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Who knows..maybe Adam was black and Eve was white. Then from there all of the mixing,diluting and refining took place. Redbird-all well spoken and well taken points.
I think you may have misunderstood what was meant by some of the comments. What's often theorized is that small nomadic groups of people slowly migrated from Asia to the North American continent PRIOR to the dawn of civilization and agriculture. We're not talking about 5,000 years ago, but rather more like as far as 50,000 years ago and perhaps even longer*. What you have to independently understand is that the culture you are a part of, everything that you stand for and resemble is all culturally North American in every respect. The beginning of civilization both here and on other continents happened independently and therefore those cultures and ways of life are respected as being iconic of their foundations independently as well.
No one is trying to take away your heritage. In fact, I think it's a wonderful heritage to have and all too often still denigrated even in today's modern society.
However, there is substantial evidence to support the idea that man initially came out of Africa. In fact, there is so much evidence to support this that it's almost futile to argue against it. From there, three races (Negroids, Mongoloids, and Caucasoids) eventually migrated out while simultaneously adapting to their respective environments based on the ecological and environmental factors affecting their natural selection. When we talk about migration we're also not talking about a group of people packing up their stuff and walking across a land bridge in a couple of days. We're also not talking about people making a quick overnight trip from Africa to Mongolia. We're talking about a process that took place over hundreds and thousands of years.
So, what I'm getting at in all of this is that if we go back far enough, we all come out of Africa. So what? That was LONG before anything that resembles the wonderful cultures throughout this world ever really took a foothold on this Earth. To further go on, although man 50,000 years ago almost certainly (and probably undisputably) did have languages, they were probably very tribal in a lot of regards and very localized. None of them were speaking modern day Japanese or Chinese as they were walking across the land bridge.
To wrap it all up, although the human race can be traced back to Africa and the subsequent migrations out of Africa and across treacherous climates like the ancient Gobi Desert and the Bering Strait were fascinating endeavors that our early homo-sapien great grandfathers successfully attempted and survived; this was long before any semblance of culture was able to take a firmly rooted identification as being anything other than human. You're ancestors developed their cultures on the North American continent, made use of the land for thousands of years, and generally lived wonderfully peaceful lives until we European Caucasoids came and ruined everything. In essence, although you may be mitochondrially linked back to Asia and subsequently Africa (as we all would be) your culture and heritage is entirely a part of the North American continent and entirely yours to be proud of and cherish as nothing but North American!
* There is some disagreement as to how long ago the first migration of people crossed the Bering Land Bridge. I've seen people state as little as 14.5 thousand years ago and I've seen some claim over 50,000 years ago. I'm more or less inclined to believe that it was somewhere in the middle approximately 20,000 to 35,000 years ago.
I couldn't edit this in time but I wanted to clarify. There are a few parts in my previous post where I made mention of "North American". I had the land bridge on my mind that connected Asia to North America and I was typing faster than my brain was allowing me to mentally edit. What I meant was "Native American". Sorry for any confusion.
I remember reading about a site in VA that dated back about 17,500 years ago. Just recently, there's another site they think goes back about 14,500 years ago. I think the very early SA sites are in a lot of dispute as to their age.
There were also rumors of blue eyed, light haired NA in ND when Lewis and Clark came thru but they were wiped out by smallpox. There's some ideas that they might have been early Celtic explorers who went up the mighty Mississippi.
When I look at pictures of Native Americans from different tribes all across the 2 continents, I'm struck by how much variation there is in their features - as much or more as in Caucasian and Negroid races. Some look very Asian but others don't look at all like Asians. Some could easily look like they came from Europe. Culturally, there is also a tremendous variation in NA customs and beliefs.
Another piece worth thinking about is what the racial or appearance of the peoples who lived in NE Asian some 10,000-20,000 years ago. Some intriguing things are the Ainu people of Japan - they look Caucasian and have roots going back to the mists of time whereas they have an approximate date for the migration of the Japanese people to the island. Also there were early successive waves of various Caucasian tribes from eastern Asia sweeping west before the Mongolian hordes did the same thing. No one is sure how far east the Scythians originated but they seemed to have had most of the continent at one time. The Asian populations seem to have come from the southeastern areas of the giant continent and over the millenia pushed the neolithic peoples west and north, eventually pushing them out completely.
Then there was the Kon Tiki theory - shown to be possible - that there was some migration of Polynesians to SA. But it was only shown to be a possibility, not a fact. Maybe all these sources along with some from neolithic voyagers from Europe who got lost were the source stock for the Native Americans.
So, perhaps the very early paleolithic and neolithic peoples who first populated the Americas were not necessarily of the Mongoloid race but Caucasian like the proto-Ainu, then later groups might have been Mongoloid. Many tribes looked like they are mixture of Asian and Caucasian. I think some DNA testing has shown that some tribes, especially in the far north, are from Asian stock. But no one has tested every tribe and there is so much mixing of European and African blood with the Native American over the last 200 years, that it gets to be impossible nowadays to be certain. Some tribes were completely wiped out, usually from disease, if not war.
The early origins and migrations are an interesting question, but getting a conclusive answer is difficult. I don't believe there is any idea of where and how the 3 major races came about (well, except for the religious beliefs, but I give no credence to the magic explanations). Whether they all originated in Africa and then moved or whether they diverged in different areas. It seems likely that the earliest ancestors were most likely with Negroid features. DNA testing showed the most diversity among the Negroid race than any of the others, lending credence to that theory.
But don't the people that live in Siberia/Eastern Russia have many common facial characteristics with Native Americans/Inuits?
I saw a news item of some sort of Anthropology study and they were looking at the same Bering Land Bridge theory but that it was Caucasian Europeans, maybe Vikings which Russians are descended from that crossed and mixed with tribes such as the Incas etc.
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The Lost Continent Mu
