Re: Dates of Human Diaspora WAS: Re: PIE and Nostratic

On Fri, 23 Sep 2005 17:20:23 -0400, tomhchappell <tomhchappell@...>
wrote:

> --- In conlang@yahoogroups.com, Jörg Rhiemeier <joerg_rhiemeier@W...>
>> wrote:
>> [snip]
>> If Nostratic is real, then Proto-Nostratic would have been spoken
>> somewhen between 12,000 and 15,000 years ago if not earlier,
>> and the most likely location is northeastern Africa.  At any rate,
>> it seems to predate the invention of agriculture.
>> [snip]
>
> Joerg, I wonder about your dates.
>
> As I understand it, there may have been some human settlement in the
> Americas as early as 20 kya (20 thousand years B.P.); and was almost
> surely at least one settlement of humans related to modern "Native
> Americans" in the Americas by 10 kya.
There's some pretty compelling evidence that the earliest humans in the
Americas came to South America from (or via) Australia close to 50 or 40
kya, and were displaced soutwards and all but wiped out by the Asian
influx somewhere around 20 to 10 kya. It seems the very last of the
bloodline exist at the very tip of Argentina, in Tierra del Fuego, and I
agree that those people have the typical Australian features with South
American coloring, and IIRC their language hasn't been successfully
related to anything else American, and there are certain cultural oddities
that defy any explanation other than the Australian origin hypothesis, or
sheer random coincidence.

Indeed, there seem to be rather too many coincidences in traditional
dress, hunting style, cave art, archaeological artifacts (these two
indicating technological as well as cultural differences between the
original inhabitants and those who conquered them), facial features,
ethnonyms and folklore to entirely discount this theory.

> I don't know if these next dates are regarded as settled; but I had
> heard that the "out-of-Africa" (into Asia) date for completely modern
> humans was probably by between about 50 kya and about 45 kya, and
> the "left turn" into Europe was probably by about 30 kya.
 From the way I've heard it, I would place the first diaspora somewhere
closer to 100 kya (north up the east coast of Africa, and then heading
east), though of course there were multiple waves.





Paul