Stone Age Hunters From Europe Discovered America 10, 000 years before the Indians arrived.

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New Evidence Suggests Stone Age Hunters From Europe Discovered America
Independent
January 26, 2018

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/new-evidence-suggests-stone-age-hunters-from-europe-discovered-america-7447152.html#

New archaeological evidence suggests that America was first discovered by Stone Age people from Europe – 10,000 years before the Siberian-originating ancestors of the American Indians set foot in the New World.

A remarkable series of several dozen European-style stone tools, dating back between 19,000 and 26,000 years, have been discovered at six locations along the US east coast. Three of the sites are on the Delmarva Peninsular in Maryland, discovered by archaeologist Dr Darrin Lowery of the University of Delaware. One is in Pennsylvania and another in Virginia. A sixth was discovered by scallop-dredging fishermen on the seabed 60 miles from the Virginian coast on what, in prehistoric times, would have been dry land.

The new discoveries are among the most important archaeological breakthroughs for several decades – and are set to add substantially to our understanding of humanity’s spread around the globe.

The similarity between other later east coast US and European Stone Age stone tool technologies has been noted before. But all the US European-style tools, unearthed before the discovery or dating of the recently found or dated US east coast sites, were from around 15,000 years ago – long after Stone Age Europeans (the Solutrean cultures of France and Iberia) had ceased making such artefacts. Most archaeologists had therefore rejected any possibility of a connection. But the newly-discovered and recently-dated early Maryland and other US east coast Stone Age tools are from between 26,000 and 19,000 years ago – and are therefore contemporary with the virtually identical western European material.

What’s more, chemical analysis carried out last year on a European-style stone knife found in Virginia back in 1971 revealed that it was made of French-originating flint.

Professor Dennis Stanford, of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, and Professor Bruce Bradley of the University of Exeter, the two leading archaeologists who have analysed all the evidence, are proposing that Stone Age people from Western Europe migrated to North America at the height of the Ice Age by travelling (over the ice surface and/or by boat) along the edge of the frozen northern part of the Atlantic. They are presenting their detailed evidence in a new book – Across Atlantic Ice – published this month.

At the peak of the Ice Age, around three million square miles of the North Atlantic was covered in thick ice for all or part of the year.

However, the seasonally shifting zone where the ice ended and the open ocean began would have been extremely rich in food resources – migrating seals, sea birds, fish and the now-extinct northern hemisphere penguin-like species, the great auk.

Stanford and Bradley have long argued that Stone Age humans were quite capable of making the 1500 mile journey across the Atlantic ice - but till now there was comparatively little evidence to support their thinking.

But the new Maryland, Virginia and other US east coast material, and the chemical tests on the Virginian flint knife, have begun to transform the situation. Now archaeologists are starting to investigate half a dozen new sites in Tennessee, Maryland and even Texas – and these locations are expected to produce more evidence.

Another key argument for Stanford and Bradley’s proposal is the complete absence of any human activity in north-east Siberia and Alaska prior to around 15,500 years ago. If the Maryland and other east coast people of 26,000 to 19,000 years ago had come from Asia, not Europe, early material, dating from before 19,000 years ago, should have turned up in those two northern areas, but none have been found.

Although Solutrean Europeans may well have been the first Americans, they had a major disadvantage compared to the Asian-originating Indians who entered the New World via the Bering Straits or along the Aleutian Islands chain after 15,500 years ago.

Whereas the Solutreans had only had a 4500 year long ‘Ice Age’ window to carry out their migratory activity, the Asian-originating Indians had some 15,000 years to do it. What’s more, the latter two-thirds of that 15 millennia long period was climatologically much more favourable and substantially larger numbers of Asians were therefore able to migrate.

As a result of these factors the Solutrean (European originating) Native Americans were either partly absorbed by the newcomers or were substantially obliterated by them either physically or through competition for resources.

Some genetic markers for Stone Age western Europeans simply don’t exist in north- east Asia – but they do in tiny quantities among some north American Indian groups. Scientific tests on ancient DNA extracted from 8000 year old skeletons from Florida have revealed a high level of a key probable European-originating genetic marker. There are also a tiny number of isolated Native American groups whose languages appear not to be related in any way to Asian-originating American Indian peoples.

But the greatest amount of evidence is likely to come from under the ocean – for most of the areas where the Solutreans would have stepped off the Ice onto dry land are now up to 100 miles out to sea.

