But not submarine!

If these mythical seafarers used this route (it's a common "romantic notion") they left no evidence in the DNA record. The Anzick Clovis Child--on the eastern side of the continental divide--is 12,500 years old, and his nuclear DNA shows he was related to all Native Americans tested so far.

My take is most archaeologists are unaware of "the marine carbon reservoir" effect which can skew dates--such as Channel Island--considerably. Moreover, with Paisley Caves, some of the coprolites that were purportedly dated to 14,000 years ago were shown to be non-human.

I hadn't seen the Huaca Prieta site mentioned before, but I notice it was excavated by Junius Bird who died in 1982. It looks like someone has "resurrected" some old dates on that one. Beware of science reporters with agendas; I'm a bit of one myself, but I fact check things with some serious molecular biologists, and I do try to report the issues objectively in spite of my acknowledged biases.

Monte Verde has its critics: Stuart Fiedel, Anna C. Roosevelt, C Vance Haynes, Dena Dincauze, and others. Those folks are invariably labeled "fossils" but if Monte Verde is "re-interpreted" then the only "pre-Clovis" structure collapses.

There's no doubt ancient people were capable of building boats, but maritime navigation--such as the Polynesians accomplished--took place over several millennia in tropical seas; a review of the average temperatures in the Aleutians casts considerable doubt on those possibilities. One "advocate" said that because bears could survive in the coastal regions, humans could as well. That doesn't take into account the reality that bears hibernate, sometimes more than six months a year.

I recommend people "do their homework" on this subject, particularly noting how so many cling to Thor Heyerdahl's claims. Interestingly, one of the first individuals to meet with Heyerdahl after his 1947 Kon Tiki voyage was John L. Sorenson, the original "Tapir John" who proposed the LGT apologetic claim about the location for the BOM. Sorenson was on an LDS mission to Tahiti at the time.

Here's an excellent YouTube video by Anna C. Roosevelt that utterly destroys Monte Verde's credibility, IMO...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wl-uoAWywOE

The reference to Monte Verde comes at about the 1:17:30 mark...

Per Carl Sagan, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence," and that caveat applies here, particular with popular literature, which is what Science Daily is. Worse, LDS apologists will use claims such as this as defenses for Lehi's mythical voyage in the BOM...

Finally, the DNA of Native Americans has been shown to be most closely related to the Altai people around Lake Baikal in Siberia and Mongolia, and a "polar route" is most logical explanation for their migration to this hemisphere, following reindeer herds, etc.

#consider this a voice for actual science and not politics, honest



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 08/14/2017 12:51PM by SL Cabbie.

Yeah, what the cabbie said :)

From the article itself:
"But these sites don't yet prove the coastal hypothesis. Some archaeologists argue that the first Americans might have entered via the continental interior and turned to a maritime way of life only after they arrived. "If they came down an interior ice-free corridor, they could have turned right, saw the beaches of California, and said, ‘To hell with this,’" says archaeologist David Meltzer of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas."

Yep.

This is how science works -- somebody proposes an hypothesis, and then folks like for evidence to confirm or refute it. So far, evidence doesn't confirm the "coastal hypothesis."