Results 1 to 19 of 19

Thread: Native Americans predominately descended from second migration from Asia.

  1. #1

    Default Native Americans predominately descended from second migration from Asia.

    Recently I had written:

    Quote Originally Posted by sumskilz View Post
    [Western Amazonian people] also have a low level Onge-like ancestry (Skoglund and Reich 2016). I suspect both ancestries are evidence of an as yet unidentified (likely earlier) distinct migration into the Americas. The main Native American migration was ~40% ancient Siberian and ~60% Han-like.
    There is morphological evidence as well.

    Here's a reconstruction of an ~11,500 year old woman found in Lapa Vermelha, Brazil:



    And a 12,000 to 13,000 year old woman from Yucatán, Mexico:



    A ~9,400 year old man from Spirit Cave, Nevada:





    The soft tissues and skin tone in these reconstructions are speculative/inferred rather than based on DNA, but based on skull morphology alone, it's clear the man from Nevada was physically much more similar to modern Native Americans than the earlier women are.

    What I didn't know when I mentioned this in the other thread, was that new evidence would be published five days later:

    Abstract: By at least 45,000 years before present, anatomically modern humans had spread across Eurasia [1–3], but it is not well known how diverse these early populations were and whether they contributed substantially to later people or represent early modern human expansions into Eurasia that left no surviving descendants today. Analyses of genome-wide data from several ancient individuals from Western Eurasia and Siberia have shown that some of these individuals have relationships to present-day Europeans [4, 5] while others did not contribute to present-day Eurasian populations [3, 6]. As contributions from Upper Paleolithic populations in Eastern Eurasia to present-day humans and their relationship to other early Eurasians is not clear, we generated genome-wide data from a 40,000-year-old individual from Tianyuan Cave, China, [1, 7] to study his relationship to ancient and present-day humans. We find that he is more related to present-day and ancient Asians than he is to Europeans, but he shares more alleles with a 35,000-year-old European individual than he shares with other ancient Europeans, indicating that the separation between early Europeans and early Asians was not a single population split. We also find that the Tianyuan individual shares more alleles with some Native American groups in South America than with Native Americans elsewhere, providing further support for population substructure in Asia [8] and suggesting that this persisted from 40,000 years ago until the colonization of the Americas. Our study of the Tianyuan individual highlights the complex migration and subdivision of early human populations in Eurasia.
    Here is the most relevant section:

    Most Asian and Native American populations share similar numbers of alleles with the Tianyuan individual (Tables S2Bv and S2Dviii). However, three South American populations—the Surui and Karitiana in Brazil (“Amazonians”) and the Chane in northern Argentina and southern Bolivia—share more alleles with the Tianyuan individual than other Native American populations do (Figure 3A; Tables S2E, S2H, and S2J). The two Amazonian populations were recently shown to share more alleles with the present-day Papuan and Andamanese Onge than with other Native Americans [8, 30, 31] (Figures 3B and 3C), suggesting that at least two populations contributed ancestry to Native Americans in Central and South America. A 12,000-year-old individual from North America (Anzick-1 [32]) does not share more alleles with the Tianyuan individual (or with Oceanians or the Andamanese [8]) than with other Native Americans (Figures 3A–3C; Tables S2Dviii and S2J). The Surui and Chane show the highest levels of allele sharing with the Tianyuan individual (D(Surui/Chane, Mixe, Tianyuan, Mbuti) = 0.02, Z > 3; Table S2J), which is higher than, or similar to, levels of allele sharing with the Papuan or Onge (Table S2J). Using an analysis robust to uncertainty of the exact population history [9], we find that the Amazonians can be described as a mixture of other Native American populations and 9%–15% of an ancestral population related to the Tianyuan individual, the Papuan, or the Onge (SE 4%–10%; Table S2G). Although the SE is high, we note that the Amazonians are consistently modeled as a mixture of other Native Americans and the Tianyuan individual, the Papuan, or the Onge. The mixture proportion estimates are also similar across all analyses, indicating that the relationship between the Tianyuan individual and the Amazonians is similar to that reported between the Papuan and the Amazonians and Onge and the Amazonians.
    Quote Originally Posted by Enros View Post
    You don't seem to be familiar with how the burden of proof works in when discussing social justice. It's not like science where it lies on the one making the claim. If someone claims to be oppressed, they don't have to prove it.


