[meteorite-list] Mucks and pre-Clovis

From: E.P. Grondine <epgrondine_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Wed, 22 Aug 2007 11:05:05 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <759229.1028.qm_at_web36904.mail.mud.yahoo.com>

Hi all -

THIS JUST IN:

Were seafarers living here 16,000 years ago?
Site off Queen Charlottes could revolutionize our
understanding of New World colonization
Randy Boswell, CanWest News Service
Published: Tuesday, August 21, 2007

In a Canadian archeological project that could
revolutionize understanding of when and how humans
first reached the New World, federal researchers in
B.C. have begun probing an underwater site off the
Queen Charlotte Islands for traces of a possible
prehistoric camp on the shores of an ancient lake long
since submerged by the Pacific Ocean.

The landmark investigation, led by Parks Canada
scientist Daryl Fedje, is seeking evidence to support
a contentious new theory about the peopling of the
Americas that is gradually gaining support in
scholarly circles. It holds that ancient Asian
seafarers, drawn on by food-rich kelp beds ringing the
Pacific coasts of present-day Russia, Alaska and
British Columbia, began populating this hemisphere
thousands of years before the migration of Siberian
big-game hunters -- who are known to have travelled
across the dried up Bering Strait and down an ice-free
corridor east of the Rockies as the last glaciers
began retreating about 13,000 years ago.

The earlier maritime migrants are thought to have
plied the coastal waters of the North Pacific in
sealskin boats, moving in small groups over many
generations from their traditional homelands in the
Japanese islands or elsewhere along Asia's eastern
seaboard.

Interest in the theory -- which is profiled in the
latest edition of New Scientist magazine by Canadian
science writer Heather Pringle -- has been stoked by
recent DNA studies in the U.S. showing tell-tale links
between a 10,000-year-old skeleton found in an Alaskan
cave and genetic traits identified in modern Japanese
and Tibetan populations, as well as in aboriginal
groups along the west coasts of North and South
America.

The rise of the "coastal migration" theory has also
been spurred by a sprinkling of other ancient
archeological finds throughout the Americas -- several
of them, including the 14,850-year-old Chilean site of
Monte Verde, too old to fit the traditional theory of
an overland migration by the "first Americans" that
didn't begin for another millennium or two.

more here:
http://www.canada.com/victoriatimescolonist/news/story.html?id=34805893-6a53-46f5-a864-a96d53991051&k=39922

E.P. Grondine
Man and Impact in the Americas
"geopoetry" raves (or is that rages)Paul Abbott




       
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Received on Wed 22 Aug 2007 02:05:05 PM PDT