[SunkenCiv]

If we're talking belief systems (i.e. the New Guinea and the Lakota were created separately) then we need to study the Holy Writings... We could go at this strictly from Sacred Texts also but (please forgive) I'm not sure where you're coming from.

Keith was talking about genealogies, not Holy Writings or Sacred Texts. Since the authors of the study claim that everyone is descended from a single individual 3500 years ago, and humans have been in the Americas for at least 10,000 years (presumably having ancestry outside the Americas, although Native Americans generally believe their ancestors have always been here), there's obviously very little chance of these study results' being plausible.

If we're talking about physical movement and mathematical probabilities, then we're discussing whether or not the various populations (such as those in New Guinea) were hermetically sealed or was there any movement at all in the last three and a half millinea.

Mathematical probabilities don't enter into it -- someone in Eurasia 3500 years ago couldn't be the ancestor of every Native American, even though (in my view) the oceans have been traveled by a huge variety of different cultures for tens (maybe hundreds) of thousands of years.

Even genetic studies don't / can't tell us about geographical origins, except in very short and recent time frames. The population in the earliest known agricultural, riverine societies rose quite quickly. The civilizations in those societies had larger families (more children who survived), and could support non-food gathering activities on a large scale. Those activities included the invention of recordkeeping and writing systems, accounting, art, centralized grandiose cults, cities, and standing armies.

Generally speaking, the parents wound up with many more descendants than parents in hunter-gatherer societies. This is a sort of discontinuity that seems to be ignored (or not thought about) in all the mtDNA studies which show greater genetic diversity in Africa. That genetic diversity has to do with the type of food-gathering that has gone on in Africa, rather than an exclusionary antiquity for that continent. FTM, since mitochondria have sex, mtDNA studies don't hold water except in very short, recent time frames (like, who is buried in Jesse James' purported grave).

The world population back then was less than 100 million. For you or I to not be descended from cousins there would have had to have been a population of 4,789,048,565,205,902,682,369,834,459,844,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. So we both agree that.

I know my family lines back (in some cases) ten or twelve generations. I've never found ANY overlapping lines. While it's true that my family seems a little unusual (my grandfather was born in 1875; his grown brother died in 1873; their father was born in 1825; one of our female ancestors from the first American generation died aged at least 100), family lines are unique, sometimes even among siblings. So, yeah, We don't know anything for sure, People intermarried a lot, and People moved around a lot.

The bozos who made this study assumed that all lines converge, and that the point at which they converge could be discerned. They erred.

George W. Bush will be reelected by a margin of at least ten per cent

[expat_panama]

 -- someone in Eurasia 3500 years ago couldn't be the ancestor of every Native American...

The point Hopkin is highlighting is that since (as we agree) that it's easy to believe that from say, 1500BC to 500BC that at least one guy visited the Americas from Asia, and shared genes.  We don't have photos but it's simply not reasonable to say it didn't happen.

Since then, 2,500 / 20 = 125 generations have passed.   Remember that this is 125 doublings -- a factor of some 40 digit number.  This would spread the guy's genes to every single human in the Americas.  This isn't hard to believe considering that it took about that long for the first Eurasians to cover that area.   The only way that his family tree would not have spread would be that maybe the guy had some kind of genetic condition where everyone in his family dies at birth (rim shot), or maybe him and the little woman moved to the moon (cow bell).

But seriously folks, not to worry-- I promise not to take advantage of our newly discovered family ties in order to borrow money.