After crossing the Panama land bridge over 10,000 years ago, Amerindians split up to evolve mostly separately in the four main environments of South America.
“So far, nobody has managed to come up with a convincing explanation for how it got to South America.”
It’s plausible that a few floated across the Pacific - the opposite way to the Kon-Tiki voyage - and managed to reproduce.
“They didn’t have data from the USA, probably because American laws make it an ordeal to sample American Indians, living or dead.”
David Reich harrumphs at length in his 2018 book about the reluctance of North American Indians to undergo genetic testing or to allow extraction from burial grounds. He never says it, but I’ve always suspected a lot of them don’t want to know how admixed they are with Europeans.
The 23andme subreddit is full of Mexicans with quite specific percentages of Old World ancestry with the New World ancestry a very broad “Indigenous American” category.
This is what Razib said "The sensational find of a connection between Oceanian populations that everyone believed diverged from the ancestors of Native Americans 50,000 years ago, and populations deep in the Amazon nearly 10,000 miles away, was greeted with skepticism, even internally within the lab. But the researchers checked and cross-checked the result for months, and it held. They concluded that earlier and more primitive techniques had simply not been powerful enough to pick up statistically robust signatures. It is hard to imagine Papuans or Australians migrating across the Pacific to South America. Rather, it seems likely that an ancient population more closely related to aboriginal Oceanians than to East Asians was present in Siberia more than 20,000 years ago. In 2018, ancient DNA from a skull in Brazil dated to more than 10,000 years ago also exhibited a detectable genetic connection to Australians and Papuans. Other remains from that period, including the DNA from the Clovis site, did not. This means that the Australian/Papuan-related population did not mix evenly into ancient indigenous populations, and may have arrived earlier and been absorbed.
In 2021, a consortium assembled DNA from indigenous people from the Pacific to the Atlantic in South America, compared the individuals to ancient and modern DNA from across the world, and discovered that low levels of Australian/Papuan-related ancestry were far more widespread than had earlier been thought. The faint affinity to Australo-Papuan populations extended across much of South America. They also found variation of the proportion of this ancestral component even within tribes, with some individuals carrying far more than others. This suggests that the admixture may have been relatively recent, and may not have been well-mixed across the population.
All of these genetic results were surprising, and do not fit neatly into the standard models and expectations. But what’s exciting is how they are perhaps less amazing now that archaeologists have confirmed that modern humans were almost certainly present in the New World 20-30,000 years ago."
Right. The picture I have in my head is that, somehow, a tropical people arrived in the New World 20k+ years ago, and barely hung on to survive. Then the Clovis culture Siberian mammoth hunter ancestors of Amerindians came stomping in and exterminated most of the indigenous megafauna, including most of the earlier humans, but allowed a handful of their womenfolk to be their sex slaves.
Do they know all four types arrived at the same time and didn't come down in separate waves? Can they estimate the number of original pioneers? Was the northern end too warm to be settled first, so they were a later mix and not the precursors?
I wonder if weaker tribes were pushed to the least amenable regions of the Americas and that affected their outlook. For instance, the Patagonians may have been weak to be pushed so far south. The Apaches were pushed to inhospitable mountain-desert regions due to weakness yet they became some of the most fierce Indians in the Americas.
It's pretty common in better documented history for the losers to become the winners. For example, the recent Reich-Patterson paper suggest that the Yamnaya conquerors may have started out as one obscure tribe. Perhaps they were the losers in the struggle for the lowlands of a river valley like the Dnieper, but then they figured out how to thrive in the steppe?
Given that Comanche society was completely based around the recently reintroduced horse and their lack of a strong religious tradition, as Stone Age Herbalist likes to point out, they were likely a recent development with a particularly hard break from their traditions.
The way I imagine it is the pre-Comanche got access to horses and their equivalent of juvenile delinquents started riding them. When the old folks complained about neglecting traditions, they basically said "screw you grandpa".
I’m open to the idea that people crossed the Pacific by sea that long ago. Monkeys are supposed to have crossed the South Atlantic over a million years ago on rafts of matted vegetation. Accidentally, one presumes.
There was a brief to-do about an archaeological site in southwestern South America with Polynesian artifacts a few years ago.
