Chasing Red Herrings Down the Kelp Highway: Paleoindian Migration via the Pacific Coast is Unproven and Improbable

Summary

Over the past two decades, migration of Paleoindian ancestors along the Pacific coast has become the dominant origin hypothesis mainly because: 1) arrival at Monte Verde by 14,300 cal BP (or even 19,000 cal BP, as recently claimed) requires a still earlier emigration from Beringia and 2) the alternative "ice-free corridor" ostensibly was not habitable by large herbivores before 13,000 cal BP. However, the coastal hypothesis cannot account for many inconvenient facts. These include: absence of pre-13,000 cal BP sites on long expanses of habitable and archaeologically visible coast, from the Aleutian Islands to the Atacama Desert; genomic evidence of all Native Americans’ descent from interior-adapted South Siberian and Clovis populations; and absence from coastal East Asia of both any credible ancestral non-microlithic archaeological complexes and the expected ancestral haplotypes (e.g., the Q-L330 male lineage) in ancient and recent genomes.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 20476