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

Paul wrote:
> 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 have heard this too;  and I vaguely recall one of my friends who is an
amateur archaeologist informed me that there's a site whose human remains
have been radiocarbon-dated to about 60-70kya.  I'm not an expert in this
field, though.  What I do wonder about is, if they did reach the Americas,
why did these Australoid peoples seem to miss all those islands (including
rather big ones, like New Zealand) that are in the way? Or did they follow
the coastline all the way north to Alaska, and thence downward, only to
be later replaced by Mongoloid populations in China, Southeast Asia et al?
I suppose a lot can happen in the better part of a 100k years.  It would
also be interesting to relate this to the population bottleneck in the
world human population that occured 74kya.

 =========================================================================
Thomas Wier	       "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago   half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
1010 E. 59th Street     Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637

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