Going to the western science endemic denial and omission of possibilities, just for a laugh, let’s try this:

In the year 14016, precisely 12,000 years into our post-nuclear world’s future, archaeologists dig up a Native American in the uniform of the French Foreign Legion, in Africa. The automatic assumption could easily be ‘His genetic markers proves the French were Native Americans.’

Or, ‘Black Africans colonized the Central African Republic and exterminated the aboriginal [Native

American] inhabitants’ based on a 10,000 years old previous [genetically Black African] find.

These scenarios are no more far-fetched than the land bridge worshipers proposals.

The actual problem I’m pointing to here is, culture (and associated tools) are not necessarily race/genetic specific. A sweeping claim based on a single example, the Montana burial, is like determining a French speaking Black African cannot trace his cultural origin to Alsace or Normandy. Culture is not DNA, one cannot be categorically tied to the other. Widely divergent peoples borrow or swap ideas. Now, to a related controversy:

The Clovis culture was proposed to have been wiped out (together with the mega-fauna) by a comet impact, causing the so-called ‘Younger Dryas’ period in archaeology.

“Working at multiple sites across the continent, researchers found nanodiamonds – microscopic particles thought to be found on comets – in a 13,000-year-old layer of rich sedimentary soil called a “black mat.” Beneath the layer with the nanodiamonds, fossils of the animals are abundant. After that layer, they disappear.

“It’s extraordinary that tens of millions of animals disappeared synchronously at exactly the time when the diamonds and carbon layer are laid down across the continent.

“Arrowheads and other artifacts from the Clovis culture of humans – an early hunter-gatherer society – also vanish after the black mat was laid down 13,000 years ago”

This is consistent with Blackfoot Oral History but the Bering land bridge worshipers scream ‘Fantasy!‘ …

“The theory has reached zombie status,” said Professor Andrew Scott from the Department of

Earth Sciences at Royal Holloway. “Whenever we are able to show flaws and think it is dead, it reappears with new, equally unsatisfactory, arguments. Hopefully new versions of the theory will be more carefully examined before they are published”

… concerning the comet theory, claiming, among other things, contaminated samples compromised the North American study but required ignoring this multiple continents study:

“We present detailed geochemical and morphological analyses of nearly 700 spherules from 18 sites in support of a major cosmic impact at the onset of the Younger Dryas episode (12.8 ka).

The impact distributed ∼10 million tonnes of melted spherules over 50 million square kilometers on four continents. Origins of the spherules by volcanism, anthropogenesis, authigenesis, lightning, and meteoritic ablation are rejected on geochemical and morphological grounds. The spherules closely resemble known impact materials derived from surficial sediments melted at temperatures >2,200 °C.

“The spherules correlate with abundances of associated melt-glass, nanodiamonds, carbon spherules, aciniform carbon, charcoal, and iridium

“Airbursts/impacts by a fragmented comet or asteroid have been proposed at the Younger Dryas onset (12.80 ± 0.15 ka) based on identification of an assemblage of impact-related proxies, including microspherules, nanodiamonds, and iridium. Distributed across four continents at the Younger Dryas boundary (YDB), spherule peaks have been independently confirmed in eight studies, but unconfirmed in two others, resulting in continued dispute about their occurrence, distribution, and origin. To further address this dispute and better identify YDB spherules, we present results from one of the largest spherule investigations ever undertaken regarding spherule geochemistry, morphologies, origins, and processes of formation.

“We investigated 18 sites across North America, Europe, and the Middle East, performing nearly 700 analyses on spherules using energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy for geochemical analyses and scanning electron microscopy for surface microstructural characterization. Twelve locations rank among the world’s premier end-Pleistocene archaeological sites, where the YDB marks a hiatus in human occupation or major changes in site use. Our results are consistent with melting of sediments to temperatures >2,200 °C by the thermal radiation and air shocks produced by passage of an extraterrestrial object through the atmosphere; they are inconsistent with volcanic, cosmic, anthropogenic, lightning, or authigenic sources. We also produced spherules from wood in the laboratory at >1,730 °C, indicating that impact-related incineration of biomass may have contributed to spherule production. At 12.8 ka, an estimated 10 million tonnes of spherules were distributed across ∼50 million square kilometers, similar to well-known impact strewnfields and consistent with a major cosmic impact event”

This is also consistent with Blackfoot Oral History as explained to myself by Floyd Heavyrunner in a close association that spanned 37 years:

The Blackfoot precursor people arrived by sea in the very far south during the period of the mega-fauna. They migrated north where they encountered a race of Whites they had intermarried with, and these Whites taught them survival in their new land.

