human connections across Bering

[Mojave]

FAIRBANKS — Research illuminating an ancient language connection between Asia and North America supports archeological and genetic evidence that a Bering Strait land bridge once connected North America with Asia, and the discovery is being endorsed by a growing list of scholars in the field of linguistics and other sciences.

Read more: Fairbanks Daily News-Miner - New book presents evidence of human connections across Bering Strait land bridge

[jeremywilliams]

Great now the Asians will want to take over the US now that they can say that there grand pa walked over the land and is now here. Or is this why there are casinos on Indian land because they can count all over the money they have. I know it was poor tasts.

[silver lake]

There seems to be plenty of Skeletal (cranial) evidence to show that the first people to populate North America (US) were Caucasian; with the group we call Native Americans arriving some few thousand years later. Naturally the indians are trying to get possession of these remains for obvious reasons. Oral history is one thing, physical evidence is something else.

[Cannonman17]

Based strictly on linguistic evidence I think there must have been at least three independant groups or more likely, three different times/phases of immigration. Also, something that not many people mention is that you really don't need a land bridge for that to happen. Look at the Natives from the NW coastal areas, very skilled with the small water craft, it really wouldn't have been too much of a leap for them to cross the bearing straits for quite a while. I mean the land bridge might have only been open for X amount of years BUT it was close enough to it for again as long on either side of that window in time for people to cross with small boats/kyaks, etc.

[mootsman]

Originally Posted by silver lake

There seems to be plenty of Skeletal (cranial) evidence to show that the first people to populate North America (US) were Caucasian...

I thought the cranial evidence had been discounted due to small sample sizes and what are considered within parameter variations in the morphology...but I haven't read these studies in several years.

FWIW, I think the answer will lie not in cranial or language studies but in the increasingly sophisticated DNA studies. If mtDNA or Y-DNA could be extracted from all or nearly all of the available oldest remains in north and south America, the riddle would likely be resolved (and I'd bet on Asian origins). However the politics and logistics of such a study would likely prohibit it. Personally, I don't care if they came from Mars. I just find it all fascinating history.

[paleo_joe]

Put me into the multiple migration camp, too. What I find interesting is the notion that this continent was populated with pre-Clovis peoples and then the Clovis point spread across them all like wildfire. What was it about that point that made it spread like that?

[Mojave]

That is the $68,000 question. I used to believe that it was a fad just like bell bottom jeans and iphones that swept the nation. They didn’t have the mass media we have today to spread the goodness though. That and all the specific lithic reduction techniques make it a real mystery. The only answer in my mind currently is that the culture itself spread quickly due to some reason like climate/environment/game.
I could believe the fad theory for the USE OF a specific point, but the whole manufacturing process needed to taught. The whole sequence couldn’t be simply copied. I currently think some points commonly recognized as Clovis are really other styles that were re-worked to emulate Clovis points when various cultures met and interacted, but the real Clovis point must have been made by the same few generations of the same people that just had ants-in-their-pants and were constantly on the move.
They must have been like the Vikings only on land. Why did they move so much? Nobody knows.
C. Vance Haynes wrote a hypothetical scenario that described Clovis getting from Swan Point to Anzick in less than a decade in a book titled “Space and Spatial Analysis in Archaeology.”
You can see it here:
http://books.google.com/books?id=vBnJ3rEvzLYC&pg=PA253&lpg=PA253&dq=Alaska +to+Anzick+site,+Montana+in+less+than+a+decade&sou rce=bl&ots=48N1qN5XlX&sig=y15PTB99tJ6LEmNuR2z0ApcJ _k4&hl=en&ei=GkdITN6IM8P68AaM3PCoDg&sa=X&oi=book_r esult&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBIQ6AEwAA#v=onepage &q=Alaska%20to%20Anzick%20site%2C%20Montana%20in%2 0less%20than%20a%20decade&f=false

[paleo_joe]

They could've been symbols that identified a tribe of traders or shamans or other group that was always on the move. Similar to the theory that the Spiro Mounds people formed their babies heads into cone shapes so they'd be identifiable as traders or emissaries from an important place.

Or they could have been spiritual / religious items that were traded.

One thing that just struck me is that if that if it was one culture moving around, they were probably doing it in a peaceful manner or we might have evidence of war.

Another thing is that you see the Clovis point being adapted into all sorts of different points across the US, after it was introduced. Here in AR it turned into the Dalton, out West maybe (I'm guessing because I don't know the chronology) the Folsom or Hell Gap.

[mootsman]

And the latest RC dating re-calibrations of all the available Clovis data indicates a time span of only 2 hundred years for the culture. I know the people didn't spread in that time but even for the technology to cover North and part of central America in that period is really amazing as you all have mentioned.

Mojave, if there is such a thing as a "classic Clovis" it would be an interesting study to bring together examples from the furthermost geographic extremities.

I mentioned in a post the other day that the remarkable similarity amongst a lot of "late Paleo" point types around different regions might indicate movement of the technology through existing cultures. And that this is masked by "regioncentric" books and type names, etc.

[Mojave]

Here is a quick pic I put together to see if there is a possible migration "direction" to Clovis. The data is from

53. Relatives in South America
The map shows general locations of the 11 most reliably dated Clovis sites in order from oldest to youngest. I had hoped to see a pattern but as you can see there is none. These sites have very small standard deviations on C14 tests. They all fall between 10,765 and 11,080 RCYBP.
Many years ago (when I knew even less than I do now) I looked at a couple Clovis points from New Brunswick. My impression at the time was they were identical to California Clovis points.
I think it is at least possible that Clovis expanded accross the country in less than 200-300 years and all the variations came later because all the variations are regional while the basic form exists everywhere.
According to the dates, Clovis man "aparently" went from Nebraska to Florida to Montana to Colorado to Ohio to Oklahoma to Arizona to Pennsylvania etc.
They were everywhere at once essentially.