A tidbit for your memory bank

This is just one view of how man spread to the western hemisphere and serves as a portal through which an opposing view can be offered. Pushing me closer to accepting the 'southern' hypothesis is a vague memory of an article linking the DNA of domesticated animals to Micronesia.

Humans Inhabited New World's Doorstep For 20,000 Years

The human journey from Asia to the New World was interrupted by a 20,000-year layover in Beringia, a once-habitable region that today lies submerged under the icy waters of the Bering Strait. Furthermore, the New World was colonized by approximately 1,000 to 5,000 people - a substantially higher number than the 100 or fewer individuals of previous estimates.

The developments, to be reported by University of Florida Genetics Institute scientists in the open-access journal PLoS ONE on February 13, help shape understanding of how the Americas came to be populated - not through a single expansion event that is put forth in most theories, but in three distinct stages separated by thousands of generations.

"Our model makes for a more interesting, complex scenario than the idea that humans diverged from Asians and expanded into the New World in a single event," said Connie Mulligan, Ph.D., an associate professor of anthropology at the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and assistant director of the UF Genetics Institute. "If you think about it, these people didn't know they were going to a new world.

"They were moving out of Asia and finally reached a landmass that was exposed because of lower sea levels during the last glacial maximum, but two major glaciers blocked their progress into the New World. So they basically stayed put for about 20,000 years. It wasn't paradise, but they survived. When the North American ice sheets started to melt and a passage into the New World opened, we think they left Beringia to go to a better place."

Link

And on to the other side of the coin...

Find May Rewrite Americas' Prehistory

The Americas were inhabited by human beings at least as early as 12,500 years ago -- far earlier and a half a world farther south than previously believed -- a team of archaeologists announced yesterday.

Artifacts unearthed at a site near Monte Verde, Chile, the nine-member group determined, predate by at least 1,300 years the evidence of human habitation from Clovis, N.M., conventionally accepted as the oldest known in the Western Hemisphere.

More portentous, however, is the fact that the discovery is in South America, thousands of miles away from the Clovis site. That suggests that the first Asian immigrants arrived by a different path from the one traditionally assumed (across what is now the Bering Strait) or got there much earlier than the current scientific consensus allows, or both. Indeed, the Monte Verde dig also has revealed preliminary evidence that Homo sapiens may have been in residence there as long as 33,000 years ago.

As to be expected, there are theories waiting substantiation.

Alternatively, many experts speculate, the early Asian immigrants may not have traveled by land at all. Instead, they may have gone by boat, hugging the shoreline all the way from Alaska to Chile. The closing of the Bering Strait, Stanford said, would have caused a backup of seawater nutrients and ocean life in the North Pacific that might have given early nautical explorers an ample food source.

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I posit the lowered sea levels, while facilitating that north land bridge, could also have exposed more of the tops of the submerged mountain ridge (clearly seen on Google earthGoogle Earth and well worth the download) which stretches from Micronesia (Pitcarin Island forms the terminus to the west) to Easter Island and San Felix close to the South American coast.

The romantic in me envisions family groups loading up their catamarans with provisions, supplies and live stock and heading for the next island. The answer will probably be found in DNA.