The one underwater site that has been identified - thanks to the scallop dredgers – is set to be examined in greater detail this summer – either by extreme-depth divers or by remotely operated mini submarines equipped with cameras and grab arms.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/new-evidence-suggests-stone-age-hunters-from-europe-discovered-america-7447152.html

[Taiguaitiaoghyrmmumin]

Your source says 2012


https://violentmetaphors.com/2016/08/15/archaeological-fantasies-and-the-genetic-history-of-the-americas/



We don’t think it’s likely that new evidence will suddenly crop up showing another source of ancestry for Native Americans, but it remains a formal, albeit remote, possibility. Should such evidence be found, it will require us to reexamine our models. But we can’t incorporate hypothetical results into our interpretations.Thatwould be unscientific.

Doesn’t skeletal data contradict the Beringian hypothesis? What about the very early Paleoindians whose skulls look physically different from later and contemporary Native Americans? Aren’t they proof that Native Americans have European ancestry?

The skeletal data show changes over time in the cranial morphology of ancient Native American populations. It’s true that comparisons of skull shapes were, for a very long time, how anthropologists studied genetic relationships between populations. However, over the last few decades, we’ve developed the technology to assess biological relationships between individuals and populations by comparing genomes. It’s generally acknowledged that this is a more precise, direct means of assessing ancestry than morphology, which can be influenced by environmental, developmental, and cultural factors.

Furthermore, the genomes of several of the Paleoindians with differently shaped crania have been examined, and they show no evidence of different ancestry than later or contemporary Native Americans. For example, Kennewick Man, who we discuss in the paper, exhibited what some have described as “Caucasoid” cranial features. However, his overall genetic affinities group him with Siberians/East Asians, not Europeans. And his mitochondrial haplogroup is the most basal lineage of X2a so far observed. This result shows that X2a—and this Paleoindian cranial morphology—are compatible with Siberian ancestry.

Why the skulls of the earliest inhabitants of the Americas look different from the later indigenous inhabitants is a very interesting question. We suspect it has to do with evolutionary forces like selection or drift acting on morphology over millennia. Current genomic research just doesn’t show evidence that they had different ancestry from later Native American groups.

Isn’t it pretty well proven that Clovis technologies are descended from Solutrean technologies?

No. The majority of archaeologists think that the similarities between the Clovis and Solutrean points are either spurious or coincidental. Very, very few archaeologists interpret the data as supporting the Solutrean hypothesis. We don’t see the genetic evidence as supporting the Solutrean hypothesis either.

Archaeologists were wrong about the “Clovis First” hypothesis, so doesn’t that mean that you’re wrong too?

Why? These are two separate models. The model of Beringian genetic ancestry of Native Americans is not dependent on the Clovis First hypothesis; in fact, the same evidence from which the “Beringian Pause” model was developed—early coalescence dates of mitochondrial lineages and ancient DNA data—was an important component in overturning the Clovis First model.

In science,anyhypothesis is falsifiable, andanymodel is provisional pending contradictory data. The overturning of the Clovis First model is a great example of the process working as it should.

Isn’t it unfair to critique the Solutrean hypothesis before it’s been fully “fleshed out?” There’s bound to be more data supporting it soon!

Any hypothesis is open to testing, otherwise it’s not scientific. And there’s no “waiting period” to protect a hypothesis until it’s gathered enough data to make it immune to criticism. This argument is a species of special pleading—no other idea in archaeology is treated this way.

What about the signal of “West Eurasian” ancestry seen in Native American genomes? Does it support a trans-Atlantic migration?

This finding has led to a lot of confusion among non-geneticists, and we address it in some detail in the paper. To summarize: Raghavan et al. (2014) and Rasmussen et al. (2014) studied the genomes of the Siberian Mal’ta individual and the Anzick-1 individual, respectively, and they found that a portion of their ancestry (between 14-38%) was derived from a population that also contributed alleles to thecontemporaryinhabitants of West Eurasia. Notably, the contemporary European gene pool appears to have emerged quite recently—within the last 8,000 years—as a result of significant migration and admixture events. We don’t know what the genomes of Solutrean peoples looked like, since none have been sequenced yet, but from these findings we predict that they would more closely resemble pre-Neolithic hunter-gatherers than contemporary Europeans [see Allentoft et al. 2015, Haak et al. 2015, and Lazaridis et al. 2014]. Importantly, based on the pre-Neolithic genomes that have been studied, it appears that these early European hunter-gatherers did not exhibit close genetic affinities to Native Americans.

