I'm a little confused why this is posted? I thought this has been common knowledge for a long time.
This isn't a news story, just a kind of encyclopedia (?) entry, and it should have a (2024) at least, because of the "Last updated June 2024" at bottom.
I think the popular knowledge was based on the bering straight ice age migration story, which has been mostly debunked. how the americas were peoples remains an open question
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peopling_of_the_Americas
You say debunked then link to an article that starts:
>The peopling of the Americas began when Paleolithic hunter-gatherers (Paleo-Indians) entered North America from the North Asian Mammoth steppe via the Beringia land bridge, which had formed between northeastern Siberia and western Alaska due to the lowering of sea level during the Last Glacial Maximum (26,000 to 19,000 years ago).
That is what is common knowledge afaik. What has been debunked?
If you look at videos of Yakut+other siberian/steppe people their cultural clothing looks pretty similar to what (native) Americans have. I think thats pretty neat.
Science includes activities outside reading papers that slightly disagree, such as testing hypotheses with experiments; hence my comment that the former isn't science in a nutshell. It describes research quite well, which one can argue is a subset of scientific activity.
Most sub-Saharan Africans have no Asian ancestors -- or at least that is our best guess. (Conversely, everyone has ancestors who lived in sub-Saharan Africa.)
I don’t think it works like that. Gene mixing happens all over the world and our nearest common ancestor of everyone alive today is only 3000 years ago.
Not that I'm particularly convinced myself but you quoted the part about the prior paper, not the one the link was talking about:
> The current paper presents more realistic mathematical and computer models. It incorporates factors such as socially driven mating, physical barriers of geography and migration, and recorded historical events.
The paper uses the proper term "most recent common ancestor" (commonly abbreviated MRCA) which specifically means the most recent individual from which all individuals of a set (such as "all humans") are genetically descended from (i.e. if you traced everyone's lineage at least one branch up the tree would always hit this person, not that this person was the only source of genetic information from that time).
> Chang established the basis of this research in a previous publication with an intentionally simplified model that ignored such complexities as geography and migration. Those precise mathematical results showed that in a world obeying the simplified assumptions, the most recent common ancestor would have lived less than 1,000 years ago. He also introduced the "identical ancestors point," the most recent time -- less than 2,000 years ago in the simplified model -- when each person was an ancestor to all or ancestor to none of the people alive today
This is clearly ridiculous. We have historical written records to know this isn’t true.
Do Anglo North American American-Indians also share the practice with Latin North American American-Indians as well as South American Indians? I thought that was mostly a Mexican isthmus thing in the Americas.
There are multiple usages, specifically just citizens of the USofA is just one use.
American, a. and n.
(əˈmɛrɪkən)
A adj.
1.a Belonging to the continent of America. Also, of or pertaining to its inhabitants.
1.b American language (usu. with the), (i) a language of American Indians; (ii) American English (see sense 3). Also American tongue.
2.a Belonging to the British colonies in North America (obs.).
2.b Belonging to the United States.
2.c U.S. spec. (See quot. a 1861.)
1837 Diplom. Corr. Texas (1908) I. 187 A large number of fine American horses‥which there is no doubt had been stolen from citizens of Texas. 1846 E. Bryant What I saw in Calif. (1849) iv. 37 Such [Indians] as rode ponies were desirous of swapping them for the American horses of the emigrants. a 1861 Winthrop John Brent (1862) ii. 14 He was an American horse,—so they distinguish in California one brought from the old States. 1878 J. H. Beadle Western Wilds, xvi. 253, I rode a good-sized American horse.
3.a Special Combinations. American bar; American blight; American cheese; American cloth; American dream; American English; American football; ...oadfoot et al. Billiards i. 41 In 1876 D. Richards‥ran second to Cook in an *American tournament. 1976 Cumberland News 3 Dec. 19/1 On Thursday, December 16‥a Christmas American tournament will take place.
3.b In the names of various trees and plants native to North America, as American arbor vitæ, Thuja occidentalis; American ash, Fraxinus americana; American aspen (tree), Populus tremuloides; American Beauty (rose), a variety of cultivated rose; American beech (tree), Fagus grandifolia; American elm (tree), = white elm; American plane (tree), the buttonwood or Virginian Plane (see plane n.1 1).
B n.
B.1 An American Indian.
B.2 A native of America of European descent; esp. a citizen of the United States. Now simply, a native or inhabitant of North or South America (often with qualifying word, as Latin American, North American); a citizen of the United States.
B.3 A ship belonging to America.
B.4 pl. Short for American stocks or shares.
