Paleo-Indians in Journey to 10,000 BC

Another pseudo-documentary contributes to the claim that Native Americans weren't here first after all:

My thoughts on History Channel’s “Journey to 10,000 BC”I’m thinking History Channel put this out to coincide with the movie 10,000 B.C., which not surprisingly isn’t that accurate of a movie. Not like I expected it to be remotely realistic, but still I kinda hoped that it would be somewhat informative because it is about as much education most people will get about prehistory in their entire life. Anyways, “Journey to 10,000 BC” wasn’t much better. It had horrible cut scenes and exclusively focused on life in North America about 13,000 years ago. A lot of other very important things were happening elsewhere, such as the emergence of Neolithic revolution, i.e. the Natufian culture that shoulda been also included.

Even though I subscribe to the Siberian origin of native Americans, I did appreciate how Dennis Stanford made a cameo and explained his hypothesis that the Clovis archaeology could have originated from sea-faring Solutrean people from Europe.Some commenters respond:A. Douglas
March 11, 2008 at 9:12 am

Trying to tie Europeans to the first migrants of the Americas and Clovis points is far-fetched and borders on ignorance. All that was mentioned by Dennis Stanford was pure unsubstantiated theories, clouded by his own desire to associate his ancestors with the first Americans. Also, his ideas that because Clovis points resemble a few Solutrean points mandates that the makers originate in Europe (southern France), is nothing but a sorry attempt to back his theory.

concolor1
April 1, 2008 at 2:36 pm

I’m right in the middle of watching the History Channel piece, and I was irritated how the “paleo-Indians” had distinctly “non-Indian” beards and non-Siberian features. I was correct in surmising this was a “lead-in” to the “Solutrean Hypothesis,” which is the darling of Dennis Stanford and a few others, but has scant chance of finding acceptance and consensus among mainstream science.

I tend to overreact on this stuff, but then I live in Utah where selling non-Siberian origins of Native Americans is a religion, a business, and the focus of a large university that routinely disseminates religious apologetics as part of its curriculum.

They routinely adopt the insulting tactics of Lawrence Brown above, who erroneously projects a gap in his own knowledge onto others; in point of fact, the only DNA evidence that suggested possible European presence in the New World was the presence of “Haplogroup X” in mitochondrial DNA found in Native Americans.

As my friend, Simon Southerton (author of “Losing a Lost Tribe”) points out, however, a much more closely related X-lineage was found among the Altai in Southern Siberia, and this evidence is powerful enough to constitute proof of Native American’s Asian origins, particularly when combined with the archeological record.Comment:  For more on the subject, see Rediscovering America:  The New World may be 20,000 years older than experts thought.