Free Republic

Russia is to beef up its military forces all the way from its western border to the Pacific islands amid ongoing strains with the West, the military said Friday. No financial details were disclosed but the buildup will likely be costly and takes place at a time when the Russian economy is in recession under the dual impact of low oil prices and Western sanctions imposed on Moscow over its role in the Ukrainian crisis. While announcing the buildup, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said the deployment of NATO’s forces near Russia’s borders has caused concern. As part of a response,...

Recent scientific findings date their arrival earlier than ever thought, sparking hot debate among archaeologists For much of its length, the slow-moving Aucilla River in northern Florida flows underground, tunneling through bedrock limestone. But here and there it surfaces, and preserved in those inky ponds lie secrets of the first Americans.For years adventurous divers had hunted fossils and artifacts in the sinkholes of the Aucilla about an hour east of Tallahassee. They found stone arrowheads and the bones of extinct mammals such as mammoth, mastodon and the American ice age horse.Then, in the 1980s, archaeologists from the Florida Museum of...

As elusive as the Cheshire Cat, the first people to arrive in the Americas have tended to appear and vanish with each new twist in the archaeological record. The latest disappearing act may be taking place on page 501, where new evidence, some claim, casts another shadow over a once-cherished idea: that Asian big-game hunters crossed the Bering Land Bridge to give rise to the Clovis people, who were considered the first Americans. New dates show that a crucial Siberian site, thought to be a way station along the Bering road, wasn't occupied until after the Clovis had begun killing...

Apparently they seek to lower the cost of dominating our markets while keeping a tight leash on a rudderless debtor and efficiently extracting benefits/wealth from Chinese properties (and powerful traitors) in the USA.  Maybe you 2x Obama voters didn't expect hopenchange to include being sold into economic slavery, yet here we are... thanks, idiots! A Bering Strait tunnel and/or bridge has been actually been proposed at various times, going back to 1892, and most often by the Russians. Moscow says they are still currently planning a bridge project for $65B, yet experts doubt that their conventional rail approach -if ever actualized- would be able...

JUNEAU -- A proposal for another big construction project is gathering headlines across the world. No, we're not talking about a $30 billion pipeline to send natural gas to the Lower 48. This is bigger: A $10 billion to $12 billion tunnel under the Bering Strait linking Alaska and Russia. And another $50 billion to lay railways to make the tunnel usable.

Russia introduced a plan Wednesday to build a tunnel between Siberia and Alaska under the Bering Strait, saying the $65 billion project could be used to export Russian oil, natural gas and electricity to the United States. While two officials at the Ministry of Economy endorsed the idea, they made clear that the Russian government had not signed off on it, other than to agree to a study on how to bridge the 93 kilometers, or 58 miles, of icy water that divides the Eastern and Western Hemispheres at their closest point. Plans for a land link over the strait...

China is considering building an 8,000-mile high-speed rail link to America that would take less than two days to travel. Travelling at around 217mph, the train would leave the north east of the country, run through Siberia and enter a 125-mile tunnel under the Bering Strait, the shortest crossing between Russia and Alaska. It would then resurface and head south through Canada, before reaching its destination in the US. It is unclear whether the American, Canadian or Russian governments have agreed to the proposals. But engineers claim it would provide a viable alternative to air travel, according to China Daily....

When People Fled Hyenas By Lee Dye Special to ABCNEWS.com Nov. 20 — Deep inside a cave in Siberia's Altai Mountains, Christy Turner and his Russian colleagues may have found an answer to a question that has hounded him for more than three decades. As a young anthropologist, Turner spent time in Alaska's Aleutian Islands in the 1970s, working at several archaeological sites and occasionally gazing westward toward Siberia. "I thought, 'That's the place that Native Americans came from,' " he says now from his laboratory at Arizona State University in Tempe. But why, he wondered then as he still...

World's dogs are descended from Asian wolves Scientists have found that almost all dogs share a common gene pool after analysing the DNA of hundreds of dogs from Europe, Asia, Africa and North America. They have concluded domesticated dogs originated from wolves in East Asia nearly 15,000 years ago. The animals travelled with humans through Europe and Asia and across the Bering Strait with the first settlers in America. Swedish and Chinese scientists studied the genes of 654 dogs and found a higher genetic diversity among East Asian dogs suggested that people there were the first to domesticate dogs from...

Research illuminating an ancient language connection between Asia and North America supports archeological and genetic evidence that a Bering Strait land bridge once connected North America with Asia, and the discovery is being endorsed by a growing list of scholars in the field of linguistics and other sciences. The work of Western Washington University linguistics professor Edward Vajda with the isolated Ket people of Central Siberia is revealing more and more examples of an ancient language connection with the language family of Na-Dene, which includes Tlingit, Gwich’in, Dena’ina, Koyukon, Navajo, Carrier, Hupa, Apache and about 45 other languages. In 2008,...

