Our journey seems to be following a backward track here. We were supposed to move on ahead and connect the dots between 487 and 3487 CE - so why are we heading in the opposite direction?
Who knows? We're just following where our path takes us, even if it seems to be backward. First DANANN skips us way ahead - and now this. Well, at least it's filled with lots of fascinating things. If you have a nervous stomach you might want to skip the section about the Anasazi that jumps in part way through the other stuff. There's a darkness to it.
I'm getting ready to watch a series of videos about Early People in North America. Apparently they aren't who we thought they would be.
First Americans Part One
The Kinnewick Man skeleton (not matching any known 'Native Americans') found in Washington state, seven thousand BCE
First Americans Part Two
Clovis, New Mexico - 1933 - spear points more than 13,000 years old
Then, Meadowcroft near Pittsburg, PA takes us back to before 16,000 BCE with carbon dating fire pit residue - and artifacts, including points ...
# Part Three seems to be missing ...
First Americans Part Four
Connecting the lineage of spear points ...
Going to mitochondrial DNA - female DNA that's outside the nucleus and remains stable but for periodic mutations, so it's possible to track the mother lineage clear back to who flung the chunk and the movements of various branches via the mutations - in studying the Ojibwa folk, they found that a quarter of them had something besides the 'normal' four markers indicating lineages associated with the 'Russia to Alaska Land Bridge' ... Siberia/Eastern Asia ... Nope, it was European and went back 15,000 years and they call it X
First Americans Part Five
Windover Bog People - Florida - more than seven thousand years old ...
Whoa. It's a cemetery as they found out when they drained the bog ...
Did you know that if there's no ceramic material associated with skeletal remains they're likely more than five thousand years old?
First Americans Part Six
Still in Windover ...
Oh my, textiles?
Being exposed to the air, they were deteriorating - so preservation techniques were tried out ... and they worked ...
DNA analysis: the bone samples - European, not 'Native American' ...
First Americans Part Seven
Guess who this one's about?
Anasazi ...
Chaco and Mesa Verde ...
Grand Gulch, Utah ... woven baskets, no pottery ...
Back to Chaco for Wetherell
First Americans Part Eight
Were the Anasazi 'exterminated'? No, but their civilization tanked big time.
The Great North Road (Chaco) had 'lighthouses' all along it - for 'fire messages'?
1150 (check date) - abandoned Chaco
Defensive building of the Cliff Dwellings ...
Signs of violence in 'outlying areas' ...
Hmmm ... Nordic 'symbol of life' started showing up on the head-dresses of the 'local' populations ... it's the straight lines of an inverted 'peace sign' in case you're wondering ...
***
Then there's this:
Raising the question - What happens around ten thousand BCE that maybe caused a clash between the Soluteans/Clovis (presumed European) and the ones who came across the 'land bridge' (presumably from Siberia/Eastern Asia) ...
Ten Thousand BCE or Earlier ...
Climate change - major climate change ...
Culture Clash? Or Culture Combination?
Clovis -> Folsom (check spelling)
Who took what from whom?
***
Moving right along ... Anasazi Cannibalism, not my favorite research of all time but ... sometimes ya gotta look into stuff whether you want to or not ...
Anasazi Cannibalism?
This has six parts ...
Let's see what we can see here ...
Beginning around 200 CE ... peaking 900-1100 CE, 'disappearing' about 1200 CE ...
note: pottery with spiral ...
30 foot wide roads connecting more than 150 places in an area about the size of Wyoming, but down in the Four Corners area, about 2/3 of it in AZ and NM ...
Bones shattered and scattered, signs of having been heated, cracked open long bones (for the marrow). irreverence, 'un-buried' ...
Some guy named Turner from either NM or AZ ... got a lot of flack and no wonder ...
Uffda ... heads 'roasted' face up ... then crack the skull open - apparently brains are good for a person ...
Cut marks on bones are 'butcher' cuts ...
Long bones shattered to get at the marrow - good source of fat it seems ...
Something called 'pot polish', which comes from the ends of the exposed bones being rubbed against the abrasive inside of a pottery pot as the stew is stirred - shows up on game bones cut to fit into 'kettle' and ... well ... other bones cut to the same length ...
Missing vertebrae, presumably because they've been smashed to bits for the marrow ...
Cowboy Wash in CO ... molecular biochemistry and human excrement ... a protein found only in human muscle (not in digestive tract) called myoglobin (check spelling) ... test for it ... it can only get into excrement via the digestive system after ingesting ... well ... human meat ...
