Humans were in Brazil 30 000 years ago

[docyabut2]

It is finding those islands in the gigantic ocean that is the Son-of-a-B. If you are off just one degree, you might go right by the island you are aiming at.

island hopping:)

[+DieChecker]

Please review the article at the below link and comment

http://anthropogenes...ber-17-19-2013/

The discovery of very low genetic diversity among Denisovans – the phenomenon only observed among Amerindians, among living human populations – casts the new light on Pleistocene demographies in Siberia.

....

Notably, the whole genome sequencing of the South Siberian Denisovan hominin who apparently left genetic traces in modern human populations (Melanesians, out of all groups!) elucidated the extremely low genetic diversity of the Denisovan population.

I'd like to know how finding just a couple samples of Denisovian DNA from one site indicates low genetic diversity? The sample size would seem to not be enough to draw any conclusions.

[+DieChecker]

island hopping:)

Isn't it like 3000 km from Easter Island to the next land to the East? That is a big hop.

[docyabut2]

Isn't it like 3000 km from Easter Island to the next land to the East? That is a big hop.

Doesn't look that far, the sea levels were also down before the end of the ice age,

[Kahn]

OK, would you like to sail it then for us using a homemade raft?

... and before you go, would you like to sign this insurance form making me your beneficiary?

Edited November 7, 2013 by Kahn

[lightly]

No one knows how old Catamaran or Outrigger type sailing craft are .... a large one of those would be perfectly capable of sailing thousands of miles ... Especially if aided by favorable currents. If you had a way to catch rainwater... and knew how to catch fish... It may have been doable? Birds Island hop... follow them.

Edited November 7, 2013 by lightly

[Frank Merton]

I really doubt technologies like you describe existed that far back.

[Piney]

I really doubt technologies like you describe existed that far back.

If artistic expression reflects technology, and I think it does, Then humans were pretty advanced 35,000 years ago. The Aurignacian Culture of Europe was impressive as the art in Chauvet Cave and the "lion man" of Hohlenstein-Stadel shows. I'm a flintknapping instructor for my tribe and at the Down Jersey Folklife Center and it takes a great deal of thought and knowhow. It took me 5 years of experimentation to figure out the tempering process the Bushkill Complex of the Late Archaic used on Cohansey quartzite and Salem Cuesta, the local lithic resources here.

Rich Joseph

[Kahn]

Well the right way of going about proving this would be to look at the evidence of habitation on various Pacific Islands and how far back it dates. I know that Indonesia is a good place to start as we even have early hominoid fossils present there. I actually have no doubt that man was capable of travel to the new world prior to 1492, the key is how early?

[Frank Merton]

You look at the European cave art and you see clear human artistic ability, but not much more than simple bows and spears. Ships crossing oceans are not credible. I don't think Bermuda was settled until 1500, and Easter Island settlements are not more than 2,000 years old.

[Harte]

However these Australoids - or whatever politically correct name anthropologists came up with lately - arrived in Australia, they must have used some sort of boats or rafts.

And that around 60,000 years ago, give or take a millennium.

Some may have drifted off course, and finally ended up in the Americas.

At the time, the trip did not require any sailing beyond visible land. It's quite unlikely that anyone drifted off course in that light.

If such people did come to the Americas, it is still far more likely they traveled north and then along the coast in rafts or over a land bridge.

Harte

[Frank Merton]

Well the right way of going about proving this would be to look at the evidence of habitation on various Pacific Islands and how far back it dates. I know that Indonesia is a good place to start as we even have early hominoid fossils present there. I actually have no doubt that man was capable of travel to the new world prior to 1492, the key is how early?

Homo erectus was in Indonesia, but probably it was then part of Asia. The Pacific Islanders didn't start their island hopping until only a few thousand years ago. No doubt the Americas were settled from Siberia into Alaska maybe 15,000 years ago, and spread within a thousand years all over the Americas, but evidence of anything earlier is speculative and generally, as far as I know, considered fringe.

[Piney]

At the time, the trip did not require any sailing beyond visible land. It's quite unlikely that anyone drifted off course in that light.

If such people did come to the Americas, it is still far more likely they traveled north and then along the coast in rafts or over a land bridge.

Harte

I follow the Coastal route theory. I think the Jomon of Japan and the Algic peoples had common ancestors

[Kahn]

Just to get things started (I'm sure that we can find notes of excavations on various islands).

http://www.csuchico.edu/~curbanowicz/PacificWAMLApril2004.html

Edited November 7, 2013 by Kahn

[Frank Merton]

I dunno about "starting" the debate; seems to me that settles it.

