Even if there were pre-Clovis humans in the Americas, it has to be asked if they contributed anything to the genetic and cultural legacy of later populations, or if they became extinct and were entirely supplanted.
I would say if verified, rather than when verified, with the “if” being of exceedingly small probability.
It’s definitely now commonly accepted that there were pre-Clovis humans in Americas, but the colonization has been pushed back maybe 5,000 or at the very most 10,000 years earlier, not 100,000 years. And it would have to be assumed that any very early population that old would have had to become extinct pretty rapidly in order not to leave the slightest trace anywhere in the Americas for 100,000 years. Certainly no trace of DNA that old has been found in Native American populations, other than the Neanderthal genes found in all non-African populations.
Yes, very definitely Pre Clovis and they are toying with 30,000 years ago. OK, 30K, that is a maybe. I dont think, once they got rid of the Clovis line in the sand, 30K would be shocking. Colibri, you wouldnt be* shocked* if the very earliest humans in the Americas was 30000 years ago, would you?
But 130,000 years ago?! :eek::dubious: wow. That would be earthshaking.
I have doubts but if!:eek:
My WAG is that HG’s required huge areas of land to follow the herds and migrating animals, which works fine until your tribe keeps bumping up against other tribes and conflicts erupt for limited resources. Once the area becomes saturated with so many people, the tribes start to look at other food sources. Since the Gathering part of Hunter/Gatherer is already established, it’s just honing these skills that brings about agriculture.
Basically population density brought about the shift to agriculture, Ie. humans learned how to be more efficient with the land they were confined to. I have no cites, again just a wag
Yeah, this is along the lines I was thinking, but better stated.
On the topic of H. sapiens’ arrival in America, the Y-chromosome tree may be of interest. I’ve crudely summarized a clading diagram from the linked site, beginning with Q’s separation from R about 29,000 years ago. (R is the haplogroup now dominant throughout Europe.) The dates are fairly firm; Ytree provides error bars which I’ve shown only for Q-M1107. All dates are in thousands of years before present, the first date is “formation”, the 2nd is TMRCA. After the dates I’ve crudely summarized the place distribution shown at Yfull.
Q 29.0/28.7
… Q-L275 28.7/14.4 South Asia
… Q-F1213 14.4/10.0 Widespread
… Q-L472 28.7/26.1
… Q-F1096 26.1/24.3 Widespread Asia
… Q-F746 24.3/16.2 China
… Q-L56 26.1/19.9
… Q-Y2659 19.9/18.7 Bosnia, Sri Lanka
… Q-L940 18.7/16.6
… Q-L932 16.6/15.7 Widespread Asia
… Q-L527 16.6/3.0 Sweden
… Q-L53 19.9/17.8
… Q-YP4040 17.8/16.6 Russia
… Q-L54 17.8/16/0
… Q-L330 16.0/7.7 Russia/Hungary
… Q-M1107 16.0±1.1/16.0±1.1
… Q-Z780 16.0/15.9 Amerindian, Anzick1
… Q-M930 16.0/15.3
… Q-L804 15.3/3.2 Scandinavia
… Q-M3 15.3/13.3 Amerindian
A move to America 16,000 years ago is clearly visible (M1107). We can’t rule out that there was an earlier Y-chromosome in the Americas, extinct or not yet detected. (At least one ancient skeleton, “Anzick1”, is shown on the Yfull chart.)
The Q-L804 haplogroup found in Scandinavia is intriguing. (Showing it is one reason I prepared this detailed chart.) Was this some sort of migration (or prisoner capture?) from America to Scandinavia???
I read that animals (mainly horses and cows) were the reason humans settled down anywhere because someone figured out the grass they ate regrew in certain spots every year
then they learned/figured how to grow the grass your self and growing food came from there as in some places the animals and people ate the same thing (and lived in the same house in the winter in colder places)
The article is going to be three years old soon, and the discovery seems to have generated remarkably little buzz during the time. I suspect their conclusions that these are signs of human activity are overblown.
There were anatomically modern humans that left Africa during the previous interglacial and spread along the tropics of India and southeast Asia. And when the climate cooled they went extinct, getting replaced by our more cold-adapted cousins. Back then we could go extinct like any other species.
