Re: Anthropologist advances 'kelp highway' theory for Coast settlement Migrating peoples were sophisticated in sea harvesting, Jon Erlandson says

Jack Linthicum wrote:
On May 29, 9:38 am, VtSkier <vtsk...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Jack Linthicum wrote:

Anthropologist advances 'kelp highway' theory for Coast settlement
Migrating peoples were sophisticated in sea harvesting, Jon Erlandson
says
Larry Pynn
Vancouver Sun
Thursday, May 28, 2009
The Pacific Coast of the Americas was settled starting about 15,000
years ago during the last glacial retreat by seafaring peoples
following a "kelp highway" rich in marine resources, a noted professor
of anthropology theorized Wednesday.
Jon Erlandson, director of the Museum of Natural and Cultural History
at the University of Oregon, suggested that especially productive
"sweet spots," such as the estuaries of B.C.'s Fraser and Stikine
rivers, served as corridors by which people settled the Interior of
the province.
Erlandson said in an interview these migrating peoples were already
sophisticated in harvesting from the sea and would have worked their
way down the coast in search of new sites.
"I think as much as anything it was an exploratory urge," he said at
an international conference on the history of marine mammals at the
University of B.C. "Populations were gradually growing and people kept
moving. What's around the next bend? If there were no people there, it
must have been a really powerful draw to keep exploring."
The kelp highway theory runs up against the long-held belief that the
first humans entered the Americas on a land bridge that spanned the
Bering Strait.
Erlandson said the kelp highway represented a diverse ecosystem and
would have extended from what is today Japan past Russia's Kamchatka
Peninsula and Alaska's Aleutian Islands all the way down the west
coast of North America to Mexico's Baja peninsula and then continuing
again in the waters off Peru, Ecuador, and Chile in South America.
"These kelp forests would have provided a migration corridor near
shore with no major barriers," he said. "It would have been a very
similar ecological zone to follow and a rich one."
It's hard to know what kind of vessels carried these early seafarers,
although dugouts (perhaps carved from driftwood) and skin boats are
possible, he said.
The world's first evidence of human harvesting of marine life is found
at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania dated to about 2.3 million years ago.
Simple shoreline ponds were likely employed to catch fish.
The first evidence of sophisticated fishing technology dates back
90,000 years to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, formerly Zaire,
where harpoons were crafted from stone points with bone barbs to catch
Nile perch.
Evidence of seaweed recovered from hearths at the Monte Verde II
archeological site in southern Chile has been dated to about 14,000
years ago.
The first seafarers would have over-exploited resources initially
amidst a windfall of marine life, but over time would have learned to
live sustainably off the ocean, Erlandson said.
"There is a general human tendency, when you come into great
abundance, to waste it. In B.C, in California and other parts of the
world there is evidence early they did impact resources.
"But I think they learned lessons from it, just as we're trying to
learn lessons from the overfishing of recent decades."
Of aboriginal involvement in the elimination of sea otters from B.C.'s
West Coast during the European fur trade starting in the late 1700s,
he said: "That was part of a globalized economy, a cash economy that
was fundamentally different."
Erlandson is part of research on California's Channel Islands that has
found evidence of human occupation -- the Chumash people -- spanning
13,000 years, evidence that they must have found a way to live
sustainably from the ocean around them.
"When Europeans got there, within 150 years all sorts of animals were
devastated. When you compare the two records, they are dramatically
different." he said.
http://www2.canada.com/vancouversun/news/westcoastnews/story.html?id=...
Great article for discussion, but there is a tendancy for
humans, including academics to discount an earlier answer
to a question when another answer is found.

The possibility that humans followed a coastal path to reach
the Americas does NOT negate the possibility that humans
followed the Beringia land bridge and walked down the
ice-free corridor east of the Rockies to reach the Americas.

By accepting one or the other, you make the assumption that
there was only one population/group/culture that colonized
the Americas in late Ice age times. This is an assumption
that is extremely difficult to prove and is probably false.

In all likelihood, both routes were used. Too bad the old
shoreline has been so deeply flooded, it would be of great
interest to find remains of these early people.