Specifically, clearly, they were taught how to make stone points. There also was a celestial impact that destroyed their world together with the mega-fauna and left few survivors. These are the stories of two separate peoples who mingled into one people. What is not clear is whether they met and mingled pre or post impact. The White race they mingled with seems to have been a scarce minority or remnant people, and this fact tends me to believe it was post impact, but we actually do not know. What is clear, from the Blackfoot Oral historical view is, there had been inter-racial and inter-cultural mixing in the Americas. There was an impact event. And it follows, after the impact, there would be large areas of North America vacated of previous life and culture, opening these areas wide to migrants from the south, consistent with the linguistics study cited towards the beginning of this article and Blackfoot Oral History. And a stone point cannot be specific to DNA, no different to

French language cannot be specific to the DNA of Northern Europe, millions of Black Africans speak French. Entire Native American tribes now only speak English, pointing to culture (language IS a cultural marker) cannot necessarily be definitively tied to any one populations bloodlines.

Thought provoking, but tangential and yet to be fully explored is the fact of Polynesian DNA found in South America:

“”Everything was both surprising and exciting from the very start,” Pena says. “The first thought that came to my mind was that we had the rule out the possibility of some contamination, although it would be difficult exactly of that kind, since there were no Polynesian individuals in the chain of custody.” Another lab ultimately independently confirmed these findings”

And Native American blood found in Polynesia:

“A team of scientists have tested the genetic makeup of descendants of the original islanders and found it includes DNA that could have only come from native Americans.

“That means that some time before the remote islands – including Easter Island – were colonized by Europeans the locals had interbred with people from South America.

“The Polynesian islands are some of the most remote in the world – lying thousands of miles west of South America and thousands of miles east of Asia”

And then you pre-Columbian, American sweet potato migration from Ecuador and Peru to Polynesia:

“Using complementary sets of markers (chloroplast and nuclear microsatellites) and both modern and herbarium samples, we test the tripartite hypothesis. Our results provide strong support for prehistoric transfer(s) of sweet potato from South America (Peru-Ecuador region) into Polynesia”

And then, the bottle gourd is particularly interesting, cultivated in Mexico for 10,000 years:

“Domesticated bottle gourds have been identified in the Americas at sites such as Guila Naquitz in Mexico by ~10,000 years ago. DNA sequences of rinds discovered in precontact America are of the Asian sub-variety” *

Now, the problem with this (for the land bridge worshipers) is Asian bottle gourds are not likely going to drift across the Pacific to Mexico, the currents between subtropical Asia and Subtropical

America are predominately the opposite direction:

And what are the chances a sub-tropical plant is going to find its way on foot from south Asia via Siberian climate, across the land bridge and down to Mexico? Pretty far-fetched. The most likely scenario is the bottle gourd came across the Pacific in the possession of a sea-faring people previous to 10,000 years ago. In fact these gourds are found across Polynesia.

And then, the pre-Columbian Polynesian chicken introduction to South America also suggests prevailing currents point away from the gourd floating to sub-tropical regions of the Americas:

“Computer simulations suggest that voyaging eastward from Polynesia in the southern hemisphere where the mid-latitude westerlies are more accessible, is a more likely prospect than a northern route to the Americas. These southern hemisphere voyages would have brought landfalls in the central and southern regions of Chile and could have introduced the Polynesian chicken to South America”

What is interesting in the preceding is, pre-Colombian peoples are acknowledged to have been all over the Pacific, from Polynesia to South America, beginning from the Asian side, up to 4,000 years or farther in the past. So, why not the Atlantic 12,000 years ago? Or the Pacific 40,000 years previous to present? The answer is as simple as looking at your hand in front of your face, it is the ego of a recently primitive culture, represented in Western Anthropology, demands no

Native Americans, the peoples whose lives they had destroyed, got anything right, before Copernicus, Galileo and Western culture’s adoption of Plato. But don’t forget, these people’s ‘civilization’ were still burning witches when Columbus landed in the Americas. Solutrean isn’t dead, it merely isn’t proven. But then, neither is much of what is taken as gospel by science proven.

