Replies

"Is Kennewick man also genetically Asian, like the Ainu?"

Professor Christy Turner of Arizona State University has done a wonderful dental study of various races. James Chatters (The archaeologist who did the Kennewick Man work) in his book Ancient Encounters, about Kennnewick man, consulted Christy Turner and it was determined that Kennewick Man had Caucasian 'type' teeth as did Spirit Cave Man, the 9,400 year old mummy (The oldest mummy in the Americas) Buhl Woman and Prince Of Wales Island Man. Meaning that they were not typical of Asian teeth.

This may interest you also, Arlington Springs woman, 13,000 year old human skeleton found on California island. (The oldest human skeleton ever found in the Americas)

"that Kennewick Man had Caucasian 'type' teeth "

Pardon me, I need to correct the above statement. Kennewick man had Sundadonty type teeth as explained by Christy Turner below:

"Sundadonty is named after the Sunda shelf, an area in Indonesian waters which was exposed during the ice age. This shelf was a massive exposed land mass during the Pleistocene, stretching hundreds of miles southeast from the current shores of Asia. The Sundadont dental group includes those who have a small shovel on the lingual side of their incisors; in other words, they have a small indentation near the tongue on their front teeth. In addition, Sundadonts have a double-rooted upper first pre-molar, a triple-rooted upper second molar, and double-rooted first and second lower-molars. Sundadont dental structure is characteristic of southeastern Asia and southern China.

Sinodonts have deep shovels on their incisors, a single-rooted upper first pre-molar, a double-rooted upper second molar, a triple-rooted lower first molar, and a single-rooted lower second molar. Turner proposed that the Northern Chinese and Siberian dental structure, Sinodonty, evolved rom Sundadonty around 18,000 B.C. He based this estimate on the time it would take for the two present forms to evolve from a common ancestry.

The dental structure of Native Americans appears to be a variation of Sinodonty- it has almost exactly the same characteristics. Turner proposed that to account for the current differences in dental structure, the American population would have had to split from the main Sinodont body around 12,000 B.C."

Professor Christy Turner of Arizona State University has done a wonderful dental study of various races.

Very interesting!
My mother and I both share the same trait of having only 3 central incisors on our bottom row of teeth (most people have 4).
I have wondered why for a long time, and if this is a common genetic trait.

BTW, mom's ancestry is Irish, English and American Indian.

I've read Ancient Encounters, by the way. I'm not discounting that there were Europeans in the Americas before the Clovis Native Americans showed up. I'm inclined to believe they'd resemble the Basques or, more likely, the Lapps if they made it here, since their most likely migration route would be along the ice shelves across the North Atlantic. This would explain why the otherwise European and Middle Eastern haploid X marker is found in a small number of Native Americans (about 3%) as well as in Finland and in the remains of ancient Basques. But as that 3% suggests, I think it was probably a small population along the Atlantic and not some sort of continent-spanning civilization. I think the larger pre-Clovis population was probably genetically Southeast Asian, related to the Aborigones and/or Ainu.

And who knows if there was even an earlier migration? That's why it's dangerous to play "I was here first and you took my land." Almost no ethnic population now lives where it started out and depending on what year you want to stop at, any number of ethnic groups can make a claim on just about any square foot of land on the planet. Of course I've always wondered if we could make a case that non-Africans were forced out of Africa and deserve "reparations" for the dismal treatment they received some 50-100 thousand years (or more) ago. If one really wants to play "This was my ancestor's land.", considering that everyone came out of Africa, then the colonial Europeans were simply "coming home".