All,
Date limit set on first Americans
By Paul Rincon
BBC Science
Tuesday, 22 July, 2003
A new genetic study deals a blow to claims that humans reached America at least 30,000 years ago - around the same time that people were colonising Europe.
The subject of when humans first arrived in America is hotly contested by academics.
On one side of the argument are researchers who claim America was first populated around 13,000 years ago, toward the end of the last Ice Age. On the other are those who propose a much earlier date for colonisation of the continent - possibly around 30,000-40,000 years ago.
The authors of the latest study reject the latter theory, proposing that humans entered America no earlier than 18,000 years ago.
If you really want to go on with this,
CLICK HERE.As far as I am concerned, this is getting to be completely silly.
This kind of (increasingly frequent) inane "science" reporting clearly serves only the BBC and (perhaps, in this case, if he is not misquoted) one Spencer Wells, and certainly adds nothing positive to our understanding of what must have been, by definition, a very complex and lengthy segment of humanity's Late Pleistocene biogeographical dispersal.
No matter what some " M242 [mutation on haplotype 10]" may indicate, suggest or whatever, in terms of intercontinental links and biological relationships, it certainly does not allow one to brazenly ignore other types of evidence emanating from other perfectly respectable avenues of investigation (i.e., from prehistory, linguistics, human palaeoecology and biogrography, etc.) which, in some cases, happen not to be in tune in phase with what is being proposed here.
The paragraph that closes the BBC piece is rather telling in this respect (see full text for context). Spencer Wells is quoted as saying that "[w]e can't rule that out," 'he said, "but in science we have to deal with what's extant." Well, as I mentioned above, what is extant, scientifically speaking, happens to be much more than what comes out of his lab. That is, unless Spencer Wells (according to the BBC report) has decided that some of the data obtained from the other types of investigation I referred to above are really not at par with those obtained from molecular biology studies.
This increasingly frequent, inept and pseudo scientific reporting made possible, at the very least and at the very best, by the complacency of fame hungry researchers certainly does not serve what we are all trying to do.
Jacques Cinq-Mars
