Observations placeholder

Hugh Brody – The Other Side of Eden

One of the workshop participants was a woman from a Cree community who was enrolled in a PhD programme at a prestigious American University.  She was not happy about the Bering Strait theory [at the end of the last Ice Age 30,000 years ago when ice sheets withdrew a large bridge allowed Asians to populate America].  The idea that people first came as immigrants from Asia was, she said, absurd.  It went against all that her people knew.  Oral cultures set out the origins of aboriginal societies; in place after place, the first people arose where they now live.  There has been no immigration, but an emergence; not an arrival from elsewhere but a transformation from ancient prehuman time

Brody added that it was puzzling that the languages of the two peoples [Asian and Native American] shared so little in common if the 'land bridge' theory was true.  Assuaga below has noted how difficult it would have been given the barrier of  ice.

The Neanderthal's Necklace – Juan Luis Arsuaga

The truth is that not a lot is known about how humans spread south through the Americas.  Although part of Alaska was not helmeted with ice, human migration south would have been blocked by two other large ice barriers.  The larger of the two, centred over the Hudson Bay, covered all of Canada and extended South beyond the Great Lakes.  It is known as the Laurentian ice sheet.  The other ice sheet was smaller, covering the coast range in the Pacific North West.  At the glacial maximum 20,000 years ago, the two mantles merged, forming an impassable obstacle