Posted on 03/04/2002 12:05:29 PM PST by afraidfortherepublic
The two leading proponents of the Europe theory admit that many scientists reject their contention, instead holding fast to the long-established belief that the first Americans arrived from Siberia via a now-submerged land bridge across the Bering Sea to Alaska.
The first of the Europe-to-North America treks probably took place at the height of the last Ice Age more than 18,000 years ago, said Dennis Stanford, curator of archaeology at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History, and Milwaukee native Bruce Bradley, an independent archaeological consultant and research associate of the Carnegie Museum.
Stanford and Bradley contend that if the original migration came from Europe, it would be logical to find more older sites in the eastern United States, as has been the case in recent years.
The Kenosha County digs show that woolly mammoths were butchered by humans here more than 13,000 years ago - at least 2,000 years older than what was once thought to be the oldest site in the U.S.
Stanford and Bradley also point to recent DNA analysis involving a particular genetic marker known as haplogroup X. The marker is found in a minority of American Indians, including some in the Great Lakes region, and Europeans, but is not found in Asians, suggesting an ancestral link between Europe and North America.
The two plan to publish a book laying out their findings in about a year, they said. They believe evidence in the book will win converts to their theory.
"There are several competing theories," said Milwaukee archaeologist David Overstreet. "All I know is people were here (in southeastern Wisconsin) several thousands of years earlier than previously thought."
Overstreet, director of the Marquette University-affiliated Center for Archaeological Research, has analyzed several southeastern Wisconsin sites where piles of bones of mammoths that had been butchered by people date back as far as 13,500 years ago.
The Kenosha County sites are among several eastern U.S. Ice Age sites that have fueled the growing controversy over whether North America's first people came from the Iberian Peninsula of Europe or from Asia.
"Whatever their source, Paleoindians appear to have reached the mid-continent by 13,500 (years ago) and successfully exploited the Pleistocene biomass (animals and plants) there for at least a millennium," Overstreet writes in a paper soon to be published in the international journal Geoarchaeology.
It was a time when the inhabitants of the Northern Hemisphere lived in an icy environment of vast glaciers, boreal forests, mastodons, saber-toothed tigers and 1,000-pound cave bears.
In the more-accepted Asia theory, people migrated across a land bridge over the Bering Sea and down an ice-free corridor to the American Southwest, where they established a culture known as Clovis.
However, while artifacts unearthed near Clovis, N.M., date to more than 11,000 years ago, several sites in the eastern U.S., including the Kenosha County sites, date to between 13,000 and 19,000 years, long before Clovis.
"In the last half-dozen years, all this stuff is popping up in the eastern U.S.," Overstreet said. "There is no question that somebody was in this area (southeastern Wisconsin) mucking around with mammoths 12,000 to 13,000 years ago. The question is, where did they come from?"
Prehistoric travelers
In separate interviews, Stanford and Bradley offered some of the strongest arguments:
With much of the world's water having been evaporated and converted to ice, sea levels during the last Ice Age were as much as 400 feet below today's levels.
An expanded coastal region probably extended from the Iberian Peninsula in southwestern France and northern Spain to the southern tip of Ireland. In addition, the Grand Banks, a series of submerged plateaus extending several hundred miles off the coast of Newfoundland, probably were above water.
The geological conditions meant the prehistoric travelers would have needed to pull off only a 1,500-mile Atlantic Ocean crossing along sheltered ice sheets teeming with easily hunted marine mammals and fish, Bradley and Stanford said.
Stanford noted that 50,000 years ago or more, humans had become skilled enough at open sea travel that they were able to arrive on the continent of Australia. They most likely used small, animal-skin boats, taking advantage of favorable sea currents.
"There would have been huge reserves of food," Bradley said.
The food, which probably included fish, seals, walruses and the now-extinct great auk, actually may have been the motivation for their wanderlust.
Overstreet added that the European glacier may have been cutting off hunting areas, forcing those inhabitants to find new food sources.
"They certainly were on the move," he said. "These people were capable of making that trip if they needed to."
'Completely crazy'
While Overstreet said he still has not completely accepted the new theory, others flatly reject it.
"It is a highly improbable theory," said James Stoltman, a professor emeritus of North American archaeology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Stoltman said he did not think Stanford and Bradley presented credible evidence to support their hypothesis.
Stanford and Bradley also point to the similarity between the bifaced stone spear points found in the U.S. and the Solutrean area off the north coast of Spain and dating to between 16,500 and 22,000 years ago.
However, while Solutrean and Clovis points are both bifaced, there are major differences, said Thomas Pleger, who teaches Great Lakes archaeology at UW-Fox Valley.
