Interesting news article here about how some scientists are going to announce evidence that the first people to arrive in the Americas came from the Australian/Pacific region:
I assume there are other sources out there as well.
I think this could potentially be very interesting, as well as controversial. I will be interested to see their evidence. This type of DNA evidence is prone to contamination for instance, so I would hope they took great pains to avoid that.
I also suspect this will generate a joke or two.
It’s obviously crap, everybody knows the first people in America were the aliens who helped the Mayans build the pyramids. But has anybody tested the long-face DNA against Alpha Centaurians? Nooooooooo, It’s a clear conspiracy.
Remember “Kennewick Man”? They found him in Oregon or Washington State, and realized that he was: (A) not Native American, and (B) much older than the oldest Native American remains. IIRC, they tentatively identified him as being similar to the Ainu, the indigenous people of Japan (the people who we usually think of as “Japanese” came over from China.) Then they had to give him up to some tribe, who buried him. (By law, any human remains that pre-date European settlement of America are assumed to be Native American.)
These new findings will definitely generate a shitstorm of controversy, but there is evidence that the Native Americans displaced an even earlier group of people.
I wonder why they are positing an Australia»Japan»Polynesia»Pacific Coast migration? Could it not have been an Asian dispersal in which one group went South to Australia, one went East to Polynesia, and one went Northeast to America? (I don’t care what result turns out to be true (or our best guess); I am just curious as to the data that led them to their particular conclusion.)
No, that didn’t happen. The current status of Kennewick Man is here
The decision is open to appeal, and apparently a few bones were re-buried before the decision came down. However, the scientific community has had access to the skeleton for studies which are detailed here.
IIRC, in Guns, Germs, and Steel it was mentioned that Madagascar is thought to have been colonized by groups crossing the Indian Ocean from Indonesia. I don’t see why they couldn’t have made it the Americas as well.
If that happened, then the American and Australia genes would differ at critical points but would both be idential to Asian genes. From what I gather from the piece, American genes and Australian genes did not diverge until much later on but differ from other Asian genes which leaves us no other conclusion than someone who originated from Australia must have arrived in America. My guess is that the tests were done on mtDNA which would give much more conclusive results.