Posted on August 11, 2006

Haplogroup X And The New World

David Tatosian, CapitolHillCoffeehouse.com, July 12, 2006

I’m sure this has happened to all of us at one time or another: you’re in a convenience store or deli somewhere, grabbing yourself a bite to eat and a little something to wash it down with. You pay the nice man behind the counter the appropriate amount, exit the establishment and stop so quickly the man walking behind slams right into you, unleashing a torrent of Spanish at your back.

You’ve walked right into one of those anti-illegal alien rallies that are cropping up all over America.

On the sidewalk to your right are a number of well behaved-but angry American citizens carrying signs and waving the national ensign.

On the sidewalk to your left is a diverse group of students and liberals, masked desperados waving Mexican, anarchist and Palestinian flags and a couple of Hispanic activists shrieking incoherently into bullhorns.

As you walk through the buffer zone, provided by a polite but no nonsense police force, you happen to glance at the raucous, obscenity shouting, finger flipping crowd to your left and notice “The Sign”.

The illegal alien crowd always displays “The Sign”, and its message is always the same: “We (meaning the Indian/Mestizo/Mexican illegal alien) were here first Gringo, you’re (meaning us European types) the illegal aliens. Go back to Europe.”

As you pull away, happily gnawing at your mystery meat burrito, you wonder just how much truth there is in that “We were here first Gringo” business.

In that, you’re not alone.

There have been a number of archaeologists who have wondered the same thing since the discovery of the Clovis People (Paleo-Indians) in Clovis, New Mexico 70 years ago.

Among them is University of South Carolina archaeologist Dr. Albert Goodyear. Dr Goodyear’s activities at the Topper Site in South Carolina have yielded startling results: “ . . . Radiocarbon tests of carbonized plant remains where artifacts were unearthed last May along the Savannah River in Allendale County . . . indicate that the sediments containing these artifacts are at least 50,000 years old, meaning that humans inhabited North America long before the last ice age . . . ”

And long before Clovis.

Nor is the Topper site alone in yielding evidence of much older settlements; sites in Meadowcroft, Pennsylvania, Cactus Hill Virginia, and Monte Verde, Chile all indicate settlements thousands of years older than Clovis.

This is not just unwelcome news for Indians or Hispanic illegal aliens. It also throws a little bit of a kink into the Africa as cradle to the world theory too. If, as the theory goes, mankind left Africa 60,000 to 80,000 years ago, how does evidence of mankind show up in the western hemisphere 50,000 years ago?

And if America’s first inhabitants scampered across a temporary land bridge and eventually spread over the hemisphere from the west, why are the sites along the eastern seaboard so much older?

Smithsonian Institution archaeologist Dennis Stanford states, “ . . . The old idea on New world origins are based on informed speculation and not supported by evidence . . . through time and repetition-and in the absence of clear alternatives — the theory became dogma and ultimate ideology . . . ”

With that in mind, Mr. Stanford and lithics (stone tools/crafts) expert Bruce Bradley set out to discover the predecessors to Clovis.

Their conclusion, based on biface technology, flintknapping techniques and other processes? “ . . . There is very little in Clovis — in fact nothing — that is not found in Solutrean technology . . . ” stated Mr. Stanford.

Archaeologist Kenneth Tankersley of Kent State University goes further, stating, “ . . . There are only two places in the world and two times that this technology appears — Solutrean and Clovis . . . ”

Apparently the Solutreans, hunters and craftsmen from France and Spain arrived before the Clovis People.

Europeans.

How did they get here?

Stanford points out that boats made of hides and other materials have been with us for tens of thousands of years, and further states, “ . . . that Solutreans were at least in part shore dwellers. At the time of maximum glaciation the sea level was down approximately 425 ft. . . ” lower than what it is today. (In 1992, Le Cosquer cave was discovered near Marseilles. Today the cave mouth lies 100 ft below the surface of the water. In Solutrean times, it would have been on a hillside 300 ft high and several miles inland from the Mediterranean.)

Stanford claims, “ . . . the permanent ice that bridged the Atlantic, and the sea ice that extended further south in the winter, would have provided limitless opportunities to haul out their boats and hunt ice-age game . . . ”

Mr. Stanford suggests it would be only a matter of time before the Solutreans would have traversed the 1,200 to 1,500 miles to the Grand Banks, the northeastern most extension of North America which, because of the low sea levels, would have afforded them safe harbor, and fish and game beyond their wildest imaginings.

And there is the work of geneticists from Emory University and the Universities of Rome and Hamburg: “ . . . Mitrochondrial 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% of Native Americans. Recently however, the genetics team identified a fifth haplogroup, called X, which is present in about 20,000 Native Americans and has also been found in several pre-Columbian populations. A most interesting fact is that haplogroup X is also present in European populations, but absent from Asians. The geneticists research suggests the marker may have existed in the Americas 12,000 to 34,000 years ago, which means it must have been introduced before Clovis. By whom? Stanford and Bradley’s prime candidates are Salutreans . . . ”

This is good stuff.

Certainly there is no reason to believe the Indians will give any credence to these discoveries and theories. As Russell Means stated at the Millions More March last year, and I paraphrase here, “the White man’s archaeologists are grave robbers.”

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