And this is the way the Americas were first populated, starting about 20,000 or more years ago. People had moved into Beringia some time before that, but they couldn’t go further due to glaciers. But coastal people, probably originating from further down the Asian coast, had the boating technology to move along the coast, bypassing those sections where glaciers came down to the sea. The main evidence is the Monte Verde site in Chile which dates from 18,500 years ago. Most of the other potential evidence for this migration is under water, since sea level at that time was 100 meters lower than it is today.
But note that this was during the Ice Age when all mountain ranges were glaciated. Since the western coast of N America is highly mountainous, those coastal people couldn’t penetrate very far inland. The first route inland that they would encounter would be the Columbia River. That would let them into the Willamette Valley and then further to the Columbia Basin, but the glaciated Rockies would have blocked further eastward movement. Ditto for the Sacramento River and the Sierra Nevada. It’s only when they get further south, southern California or Mexico, could they move inland.
And then it’s likely that only a small fraction of those people would want to move inland. Most would want to stay in the familiar coastal environment. So if population pressure made them consider a move, they usually would just load up some boats and move along the coast. And in a couple thousand years, they’d reach the southern tip of S America and then start up the other side.
On further consideration, especially of that clade’s cousin, Q-L527, I’ve decided that this “Trans-Atlantic Hypothesis” is very unlikely. Apologies to all. :o :o
The diversion, even if wrong-headed, wasn’t a total loss. It led to the 2019 paper with latest date estimates for the “Beringian Standstill.” And the Hypothesis, however erroneous, may serve as an example of the sort of deductions which can be made from the Y-chromosome tree. (The phenomenal expansion of the Bell Beaker Y-chromosome, with its historic implications, is one of the most blatant examples, but there are many others.)
Yes; this is why the Y-chromosome tells such a clear story. Y-chromosomes do not get diluted. Many Native Americans will not be in Q-haplogroup at all, but those who are will have inherited their Y-chromosome directly from a specific Beringian line.
Because of patrilocality (wives moving to husbands’ homes rather than vice versa), inheritance of caste from fathers, and because elite males can sire far more children than a single woman can bear, the male Y-chromosome tells a crisper and more stunning story than the female-linked mtDNA does. (N.E. Asia tends to matrilocality so this is partly reversed there, with the mtDNA distribution clines crisper and Y-Haplogroup clines fuzzier.)
Who likes to move; especially on a constant basis? The overwhelming motivation was food. I think that spurred people into finding ways of NOT having to move. That sounds simplistic, but I think that is what made it inevitable because there are innumerable advantages to being able to settle in one place as opposed to not having to move; much more permanent homes, the construction of storage centers and shared structures, a defense perimeter, a claim to a specific territory, etc.
I’m rereading GGS (although not because of this thread) and by coincidence just came across a passage that says that in some places in the Fertile Crescent, the abundance of wild grains was such that people built villages there before those grains were domesticated.
There’s also the Pacific NW where they never did domesticate any plants, but they still built large houses that they lived in for part of the year. The houses were next to their fishing ground and of course salmon was their main source of protein. But some of the year they spent in several different places where they gathered various plant foods. Call them circuit nomads, since they just rotated through the same places every year. If there’d been local plants worth domesticating, they could have done so, since they always came back to the same places.
I believe that the gathering of some things like blueberries in the PNW was done in a way that was on the cusp between wild plants and agriculture, but I’m unclear on the details.
It’s possible they made steps towards cultivating the wapato, either Sagittaria cuneata or Sagittaria latifolia. And definitely were close to cultivating camas (Camassia quamash). Don’t know about domesticating berries. Salal, Oregon grape, and salmonberry are fairly abundant in NW forests, so I’m not sure there’d be much need of domesticating them.
