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Thursday, July 28, 2011

The Bering Strait Myth - MOST COMPLETE LIST ON THIS SITE

March 2018 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/03/30/the-oldest-footprints-in-north-america-are-right-where-native-historians-said-they-should-be/?utm_term=.822ab159e0f0

The oldest footprints in North America are right where native historians said they should be 
Archaeological material and genetic studies suggest that people first ventured into the Americas via a land bridge between Asia and Alaska. Further travel would have been blocked by the two massive ice sheets that covered most of Canada until about 10,000 years ago, yet scientists keep finding signs of human presence many thousands of years before that: in Washington, a mastodon rib with a stone point buried in it; in Chile, chipped tools and burned bones; in Oregon, fossilized feces containing ancient human DNA.


Did Native Americans Discover Europe?  

Before Columbus came to America?  There is evidence that supports the idea that Native People circumnavigated the globe, or at least went out far on the ocean in their own "ships."
 

The Bering Strait Theory is also losing credibility.  Native People could have come to the western hemisphere in many ways. First, listen to one of the "great flood" stories told by Native People. Then, read a summary of Red Earth, White Lies by Vine Deloria, Jr. where he offers evidence against this one theory.  
"At the Ceno-Catastrophism convention in Portland a year ago, Deloria said that he had been researching a major project, a compendium of Indian oral traditions and folklore. He said that for many years, he had been out speaking with nearly every chief, shaman, medicine man, storyteller, and keeper of oral traditions of nearly every tribe in North America. He noted the extent to which virtually every one of these tribes retained descriptions of pliestocene megafauna and, more often than not, dinosaurs. If any of that is true, than much of what scientists think they know about the history of our Earth is certainly wrong." Ted Holden, The Emerging Science of Catastropism.
In case you don't know.  The Bering Strait Theory proposes the idea that all Native Americans are descendant from people who crossed a "land bridge" following animal herds during the last ice age, approximately 18,000 years ago.  The video below dramatizes where the land bridge was formed, and how it disappeared again under the water.  The main problem with supporting this theory are:
  1. It eliminates all other ways people came here and denies Native People their creation stories.
  2. It negates the artifacts and evidence which support earlier settlement and denies the cultural/historical significance of those findings.  Even if you believe the B.S. Theory, it denies that the land bridge opened 40,000 years ago, so people could have traveled at that time up until 12,000 years ago.
  3. It supports oppressive political ideology by calling Native People "newcomers" who don't really have that much claim on the lands of the Americas. 
 

What about the human-genome project? DNA? Evolution? Funny, you should ask.  Here are some videos suggesting very different origins.  The top one on the left shows how current research supports the "all humans came out of Africa" theory.  The one on the right shows new DNA research which supports interbreeding with Neanderthals whose DNA is ABSENT from the African gene pool, meaning they originated (and stayed) outside of Africa.  The next videos underneath shows a third human type that lived alongside Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal whose DNA was extracted from bones found in Siberian caves.  The next videos discus what happens when archaeologist "dig deeper than Clovis" and find ice-age European explorers.
 
 

More information and video compilation here

DNA Evidence  More here: http://nativeamericanresources.blogspot.com/search?q=dna

The Bering Land Bridge is just one part of the equation. DNA provides more information, but not all of it. Did European mitochondrial DNA emerge in the Native American gene pool because Native People traveled to Europe or because Europeans traveled to the Americas? There are so many points of view.  There is so much controversy.  There is so much we don't know.  One thing we do know is that immediately preceding European contact, there were people in the Americas.  These people developed complex societies, spoke over 200 languages, created roads, domesticated plants, established new technologies for hunting and farming, and used complex medicines and medical techniques (just to name a few things).  

While there are many differences among Nations, there are also commonalities in culture related to the plants, animals, seasons, weather, and other ecological systems that only exist in the "Americas" and therefore influenced the unique culture that developed stories, traditions, foods, and technology in response to this eco-system and its resources, and no other eco-systems in the world.  What is the "take-away" from this?  Research is ongoing and we can't rule out that Native Americans are accurate when we say, "We've always been here."

January 2018 Evidence from ancient ice age baby Beringian.

Linguistic Evidence
Over the past few weeks, new scientific discoveries have rekindled the debate over the Bering Strait Theory. Two of the discoveries were covered recently in Indian Country Today. The first “More Reasons to Doubt the Bering Strait Migration Theory,” dealt with the growing problem of “science by press release,” as scientific studies hype their conclusions to the point that they are misleading; and the second, “DNA Politics: Anzick Child Casts Doubt on Bering Strait Theory,” discussed how politics can influence science, and the negative effects these politically-based scientific results can have on Native peoples.