  2. #2
    Magister Militum Flavius Aetius's Avatar δούξ θρᾳκήσιου
    Join Date
    Mar 2010
    Location
    Rock Hill, SC
    Posts
    16,318
    Tournaments Joined
    1
    Tournaments Won
    0

    Default Re: Native Americans predominately descended from second migration from Asia.

    I thought the consensus was that Native Americans descended from a group that was actually living on the land in the Bering strait and that group migrated into America and Mongolia as the climate changed?

  3. #3

    Default Re: Native Americans predominately descended from second migration from Asia.

    Quote Originally Posted by Magister Militum Flavius Aetius View Post
    I thought the consensus was that Native Americans descended from a group that was actually living on the land in the Bering strait and that group migrated into America and Mongolia as the climate changed?
    That hypothesis came about because of discrepancies between the mtDNA divergence times and the oldest archaeological evidence, though it probably accurately describes the ancestry from which modern Native Americans mostly descend, but also take a look at this:

    The entry of the first Asians into the New World is generally thought to have occurred no earlier than 12,000 years ago1,2. Recent archaeological evidence from South America suggests that the migration from Asia to North America might have taken place much earlier. This evidence comes from the Brazilian site of Boqueirao do Sitio da Pedra Fur ad a3,4, with a long cultural sequence possibly extending as far back as 32,000 yr BP, and the Chilean site of Monte Verde5,6. This latter site has one well-documented cultural episode radiocarbon dated at 13,000 yr BP7 and another possible one at 33,000 yr BP. We report here two carbon-14 dates from charcoal taken from cultural features associated with the older materials of ~33,000 yr BP. These findings provide additional evidence that people colonized the Americas much earlier than was previously thought.
    Early cultural evidence from Monte Verde in Chile

    A bit more:

    "There's no doubt about the age -- it's 33,000 years old," Pino said of the sediment layers bearing the apparent artifacts under the knoll.

    The date, which would put the occupation during a warm interlude in the ice ages, is based on radiocarbon examination of burned wood that scientists suspect came from hearths at the hunting camp. Archeologists found the charcoal in three shallow depressions lined with scorched clay. Other hints of human occupation include 24 fractured pebbles, several of which were probably flaked by people using them to cut and scrape meat, hides and plants.

    When independent archeologists visited Monte Verde last year and authenticated the younger camp site, Pino said, they also examined the material from the deeper, 33,000-year-old layer. "They said there is no doubt these are real human artifacts," he said. "We were surprised. We expected another fight."

    Dillehay is somewhat more circumspect. In an interview by telephone, he said: "We'll open up that level and see what's there. If the results remain ambiguous, we will have done the best we could. But I'm leaning toward accepting the antiquity of the level and the traces of human activity."

    Dr. David J. Meltzer, an archeologist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, who was a member of the review committee that endorsed the younger site, welcomes the new excavations. The older layer is "really intriguing," he said, "but we can't conclude anything about it until we have a better sense of what's there."

    What is needed, Meltzer said, are excavations over a much larger area to increase the chances of finding many more artifacts and samples for radiocarbon analysis. If these support the early presence of humans at the site, he predicted, other archeologists will be quicker to accept the findings than they were with the first Monte Verde site.

    "Of course, it depends on what they find," he said, "but this time archeologists wouldn't be as resistant because now they are not operating within the framework of Clovis history."

    Since the 1930's discovery of distinctive spear points of the so-called Clovis hunters, nearly all archeologists staunchly held the view that the first Americans were big-game hunters who crossed the ice-covered Bering Straits between Siberia and Alaska some 12,000 to 13,000 years ago -- that is, not long before the 11,200-year-old dates of the earliest Clovis weapons. Prior to the Monte Verde breakthrough, several other presumed pre-Clovis sites had been reported, but none has yet met all the requirements to be judged an authentic human site dating earlier than the Clovis people.

