Columbus?
Is this the same Columbus that not only didn't discover America but never set foot on what is now the United States?
DNA from a prehistoric Siberian boy could reveal exactly where Native Americans - the people who occupied the American continents before Europeans crossed the Atlantic - actually came from. Everybody's pretty clear that the Native Americans arrived across the ancient land bridge from Asia, the location of the present-day …
"Sometimes its easier just to run along with what the average Seppo thinks is their history than try to explain it to them yet again."
A bunch of thieves stumbled across a place they didn't know existed and proceeded to rape and pillage in the name of some far off king and god destroying the culture and impoverishing the people that existed before they arrived and continue to do so. Before that it was likely a bunch of nomads looking for a place to find new and interesting plants and animals and eat them. What's to explain?
How does this affect the sillyness of US law?
'You get to have some casino profits because my government gave your tribe a monopoly in apology for my ancestors killing some of your ancestors.'
With the reservations and such, they've effectively got independent legal systems based on ancestry.
Obviously if native Americans and Europeans had common ancestors then Europeans get to run casinos as well.
Although apparently it's racist to claim that 1st nations came from Africa via Asia via an Alaskan land bridge. Their sincerely held beliefs are that they originated here on the land and so have absolute rights to it.
Racism is a modern sin. Apparently its worse to treat someone badly if they look slightly different from yourself, if they have a darker skin-tone than yourself, than if they are the same or lighter.
I don't really get that. Abuse is abuse and I have no time for "grading" an evil action based on motivation. It is not better to beat someone in order to take their wallet than it is to beat them because they are foreign.
I don't care about your colour or your slave's colour. Slavery is wrong.
"Although apparently it's racist to claim that 1st nations came from Africa via Asia via an Alaskan land bridge. Their sincerely held beliefs are that they originated here on the land and so have absolute rights to it."
But I thought the geneticists had proved we were all derived from Africa? I'm not sure what to put on the census, or the employer diversity forms any more. The fools keep on putting choices like "White British" of "Black AFrican/Caribbean". Perhaps they should separate colour and ethnicity. We could all then tick "African", and then whatever colour we felt today.
And another thing! I'm not white, I'm pink. Dead people, they're a sort of off-white. Now where's my box for "Pink African"?
@Syrucou Raven:
Re: "With the reservations and such, they've effectively got independent legal systems based on ancestry."
I used to think the same way before I became acquainted with how shamefully the indigenous population got ripped off. The rip-off is ongoing. It would not be us giving them something we both inherited. It would be us recognizing their ownership which was never legally transferred. It is *still* their land.
Don't worry, these people are playing the long game. The eye of the eagle sees a wider horizon and all that. I have relatives with Lakota blood in their veins, their stories tell of a time yet to come, not for revenge, but for resetting the status quo. Some of the precarious lives lived today are but short and sad moments that will never be forgotten but you cannot rush an eternal spirit.
...at the time. Keep in mind that the ancestors of most of today's Indo-European-speaking European inhabitants didn't actually arrive in Europe until at most 3-4000 years ago. What we're talking about here is a population where one part headed west for new lands across Beringia, and another part just kept bouncing around inner Asia for the next several thousand years.
"Wasn't there some kind of (still debated) evidence that the mysterious Clovis culture might have come from somewhere in the Northern France during the Ice Age? There are a number of pretty well done BBC, Nova and other nice documentaries on this out there."
I'll have to look for those. Never heard that one before.
Stranger things have happened in human history.
Yes indeed, Clovis was the first Catholic Frankish or French King. Yet, there is a Clovis culture, the oldest found in North America (peculiar shapes of arrow heads etc) . One hypothesis uses the fact that unlike the later cultures in the Americas, Clovis is very reminiscent of those found in Northern Europe and asserts that it was a result of migration of people from the Ice Age Europe that eventually settled in in North America.
So, Northern France comes up there pretty coincidentally. It's quite likely that the Atlantic ocean was much better navigable at the time, so the coast of Normandy is a pretty good candidate.
This article makes no mention of the discovery of Solutrean (European) artifacts on the east coast of America dating back approx. 19,000 - 26,000 years ago. The oldest known settlers of the Americas were believed to have crossed the frozen shores of the North Atlantic from modern day France/Spain at the height of the last Ice Age glaciation.
Unless there is evidence that the Solutrean settlers died out before the Asiatic settlers arrived, then it is most likely that the ethnic peoples who consider themselves indigenous Americans today are partly descended from the Solutrean settlers.
"Mostly Vikings, mostly got the pants beat off them by the Americans."
Actually, losing Vineland (now called Greenland) as a way station due to glacier growth and colder climate sent them packing.
Remember, they needed lines of communication back home to send church tithes.
The Roman Catholic church actually proved Viking colonization of Greenland via the tithe ledgers.
The Vikings weren't particularly hot on writing down their history. I think it's quite likely that more of them went further in North America than is generally realized. Genes don't record who raped who. (And propaganda being what it is, if there had been peaceful, occasionally loving, co-existence between native Americans and Vikings, the warmongers on both sides would call them traitors and erase them from the verbal histories as soon as possible).
BTW the Chinese discovered the West coast of North America before Columbus. In a parallel universe, the emperor didn't order these explorations to cease, didn't burn the fleets to make sure, and it was the Chinese empire not the British empire where the industrial revolution took place.
Happened before, and alll of this will happen again.
After all, Deanna's model spawned Xena when the. last Deanna got sick and tired of being chased by Cavil's forces, and before that, having her head bashed in by a chunk of concrete, hehehehe.
Some that DNA bombshell may be from Hera Agathon....
hehehehehe....
Then, in the future, we'll probably see offshoots of our species, less mixed with prehistorics of our planet. Per BSG TRS, Galactica left behind on at least TWO planet some number of personnel and equipment (tho no specified equipment in dialog). On top of that, despite the Cylon Hybrid claiming complete destruction of the colonies ("The colonies of Man lie tampled at our feet", more or less), for episodic/dramatic reasons, there were survivors on Caprica, people left behind on New Caprica, people abandoned in space, and unaccounted-for humans captured or experimented on, not to mention the possibility of Cain's civilian fleet having a few ships jump away as soon as they realized (if they had the chance or time) that Cain was stripping ships of their FTLs. Of course, any escapees would have to luckily jump away repeatedly, too far from, and time-wise uneconomical for Cain to pursue them. AND, they'd have to be luckier at landing on a planet better than an algea planet on whatever jumps they could do with limited fuel.
Ahh, yes, it seems to me that even tho the BSG writers are accused of (and admitting) making up stuff as they went along, some of it nicely retroactively fits like puzzle pieces intentionally left out. If taken literally, they'd make a little more sense than most Bibles/Testaments seem to. I'd LOVE to be found linked to Hera or Cylon DNA. Maybe, if not killed or inadvertently stuck down, I might live to reach age 133, with a little help along the way.
Theoretically, this could in 5 or 8 years help BSG re-download the way STTNG, DS9, VOY, and ENT sprang up, though as franchises, not as alt-timeline spawns, per se.