The distinctness you mention, of Athabascan and Inuit genetic groups, has also been suggested to be the result of a really large single migration over long periods of time. Like central Asians and coastal Asians moving across the Strait, the coastals moving south and the Athabascan Centrals spreading East through the North American inlands in similar time periods. The language similarities are really interesting. I’d like a reliable source for some of this early history.

50 years ago I took two quarters of a class called Transpacific Contacts by Professor Alex Krieger who was the then supervisor for all the University of Washington digs south of the Mexican Border. I saw hundreds of slides of early Mexican and Central American pottery and statues, etc. paired with nearly identical versions from such places as the Valley of Kashmir, China, and Japan (9000 year old vase). The Kashmir item was a strange boat known only in Kashmir and from Teotihuacan. both boats were used for a unique form of agriculture known only to those two places, but the Mexican boat was 1000 years later than the Kashmir boat.

Krieger also told of a Chinese Emperor who was having the history of the world written by eminent authorities of the time. He sent 5 monks to travel across the Pacific to get the history of the natives of Central Am. and Mexico (Aztecs and related natives. They took a hairless dog with them, and there are hairless dogs to this day in Mexico.

We saw more slides and evidence of the monks’ arrival and an extended stay along the North coast of South America. I think the Chinese history book got burned later so we didn’t find out if the monks ever got back home. Krieger never finished his book on Transpacific Contacts, and probably lost his battle for the concept because the transpacific contact thing was in the process of being drummed out of the U of W archeology department. However, the cultural evidence for east-west contacts was huge, and as I learned at a young age, archeology is riddled with politics.

On another note, the large number of Inuit and Athabascan tribes in N. America plus their still incomplete genetic history suggests the movement of one large migration, or two crossings of Bering Strait of the same migration, coming from Siberia and Mongolia, and possibly other Asian areas, at much earlier dates than the 5 monks story, certainly suggest connections with the Asian continent.

My thought at the time, and still is, that both theories need to be considered as complementary events rather than having two camps arguing the topic. There was trans pacific navigation earlier than we first thought.

Hey, we may be talking about me, and my Inuit son-in-law, so I’m interested in all theories!

Virginia

An early expansion through India seems a necessary assumption for the out of Africa hypothesis to stand. But where’s the evidence? For example I was just looking at Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_C_(Y-DNA)

From the article: “It represents a great coastal migration along Southern Asia, into Southeast Asia and Australia, and up the Asian coast.” Note, no ‘maybes’ or ‘possiblys’. But when we read more closely: “Haplogroup C5 occurs at a very low frequency in India, Nepal, and Pakistan.” Note, not in southern tribal groups which is what we’d expect if C5 was an early arrival and SE Asian types derived from types who had moved through India. Also: “Haplogroup C3-M217 is probably the most important of these, as the geographic extent of its dispersal is without compare”. Across the northern latitudes from Germany to North America. Now isn’t that what we’d expect if Y-chromosome C had moved through Central Asia?

I’ve said before that many people seem to have an emotional need to accept a single point of origin for all species.

I realise that Xylophones tend to be most common in West Africa. That has occurred to me in the past.

“I’ve been meaning to mention that I too have noticed surprising similarities between some SE Asian Music and some African. But we have to remember that Madagascar was settled by what we today would call Indonesians. Presumably they reached the African mainland and took their music and instruments, especially xylophone types.”

Thanks for raising that very interesting point. You might be familiar with the work of A. M. Jones, who did very detailed comparative studies of African and Indonesian xylophones, finding several remarkable points of similarity. He too postulated an influence from Indonesia through Madagascar to Africa. The problem with this theory is that it is not borne out by the distribution of xylphones in Africa, which are, I believe, more common in the West than the East — and not common in Madagascar itself.

A more recent and more convincing interpretation (as offered by, among others, Roger Blench) is that the commonalities could be due to the presence of African slaves in Southeast Asia and/or Indonesia at some point in the distant past. The xylphone could have diffused in this area in a manner very similar to the way the marimba became so popular in Latin America as a result of the influx of African slaves in the colonial era.

While I have found strong evidence of an “African signature” in SE Asia and Indonesia and Melanesia dating possibly to the “Out of Africa” migration, I see no evidence that xylophones were part of that very early development.

The Out of Africa evidence is very real and very convincing, not at all the product of wishful thinking. Whether all homo sapiens derive from a single “Adam and Eve”-like pair is highly debatable, agreed. But the mtDNA of everyone tested so far has pointed quite clearly to a single female progenitor, in Africa. She was not the only “modern” human alive at that time, but she was, apparently, the only female whose lineage has survived to the present day. The evidence for her existence is very strong.

I agree various groups of humans have been through several bottlenecks. But not necessarily the whole human population at once. However I would argue that many people have an emotional desire to believe we all come from just one small group. After all two thousand years of Western history has been based on the idea.

I’ve been meaning to mention that I too have noticed surprising similarities between some SE Asian Music and some African. But we have to remember that Madagascar was settled by what we today would call Indonesians. Presumably they reached the African mainland and took their music and instruments, especially xylophone types.

In the Out of Africa case, it seems to me that the problem you’re considering would be relevant if the original OOA migrants were all from the same family. If several different families were involved, then the dangers of inbreeding would be greatly reduced, no? The same would be the case with population bottlenecks I would think.

IMO, Out-of-Africa should really be called: Out of Africa with Bottleneck(s). That’s what makes Oppenheimer’s thinking on all this so convincing — he takes the bottleneck issue very seriously, whereas many others gloss over it. There ARE significant differences that need to be taken into account in any version of OOA. In other words, for OOA to have real explanatory value, it would seem that some sort of major bottleneck, via either Toba or a Tsunami, perhaps, is almost a necessity for OOA to work.

As far as the differences between mtDNA and Y lines, I don’t see your point. Both lines take us back to Africa but neither supports the survival of the earliest Out of Africa migration, into the Levant. I don’t understand the technicalities well enough to explain why, but I don’t know of many geneticists who believe that line survived.