There was also a recent article comparing modern Navajo/Hopi DNA to the ancient cliff dwellers that found them to be direct descendants of those people. So, maybe at least some of those tribes are allowing DNA sampling.
Wikipedia gives a figure of 293 known Japanese whose vessels were blown across the Pacific in the 17th and 18th centuries. These were from 23 separate landings where headcount’s were taken. These boats landed from the Aleutians to Mexico. In two cases the survivors were enslaved/adopted by Indian tribes.
It seems implausible that this only started in historical times.
The Melanesian data wasn't an entire surprise, if you read old and long-discredited work.
José Imbelloni (1885 - 1967) was an Argentine physical anthropologist who had a typology based on skull morphology that proposed Melanesian ancestry for some South American populations (I think some Northern ones too -- California Channel Islands if memory serves, looking not at living populations but at old skeletal finds)
He proposed that the prehistoric Americas were settled in several waves of distinct origin.
I know this because I opened my job talk in 2005 with a joke about how silly this obviously was. Not looking so silly now, like so much anthropological work from the bad old days.
And regarding early settlers getting pushed to marginal zones -- I don't know if anybody has done much recent genetic work on the Ayoreo, but they live in the interior of the Chaco (very arid, very difficult terrain) and older work suggested they were quite genetically distinct from neighboring Chacoan groups. If I were a human geneticist I'd be looking at them for Melanesian ancestry.
It should also be noted that many South American Indians such as the Aguaruna have an amount of Polynesian and melanesian ancestry. Skeletons of people of Polynesian ancestry been found deep, deep into the Amazon rainforest
“So far, nobody has managed to come up with a convincing explanation for how it got to South America.”
It’s plausible that a few floated across the Pacific - the opposite way to the Kon-Tiki voyage - and managed to reproduce.
“They didn’t have data from the USA, probably because American laws make it an ordeal to sample American Indians, living or dead.”
David Reich harrumphs at length in his 2018 book about the reluctance of North American Indians to undergo genetic testing or to allow extraction from burial grounds. He never says it, but I’ve always suspected a lot of them don’t want to know how admixed they are with Europeans.
The 23andme subreddit is full of Mexicans with quite specific percentages of Old World ancestry with the New World ancestry a very broad “Indigenous American” category.
Aren’t many Native American very much against the Out of Africa theory of human evolution? That is why they call themselves First Nations.
How strong is the evidence that South American dna is linked to New Guinea? Seems so implausible. Maybe the geneticists got this one wrong.
It's not a popular finding, so I suppose some effort has gone into finding the technical flaw, but so far nobody seems to have found one.
This is what Razib said "The sensational find of a connection between Oceanian populations that everyone believed diverged from the ancestors of Native Americans 50,000 years ago, and populations deep in the Amazon nearly 10,000 miles away, was greeted with skepticism, even internally within the lab. But the researchers checked and cross-checked the result for months, and it held. They concluded that earlier and more primitive techniques had simply not been powerful enough to pick up statistically robust signatures. It is hard to imagine Papuans or Australians migrating across the Pacific to South America. Rather, it seems likely that an ancient population more closely related to aboriginal Oceanians than to East Asians was present in Siberia more than 20,000 years ago. In 2018, ancient DNA from a skull in Brazil dated to more than 10,000 years ago also exhibited a detectable genetic connection to Australians and Papuans. Other remains from that period, including the DNA from the Clovis site, did not. This means that the Australian/Papuan-related population did not mix evenly into ancient indigenous populations, and may have arrived earlier and been absorbed.
In 2021, a consortium assembled DNA from indigenous people from the Pacific to the Atlantic in South America, compared the individuals to ancient and modern DNA from across the world, and discovered that low levels of Australian/Papuan-related ancestry were far more widespread than had earlier been thought. The faint affinity to Australo-Papuan populations extended across much of South America. They also found variation of the proportion of this ancestral component even within tribes, with some individuals carrying far more than others. This suggests that the admixture may have been relatively recent, and may not have been well-mixed across the population.
All of these genetic results were surprising, and do not fit neatly into the standard models and expectations. But what’s exciting is how they are perhaps less amazing now that archaeologists have confirmed that modern humans were almost certainly present in the New World 20-30,000 years ago."
The original great replacement. Is absorbed a euphemism for genocide?