The problem is that the use of DNA studies has created a problem for
multiple groups and routes. This is from wiki , for which I apologize,
but it lays the question down in its basic format. The latest study is
attached as part of the last note from wiki.

"A recent molecular genetics study suggests that the Amerindian
population in the Americas may be derived from a theoretical founding
population with an effective size of as small as 70.[3] The Hey study
is restricted to 9 genomic regions (or loci) in the Americas and Asia,
and excludes speakers of Na-Dene and Eskimo-Aleut languages. The study
does not address the question of separate migrations for these groups,
and excludes other DNA datasets not sampled in the source literature.

An October 2007 study suggested "that the initial founders of the
Americas emerged from a single source ancestral population that
evolved in isolation, likely in Beringia... the isolation in Beringia
might have lasted up to 15,000 years. Following this isolation, the
initial founders of the Americas began rapidly populating the New
World from North to South America."[4]

To be sure, Amerindian groups in the Bering Strait region exhibit
perhaps the strongest DNA or mitochondrial DNA relations to Siberian
peoples. The genetic diversity of Amerindian groups seems to increase
with distance from the assumed entry point into the Americas, and
certain genetic diversity patterns from West to East may suggest at
least some coastal migration events.[5]

A more recent article in the American Journal of Human Genetics states
"Here we show, by using 86 complete mitochondrial genomes, that all
Native American haplogroups, including haplogroup X, were part of a
single founding population, thereby refuting multiple-migration
models." The study also argues for a Beringian isolation with a
subsequent coastal route of expansion into the Americas.[6]"

# ^ On the Number of New World Founders: A Population Genetic Portrait
of the Peopling of the Americas
# ^ Beringian Standstill and Spread of Native American Founders
# ^ PLoS Genet 3(11): e185. doi:10.1371/journal.pgen.0030185
# ^ http://www.ajhg.org/AJHG/fulltext/S0002-9297(08)00139-0#
"Mitochondrial Population Genomics Supports a Single Pre-Clovis Origin
with a Coastal Route for the Peopling of the Americas" Fagundes,
Nelson J.R.; Kanitz, Ricardo; Eckert, Roberta; Valls, Ana C.S.; Bogo,
Mauricio R.; Salzano, Francisco M.; Smith, David Glenn; Silva, Wilson
A.; Zago, Marco A.; Ribeiro-dos-Santos, Andrea K.; Santos, Sidney
E.B.; Petzl-Erler, Maria Luiza; Bonatto, Sandro L. American journal of
human genetics(volume 82 issue 3 pp.583 - 592)




PLoS Biol. 2005 June; 3(6): e193.
Published online 2005 May 24. doi: 10.1371/journal.pbio.0030193.

PMCID: PMC1131883
Copyright : © 2005 Jody Hey. This is an open-access article
distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution
License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and
reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly
cited.
On the Number of New World Founders: A Population Genetic Portrait of
the Peopling of the Americas
Jody Hey1
1Department of Genetics, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey,
Piscataway, New Jersey, United States of America
Andy G. Clark, Academic Editor
Cornell University, United States of America
Received July 12, 2004; Accepted March 25, 2005.
Small right arrow pointing to: See "From Few to Many: New World
Founded by Surprisingly Small Population" on page e227.
Small right arrow pointing to: This article has been cited by other
articles in PMC.

Abstract
Introduction
Results
Discussion
Materials and Methods
Supporting Information
References

Abstract
The founding of New World populations by Asian peoples is the focus of
considerable archaeological and genetic research, and there persist
important questions on when and how these events occurred. Genetic
data offer great potential for the study of human population history,
but there are significant challenges in discerning distinct
demographic processes. A new method for the study of diverging
populations was applied to questions on the founding and history of
Amerind-speaking Native American populations. The model permits
estimation of founding population sizes, changes in population size,
time of population formation, and gene flow. Analyses of data from
nine loci are consistent with the general portrait that has emerged
from archaeological and other kinds of evidence. The estimated
effective size of the founding population for the New World is fewer
than 80 individuals, approximately 1% of the effective size of the
estimated ancestral Asian population. By adding a splitting parameter
to population divergence models it becomes possible to develop
detailed portraits of human demographic history. Analyses of Asian and
New World data support a model of a recent founding of the New World
by a population of quite small effective size.


