Johan's lookalike found! - a 3000 year old mummified aryan? king!

[Tyra]

OK, there are very, very few sources that I trust when it comes to ancient DNA. On top of that, even some (as in "most") of the research that's 20 years old is now outdated. Although I did take courses on ancient DNA, they only served to prove to me that I will never have enough knowledge of ancient DNA to actually be able to work with it. You have to know your archaeology really well, and you have to know your DNA science really well - two completely differnt fields of research - to pass muster with me. I tend to be very sceptical of what I read, and this applies even more so when I am reading about ancient DNA. This is scientific stuff that tends to get misused horribly by people who want to prove something and who will twist and bend any science that can be easily manipulated into proving whatever it is they want to prove (as a difference to creating a hypothesis, testing it using a scientific methodology and showing the hypothesis to be true or false) which is why I only trust those few sources. DNA is easy to twist and bend into whatever one wants, because very, very few people actually understand the intricasies of understanding, interpreting and collecting ancient DNA. You can say "this is how it is", but until the reader has a reasonably good knowledge of the subjectmatter(s), he/she cannot interpret the answer, never mind assess if a scientifically sound method has been applied correctly.
In regards to the article you referenced to, this is one of those times when I just don't know the answer becasue I don't know which markers they've looked at. For example, there are some markers we use today to be able to tell if someone is of ancient Swedish stock. This is a marker that we have in common with the Mongolians. I've heard this be so incredibly misinterpreted by a TV reporter, that he said that the (Swedish) man found in a grave in Fröjel had DNA that clearly showed that this man was a visiting Mongolian. There will probably be markers that are "closer to Greek" in many populations, as compared to, let's say, a Saami marker. It quite simply depends on what you are comparing and with what you are comparing it to. It's like in advertising when they use phrases like "Canada's number one selling brand" - brand of what? Or "We make the best cookies" - on your street or just in your home? Just because your blenders sell more than any other in Canada does not mean that I would buy the car you manufacture! Here it's "more Greek" than what?
There is a Circumpolar tribe that live up in the Russian part of the world today whose DNA and ancient tool assembly resembles the ancient Native tools etc that we have. That tribe can be followed reasonably well, and we can put together weather patterns and ecological changes to show how they would have had to move a certain way so that they eventually would have been forced across the Bering Sea. That research is so fresh that not many people know about it. The theory of people crossing the Pacific onto the Easter Islands and then coming north is also very plausable in my opinion, but it needs more published research, too.

 

[Vilewoman]

Actually the testing in question was done on people alive today. DNA was taken from people from all over the world and tested for markers, they found the "Native Americans" and the "Greeks" had the closest markers.
If it had been ancient, then I probably wouldn't think too much into it. Many things can be lost due to decaying DNA. But this was done on people alive today...that is why it surprised me so much.

 

[Shadow77]

Maybe us native people are just Greeks that migrated,that would be my guess on how they could be similar. Or Greeks that migrated,met another race of people,had kids. My best guess.

 

[Tyra]

Well, the markers would still show up from way back when, though, even in a modern population. It's like this: Most European people have been exposed to Indo-European DNA at some point. The Greek carry that marker, too, and the Greeks themselves have passed that marker on to other populations, even African populations and so on. It could be that because there is not a huge amount of new DNA being added to either group, they end up showing a larger amount of markers in common as compared to other groups. Again, it depends on how big a number of groups you have compared these two groups to, and for sure it depends on what you consider representative of "Native American" (as in how many different people and from how many different tribes - all Native DNA is not the same!). The longer we wait, the better, because the World Gene Project or whatever it's called these days is collecting DNA from as many groups as possible all over the world. The more groups to add to the study, the more accurate of a result we'll get.
In any case, like I said, I am not good at DNA research

 

[Celtik Militia]

Maybe the greeks today have more Minoan blood than Mycenaean (indo-european) blood. And perhaps the Minoans are of the same people than those who migrated into siberia and then the americas giving some of the native american tribes.
I'm just guessing I never heard of that greek/native american relation before.
I have heard of a relation between Turkic people, Japanese and native americans though. Mostly linguistic.