    Once archeologists accepted the 12,500-year date for the younger Monte Verde camp, they were forced to rethink how long people had already been in the Americas for them to have made it all the way from North America to southern Chile, 500 miles south of Santiago.

    Archeologists are also puzzled by the absence so far of any confirmed human sites in North America that predate Monte Verde. The numbers of migrating human bands must have been so small, and their movements so nomadic, that they left no impression on the land -- they were "archeologically invisible."

    No scholars seriously consider the possibility that the early Americans landed first in South America. All linguistic, genetic and other evidence points to the Bering Strait as the most likely point of entry.
    Chilean Field Yields New Clues to Peopling of Americas

    If the genes of the pre-Clovis inhabitants only survived at very low levels in a few Native American populations, it makes sense that their languages wouldn't have survived either. No Mesolithic European languages survived either, and only one Neolithic one did. The bulk of Native American ancestry appears to be from the Clovis Culture.
    Quote Originally Posted by Enros View Post
    You don't seem to be familiar with how the burden of proof works in when discussing social justice. It's not like science where it lies on the one making the claim. If someone claims to be oppressed, they don't have to prove it.


  4. #4
    Praeses
    Join Date
    Nov 2006
    Location
    Australia
    Posts
    8,355

    Default Re: Native Americans predominately descended from second migration from Asia.

    The Amazon stone tools from 30K+ was known in the 1980's when I briefly studied the subject. It was unfashionable in the 1990's to mention though, I was dismissed out of hand for mentioning it too an archaeologist then.

    Possibly due to glacial site erasure the oldest sites tend to be in the south, OR WAS THOR HEYERDAHL RIGHT? Were the Americas populated by Egyptians starting at Tierra del Fuego and moving up the Andes?

    Jk lol no.
    Jatte lambastes Calico Rat

  5. #5

    Default Re: Native Americans predominately descended from second migration from Asia.

    May I just point out that the use of "before present" as a dating method is retarded. Who the hell thought of that, anyway? Even the Imperial System appears sane by comparison.


    Quote Originally Posted by Cyclops View Post
    The Amazon stone tools from 30K+ was known in the 1980's when I briefly studied the subject. It was unfashionable in the 1990's to mention though, I was dismissed out of hand for mentioning it too an archaeologist then.

    Possibly due to glacial site erasure the oldest sites tend to be in the south, OR WAS THOR HEYERDAHL RIGHT? Were the Americas populated by Egyptians starting at Tierra del Fuego and moving up the Andes?

    Jk lol no.
    The advent of DNA testing really takes the fun out of speculating.

  6. #6
    Copperknickers II's Avatar quaeri, si sapis
    Citizen

    Join Date
    Mar 2008
    Location
    Scotland
    Posts
    12,647

    Default Re: Native Americans predominately descended from second migration from Asia.

    Quote Originally Posted by athanaric View Post
    May I just point out that the use of "before present" as a dating method is retarded. Who the hell thought of that, anyway? Even the Imperial System appears sane by comparison.
    What's wrong with it? It's the most sensible kind of dating method. Not least because now the Western world is abandoning Christianity, BC and AD are probably going to be replaced by a Year Zero starting around now at some point.

    Quote Originally Posted by Cyclops View Post
    The Amazon stone tools from 30K+ was known in the 1980's when I briefly studied the subject. It was unfashionable in the 1990's to mention though, I was dismissed out of hand for mentioning it too an archaeologist then.

    Possibly due to glacial site erasure the oldest sites tend to be in the south, OR WAS THOR HEYERDAHL RIGHT? Were the Americas populated by Egyptians starting at Tierra del Fuego and moving up the Andes?

    Jk lol no.
    Is it possible, though, that this early Australoid population (some people are calling it 'Population Y') came over across the ocean, rather than via the Bering Strait? Lack of archaeological sites in North America might be explained by glacial erasure, but what about the lack of genetic markers in North and Central Americans for this population? The concentration seems to be around the Amazon. It could be the Amazon is just a particularly impenetrable place and so population Y once existed all over the Americas but managed to hide out only in those areas having been exterminated elsewhere, but why the Amazon in particular, and why only some parts of it?
    A new mobile phone tower went up in a town in the USA, and the local newspaper asked a number of people what they thought of it. Some said they noticed their cellphone reception was better. Some said they noticed the tower was affecting their health.