Several studies have also formally tested the evolutionary relationships between Native American genomes and genomes from ancient and contemporary populations worldwide (see Rasmussen et al. 2015, Raghavan et al. 2015, and Lazardis et al. 2014). These studies have consistently showed that the model which best fits the current genetic data did not match the predictions of the Solutrean hypothesis. We discussed this in the paper, noting that the most supported model:

was one in which the population ancestral to Native Americans was derived from ancient North Eurasian and East Asian sources, while contemporary Europeans were derived from ancient North Eurasian and West Eurasian sources. In other words, gene flow was from the ancestral North Eurasian population into both the ancestral Native American and ancestral European populations. Lazaridis et al. (2014) did not find any evidence of Pleistocene gene flow directly from West Eurasians into Native Americans. Their model is also consistent with other studies, which have shown that 62-86% of Native American ancestry derives from East Asia.






https://www.google.com/amp/s/violentmetaphors.com/2014/03/10/problematic-science-journalism-native-american-ancestry-and-the-solutrean-hypothesis/amp/


This is the second post in a series discussing the recent publication of a 12,500 year old genome from Montana. You can find the first posthere.

In the weeks following the publication of the complete genome from a Clovis child, there’s been a lot of press coverage of this study and its possible implications. I want to discuss a bit of the media coverage on this subject, since it raises issues that I think science journalists need to consider more carefully.

First of all, to recap the major findings of the original study (discussed in more detail at the link above):
1. Anzick-1, the 12,500 year oldClovischild whose genome Rasmussen and colleagues sequenced, is very closely related to living and ancient Native Americans.
2. Anzick-1 is more closely related to Siberians than other Eurasian groups.
3. Anzick-1 is more closely related to Central and South American Native American groups than to some North American groups.
4. The results from Anzick-1’s genome fit with thescientific consensusabout the peopling of the Americas. This consensus encompasses the results of decades of archaeological, genetic, and paleoclimate research.

Unfortunately, several press reports chose to find controversy in a decidedly non-controversial story by giving undue weight to problematic “alternative” explanations of Native American origins, including theSolutrean hypothesis, and other “European contributions” to Native American ancestry.

Clovis tools from the Anzick site. From Rasmussen et al. 2014.

The Solutrean hypothesis rejects the consensus view by researchers that the ancient Native American Clovis peoples were descended from ancestors who lived in Beringia (who themselves were descended from ancient peoples who lived in Siberia). Instead, its proponents suggest that Clovis peoples are descended from a group of people living in France during the Solutrean period (21,000–15,000 years before present) who migrated across the Atlantic and spread westward across North America. They point to similarities in the stone tool technologies of the Solutrean and Clovis peoples as the main support of this idea. (These “similarities” in tool shape are vigorously rejected by most American archaeologists. I won’t go into a discussion of the details here, because that’s not my field, but if any archaeologists wish to in the comments, please feel free!).

In addition to extravagant claims based upon problematic dating and superficial similarities between tools, a serious problem with the Solutrean hypothesis is that its claim of an ancient European origin for Clovis also predicts that we would find a significant genetic contribution from ancient Europeans into ancient Native American populations. We don’t. All ancient and modern Native Americans possess mitochondrial (maternally-inherited) and Y-chromosome (paternally-inherited) lineages that are descended from those found in peoples of Siberia. They are not found in ancient or modern Europeans. Comparisons of bi-parentally inherited nuclear markers also show a close relationship between all Native Americans and Siberians, not Europeans.

What about haplogroup X?
X is mitochondrial haplogroup that has been cited as evidence of a trans-Atlantic genetic contribution. Some say that it’sevidence of a European migration, and others claim that it’s evidence of an ancient Israelite migration (including the makers of the 2011 documentary “Lost Civilizations of North America”). In the latter case, interviews of archaeologists, historians, and geneticists who work on Native American history and prehistorywere editedto make it sound like they supported the idea that haplogroup X was evidence of a pre-Columbian migration of Israelites to the Americas. The scholars responded by writing a series of articles refuting the documentary’s claims in Skeptical Inquirer (“Civilizations Lost and Found: Fabricating History”). Specifically, inthis articleone of them (my current advisor, Deborah Bolnick) discusses haplogroup X, and I encourage you to go read it. The main points are:

–Haplogroup X is widely distributed throughout Eurasia.

–The particular lineage found in North America, X2a, is specific to Native Americans. Itnotclosely related to X lineages found in Europe or in the Middle East.

–X2a is roughly the same age as other Native American-specific haplogroups (Perego et al. 2009), which fits a model of simultaneous expansion from a single source, and would not likely be the case if it was a much older lineage expanding from Europe.

The interpretation of X2a as evidence of a European genetic contributionis not acceptedby geneticists specializing in the study of Native American origins.This was carefully considered as a hypothesis a decade ago by our field, and rejected based on a strong body of evidence. Many of us are mystified that it’s recurring now, given that it was thoroughly debunked so long ago.

