Based on information from University of Copenhagen`s website, published 3 April 2008, Professor Eske Willerslev reports the results of the DNA tests conducted by himself and his colleagues on samples of what turned out to be fossilised human faeces. It was found in deep caves in the Oregon desert.
The oldest of the droppings have been carbon-dated to be approximately 14,340 years old. Willerslev’s faeces samples clearly contain two main genetic types of Asian origin that are unique to present-day North American Indians. The findings were published Friday, 4 April 2008 in the internationally recognised American journal Science.
Not only is this proof that the American Indians are descendants of the first immigrants to the continent, it is also proof that immigration took place approximately 1,000 years earlier than otherwise believed.
The American continent was the last of the world’s continents to be populated. There are many contradictory and more or less well-founded scientific theories on when this occurred and from where the first immigrants came. These theories span from immigration via the icy Atlantic Ocean to Thor Heyerdahl’s papyrus boat expeditions from Africa to America.
The most accepted theory is based on findings of stone tools from the Clovis culture in soil layers dating back to approximately 13,000 BC. According to the theory, people from Siberia migrated, perhaps in search of mammoth, across the land bridge that once connected Siberia and North America.
From there, they continued south and spread out across the American continent. The migration passed through a corridor that opened up approximately 14,000 years ago in the giant glacier that covered the American continent. But these new findings call this immigration theory into question.
Our findings show that there were people south of the ice cap several hundred years before the ice-free corridor developed. The first humans either had to walk or sail along the American west coast to get around the ice cap, explains Eske Willerslev, and concludes, That is, unless they arrived so long before the last ice age that the land passage wasnt yet blocked by ice.
Stein Morten Lund, 16 April 2008
Additional information
University of Copenhagen:
http://www.ku.dk/english/news/?content=http://www.ku.dk/english/news/voyage_america.htm
Contact:
Professor Eske Willerslev
Tel: +45 2875 1309
E-mail: ewillerslev@bio.ku.dk
University of Copenhagen Contact:
Communications Division +45 35 32 42 61
Nørregade 10, P.O. Box 2177 kommunikation@adm.ku.dk
DK-1017 Copenhagen K
Science Magazine:
http://www.sciencemag.org/
Native Americans:
Native Americans in the United States are the indigenous peoples from the regions of North America now encompassed by the continental United States, including parts of Alaska. They comprise a large number of distinct tribes, states, and ethnic groups.
Longe before the white man set foot on American soil, the American Indians, or rather the Native Americans, had been living in America.
When the Europeans came here, there were probably about 10 million Indians populating America north of present-day Mexico. And they had been living in America for quite some time.
It is believed that the first Native Americans arrived during the last ice-age, approximately 20,000 - 30,000 years ago through a land-bridge across the Bering Sound, from northeastern Siberia into Alaska .
The oldest documented Indian cultures in North America are Sandia (15000 BC), Clovis (12000 BC) and Folsom (8000 BC).
Although it is believed that the Indians originated in Asia, few if any of them came from India. When the Europeans started to arrive in the 16th- and 17th-century they were met by Native Americans.
The name "Indian" was first applied to them by Christopher Columbus, who believed mistakenly that the mainland and islands of America were part of the Indies, in Asia.
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