Re: Thoughts on the South- American Man

From: derek gatherer (dgatherer2002@yahoo.co.uk)
Date: Fri 05 Dec 2003 - 09:19:48 GMT

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    > " Man was probably generated on the earth at
    various
    > places roughly
    > the same time.

    No, that's wrong.

    Different climates produced different
    > types of people,
    > but all men shared the same basic characteristics or
    > essential na-
    > ture. " ( Konosuke Matsushita 1982)

    and that's very controversial.

    > Talking to someone of Ecuador he told me that
    > investigations
    > are under way to provide, in terms of a model, a
    > better under-
    > standing of to how the peoples of South- America
    > came about.

    Who was that? It wasn't Padilla, was it? I used to work across the corridor from him when I was in Ecuador. In those days he was spending a lot of his time up at Barro Colorado in Panama where there were lots of relatively unmixed indigenos.
     
    > The claim is being made, as I understand it, that
    > the genetic an-
    > cestory of the territory lies in China and thus is
    > not due to the
    > massive movement of peoples coming from the North,
    > trying
    > to escape some Ice Age or in search for food and
    > shelter.

    But who said it was? The genetic invariablity of most indigenous Americans indicates that the founding poopulation was probably quite small, but expanded rapidly owing to an abundant food supply and no competition. The ultimate North Chinese origin is just a question of where the Y-lineages point back to.
     It doesn't imply that anything unusual was driving people out of North China, or sucking them into the Americas. Nomadic people wander. The ancestral tock was probably wandering for thousands of years in Siberia, after they left Manchuria, before they crossed the land bridge into Alaska.

    > but what
    > if the continent, at least in the South, was already
    > occupied !?

    What makes you think it was?

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