Unfortunately, the majority of media reports about the Clovis child’s genome chose to give undue weight to the Solutrean hypothesis and/or his “European connections”. I saw two major types of this reporting. The first, like thisReuters articlepresented the debate as if there were equal weight to both sides, an example of false equivalency that we see quite often in science coverage of controversial topics (and which I explicitly tried to warn reporters against when I was being interviewed on the subject). The second, like this article in der Spiegal“Montana Boy: Bones Show Ancestral Links to Europe”, emphasized the Anzick-1’s genetic affinities with the recently published genome from the ancient Siberian “Mal’ta child” (Raghavan et al. 2013) as evidence of European ancestry. (They specifically suggest that he may have German ancestry). That they chose to do so is puzzling. Shared ancestry between an ancient Native American and an ancient Siberian individual from the Lake Baikal region is a totally unsurprising result and fits within our consensus models for the peopling of the Americas. But Spiegal’s interpretation of this as a “European link” to Native Americans is inaccurate. The Mal’ta individual shows shared ancestry with a broad distribution of Eurasian populations, not just modern Europeans. Furthermore, the Mal’ta child lived 24,000 years ago, and the genetic landscape of that time period was almost certainly unlike the genetic landscape of today. To say that the Mal’ta child was “European” is to inappropriately apply a modern description of genetic variation backwards to a time when genetic diversity patterns in Europe likely were very different: by that logic, it would be just as accurate to say that modern Europeans are “Siberian”!

Emphasizing the “European connections” to the ancient Native American genome seems at first glance to be a particularly bizarre approach, because the genome showed absolutely nothing new in this context; it fit all expectations for what Clovis genetic diversity should look like if the standard migration model from Siberia to the Americas (via Beringia) was correct. So why did they choose to report it this way?

I think one possibility is that such alternative explanations are very appealing to reporters, as they evoke the concept of “lost civilizations” and add a touch of mystery and drama to what might otherwise be rather dry genomics papers. And it doesn’t help that we geneticists sometimes aren’t careful about thinking through the implications of emphasizing some aspects of our results over others. When we don’t provide appropriate anthropological context for our results, it’s easy to misunderstand them. What journalists may not be aware of is that there is a long and unsavory tradition in the United States–going back to the very earliest days of European colonization–of attempts to insert Europeans into Native American history. These attempts have taken many forms, as Feder and colleagues (2011)discuss:

“Even restricting ourselves to just North America, the list of such claims is long—though evidence is short—and includes: Celtic kingdoms in the northeastern United States thousands of years ago (Fell 1976); Coptic Christian settlements in ancient Michigan (based on the so-called Michigan Relics) (Halsey 2009); Roman Jews in Arizona (the Tucson Artifacts) (Burgess 2009); the Lost Tribes of Israel in Ohio (the Newark Holy Stones) (Lepper and Gill 2000); and strange mixtures of various ancient Old World peoples secreted in hideouts in the Grand Canyon in Arizona (“Explorations in Grand Canyon” 1909) and in a cave in southeastern Illinois (Burrows Cave) (Joltes 2003). These claims are predicated essentially on the same notion: ancient Europeans, Africans, or Asians came to the Americas long before Columbus and long—perhaps thousands of years—before the Norse; they settled here and had a huge impact on the native people but then somehow became lost, both to history and to historians.”

This recent round of media attention is merely the latest iteration of a long tradition of emphasizing completely unsubstantiated hypotheses of European contributions to Native American prehistory. The fact is that they run counter to the consensus of over a century of research by hundreds of scholars in multiple disciplines. But that seems to be precisely what makes them attractive–the media is very fond of the story of the lone scientist (or group of scientists) radically challenging the dominant scientific paradigm. But they are doing so with complete unawareness—or worse, disregard—for the ways in which this narrative has been used over the past several centuries as a tool to de-legitimize Native Americans’ connections to their own history.

Some ideas that buck the scientific consensus are brave and new and bold and right, like the idea thatClovis peoples weren’t the first inhabitants of the Americas.

But most are brave and new and bold and wrong, like the notion thatskulls with intentional cranial deformation belong to aliens or an unprecedented new hominid species.

In this case, not only does speculating about European genetic or cultural contributions to Native American history run completely counter to existing genetic and archaeological evidence, it buys in to a long and unfortunate tradition of asserting problematic external explanations for Native American achievements. As Feder et al. (2011)put it:

“Native Americans were fully capable of developing complex and sophisticated cultures on their own without help from other societies. The archaeological record of North America clearly shows the indigenous development of the technologies, art, architecture, social systems, subsistence practices, and engineering accomplishments seen in native America. There is no archaeological or biological evidence for the presence of interlopers, and there is no need for their presence in explaining the archaeology of native America.”

Dear journalists, please delve a bit deeper into the history of research into American prehistory before trotting out discredited theories. Mavericks love to tout their iconoclasty as evidence that they’re right, but you know that’s not how science works. Ideas live or die based on whether they’re right or wrong, and the Solutrean hypothesis is simply wrong.

[RenaRyuguu]

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