    A local administrator was asked to comment. He nodded sagely, and said simply: "Wow. And think about how much more pronounced these effects will be once the tower is actually operational."

  7. #7

    Default Re: Native Americans predominately descended from second migration from Asia.

    Quote Originally Posted by Copperknickers II View Post
    What's wrong with it? It's the most sensible kind of dating method.
    Because "present" is no fixed point in time. The concept might be OK for astronomy, but for anything as young as human history, it's worthless. For anyone who feels uncomfortable with BC and AD, there's the neutral terms BCE and CE. Heck, even the calendars from other religions are more sensible than "before present".


    Not least because now the Western world is abandoning Christianity, BC and AD are probably going to be replaced by a Year Zero starting around now at some point.
    Te rest of the world isn't abandoning Christianity any time soon though. Also, as indicated above, I wouldn't have a problem with someone setting an arbitrary new "Year One", other than it's superfluous. That's an entirely different way of counting time though than the one I'm complaining about.

  8. #8

    Default Re: Native Americans predominately descended from second migration from Asia.

    Quote Originally Posted by Copperknickers II View Post
    Is it possible, though, that this early Australoid population (some people are calling it 'Population Y') came over across the ocean, rather than via the Bering Strait? Lack of archaeological sites in North America might be explained by glacial erasure, but what about the lack of genetic markers in North and Central Americans for this population? The concentration seems to be around the Amazon. It could be the Amazon is just a particularly impenetrable place and so population Y once existed all over the Americas but managed to hide out only in those areas having been exterminated elsewhere, but why the Amazon in particular, and why only some parts of it?
    That they came across the Pacific seems a lot less plausible, though not impossible I guess. There is no evidence of occupation of most of the Pacific Islands until much later, and due to the direction of the Oceanic currents and distance involved, it would have been much more likely for the Americas to have been populated early from across the Atlantic than from across the Pacific, but of course that didn't happen according to the genetic evidence. Population Y must have had a much lower population density than the Clovis Point culture and have been less technologically advanced. Presumably they weren't able to exploit big game in the way the Clovis Point people could. I suspect that some of the Population Y ancestry contains alleles that are locally adaptive and is located in the places Population Y was displaced last. Native Americans have a lot of traits that are suspected to have arisen due to adaptation to arctic and subarctic conditions. That fits with the hypotheses that the Clovis Point people were descended from a group isolated in the north for a long period of time that then later expanded. Maybe places like the Amazon were where the advantage of Population Y's biocultural adaptions outweighed or at least balanced those of the newcomers. Prior to the development of large agricultural communities, near complete replacement was not that uncommon in human prehistory, but usually the displaced population left some impact on the replacing population.

    Quote Originally Posted by athanaric View Post
    Because "present" is no fixed point in time. The concept might be OK for astronomy, but for anything as young as human history, it's worthless. For anyone who feels uncomfortable with BC and AD, there's the neutral terms BCE and CE. Heck, even the calendars from other religions are more sensible than "before present".
    The "present" in BP is fixed though, it's 1950, which makes it no less stupid.

    EDIT: Ocean Currents:



    Then again, how different were these during or before the last glacial maximum?
    Last edited by sumskilz; October 30, 2017 at 03:31 PM.
    Quote Originally Posted by Enros View Post
    You don't seem to be familiar with how the burden of proof works in when discussing social justice. It's not like science where it lies on the one making the claim. If someone claims to be oppressed, they don't have to prove it.


  9. #9
    Copperknickers II's Avatar quaeri, si sapis
    Citizen

    Join Date
    Mar 2008
    Location
    Scotland
    Posts
    12,647

    Default Re: Native Americans predominately descended from second migration from Asia.

