Cro-magnons settle America

History channel had an episode that posited that man from the Iberian area migrated to the American continent pre 12000yrs and were either assimilated by or exterminated by the Siberian migration. They base this on similar arrow point tech found in both America and Europe. Also the Siberian migration couldn't happen before 12,000yrs ago because the glacier ice did not recede enough to allow them to migrate down into the America until then so any older settlements couldn't come from the Siberian land bridge. Another reason why the so called native American Indians will not let scientist example older finds claiming burial rights, or maybe protecting their profitable claims as first inhabitants?
 
yes, i am aware of that. I guess their skin colour would be not that far from what amerindians OTL have, maybe darker. i also dont think that blue eyes would be common, most people would probably have brownish skin, black or dark brown hair and brown eyes.

Blue eyes should be selected against in tropical areas, as they cause the retina to get more light and mean a higher chance of blindness in old age. But if blue eyes were universal in pre-agricultural Europe, or even just very common to the point none of the initial settlers had brown eyes, the trait would be fairly fixed and it would be hard for eyes to darken again. Sort of similar to how Amerinds in the tropics IOTL couldn't darken to the point that people from Africa or New Guinea were in the old world. Their super-dark pigmentation genes were lost through mutations, and couldn't easily be re-evolved.

So you are saying that the "original" European inhabitants, at least in northern Europe, were in fact directly descended from the Ancient North Eurasians, and later intermixed with another population to produce most modern Europeans.

Or perhaps the other way around, that some of the Ancient North Eurasians migrated into a northern Europe already inhabited by the dominant ancestors of modern Europeans, and have simply contributed to the existing populations.

In the first case, I would say that the Solutrean Hypothesis is alive and well, with the recent discovery of an Ancient North Eurasian component quite possibly explained by a trans-Atlantic Ice-Age migration from western Europe.

In the second case, the Solutrean Hypothesis would seem much less likely.

Although I suppose that it all depends on the timing of any migration of Ancient North Eurasians into northern Europe. Is there any data on that?

Ancient North Eurasians and European Hunter-Gatherers were related populations, but had been genetically separate for tens of thousands of years through the Ice Ages - probably because glaciers and uninhabitable wasteland blocked free passage between Europe and Central Asia/Siberia for much of this period.

The farmer population which came out of the middle east though was something else entirely. It was a mixture, according to the latest studies, of Western Hunter-Gatherers and another, now extinct population termed "basal Eurasian" which split off after humans left Africa, but is equally distant from modern Europeans and Asians. Presumably either a native group from the Near East, or some secondary migration of East Africans into the near east, who helped contribute to the founding of agriculture.

Regardless, while modern-day northern Europeans have more ancestry from the "West Hunters" than the "First Farmers" we'd not perceive the West Hunters as white, while the First Farmers probably had pale skin, brown eyes, and dark brown hair.

Ancient North Eurasians themselves did seem to migrate into Europe, although it's a bit of a question when this (roughly 10%) admixture happened. Uralic groups and those with a lot of Uralic substrate (like Russians and Swedes) show significantly more. But it's found in high levels in virtually every European population, with the lowest amounts in Sardinians and to a lesser extent the Basque. It is generally thought that Indo-Europeans brought more of it into Europe than existed before, which would make sense if you believe (as most now do) they came from somewhere around the Ukraine, and thus were exposed to "eastern" influences.
 
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