reply to post by Harte
You miss understood my statement, in north american the clovis style point appears to have spread from east to west.
And there is no analog to it in asia at all, the asiatic people who moved into NA were forest dwellers and hunted small game. Thier points attest to
this life style, and after the clovis dissapears you find these smaller and more delicate points spreading from nw into NA.
Genetic evidence points to the basque as having been descended from people who populated europe during the upper paleolithic.
The fact that their language has no realted laguage among other euopreans attests to their different backgrounds.
Waht Im say is that as the ice built back up in europe during the wurm glaciation? , the people who lived in the interior of the continent were
forced to migrate to the coast, where it was warmer and changed from hunting large land game animals to hunting sea mammals. They followed the
southern margin of the ice westward till they reached NA.
They may have settled in small groups along the coast, some pushed inland and some stayed on the coast. Its my contention that the clovis type point
itself spread and maybe not nesscearily the people themselves.
By the way clovis points have been found at pre-olmec sites dating to 7k-8k years ago, 2k years after they dissapered in NA.
The other interesting thing is the Atlatl, or spear thrower, the Atlatl was used by paleolithic europeans until the arrival of the bow and arrow.
It was used by neolithic north americans and many native american tribes and in meso america.
And as far as I can find there is no asiatic analog at the same period in time.
At several sites in cal and nev, all on the east slope of the sierra, the giant glaciers 17k+ feet in elevation, kept people from crossing, there are
caucasoid skeletons at the oldest levels of habitation, 10K years ago.
One site that was inhabited for seversal thousand years, there is a distinct transtion from caucasoid to asiatic, yet the people reamin the same
culturaly, they used the same points, they wove baskets the same way, they made clothing the same way.
And you cant totaly discount the remembered lore of the people involved, some stories are rememberd for a long time.
A perfect example is that of the Lemba in south africa, for generations they have maintained that they were descended from jewish priests, and it was
discounted.
But recent gentic testing proves they are descended from 8-12 jewish males who lived 1300 years ago, in yemen.
The lemba's own tales state that they are descedned from 7 men who came from a far off place called Sena, sena was infact one of the last jeweish
settlements in Yemen, at the time of the spreading of islam.
So there is certainly a thread of truth running through the shared tales of so many disparate cultures.
There is a site that has a compilation of native american creation and flood myths from tribes all over the americas north south and central.
It really changed my perceptions of this whole subject, in flood myth their are two common themes,1) that a couple or a small set of induviduals
survived on a raft or canoe
2) or that a coulpe or small group survived by hiding in a cave in the mountains.
Another common thread is that the survivors left their devastated homelands to start a new life and they all spoke the same tongue.
upon reaching the new land, their laguages became confused and they spread apart.