From school years, everyone knows that America was settled by the inhabitants of Asia, who moved there in small groups through the Bering Isthmus (at the site of the present strait). They settled in the New World after a huge glacier began to melt 14-15 thousand years ago. However, recent discoveries by archaeologists and geneticists have shaken this coherent theory. It turns out that America was inhabited more than once, some strange peoples, almost akin to the Australians, did it, and besides, it is not clear on what transport the first "Indians" got to the extreme south of the New World. "Lenta.ru" tried to figure out the riddles of the settlement of America.
The first one went
Until the end of the 20th century, American anthropology was dominated by the "Clovis first" hypothesis, according to which this culture of ancient mammoth hunters, which appeared 12.5-13.5 thousand years ago, was the oldest in the New World. According to this hypothesis, people who came to Alaska could survive on ice-free land, because there was quite a bit of snow here, but further southward was blocked by glaciers until 14-16 thousand years ago, which is why the dispersal across the Americas began only after the end of the last glaciation.
The hypothesis was harmonious and logical, but in the second half of the 20th century, some discoveries that were incompatible with it were made. In the 1980s, Tom Dillehay, during excavations in Monte Verde (southern Chile), found that people had been there at least 14.5 thousand years ago. This caused a violent reaction from the scientific community: it turned out that the discovered culture is 1.5 thousand years older than Clovis in North America.
Most American anthropologists have simply denied scientific credibility to the find. Already during the excavation, Dilei faced a powerful attack on his professional reputation, it came to the closure of funding for the excavation and attempts to declare Monte Verde a phenomenon not related to archeology. Only in 1997 did he manage to confirm the dating of 14 thousand years, which caused a deep crisis in understanding the ways of settling America. At that time, there were no places of such ancient settlement in North America, which raised the question of where exactly people could get to Chile.
Recently, the Chileans suggested to Delay to continue excavations. Influenced by the sad experience of twenty years of excuses, he at first refused. “I was fed up,” the scientist explained his position. However, in the end he agreed and found at the MVI parking lot weapons, undoubtedly made by man, whose antiquity was 14.5-19 thousand years.
History repeated itself: archaeologist Michael Waters immediately questioned the findings. In his opinion, the finds may be simple stones, vaguely similar to tools, which means that the traditional chronology of the settlement of America is still out of danger.
Promotional video:
Found Delay "tools"
Photo: Tom Dillehay / Department of Anthropology, Vanderbilt University
Seaside nomads
To understand how justified the criticism of the new work is, we turned to the anthropologist Stanislav Drobyshevsky (Moscow State University). According to him, the found tools are indeed very primitive (processed on one side), but made from materials that are absent in Monte Verde. Quartz for a significant part of them had to be brought from afar, that is, such items cannot be of natural origin.
The scientist noted that systematic criticism of discoveries of this kind is quite understandable: "When you teach at school and university that America was inhabited in a certain way, it is not so easy to abandon this point of view."
Mammoths in Beringia
Image: Yukon Beringia Interpretive Center
The conservatism of American researchers is also understandable: in North America, recognized finds date back to a period thousands of years later than the period indicated by Delay. And what about the theory that before the glacier melted, the ancestors of the Indians blocked by it could not settle to the south?
However, notes Drobyshevsky, there is nothing supernatural in the more ancient dates of the Chilean sites. The islands along the current Pacific coast of Canada were not covered with glaciers; the remains of bears from the ice age are found there. This means that people could well spread along the coast, sailing on boats and not going deep into the then inhospitable North America.
Australian footprint
However, the strangeness of settling America does not end with the fact that the first reliable finds of the ancestors of the Indians were made in Chile. Not so long ago it became clear that the genes of the Aleuts and the group of Brazilian Indians have features characteristic of the genes of the Papuans and Aborigines of Australia. As the Russian anthropologist emphasizes, the data of geneticists are well combined with the results of the analysis of skulls previously found in South America and having features close to those of Australia. In his opinion, most likely, the Australian footprint in South America is associated with a common ancestral group, part of which, tens of thousands of years ago, moved to Australia, while the other migrated along the coast of Asia to the north, up to Beringia, and from there reached the South American continent …
The appearance of Luzia - this is the name of a woman who lived 11 thousand years ago, whose remains were found in a Brazilian cave
Image: Cicero Moraes
As if that were not enough, genetic studies in 2013 showed that the Brazilian Botakudo Indians are close in mitochondrial DNA to the Polynesians and some of the inhabitants of Madagascar. Unlike the Australoids, the Polynesians could well have reached South America by sea. At the same time, the traces of their genes in eastern Brazil, and not on the Pacific coast, are not so easy to explain. It turns out that a small group of Polynesian seafarers, after disembarking for some reason, did not return back, but overcame the Andean highlands, unusual for them, to settle in Brazil. The motives behind such a long and difficult overland journey for typical seafarers can only be guessed at.