[Leonardo]

I'm not sure what a discussion regarding the spread of Polynesians through the Pacific would add to the thread, as the racial type of the skulls found in Brazil were stated to be of the Australoid/Melanesian peoples - not the Polynesian.

[Kahn]

That is actually quite significant as archeologists have identified two distinct waves of migration (see the map I posted, #89)

This link is also good: http://lens.auckland.ac.nz/images/3/31/Pacific_Migration_Seminar_Paper.pdf

Edited November 7, 2013 by Kahn

[Leonardo]

That is actually quite significant as archeologists have identified two distinct waves of migration (see the map I posted, #89)

This link is also good: http://lens.auckland...minar_Paper.pdf

The 'multiple migration model' for the remote Pacific based on mtDNA of the Pacific Rat makes a seriously speculative assumption - that the different lineages of the rat suggest multiple migrations into the region from outside. But those different lineages could be the result of multiple migrations within the region itself - allowing for the 'Lapita only model' to be true while accommodating this genetic data.

But still, this is not entirely relevant to the thread topic - which is about human inhabitation of Eastern South America (north-east Brazil) sometime between 30-50,000ybp. And that phrenology indicates these people are more akin to the early Australoid/Melanesian peoples than the later Polynesians.

Edited November 7, 2013 by Leonardo

[cormac mac airt]

That is actually quite significant as archeologists have identified two distinct waves of migration (see the map I posted, #89)

This link is also good: http://lens.auckland...minar_Paper.pdf

Genetic studies suggest at least three:

Recently, after extensive consideration of the linguistic classification and the genetic differentiation of the three Native American family groups [2,33,34], the latest genetic screening of the nuclear genome supports a model with at least "three migration-waves", with a major contribution from the first arrival, accounting for 100% of the Amerindian ancestry in most Native American populations and with decreasing contributions from the subsequent two migrations, which mainly affected Na-Dene and Eskimo-Aleut groups [35].

http://www.plosone.o...al.pone.0071390

From Leonardo:

But still, this is not entirely relevant to the thread topic - which is about human inhabitation of Eastern South America (north-east Brazil) sometime between 30-50,000ybp. And that phrenology indicates these people are more akin to the early Australoid/Melanesian peoples than the later Polynesians.

While it's my understanding that phrenology is considered a pseudoscience (perhaps you meant cranial morphology), I'd be very interested to see how the above claim can be reconciled, genetically, against the following which is also from the same link:

The uneven distribution of haplogroup Q1a3a1-L54 in Native American and Asian samples recently described by [49]was confirmed. This clade harbors virtually all (99.5%) the Native American Y chromosomes. However, when taking into account also the Altaian samples of Dulik et al. [51], it accounts for only 51% of Q Y chromosomes from Asian populations living in the regions that have been proposed as sources and pathways of Native American migrations (Figure 1, Table 1 and Dulik et al. [51]). In addition, with the only exception of two Koryak samples that were M3-positive, none of the observed lineages are shared between Native Americans and Asians, 80% of the first falling into the Q1a3a1a sub-clade characterized by the biallelic marker M3 and 49% of the second harboring the Q1a3a1c sub-clade defined by the L330 marker.

Only two American Y chromosomes did not cluster into the L54 sub-branch. They were both M378-positive, thus belonging to Q1b, a finding never previously reported for Native Americans. Considering that the phylogeography of this infrequent haplogroup is restricted to South West Asia [52–55], the most likely interpretation of this outcome is that they represent an arrival from Asia in contemporary history. For this reason the two Y chromosomes were not included in subsequent analyses.

cormac

Edited November 7, 2013 by cormac mac airt

[Frank Merton]

I took a look at Cormac's web site, and have my questions. It says "peer reviewed," but I couldn't find it. All the footnotes are from basically the same source, another similar web site. It has all the appearance of scholarship but no academic credentials. I gotta wonder if we are to base conclusions on this.

[cormac mac airt]

I took a look at Cormac's web site, and have my questions. It says "peer reviewed," but I couldn't find it. All the footnotes are from basically the same source, another similar web site. It has all the appearance of scholarship but no academic credentials. I gotta wonder if we are to base conclusions on this.

