Posted on 02/13/2008 2:20:02 PM PST by Pharmboy
People who migrated from Asia to the New World camped out for 20,000 years on land now submerged under the Bering Strait between Alaska and Siberia, according to a genetic analysis published on Tuesday.
A team at the University of Florida combined studies of DNA, archeological evidence, climate data and geological data to come up with their new theory, which describes a much longer migration than most other researchers have proposed.
"We sort of went out onto a limb, incorporating all this nongenetic data," molecular anthropologist Connie Mulligan said in a telephone interview.
Mulligan's team proposes that the people who left Central Asia to eventually populate the Americas passed quickly through Siberia, and then got stuck in Beringia -- a former land mass that now lies under the frigid Bering Sea.
There they stayed for 20,000 years, until glaciers melted about 15,000 years ago, opening a route to the Americas.
"The reason there is no archeological evidence for that occupation is that the area is under water," Mulligan said.
The researchers used sequences of mitochondrial DNA taken from Asians and Native Americans for their analysis. This type of DNA is passed along virtually unchanged from mother to child.
The small mutations that occur can be used as a genetic clock to track the descent and the sizes of ancient populations.
"After a long period of little change in population size in greater Beringia, Amerinds (American Indians or native Americans) rapidly expanded into the Americas less than 15,000 years ago either through an interior ice-free corridor or along the coast," they wrote in their report.
"This rapid colonization of the New World was achieved by a founder group with an effective population size of 1,000 to 5,400 individuals."
WAITING AND MUTATING
The University of Florida's Michael Miyamoto said the DNA suggests a 20,000-year "waiting period" during which generations passed and genetic changes accumulated.
"By looking at the kinds and frequencies of these mutations in modern populations, we can get an idea of when the mutations arose and how many people were around to carry them," he said.
Other theories have suggested one single expansion of people from the Old World to the New around 15,000 years ago.
"If you think about it, these people didn't know they were going to a new world. They were moving out of Asia and finally reached a landmass that was exposed because of lower sea levels during the last glacial maximum, but two major glaciers blocked their progress into the New World," Mulligan said in a statement.
"So they basically stayed put for about 20,000 years. It wasn't paradise, but they survived. When the North American ice sheets started to melt and a passage into the New World opened, we think they left Beringia to go to a better place."
Anthropologist and genetics expert Henry Harpending of the University of Utah, who did not work on the study, said it made sense.
"The idea that people were stuck in Beringia for a long time is obvious in retrospect, but it has never been promulgated," he said. "It's very plausible that a bunch of them were stuck there for thousands of years."
The study is available at http://www.plosone.org/doi/pone.0001596
(Editing by Will Dunham and Cynthia Osterman)
Silly! That is why it took 20,000 years. They could only build so many campfires, so it took a lot longer to melt them back then.
Silly! That is why it took 20,000 years. They could only build so many campfires, so it took a lot longer to melt them back then.
Silly! That is why it took 20,000 years. They could only build so many campfires, so it took a lot longer to melt them back then.
Three times a post is thrice as nice, I guess.
First two times I hit ‘Post’, I got a “Proxy Error” screen, so had no idea that it accpeted it.
This a new one on me.
No...that was during the "Global Cooling" period - Gore-Magnon man announced the debate was over, so the ice stayed.
When it started to melt, he had some 'splaning to do, so the long lost ancestor The Goracle is now claiming "Global Warming"...
Makes 40 years in the desert with Moses look like a pretty good deal.
Somebody must have found a tooth somewhere to figure all this out.
“The reason there is no archeological evidence for that occupation is that the area is under water,”
I tried that line of argument in my NSF grant application to study the lost continent of Atlantis...
A Comet May do it.
Comet Theory Collides With Clovis Research, May Explain Disappearance of Ancient People
Could you beat the ice pack prior to modern vessels?
Was this the same time frame as when the giant sabertooth’s considered the Bering land bridge a buffet table of humanity?
“So they basically stayed put for about 20,000 years.”
I’m confused. Did their carbon credit economy stop the global warming and cause the sea levels to drop, exposing the land bridge?
Thanks Pharmboy, alas...
A Three-Stage Colonization Model for the Peopling of the Americas
Plosone.org | 2-13-2008 | Andrew Kitchen, Michael M. Miyamoto, Connie J. Mulligan
Posted on 02/13/2008 1:45:46 PM EST by blam
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1969791/posts
Mulligan's team proposes that the people who left Central Asia to eventually populate the Americas passed quickly through Siberia, and then got stuck in Beringia -- a former land mass that now lies under the frigid Bering Sea.It's another ridiculous kludge to try to save the moribund Clovis-First-and-Only delusion.
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Thanks Pharmboy. |
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Just stay south of the ice pack and you can still make it over here from there.
When you said “off the Russian coast and go north” I pictured somewhere farther West than the East coast. Sorry, I misunderstood.
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