Wednesday, April 18, 2018

Conspiracy theories

The "eastern migration" to the Americas?

a conspiracy theory that is now being discussed on the Smithsonian channel.



Smithsonian lecture here:



SpiegelOnLine article. notes the DNA shows links to Germany and Siberia.

The UKGuardian article debunks the theory

Wikipedia article on the Solutreans.

Those guys really got around... even though this was before the days of horses to carry them. (see the Horse the Wheel and Language, which claims the Indoeuropeans got around because they had horses, a story that started only in about 3500 BC).


AUKGuardian article debunks the entire theory, and notes:

the contemporary European gene pool was formed only within the last 8,000 years, and it’s unknown whether earlier peoples would have had haplogroup X in the same frequencies (or at all). No genomes from Solutren peoples have ever been sequenced, and you should always be cautious when a case is made for extending present day patterns of genetic variation into the past without direct confirmation from ancient DNA.


the amusing/horrible part of all this is that "white supremicists" types (and yes they exist) are saying: White people beat the Asian migrations to the Americas so it proves we are superior. What nonsense: their ancestors were probably living in Kazahkstan at the time, or maybe Russia or northern India. and they may not have turned so pale until ricketts pushed pale gene evolution when they moved north.

so where do the Solutreans fit into Europe or the Americas? Not much: they were replaced or merged with later populations moving there... unless, of course, you are Basque... and since a lot of Irish have Basque ancestors maybe the rumor of the Irish finding America first is true (/s).

A lot of the DNA studies are preliminary of course, but I do try to keep up on such things.

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