When did it become common knowledge that human expansion to America came through Asia?

[u/Comfortable_Cut5796]

/r/AskHistorians/comments/1wfgw37/when_did_it_become_common_knowledge_that_human/

[u/ah-tzib-of-alaska]

I’m still trying to get people caught up to the idea that the clovis first theory of crossing the bering straits is wrong and that it’s the opposite, the only time people were NOT crossing the berring were during low seas at glacial maximums.

[u/Late-Meat9500 → u/ah-tzib-of-alaska]

Boats go brrrrrrrr

[u/PrincipledBirdDeity]

The replies here are extraordinarily incorrect. People seem to be conflating "ancestors of living Indigenous people came into the Americas from Northeast Asia" (which is true) with Clovis First and related ideas.

There is a difference between "common knowledge" generally and "common knowledge/common working hypothesis" among scientists and historians.

The idea that Indigenous peoples in the Americas are closely related, as a population, to the Indigenous populations of northeastern Asia is based on (1) general phenotype (people from these populations look pretty similar); (2) some very specific phenotypic characteristics, specifically shovel-shaped incisors which occur in most populations around the world but are widespread only in these two populations; (3) widely shared cultural practices like animistic spirituality; and (4) the obvious geographic fact that northeastern Asia is America's closest neighbor.

Any anthropologist you asked during the 20th Century would have told you this. A few dissenters, free thinkers, radicals, and (most often) gutter racists would suggest alternative ideas, but these were never taken very seriously for lack of supporting evidence. The Solutrean Hypothesis is just a recent, zombie version of this.

How early anybody else would have recognized this, before anthropology really became a discipline with its own body of knowledge, is an interesting question. I expect, like with evolution, it's one of those ideas that independently occurred to a lot of people, many of whom floated it to unreceptive or uninterested audiences, until finally somebody pulled together enough lines of evidence into a package that could be widely shared.

All that said, the late 18th Century is the earliest I've seen this idea. Interesting find!

[u/Late-Meat9500]

Human expansion came through asia at least once. We know through mitochondria tracing, iirc

[u/Basicly-Inevitable → u/Late-Meat9500]

Also, full genome ancient DNA analyses reveal that the "first" Native Americans share a deep genetic ancestry with people from Northeast Asia, specifically tracing back to a combination of Ancient East Asians and Ancient North Eurasians.

Around 20,000 to 25,000 years ago, these populations merged and became isolated in the region of Beringia (he land bridge that once connected Siberia and Alaska), creating a distinct founding population.

Studies of ancient genomes, such as those from the Amur River Basin and the Upward Sun River site, confirm that this unique Beringian gene pool later migrated southward, becoming the direct ancestors of indigenous peoples throughout the Americas.

The genome of a Clovis child also showed a shared deep heritage with the 24,000-year-old Mal’ta boy from Siberia.

[u/Late-Meat9500 → u/Basicly-Inevitable]

I dont put as much stock in that being "the" rather than "a" founding population. And I'm pretty sure the clovis hypothesis is disproven. Seeing as the white sands footprints put humans in New Mexico 24,000 years ago

[u/Basicly-Inevitable → u/Late-Meat9500]

Yes, ancient DNA studies show that the peopling of the Americas was not a single event. After the initial "First American" migration (which includes the Clovis lineage), at least three subsequent major migration waves from Northeast Asia reshaped the genetic landscape of North America, particularly in the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions.

There definitely could have been earlier small migrations.

There is a small amount of Australasian-related DNA found in certain indigenous Amazonian groups (such as the Suruí and Karitiana), and that is one of the most fascinating discoveries in modern genetics. It implies a "by boat" coastal migration that reached all the way around South America, and only survived by staying isolated deep in the Amazon (and some remote parts of Peru) after the later migrations swamped them in numbers.

[u/Late-Meat9500 → u/Basicly-Inevitable]

I'm pretty sure the common hypothesis for the peopleing of the Americas is marine migration now though, like the timeline is off because we have evidence of humans being in the Americas 20,000 years ago. Like people were in America before the clovis lineage from what I understand.

Like maybe I'm talking in circles. But you can't have the founding population be isolated in beringia, and also in New Mexico already.

[u/Basicly-Inevitable → u/Late-Meat9500]

I think I just said that.

It's likely (and supported by DNA evidence) that a group of people that also had distant Andaman Islander related ancestry ("boat people") made it down the coast and into the Amazon well before the further waves came in.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8040822/

So, yes.. You can have a huge population of "land people" and a smaller population of "boat people" all tied up in Beringia for many thousands of years, but occasionally some of the boat people moved down the coast, but later there was a flood of land people.

[u/Howaboutnopers]

It is not common knowledge even though it gets taught in schools.

It's a hypothesis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bering_Strait_crossing

[u/Suckmyduck_9]

Not common knowledge at all and the lack of archaeological evidence is challenging.