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The Caribbean as a pristine environment … and the Beringia Standstill.

2 March 2014
Archaeology

At  www.pasthorizonspr.com/index.php/archives/02/2014/caribbean-ecosystem-re… … a study of plant and animals life in one part of the Caribbean, in the north of the Bahamas, and possibly representing a midden left behind by human hunter gatherers, has revealed some interesting information. The remains were buried in a layer of peat beneath beach sands deposits and include a tortoise shell C14 dated to just 900 years ago. Crocodile predation of some of the bones (bite marks) is evident (and crocodiles survive in a remote part of Cuba) and of 17 animal species just 10 are found today.

Meanwhile, over at http://popular-archaeology.com/issue/12012013/article/before-they-were-n… … (and the same story is at www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2014-02/uoca-css022514.php) which is all to do with the Beringia Stand Still theory as first suggested by Latin American geneticists ub 1997 and then refined by University of Tartu research (Estonia) in 2007. Now a team from the University of Colorado, at Boulder, have written an article in support of the idea. Basically, DNA studies have indicated that direct ancestors of the Native Americans have been isolated from their Siberian counterparts by much longer than the First Clovis theory allows. They must have been separated since at least 25,000 years ago, during the Late Glacial Maximum. Is this evidence some parts of Siberia were not as inhospitable as the consensus uniformitarian theory allows – and come to that, Alaska and the Yukon. It is rather convenient to have lots of ancestors hanging around on a piece of land now submerged beneath the ocean – but they could also have been living there too, of course. They may even have migrated down the coast to British Columbia (and even further to the south), island hopping and following sea mammals on which they might have preyed. Altogether this might be inconvenient to the mainstream Ice Age theory in which Siberia is regarded to have been cold, bleak, and largely tundra. In fact, this idea is contradicted by a sediment core recently conducted on the former landscape (submerged). Temperatures appear to have been relatively mild and contained trees such as birch and various woody shrubs and plants. The local beetle fauna also indicated a warmer world than imagined by consensus theory.

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