Did you know that 16th-18th century Europeans practiced 'medicinal cannibalism'? They allegedly found evidence in Spain that a million years ago human ancestors were eating each other. Then there's the Donner Party who got stranded in the mountains while trying to go over them in the winter of 1847 ... some died; some did not.
900-1150 climate - warming trend (very good weather, lots of resources, etc.) ... 'survival cannibalism' not likely during that time ... but maybe ...
'Typical' sites show 5-7 people but up to thirty ... enough to feed a couple of hundred people, if that's what this is really all about ...
Religion?
Warfare? Intermittent up to about 900, then it stops for a couple hundred years, the time of the cannibalism. So what's up with that? It's a time of peace, so warfare can't be the answer.
Ah. MezoAmerican cultural influences ... ballcourts for example ... and columns built into walls ... dental modifications like people did 'down south' back in the day (but none found in any North American tribes) - apparently some came north from Mexico - a skull was found at Chaco ... rituals, taking us back to religion ... and power/control ... apparently just before the 'Chaco Phenomenon' there was a big conflict down south and a lot of people fled ... to where? ... perhaps to implement a reign of terror from Chaco for a couple of hundred years ... cannibalism as terrorism ...
1150 CE environmental conditions went bad ... climate cold and dry ... crop failures ... scarcity of game ... drought, starvation, disease ... the power of Chaco ends and so, pretty much at the same time, does cannibalism ...
which if you ask me also ends the question about it having been survival-related ...
#
And that's it for our Anasazi detour for the time being. I've always been fascinated, since my grandmother had a book about Wetherell's finds - I read it when I was a kid many long years ago.
#
Back to the Kennewick Man ...
Apparently he was about 45 years old ... Caucasian ... with the base of a kinda big spear point embedded in his hip that had been there for quite a while before he died as it was healed (according to James Chatters) ... so probably not a recent homicide victim after all ... 45? No, more like nine thousand ...
HERE'S ANOTHER LINK It's from NOVA.
Going back ... he also had broken his elbow in his youth ... had his chest crushed with a 'massive blunt blow' that broke his ribs off on each side, leaving them separate and should have killed him - but he lived and healed ... had a smallish skull fracture on the upper left side - was he hit by a club by a right-handed person? ...
He wasn't the only one. Others from that time period are around. And none of them remotely resemble people who were supposed to have been their descendants. They're European, Caucasian ... but ancient ...
Then his skeleton, before it could be studied much, was 'claimed' by some native tribes and whisked away by the feds. Four days ... so some scientists filed suit ... this guy wasn't related to current tribes ... he didn't seem to be related to anybody at all, at least not any current populations ... and in 2002 a judge ruled that no he is not Native American (although some argue that because he was here before Columbus he definitely qualifies, which is true - but where does that leave the current 'natives' - as he's way older but not related to any of them, how can they claim to be native? Just wondering, not looking to get anybody's knickers in knots about it.) Anyway, they get to study him after all I reckon.
On another front, enter the Clovis Points, some of them found embedded in mammoth bones eleven thousand four hundred years old, the end of the last Ice Age ... when a honkin' big part of northern North America was under ice two miles thick and the sea level dropped, exposing the 'land bridge' (Continental Shelf) between Russia and Alaska ... then things warmed up and a corridor opened to the south of where everyone had stopped up north ... and so they headed south ... that's 'Clovis' - or was -
Meanwhile, down in Chile in 1996 ... a living place a thousand years older than Clovis ... so who beat Clovis to the Americas? 'Merte Verde' is the place I think ... dangit people, either speak clearly or spell things out! (Monte Verde, geez)
Onward we go to Brazil where we find prehistoric rock shelters ... with human remains ... that don't look anything like present day Indians either. Luzia is more than eleven thousand years old ... with Negoid features ... not Indian ... she (they, as she has been joined by at least forty others) may have come via Australia from Southeast Asia across the Pacific ... or not ...
If all American natives are descended from the Clovis folk who supposedly got here over the land bridge, how did people migrate so far south before the corridor was even open, hmmm?
Well now. They went up and checked the Alaskan coastal area ... and found stuff from back in the 'frozen' time showing it wasn't as frozen as they had thought. Caribou, for one thing. And they're working pretty far 'inland' from where the coast would have been when the sea level was a lot lower. They find a few sites they can get to - like ancient bear caves way into the ground. Don't ask me how they found the caves, but in them they're finding caribou, fox, seal, and bear bones going back 50,000 years. They figured that if bears lived there straight through, as the layers they're uncovering indicate, so could humans. Then, making an exciting story, at the last minute of their excavation, out pops a bone tool and some human bones - a mandible (lower jaw) more than nine thousand years old, although the guy it belonged to was only in his twenties who ate a lot of food like marine mammals and ocean fish.
