If true, he asked, why wouldn't archeologists find evidence of older and more developed civilizations in Alaska, British Columbia and the Northwest and newer, more rudimentary civilizations as the migration route turned south? Instead, we find exactly the opposite.
I could never answer his question though I tend to think the Bering Straight might account for some of the migration, just not all of it.
One explanation that occurs to me is that the crossers did not stop in Alaska, because of the inhospitable climate. People who lived there were naturally living at a subsistence level.
The South Pacific islander route and theory is well known as a colonization theory for South and Central America.
As for North American aboriginals, it's not a stretch to say they were probably descended from Bering Strait crossers.
All will come out in the wash with deeper understanding of both Y and mT DNA haplotypes.
Where did he think his people came from?
A friend who is Hopi/Paiute and a tribal elder says they came west from Florida not south from the Bering Strait.
Cause they wouldn’t have lasted too long had they lingered in the Alaska? Cause those who stayed became the Eskimos/Inuit/etc., who don’t have a big cultural footprint to this day?
What would the alternate theory be?
Ultimately the land in the far north can't support huge populations of people, that's why you find the initial civilizations nearer the equator, in very fertile lands.
So people came through the Bering Straits, and some kept on trucking to more amenable climes were their populations boomed.
Remember the Kennewick Man controversy. Although scientists said the remains were not related to any present-day Indians of the area, the local tribes claimed that they had aleays lived there and had never immigrated from anywhere else, so those 9000(?)-year-old bones had to be of one of their ancestors...and the Clinton administration supported their claim
That’s very interesting. It seems there is evidence (and always has been) for a multi-factorial answer to the question of American Indian origins. And your experience conforms to my reading, that it’s not the American Indians who reject this - it’s their vocal, mostly white, ‘advocates’, who insist on the single origin Bering Strait story.