B.5 American English; the form of English spoken in the United States.
Yes, that is one use of the demonym “American” in a modern, geopolitical context. There are other contexts and other uses when it has different meanings.
Asserting it has that meaning when used in context of a time tens of thousands of years ago is nonsensical.
Idk, seems like if you're already established somewhere and someone else comes in and tells you the place you live and your ancestors have lived in for millennia is now called "America"... Dunno, that feels kind of wrong.
But that’s what it’s called in English, the language the article is written in.
Germans don’t call the place they live Germany. They don’t even call themselves Germans. But I call it Germany because that’s the English name for that place.
You have to call it something. Place names are a function of language, not of genetics. In English it's called North America or South America, and together The Americas. In Chinese South America is "South Beautiful Continent".
Oh nooo, I'm so offended that Chinese people have a name that I didn't agree too for the place my ancestors are from for the last 350 years. Someone give me some pearls to clutch.
Their "point" was nothing more than repeating the colonialist propaganda that the real americans were the ones who ""settled"" later and named the continent.
(ALso that is a so ridiculous reasoning, by that logic everyone is native african and not native <insert place where they genetically diverged and settled>)
No that does not follow, but the very first individuals who migrated to America (the humans this discussion is about) obviously were not born in America. By my logic there were no native Americans that came from Asia to America, but their descendants became native.
Yes I know, very pedantic. I don't think there is anything wrong with the title.
I suspect "enlightenment" is that the inverse is also true, but I think that this concept, as most are, is not reversible. In the animal kingdom, invasive species are often a detriment to the local species. In the human world, incoming cultures are often a detriment/disruption to local cultures. This is especially true when the incoming culture has an incompatible value system. For example, see the many examples of Islam and Christianity decimating/erasing local cultures, over the centuries. The value system can be so out of whack that you end up with genocide of the native populations, like in Canada, USA, and Australia. The tricky part is that the very perception of "disruption" depends on if a culture is valued or not, with many modern cultures have little/no accepted value. Related, this is why religious cultures are the most disruptive: religion is culture that's strictly defined in a personal way, with high personal value, so high rigigity. Rigid things don't mesh well.
Thor Heyerdahl famously believed that America was colonized from the east. He built a papyrus boat and crossed the Atlantic from Morocco to prove it was possible. It was not the first time he was wrong.
> He was certainly a “doer”. His theories met fierce criticism from academics though.
It seems the privileged place some people give to 'doer', and their decision to define the hard work of academic research as not 'doing', produced the wrong answer. Thor might have done better with another approach.
Those are interesting mythologies, akin to an invisible guy in outer space making a man out of a twig and 2 dingleberries, but does it really have anything to do with where early american people actually came from?
After a couple of genrations, I'm sure early american's had lost cultural knowledge of how exactly they came to be in the americas. After a couple of centuries, for sure all of this info was gone.
Another example of this might be the early viking habitation in north america, which was totally forgotten before other europeans arrived 500 years later...
Myths are not meant to be believed literally, they tell a story about how to live in right relationship to the earth. And that's why I find the first nation stories so valuable - it's a philosophy born of a very different historical trajectory than European culture.
The Beringian Standstill hypothesis states that a group migrated out of Asia 25k years ago and were effectively trapped by glaciers in the temperate coastal plains of southern Alaska (what is now the Gulf of Alaska). When glaciers melted 15kya, sea levels rose and they start traveling south.
(You'll notice lots of references to a great flood - the globally rising sea levels no doubt leading to this myth being prevalent around the world in many cultures, first nations included)
By that point, they'd already been Americans for 10k years. There wasn't likely any conscious realization of this, no cultural memory of "Asia". But they truly were the first Americans, and way earlier than we were taught.
The result is a grand natural experiment - a group of humans completely cut off from Asia/Africa/Europe for millennia. That culture incubated in southern AK for 10k years, then spread out over the Americas for the last 15k, only to run into long lost European cousins 500 years ago. It's that long period of relative isolation that makes the first nation stories so valuable. The kind of morals, myths and values that arose from this unique historical trajectory can be quite different to philosophies of the old continents. Yet surprisingly similar (we are human after all).
Even in more modern times, the details of how a population of people came to be can get lost.
For instance, nobody actually knew where the Romani people actually came from until the 1800s or so, and even then, the theory of a migration out of India (specifically, the Punjab region) couldn't be proven until the advent of modern DNA science.
> which was totally forgotten before other europeans
Was it? They just haven’t realized or cared that it was a different continent rather than a bunch of different islands far in the North.