Pleger said there just is no credible evidence to support a theory of an Ice Age migration from Europe.
"It is a completely crazy and unsupported hypothesis," said Lawrence Guy Straus, a professor in the anthropology department at the University of New Mexico and an expert on the Upper Paleolithic period in Western Europe. He also serves as editor of the Journal of Anthropological Research.
Straus said there are major differences between bone and stone technology used by Solutrean people and the Clovis culture of North America.
In addition, he said most of the British Isles, the supposed jumping-off point for the migration, was covered with ice between 13,000 and 27,000 years ago.
There also is no evidence that the Solutrean people had acquired skills, such as navigation, deep-sea fishing and marine mammal hunting, that would have been needed to pull off such a migration, he said.
Ancestry in question
Straus also said the Stanford/Bradley theory has angered some American Indian groups whose ancestry has been tied to Asia, not Europe.
"It is basically saying they weren't here first," Straus said.
However, at the same time traditional religious beliefs of many American Indians fail to acknowledge any migration from another part of the world, said John Norder, an assistant professor of anthropology who specializes in American Indian matters.
Norder, who also is a member of the Dakota Sioux, said a common religious belief among many American Indians is that their ancestors' land was either created for them or that they came to it from an underworld.
Recently, some American Indians have incorporated the idea of their ancestors crossing a Bering Sea land bridge, he said.
In the meantime, the theory of Stone Age Europeans discovering America dominates the debate.
"People discuss it as being crazy and wish it would go away," said Straus. "I'm amazed at the amount of attention."
Thanks again. Let me reciprocate by recommending a work by one of the great comparative and historical linguists of our time, Joseph H. Greenberg, "Indo-European and its nearest relatives," put out by Stanford Univ. Press a couple of years ago. Briefly, his thesis, which he backs up with intriguing and often brilliant examples, is that Indo-European (the language family that includes English, German, the Latin languages like French, Italian and Spanish, Russian and the Slavic languages, Irish and the Celtic languages, Armenian, Greek, Persian, Hindi and the other languages of North India) in turn belongs to a language "super-family" he calls "Eurasiatic." This proposed family would consist of, in addition to Indo-European, the Uralic languages (Hungarian, Finnish, Samoyed, etc.), Altaic (Turkish, Mongolian, the Siberian Tungusic languages, etc.), Chukotian (Chukchi, a isolated language spoken in extreme northeastern Siberia, and its related languages there), Nivkh or Gilyak (an extremely isolated language family spoken in the lower Amur Valley and parts of Sakhalin), Japanese, Korean, and *AINU*, and the (New World) Eskimo-Aleutian languages!!! (As a footnote, Greenberg's thesis is not an entirely original one, and he extensively acknowledges his indebtedness to other linguists who have investigated what Holgar Pedersen named the "Nostratic thesis" in the early 20th century---after Latin "nostrates"="our homeboys"---but in my opinion, Greenberg makes the best case for the thesis).
Now, can you beat that? :)
No, no, wait. It's all a conspiracy to damn our souls to evolutionist Hell. The critter really is a dinosaur, but even though no dinosaur remains have been found younger than 65 million years old and no human remains have been found older than a quarter million years old, the Indians know for a fact that humans lived around dinosaurs just like the documentary television series, The Flintstones, proves.
A little slow on the reply but, nope!
Ernest, "Gods, Graves, Glyphs," please. Thanks.
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So were Spanish fishermen. It is known that Basques fished off the Grand Banks millenia ago (and still do so today).
However, I don't think Spain could be responsible for the "Indian" ethnic groups. Basques are very tall and are the tallest men in Europe (oddly enough, the women are among the shortest), have very coarse black hair, and are extremely fair-skinned. I don't think you could find much in common with the average Algonquin.
Wow...that's something I didnt know. :D Thanks! YOu remind me of the Karankawa Indians, who lived mainly along the Texas coast and were known to be VERY tall and made tremendous long bows from a native tree, later dubbed "bois d'arc" or as I knew it "bohdark". These bows, it was said, were equivalent in strength and range to the English longbow and the Karankawa came to be known as cannibals through Cabeza de Vaca's reports.
this appears to be the oldest FR topic about Al Goodyear:
Site Sheds Light on Human Arrival
Source: AP via Yahoo
Published: May 26, 2001
Posted on 05/27/2001 06:25:12 PDT by sarcasm
http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3b11003848e1.htm
Please FREEPMAIL me if you want on or off the
"Gods, Graves, Glyphs" PING list or GGG weekly digest
-- Archaeology/Anthropology/Ancient Cultures/Artifacts/Antiquities, etc.
Gods, Graves, Glyphs (alpha order)
Bump to re-read
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