Years ago the consensus was that 100% of the first inhabitants of the Americas came from the Bering Strait. There has been much DNA analysis. What is the current view on this?
Other theories, such as that there was a migration from Europe to northeast North America tens of thousands of years before anyone crossed the Bering Strait, have gained currency in recent years, but there’s no definite answer. The main controversy surrounds the dating of archaeological sites in the Americas. Some archaeologists still hold to the Clovis Barrier, the idea that there were no inhabitants of the Americas before roughly 11,000 B.C. Others reject that theory and there are numerous hypotheses regarding migrations prior to that date.
That idea has been pretty much discounted by most archaeologists.
There may be a few holdouts, but there are very few archaeologists who still ascribe to the “Clovis first” dogma. The majority accept that the Monteverde site in Chile predates Clovis, and there is increasing good evidence of pre-Clovis site in North America as well.
The main controversy these days is the relative importance of coastal routes, that skirted the ice sheets in western North America, versus migrations via inland routes after the ice partly melted.
I’ll add that, AFAIK, current consensus is that there were at least three very distinct migrations across the Bering zone. The last one was the proto-Inuit, the middle one was the proto-Na-Dene (Navajo and Athabaskans, who are lingustically and geneticlly quite different from everyone else), and the the first one was proto-everyone-else (sometimes lumped together as “Amerind”).
As others have mentioned, the dating for the first wave is disputed. The dating for the last wave is recent enough to be less disputed. Anyone know about the iddle wave – the Na-Dene? I think that’s a matter of dispute as well. Basically something like “about a thousand years after the first wave – whwtever you think that first-wave date might be.”
Unless something was chasing these people, it would have taken many generations to go from the Bering Strait to Chile, no? Are the archaeologists suggesting that these people had no long term settlements along the route? Do they believe they traveled by sea to Chile?
First, there wouldn’t need to be pressure behind: so long as there was no pressure in front (i.e., going ahead was relatively easy), the more adventurous people would keep on moving in search of that greener grass a few hills ahead.
Second, it is possible to have those go ahead while other stay behind, spreading all over the place. That first wave didn’t go over Bering and all-together-right-now head to Tierra del Fuego without leaving anybody behind, they spread.
Would they have fled glaciation in the North and Midwest, and fled their in-laws after that?
No, but that doesn’t mean that a given archeologist is going to accept the dating of a given site in N.A. Everyone expects there to be such sites, but you still have to rigorously prove the dates. And some of the sites are on the East Coast of the US-- not necessarily a route they would have taken from Alaska to Chile.
Or their mothers…
The Solutrean hypothesis that envisions people crossing via sea ice from France and Spain was an ingenious conjecture, but there is very little evidence in favor of it and considerable evidence against. See especially the section in that article recent genetic research.
Well, I had hoped to glean more information from this post, but alas it died a sudden death. Did I put it in the wrong forum? Or would people rather discuss peeing or pooping their pants?
Well, excuuuuse us. Did you read the links that were supplied?
You may be expecting definite answers in a field where knowledge changes rapidly and opinions abound, even among experts. Over the past 50 years, the scientific community has debated many migration possibilities and made some interesting discoveries (check out Kennewick Man). DNA analysis is ongoing, and you can expect some fluctuation in our knowledge in the next 50 years, too.
We’ll try to keep you posted.
There’s tantalizing, but inconclusive, evidence that the first visitors to the Americas were from farther south in Asia, not from Siberia. Kennewick Man in Washington State and many skeletons in South America look more Polynesian than Siberian, and are among the oldest skeletons found in the Americas. When the Spaniards first reached the West Coast in the 1500’s, there were tribes on the Baja Peninsula (that have since died out) who were physically and linguistically distinct from other tribes, and might have been the last remnants of these people. If they were indeed from southern Asia, they might have intentionally island-hopped across the Pacific, or been accidentally blown across, rather than cross the Bering land bridge.