So, a small part of American Aborigines have traces of genes that are very distant from the genome of other Indians, which contradicts the idea of a single group of ancestors from Beringia.
Good old
However, there are more radical deviations from the idea of populating America in one wave and only after the glacier melts. In the 1970s, the Brazilian archaeologist Nieda Guidon discovered the Pedra Furada cave site (Brazil), where, in addition to primitive tools, there were many fireplaces, the age of which radiocarbon analysis showed from 30 to 48 thousand years. It is easy to see that such numbers have generated a lot of opposition from North American anthropologists. The same Delay criticized radiocarbon dating, noting that traces could have remained after a natural fire. Gidon reacted sharply to such opinions of her colleagues from the United States in Latin American: “Fire of natural origin cannot arise deep in a cave. American archaeologists need to write less and dig more."
Drobyshevsky emphasizes that although no one has yet been able to dispute the dates of the Brazilians, the doubts of the Americans are quite understandable. If people were in Brazil 40 thousand years ago, then where did they go and where are the traces of their stay in other parts of the New World?
The eruption of the Toba volcano
Image: USGS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory
The history of mankind knows cases when the first colonizers of new lands almost completely died out, leaving no significant traces. This happened with Homo sapiens, who settled in Asia. Their first traces there date back to the period up to 125 thousand years ago, but the data of geneticists say that all of humanity came from a population that came out of Africa, much later - only 60 thousand years ago. There is a hypothesis that the reason for this could be the extinction of the then Asian part as a result of the eruption of the Toba volcano 70 thousand years ago. The energy of this event is considered to be superior to the total power of all the combined nuclear weapons ever created by mankind.
However, even by an event more powerful than a nuclear war, it is difficult to explain the disappearance of significant human populations. Some researchers note that neither Neanderthals, nor Denisovans, nor even Homo floresiensis, who lived relatively close to Toba, died out from the explosion. And judging by individual findings in South India, local Homo sapiens did not die out at that time, traces of which are not observed in the genes of modern people for some reason. Thus, the question of where the people who settled 40 thousand years ago in South America could have gone remains open and to some extent casts doubt on the most ancient finds of the Pedra Furada type.
Genetics vs. Genetics
Not only archaeological data are often in conflict, but also such seemingly reliable evidence as genetic markers. This summer, Maanasa Raghavan's group of the Natural History Museum in Copenhagen announced that genetic analysis disproves the idea that more than one wave of ancient settlers was involved in settling America. According to them, genes close to the Australians and Papuans appeared in the New World later 9 thousand years ago, when America was already inhabited by immigrants from Asia.
At the same time, the work of another group of geneticists, led by Pontus Skoglund, came out, which, based on the same material, made the opposite statement: a certain ghost population appeared in the New World either 15 thousand years ago, or even earlier, and perhaps settled there before the Asian wave of migration, from which the ancestors of the vast majority of modern Indians originated. In their opinion, the relatives of the Australian aborigines crossed the Bering Strait only to be driven out by the subsequent wave of "Indian" migration, whose representatives began to dominate both Americas, pushing the few descendants of the first wave into the Amazon jungle and the Aleutian Islands.
Reconstruction of the settlement of America by Ragnavan
Image: Raghavan et al., Science (2015)
Even if geneticists cannot agree among themselves on whether the "Indian" or "Australian" components became the first aborigines of America, it is even more difficult for everyone else to understand this issue. And yet, something can be said about this: skulls, similar in shape to the Papuan ones, have been found on the territory of modern Brazil for more than 10 thousand years.
The scientific picture of the settlement of the Americas is very complex, and at the present stage it is changing significantly. It is clear that groups of different origins participated in the settlement of the New World - at least two, not counting a small Polynesian component that appeared later than the others. It is also obvious that at least some of the settlers were able to colonize the continent in spite of the glacier - bypassing it by boats or on ice. At the same time, the pioneers subsequently moved along the coast, quite quickly reaching the south of modern Chile. Apparently, the first Americans were very mobile, expansive and good at using water transport.
Alexander Berezin