Comments by "mpetersen6" (@mpetersen6) on "Finding America: The Arrival of the First Americans (OLD VIDEO)" video.

I vote for the water route. Boats have been around a long time. But who ever reached the Americas first it wasn't like they just packed their bags and decided to settle somewhere new. Any migration was likely a slow process that saw family groups split off when their numbers grew too large to be supported by their normal range. But there is one thing that may have speeded migrations along the way. If hunters were following seals or walrus into their summer feeding grounds then they could have noticed one population headed back the other way in fall. I suspect that a lot of the evidence of early human inhabitation of the Americas is under anywhere from 100 meters to 130 meters of water. Also there could have been early groups that died out for one reason or another. Where did the these people come from? The obvious answer of course is Northeast Siberia. The supposed genetic evidence for a southern route across the Pacific. I don't buy it. It's too far and any landfalls along the way are simply too tough of an environment. One possible route I could see having taken place by accident is from West Africa if there were coastal people that were fishing off shore and got swept out to sea due to bad weather. It's a long shot. Plus it would have to be a breeding population. The third possibility is along the fringe of the sea ice in the North Atlantic. The only way this could happen IMO is if a population in Western Eurasia was habitually hunting seals seasonally and wound up following the sea life down into the Maritimes or along the East Coast. The similarity between Clovis and Solutrean lithic point technology is intriqueing but not totally convincing
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Boats (or water craft of some kind) have been around a long time. There is some evidence of Neanderthal presence on Cyprus. And with the topography of the Mediterranean Basin they sure didn't walk there. There is also some evidence of possibly Homo Erectus in the Phillippines. It may have been possible to walk from Borneo to either Mindanao along the arc of islands that extend between the two or from Borneo via Palawan. But there's a stretch of deep water between Palawan and Mindaro. Another possible route is from Sulawesi along but it features a number of deep water gaps. Several of them fairly long.
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I doubt it. It's a matter of distance. Yes people have been using boats for a long time. There seems to evidence of boats* being used by both Neanderthals and Homo Erectus. I'm not positive that sea levels dropped low enough during Glavial Maximums for the Homo Erectus population that reached the island of Flores to have arrived on foot. If they did they were then cut of and then due to local environmental pressures slowly became the smallest known member of the genus Homo. That being Homo Florensis. The earliest arrivals in the Americas** probably arrived by boat hopping along the coasts of Eastern Siberia, Alaska and Beringia when sea levels dropped during a period of glaciation. A second possibility is from Western Africa around Senegal with the initial arrivals being fishermen driven across the Atlantic to Brazil's northern coast. The third option is people from Western Europe following seal populations along the edge of the pack ice. Both number 2 and 3 seem unlikely to lead to substantial populations in my opinion. The idea of people following the southern route route of Auxtralia, to Antarctica is very implausible in my opinion. This would involve crossing large stretches of ocean in the face of the worst seas on the planet. They aren't called the Roaring Forties and the Furious Fifties for the calm weather. Part of the reason for their being so bad is the Antarctic Current circling around the continent with no landmasses to deflect it. This is also why Antarctica iced over. Now for the wild cards in the deck. There is a site in Texas that turned up Carbon 14 dates of 26KYA. There is another site in Mexico that was dated around 120KYA iirc. Then there's the mammoth found in an excavation in the LA area that possibly shows evidence of butchering tools. My guess is the peopling of the Americas is a tale far more complicated and longer than we think. It may even include members of Homo Erectus who made it to the Americas only to die out. We don't even know just how many members of the Genus Homo actually existed. The Denisovians were unknown until recently. *Well watercraft of some sort. Part of the problem is organic materials simply don't last very long. **As noted in the video the name has baggage but we're stuck with it.
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