The Extremely Fast Peopling of the Americas

Great article Bob. My take away from it is it asks more questions than it answers. But that is the route of science.
For example, how did that Australian Aboriginal DNA wind up in Brazil?
 
Great article Bob. My take away from it is it asks more questions than it answers. But that is the route of science.
For example, how did that Australian Aboriginal DNA wind up in Brazil?
I have long suspected that South America may have been inhabited much earlier than North America. No firm evidence, but the possibility remains. As you say, there are more questions than answers.
 
Bob this is in the spirit of the topic. It's about what science takes for granted and just assumes to be true, yet nobody ever tests it. And these things are testable.
This story is by memory, and was a big deal when I was in grad school. Here is the faulty assumption:

Human brain cells do not regenerate. In the 1980s a woman was looking for a dissertation topic to get her PhD at Harvard in neuroscience. She discovered through the literature that the origins of the non regeneration statement we're from a French physician in the mid-nineteenth century. And everybody always just took him at his word.

Her test was gruesome. But it proved that brain cells do regenerate in monkeys. The first step was to cut a lesion into the brains of a group of monkeys. Then one group of monkeys is loved, and entertained, given mental puzzles, and fedwell. The other group was treated like they lived in a concentration camp .

The monkeys were then euthanized and their brains examined. In the first group the lesions showed healing and the nervous system rerouted and the brain's regained its faculties .The latter group showed no improvement. We learned about this in school when her study was sufficiently peer reviewed.

Assumptions.
 
The Forbes article cleared up a lot of things for me. My takeaway is the genetically different people cross the Siberian ice bridge over a period of thousands of years.
When they had a chance to move South they moved very quickly and populated South America.
Bob ,I'm also a simpleton when it comes to this stuff. I'd really like to hear a proper explanation from you.
 
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The Forbes article cleared up a lot of things for me. My takeaway is the genetically different people cross the Siberian ice bridge over a period of thousands of years.
When they had a chance to move South they moved very quickly and populated South America.
Bob ,I'm also a simpleton when it comes to this stuff. I'd really like to hear a proper explanation from you.
Any current explanation is far from complete, and makes assumptions that the first populations into the Americas came across an ice free corridor, through Beringia. What if some migrations were by boat, down the east or west coast of the Americas? Or, across an open ocean? A lot remains to be answered
 
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So the boats from Alaska to South America could explain speed........
I don't doubt it because of my absolute firm belief in Carl Jung's theory of the collective unconscious. I look at the collective unconscious is an aspect of the human DNA outside of time and distance. Sigmund Freud called it the survival Instinct.
Man-made fire, and boats, and bows and arrows, metal works,, and the Pierogi*, all independently.
A dumpling stuffed with meat or cheese is universal.
 
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My best guess is a really early migration to the Americas of a culture which adopted a religion that championed chastity, limiting population growth. Much later new migrants came across from Siberia and found the other culture already there. The pre-existing network of people across both continents allowed the new arrivals to rapidly travel and inhabit the whole land mass without being slowed down by having to explore or worry about braving the unknown; they could take the whole family with them and move between existing tribes! As the new arrivals had no chastity custom they multiplied like rabbits (or non-chaste humans) and quickly outnumbered the original inhabitants. The few odd corpses with unusual skulls are from the first inhabitants or their descendants before their unique characteristics vanished through interbreeding with more numerous Siberians for generations. Also, queue up beliefs about a separate race of helpful gods.