ABOUT THOSE 6,000 YEAR OLD COLUMBIAN SKELETONS…
One of my friends, D.S.G., spotted this story, and I suspect that if you're like me, you need an occasional bog or story that has nothing to do with the meltdown of our civilization at the hands of our "leadership". This story does, however, have a civilizational, and historiographical, implication. Indeed, the latter, as I will suggest in today's high octane speculation, is perhaps almost the exact opposite of the quackademic narrative being advanced - in my opinion with some desperation - in the article. Here's the story:
Mysterious 6,000-year-old skeletons with never-before-seen DNA rewrites human history
Notice firstly that these skeletons and remains are a genetic one-off vis-a-vis the surrounding populations, and that whatever they represent, they represent an isolated population from the rest of Meso- and South America:
Archaeologists have uncovered 6,000-year-old skeletons in Colombia that belonged to a mysterious group of people that could rewrite human history.
The remains, discovered at the ancient preceramic site of Checua near Bogotá, were of hunter-gatherers whose DNA does not match that of any known Indigenous population in the region today.
Instead, their genetic signature reveals a distinct and now-extinct lineage that may have descended from the earliest humans to reach South America, one that diverged early and remained genetically isolated for thousands of years.
So far, so good, but now, enter the well-known Bering Strait land bridge hypothesis, that all of this population of ancient North and South Aamerica came by way of humans pressing across what was an old land-and-ice- bridge at the Bering Strait, and from there dispersing themselves slowly throughout the two continents, from north to south, over thousands of years, via the land bridge between North and South America that is the Panamanian isthmus:
'This area is key to understanding how the Americas were populated,' said Kim-Louise Krettek, lead author and a Ph.D. student at the Senckenberg Center for Human Evolution in Germany.
'It was the land bridge between North and South America and the meeting point of three major cultural regions: Mesoamerica, Amazonia, and the Andes.'
The rest of the article then proceeds with some minutiae, all of which serves loosely to cast this whole discovery in terms of that land-bridge hypothesis, which is, as far as the population of North and South America goes, the favored narrative of modern quackademia. The problems posed by the remains are thus conveniently brushed under the rug, and ignored, but the problems may be highlighted by asking the following question: If the land-bridge hypothesis be true and the indigenous populations of North and South America are all descended from the same land-bridge-faring ancestors, then how did a population of completely unique genetic characteristics arise in the middle of the two continents, a population that bears no genetic resemblance to those which preceded or succeeded it?
Something is amiss with this picture, and that brings me to today's nosedive into the canyon of high octane speculation, in this case, speculation based on the meager amount of information - and its implications - supplied in the article. To give that speculation a bit of context, however, I am couching it in the context of my friend Igor Witkowski's book Axis of the World, published by Adventures Unlimited Press, and which I helped him get published by polishing his English text. (He is, after all, Polish, and is the author of the well-known book about Nazi secret weapons, including the Bell, titled The Truth about the Wunderwaffe.) In Axis of the World, Witkowski outlines a radically different approach to the population diffusion model of North and South America, arguing on the basis of linguistic and other evidence, that it is more likely that the two American continents were seeded by seafaring populations making their way across the south Pacific ocean by island-hopping overtime, leaving their linguistic clues and monuments along the way. It's a fascinating, and in my opinion, well-argued case and challenge to the land-bridge hypothesis, and it also squares with the chronological evidence of sophistication of monuments, for notably, the further south one goes, the more sophisticated and advanced and ancient the monuments become. It is as one proceeds to North America that the monuments and the technology producing them gradually decline over time, so that the more recent the monument, the greater the decline. For example, compare the technological sophistication that went into the production of the intricate "h-blocks" in the ruins at Lake Titicaca in South America, to a North American Indian teepee, and one gets the idea.
But howsoever on evaluates Witkowski's overall argument, the core premise is that of contact by seafaring peoples, and a sea-faring invasion of a population into that region of Columbia, into a region of otherwise genetically connected humans, would go far to explain the anomaly in a way which the over-used land-bridge hypothesis cannot. One might therefore wish for a comparison of the genetic data of this population with other populations in Eastern Asia, and across the southern Pacific archipelagos. It might go a long way to confirm Witkowski's hypothesis.
See you on the flip side...
(If you enjoyed today's blog, please share it with your friends.)
No comments:
Post a Comment