First Americans may have been Neanderthals 130,000 years ago

[LoLeL]

https://www.newscientist.com/article...000-years-ago/

An extraordinary chapter has just been added to the story of the First Americans. Finds at a site in California suggest that the New World might have first been reached at least 130,000 years ago – more than 100,000 years earlier than conventionally thought.

If the evidence stacks up, the earliest people to reach the Americas may have been Neanderthals or Denisovans rather than modern humans. Researchers may have to come to terms with the fact that they have barely scratched the surface of the North American archaeological record.

“We often hear statements in the media that a new study changes everything we knew,” says Chris Stringer at the Natural History Museum in London. “If this result stands up to scrutiny, it does indeed change everything we thought we knew about the earliest human occupation of the Americas.”

The evidence comes from a coastal site in San Diego County, California. In the early 1990s, routine highway excavations exposed fossil bones belonging to a mastodon, an extinct relative of the elephant. Researchers moved in to examine the site, and they soon decided that this was no ordinary mastodon fossil.

[LoLeL]

Another source: Mastodon discovery shakes up understanding of early humans in the New World

[Lucas]

It's groundbreaking discovery. It explains many things. Also some Amerindians morphology.

None of this would be particularly controversial except for one final detail. Holen’s colleague – James Paces at the United States Geological Survey in Colorado – has used uranium-thorium isotope dating to age the mastodon fossils. The results suggest the remains are 131,000 years old, give or take 10,000 years. The current consensus view is that humans first reached the Americas much more recently, perhaps just 15,000 years ago.

“We believe we have a robust and defensible age for early humans being in America more than 100,000 years earlier than people had imagined,” says Paces.

Exactly who those people were is impossible to say as there were no human fossils at the Californian site. “But there are a range of possibilities,” says team member Richard Fullagar at the University of Wollongong in Australia. “They could have been Neanderthals or Denisovans.”

Both of these groups were probably present in Siberia more than 130,000 years ago. Holen says sea levels were low and a land bridge existed between Siberia and North America just before 130,000 years ago. Either group could in theory have wandered across.

[Lucas]

https://www.nature.com/nature/journa...ture22065.html

[Rethel]

Ok, if so, then which hg is theirs - R1, Q1 or C2?

[LoLeL]

Ok, if so, then which hg is theirs - R1, Q1 or C2?

Since when neanderthals had such haplogroups?!

[Rethel]

Since when neanderthals had such haplogroups?!

Idk, ths is why I asked.
If they were/are there, they should be reconizable.

[Taiguaitiaoghyrmmumin]

Idk, ths is why I asked.
If they were/are there, they should be reconizable.

Neanderthal haplogroups would predate by least 2 million years from us.

[Peterski]

I don't think that "Genetics" is a good subforum for this thread, because there is no DNA in that paper. And we have no freaking idea if those were Neanderthals or Denisovans, or maybe some group of early Negritos, anatomically modern humans. I started a similar thread in American subforum:

http://www.theapricity.com/forum/sho...r-than-thought

[Mars06]

But what if current Americans are Neanderthals 130,000 years ago?