This highly technical genetic paper, from the excellent Public Library of Science online, seems to suggest that the entire "native" population of the New World may decend from only seventy or eighty people!
Of course that doesnt mean that there weren't others who may have left no descendants, as Matt Mullenix has suggested...
I'd be curious what Reid Farmer (or any other archaeologists out there ) think.
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As a dirt archaeologist - one professor of mine said that most of an archaeologist's gray matter was under his fingernails - I am not competent to comment on the science or statistics of the DNA analysis. This line of evidence, if sustained by other research, seems to fit with what has been the conventional view of a single overland period of migration across Beringia.
I will be interested to see how this plays out with respect to other archaeological evidence that indicates that the peopling of the New World may have been much more complex than previously thought. Some examples:
Erlandson - displays evidence that the terrestrial immigration from Asia was supplemented by maritime immigration coast-wise on boats, with the upshot that many early sites are now underwater due to the sealevel rise at the end of the Pleistocene
Faught - who has found some drowned early sites off the Florida coast
Stanford & Bradley - theorize that Clovis technology is derivative from the European Solutrean and that the information spread was due to late Pleistocene trans-Atlantic migration
Jones & Klar - citing linguistic evidence theorize that Chumash sewn-plank technology used in boat building was spread to them by trans-Pacific contact from Polynesia about 1100 BP - and we know Polynesians reached South America because they carried the sweet potato from SA to Polynesia
Whitley - He says he has archaeological and rock art evidence of "classic" shamanism dating to 12000 BP in the western US. This predates similar evidence in Northwest Asia by 3000 years - leading him to posit that it was invented in North America and diffused "backward" to Asia
This is a time of great ferment in the study of the peopling of this continent. It will be fun to watch this play out as many of the old paradigms are broken
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