For this find to be accurate, we would have to have migrated though colder areas, pushing out the better-adapted Denisovans, and then into the Americas. And then have gone extinct with no push from other Sapiens in our niche.
And we’d need to be capable of hunting some really big megafauna back the for that find to be accurate. That level of hunting capacity is normally associated with us wiping out the megafauna on a vast scale.
So summing it up:
-This is really far outside of our range at the time.
-We’d need to push through environments and competition we did not seem to handle well at the time to get there.
-We’d need to do it** fast**, 130 000 years ago was at the very start of the previous interglacial, predating the other signs of an ancient out-of-Africa episode.
-Theres no sign of the kind of impact humans capable of hunting megafauna like that normally has on ecosystem.
-Theres no sign of humans from the time period or after. Humans capable of getting there and hunting like that does not just go extinct in the absence of competitors.
Remember, the group that became ancestral to almost all native American DNA is supposed to have had a period of isolation in Beringia for 15 - 25 000 years. (Beringia standstill hypothesis)
Common ancestors. The same group that became ancestral to Native Americans also migrated westwards into Scandinavia. Remember, the earth is a sphere and the further north towards the pole you go the shorter the east- west distance around the earth becomes.
Linguistic and genetic evidence point strongly to three invasions of America:
(a) Amerindian ca 15,500 BP
(b) Na Dene 8000 BP?
(c) Eskimo-Aleut
Is this three-wave model still widely accepted?
The first Google hit suggests either “about 30,000 BP” or (after 2015 study by Raghavan) “no earlier than 23,000 BP” for the beginning of the isolation in Beringia. These dates make more sense to me than the 40,000 to 30,000 BP you imply. One might surmise that the Q Y-haplogroup developed in Beringia (and migrated both west and east after the glaciers receded), while R, sibling to Q, was left behind in Siberia, west of Beringia
Perhaps. But note from the chart that the Scandinavian haplogroup Q-L804 makes the Amerindians of Q-Z780 paraphyletic. Q-L804 has a very recent MRCA date (1200 BC) and hasn’t turned up anywhere except Scandinavia and its colonies. I don’t know how to explore the hypothesis but I think an ancient Atlantic sea voyage may be plausible.
More likely Sámi or some other group with a large Siberian genome component (~25% in their case).
Saami is mostly N Y-Haplogroup and did not migrate to Scotland etc. as Q did. The Q-L804 has not been found in Siberia.
A prehistoric transAtlantic voyage does NOT seem far-fetched. Scandinavians were known to be serious sea navigators well before 1500 BC.
I’m not suggesting they did, I’m suggesting a path for the genes to get into the overall Scandinavian genome. From there, getting to Scotland is easy. Like you said, Scandinavians love their sailing.
As to it not showing up in current Siberian populations - I doubt the coverage is so great that we can rule it out completely yet.
It’s not impossible, and later Scandinavians in Greenland certainly interacted with the Thule. It’s just way earlier than the recorded voyages, and without any textual or artifact evidence.
You’re probably right. Its been many years since I read on it properly and I see they’ve revised the estimates downwards. When I first came across it it was assumed the proto-Americans needed to be there before, and then get isolated as the Ice Age worsened in the Late Pleniglacial.
Are you sure? I rather thought Q-L804 was 10-17 000 years old with a most likely origin in Beringia or Northeast Asia. Sister group to Q-M3?
In broad outlines yes, although the Amerindian migration in particular has been found to be quite complex, with an early split between groups that colonized eastern North America and South America, as well as apparent back-migrations. The hint of some Australasian ancestry in some South American groups has AFAIK not yet been fully resolved.
The Eskimo-Aleut migration is also more complex than previously thought. Some studies have found the Paleo-Eskimos, or Dorset culture, to have been a separate, earlier migration not connected to later Eskimos/Inuit. More recent studies have found genetic connections of the Paleo-Eskimos to not only to the Inuit and Aleuts but also the Na-Dene.
One thing is for sure, more data almost always results in a more complex picture than previously assumed.
