LeftCoast

Just caught the last 1/2 of a program on the "Discovery Channel" this afternoon called "The Real Eve" where they go into the tracing of our ancestry and migration routes using mitochondrial DNA.

The did address the migrations to the America's and indicated that current evidence shows multiple migrations the first 20-30kya and the most recent at the end of the last ice-age about 10kya.

My $0.02:
Mibby seems hung up on the idea that the oral traditions of the aboriginal people in the America’s should be treated as somehow authoritative. I wonder if he’s considered that the “Creationist” dogma that he has railed against is just the oral traditions of the aboriginal people of the Middle East.

You can’t have it both way’s Mibby. The only creationist that I’ve seen in this entire discussion is you – though you are a novel breed of Creationist – the American Indian Creationist.

lpetrich

Also, oral traditions can become corrupted in various ways, making them only partly reliable. For example, they can be "updated" with new info; there is reportedly a Sioux creation story that features the horse, even though the Sioux had only had horses for a few centuries before the telling of this tale to someone who wrote it down. If they had had a more precise oral-tradition memory, they would have described when they saw the first horses came trotting their way and how they learned to tame and ride these beasts.

Also, while Mibby may seem to be stating a logical viewpoint when he claims that conquerors never adopt the cultures of those they conquered, there are numerous counterexamples:

China has been conquered more than once, notably by the Mongols and the Manchus, but the conquerors became assimilated and acquired Chinese ways.

The Norman conquerors of England eventually gave up speaking Norman French, though not without leaving English stuffed with Norman-French words.

The name "Norman" sounds much like "Northman"; this suggests an origin from Germanic-speaking conquerors who eventually became assimilated; around 1-1000 CE, Germanic tribes spread out in all directions from their Denmark-meets-Germany home.

Those that went to England, Scandinavia, Iceland, and what are now Germany and Austria kept speaking Germanic dialects, while those who went to France, the Iberian Peninsula, Italy, and southeastern Europe eventually became assimilated, though not without leaving behind such linguistic evidence as words for "white", "blue", "north", "east", "south", and "west" in Romance languages, and the names of places like Lombardy in Italy (from "Longobard" -- "long beard").

Before that, the Celts had had their migrations, going from their central European home to what is now France, the British Isles, the Iberian Peninsula, Italy, Greece, and Asia Minor (the New Testament's "Galatians"). However, the latter ones became assimilated without a trace.

The Romans also adopted some of the culture of some of those that they conquered, most notably Greece. They identified their deities with Greek ones and they liked to imagine themselves successors of some Trojan War heroes -- the poet Virgil wrote an imitation-Homeric epic, the Aeneid, about the Trojan War hero Aeneas who wanders the Mediterranean, eventually settling where Rome would eventually be.

Greece itself fits that pattern; Hellenic speakers arrived in 1800-1500 BCE, and adopted some of the culture of those that they conquered, like some of their deities and their system of writing (Linear B is a modification of Minoan Linear A).

There is similar evidence of a migration by Indo-Aryan speakers from central Asia through Afghanistan into India about 1500-1200 BCE; they adopted lots of the customs of those they conquered, including worship of a "Master of Animals" who became Shiva, though they did not acquire Harappan writing.

garraty

Nit pick time.

The Australian ones have traditionally been called "Australoid".

Actually here in Australia, they are traditionally called Aborigines.

And I in no way see Australian Aborigines as looking "totally Negroid", if you can't see the difference between an African and an Australian, you probably think Mongolians look like Native Americans.

Actually the thing I've found most interesting about this thread (besides the fact it isn't in S&S) is the relative youth of America to Australia in terms of human occupation. Granted we have a much drier climate that is more conjusive to archeological digs, but compared to some of our finds of 40,000 to 50,000 yr old human habitation, 11,000 yr old remains in Texas doesn't seem to be too big a deal. I'm surprised you haven't found anything older, sooner.

mibby529

Well, just saying that Beringia exists doesn't mean ppl crossed it. If that's the case, man must've left Africa as soon as H. sapiens evolved; after all, man COULD. Ppl don't just explore "because it's there," you know. You'll have to explain the lack of herbivores.

It's STILL possibilism, as I'm sure YOU'LL appreciate, O lpetrich.

But would it be clear enough for man?

Fossils. Remember, since it's outside of US territory, you don't have to worry about NAGPRA.

But not ALL of the culture.

That's a cop out. They're no more different from negroid than an Ethiopian or a Kenyan.

Why not by boat?

Nope, I meant Darwin. Mendel just said traits are passed from parents to children. Darwin took the logical next step, saying that someone who doesn't have children - his/her traits are lost.

Stop right there. Most nations are extinct, and I have no doubt that heavily miscegenated nations, such as the Cherokee, can be excluded as well. (I've never in my life met anyone who was more than 1/4 Cherokee, even among the elderly.)

And even then, not every full-blooded Indian is included in the test, either. Such a quest would be futile, and, in the end, raise questions of how much foreign blood quantum can be allowed.

Well, I've been polite enough to tolerate the fact that every one of the original proponents of the "land bridge" was either a Christian missionary or believed in bullshit like craniometry.

Now, now, Abacus, it isn't polite to point out such obvious contradictions.

Straw man. I have not mentioned oral tradition at any time in this thread. (Check for yourself.) The greater issue is scientific racism, as well as the fact that Western - or, more appropriately, American - scientists fail to question each other. You know, in Europe, the land bridge sank a long time ago.