Right. The picture I have in my head is that, somehow, a tropical people arrived in the New World 20k+ years ago, and barely hung on to survive. Then the Clovis culture Siberian mammoth hunter ancestors of Amerindians came stomping in and exterminated most of the indigenous megafauna, including most of the earlier humans, but allowed a handful of their womenfolk to be their sex slaves.
But who knows?
It would really change some narratives not that I care. It’s just fascinating history.
Typo in title.
Thanks. It took me two minutes of staring to find it.
It's always the last place you look.
I'd read a bit of your material at Unz, but was reintroduced to you when you were on Tucker, so I subscribed on Substack. I always enjoy your posts.
Do they know all four types arrived at the same time and didn't come down in separate waves? Can they estimate the number of original pioneers? Was the northern end too warm to be settled first, so they were a later mix and not the precursors?
North America seems to be several waves.
I wonder if weaker tribes were pushed to the least amenable regions of the Americas and that affected their outlook. For instance, the Patagonians may have been weak to be pushed so far south. The Apaches were pushed to inhospitable mountain-desert regions due to weakness yet they became some of the most fierce Indians in the Americas.
It's pretty common in better documented history for the losers to become the winners. For example, the recent Reich-Patterson paper suggest that the Yamnaya conquerors may have started out as one obscure tribe. Perhaps they were the losers in the struggle for the lowlands of a river valley like the Dnieper, but then they figured out how to thrive in the steppe?
The Comanche were another loser-turned-winner, at least according to S.C. Gwynne.
Given that Comanche society was completely based around the recently reintroduced horse and their lack of a strong religious tradition, as Stone Age Herbalist likes to point out, they were likely a recent development with a particularly hard break from their traditions.
The way I imagine it is the pre-Comanche got access to horses and their equivalent of juvenile delinquents started riding them. When the old folks complained about neglecting traditions, they basically said "screw you grandpa".
And now that I'm thinking about it, like the Yamnaya, the Comanche also turned from loser to winner by mastering equine mobility.
One more example and we have a Rule?
The Mongols became a great power due to their use of the horse. Today, Mongolia is one of the most obscure countries in the world.
We're lucky they didn't last long. They were just a flash in Japan.
Pun stolen from the late Queen Mother.
The problem with many steppe nomad groups, is that while they could conquer, they didn't have the cultural technology to govern long term.
I’m open to the idea that people crossed the Pacific by sea that long ago. Monkeys are supposed to have crossed the South Atlantic over a million years ago on rafts of matted vegetation. Accidentally, one presumes.
There was a brief to-do about an archaeological site in southwestern South America with Polynesian artifacts a few years ago.
There was also a recent article comparing modern Navajo/Hopi DNA to the ancient cliff dwellers that found them to be direct descendants of those people. So, maybe at least some of those tribes are allowing DNA sampling.
Wikipedia gives a figure of 293 known Japanese whose vessels were blown across the Pacific in the 17th and 18th centuries. These were from 23 separate landings where headcount’s were taken. These boats landed from the Aleutians to Mexico. In two cases the survivors were enslaved/adopted by Indian tribes.
It seems implausible that this only started in historical times.
There are no, “indigenous people,” just wanderers from somewhere else…
We are all just Dust in the Wind.
The Melanesian data wasn't an entire surprise, if you read old and long-discredited work.
José Imbelloni (1885 - 1967) was an Argentine physical anthropologist who had a typology based on skull morphology that proposed Melanesian ancestry for some South American populations (I think some Northern ones too -- California Channel Islands if memory serves, looking not at living populations but at old skeletal finds)
He proposed that the prehistoric Americas were settled in several waves of distinct origin.
I know this because I opened my job talk in 2005 with a joke about how silly this obviously was. Not looking so silly now, like so much anthropological work from the bad old days.
And regarding early settlers getting pushed to marginal zones -- I don't know if anybody has done much recent genetic work on the Ayoreo, but they live in the interior of the Chaco (very arid, very difficult terrain) and older work suggested they were quite genetically distinct from neighboring Chacoan groups. If I were a human geneticist I'd be looking at them for Melanesian ancestry.
It should also be noted that many South American Indians such as the Aguaruna have an amount of Polynesian and melanesian ancestry. Skeletons of people of Polynesian ancestry been found deep, deep into the Amazon rainforest