In Nevada, the Spirit Cave Man, well-preserved for his age (except for that fractured skull), which is nine thousand four hundred years, seems to have distinct Caucasian features based on building a reproduction of his head from a reproduction of his skull. Is he just a funny-looking Indian? If so, he isn't alone. He's got the Kinnewick Man for company, for starters ... there are only a handful (so far) that are as old as they are ... and all of them are 'distinctively different' from modern populations, especially 'Native Americans' ... artifacts indicate European ... and he seems to have a 28,000 year old twin, found in China (I'm betting the western desert but don't quote me on that for goodness sake) ... but the Spirit Cave Man looks nothing at all like South Americans from the same time span - they look more like Australian Aborigines or Peloponnesian (southern Greece).
At any rate, evidently seven thousand or so years ago here came the rounder-headed Mongolian-style/Northern Asiatic folk who more closely resemble modern tribes. What happened to the ones who were already there is ... well ... a bit of a mystery, isn't it?
(and something to look up is the Ice Age Columbus from 18,000 BCE or so found in Virginia ... another item of interest to look into, although maybe not directly related here - the Ainu ancient people of Japan from before the 'current' population got there a couple of thousand years ago ... )
***
Next: Who are the Solutreans? Something about a spear point ... pre-Clovis I betcha ...
Ahh! Here we go with the Ice Age Columbus ... worth a watch I do believe!
Solutreans as the First?
Let's find out, shall we?
17,000 years ago ... Ice Age time ...
What's this? The south of France? Oh my.
Okay, this is not your typical documentary, no indeed.
Makes me think of when Ayla and Jondolar had to cross the glacier - only this was the Atlantic ... uffda ...
Ah, they accidentally caught a ride on an ice flow, riding the Gulf Stream or some such along the edge of the glacier, sort of ...
And back into the 'story line' pops that DNA thing - the one that doesn't match any of the 'expected' native but is in like a quarter of the western Great Lakes peoples, think Ojibway, and is also found in Europe, think southern France (hence the connection of this unusual documentary in terms of its characters) and so the spear point found in Virginia connects to the Great Lakes Tribes somewhere along the way between 17,000 years ago and now ... don't forget the Lakes were under a couple of miles of ice back then ... and the crop of current tribal DNA didn't get here until five thousand years later ...
***
And ... this guy makes the point that Clovis points probably did NOT originate with the DNA that came over the Bering Land Bridge because there don't seem to be any such points in the area those folk came from. Rather, the similarities between Solutrean (17,000 years back) and Clovis (12,000 years back) seem to be striking (no pun intended for you knappers out there, but what the heck, there it is), and guess what turned up under some Clovis points? It was in Virginia I think but don't quote me on that.
He also points out that considering the Clovis folk supposedly came from the west across the bridge and took it from there they sure didn't leave many points lying around until they got further east in North America where there are scads of them, the numbers tapering off as you go further west.
What I'm getting kind of curious about is what happened in the five thousand years between 17,000 years ago and 12,000 years ago, besides the glacier thing and all that. If the Solutrean folk were around, where were they and what were they doing? There's barely any depth of excavation between the Clovis/Solutrean finds in Virginia from what I can gather. Five thousand years apart and there's nothing to speak of in between them?
Onward ...
Another similarity - eyed needles, yep. Besides their knapping tools, choice of materials (even if they have to get them from forever away), and their other tools, in both material and design.
Then there's the art. It's a Solutrean thing and not a Clovis thing particularly. But both have what they call portable art - simple lines and such on stone (spear points?) ...
Some of the finds have been miles out from the current coast ... glaciers and such changing sea levels here and there, remember ...
***
Oral Tradition of Tribes: The Ones Who Were Here Before Us
This guy gives a bit of a recap and then gets into a bit of the oral traditions of the Tribes - the part where they killed all the ones who were here when they got here, and their descriptions fit to a tee European Caucasian characteristics ... the parts of the tales, as this guy says, that aren't exactly as popularly expressed as some of the other parts.
note: look up the work of a guy by the name of Bruce Bradley University of Exeter
Cro-Magnon North AmericansThis is an article, not a video link. And yeah I realize (now) that it's an Atlantis thing - but we're focusing on an accumulation of information so what the heck.
