Skulls point to varied origins for first Americans

Thought that this was pretty interesting... if we have any paleontologists or anthropologists in the house, this would be up your alley.

BARCELONA, SPAIN - The ancestry of the first Americans may be more complex than anthropologists thought.

Researchers studied 33 ancient skulls excavated in Mexico. They say unlike other early American remains, the artifacts resemble those of people from south Asia and the southern Pacific Rim.

www.cbc.ca...

A little related information...

Archeologists have long insisted that people first came to the Americas by crossing the Bering land bridge from Siberia between 10,000 and 18,000 years ago. However, most indigenous people in both North and South America deny this. South Americans say they came from the sea and many Native Americans say they came from the South. Now it's been discovered that they couldn't have crossed the Bering Bridge, since it didn't exist then.
Allison M. Heinrichs writes in the Los Angeles Times that archeologists carbon dated materials found at the Ushki site in Siberia, which is thought to be the original starting point for crossing the Bering land bridge into North America, and found it's much younger than they previously believed. This means the first Americans couldn't have used it to migrate overland during the last great ice age. The Ushki site is the remains of a community of hunters who lived around Ushki Lake in northeastern Russia that is now known to be only about 13,000 years old.

The new date means the Ushki settlement is the same age as the Clovis site, an ancient community found in New Mexico. It would have been impossible for people to walk thousands of miles from Siberia and then on into what is now New Mexico in such a short period of time. "This was the last site out there in Siberia that could have been an ancestor for the Clovis," says researcher Michael Waters. "We have to think bigger now and start thinking outside the box."

www.unknowncountry.com...

Land bridge never made sense to me, even as a child. Can one trust carbon dating? Scientists are going to have to come up with some other dating formula because it is getting to the point that things are getting rewritten in history quite a bit in the last twenty some odd years now.

[edit on 14-1-2005 by ancientsailor]

Great story, Dragonrider. I grew up with a canoe paddle in my hands, we don't need no stinking landbridges.