Posted on 01/27/2012 8:32:48 AM PST by Theoria
Altai in southern Siberia sits right at the centre of Russia. But the tiny, mountainous republic has a claim to fame unknown until now - Native Americans can trace their origins to the remote region.
DNA research revealed that genetic markers linking people living in the Russian republic of Altai, southern Siberia, with indigenous populations in North America.
A study of the mutations indicated a lineage shift between 13,000 and 14,000 years ago - when people are thought to have walked across the ice from Russia to America.
This roughly coincides with the period when humans from Siberia are thought to have crossed what is now the Bering strait and entered America.
'Altai is a key area because it's a place where people have been coming and going for thousands and thousands of years,' said Dr Theodore Schurr, from the University of Pennsylvania in the US.
Among the people who may have emerged from the Altai region are the predecessors of the first Native Americans.
Roughly 20-25,000 years ago, these prehistoric humans carried their Asian genetic lineages up into the far reaches of Siberia and eventually across the then-exposed Bering land mass into the Americas.
'Our goal in working in this area was to better define what those founding lineages or sister lineages are to Native American populations,' Schurr said.
The region lies at the intersection of what is now Russia, Mongolia, China and Kazakhstan.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
I’m going to look for that book/paper tomorrow-I’m very interested in reading it.
The trade routes of early people in part the Americas can be followed from the seacoasts in Mexico, too. You can visit the ruins of the port cities, then the ruins of the trading/distribution centers inland and leading north, with the places getting smaller and less refined as you go inland and farther away-sort of a western caravan route, except that the goods came over the sea from far places rather than overland from those places.
If they traded the same way as people did later on, the best stuff-exotic luxury goods and such-was probably offered first in the costal and other big market centers for maximum profit and already traded out by the time the traders reached what passed for the frontier in that age. They probably loaded their pack animals with hard-to-get simple treats like cloth made of something softer than rough wool, finer animal skins, better tools and inexpensive decorative items for the homesteaders. There was no paleoindian/preclassical equivalent of the Sears catalog back then, after all...
Woah! They even used teepees.
Whoa! They even used teepees.
Sorry, but I don’t see how the reduction of the entire human population to 10,000 could possibly be moot.
What happened 60,000 years before the period under didcussion is moot. Do you have any idea how long 60,000 years is? The entirety of our known civilization only goes back a mere 8,000 years.
Whatever genes existed in the pre-Toba population which do not exist now is unknown. Those putative missing genes are just that: speculative. They make no difference to human evolution. Moot.
And 10,000 survivors is a rather high number, the actual number may be only 2,000. The Late Pleistocene was a rough time for humanity.
“They make no difference to human evolution. Moot.”
Perhaps we’re quibbling over the definition of the word “moot.”
A dieback in the human population to 10,000, or 2,000, cannot possibly be irrelevant to human evolution.
Probably add Koreans to that.
I don't have internet links immediately available, but I understand that Navajo is the modern language most closely related to Korean, with much more distant relationships to Finnish and Hungarian.
The assumption is different groups of people emigrated from the same area of central Siberia, with some ending up on the Korean peninsula, others crossing the Bering Strait to North America, and still others emigrating west to become Finns and Magyars.
A dieback in the human population to 10,000, or 2,000, cannot possibly be irrelevant to human evolution.
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Well yes it is - if humans evolve from what we are now, it will be from the genes we now have. Those genes which were lost in Toba don’t count - they are gone. Those lost genes cannot effect our future evolution.
For all we know if Toba had not happened we could all be morons now ... oh wait....
There are a lot of theories about how that happened. One is that the native languages in the prehistoric period (in that part of the world) were actually ancestral to the Turkish language(s) that were spoken by later Eastern invaders.
What to look for in the future as we learn more and more about this phenomenon ~ could be the spread of the X-Factor DNA sequence. This is a DNA sequence that acts more or less as a bar-code for the Sa'ami. People who descend from the Sa'ami ~ a people who moved out of the Western European Ice Age "refugia" ~ of about 14,000 years ago, or MORE, have this sequence.
So far the Fulbe, Berber, Yakuts, Sa'ami, (lots of Finns and Norse), Iroquois, Chippewa and Cherokee have a large percentage of their number who have this sequence.
It is known to have originated among the Sa'ami and spread to the other groups.
They didn’t replace the indigeous population. Else their descendants wouldn’t have the X-Factor gene sequence.
Mu - say what?
“For all we know if Toba had not happened we could all be morons now ... oh wait....”
Yuk, yuk.
Or if it had not happened we could all have Stephen Hawkings’ brains and Baywatch good looks.
My point is that it almost certainly had an effect.
You, for the first time, mention “future” evolution. Yes, pre-Toba genes are irrelevant to *future* evolution.
What I was wondering about was what the effects might have been of reducing the gene pool to 2,000 (or whatever the correct number is).
Remember me telling you that many words in their language were pronounced and meant the same as those of the Korean & Chinese languages....
I wonder what the results were from the kenewick man?
Also, what about those rumers of Ghengis Kahn (Jinjis kahhn as said by john Kerry who served in Vienam) gallavanting around the world and spreading his seeds of love?
What I was wondering about was what the effects might have been of reducing the gene pool ...
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What was the effect on your personal evolution of that toy your parents didn’t buy when you were three years old?
Same question put another way. One cannot know the effects of something that no longer exists, if it still existed.
One of the possible effects of the gene pool reduction is one bilion people pray 5 times a day to a rock facing toward a certain direction ...
Thank you for the info on Asian migrations...
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