First Americans from Stone Age Europeans 20,000 years ago?

some of the oldest skulls found so far have caucasian features

General Pilates said:

Chronology doesn't really match up in any logical way. The Clovis hunters have a clear path through the Americas which is guided by the sudden extinction of a species in an area as well as multiple sites with tools. The fact that there is very little evidence for a European migration leads me to believe it doesn't really hold much water.

Often when we get claims of pre-Clovis arrivals, they are using pieces of 'spears' that could be just as easily construed as pieces of charcoal.

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Oerdin said:

It's possible but people, even hunter-gatherers, reproduce pretty fast so I would expect there to be some sort of genetic legency. DNA tastes of natives show no such legency. It's possible they came and then died out but typically it's farmers who kill off hunter gatherers not other hunter gatherers because they don't have a comparative advantage over each other. At most the hunter gathers groups just displace each other causing them to move after minor loses.

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The use of similar weapons, including styles not found amongst "asiatic" indians as well as European fishing techniques is pretty compelling...
It is odd they haven't found any bones yet though... those obviously have to exist, unless they were using the corpses for equipment making (bone lures, etc)... but just because it hasn't been found YET doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

Hmm ... time to rename Leif Eriksson day?

Cutlass said:

If any of the ancestors of Native American Indians came from Europe instead of north east Asia, they didn't seem to have left much of any form of a genetic marker behind. Which suggests that no one from Europe is an ancestor of Indians.

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Doesn't have to for the genetic connection to be there anyway. Genetic mathematics has complicated some of the more facile assumptions about these things.

I'm not sure people caused the mass extinction, it appears the Younger Dryas period may have nearly finished off the Clovis culture along with many mammals. Later people from Alaska and Siberia would have played a role finishing off the larger critters that did survive (and perhaps Clovis peoples), but with the melting ice sheet the connection with Europe sank into the sea and boating across the Bering Sea became the easiest way into the new world.

kochman said:

The use of similar weapons, including styles not found amongst "asiatic" indians as well as European fishing techniques is pretty compelling...
It is odd they haven't found any bones yet though... those obviously have to exist, unless they were using the corpses for equipment making (bone lures, etc)... but just because it hasn't been found YET doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

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This of course assumes that the 'weapons' found can be interpreted such. If such a thing were likely, there would have been more compelling evidence. I don't see why the Asiatic route is supported by hundreds of pieces of evidence, while the only evidence for the European route is a few weapons, which may or not actually be weapons? If there were actual human sites there there would have been much more proof of such a thing; it's not as if we haven't been looking.

Well, lack of discovery thus far does not equal your conclusion... it's possible, time will tell. Now, with these discoveries, a more focused search is likely taking place.

I'm pretty sure this guy doesn't have some kind of weird agenda, and therefore, I tend to trust that he might be on to something...
He could be wrong, true, but just to dismiss with your ideas seems premature.

Bumb! Because there is finally a (rather) definite answer.

So it turns out that a prehistoric European-like population indeed participated in settling the Americas - but they did not come along the ice sheet of Greenland on boats (which is what the Solutrean hypothesis claims), instead they came through Beringia, from areas of Mal'ta and Afontova Gora on the Yenisei River, in Siberia, where they had lived before:

"Upper Palaeolithic Siberian genome reveals dual ancestry of Native Americans":

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4105016/

http://anthropogenesis.kinshipstudi...-from-malta-and-afontova-gora-a-full-account/

https://www.academia.edu/7110954/Up...al_ancestry_of_Native_Americans-_Supplemental

(...) This suggests that populations related to contemporary western Eurasians had a more north-easterly distribution 24,000 years ago than commonly thought. Furthermore, we estimate that 14 to 38% of Native American ancestry may originate through gene flow from this ancient population. This is likely to have occurred after the divergence of Native American ancestors from east Asian ancestors, but before the diversification of Native American populations in the New World. Gene flow from the MA-1 [Mal'ta] lineage into Native American ancestors could explain why several crania from the First Americans have been reported as bearing morphological characteristics that do not resemble those of east Asians2, 13. Sequencing of another south-central Siberian, Afontova Gora-2 dating to approximately 17,000 years ago14, revealed similar autosomal genetic signatures as MA-1, suggesting that the region was continuously occupied by humans throughout the Last Glacial Maximum. Our findings reveal that western Eurasian genetic signatures in modern-day Native Americans derive not only from post-Columbian admixture, as commonly thought, but also from a mixed ancestry of the First Americans. (...)

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Here is where those guys probably came from (Mal'ta and Afontova Gora):

Figure "C" shows ancestry derived from those prehistoric people of Mal'ta and Afontova Gora in DNA of modern populations (warmer colors - red and yellow - show more descent from them; colder colors - blue and black - show less descent):

Figure "B" shows that Mal'ta 1 guy from 24,000 years ago was most genetically similar to modern Europeans, Central Asians, South Asians, Native Americans, as well as modern Siberians (but modern East Asians are less similar to that guy):




Link to video.

Does this mean I can open a casino?