Vinland sagas were written several hundred years after the last voyages and weren’t lost either (Iceland itself had very limited contact with the rest of Europe though (e.g. it took the plague an extra 50 years to get there).
Other Europeans never knew anything that they could forget…
Nobody cared or had any clue what some “savages” in the North were up to and whether they discovered another random island. If they did it had no impact on them.
Europe was extremely different in the late 1400s compared to 1000 AD, Columbus letters were published in many major cities almost immediately after his return.
Even though it was already known, more proof is good.
I'm a little confused why this is posted? I thought this has been common knowledge for a long time.
This isn't a news story, just a kind of encyclopedia (?) entry, and it should have a (2024) at least, because of the "Last updated June 2024" at bottom.
I think the popular knowledge was based on the bering straight ice age migration story, which has been mostly debunked. how the americas were peoples remains an open question https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peopling_of_the_Americas
You say debunked then link to an article that starts:
>The peopling of the Americas began when Paleolithic hunter-gatherers (Paleo-Indians) entered North America from the North Asian Mammoth steppe via the Beringia land bridge, which had formed between northeastern Siberia and western Alaska due to the lowering of sea level during the Last Glacial Maximum (26,000 to 19,000 years ago).
That is what is common knowledge afaik. What has been debunked?
Yeah idk maybe I misunderstood what's going on
> how the americas were peoples remains an open question
Did you mean "peopled"?
Yes
No surprise here.
Look, for example, at this clip of traditional Siberian music.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SU1apJTv94o
or this one
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXLoP9iSU5Y
The similarity to North American Indian cultures is still striking, 13 thousand years later.
(And I like the way the singer just overflows with musical energy, too...)
If you look at videos of Yakut+other siberian/steppe people their cultural clothing looks pretty similar to what (native) Americans have. I think thats pretty neat.
you mean, like (Yukaghir)? https://www.ethnicjewelsmagazine.co.uk/articles-yukagir/#!ji...
To be fair, the environment imposes a lot of constraints.
And there's the Eskimo/Inuit cultures that cross the Bering strait.
Difficult to read excerpts from a few different articles that mostly but not completely agree
This is science in a nutshell, no?
This is "Writing the meta-analysis left as an exercise to the non-specialist reader"
More research than science :)
What's the difference?
The processes that lead to science are somewhat subjective, otherwise scientific progress would be constant and guaranteed, no?
But how does that effect the definitions of each?
Science includes activities outside reading papers that slightly disagree, such as testing hypotheses with experiments; hence my comment that the former isn't science in a nutshell. It describes research quite well, which one can argue is a subset of scientific activity.
>Migration Patterns Deduced from Blood Types and North America and Siberian Languages
The title will be more accurate if include languages as well.
also "The population history of northeastern Siberia since the Pleistocene"
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7617447/
Who did not come from Asia, is my question.
Most sub-Saharan Africans have no Asian ancestors -- or at least that is our best guess. (Conversely, everyone has ancestors who lived in sub-Saharan Africa.)
I don’t think it works like that. Gene mixing happens all over the world and our nearest common ancestor of everyone alive today is only 3000 years ago.
http://www.stat.yale.edu/~jtc5/papers/CommonAncestors/Nature...
> ignored such complexities as geography and migration
That article doesn't look compelling when refuting a claim that depends entirely on geography and migration.
Not that I'm particularly convinced myself but you quoted the part about the prior paper, not the one the link was talking about:
> The current paper presents more realistic mathematical and computer models. It incorporates factors such as socially driven mating, physical barriers of geography and migration, and recorded historical events.
That's embarrassing. Thank you.
There is zero chance our nearest common ancestor was only 3000 years ago.
I wonder if the authors of the paper thought about that issue. How is "nearest common ancestor" defined?
The paper uses the proper term "most recent common ancestor" (commonly abbreviated MRCA) which specifically means the most recent individual from which all individuals of a set (such as "all humans") are genetically descended from (i.e. if you traced everyone's lineage at least one branch up the tree would always hit this person, not that this person was the only source of genetic information from that time).
Clarity: it should have read "if you traced everyone's lineage _then_ at least one branch _somewhere_ up the tree would...".
I realized the way it was written could be ambiguously read as "if you traced everyone's lineage _by_ one branch up" after the edit window had passed.
Feel free to post scientific papers that show this.
A moment's logical thinking demonstrates it. "Scientific papers" are not the currency of correctness.
And yet they are worth infinitely more than simple contradiction free of any evidence whatsoever.
A moment's though yet you can't write it down?