I have a good laugh, time to time, when it occurs the people and culture who were burning heretics a mere 500 years ago, hold to anything considered to be a definitive or empirically proven or dis-proven ‘truth.’

How about a ‘litmus test’ of self-veracity for western science? The human appendix was faithfully described by science as a ‘vestigial organ’ for what seemed like a very long time (how many decades? Centuries?) and then an ‘Eureka!’ moment came along within the last decade; the human appendix is a perfectly modern, functional organ whose purpose is restarting the gut flora, following a case of dysentery.

It follows, it is immaterial whether Solutrean people were White or Black, whether they possibly walked over ice via Greenland or possibly arrived by sea, or didn’t arrive at all. What is material is, the culture that produced western science, that is to say science itself, in a sense, is still burning heretics.

Meanwhile, the ‘anthros’ discover Australasian blood in Brazil and the Aleutian islands, and (grudgingly) push the ‘first’ Americans arrival back to a possible 23,000 years (whilst ignoring the 50,000 years find), recalling:

“19,000 year old stone tools have been found at precisely the wrong end of the Americas (southern Chile), so yeah, where were those ‘land bridge’ North Americans prior to 14,500 years ago? As well, several Amazon tribes have been discovered to be the most closely related (of all modern peoples) to the Austral-Asian peoples of Papua and Australia; with no comparable (or even remote) intermediate genetic relationships to the north of their Amazon location until you get to the Aleutian Islands and a population of late arrivals from Siberia. The most common sense explanation is the ancestral Austral-Asian type found in the Amazon tribes’ genetics journeyed to South America about the same period as Papua and Australia were initially peopled (40,000 to 60,000 years ago.)

But, all those anthropologists with ‘Boners for Beringia’ have stretched logic (and inflated their credulity) by insisting these Amazon tribes genetics could only have arrived via Siberia within the last 15,000 years; while ignoring “New Evidence Puts Man in North America 50,000 Years Ago.” There are numerous problems with this ‘mainstream’ postulate; it ignores evidence from linguistics, it ignores other cultural evidence, it ignores physical evidence, and most of all, it ignores the primitive and nativistic nature of western empiricism’s roots.”

Relevant to this immediate preceding, it is clear from a BBC article the anthros with Boners for Beringia will never allow for a European (Solutrean) presence as they continue to deny, equivocate, stretch the imagination (in most close minded ways) and otherwise stick to the land bridge ‘scientific’ orthodoxy:

“[So] the fanciful ideas that somehow the Americas were populated by people coming from

Europe and all kinds of other places are wrong”

* Since I’d published an initial version of this analysis as “Apple Indians & Anthropology” (February 2014), the linked article on the bottle-gourd story has been amended to omit the “Asian sub-variety” (dna) quote and changed to emphasize a larger study that essentially buried the result of the study finding pre-Columbian rinds with DNA pointing to the Asian variety. What appears to have happened is, by adding in study of modern gourds found in the Americas, the people who insist the bottle gourd floated from Africa to the Americas, essentially are inferring the ancient rinds found with Asian DNA are somehow irrelevant because they could not recover some of the genetic information the previous study had identified (one gets the impression there was little motivation to accomplish this), as well the new study shows other problems (an analogy would be to be bury the odd facts that don’t fit the new study as an anomaly within the numbers.)

In the new study, there are several glaring stretches of possibilities on top of the fact the ancient dispersal model does not even consider the possibility of human transport of the gourds by sea; the largest stretch postulates the rare African wild gourd varieties made multiple ancient crossings of the Atlantic on their own in a 10,000 years past window of time that does not appear to have been repeated before or since. Also overlooked is the ‘coincidence’ these gourds had been domesticated in Asia and the Americas for 10,000 years plus but only in Africa much later.

The real conclusion supported throughout is, when it comes to protecting one’s turf, science is as dirty as politics.

Boners for Beringia references (links) follow Cosmos & Consciousness (notes)