clovis may be an indigenous culture that originated in the southeastern United States and spread from there. The Monteverde site in Chile, 1,000 years older than Clovis, is now widely recognized as being authentic. The Meadowcroft and Cactus Hill sites in the US also probably are earlier than Clovis. And the resemblances between Clovis stone tools and similar technologies (“fishtail”) in South America are probably coincidental.
While an interesting hypothesis, this proposal does not have much credibility among archeologists. For one thing, I can’t imagine how a group could maintain a stone tool tradition during an extended migration along the edge of thousands of miles of sea ice, where no source of stone would have been available.
Good point about the lack of stone resources on pack ice. That hadn’t occured to me.
But I didn’t mean to imply that the hypothesis had a lot of support. Nor do I think it likely. I was just offering an example of an idea that’s out there.
Most of the speculation, (nothing rising to the level of theory) that I have seen involves nothing more than repeated migrations from Asia with variations on the route and dates extending back prior to the long, (but no longer), held Clovis date of 11,000 y.a.
Among the routes proposed have been
the Siberia-Alaska-Alberta/Saskatchewan route during a warming break in the ice age. (That is not the name given, but my interpretation of the maps I have seen.)
the Siberia-Alaska-British Columbia coastal route
the Siberia-Western Coastal sea route, (where landings could include any point from Alaska to California).
I have not yet seen anything that has caught on as well accepted, but given a period of several thousands of years of migration, all of them are possible for successive migrations. There is also no evidence (of which I am yet aware) that there were multiple migrations, so it is possible that there was only a single event, although even that might have been a prolonged event over many years.
There is one outlier claim for a migration from Oceania, but I doubt that that one will survive. There is a DNA marker in a huge percent of indigenous American men that corresponds to a mutation that appears to have occurred in far Eastern Siberia that tends to indicate that the majority of migrations would have originated there.
In the same way, (or more so), claims for trans-Atlantic migrations tend to be pretty silly. There may have been a few short lived settlements, (such as the documented landing of Norse at L’Anse aux Meadows), but claims that Phoenicians, Egyptians, or Europeans established permanent settlements or that the Olmecs are African in origin tend to be wishful thinking by people who want to make white (or black) people the originators of all world culture.
ETA: I have no reason to believe that the Solutrean hypothesis was based on a desire to make Europe the source of American culture, but even if the hypothesis only claims that there was a knowledge transfer by a few Solutreans regarding stone tools, the DNA evidence argues strongly for an Asian, not European origin for the overwhelming majority of indigenous Americans.
I wasn’t thinking in terms of migration, exchange of plants and animals, permanent settlements, etc. I was thinking more in terms of the occasional foray. I read an article maybe ten years or so ago–can’t remember where or exactly when, which is why it didn’t go in the OP, that claimed there may have been excursions that did not result in temporary settlements. You know, hit the beach, have a barbeque, go home.
Of course, the difficulty here is that such trips would leave minimal if any archeological traces, so I guess we’ll never know. I like to think that some group, at some distant time, bumped into the North/South American continents, didn’t know or didn’t care about what they’d discovered, ate a few fish, and went on their merry way.
There’s a huge piece of evidence in favor of the “Multiple migrations” hypothesis: Kennewick Man
He was found along the coast of Washington State, and is somewhere between 5000 and 10,000 years old, but he is not Native American. He’s most closely related to the Ainu people of Japan.
The world prehistory course I took last semester touched on this. My memory’s already starting to get a bit fuzzy, but the three language groups of the Americas (Amerind, Na-Dene, and Eskaleut), mitochondrial DNA groups, and dental shape groups have all been interpreted as evidence for three waves of migration into the Americas. It’s still a bit too early for me to get into this really heavily, but this should be an excerpt from a book that deals with the subject.
Nitpick: Kennewick is not on the coast. It’s on the Columbia River well inland (east of the Cascades, in fact). That fossil was actually found on the bank of the river.
I’m not sure if it has a name, either. But I believe it was either a permanent gap in the ice or an area with very thin ice that melted relatively quickly. This was due to that area’s dryness. The massive glaciers on the Rockies to the west would have blocked most of the Pacific storms and there just wasn’t enough moisture coming up from the south.
The problem with this route is the lack of food. If it had been ice covered, when it melted, it would have been a very barren corridor. Few, if any, plants would have grown in it, so there would have been no animals to hunt. Even if it had not been ice covered, the dryness would have made it a desert.
I don’t think there was a route through the ice in British Columbia. The first gap would have been the Columbia River. I get the impression the coastal route is favored by most researchers, but there’s a problem with finding evidence in its favor. Sea level was significantly lower during the ice age, so virtually all sites would be underwater today.
Not sure how this is significantly different from the previous one.
We don’t know that he was “most closely related to the Ainu people of Japan.” Unless there has been some genetic testing that was done that I never heard about.
