The recent research on a genome from an arm bone of a youth found buried in Siberia has caused waves, so to speak. It has also thrown up another interesting little tidbit not yet realised, going by what has been written so far. Go to http://frontiers-of-anthropology.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/americas-natives… … and you will see that when the Late Glacial Maximum set in, the last expansion of the Ice Age, and spread southwards towards central and western Europe, humans moved south to areas such as Iberia, Italy, and the Caucasus. It now seems there is evidence to prove they also moved eastwards – into Siberia. Why did they do that?
The ice sheet was supposed to have affected the whole of northern Eurasia. Siberia and Alaska may not have had an ice sheet covering them but they were extremely cold – according to consensus theory on the Ice Ages. It was so cold in the north that huge Arctic winds moved dust from the ice sheet margins south into China, building up the huge beds of loess of that country. Why would humans move into such an inhospitable habitat?
Peter Warlow, at the last SIS Cambridge Conference, claimed the Late Glacial Maximum consisted of an ice sheet surrounding a North Pole located just to the west of Greenland, and large parts of Siberia were not just ice free but were in a temperate zone, the equator being somewhat skew whiff to what it is today, with mango forest almost as far north as Hong Kong. If so it may have been an attractive place to live for people that had been living in Europe. Ignoring how the Poles may have moved, but considering the possibility they did, then people living in Siberia could have been moving around the Arctic Ocean and crossing over into Alaska and N America. It is this movement the link to the post above is mainly concerned with – orgins of the Native Americans. They had clear links with the genome of the youth. This displayed a mixture of European and East Asian genes – as reported here a few days ago.