Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Native American history revised (“incredibly surprising”)

Share
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Flipboard
Print
Email

By new facts, not the latest political correctness (so this is worth paying attention to):

From ScienceDaily:

“It’s incredibly surprising,” said David Reich, Harvard Medical School professor of genetics and senior author of the study. “There’s a strong working model in archaeology and genetics, of which I have been a proponent, that most Native Americans today extend from a single pulse of expansion south of the ice sheets–and that’s wrong. We missed something very important in the original data.”

Good thing we paid in advance to learn your earlier incorrect ideas.

Previous research had shown that Native Americans from the Arctic to the southern tip of South America can trace their ancestry to a single “founding population” called the First Americans, who came across the Bering land bridge about 15,000 years ago. In 2012, Reich and colleagues enriched this history by showing that certain indigenous groups in northern Canada inherited DNA from at least two subsequent waves of migration.

That sounds more normal, actually.

The new study, published July 21 in Nature, indicates that there’s more to the story. More.

Free advice: Yup.

Follow UD News at Twitter!

Comments
they were not the first americans?? no right to the name and its not their name. Indians immifrated to america/Canada in truth like all foreigners. anyways. I think also there were more then one migration. simply it was not that long ago. Say 3500 years. The language shows at least three good divisions. What probably happened was the first migrated along the coast and quickly down toward mexico. The later ones bumped into settled areas and so were stopped in the north. I don't think there was a land bridge but rather a more mild condition following the big melt. they mess it up because they add on non existent thousands of years and then have they chipping awat at the ice to get through. its not surprising to find a dna trail showing many migrations. Reich needs to do better research.Robert Byers
July 25, 2015
July
07
Jul
25
25
2015
01:35 AM
1
01
35
AM
PDT
The 'land-bridge' doesn't make sense. The period when it was available was a period of extreme glaciation, when most of the Northern Hemisphere was ice-covered. People might have been able to cross, but they'd have nowhere to go after they crossed. If you look at a polar view of the world, you can see a much simpler truth. The Arctic Sea is almost perfectly surrounded by land. The longest gap is from Iceland to the Faeroes, about 200 miles. Many of the 'ocean crossings' are more like river crossings. Literally a stone's throw, and an easy walk in winter. The simple fact is that the Northern people have ALWAYS wandered ALL around the circle. They're all more or less the same people with the same legends. There was never a "discovery" of the Western Hemisphere, not by Columbus, not by the Vikings, not via the land-bridge.polistra
July 23, 2015
July
07
Jul
23
23
2015
05:33 PM
5
05
33
PM
PDT
So someone is saying that some substantial portion of AmerIndians are NOT descended from Siberian Eskimos? That doesn't make much sense. There were "pulses" from deeper within Asia that somehow bypassed the people who settled in Alaska and Canada, and people in these pulses kept moving south without mixing with the settlers they passed along the way? But of course stranger things have happened.mahuna
July 23, 2015
July
07
Jul
23
23
2015
03:19 PM
3
03
19
PM
PDT

Leave a Reply