    Quote Originally Posted by athanaric View Post
    Because "present" is no fixed point in time. The concept might be OK for astronomy, but for anything as young as human history, it's worthless. For anyone who feels uncomfortable with BC and AD, there's the neutral terms BCE and CE. Heck, even the calendars from other religions are more sensible than "before present".
    As Sumskilz says, BP is fixed at 1950. And it's not used for human history, it's used for human prehistory, which stretches back hundreds of thousands of years, not to say millions. BCE and CE are not neutral terms because they are still based on an arbitrary point in time defined from a Christian viewpoint (and a point of time which is not even accurate, by the way). I really don't see how BP is any worse than BC/AD, BC/AD is an utterly stupid way of dividing up time which serves nobody any kind of useful purpose except Medieval historians, and I say that as Medieval historian in training myself.

    The rest of the world isn't abandoning Christianity any time soon though. Also, as indicated above, I wouldn't have a problem with someone setting an arbitrary new "Year One", other than it's superfluous. That's an entirely different way of counting time though than the one I'm complaining about.
    It's not really superfluous, BC/AD is the Imperial System of time measurement. It has no place in the modern world because it intrinsically doesn't make any sense.
    A new mobile phone tower went up in a town in the USA, and the local newspaper asked a number of people what they thought of it. Some said they noticed their cellphone reception was better. Some said they noticed the tower was affecting their health.

    A local administrator was asked to comment. He nodded sagely, and said simply: "Wow. And think about how much more pronounced these effects will be once the tower is actually operational."

  10. #10
    saxdude's Avatar Vicarius Provinciae
    Join Date
    Jul 2009
    Location
    House of Erotic Maneuvering
    Posts
    10,420

    Default Re: Native Americans predominately descended from second migration from Asia.

    I was under the impression that the growing consensus for the peopling of america was in earlier groups than the clovis people, but those with ultimatly the largest impact were the clovis themselves. Still interesting that the amazonian people have yet another admixture group added to the Onge and Melanesian cocktail. Puts a spin on the whole "native americans are a single genetic group".

    the Surui and Chane show the highest levels of allele sharing with the Tianyuan individual (D(Surui/Chane, Mixe, Tianyuan, Mbuti) = 0.02, Z > 3; Table S2J), which is higher than, or similar to, levels of allele sharing with the Papuan or Onge (Table S2J). Using an analysis robust to uncertainty of the exact population history
    Incidently Sumskils, do you know what the bolded terms signify in the context of the study, specifically the Mixe?

  11. #11

    Default Re: Native Americans predominately descended from second migration from Asia.

    Quote Originally Posted by saxdude View Post
    Incidently Sumskils, do you know what the bolded terms signify in the context of the study, specifically the Mixe?
    That's a D-stat, which kind of has to be explained mathematically. Mixe is probably what you recognize it to be, it's DNA samples from the ethnolinguistic group who live in Oaxaca. Surui/Chane are enthnolinguisitc groups in the Amazon, Tianyuan is the 40,000-year-old individual from Tianyuan Cave, and Mbuti are an African pygmy ethnic group. In D-statistics, an outgroup is used to establish a root for the divergence of populations. Mbuti are used to established the root being the point at which Eurasians and Mbuti diverged. So the statistic measures how much genetic drift from the root that Surui/Chane and Mixe people share with the individual from Tianyuan Cave in comparison to each other.
    Quote Originally Posted by Enros View Post
    You don't seem to be familiar with how the burden of proof works in when discussing social justice. It's not like science where it lies on the one making the claim. If someone claims to be oppressed, they don't have to prove it.


  12. #12

    Default Re: Native Americans predominately descended from second migration from Asia.

    Quote Originally Posted by Copperknickers II View Post
    As Sumskilz says, BP is fixed at 1950. And it's not used for human history, it's used for human prehistory, which stretches back hundreds of thousands of years, not to say millions.
    Technically speaking, human prehistory also covers some quite recent periods, including some AD dates, depending on the culture and place in question.