> Chang established the basis of this research in a previous publication with an intentionally simplified model that ignored such complexities as geography and migration. Those precise mathematical results showed that in a world obeying the simplified assumptions, the most recent common ancestor would have lived less than 1,000 years ago. He also introduced the "identical ancestors point," the most recent time -- less than 2,000 years ago in the simplified model -- when each person was an ancestor to all or ancestor to none of the people alive today
This is clearly ridiculous. We have historical written records to know this isn’t true.
Considering Afro-Eurasia is just one giant continent, nobody.
Not surprising since Dios de la muerte is very reminiscent of ancestor worship through out Asia down to the ritualist food offerings at the cemetery.
Do Anglo North American American-Indians also share the practice with Latin North American American-Indians as well as South American Indians? I thought that was mostly a Mexican isthmus thing in the Americas.
thats common everywhere though
So America is actually Russia?
Sure, and Russia is actually Iran which is actually Tanzania.
First Americans?
Yes, the first humans in North America.
Exactly. That's what the title should be.
Why? It makes sense to call the first people living in the Americas “American”, especially when talking about a time before even civilizations.
So what, we have Asians, Africans, and Humans Living in North America?
American refers to people from the USA. Canadians rightly bristle when called Americans.
There are multiple usages, specifically just citizens of the USofA is just one use.
American, a. and n.
(əˈmɛrɪkən)
Yes, that is one use of the demonym “American” in a modern, geopolitical context. There are other contexts and other uses when it has different meanings.
Asserting it has that meaning when used in context of a time tens of thousands of years ago is nonsensical.
Are you really proposing that Native Americans are not Americans? Is the term "American" so stained by colonialist hate?
Idk, seems like if you're already established somewhere and someone else comes in and tells you the place you live and your ancestors have lived in for millennia is now called "America"... Dunno, that feels kind of wrong.
First, it's not "America", it's "The Americas" -- we're talking about the two continents, right? The New World?
Second, that's the word we use in English. If you've lived here for millenia, you can use the appropriate word in your own language.
Whether you count it as two continents or one depends on where you are from.
Who counts them as one continent? That seems hard to argue geographically. I don't think a land bridge prevents them from being continents.
> The six-continent combined-America model is taught in Greece and many Romance-speaking countries—including Latin America.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continent?wprov=sfti1#Number
All English-speaking countries count them as two continents though.
And in English, it's conventionally "the Americas" even if you believe it's a single continent.
Kind of like, we call it the Bahamas, not Bahama, even though it's one country. It's linguistic, not conceptual.
Very interesting. I can't check the Greek-language citations; I'd love to hear from someone who has lived or gone to school in one of those countries.
But that’s what it’s called in English, the language the article is written in.
Germans don’t call the place they live Germany. They don’t even call themselves Germans. But I call it Germany because that’s the English name for that place.
You have to call it something. Place names are a function of language, not of genetics. In English it's called North America or South America, and together The Americas. In Chinese South America is "South Beautiful Continent".
Oh nooo, I'm so offended that Chinese people have a name that I didn't agree too for the place my ancestors are from for the last 350 years. Someone give me some pearls to clutch.
Maybe their point is that they were native Asians and not native Americans.
Their "point" was nothing more than repeating the colonialist propaganda that the real americans were the ones who ""settled"" later and named the continent.
(ALso that is a so ridiculous reasoning, by that logic everyone is native african and not native <insert place where they genetically diverged and settled>)
> by that logic everyone is native african
No that does not follow, but the very first individuals who migrated to America (the humans this discussion is about) obviously were not born in America. By my logic there were no native Americans that came from Asia to America, but their descendants became native.
Yes I know, very pedantic. I don't think there is anything wrong with the title.
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Gotta make a living. "First" rolls off the tongue more easily than "to date the oldest statistically correlated."
First native Americans.
Had there been other Americans before them?
They are not native. They are native to africa like all other humans. humans arrived in amierica via asia first.
Then, necessarily, no creature is native, since the world is covered by creatures with a common ancestor/geographic location: they all migrated.
You are so close to enlightenment!
I suspect "enlightenment" is that the inverse is also true, but I think that this concept, as most are, is not reversible. In the animal kingdom, invasive species are often a detriment to the local species. In the human world, incoming cultures are often a detriment/disruption to local cultures. This is especially true when the incoming culture has an incompatible value system. For example, see the many examples of Islam and Christianity decimating/erasing local cultures, over the centuries. The value system can be so out of whack that you end up with genocide of the native populations, like in Canada, USA, and Australia. The tricky part is that the very perception of "disruption" depends on if a culture is valued or not, with many modern cultures have little/no accepted value. Related, this is why religious cultures are the most disruptive: religion is culture that's strictly defined in a personal way, with high personal value, so high rigigity. Rigid things don't mesh well.