For reference, here is the relevant part of the Y-chromosome tree I showed earlier:
… Q-M1107 16.0/16.0
… Q-Z780 16.0/15.9 Amerindian, Anzick1 [aka Q-CTS1780]
… Q-M930 16.0/15.3
… Q-L804 15.3/3.2 Scandinavia
… Q-M3 15.3/13.3 Amerindian
Using the dates from Yfull, Q-L804 was formed 15,300 years ago, but the MRCA of all Q-L804 males known to Yfull was a recent 1200 BC. (Since the lineage is rare anyway, the recency of this MRCA date may mean very little.) The “formation” date of a node is simply the MRCA date of its immediate ancestor node.
One way to bring about the diagram — perhaps much more likely than the capture of Amerindians by ancient Scandinavian seafarers — is that M1107 was Beringia; M3 went East while L804 went West, and Z780 stayed behind in Beringia. Later Z780 followed M3 to America. This is the view of a 2019 paper “Y Chromosome Sequences Reveal a Short Beringian Standstill, Rapid Expansion, and early Population structure of Native American Founders”.
The chronology in this paper is vague (unless I missed it, skimming); is “after the melting of the glaciers at the end of the Pleistocene” intended to represent some time many centuries after the M3 invasion? BUT, the Anzick1 skeleton (12,600 ybp) is in Z780 and Yfull shows Z780 radiating into separate Amerindian branches at 15,000 ybp.
My reading on these matters was several years ago, so I hope I can be forgiven for overlooking this 2019 paper! Still, I’m not at all sure my trans-Atlantic hypothesis is wrong:
- The ancient Scandinavians were accomplished sea-farers.
- Sure, a back-migration from Beringia to some arbitrary corner of Asia is possible. But to pick Scandinavia as that arbitrary corner?! The corner almost adjacent to America by excellent sea-farers! Coincidence?
- Yfull’s 15,000 ybp date for Z780 radiation calls into question the paper’s assumption that the Beringians lingered after the M3 invasion.
Another point - migrations initially happened along the seacoasts - that the aboriginal ancestors made it to Australia indicates a decent level of sea-going capability over 40,000 bc - not transoceanic, but more than just floating haphazardly on makeshift rafts. People settled in rich delta areas where birds and fish were abundant could be hunters with little incentive to move camp. This likely gave them the time and observational data to understand they could plant the food crops they wanted as supplements to their diet. Delta dwellers would also have ample fertile, well-watered land inland to expand their growing options.
(Also note that contrary to the plough concept, I recall the folklore about Thanksgiving mentioned the locals taught the pilgrims effective farming techniques with local crops that involved building a mound with corn on top, beans around the side, and for good measure, bury a fish carcass in the mound to provide fertilizer. One can’t help but wonder if this mimicked the original evolution of agriculture in the area, where they discovered seeds germinating out of a garbage heap.)
It occurs to me that a straightforward research is possible which might find strong evidence for the Trans-Atlantic Hypothesis! (Absence of the evidence wouldn’t refute the the hypothesis, but it would significantly reduce the likelihood.)
In the Hypothesis, an ancient group of North Americans somehow migrated across the Atlantic to some destination in Northwest Europe. With a Y-chromosome (Q-L804) which has not yet turned up among Native Americans. But IIUC there has been very little coverage of Natives from U.S. (or Canada?) — precisely the region likely to have cousins of Q-L804 if they exist.
How many U.S. Native Americans, especially from Northeastern non-Eskimo tribes, have had DNA tested? Very few seem to appear at YFull. IIRC a near-taboo by natives against DNA-testing was mentioned in one of the ‘Pocahontas Liz’ news items.
And, I suppose, digging up ancient Native skeletons may infuriate Natives. Even the Anzick testing annoyed Natives, especially since they weren’t notified in advance.
If/when a large canvass of Northeastern Native American Y-chromosomes is ready (preferably supplemented with old skeletons), what odds am I offered that someone will show up cousin to Q-L804?
No, That level of hunting capacity is not normally associated with us wiping out the megafauna on a vast scale.
Which is- very little.
Yes, fish guts & bones, but not a whole fish as often pictured, since you’d get more food energy out of a whole fish.
Very few to no American natives today are 100% native.