    BCE and CE are not neutral terms because they are still based on an arbitrary point in time defined from a Christian viewpoint (and a point of time which is not even accurate, by the way). I really don't see how BP is any worse than BC/AD, BC/AD is an utterly stupid way of dividing up time which serves nobody any kind of useful purpose except Medieval historians, and I say that as Medieval historian in training myself.
    Who the cares if it's theologically accurate? Who cares if it's Christian? It works. Heck, I would have no problem using the Islamic calendar, if it weren't based on something as asinine as moon cycles.


    It's not really superfluous, BC/AD is the Imperial System of time measurement. It has no place in the modern world because it intrinsically doesn't make any sense.
    It makes more sense than "BP". I don't know if you're aware of that, but 1950 isn't "present". And it's not going to be any more "present" in the future.
    Anyway, if they really wanted to have a new calendar with a fixed starting point, why not some date that was actually relevant, like 1492?


    Quote Originally Posted by saxdude View Post
    Puts a spin on the whole "native americans are a single genetic group".
    Is that even a widely held belief, though?

  13. #13
    saxdude's Avatar Vicarius Provinciae
    Join Date
    Jul 2009
    Location
    House of Erotic Maneuvering
    Posts
    10,420

    Default Re: Native Americans predominately descended from second migration from Asia.

    Quote Originally Posted by athanaric View Post
    Is that even a widely held belief, though?
    It's the basis of the germs portion in Guns, Germs and Steel and 1492, that all native americans are fairly genetically similar because they mostly come from that one migration into the Americas, which explains the supposed weakness and subsequent annihilation of native american populations at the offset of the spanish conquest. I've gone in to detail on how that isn't the case and why the "population collapse" is no where near as simple and reductive as such publications make it out to be, but that is one of the major tennets of the biological explanation.

    That's a D-stat, which kind of has to be explained mathematically. Mixe is probably what you recognize it to be, it's DNA samples from the ethnolinguistic group who live in Oaxaca. Surui/Chane are enthnolinguisitc groups in the Amazon, Tianyuan is the 40,000-year-old individual from Tianyuan Cave, and Mbuti are an African pygmy ethnic group. In D-statistics, an outgroup is used to establish a root for the divergence of populations. Mbuti are used to established the root being the point at which Eurasians and Mbuti diverged. So the statistic measures how much genetic drift from the root that Surui/Chane and Mixe people share with the individual from Tianyuan Cave in comparison to each other.
    Honestly it's hard to make heads or tails of the graphs and technical jargon presented in the article, it's frustrating not being able to grasp what exactly the article is trying to convey.

    What I'm seeing here are the Maya, the Mixe and the Quechua (as well, I would presume, the native american group from the california golf that I mentioned in the neanderthal depression thread) all seemingly sharing some amount of ancestry with either onge, papuan (melanesian rather), or tianyuan, more so than the average native american population but less so than the amazonian Surui, Chane and Karitiana. Thusly the researchers are suggesting that these groups are genetic holdouts of older migrations from east asia, the amazonians moreso than the rest.
    Otherwise I'm not entirely sure why the researchers chose to focus on those specific non-amazonian groups, unless I'm misinterpreting the information.

    If what I'm saying is correct though, then the paper has some very interesting implications for the Mixe-Zoque linguistic group, which has a number of peculiar linguistic, archaeological and historical baggage that may well be turned into overdrive with this information.

    Could you please elaborate then, the place the Mixe, Maya and Quechua have in this paper in relation to the Surui and Chane people?

  14. #14

    Default Re: Native Americans predominately descended from second migration from Asia.

    Quote Originally Posted by saxdude View Post
    Honestly it's hard to make heads or tails of the graphs and technical jargon presented in the article, it's frustrating not being able to grasp what exactly the article is trying to convey.

    What I'm seeing here are the Maya, the Mixe and the Quechua (as well, I would presume, the native american group from the california golf that I mentioned in the neanderthal depression thread) all seemingly sharing some amount of ancestry with either onge, papuan (melanesian rather), or tianyuan, more so than the average native american population but less so than the amazonian Surui, Chane and Karitiana. Thusly the researchers are suggesting that these groups are genetic holdouts of older migrations from east asia, the amazonians moreso than the rest.
    Otherwise I'm not entirely sure why the researchers chose to focus on those specific non-amazonian groups, unless I'm misinterpreting the information.