"Native" can mean many things. Your usage is one of them.
Another usage is that people are native to where they were born.
Then I'm native american. Not what nost people want that lable to mean. (Though the ones I know who are that don't care at all)
I mean where else would they have come from
Thor Heyerdahl famously believed that America was colonized from the east. He built a papyrus boat and crossed the Atlantic from Morocco to prove it was possible. It was not the first time he was wrong.
I think he did prove it was possible.
He did! So he reached his goal. He was certainly a “doer”. His theories met fierce criticism from academics though.
> He was certainly a “doer”. His theories met fierce criticism from academics though.
It seems the privileged place some people give to 'doer', and their decision to define the hard work of academic research as not 'doing', produced the wrong answer. Thor might have done better with another approach.
Not familiar with him, but if we remove the curiosity about “first”, there could be paleolithic eastern migration and explorers too
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kon-Tiki_expedition
There's a very good movie documentary about it, which won an oscar.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kon-Tiki_(1950_film)
Also, the following regarding his later Papyrus boat expedition:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ra_(1972_film)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diné_Bahaneʼ
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopi_mythology
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creation_myth
Kamiah, ID
https://www.nps.gov/nepe/learn/historyculture/heart-of-the-m...
Those are interesting mythologies, akin to an invisible guy in outer space making a man out of a twig and 2 dingleberries, but does it really have anything to do with where early american people actually came from?
After a couple of genrations, I'm sure early american's had lost cultural knowledge of how exactly they came to be in the americas. After a couple of centuries, for sure all of this info was gone.
Another example of this might be the early viking habitation in north america, which was totally forgotten before other europeans arrived 500 years later...
Myths are not meant to be believed literally, they tell a story about how to live in right relationship to the earth. And that's why I find the first nation stories so valuable - it's a philosophy born of a very different historical trajectory than European culture.
The Beringian Standstill hypothesis states that a group migrated out of Asia 25k years ago and were effectively trapped by glaciers in the temperate coastal plains of southern Alaska (what is now the Gulf of Alaska). When glaciers melted 15kya, sea levels rose and they start traveling south.
(You'll notice lots of references to a great flood - the globally rising sea levels no doubt leading to this myth being prevalent around the world in many cultures, first nations included)
By that point, they'd already been Americans for 10k years. There wasn't likely any conscious realization of this, no cultural memory of "Asia". But they truly were the first Americans, and way earlier than we were taught.
The result is a grand natural experiment - a group of humans completely cut off from Asia/Africa/Europe for millennia. That culture incubated in southern AK for 10k years, then spread out over the Americas for the last 15k, only to run into long lost European cousins 500 years ago. It's that long period of relative isolation that makes the first nation stories so valuable. The kind of morals, myths and values that arose from this unique historical trajectory can be quite different to philosophies of the old continents. Yet surprisingly similar (we are human after all).
The article was about where the first americans came from.
What does a navajo creation myth have to do with that?
A creation myth is literally a story about where people come from, the connection seems fairly obvious.
Even in more modern times, the details of how a population of people came to be can get lost.
For instance, nobody actually knew where the Romani people actually came from until the 1800s or so, and even then, the theory of a migration out of India (specifically, the Punjab region) couldn't be proven until the advent of modern DNA science.
See more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Romani_people#O...
That's an excellent point, and exactly what I was trying to point out in my post.
> which was totally forgotten before other europeans
Was it? They just haven’t realized or cared that it was a different continent rather than a bunch of different islands far in the North.
Vinland sagas were written several hundred years after the last voyages and weren’t lost either (Iceland itself had very limited contact with the rest of Europe though (e.g. it took the plague an extra 50 years to get there).
It was forgotten by the other europeans...
Other Europeans never knew anything that they could forget…
Nobody cared or had any clue what some “savages” in the North were up to and whether they discovered another random island. If they did it had no impact on them.
Europe was extremely different in the late 1400s compared to 1000 AD, Columbus letters were published in many major cities almost immediately after his return.
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Seriously, was there ever any doubt about this?
Polynesians who kept going east was a fringe theory.
Polynesians didn’t reach Tahiti until 900AD.
Well I did say it was a fringe theory.
And you have a very relevant username!
It’s a magical place. Definitely go if you can.
It is my understanding that they've always been understood to be descendants of the Siberians.