"Reportedly" is the operative word; there is no such story. I think you might have our history mixed up with the Book of Mormon.

They're afraid to.

garraty

Mibby:
You're so misinformed it's laughable. On the one hand you deny an Asian/North American link with nothing to back you up. And on the other you claim there is no difference between Australians and Africans, even though they have been seperated for a lot longer.

lpetrich

What lack?

Mibby, you are being unreasonable. Try doing some Bering-Strait paleontology some time and you'll see my point.

Except that there are some which have, to the point of disappearing as recognizable ethnicities!

And I'm surprised that Mibby has not had a chuckle at those Romans who liked to imagine themselves the successors of some wayward Trojan War heroes.

The Bering Straits had been the land of Beringia back then.

Mibby, are you claiming that genetics researchers are dummies who are unwilling to take such effects into account? And I think that white and black admixture would easily be recognizable as apparent European or West African ancestry.

SO WHAT? All that means is that some of their ideas have held up and some of them have not. Johannes Kepler had believed in astrology, but that is not usually considered to falsify his famous three laws of planetary motion. Galileo had continued to believe that the planets' orbits are circles, and he had believed that the tides are due to the oceans sloshing -- he considered the idea of a long-range force of gravity to be mystical nonsense.

Mibby, Mibby, Mibby, you remind me of the sort of black who thinks that all white people are racists. Present-day scientists are much less racist than some past ones had been. And even past ones' racism had been half-understandable -- who were the winners who were the losers?

Mibby, the mainstream scientists you disparage would agree with you that the Book of Mormon is pure fiction.

ps418

Yet again, Mibby simply fabricates the 'facts' to support his wacky belief system, just as he previously fabricated the 'fact' that there are 40k yr old 'Indian skeletons' at Monte Verde, and the 'fact' that George Simpson showed that the land bridge was impossible (directly contradicting him), amongst other.

There is no dispute about the reality of a land bridge amongst European geologists. Mibby, you might want to correct your ignorance on this point by checking out The Ice Age World, by Bjorn Anderson and Harold Borns, published by Scandanavia University Press, especially chapter 2. You also might want to check out Anderson's chapters on Europe and Asia in The Last Great Ice Sheet. That is, unless you wish to remain clueless on this matter.

ps418

What's amazing to me is that you are still actually defending this thoroughly illogical principle that the person who thinks of or discovers something first has some bearing on whether or not its true. That is just really, really stupid. Like hopelessly stupid. Monumentally stupid. Isaac Newton was a fundamentalist Christian and an Alchemist. But the inverse square law is still true. But its not true because Newton said it, its true because the evidence supports it.

And like I asked before, many native americans believe in superstitious nonsense like divination and the efficacy of rain dances. But that doesnt make all statements or theories originated by native americans false a priori.

mibby529

Point me to an herbivore fossil.

"It's difficult to excavate" is roughly the same as "I don't know." All you have to do is threaten my life and/or bribe me to not make the issue, and you'd have Pascal's Wager down pat.

I only used "boat" for the sake of argument, since some people think you have to prove a theory to disprove it.

You haven't seen many Cherokees, have you? We're not talking Shania Twain here; we're talking 1/8 Indian or less.

Ah, but anthropologists' ideas HAVE been upheld - ESPECIALLY the ones involving missionary accounts.

Here's an example you might be familiar with. Schools still teach the "oven story" as "authentically Navajo." For our non-American viewers, it (allegedly) works like this: Coyote puts some ppl in the oven, they come out too early, hence the white man. He tries again, and they come out too late, hence the black man. Then he finally gets it right. In time, the Great Spirit (Oops! Navajos are polytheistic. And the "Great Spirit" itself is a mistranslation of a Lakota word, which really means mystery.) befriends a white man on the edge of the white man's territory. (I'm sure you can guess who that is.) Now the story of this relationship is of course not mentioned, but you can quote the Bible liberally to get what the missionaries were implying.

Not at all. I'm saying anti-Indian racism is politically correct. Why else would Americans bitch so much when we protest racist portrayal?

Then why do you quote the Book of Mormon as "Indian oral tradition," unless you want to claim that the Lakota language is written in hieroglyphics; in reality, we have a fairly abstract pictorial language, mostly used for historical record.

But, as I said before, one doesn't need to just prove a land bridge, but prove that man crossed it. You must prove first off that man couldn't live in Siberia anymore - contrary to your wacky ideas, there was no reason to go into those mountains.

One of the difference between the Europeans I've met and the Americans I've met is that Europeans don't assume that everyone has the desire to exploit the world that characterized Columbus or the warrior machismo that characterized Erik the Red. There is no one crossing a mountain "because it was there," nor is there any way they could imagine land better than the Siberian land.

Your Newton claim is "really, really stupid. Like hopelessly stupid. Monumentally stupid." Once again, the inverse square law doesn't help us find a philosopher's stone or find some fundamental element of Xianity, while the Bering Strait is of vital importance to 19th-century racialism.

Then why are Indian scientists, historians, philosophers, et al largely ignored? Deloria was the first to extend Darwin to cultural evolution(God is Red) and now everyone agrees with it, but ONLY AFTER Dawkins wrote The Selfish Gene.

Richiyaado

Is this still going on? Yikes!