DNA Link between Ancient Peruvians and Ainu

This is a direct DNA evidence link with the Ainu. This is expected news but also news that is a little late in presenting itself. It has been understood for some time that the art of the kayak had provided means for traffic along the coast twenty thousand years ago or more.

What is more than evident though is that they were not the only folks making the trip.

My own speculation on this is that DNA work will find a surprising number of affinities between tribal populations from both East Asia and even southern Europe. We forget the dominance of hybridized European and Han population stocks that diluted uniqueness. Tribal groups exported their genes into the super tribe and the reverse was uncommon.

This process is obviously accelerating around the world and the effort to collect the related genetic information is still in infancy. It needs to be supported. Once completed, we will find many surprises.

Our conjecture regarding Bronze Age commerce means that a secondary DNA migration injected itself on the Americas for a least a millennia adding some hybridization to the gene pool. What we do not understand is the original variation that was in place.

Our conjecture regarding the Pleistocene Nonconformity makes any conjectures regarding the linkage of the American gene pool with that of Asia suspect and supports the likelihood that DNA injections from Asia were not fundamental. We have to at least consider that.


Study Reveals DNA Links Between Ancient Peruvians, Japanese

LIMA -- A study has revealed genetic links between people who inhabited northern Peru more than 1,000 years ago and Japanese, El Comercio newspaper reported Thursday.

Japanese physical anthropologist Ken-ichi Shinoda performed DNA tests on the remains of human bodies found in the East Tomb and West Tomb in the Bosque de Pomas Historical Sanctuary, which are part of the Sican Culture Archaeological Project, funded by Japan's government.

The director of the Sican National Museum, Carlos Elera, told the daily that Shinoda found that people who lived more than 1,000 years ago in what today is the Lambayeque region, about 800 kilometers (500 miles) north of Lima, had genetic links to the contemporaneous populations of Ecuador, Colombia, Siberia, Taiwan and to the Ainu people of northern Japan.

The studies will be continued on descendents of the Mochica culture, from the same region, who are currently working on the Sican Project and with people who live in the vicinity of the Bosque de Pomac Historical Sanctuary.

Peruvian archaeologist Luis Chero told El Comercio that "currently, the DNA results have great value because they can be understood to show that there were people who arrived in these zones from Asia and who then converted these zones into the great culture of the New World."

The results of the studies will be presented at an exhibit on the Sican culture that will be set up for a year at the Tokyo Museum of Science and Nature.

Also to be displayed at that exhibit will be gold, silver and copper jewelry found in the tombs of the ancient Sican rulers and priests.

Jon Turk and the Jomon road

I am reading the book written by Jon turk titled 'In the Wake of the Jomon' in which he recounts his expedition in one man vessels from Japan up through the Kurils and along Kamchatka and onto Alaska. Two boat types were used, at first with Windriders to Kamchatka, and finally with sea kayaks.

This was a practical effort to evaluate the possibilities and the limitations faced by these stone age seafarers. He is successful in doing just that.

Two principal routes have been espoused for the peopling of he Americas. The earliest been the ice age sea route that allowed mariners to travel the Pacific Coast from Asia down through to the tip of South America starting around 20,000 years ago when making the sprint across the top of the Alaskan gulf was possible. They relied on sea food for sustenance including seals and walruses.

The second route was the late opening of the passage between the Cordilleran Ice Sheet and The Laurentide Ice sheet after the Pleistocene Nonconformity, allowing big game dependent hunters to break into North America from the Bering North Slope. These are the folks who perhaps created and used the Folsom point to take down the large game around them.

I was an early fan of the sea route and of course welcome the steady addition of evidentuary support. So perhaps I am a little biased. The point that I make in my book Paradigms Shift is very simple and is based on anthropological reports of hunter gatherers living in a productive ecosystem. It is that a successful group that is able to occupy a hunting ground like a fishing village will have an increase in population over the carrying capacity of the range. This will lead to a calving off of a subset of sufficient young people who will then march over to the next empty hunting range or in the case of the coast, the next available safe landing and build a new settlement. This has been going on forever.

Jon Turk imagines intrepid voyagers who imagined a new world a thousand mile away. I imagine brave young men who scouted out a suitable location forty miles away and then dragged their wifes there while promising to visit home often. Generation after generation others followed these stepping stones and helped create stepping stones themselves, until they faced long barriers of ice that made return unlikely. Eventually a few would make the sprint, or conditions ameliorated enough to make it easier. In any event, in a thousand years or so, their descendants were moving south along the coast into constantly improving conditions.

What Jon shows us is that it was all very possible and actually inevitable using the skin boats of the time and place. The folk most likely were living throughout the Siberian coast merely including Northern Japan. In fact we have every reason to suspect that these mariners were also the same stock as the Polynesians and other early stock that made up the populations of 20,000 years ago. Remember that the onset of agriculture selected through population growth several small tribal groups who then became large enough to largely impose their genetic characteristics onto the remaining populations. The Han Chinese is perhaps the best example but is hardly unique.

Our scholars of the past have been so bound up in attempting to classify peoples as to their characteristics, that they have often been blinded to the obvious. What woke me up was a photo of a crowd of people in the Tibetan mountains. Their features could have been dropped in among the Haida and no one would have noticed. In fact the northern global root stock is discernible as such and it differentiated across Asia Europe and the Americas during the past 20,000 years. Were differentiation was minimized was in those areas where agriculture was a latecomer or never arrived and the tribal ethos was sustained. This describes the Haida and the Tibetans and other constrained northern populations.

Jon shows us both that the the challenges were daunting in the extreme but yes they could be mastered. And yes, men would die. His own trip rolled the dice several times and it is a surety that ten such trips would kill someone sooner or later. Jon of course, made no serious effort to live off the sea on this trip. It would be neat to retrace part of the route with an Australian bushman aboard just to gain his insight of even for him is a hostile foreign environment. His instincts may inform us.