No academic credentials? One can click on each persons name to see their qualifications but to make it easy, here is the full list:

Vincenza Battaglia¹, Viola Grugni¹, Ugo Alessandro Perego^1,2, Norman Angerhofer², J. Edgar Gomez-Palmieri², Scott Ray Woodward^2,3, Alessandro Achilli⁴, Natalie Myres^2,3, Antonio Torroni¹, Ornella Semino^1,5*

1Dipartimento di Biologia e Biotecnologie "Lazzaro Spallanzani", Universita` di Pavia, Pavia, Italy, 2Sorenson Molecular Genealogy Foundation, Salt Lake City, Utah, United States of America, 3 AncestryDNA, Provo, Utah, United States of America, 4 Dipartimento di Chimica, Biologia e Biotecnologie, Universita` di Perugia, Perugia, Italy, 5 Centro Interdipartimentale "Studi di Genere", Universita` di Pavia, Pavia, Italy

As to being peer-reviewed, if you're looking for the names of the actual people who were on the board this was reviewed by you're not going to find it. It's not published therein and isn't considered germane to the contents of this article. As to the authors themselves, these are many of the leading people in genetics research so yes one can base conclusions on this.

cormac

Edited November 7, 2013 by cormac mac airt

[Leonardo]

While it's my understanding that phrenology is considered a pseudoscience (perhaps you meant cranial morphology), I'd be very interested to see how the above claim can be reconciled, genetically, against the following which is also from the same link:

My apologies, I was looking up info on phrenology at the time (well, not exactly at the same time!) and confused my reply. Yes, I was meaning to refer to cranial morphology.

I don't question the info you provided (via the link Kahn provided) on the genetic/cladistics of the native Americans who migrated from Asia, but that is not strictly the subject I am addressing - which is the origin of the alleged early (circa 30-50kybp) South Americans. The skulls excavated in north eastern Brazil (although not of the age as the earliest alleged archaeology) do not match the typical Mongoloid skull, but show Australoid/Melanesian traits. To my knowledge there has not been any genetic analysis of these paleo-remains so I do not see how hypotheses on the origins of them would be supported or denied by the info you supplied.

The point I was making in replying to Kahn, was that the remains in question do not show Polynesian traits either, therefore pondering a migration from Polynesia to explain these skulls is a non-starter. If they arrived via the Pacific, it would have to have been as part of the very early (50 - 60kybp) migration of peoples into Australia/Melanesia - not as part of the much later (~3 - 5kybp) migration of the Polynesians across the remote Pacific. I hope that explains in greater clarity the point I am making.

[Kahn]

This is what I like! A nice scholarly debate backed up with real science.

[cormac mac airt]

My apologies, I was looking up info on phrenology at the time (well, not exactly at the same time!) and confused my reply. Yes, I was meaning to refer to cranial morphology.

I don't question the info you provided (via the link Kahn provided) on the genetic/cladistics of the native Americans who migrated from Asia, but that is not strictly the subject I am addressing - which is the origin of the alleged early (circa 30-50kybp) South Americans. The skulls excavated in north eastern Brazil (although not of the age as the earliest alleged archaeology) do not match the typical Mongoloid skull, but show Australoid/Melanesian traits. To my knowledge there has not been any genetic analysis of these paleo-remains so I do not see how hypotheses on the origins of them would be supported or denied by the info you supplied.

The point I was making in replying to Kahn, was that the remains in question do not show Polynesian traits either, therefore pondering a migration from Polynesia to explain these skulls is a non-starter. If they arrived via the Pacific, it would have to have been as part of the very early (50 - 60kybp) migration of peoples into Australia/Melanesia - not as part of the much later (~3 - 5kybp) migration of the Polynesians across the remote Pacific. I hope that explains in greater clarity the point I am making.

That's my point in asking how the northeastern Brazil claim could be reconciled against the genetics that we're already aware of. If a genetic sample or samples could be taken from the Brazil remains and compared with what's already known this should IMO answer whether or not an influx of peoples entirely different from the known ancestral NA actually migrated to South America, or if the Brazil claims are of peoples of a wider variation of the previously identified haplogroups.

cormac

Edited November 7, 2013 by cormac mac airt

[docyabut2]

I go by the human bones found in the Americas the oldst are dated 14,000 years ago found in the Yucatan , the Calf Baji skulls were dated 13,000 years ago and had oblong jaws that may suggest they were more european,

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/09/080903-oldest-skeletons.html