Human History...

...that the Indian Industry will be sure to find fault with:

Old American theory is 'speared'

We're talking here of dating techniques that are accurate to within 40 to 50 years. We're also talking about the rapid disappearance of large North American animals, such as the mastodons and mammoths, at the hands of human predators.

"The timing of humanity's presence in North America is important because it plays into the debate over why so many great beasts from the end of the last Ice Age in that quarter of the globe went extinct.

Not just mastodons, but woolly mammoths, sabre-toothed cats, giant sloths, camels, and teratorns (predatory birds with a nearly four-metre wingspan) - all disappeared in short order a little over 12,700 years ago.

A rapidly changing climate in North America is assumed to have played a key role - as is the sophisticated stone-tool weaponry used by the Clovis hunters. But the fact that there are also humans with effective bone and antler killing technologies present in North America deeper in time suggests the hunting pressure on these animals may have been even greater than previously thought.

"Humans clearly had a role in these extinctions and by the time the Clovis technology turns up at 13,000 years ago - that's the end. They finished them off," said Prof Waters."

Some people are not gonna be happy. Hell. They haven't even accepted the Clovis model. The "creator" put them here, you know. And what's this about "rapidly changing climate"?

And then there's this:

Americas 'settled in three waves'

""The Asian lineage leading to First Americans is the most anciently diverged, whereas the Asian lineages that contributed some of the DNA to Eskimo-Aleut speakers and the Na-Dene-speaking Chipewyan from Canada are more closely related to present-day East Asian populations.""

That's very interesting. In a previous life, I lived and worked on three different Indian communities in Saskatchewan. Two of them were Cree and one was a mixture of Cree, Dene and Metis. The Metis, obviously, were relative newcomers. (I guess we could expand that a wee bit, and say four waves.) But the Dene people in that community had what I could only describe as a north-western orientation in their day-to-day outlook on things, whereas the Cree seemed to look south and east when talking about the past or about closely related people. With the Dene, they had relatives and economic connections with communities in Northern Alberta and the Northwest Territories. They knew very little about the south. The same was not true of either the Cree or the Metis. It used to be that academics thought people like the Dene had migrated from the south and settled in the north. Looks like that just ain't so. The modern day Dene could be part of the second wave.