The First North Americans ... "seem to appear by magic" ??
There were more people living in the New World at the time of Columbus than previously believed – population density along the east coast of North America may have been greater than in Europe at the same time. The ancient civilizations of the Americas were sophisticated and date back as far as the great civilizations of the Middle East and Asia.
Update here ...
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1013315/posts
Another theory, The Solutrean Hypothesis, is that the there was a early pre-Clovis Atlantic migration route in addition to the Asian Bering Straight land bridge as shown on the following map:
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1377656mtDNA haplogroup X: An ancient link between Europe/Western Asia and North America?
http://www.crystalinks.com/clovis.html
And while independent invention could account for these similarities (i.e., finding the same solutions to the same questions), the oldest Clovis tools are not on the Great Plains, or in the Great Basin or Southwest of the U.S. - where they should be if the Clovis people trickled in from Siberia and then fanned out across the continent - but rather they are found in the eastern and southeastern regions of the U.S. It's possible that Ice Age Europeans may have crossed into North America by boats, hugging the edges of the great ice sheets that stretched from Greenland westward to what is now upstate New York."no Clovis sites in either Alaska or Canada;" ? Not in Alaska, or coming from Alaska into Canada, no ... not from that direction first. But in Canada yes, from the east coast of northern North America, into New York, into the Great Lakes ... ... and at some point into Caledonia? There were more people living in the New World at the time of Columbus than previously believed – population density along the east coast of North America may have been greater than in Europe at the same time. The ancient civilizations of the Americas were sophisticated and date back as far as the great civilizations of the Middle East and Asia. and ... http://www.stevequayle.com/Giants/N.Am/St.Lawr.html The Mandarins of the Canadian Museum of Civilization (Hull/Ottawa) also at long last admit: "Historically documented native beliefs in Canada appear to have been quite similar to those of the preChristian Celtic, Germanic and old Scandinavian peoples of northwestern Europe" ... (Old Scandinavian means Lapps and Finns).
Origins - History
http://www.crystalinks.com/clovis.html
Once thought to span thousands of years, the Clovis era is now dated to a few hundred, roughly from 11,400 to 10,900 radiocarbon years ago (13,325 - 12,975 cal BP)
In many ways, the Clovis people seem to appear by magic on the North American continent. The assumption has been that their ancestors moved south from Alaska, pursuing their favorite prey, the mammoth. However, there are no Clovis sites in either Alaska or Canada; (umm ... except in Caledonia!) likewise, there are no technological antecedants for Clovis anywhere in the Americas nor are their any technological antecedants in northeast Asia, extreme eastern Asia, or anywhere in Asia. So from where did the Clovis people come - or at least, from where did their technology of producing finely crafted, fluted spear points, come?
Some scientists have speculated that the ancestors of the Clovis people perfected their distinctive toolkits and fluting techniques while in route, via the (in)famous "ice-free corridor", from Alaska to the great plains of North America.
Other scientists have suggested that the ancestors of the Clovis people lived South of North America since there are isolated hints of human settlement earlier than 11,500 years ago (the earliest time Clovis appears in North America), at places like Monte Verde in southern Chile and Pedra Furada in Brazil. Alternately, there are a few sites in North America which pre-date Clovis, such as Meadowcroft Rockshelter, in western Pennsylvannia, and Pendejo Cave in New Mexico, and it may be that these sites represent not only a Pre-Clovis population, but one technologically ancestral to Clovis.
First Americans May Have Been European
By Bjorn Carey, LiveScience Staff Writer
posted: 19 February 2006 08:16 pm ET
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 chance that people walked from one continent to the other.
Also, when archaeologist Dennis Stanford of the Smithsonian Institution places American spearheads, called Clovis points, side-by-side with Siberian points, he sees a divergence of many characteristics.
Instead, Stanford said today, Clovis points match up much closer with Solutrean style tools, which researchers date to about 19,000 years ago. This suggests that the American people making Clovis points made Solutrean points before that.
There’s just one problem with this hypothesis—Solutrean toolmakers lived in France and Spain. Scientists know of no land-ice bridge that spanned that entire gap.
The lost hunting party
Stanford has an idea for how humans crossed the Atlantic, though—boats. Art from that era indicates that Solutrean populations in northern Spain were hunting marine animals, such as seals, walrus, and tuna.
They may have even made their way into the floating ice chunks that unite immense harp seal populations in Canada and Europe each year. Four million seals, Stanford said, would look like a pretty good meal to hungry European hunters, who might have ventured into the ice flows much the same way that the Inuit in Alaska and Greenland do today.
Inuit use large, open hunting boats constructed from animal skins for longer trips or big hunts. These boats, called umiaq, can hold a dozen adults, as well as several children, dead seals or walruses, and even dog-sled teams. Inuit have been building these boats for thousands of years, and Stanford believes that Solutrean people may have used a similar design.
It’s possible that some groups of these hunters ventured out as far as Iceland, where they may have gotten caught up in the prevailing currents and were carried to North America.
“You get three boats loaded up like this and you would have a viable population,” Stanford said. “You could actually get a whole bunch of people washing up on Nova Scotia.”
Some scientists believe that the Solutrean peoples were responsible for much of the cave art in Europe. Opponents of Stanford’s work ask why, then, would these people stop producing art once they made it to North America?
“I don’t know,” Stanford said. “But you’re looking at a long distance inland, 100 miles or so, before they would get to caves to do art in.”
Actually, a good bit of the Finnish population appears to be related in some ways to the Basques, so it’s not quite “all” that remains. There’s also a possibility that the “Picts” may be another group, though they were eventually absorbed by the Irish Scots, though the matrilineal descent of Scottish clans may be a tiny echo of the old Pictish matrilineal/matrilocal system, which was rather like the Haudenosaunee.