    If what I'm saying is correct though, then the paper has some very interesting implications for the Mixe-Zoque linguistic group, which has a number of peculiar linguistic, archaeological and historical baggage that may well be turned into overdrive with this information.

    Could you please elaborate then, the place the Mixe, Maya and Quechua have in this paper in relation to the Surui and Chane people?
    Yeah, the formal stats aren't easy to just jump into, and each one doesn't really tell a general picture but instead tests a specific proposition. You misunderstood them, but once you know how to read them, you may have some interesting insights regarding the relationships to linguistics and archaeology.

    Mixe are being used as a bassline in those D stats. Apparently, the reason Mixe were chosen as a baseline is due to their similarity to Anzick-1, a ~12,000 year old Clovis Point male infant from Montana. Anzick-1 can't be used to represent the Clovis Point people because it's only one individual, so Mixe as the statistically most similar people of the existing data sets are being used as a proxy.

    Here are the scores:



    Higher D scores indicate more shared drift compared to Mixe as a bassline. The Z score function as an indication of statistical significance. Greater than 3 is significant without a doubt. Surui and Chande clearly share more drift with Tianyuan. Surui clearly shares more drift with Papuan. Karitiana probably shares more drift with Tianyuan, Papuan, and Onge. Surui probably shares more drift with Onge. Others are less clear, but now I think you can get a sense of the probabilities and potential degrees of relatedness.

    Something seems odd about Mixe people considering their geographic location. Why would they be more Clovis Point-like than others? Could some of their ancestry be more recently from the North? In any case, they seem like a bit of a population isolate. Possibly isolated from a population movement from the south rather than themselves being more recently arrived from the north. These are two possibilities that fit the genetic data, and I say that entirely based on the genetic evidence, I haven't looked up how linguistics or archaeology might inform either proposition.

    The Quechua population history appears to have some unidentified complexities. They may be particularly unrelated to Population Y, and remarkably Clovis Point-like, but this test can't seem to tell us anything with any certainty, notice the negative Z score.
    Quote Originally Posted by Enros View Post
    You don't seem to be familiar with how the burden of proof works in when discussing social justice. It's not like science where it lies on the one making the claim. If someone claims to be oppressed, they don't have to prove it.


  15. #15
    Copperknickers II's Avatar quaeri, si sapis
    Citizen

    Join Date
    Mar 2008
    Location
    Scotland
    Posts
    12,647

    Default Re: Native Americans predominately descended from second migration from Asia.

    Quote Originally Posted by athanaric View Post
    Who the cares if it's theologically accurate? Who cares if it's Christian? It works.
    It's exactly the same as BP FFS except it starts 1950 years earlier. Both are equally useful. Nothing of significance happened in AD 1 so there's no reason for us to base a system of time around that year. There is absolutely zero reason to use BC/AD if you are not a Christian, other than the fact that it is the norm in European society. If you want to use BC/AD, fine, do it, but don't give it some stupid name like BCE/CE. You're literally basing the human system of time on an expression 'common era' that DOESNT ING MEAN ANYTHING.

    It makes more sense than "BP". I don't know if you're aware of that, but 1950 isn't "present".
    I think the idea with Before Present is that it will be updated every century or so, or until we find a better year zero. Until then, it really doesn't matter, since as I said it is not really used for specific dates, it's usually rounded up to the nearest 100, if not 1000, so it functions as pretty much the present day as year zero. We can't just update it every year as that would rather defeat the purpose. Obviously in an ideal world we should choose a year zero with some kind of meaning, such as the end of WW2 or the invention of writing.

    Anyway, if they really wanted to have a new calendar with a fixed starting point, why not some date that was actually relevant, like 1492?
    Wouldn't be my personal choice of date as I think the discovery of the Americas is far from the most important thing to happen in recent years, but yes, we should choose a sensible date like that when something of importance happened.
    A new mobile phone tower went up in a town in the USA, and the local newspaper asked a number of people what they thought of it. Some said they noticed their cellphone reception was better. Some said they noticed the tower was affecting their health.

