Nth American Indian origins

[Prof]

Since the remains are 300m underwater, I think it is a Noah type event. If we assume a sudden deluge rather than a steady but slow creep. And if 1 foot of water= 1 mile of coverage along flats and what ever more when the land slopes upwards then 300m= up to a 984 mile run to safety. Depending on just how fast the water rose and anything over 12 miles a day will kill anyone trying to leave with livestock and over 20 miles a day only those near the edges will get away undrowned. When the land slopes sharply upward the refugees have elss distance to travel, but will go much slower as well.

Furthermore if we assume that people were concentrated near the freshwater lakes and rivers, then only those upriver near the bowl rivers headwaters would really be in a position to escape with much at all.

Having seen first hand just how fast 6-14' of water can appear from just 2 rivers, imagine something like a sea breaking in to a bowl.

Raver:

As I understand the sequence of events it went something like this:

Sometime between 16K BP & 12K BP the Agaean overtopped a natural dam separating it from the lake that later became the Black Sea. The salt water cut a deep & narrow channel & began to fill the lake. Anybody hanging around would have been displaced due to the replacement of land with water & of fresh water with salt. This was a major event but at that time (late Pleistocene) there weren't many people to displace. The new body of water stabilised. Several thousand years later (~7.6K BP; early Holocene - that's us) a similar event occurred. It happened at a particularly ripe time for starting all sorts of stuff that actually happened, & would have been an ideal precipitating event. but this one was supposedly much less catastrophic, confined to the western shores of the sea. The geologic evidence for these two events is the presence of beach formations under the water dating to two separate time periods & cores taken from the current mouth of the Danube.

"Current" thinking as of the references that filled me with gloom had the rise in water of the second event being rather slow. That's fine with me. Its smallness was the problem. No one knows how fast the first one flooded its much larger area.

Something that makes me feel a litle better today is that I've found more recent references taking issue with the "small flood" hypothesis. Note the illustration. This is a much larger flood scenario. Note the "C" shaped extention of water on the West. This is about the extent of what I was grumbling about. The event on the map is much larger & perfectly capable of displacing lots people who were by that time settling into communities.

Incidentally, while the depth of ~100M is dead on, the black sea continued to fill slowly due to melt water & rivers to its current depth. It was apparently shallower back in 5600BCE, even after the deluge.

Prof

[Prof]

Oh. Here's a nifty satellite shot of the channel.

Prof

[Prof]

And here's the possibly connected IndoEuropean migration pattern. Eastern guys, hang a right at the end of Siberia. Just another possible way for European types to have gotten into America, in this case much later than the "Solutrean Solution."

Prof

[Prof]

& another:

[Prof]

O goody. Now we have a Dr. B.B. Lal proposing, at least as of 2002 & very reasonably, that the original IE homeland was in India itself, that the diaspora was away from India instead of toward it, & was prompted by a sort of "anti-deluge" of rivers drying up, causing the Harappan Civilization to die of natural causes & its folks go elsewhere. The Hell with this. Back to America, & genetics.

Prof

[Prof]

O goody. Now we have a Dr. B.B. Lal proposing, at least as of 2002 & very reasonably, that the original IE homeland was in India itself, that the diaspora was away from India instead of toward it, & was prompted by a sort of "anti-deluge" of rivers drying up, causing the Harappan Civilization to die of natural causes & its folks go elsewhere. The Hell with this. Back to America, & genetics.

Prof

And tools. For what it's worth, assuming this thread continues, here are some classic European Solutrean points dating from 25-17K BP, some classic Clovis points, & a couple of later points, the first from North Carolina & the other from Guatemala, from 8K-3K BP. That is, after, not before, the clovis culture, & 'way after the European Solutrean points. There's a ping in the achaeological groupthink engine on both sides of the argument.

Prof

[Mihais]

Prof,any difference between those you posted and those used by some Indian tribes up until late 1800's?IIRC these guys were located somewhere in Sierra Nevada and the last ones died around 1910.I swear I'll remember the tribe.

[Prof]

Prof,any difference between those you posted and those used by some Indian tribes up until late 1800's?IIRC these guys were located somewhere in Sierra Nevada and the last ones died around 1910.I swear I'll remember the tribe.

Mihais:

Cute. Here's an undated "Clovis" point used an an illustration for an article on the 'Net. It's not Clovis. No flute, no flared base. Personally, I'm having trouble finding pre-clovis stuff that looks like Solutrean, but I'm also finding lots (?as in all?) of fairly convincing pre-Clovis stuff that's more archaic than Solutrean. These, unlike the really old Topper site tools, appear to be real artifacts (abandoning English spelling now; didn't know I was engaging in it).

I've been reading a zillion submissions by a chatty guy named Tony Baker (weird combo of archeologist/engineer - oughta be more of 'em). He has an interesting hafting semi-theory. Reproducible. The guy is fun to read. He has some firm ideas, but he's evidently had a bunch of those before & evidently he's been willing to abandon each of them at a nudge from reality. Not bad for a social scientist. Or any scientist. I hope he's still alive. We'll see.

I'm becoming more & more of a "they came from anytime, any culture, any mode, anywhere" type of person. For now. 'Course, that's where everyone started. There's more out there.