Let's see what it has to say.
Ah- beginning in South America ... they found hearths with orderly layers that go from 17,000 to 32,000 years ago down in Brazil. In painted caves/rock shelters. Some may be up to 50,000 years old.
Back to that Monte Verde thing, people were in the Americas by at least 14,000 to 15,000 years ago. They lived in frame houses, maybe insulated with hides, made hunting 'projectiles' (arrow or spear points) along with choppers and scrapers, and ate what they presumably hunted - mastodon. I reckon they ate other stuff too, eh?
Kind of right next door there's a site that weighs in at 33,000 years old, going by the dating of the charcoal of the hearths.
"The finds are nothing short of amazing, since such a date approaches the date that Cro-Magnon first appeared on the other side of the Atlantic."
Finding some skeletons would help the situation.
So we've got this idea about Ice Age Voyagers coming across the Atlantic, and some indications that the direction may have been reversed now and then toward northern Africa and western Europe. Just exactly how low did the level of said ocean drop and what islands might have then existed to provide pit stops for said voyagers? Or were the Phoenicians not the only highly skilled voyagers?
Onward.
We're back to Stanford and Bradley and Cactus Hill, VA - with a find mid-range between 17,000 Solutean and 12,000 Clovis, filling a gap with a point more Solutean than Clovis at 15,900 or 16,000 years.
Regarding a pre-Clovis (by a thousand years) spear point found in mastodon remains in Washington state -
... Included in Willerslev's report was the following significant statement:
"Our research now shows that other hunters were present at least 1,000 years prior to the Clovis culture. Therefore, it was not a sudden war or a quick slaughtering of the mastodons by the Clovis culture, which made the species disappear. We can now conclude that the hunt for the animals stretched out over a much longer period of time . . . Maybe the reason was something completely different, for instance the climate."
The Gault Site in TX has artifacts bopping back 13,500 years with older stuff in the wings to be explored. Solutrean by nature, it appears. The people occupying it stuck around for hundred of years, belying the notion that everyone back then was a wandering hunter type.
Going for a moment back to that awesome documentary/movie, the northern ice pack providing a route with everything necessary (drinking water *ice*, food *fish, marine mammals*, clothing *marine mammals*, shelter *marine mammals*) for the journey except wood, peat, or coal to use for necessary fires, isn't all that far-fetched. Bring your own fire and weapons. And vitamins.
"Stanford's theory—outlined at a recent archeology conference in Santa Fe, N.M.—is based on discoveries indicating ancient American people were culturally far more like the Stone Age tribes of France, Spain and Ireland than the Asian people whom scientists had previously thought to be the sole prehistoric settlers of North America."
Huh.
Those folk would have known stuff. Maybe LittleMamm and David were being Called by relatives and 'going Home' in the 400s CE.
O_O
"It should be noticed that it is usually the very oldest American skulls which exhibit the Cro-Magnon trait of "disharmonism" (the short-faced dolichocephalics); rather than the more plentiful broad-faced, round-headed (brachycephalic) skulls—mongolian types who entered the Americas from Asia via the Bering land bridge."
And this again:
"Drs. Stanford and Bradley point out important discoveries in genetics which have been made by researchers at Emory University and the Universities of Rome and Hamburg. Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), which is inherited exclusively from the mother, normally contains four markers called haplogroups, labeled A, B, C, and D. These four are shared by 95 percent of Native Americans.
Recently, however, the same genetics team identified a fifth haplogroup, called X, which is present in about 20,000 modern Native Americans. Scientists have also done some testing on pre-Columbian Amerind skeletal remains from before 1300, and found haplogroup X in the same proportion as in modern Amerind populations. A most interesting fact is that haplogroup X is most prominent in European populations ..."
And ...
"In addition to the European Marker X in North America, the Araucanians of Chile (most likely arriving in the Americas 18,000-12,000 years ago) carry apparent "Caucasian" genes. For instance, it is common for Araucanians to have curly reddish brown hair and green eyes (Bonnichsen et al., n.d.).
Comprehensive studies of blood types also show that Mayans, Incas and Araucanians are all virtually 100% group O, with 5-20% of the population being rhesus negative. This was the blood type of the original Europeans and stems from Cro-Magnon man (Kurlansky, 2001). The races that possess this blood type are races of the Americas, the Canary Islands, the Berbers, the Basques, and Gaelic Kelts."
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