    A local administrator was asked to comment. He nodded sagely, and said simply: "Wow. And think about how much more pronounced these effects will be once the tower is actually operational."

  16. #16
    Mithradates's Avatar Domesticus
    Join Date
    Nov 2006
    Location
    Hungary
    Posts
    2,192

    Default Re: Native Americans predominately descended from second migration from Asia.

    ...or might as well just leave it at AD 1, you know, the year of "nothing of importance" (lol at the self-contradiction )

  17. #17

    Default Re: Native Americans predominately descended from second migration from Asia.

    Quote Originally Posted by Copperknickers II View Post
    Wouldn't be my personal choice of date as I think the discovery of the Americas is far from the most important thing to happen in recent years, but yes, we should choose a sensible date like that when something of importance happened.
    It's not the "discovery" part, which is subject to debate anyway, it's the fact that that date marks the beginning of the Columbian Exchange, which had a tremendous political, economic and ecological impact. There's also a few other dates you could take, like the invention of the modern printing press, or the steam engine, or the anti baby pill. Or the founding of the USA, being the first country to founded upon the values of Enlightenment, or the end of various wars etc.
    But 1950 is as random as 1 AD, meaning the change was entirely superfluous, and to call that new system "before/after present" firmly steers the whole thing into idiot territory. Ultimately, it's firmly a case of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it".

  18. #18
    Frunk's Avatar Form Follows Function
    Moderator Emeritus

    Join Date
    Jun 2009
    Location
    Gold Coast
    Posts
    6,495

    Default Re: Native Americans predominately descended from second migration from Asia.

    Why not just use the astronomical system? No AD or CE suffixes, just plus or minus prefixes.

    It treats 1 BC/BCE as "Year 0", and thus all other years in BC/BCE whatever that years is, minus one. e.g.:

    2 BC = -1
    1 BC = 0
    1 AD = +1

    It seems like the only concern with AD vs. CE is a desire to be politically correct (not religious), but not politically correct gone mad.
    Last edited by Frunk; November 12, 2017 at 11:11 PM.

  19. #19
    Charerg's Avatar Citizen
    Join Date
    Apr 2013
    Location
    Finland
    Posts
    623

    Default Re: Native Americans predominately descended from second migration from Asia.

    Quote Originally Posted by sumskilz View Post
    That they came across the Pacific seems a lot less plausible, though not impossible I guess. There is no evidence of occupation of most of the Pacific Islands until much later, and due to the direction of the Oceanic currents and distance involved, it would have been much more likely for the Americas to have been populated early from across the Atlantic than from across the Pacific, but of course that didn't happen according to the genetic evidence.
    Considering that many major islands were populated relatively late in history (Madagascar permanently settled maybe 300 BC at earliest, and Cuba around 3000 BC), I agree that the "overseas migration" theories seem fairly far fetched. In the case of Cuba, which is perhaps more relevant to the subject of the thread, it's interesting to note that some Ice Age megafauna far outlived the end of the Ice Ages on the island (namely the giant ground sloth, which went extinct around 2500 BC, likely coinciding with the human settlement of Cuba).

    That said, I do personally consider an "along the Pacific coast" migration far more likely than an inland migration through the corridor between the Cordilleran and Laurentide ice sheets. In general, I'd say that history has shown that the sea is a much more reliable source of food in arctic conditions than the tundra. And tbh an area between two major ice sheets probably experienced a fairly extreme climate. For all we know the place could have been a polar desert like the Dry Valleys of Antarctica.

    Quote Originally Posted by sumskilz View Post
    EDIT: Ocean Currents:



    Then again, how different were these during or before the last glacial maximum?
    At the end of the day the ocean currents are caused by the rotation of the planet (which in turn results in the formation of a specific number of atmospheric cells). In the Ice Ages some of the cells probably expanded/shrinked somewhat as a result of different climatic conditions, and some of the currents may have "migrated" a little towards the equator as a result, but the overall pattern was almost certainly pretty much the same as today.
    Under the patronage of Finlander, of the Imperial House of Hader

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •