Native American's Now From Siberia!

[auteur55]

So a new study out has come to the conclusion that Native American's migrated from Siberia as well as Asia. The new study opens up the possibility that the entire population didn't come over in clusters from Asia like we initially thought.

Here is the story:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20071127/ts_al...pologymigration

What's next a migration is discovered to have possibly come from Jerusalem??

That anyone lost their testimony of the BoM over this issue is a tragedy.

[Uncle Dale]

That anyone lost their testimony of the BoM over this issue is a tragedy.

....

Never had a testimony of Nephites, Mulekites and Jaredites to "lose" in the first place.

My testimony has always been of the gospel of Jesus and of our latter day efforts to restore it.

Anybody who places all their faith in the historicity of the BoM is just naturally opening

themselves up for the possibility of losing that sort of belief.

IMHO.

Uncle Dale

[thesometimesaint]

Isn't Siberia part of Asia?

[cdowis]

So a new study out has come to the conclusion that Native American's migrated from Siberia as well as Asia. The new study opens up the possibility that the entire population didn't come over in clusters from Asia like we initially thought.

Here is the story:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20071127/ts_al...pologymigration

What's next a migration is discovered to have possibly come from Jerusalem??

That anyone lost their testimony of the BoM over this issue is a tragedy.

Ahem. I would control my enthusiasm. I think you misread the study.

Let me quote the relevant part

This variant (of the DNA marker) "has not been found in genetic studies of people elsewhere in the world except eastern Siberia," the report said.

IOW, the study indicates that Native Americans came from eastern Siberia and *not* from other parts of Asia.

[USU78]

Isn't Siberia part of Asia?

Isn't the Levant part of Asia?

[LifeOnaPlate]

So a new study out has come to the conclusion that Native American's migrated from Siberia as well as Asia. The new study opens up the possibility that the entire population didn't come over in clusters from Asia like we initially thought.

Here is the story:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20071127/ts_al...pologymigration

What's next a migration is discovered to have possibly come from Jerusalem??

That anyone lost their testimony of the BoM over this issue is a tragedy.

Aw, nuts! Now the scientists are changing everything!

[thesometimesaint]

USU78:

Last time I looked.

[Mark Beesley]

Here's a map of Asia:

Here's a map showing where Siberia is in Asia:

Don't they teach this stuff in High School any more???

[auteur55]

Anybody who places all their faith in the historicity of the BoM is just naturally opening

themselves up for the possibility of losing that sort of belief

I agree. But there are people who lost their faith in the restored gospel over the DNA issue.

Ahem. I would control my enthusiasm. I think you misread the study.

Probably. But I think my point is none of this stuff is definitive and scientists will start to disagree and quarrell over their respective studies. The DNA topic is ongoing and nothing is final. We could be discovering stuff for years.

[thesometimesaint]

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/comm...ocationAsia.png

[Avatar4321]

i don't mean to throw a wrench into all this, but how do we know that Siberians didnt come from America?

[thesometimesaint]

Avatar4321:

I'm pretty sure they do/did. Does anyone know if they were ever considered the principle ancestors?

[Defender]

Sorry to burst your bubble, but that article actually reinforces the Asian Land Bridge migraton theory while shooting down rival theories of multiple migrations such as by boat. This article actually helps the critics.

"A US genetic study bolsters claims that Native Americans are descended from one migrant group that crossed a lost land link from modern Siberia to Alaska -- not waves of arrivals from Asia, as rival theories say...

"Analysis found one unique genetic variant widespread across both the northern and southern American continents -- suggesting that all Native Americans were descended from a single group, not various ones as the rival theory holds."

Siberia is in Asia and the Siberian migration theory has been the dominant theory for some time now. The article is saying that ALL NAs came from Siberia over the land bridge and not from a series of migrations from other areas as some recent rival theories have suggested.

I expect the critics will be shoving this in our face for a long time now.

[jadams_4242]

Never had a testimony of Nephites, Mulekites and Jaredites to "lose" in the first place.

My testimony has always been of the gospel of Jesus and of our latter day efforts to restore it.

Anybody who places all their faith in the historicity of the BoM is just naturally opening

themselves up for the possibility of losing that sort of belief.

IMHO.

Uncle Dale

And i certainly do respect your humble opinion, but on the other hand I dont place any faith in the B.O.M , I know it is of sacred and Holy origin, so not to fret, I will never lose my "knowledge".

[Bernard Gui]

Native Americans do not accept the Asian connection.

Bernard

[helix]

Siberia is in Asia and the Siberian migration theory has been the dominant theory for some time now. The article is saying that ALL NAs came from Siberia over the land bridge and not from a series of migrations from other areas as some recent rival theories have suggested.

Not really. It's simply saying what to me, seems rather obvious.

That the Americas were empty...then populated by a migration, that population grew, and took over the continent.

It does not preclude, as Simon Southerton said, a small group of thirty or so merging into that existing culture.

What it does rule out though, is say, a South American culture growing alongside a distinct North American culture, before the two merged. Or a European migration that settled in the Eastern US, growing as a distinct population, and then merging into the rest of the American population.

[katherine the great]

So a new study out has come to the conclusion that Native American's migrated from Siberia as well as Asia. The new study opens up the possibility that the entire population didn't come over in clusters from Asia like we initially thought.

This is not a new theory. There have always been arguments for and against a single migration. This just is supportive of it.

[Stargazer]

Sorry to burst your bubble, but that article actually reinforces the Asian Land Bridge migraton theory while shooting down rival theories of multiple migrations such as by boat. This article actually helps the critics.

Not really. The research behind the article doesn't even come close to saying that the ALB was the sole migration route. It only says that the immigrants who came over the ALB came from one distinct region in Siberia, not many different areas of Asia. How can this exclude other, smaller, migrations, such as that of the Mulekites and the Lehites? Answer: it can't. The ALB may well be the principal migration route, but looking at the hypothesized 1421 Chinese expedition (which allegedly visited the Americas via the Pacific Coast), the well-known, and brief, Viking incursion around 1000 CE, it is more than clear that the Americas were not totally unknown to Eurasians. It would also be surprising if no Polynesians ever sailed to the Americas (reverse-Hagoth), given the enormous distances these people were capable of sailing.

"A US genetic study bolsters claims that Native Americans are descended from one migrant group that crossed a lost land link from modern Siberia to Alaska -- not waves of arrivals from Asia, as rival theories say...

"Analysis found one unique genetic variant widespread across both the northern and southern American continents -- suggesting that all Native Americans were descended from a single group, not various ones as the rival theory holds."

Just as it's possible that a large percentage of Native Americans are descended from Lehi (but through a great deal of dilution).

Siberia is in Asia and the Siberian migration theory has been the dominant theory for some time now. The article is saying that ALL NAs came from Siberia over the land bridge and not from a series of migrations from other areas as some recent rival theories have suggested.

I expect the critics will be shoving this in our face for a long time now.

That much is certain. But they shove many more things in our faces, so what else is new?

[freakin a man]

"Analysis found one unique genetic variant widespread across both the northern and southern American continents -- suggesting that all Native Americans were descended from a single group, not various ones as the rival theory holds."

I don't see how this can be proven from small DNA samplings. Plus if Lehi's group merged with these other groups early one, their DNA would be diluted out of the pool. Sort of like if a family moves to Japan and the kids marry Japanese citizens. That are the chances of finding their DNA 2500 years after the move? I still believe the DNA issue is one that critics that are LDS should run as far away from. With no DNA evidence supporting important Bible claims like all of mankind from Adam and Eve or Noah's family, then the Bible is equally flawed as the BOM in terms of DNA evidence. To to mention that the evidence presented of people from Siberia crossing into America thousands of years before Adam and Eve existed according to the Bible might be a problem as well. The vast majority of critics of the BOM are Christian. So when they bring stuff up, throw the mud back in their face. If DNA has proven the BOM false, then its also proven the Bible false.

[The Dude]

LOL, great thread Avatar and everybody else!

Native Americans do not accept the Asian connection.

So what to they believe, Bernard? Do they believe in Hebrew migrations ~2600 years ago?

...genuinely curious...

[The Dude]

i don't mean to throw a wrench into all this, but how do we know that Siberians didnt come from America?

The first archaeological remains in America date around ~10-12,000 years ago, but Siberia and the rest of Asia has been populated for tens of thousands of years longer than that. So, logically, Asia was populated before America.

If you leave that aside and just look at DNA markers there's no directionality of who came from where, just evidence of relatedness and time of separation. One of the most recent Y-chromosome mutations to appear in American indians is found nowhere else except America and the northeastern-most corner of Asia, closest to Alaska. Scientists take this as evidence of a limited back-migration, where a new mutation occurred in America and was carried back to Asia in the recent past.

[MormonMason]

In the most underdeveloped state of Brazil, Piaui, lies one of the richest prehistoric archaeological sites in the world. Pedra Furada is also one of the most controversial sites in the Americas - splitting archaeologists into two emotionally charged camps and threatening to rewrite the history of the continent's colonisation.

A thinly inhabited, semi-arid area of sandstone rock shelters, 500 miles west of the coastal city Recife, Pedra Furada contains more than 400 prehistoric sites, including 340 stone walls full of ancient paintings. Researchers are still finding new remains at the rate of 40 a year.

But it is not the vast number of archaeological discoveries that has the academic world excited. It is their age.

Brazilian excavators, led by Niede Guidon, claim to have proved the existence of the oldest Americans. Ms Guidon claims that charcoal that she says is the remnant of camp fires has been carbon dated to 50,000 years ago.

This makes it the most ancient site in the Americas by a long chalk - about 40,000 years - and if true, poses fundamental questions about how humans arrived in South America well before it is believed they arrived in the North.

This year she went one step further. In January she said the results of carbon dating tests on three fossilised teeth and a part of a human skull she found in 1987 had put their age at 15,000 years.

This would make them the oldest human remains in the New World.

The results are controversial because they smash the traditional view, established in the 1950s, that the earliest Americans were the "Clovis hunters" from New Mexico - whose spear points have been dated at 12,000 years ago. The Clovis hunters are thought to have migrated across the Bering strait.

Ms Guidon says: "I don't have any doubt that the oldest traces of humans yet discovered are here in Brazil. But there will be others found. These humans had to get here somehow.

"But I think it's wrong that everyone came running across Bering chasing mammoths - that's infantile. I think they also came along the seas. I don't see why they couldn't have come across the Atlantic."

Ms Guidon's research has divided the academic community into two sides - roughly between US archaeologists, who refuse to accept it, and the south Americans and Europeans, who do. ...

("Archaelogists feud over oldest Americans: US doubts over prehistoric relics in Brazil reopen colonial wounds" URL: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2000/feb...ternationalnews Accessed: 12-1-2007; bold emphasis mine)

[Thama]

The Americas are kind of a big object for the entirety of human civilization to miss for over 10,000 years, besides 1 chance migration of hunter-gatherers, a single Viking ship and the famous accident of Christopher Columbus. The reality is that there have almost certainly been interactions between the Americas and other continents almost continuously throughout the history of civilization.

I was even recently talking to a Spanish history professor at my university who was quite convinced that the Olmecs had West African origins. The entire idea that the Americas were isolated and untouched before the Spanish conquest strikes me as a fantastically Euro-centric viewpoint.

[The Dude]

The Americas are kind of a big object for the entirety of human civilization to miss for over 10,000 years, besides 1 chance migration of hunter-gatherers, a single Viking ship and the famous accident of Christopher Columbus. The reality is that there have almost certainly been interactions between the Americas and other continents almost continuously throughout the history of civilization.

I agree there may well have been other chance interactions between the Americas and other continents, but there is plentiful evidence for a bottleneck and far, far less interaction than what took place in the history of Eurasia and Africa. The gene studies are the latest to bear that out.

The entire idea that the Americas were isolated and untouched before the Spanish conquest strikes me as a fantastically Euro-centric viewpoint.

You mean it wasn't hermetically sealed up from the knowedge of all other nations like the Book of Mormon says?

[Thama]

I agree there may well have been other chance interactions between the Americas and other continents, but there is plentiful evidence for a bottleneck and far, far less interaction than what took place in the history of Eurasia and Africa. The gene studies are the latest to bear that out.

Far less interaction than within Eurasia and Africa? Absolutely... there's an ocean in the way. No interaction? That's hard to believe. Gene studies are perhaps useful for tracking large-scale migrations, but there are a lot of interactions (small trading colonies, immigration of very small groups, etc.) for which genetics isn't really a viable tool to study.

You mean it wasn't hermetically sealed up from the knowedge of all other nations like the Book of Mormon says?

Comparatively speaking, it was. Of course, the small seafaring nations of the Pacific and East Asia weren't quite as big a threat to "overrun the land", as Lehi was worried about, as were the Greeks, Egyptians, Babylonians, and later western Europe and the Islamic Empire.

That's a thought-provoking point, though. It's apparent that there were occasional external interactions throughout the history of the Americas... would all of those qualify as people brought to the promised land by the Lord? I really don't know.