Thanks for the input John, nothing like getting the information from a reliable source.
Consider hanging around the SDMB, if nothing else it can help you waste time that you should be spending writing.
"Dr Gonzalez told BBC News Online: "We believe that the older race may have come from what is now Japan, via the Pacific islands and perhaps the California coast. " It always seems like a lack of imagination on the part of these acknowledged greats in the field when they associate ancient remains with places where similar types can be found to day. I assume Dr Gonzalez is associating these remains with proto Ainu or Jomon (I do not know if the Ainu are generally accepted as the descendants of the Jomon but I think they are.) It would seem much more likely that the proto-Jomon extended over more of northeast Asia than just the Japanese Islands and that they were the first American, pre-Clovis immigrants.
Whenever you postulate the immigration of the pre-Clovis people into the Americas you must consider that there were only a few windows of opportunity to travel (or even survive) thru the glacial landscapes of NE Asia and northern North America. There was one just before the Clovis showed up. The next earliest would have been about 38,000 to 30,000 years ago.
I have flown over the North Slope Arctic coast and I can’t believe that anybody would willingly face several thousand miles of even colder, more glaciated coastline in a Mesolithic boat.
I have read that dark hair can turn red after death in certain conditions, so there are quite a few red-headed mummies who would have had black hair in their salad days.
Meybe it was a drug pusher’s hut. 
Thank you all for the great info–I find it all so fascinating. It is a shame that the Army Corps of Engineers covered the Kennewick site with tons of fill. It is my understanding that the remains until recently were not available for study due to Native American protest. I can certainly understand their feelings, but apparently it is not known for sure the ethnicity of Kennewick. I just wish there had been more time to investigate the whole area.
I am not familiar with the redhead from Nevada. Can you fill me in? Rather, I should say Will you fill me in. I am a humble interested party among the learned.
And where does Bigfoot fit in? 
Actually, AFAIK, the Ainu and Jomon were hardly known outside of the sea of Japan. They are related to the various Indian tribes, albeit somewhat distantly. That’s about it, though.
Well we’re all related “somewhat distantly” to the various Indian tribes, so that’s not really saying much. This study going on right now, Global Gene Project to Trace Humanity’s Migrations will shed a lot of light on this subject and clarify which groups are most closely related to each other.
[QUOTE=mipsmanIt always seems like a lack of imagination on the part of these acknowledged greats in the field when they associate ancient remains with places where similar types can be found to day.[/quote]
I’ve found most people, once they have laid out the bailiwick of their expertise, lack imagination. If one archaeologist on the Scientific American Frontiers episode I saw on this can believed, once folks hit the bottom of the Clovis horizon they would stop digging because everybody knew they wouldn’t find anything any deeper.
But people live along the North Slope even today. If you are a nomad and hunting stays good as you head west there’s no reason to turn around.
Ooops! Anyway, mipsman, you’re probably going to want to pay your registration before Tuba bans you. Returning prodigals like you don’t get the guest period because they figure you already had it.
Wow. All this stuff I never knew about prehistorical times. Could someone explain what exactly the Clovis barrier is in the first place?
Back about 80 years ago a rancher and arrowhead collector near Clovis, New Mexico, found some distinctive stone “points” (in this case spearheads, IIRC) that he sent off to the Smithsonian. Similar points, whose style had been named after where they were first found, were later found in sites all around the Americas and these sites were the oldest yet found, about 10,500 to 11,500 years old. Because until recently no sites in the Americas had been reliably dated older than 11,500 years it was decided that no humans lived in the Western Hemisphere before then, having been prevented from crossing the Bering Strait because of the presence of too much water, be it liquid or frozen (a glacier). This “barrier” was named after the oldest culture.
It was patent nonsense, of course, that a couple miles of water would stop people from traveling. After all, the native Australians crossed a greater distance thousands of years earlier and even the so-called “Hobbits” discovered recently managed to get to an island that has always been an island, and they weren’t even particularly human! But the big-wigs of American archaeology got it in their heads that people back then had to walk across the Bering land bridge to get to Alaska. And despite the example of the Inuits and other people of the far north who have lived where glaciers meet the sea for thousands of years these same archaeologists couldn’t imagine that people might have followed the shoreline, with its rich fishing, from both Asia and Europe.
In the past few years sites have been discovered that date well before the “Clovis barrier” but the number of Clovis sites greatly outnumber those of earlier tool cultures and have been found all over. This suggests to some that the Clovis people entered a virtually empty (as far as humans are concerned) pair of continents. Others see the sudden spread of the point style (it took just a few hundred years to be adopted everywhere) as an example of cultural diffusion, where a design is so demonstrably better than what people had been using that they grabbed it and didn’t look back. I, as usual, assume the truth is somewhere in between. Not finding earlier sites because nobody looked for earlier sites explains only so much; it’s obvious there weren’t a whole lot of people here 12,000 years ago. On the other hand, while Clovis is superior to earlier styles, especially when hunting large game, people 10,000 years ago could still fall prey to cultural conservatism and reject a superior product because it wasn’t what they were used to making.
Remember though that 10-11K years ago coastal sea levels were several hundred feet shallower than present due to the large amounts of water locked up in the ice sheets covering North America. Evidence of an advanced maritime technology that predates Clovis is most likely buried by sediment in an underwater cave somewhere off the coast.
While I agree with dropzone that it is intuitively logical to assume that the early denizens of the continent were sea-faring folk, this does not constitute evidence. It raises an interesting question that if they did specialize in maritime adaptations why was the technology abandoned in favor of hunting large (and dangerous) terrestial animals?
Water dwelling is not necessarily seafaring :dubious:
I’m sorry…what do you mean?
They were (presumably) already hunting large and dangerous animals in the water and on the ice. If the people of the far north were pushed into a marginal environment by larger or more-aggressive groups to the south, as is assumed because nobody can imagine anybody moving there on purpose ;), they would have found no such pressures upon reaching North America and could spread as they pleased. Bear in mind also that big game is just the flashiest stuff hunter-gatherering people eat; mostly they eat what the women gather (plantstuffs) and snare or bean with a rock (bunnies and quail). Hunting big game is often a macho thing and if the women are bringing in most of the food, as can be done in a more temperate climate, the men can cut way back on hunting and devote more of their time to the other manly pursuits of lounging around, gambling, drinking, smoking, and bragging about the mammoth they killed once.