Introduction
Archeological evidence, as well as anatomical, linguistic, and genetic
evidence, have shown that the original human inhabitants of the
Western Hemisphere arrived from Asia during the Late Pleistocene [1–
4]. However, there persists uncertainty on the source, within Asia, of
peoples who migrated to the New World [5], on the timing of the
earliest migration [6–10], and on whether there have been multiple
migrations [3,11–13].
For complex historical subjects such as the colonization of the
Americas, there are many ways that models can be constructed,
examined, and compared. One approach is to develop a portrait based on
a particular kind of data, such as linguistic [6], skeletal [14], or
archaeological [15] data, or on DNA sequence data from a particular
portion of the human genome such as the mitochondria [4,16–19] or the
Y chromosome [9]. Yet each source of data has unique sources of
variation. In the case of genetic data there occurs a large stochastic
variance of the coalescent history among genes that causes different
loci to vary widely in levels of genetic variation and in apparent
patterns of relationships among populations [20–22]. This stochastic
variance is sometimes overlooked, for example in discussions of the
histories of the individual DNA sequence haplotypes [18], and it is
easy to underestimate the many possible histories that are consistent
with a finding that haplotypes are shared by different populations [23–
25].
To accommodate the stochastic variance among loci, population
geneticists have turned in recent years to Bayesian and likelihood
methods that explicitly take into account the range of possible gene
tree histories that are consistent with a given dataset [26–30]. For
questions on population divergence, the focus has been on models of
population splitting in which an ancestral population divides into two
descendant populations, after which there may be gene flow between the
descendant populations. These “isolation with migration” (IM) models
can have a large number of parameters, and they offer the possibility
of capturing many of the dynamics that occur in the early stages of
population divergence or speciation [30–33].

<snip body of report>
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Models_of_migration_to_the_New_World)

Another great article which I have saved.

Of course this article brings up as many questions
questions as it answers.

1) Where was this group of 80 or so individuals who
were the founding population for the Americas?

If they were in the Americas, then there may have
been only one immigration route.

However, if they were in asia, then they may well
have had time to expand in size *before* they
traveled east. If so, then there well could have
been multiple routes.

2) Populations of humans in the late Pleistocene,
especially in cold regions, I would assume to be
rather sparse. It is easy to posit any number of
locations for this founding population group to
be located.

3) The article speaks of an up to 15,000 year
isolation of the founding population in Beringia.
If this is true, then the scenario is this:

The original 80 got to Beringia, maybe 25,000
years ago. The subsisted nicely, isolated by
maybe some meteorological events to the west in
Asia, but had lots of plentiful ice age fauna
to hunt and lived well.

They stayed there for 15,000 years eating well.
The Law of Nature says that a population (of
anything) will increase as it's food supply
increases (or is in excess of what is required
for the existing population).

Therefore the original band of 80 will have
increased to several thousands by 12 or 14k
years ago. They will have organized themselves
into groups no larger than bands and will have
lived in relatively isolated groups. Some will
have live near a shore line. Some will have
lived in the interior.

Those that lived near the shore will have had
population pressure to move. There may have been
impediments to moving west, so east (and
therefore south) would have been the direction.

The same will have gone for the groups in the
interior.

Even with the article on genetic distribution
provided, the possibility of more than one route
for colonization of the Americas is more probable
than only one.

But really, who can say. Beringia (or most of it)
is no longer with us and all that remains of
those people who may have lived there for 15k
years is gone.
--------------------
The article excludes Na-dene speakers from its
study. It has always been assumed that these
people were late-comers from Asia, oh, say,
6000 to 5000 BCE.

Stephen Oppenheimer posits that these people
are actually another isolate who were stuck in
the region of the Yukon River for many millennia,
maybe even predating the people who became
everybody except Na-dene speakers and who migrated
south after the ice sheets completely disappeared.

There is apparently a group in Central Asia, in
the area of the Lena River IIRC, who speak a
closely related language suggestive of a founding
population for Na-dene peoples or perhaps a
reverse migration from North America to Asia
in the distant past.
.

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