Nichols’ paper used six independent linguistic methods for calculating American Indian antiquity and she determined that it would have taken a minimum of 50,000 years for all of the American Indian languages to have evolved from one language, or 35,000 years if migrants had come in multiple waves. She concluded that, “The unmistakable testimony of the linguistic evidence is that the New World has been inhabited nearly as long as Australia or New Guinea.”

Bering Strait Theory Series of Articles
Bering Strait Theory, Pt. 1: How Dogma Trumped Science
https://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2014/06/13/bering-strait-theory-pt-1-how-dogma-trumped-science-155284
and an excerpted version:  http://nativeamericanresources.blogspot.com/2014/06/how-dogma-trumps-science-part-1.html
Bering Strait Theory, Pt. 2: Racism, Eugenics and When Natives Came to America
https://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2014/06/20/bering-strait-theory-pt-2-racism-eugenics-and-when-natives-came-america-155406

Bering Strait Theory, Pt. 3: The Theory Becomes a Religious Crusade
https://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2014/06/27/bering-strait-theory-pt-3-theory-becomes-religious-crusade-155429

Bering Strait Theory, Pt. 4: The Indisputable Facts in the Artifacts
https://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2014/07/04/bering-strait-theory-pt-4-indisputable-facts-artifacts-155659

Bering Strait Theory, Pt. 5: The Theory Comes Crashing Down
http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2014/07/11/bering-strait-theory-pt-5-theory-comes-crashing-down-155774

Bering Strait Theory, Pt. 6: DNA, Blood Types and Stereotypes Read more at http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2014/07/19/bering-strait-theory-pt-6-dna-blood-types-and-stereotypes-155920

Before the Ice Age
http://nativeamericanresources.blogspot.com/2014/04/before-ice-age-research-on-early.html

Native American Origins May Be West Asian and European
Nearly one-third of Native American genes come from west Eurasian people linked to the Middle East and Europe, rather than entirely from East Asians as previously thought, according to a newly sequenced genome.  http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/11/131120-science-native-american-people-migration-siberia-genetics/?sf5616090=1#at_pco=cfd-1.0&at_ab=-&at_pos=5&at_tot=4&at_si=545a6eb8c67bf75f?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=Social&utm_content=link_fbge20141105nativeamericans&utm_campaign=Content

Two Studies Find Ties Between Native Americans and Australia: http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2015/07/24/two-studies-find-ties-between-native-americans-and-australia-disagree-everything-else

Flora and Fauna Evidence:
Indeed, if anything, the study findings set the Beringian Standstill theory back. According to a review in Scientific American, “This kind of vegetation would not have supported the large, grazing animals – woolly mammoth, woolly rhino, Pleistocene horses, camels, and bison.” It had previously been presumed that Beringia was covered in grass, and that the large animals were what the Paloeindians had lived on, but the shrub tundra would have only supported small mammals, “perhaps some bighorn sheep,” and possibly elk.
http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2014/03/08/more-reasons-doubt-bering-strait-migration-theory

 

To use when presenting multiple perspectives and doing critical analysis.
* My personal favorites


Articles: 
* The Bering Strait Myth by John Two Hawks
Letter I wrote


East or West Coast Migration?
The find doesn’t change any minds in the debate between the West Coast-Bering Strait experts or the East Coast-Solutrean experts, as they argue over discoveries and evidence. Discoveries along either coast are bound to push back dates, as these were the favored migration routes but they are hard to find and test. These sites encounter many other modern issues like development and rising waters.

Read more at http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2014/08/26/22000-year-old-mastodon-and-tool-discovery-raise-questions-156580
 
Popular theory on how humans populated North America can't be right, study shows
http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/ice-free-corridor-north-americans-1.3715397
Human archeological sites as old as 14,600 years old have since been found south of the ice sheet, in Oregon, Florida, Texas and even as far south as Chile.Sediment coreSediment cores were drilled at Charlie Lake and Spring Lake during the winter because the frozen lake surface provided the researchers with a solid platform for drilling into the sediment. (Mikkel Winther Pedersen/University of Copenhagen)Meanwhile, no Clovis sites have been found in Alaska or Yukon, although one dating to around 13,000 years ago has been found in Charlie Lake, B.C., raising the possibility that it could have belonged to people who came through the ice-free corridor from the north.

Books about Bering Strait and population of the world.
Dickason, Olive P. Canada's First Nations:  A History of Founding Peoples from Earliest Times, 2nd Ed.  Oxford University Press.  Toronto, 1997
 
Jones, Mary Ellen.  Seeds of Change:  Readings on Cultural Exchange After 1492. Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc. Reading, MA1993.

* Mann, Charles C.  Before Columbus:  The Americas of 1491.  Antheneum Books.  New York, 2009. 

Waldman, Carl.  Atlas of The North American Indian.  Checkmark Books.  New York , 2009.