 

[Vilewoman]

Thanks Tyra. I will have to check up on the study you mentioned and keep up on it.
@ CM
Could be, you never know. The Minoan's island did kind of blow up.

 

[Tyra]

Sorry for re-opening an older thread, but I couldn't help but think about this particular one when I read this today. It kind of explains things as they stand today in a (somewhat oversized) nutshell.
Oldest known Central Texans might teach textbook writers a thing or two
October, 12 2009






Waco Tribune

In a big white tent pitched near Buttermilk Creek, archaeologists and volunteers are on their knees, scraping away sticky black clay a few tablespoons at a time. They wash the dirt and screen it for stone shards, spearpoints and flakes from some 13,000 years ago.



Little by little, those bits of stone are chipping away at long-held pictures of the earliest Americans, wiping away images that are still depicted in high school textbooks and museum dioramas.
The Gault Site is about 70 acres in a valley between Florence and Salado, about an hour from Waco. It remains unknown to many Central Texans, though it's now open for tours and is the subject of a daylong event Thursday at McLennan Community College.

But it's renowned among archaeologists worldwide as the continent's biggest trove of knowledge about the Clovis people, nomadic hunters who overran the Americas some 13,500 years ago.

"It's such a well-kept secret," said Linda Pelon, an MCC anthropology instructor who is helping organize the Thursday event and whose students have volunteered at the site. "This is an internationally significant site that may help rewrite the story of the peopling of the Americas."

The Gault Site is an ancient rock quarry that yielded a flintlike chert of such high quality that it's found in Paleolithic tools and weapons throughout the Midwest. It was inhabited off and on for thousands of years, even into Spanish colonial times, archaeologists say. It was plundered by fossil hunters through most of the 20th century.

In the past two decades, the Gault Site has yielded some 600,000 Clovis-era artifacts, including etched rock plates that represent the only Paleolithic artwork yet discovered in the New World. There's also what appears to be a square stone foundation, which might be the earliest house ruins ever found in the Americas. And there is a range of tools used for tasks such as knapping chert, butchering animals or cutting grass.

These finds are interesting in themselves, but combined with other finds at Gault, they undermine old assumptions that Clovis people were specialized mammoth hunters who swept across the New World and never stopped moving, Gault School archaeologist Michael Collins said.

"When you find a site like Gault - it's Clovis, and the site is enormous, and the thickness of layers suggests they were there 400 years or so - you see they're not just rapidly moving across the landscape," Collins said. "They're staying there for days or weeks."

The site off Farm-to-Market Road 2843 is a green oasis, shaded by pecan and burr oak trees and centered on a spring-fed creek. Even in the Clovis age, the access to springs and a variety of food would have been attractive to settlers, said Clark Wernecke, executive director of the Gault School of Archaeological Research.

He said the diet of the Paleolithic Gault residents included small mammals, frogs and turtles, which supports the conclusion that these weren't just footloose mammoth chasers.

This picture of settlement conflicts with the old textbook accounts. For more than half a century after Clovis remains were first identified and named in New Mexico in the 1930s, the accepted view was that Clovis people were the first American immigrants.

According to the "Clovis First" theory, hardy tribes of Asian hunters followed big game into the Americas about 13,500 years ago, when Ice Age glaciers supposedly began to melt enough to create an ice-free corridor. The hunters then spread like wildfire across the Americas. Using spears with leaf-shaped "Clovis points," they hunted mammoths and dozens of other large animals into extinction within a few hundred years.

Wernecke mocks the textbook depictions of these mammoth hunts as "naked men poking elephants with spears." Instead of such dangerous up-close contact, Paleolithic people would have used a spear-launcher, called an atlatl. As Wernecke demonstrated on his tour, the atlatl could hurl spears over long distances with deadly force.

