Thanks, but I'm trying to avoid ASB. Quoting James W. Loewen doesn't lend your theory much credibility, if I may say so. And the Bering Land Bridge hypothesis is accepted by far, far more than 50 percent in academia. If you have evidence to the contrary I'd love to see it, since it certainly isn't the case in the parts of academe I'm familiar with.
Disparaging a historian as widely used as Loewen doesn't do much besides make you look like you have a personal grudge against a popular historian. You might want to try reading before you condemn something as ASB. I linked to show you Loewen's source, if you'd bother to notice, and you should critique that rather than engage in ad hominem attacks.
Your local circle in academia hardly counts. That's anecdote, not evidence. Up til ten years ago the BS theory has mostly been maintained by fear, not evidence.
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http://goarchie.com/aashid/BeforeIndians.html
Rediscovering America
The New World may be 20,000 years older than experts thought
Reprint from October 12, 1998 issue of “U.S. News and World Report”
....But the big break that persuaded many to rethink the conventional theory has come thousands of miles from Clovis in Monte Verde, Chile. There, archaeologist Tom Dillehay of the University of Kentucky has, for 20 years, been excavating wood, bone, and stone tools from rolling pasture land. Last year he was joined by a blue-ribbon group of archaeologists, including many who were skeptical of Dillehay's long-controversial assertions that the artifacts probably are at least 12,500 years old. The expert panel viewed the site and wound up agreeing with Dillehay: The tools bore no resemblance to those of the vanished Clovis culture. Dillehay and his Chilean colleagues now are planning more excavation to explore hints that people were at the site as many as 30,000 years ago.
Some scientists say one needs only to study modern Indians to conclude that their ancestors got here before Clovis time. One hint is in genetic material passed down only from mothers to offspring, called mitochondrial DNA. Such genes carry a molecular clock--if a single population splits into isolated groups, the buildup of random, but distinct, mutations allows geneticists to estimate how long the original groupings have been separated. "For the last five years, the genetic evidence has been saying early, early entry" into the Americas, says Theodore Schurr, a geneticist at Emory University in Atlanta. When Schurr counts the mutations accumulated among American Indians, the
molecular data are consistent with departures from Asia between 15,000 and 30,000 years ago. The analysis revealed three distinct families of mutations common among American Indians and found elsewhere only in Siberia or Mongolia. Strangely, about 3 percent of Native Americans also have a genetic trait that occurs elsewhere only in a few places in Europe. This could mean either that some Asian populations migrated both west, into Europe, and east to the Americas, or that Ice Age Europeans may have trickled into the New World many thousands of years ago, perhaps by skirting the Arctic ice pack over the North Atlantic.
Linguists offer a remarkably parallel analysis. Johanna Nichols, a professor in the Slavic languages department of the University of California--Berkeley, counts 143 Native American language stocks from Alaska to the tip of South America that are completely unintelligible to one another, as different as Gaelic, Chinese, or Persian are from one another. The richest diversity of languages is along North America's Pacific coast, not along the Clovis group's supposed inland immigration route. California alone has dozens of dissimilar languages.
It takes about 6,000 years for two languages to split from a common ancestral tongue and lose all resemblance to each other, Nichols says. Allowing for how fast peoples tend to subdivide and migrate, she calculates that
60,000 years are needed for 140 languages to emerge from a single founding group. Even assuming multiple migrations of people using different languages, she figures that people first showed up in the Americas at least 35,000 years ago. If archaeologists haven't found proof of such ancient events, well, "as a linguist, that's not my problem," Nichols shrugs.
Clovis-first, she says, is "not remotely possible."
The glacier highway.
Even some geologists are taking a punch at Clovis primacy. "Recent work shows that the corridor [through the glaciers] was not open until 11,500 years ago," says Carole Mandryk, a geologist at Harvard University. "That is a pretty major problem for ideas that it was a highway for colonization within a few centuries." Mandryk's studies indicate the corridor would have been nearly impassable for a century or more, with little game or edible vegetation, and vast, boggy wetlands. "The corridor is 2,000 miles long," Mandryk says. "Let's say you are two young guys, and you carry as much food as you can, and you walk as fast as you can. It still takes you six months to get through. And then you run around and kill a lot of animals. Then you have to go back and tell everybody else to get their families and come on down."
She blames the persistence of the Clovis-first theory on these "macho gringo guys" who "just want to believe the first Americans were these big, tough, fur-covered, mammoth-hunting people, not some fishermen over on the coast."
Just this summer, one longtime Clovis-firster abandoned the idea. For years, Albert Goodyear, associate director for research at the South Carolina Institute of Archaeology, has calmly supported Clovis. Monte Verde shook him just a bit. So in July, along the Savannah River at a site called Topper, he decided, just to be responsible, to keep digging below sediments dated to the Clovis era. All of a sudden, "we found a tool, and then another." For a solid yard down, scores of blades, flakes, and other human-crafted artifacts turned up. Goodyear told students and volunteers, yes, those sure look older than Clovis. "I had a paradigm crash right there in the woods. I felt like Woody Allen, like I had to turn and say to the audience, 'Why am I saying these things I'm not supposed to believe?'
Just five years ago, nothing new was possible in American prehistory, because of dogma. Now everything is possible; the veil has been lifted."
Finds such as Goodyear's are cause for celebration among long-suffering Clovis doubters. "
The Clovis-first model is dead," proclaims, with some overstatement, Robson Bonnichsen, director of the Center for the Study of the First Americans at Oregon State University. He has made the center a clearinghouse for information about alternatives to Clovis-first. "I've felt there were people here more than 12,000 years ago from the start," he says. "We're finally getting the evidence to back that up."
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