<HTML>Hi,
People will probably remember Sharif claiming that a recent study, proposing that the American Indians were descendants of the Japanese Jomon culture, offered support to Hancock view's on lost civilisations. It appears this statement was based upon the newspaper summaries of the study, although I could be wrong.
The study in question is:
C.L. Brace, et al. 2001. Old World sources of the first New World human
inhabitants: A comparative craniofacial view. PNAS
I have a copy of the article and have posted the article's conclusion below.
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A combination of two different regional populations appears to
have been involved in the initial human expansion into the
Western Hemisphere. The regions in question were a mainland
East Asian core located in China north of the Tropic of
Capricorn and south of the Gobi Desert, and a northwestern
component originally running from near Moscow to the Atlantic
coast of Europe north of the Mediterranean Sea. The archaeological
record indicates that both of these components had been
separate in the Middle Pleistocene. The northwestern component
expanded eastwards to exploit unoccupied terrain at the
northern edge of Asia in the Middle Paleolithic ca. 200,000 years
ago. The reduction in robustness that produced the ‘‘modern’’
form from an archaic version of Homo sapiens in the Late
Pleistocene led to the emergence of people of similar appearance
at the northwestern and northeastern edges of the Old World.
Technological developments and climatic amelioration starting
17,000 years ago allowed the population segment across the
northern edge of the inhabited Old World to extend north
toward the previously uninhabited Arctic (8).
At the eastern end of this range, contact with the indigenous
core population of mainland East Asia led to the incorporation
of some of their genetic characteristics, making those who were
first able to move across Beringia into the New World properly
characterized as Eurasian. After the end of the Pleistocene,
the development of agriculture led to a major expansion of
the core population of mainland East Asia and its increasingly
important contributions to the subsequent movements into
the New World, Southeast Asia, and Oceania. A schematic
representation of the placement of the original populations and
their subsequent movements and combinations is depicted in
Fig. 5.
The solid arrow labeled 1 represents the Middle Pleistocene
movement across the northern edge of the Old World (49). The
arrow labeled 2 indicates the Late Pleistocene spread into
Australia (59). Arrow 3 shows the terminal Pleistocene initial
entrance into the New World (8, 11, 12), and the arrows labeled
4 show post-Pleistocene expansions made possible by the utilization
of new food resources related in part to the development
of agriculture (27). Arrows 1 and 2 represent single population
expansions into unoccupied land. Arrow 3 represents movement
into unoccupied land but by a population with both European
and Asian roots. Arrow 4 represents a technology-based expansion
of different populations into areas that, with the exception
of Oceania, were already occupied. The consequence was a much
greater rate of genetic exchange than had been true for any of
the earlier movements.</HTML>
