A new study of DNA suggests North America was originally settled by just a few dozen people who crossed a land bridge from Asia during the last Ice Age.

Remainder of the article found here: http://msnbc.msn.com/id/7980657/?GT1=6542e

Is there anyone on sciforums that is working in or studying this field? I'm curious what their thoughts might be on whether this is a tenable hypothesis. I also remember some work that an anthropologist was doing in researching the correlation that the Zuni tribe of New Mexico had with ancient Japan in liguistics, symbology, and osteological characteristics. I forget the name of the researcher and the book she wrote, however.

The last time I did any indepth research, a few years ago, there was evidence of three (3) different groups of people who came across the Bering Strait. I don't recall how many or anything, but the article implied "small clans" ...whatever that means?

But the DNA sampling is pretty good evidence. There are, however, some drawbacks because of sufficient sampling. I.e., if they "happened" to miss one sampling of DNA, then that might mean a whole new group that wasn't studied. So how many people might that be?

Baron Max

The three groups are:

1. The Athabascans, who came over sometime before 12,000BCE and possibly as early as 20,000BCE, now represented by all peoples south of the Rio Grande and most east of the Rockies.

2. The Na-Dene, who came over around 4,000BCE, ancestors of most of the peoples west of the Rockies but a few further east.

3. The Eskimo-Aleut, who arrived around 2,000BCE.

This was determined by an exhaustive analysis of dental patterns, blood types, and languages about twenty years ago.

Sometime since then, probably using DNA analysis as well as massively parallel processing applied to linguistics, it was determined that they all started in about the same area in (if I remember correctly) what is now northwestern China.

This may explain why they appear to be descended from the same clans. They may have been, but from individuals who were separated by thousands of years in time. It's also possible that a larger group of explorers colonized the Americas, but after settlement their population was reduced by disease and only people with a disease-resistant gene survived to repopulate the hemisphere.

It has never been generally suggested that only small clans arrived here. In fact some anthropologists think that the Athabascan migration occurred before the ice age created the Bering Land Bridge, and the people came over in boats. Ocean-going boats that could hug the shoreline were in use many tens of thousands of years ago so this is not an extreme hypothesis.

I remember hearing that another group came across the Atlantic, earlier than the Athabascans. Supposedly they were French

This was based on mitochondrial dna

Skinwalker, don't know if you saw this;

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4435009.stm

but the results should be interesting.

Some of the links in that article are fairly interesting too.

I have a slight problem with Zuni being related to Japanese, since Japanese may be a combo of Korean & Polynesian or various other theories:
http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclop...anese-language,
while Zuni is a Tanoan language, which is more related to Aztec than Japanese
http://www.answers.com/main/ntquery;...0_1&sbid=lc04b

I have to agree with your skepticism, Randolfo. I did find the name of the book and googled it, however. It's called the Zuni Enigma, by Nancy Yaw Davis, an anthropologist from the Uni of Washington.

There's also an article at Science Frontiers, a source I'm not familiar with, but it cites a journal article she published in the New England Antiquities Research Association's journal, NEARA.

I'm skeptical, but if my Uni library has the texts, I might read them. From previous anthro studies, I remember the Zuni being an anomaly in the South West in relation to the other existing cultures, having their own distinctive traits and linguistic characteristics. I don't remember the Aztec-Tanoan connection, however. I think I still have my books by Barbara and Dennis Tedlock... I need to dig.

I'm also looking for a primary source for Jody Hey's DNA study. I thought it might be in Nature but it appears not.

Athabascan is the language, Na-Dene are the people group, much like Uto-Aztecan is the language, Shoshonean are the people, or English is the language, American are the people:
http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/society/A0805175.html
who was first, is up to debate; named 'paleoindian' or 'Clovis-people' by some

I think I saw the special on PBS that you're talking about,
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/listseason/27.html#2705
the people were not french, but pre-dating the french by about 16,000 years.
http://www.cabrillo.edu/~crsmith/firstamer.html
The French are a combo of the Latinized people left after the Fall of the Roman Empire in Gaul & the Germanic tribal peoples called Franks, Burgundians, etc. which conquered the area & started forming into what became the French people after 507 AD:
http://www.ku.edu/kansas/medieval/10...anks_rise.html
new discovery
http://www.archaeology.org/9611/newsbriefs/uptar.html

"Hey" has many published articles, go to your local library & have them order them, so they loan you copies, saves you the trouble of paying for a copy of the journals involved from college, unless yours is more highclass than my old one, which charged for everything

check this out, from a sidebar to previous link
http://biology.plosjournals.org/perl...l.pbio.0030193
see this section, starting on #25, some are available online via link

I have access to most major and many minor peer reviewed journals, so that's not a problem... I just haven't got around to searching AnthroPlus+ yet

Any thoughts on the South american tribes, in particular, the Olmec?
How about the Hopi, and their art and legends?