Prof

[Prof]

Mihais:

The double-ended lanceolate points I think you're talking about are fabulous tools but are a really old technic. If you can document American Indians making & using stuff like this in 1910 it would be interesting. Sort of a "Why not go to the blacksmith, or, uh, the hardware store?" question.

Prof

[Crocodylus]

According to the Hopi legends...

I once read in Frank Waters' Book of the Hopi that historians posited that the ancestors of the Hopi and other Uto-Aztecan peoples arrived by boat on the Pacific Coast of Mexico in 323 B.C., coming from a region known as "Tula", on the shores of Lake Baikal. This fits well with the legend of how the Hopi came from an area to the south of their present location.

It would be possible, since even at that time in history several Asian peoples had knowledge of sea navigation. For one, the Polynesians navigated the South Pacific using only memorized positions of constellations in the night sky and phenomena such as changes in tidal patterns, which would often indicate nearby land. If a group of people sailed from somewhere in the Far East, they could just sail along the coast up to Kamchatka, then hop along the Aleutian Islands and then sail down the Pacific Coast of North America until reaching the Mexican coast.

There are many theories about foreigners reaching the Americas by sea. Gavin Menzies posits that the Chinese reached the New World before Columbus and that in parts of Central America there are indigenous groups with some Chinese ancestors in their genealogical trees. Also, some say that, instead of reaching the Americas by accident, Columbus first found out about the Americas from West African seafarers when he was working for the Portuguese as a naval apprentice; West African seafarers often sailed between West Africa and the Caribbean, so it is likely that some of them told Columbus about that part of the world.

[Prof]

I once read in Frank Waters' Book of the Hopi that historians posited that the ancestors of the Hopi and other Uto-Aztecan peoples arrived by boat on the Pacific Coast of Mexico in 323 B.C., coming from a region known as "Tula", on the shores of Lake Baikal. This fits well with the legend of how the Hopi came from an area to the south of their present location.

It would be possible, since even at that time in history several Asian peoples had knowledge of sea navigation. For one, the Polynesians navigated the South Pacific using only memorized positions of constellations in the night sky and phenomena such as changes in tidal patterns, which would often indicate nearby land. If a group of people sailed from somewhere in the Far East, they could just sail along the coast up to Kamchatka, then hop along the Aleutian Islands and then sail down the Pacific Coast of North America until reaching the Mexican coast.

There are many theories about foreigners reaching the Americas by sea. Gavin Menzies posits that the Chinese reached the New World before Columbus and that in parts of Central America there are indigenous groups with some Chinese ancestors in their genealogical trees. Also, some say that, instead of reaching the Americas by accident, Columbus first found out about the Americas from West African seafarers when he was working for the Portuguese as a naval apprentice; West African seafarers often sailed between West Africa and the Caribbean, so it is likely that some of them told Columbus about that part of the world.

Croc:

Interesting. There's a virtual cult on the Web involving a maritime West African origin for the mysterious Olmecs (who, incidentally, had a written language that hasn't been translated yet) & much of their statuary does indeed look very Negroid.

Back a bit in this thread is a map showing various seriously proposed migration routes to the Americas. One of those is down the Pacific coast & is well thought of by just about everyone but really rabid one-small-group-&-that's-all people. 'Course late paleolithic folks didn't have boats, & the ancient Australians flew there before shedding their wings.

If I were in a poker game & an opponent said he held cards saying that all sorts of neolithic & early Bronze Age cultures had sophisticated open-ocean navigation while mine said "no" I'd probably fold.

Prof

[Parihaka]

If I were in a poker game & an opponent said he held cards saying that all sorts of neolithic & early Bronze Age cultures had sophisticated open-ocean navigation while mine said "no" I'd probably fold.

Prof

You'd be mad not to, Polynesia after all being a contemporary example.

[Prof]

You'd be mad not to, Polynesia after all being a contemporary example.

Pari:

You bet. Unfortunately, the Archaeology community is apparently full of people who are madder than hatters. Not just tenaciously holding on to untenable ideas for dear life, but really crazy stuff like salting digs.

Prof

[Mihais]

Croc:

Interesting. There's a virtual cult on the Web involving a maritime West African origin for the mysterious Olmecs (who, incidentally, had a written language that hasn't been translated yet) & much of their statuary does indeed look very Negroid.

Prof

Yet the Africans never had a seafarer civilization that I can recall.All other candidates retained the nav. skills over centuries.Not familiar with the Olmecs,but it sounds that no grave was found.Otherwise it would be clear if they had african roots or not.Sounds like more afrocentric crap to me.

[Prof]

Yet the Africans never had a seafarer civilization that I can recall.All other candidates retained the nav. skills over centuries.Not familiar with the Olmecs,but it sounds that no grave was found.Otherwise it would be clear if they had african roots or not.Sounds like more afrocentric crap to me.

OHellYeah. Much of it certainly is. But there were fishing-centered cultures along the West African coast (of course) that had the same opportunities to figure out open-ocean navigation or to get blown off course as anybody else. Can't set the notion aside because of some vigorous current political agenda. Gotta hunt for legit sources, as obscured by politics or elusive as they might be, right?

Prof