ETA: Sorry, I don’t have anything about pooping in pants.
With all do respect cat, I wasn’t making a value judgement. Simply a question if this post was in the wrong forum. Being the new kid here, I am just gathering information on the working of this MB. This is my first and only MB. And I have already learned a great deal. Gracias and thank you for the reply and link.
Obviously. That doesn’t answer the question though.
There is a claim that the oldest site is way down at the southern tip of South America. It would follow that there was some route to get there. Why aren’t there older sites long the way or is it that they were hunters/gatherers until they reached the end?
Because if there is low population density, there are very few human habitation sites to begin with. And then only a fraction of those human habitation sites are preserved for tens of thousands of years. And then only a fraction of those preserved sites are discovered. And only a fraction of those discovered sites can be dated conclusively.
There are probably tens of thousands of artifacts gathering dust in museum drawers all over North America that are older than the Monteverde artifacts. But we’ll never know, because they were taken from sites before good dating techniques were available, or the sites lacked good dating diagnostics, or rigorous dating was never done for the site because of lack of time, money, and expertise.
The earliest humans to reach the Americas encountered a nearly unprecedented environment. A place where there are no neighboring human beings who would resent the fact that you’re wandering over their territory. Most people in the world can’t just pick up and move a couple of miles away from their annoying neighbors, because no matter where you go there are already neighbors already living there, unless you move to an extremely marginal environment. The Americas were immensely rich environments with no people, you could move anywhere you wanted and start hunting the naive animals that lived there.
So the first waves of colonization were likely at very low population densities, extremely low densities even for hunter-gatherers. And so there were very few sites created during this time because very few humans lived in the Americas. It’s only after hundreds of years of population growth that you have enough habitation sites to expect to regularly find remains of them.
Couple things. First off, we don’t know what Polynesians looked like 10k years ago, so it’s not really accurate to say that Kennewick man looks “Polynesian”. I know this is often reported in the press, but I cringe every time I read it.
Secondly, IIRC, even the South Asian hypothesis allows for the possibility that the migrants took a sea route hugging land north through Asia and then along the Aleutians and then south. I don’t believe the idea is that they island hopped as the more modern Polynesians did.
Agreed. The chronology of the settlement of the Pacific is fairly well worked out and proceeded in waves as the people who eventually became the Polynesians gradually developed a more and more sophisticated toolkit for long-distance navigation. The final wave of settlement where the Polynesians made the sort of epic journeys required to reach Hawaii and Easter Island only happened about 1500 years ago. There is no way that Polynesian or proto-Polynesian peoples could have crossed the open Pacific before the beginning of the Common Era.
As Lemur866 has explained, when populations were at very low density sites are going to be few and far between. However, in the case of coastal migrations, another factor helps explain why sites may be so few. During the glacial periods, so much ice was locked up in the ice caps and glaciers that sea level was much lower than at present. If these migrants were culturally adapted to using coastal resources, their campsites are now mainly going to be underwater now. In fact, there are cases of stone tools having been dredged up from coastal waters.
Besides this, the “Clovis first” dogma was entrenched so long in North American archaeology that possibly older sites were dismissed or misinterpreted. Many of these sites are now being more critically examined.
Last year some of the most definitive evidence on a pre-Clovis site from Buttermilk Creek, Texas, was published in Science.
Here’s a story on pre-Clovis DNA found in coprolites (fossil feces) in Oregon.
I just want to point out, that at least here in SE Alaska. In addition to the ocean level lowering due to amount of ice locked up in the glaciers. The sheer weight of the glaciers actually compressed the land into the ocean. This created a frontal bulge in the land as it was compressed, much like the bulge that rides in front of a rolling pin when flattening dough. With the melting of the glaciers the land then rebounded, putting many village sites hundreds of feet above the current ocean level. Only within the last few years have they started to develop models to predict village sites based on the historical ebb and flow of the ocean level.