Both appear on the surface to have direct African linages.



also, off topic, any thoughts on the reverse migration theory of the Hawiian and New Zealand peoples from the late Athabascan or early Na-Dene peoples?

The Olmec are of Early Preclassic Central America, but their culture influenced many in both Mesoamerica and South America. I just finished viewing Journey of Man, a PBS production hosted and presented by Dr. Spencer Wells, which explores the genetic evidences associated with many migrations of people throughout the world, originating from Africa.

The conclusions Wells makes are that the journey from Africa to North America begans 2000 generations ago. He also stated that the group that crossed over the Bearing Strait's land bridge during the Ice Age could have been as few as three men and as few as ten total people, based on genetic markers he found in various populations from Africa to Central Asia to the Russian Arctic to Arizona.

Fascinating stuff.

Oh.. the peoples of Hawaii and New Zealand are of Polynesian and Asian decent according to genetics. There doesn't appear to be any genetic evidence of migration from South or Central America to Hawaii, Easter Island, etc.

the olmec's worshipped a werejaguar type god, that gave them a puffy-faced head. look into more of the olmec belief, art & relics.
http://www.hyperhistory.net/apwh/ess...3olmecmaya.htm
http://images.google.com/imgres?imgu...icial%26sa%3DN
http://images.google.com/imgres?imgu...icial%26sa%3DN

BTW, when I was working down in ELA about 8 years ago, one of the physical therapy assistants (PTA's) brought his son to work a few times, the little chubby-cheeked tyke looked just like an Olmec, all he needed was an old leather football helmet & you had a model for designing an Olmec head. They were Mexicans all right
that may be part of some wild theory, which if correct, I would ask, "why would the ancient Hawaiians & Maori speak polynesian languages (from the Asian area) then, and not from Native People's of the Western Hemisphere?"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaiian_language

note that Athabascan & Na-Dene are the same people group
http://www.native-languages.org/famath.htm

even sounds like a mormon false theory on who peopled the Western Hemisphere & the Pacific Islands.
http://www.utlm.org/onlineresources/bomoverview.htm

Thanks for the reply, Randolfo. In particular the language information.

What are your thoughts on the Journy of Man info about African-> N. America travel that SkinWalker mentions? 2000 generations, roughly 25 years/generation, or about 50,000 years ago.

SkinWalker, did Dr. Wells make any mention of where these African populations may have settled in N. America? What about S. America?

though most evidence looks like 12 to 15 thousand years in the Western Hemisphere, the languages have way too much variance, they seem to say 50K or more to develop into so many distinct languages & dialects, & no apparent Asian connection except for Inuit (N. America to Siberia), the others seem to have only Western Hemisphere roots. So what happened to the connection?

Anybody hear anything about this?

Until recently it was taken for granted that you could never prove or disprove linguistic relationships more than 10,000 years old because the languages changed too much. That's why nobody could identify a 13,000-year-old connection.

The latest research I've read about used massively parallel computing to push that barrier back to, well practically forever. They've identified a couple of dozen words that are the most stable and found correlations in virtually all of the language families of Asia including Indo-European. Phonetic shifts were always the biggest impediments and with computing power they were able to crack them.

So at this point they've got the world's languages down to two families: Eurasiatic, which includes the relatively new languages of the Western Hemisphere, and African. They're just taking it on faith that they will eventually find the key to relating those two. It's an inviting hypothesis that language was the tool Homo sapiens needed to migrate out of Africa and settle successfully absolutely everywhere else, and that therefore language is quite old and that all languages are descended from the African diaspora.

This theory has not been universally accepted. But I saw what they'd been able to do in the way of establishing cognates that no one could have possibly done thirty years ago, and I was really impressed.

you're welcome
read the book, missed the series though
I think he is very close to right on, the DNA seems to support the theory.

I have several theories that correlate to it:
1. that the people that made it across the landbridge were relatively healthy, the cold frigid weather had killed the weak & sick
a. this left the descendants open to any disease brought in by others; witness the horendious deathtold after 1492 by measles, smallpox, etc.
2. because these people were big-game hunters, that had such success against all the animals that had never seen man, they caused the extinction of all the giant animals like the G. sloth, G. bison & mammoth
a. that their experience with man-made extinctions, created in them an "environmental ethos", were they have tried to live with nature ever since

I know that if i ask if your any part asian and you say no, your wrong....
We migrated from asia [more specific, russia] and crossed an ice bridge [brrr]
and settled, then more crossed and the offsprings of the settlers moved, and so on and so forth.

The kindergarden books say that "indians" were there from when they british are in Britin....

But they native american were named indians, and some of them were from indonisain ancestors!!

Theres only one problem, the vikings....

Christiphor Columbus was not the first comander to said to north and south america. It was the Vikings, meaning that some could not be asian...

Anyways, some of the stories we rely on could of been false...

[sorry for my excessive ...'s, its a small habit im trying to get rid of]

2nd prob,
Vikings were racists, they called Inuit "Skræling", & did not like them, fought them, & lost out to both the frigid cold & the Inuit