Giant sloth pendants suggest people arrived in the Americas thousands of years earlier than thought

[wnylib]

6. The hypothesis about people crossing

the Atlantic to North America along the edge of the sea ice has been debunked. The spear points in question are the Solutrian points from France and the Clovis points in North America. There is a superficial similarity between the spear point styles and manufacturing technique, but experts in stone tool technology have pointed out some significant differences between them. Also, the timing does not work out. There is more than a thousand year gap in the dating between the two styles, making it impossible that they were connected or related in any way.

Besides that, people could not have survived the minimal time needed to make the crossing, which would have been 2 to 3 weeks if they moved quickly. They would not have known that there was another continent on the other side and would have only been following the ice for some other reason, aimlessly. The need to capture food, find warmth or shelter on the way, plus materials to replace tools lost or broken in trying to capture food would have made it impossible to survive.

In addition to that, European DNA haplotypes do not exist in the Americas.

The ice across the Atlantic hypothesis got started over controversy regarding the Kennewick skeleton that was found a few decades ago in Washington. An anthropologist who examined it said that it had features that resembled both Asian and "Caucasoid" traits. Archaeologists and anthropologists wanted to do extensive testing on the skeleton, but ran into opposition due to NAGPRA, which requires giving human remains to the Native Anericans in the region where they are found.

At that point, the late Dennis Stanford of the Smithsonian Institute claimed the right to examine it if it had Caucasian features. He developed the hypothesis of Europeans crossing via Atlantic sea ice. Added to this argument was the discovery of the X haplotype in some Native Americans. The X haplotype exists in a small number of Europeans, too.

But further study of the X haplotype has proven that the European X and the Native American X had a common ancestor 30,000 years ago in the Middle East. Then they diverged in separate directions. European X went west and north into Europe, developing mutations along the way that distinguish them from Native American X. The ancestors of Native American X went east and north into Siberia, then into northeastern Asia (Russia) and crossed from there into North America. There are distinctive, identifying mutations in the Native American X haplotype that the European X does not have. So they are two separate populations. European X does not exist in Native Americans and Native American X does not exist in Europe.

BUT, white supremacists seized on the idea of the X haplotype and the disproven ice across the Atlantic idea to claim that the Americas have always belonged to Europeans. They have a fantasy tale with zero evidence that the first Americans were civilized Europeans and that Native Americans were Asian savages who arrived later and slaughtered "white" Europeans in the Americas. Therefore, Native Americans do not have any legitimate rights to land, human remains, or citizenship and civil rights. All BS, of course.