Proof at last. I will be filing a joint Native Title claim on behalf of
the Wurrundjerri and Yorta Yorta peoples immediately. We suggest that
all present merkins drop the flag and pack your bags and get back to
Europe, Africa or Siberia immediately - or wherever. Avoid the rush.
Except Walt of course - hey Walt, wanna be Consul?
AndrewF
Did the First Americans Come From, Er, Australia?
EXETER, England (Reuters) - Anthropologists stepped into a hornets'
nest on
Monday, revealing research that suggests the original inhabitants of
America
may in fact have come from what is now known as Australia.
The claim will be extremely unwelcome to today's native Americans who
came
overland from Siberia and say they were there first.
But Silvia Gonzalez from John Moores University in Liverpool said
skeletal
evidence pointed strongly to this unpalatable truth and hinted that
recovered DNA would corroborate it.
"This is very contentious," Gonzalez, a Mexican, said with a smile at
the
annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of
Science.
"They (native Americans) cannot claim to have been the first people
there."
She said there was very strong evidence that the first migration came
from
Australia via Japan and Polynesia and down the Pacific Coast of America.
Skulls of a people with distinctively long and narrow heads discovered
in
Mexico and California predated by several thousand years the more
rounded
features of the skulls of native Americans.
One particularly well preserved skull of a long-face woman had been
carbon
dated to 12,700 years ago, whereas the oldest accurately dated native
American skull was only about 9,000 years old.
"We have extracted her DNA. It is going to be a bomb," she said,
declining
to give details but adding that the tests carried out so far were being
replicated to make sure they were accurate.
She said there were tales from Spanish missionaries of an isolated
coastal
community of long-face people in Baja California of a completely
different
race and rituals from other communities in America at the time.
These last survivors were wiped out by diseases imported by the Spanish
conquerors, Gonzalez said.
The research is one of 11 different projects in America, Africa, Asia
and
the Middle East being funded over a four-year period by Britain's
Natural
Environment Research Council.
The projects, focusing on diet, dating and dispersal of people down the
millennia in the face of climate change, aim to rewrite anthropology.
"We want to make headlines from heads," said Professor Clive Gamble of
Southampton university. "DNA will give us a completely new map of the
world
and how we peopled it."
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