OK, I didn't watch the Sarah Palin interview, but apparently she made the comment that "you can actually see Russia from Alaska." Of course, the DUmmies are all over this "gaffe", and there are numerous hits on Google about it already. The Bering Strait is 53 miles across, which means you can't see Russia across it because of the curvature of the earth. However, I did find one post on answers.yahoo.com that states: Actually, the answer is yes and no. From the mainland, there is no way to see Russia from Alaska. The distance is too great. However, there are...

Genetic study ties Siberians to people in Americas By Will Dunham Thu Feb 21, 5:08 PM ET WASHINGTON (Reuters) - People indigenous to Siberia have strong genetic links to native peoples in the Americas, according to a study further supporting the theory that humans first entered the Americas over a land bridge across the Bering Strait. Scientists at Stanford University in California combed through the genes of 938 people from 51 places, looking at 650,000 DNA locations in each person. The study, in the journal Science on Thursday, revealed similarities and differences among various populations. "This is the highest resolution...

People who migrated from Asia to the New World camped out for 20,000 years on land now submerged under the Bering Strait between Alaska and Siberia, according to a genetic analysis published on Tuesday. A team at the University of Florida combined studies of DNA, archeological evidence, climate data and geological data to come up with their new theory, which describes a much longer migration than most other researchers have proposed. "We sort of went out onto a limb, incorporating all this nongenetic data," molecular anthropologist Connie Mulligan said in a telephone interview. Mulligan's team proposes that the people who...

Humans somehow made their way into the Americas from distant lands, but knowing precisely when and from where they made the journey are matters of heated scientific debate. New genetic evidence, however, backs up a chilly northwestern arrival to North America from Siberia about 12,000 years ago, via a temporary land bridge spanning the Bering Strait. The findings further challenge an alternative idea that humans sprinkled in to both North and South America on open sea voyages 30,000 years in the past. Excerpt only...... whole story at link

Contact: Anne Rueter arueter@umich.edu 734-764-2220 University of Michigan Health System 11-26-2007Gene study supports single main migration across Bering StraitSiberians and Native Americans share unique genetic variant The U-M study, which analyzed genetic data from 29 Native American populations, suggests a Siberian origin is much more likely than a South Asian or Polynesian origin. Did a relatively small number of people from Siberia who trekked across a Bering Strait land bridge some 12,000 years ago give rise to the native peoples of North and South America? Or did the ancestors of today’s native peoples come from other parts of Asia or...

Native American populations share gene signature 00:01 14 February 2007 NewScientist.com news service Roxanne Khamsi A distinctive, repeating sequence of DNA found in people living at the eastern edge of Russia is also widespread among Native Americans, according to a new study. The finding lends support to the idea that Native Americans descended from a common founding population that lived near the Bering land bridge for some time. Kari Schroeder at the University of California in Davis, US, and colleagues sampled the genes from various populations around the globe, including two at the eastern edge of Siberia, 53 elsewhere in...

ST. LOUIS—The first humans to spread across North America may have been seal hunters from France and Spain. This runs counter to the long-held belief that the first human entry into the Americas was a crossing of a land-ice bridge that spanned the Bering Strait about 13,500 years ago. The new thinking was outlined here Sunday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The tools don’t match Recent studies have suggested that the glaciers that helped form the bridge connecting Siberia and Alaska began receding around 17,000 to 13,000 years ago, leaving very little...

Special Report 2/23/04 Island Hopping To A New World The first Americans may have arrived not on foot but by boat from Asia, even Europe By Alex Markels Digging in a dank limestone cave in Canada's Queen Charlotte Islands last summer, 21-year-old Christina Heaton hardly noticed the triangular piece of chipped stone she'd unearthed in a pile of muddy debris. But as her scientist father, Timothy, sifted through the muck, he realized she'd struck pay dirt. "Oh my God!" he yelled to her and the team of other researchers scouring the remote site off the coast of British Columbia. "It's...

Ancient site hints at first US settlers 15:03 02 January 04 NewScientist.com news service Stone-age people lived in the lands north of the Arctic Circle before the last Ice Age - much earlier than had been thought, suggests new findings. The discovery of the site in eastern Siberia also hints that people might have moved from the Old World into the Americas at a much earlier date than believed. The site along the Yanu River, carbon-dated as 30,000 years old, is twice the age of the oldest previously known Arctic settlement, report Vladimir Pitulko of the Institute for the History...

Mammoth herds 'roamed fertile Bering Strait in Ice Age' Huge herds of mammoth, wild horses and bison once roamed the land bridge between North America and Siberia, new evidence suggests. Plant fossils have shown that 24,000 years ago, during the last Ice Age, dry grassland covered much of region. The vegetation would have allowed large populations of mammals to survive all year round on the now-submerged landmass known as Beringia or the Bering Strait. Scientists writing in the journal Nature said the animals would have been sustained by a diet rich in prairie sage, bunch grasses, and other grass-like plants....