The Clovis First theory has been undermined in the past few decades by human artifacts dated more than 1,000 years before the supposed Clovis migration, found as farflung as Chile, Virginia and Pennsylvania.

The latest evidence to debunk this theory may come from the Gault site. In the dig site now covered by the big white tent, archaeologists took a core sample in 2007 and found something startling: what appear to be manmade stone artifacts that differ from Clovis technology. That could mean Gault was inhabited some 14,500 years ago, Gault School officials said.

"That would be the nail in the coffin of Clovis First," said Collins, the University of Texas archaeologist who has been the site's chief excavator.

Collins, 68, said that when he started in archaeology in 1960, almost nobody questioned the Clovis First theory. Collins grew to doubt it, based on new discoveries in Chile and elsewhere, but it took a long time for alternative theories to gain traction in the world of archaeology.

"What I despised most among my colleagues was that they would simply dismiss your argument when they didn't know anything about it," he said. "Or they would ignore it."

Today, the question of the first Americans is a wide-open debate, with scientists such as Collins suggesting Asian and even European colonization by boat between 15,000 and 24,000 years ago.

"When I first started doubting Clovis First a long time ago, maybe 2 percent of professional archaeologists considered the possibility of an earlier date, Collins said. "Now, that number is probably 95 percent."

The Gault Site confirmed Collins' doubts about Clovis First.

When he was called to investigate it in 1991, it was still a privately owned site, and archaeologists had written it off as destroyed by looters. People began excavating this site for archaeological treasures as early as 1904, looking mostly for what were generically called "arrowheads" - often from spears or lances. Longtime owner Henry Gault allowed a pioneering Texan archaeologist, J.E. Pearce, to dig up large portions, and the family continued to allow amateur treasure hunters to dig in exchange for a daily fee for decades.

In 1991, Collins and a colleague did a limited investigation of the etched stones and discovered that they were in the same stratum as a Clovis-era point.

By 1998, the site had changed hands, and the new owners, the Lindsey family, had stopped the pay-to-dig operation. They were doing their own digging one day and discovered what appeared to be ancient animal remains.

They asked around about an expert, and a distant cousin mentioned Collins, who, in addition to being a nationally known early American expert, owned a ranch near Florence.

"It was another call out of the blue," Collins said.

It helped that Collins, a West Texas native, "speaks fluent rancher, and doesn't speak academic," Wernecke said.

Collins' crew identified a juvenile mammoth jaw and parts of ancient horse and bison, along with hundreds of Clovis-era stone tools and points at the same level.

"There were so many Clovis artifacts, we knew this had to be one of the major Clovis sites in the New World," he said. "It turned out to exceed our expectations."

From 1999 to 2002, Collins' crew and hundreds of volunteers painstakingly excavated the site. The top layers had been disrupted, but most treasure hunters had not dug down to the Clovis level, often more than 10 feet deep.

"The guys who were collecting dug wide, shallow holes," Wernecke said. "The smarter guys knew there were Paleoindians here, but it wasn't worth their while to try."

Collins tried for years to raise money to buy the land from the Lindseys but with no luck. In 2007, he gave up and bought the land with his own savings, then donated it to the nonprofit Archaeological Conservancy.

The Gault School was created in 2006 to care for and explore the site, and to educate the public about it. Wernecke said the school is hoping to raise money to build an interpretive center there. In the meantime, the Bell County Museum offers a Gault Site exhibit and coordinates with the Williamson County Museum to offer monthly tours of the site. Students and other volunteers are still needed for weekend excavations.

"Ten years from now, they'll be able to pick up a textbook and see the Gault site, and they can say, 'I was a part of that,' " Wernecke said.

 

[NewWorld]

Next thing you know it'll be like in one of those weird time loop stories and we will start finding things that point to a similar world to ours, only several millenia ago...