Paul Salopek: Going for a seven-year walk

[dipsydoodle]

US journalist Paul Salopek is going to spend the next seven years walking from Ethiopia to the tip of South America, retracing the journey of early humans out of Africa and around the world.

Along the way he will be writing articles, shooting video and tweeting.

Salopek will take some 30 million footsteps during this journey, which he calls "the long walk into our becoming". So there is a lot of potential for blisters.

But he insists he is not doing this as some kind of extreme sport - he will be thinking hard, en route, about human evolution.



http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-20902355

[Warpy]

1. It might make a bit more sense if he island hopped

in a boat, taking the southern route through the Pacific Islands and thence o the coast of South America. The Siberian land bridge theory is all but dead as the "only" explanation for humans settling the western hemisphere.

Island hopping in outrigger canoes is the more logical explanation. They wouldn't have been traversing glaciers and there would have been plenty to eat on the way.

[muriel_volestrangler]

5. Really? You think they were island hopping across the Pacific 10,000 years ago, or more?

When they only got to the Pacific islands themselves much later than that? You think earlier voyagers spent time on the islands? What traces did they leave to make you think that?

[Warpy]

8. Don't forget the dramatic rise in sea level at the end

of the last Ice Age. We're only now beginning to explore some of what might have been on the continental shelves. Likely the islands were much the same, abandoned for thousands of years when much of their mass disappeared.

[muriel_volestrangler]

10. So you are positing a level of technology not found anywhere in the world from that time

and excusing the total lack of evidence for it on them only living on a now-flooded seashore, rather than living on the main area of an island, where there's no evidence whatsoever, on any of the islands? The Pacific islands have steep sides; very little area of land will have been lost from sea level rise.

But you think this evidence-free hypothesis should have been followed by this man, in favour of the one with archaeological evidence, because "the Siberian land bridge theory is all but dead" and "island hopping in outrigger canoes is the more logical explanation".

[Posteritatis]

12. Someone swapped Occam's razor for his bowling ball. (nt)

[Odin2005]

6. Genetics says you are wrong.

Polynesia was only settled in the last 2500 years.

[Warpy]

7. Really? I had thought the origin of South American tribes

was pretty well established to have been the same people who settled the Pacific islands.

I do know that some of the earliest remains unearthed in North America, originally thought to be European, were eventually traced to the Ainu people of Japan.

I've never bought the land bridge theory because it was too far north during an Ice Age. People would have followed the edge of the glaciers on land or in boats, chasing herds of land animals or shoals of fish. There would have been nothing for them (or the herds they were supposedly following) on top of a mile thick ice sheet covering a land bridge.

[muriel_volestrangler]

9. Think again:

But the majority of today's indigenous Americans descend from a single group of migrants that crossed from Asia to Alaska 15,000 years ago or more.
...
The second and third migrations have left an impact only in Arctic populations whose languages belong to the Eskimo-Aleut family and in the Canadian Chipewyan who speak a language that belongs to the Na-Dene family.
...
After their divergence, there was little gene flow among Native American groups, especially in South America.
...
Second, the Naukan and coastal Chukchi from north-eastern Siberia carry distinctive "First American" DNA. Thus, Eskimo-Aleut speakers migrated back to Asia, bringing Native American genes.



http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-18770963

Pacific Islanders are quite different from Siberians. And the Ainu are linked to the inhabitants of Asia north of them, ie more or less Siberia:

Of the 14 shared types, the most frequently shared type was found in common among the Ainu, Nivkhi in northern Sakhalin, and Koryaks in the Kamchatka Peninsula. Moreover, analysis of genetic distances calculated from the mtDNA data revealed that the Ainu seemed to be related to both the Nivkhi and other Japanese populations (such as mainland Japanese and Okinawans) at the population level. On the paternal side, the vast majority (87.5%) of the Ainu exhibited the Asian-specific YAP+ lineages (Y-haplogroups D-M55* and D-M125), which were distributed only in the Japanese Archipelago in this analysis. On the other hand, the Ainu exhibited no other Y-haplogroups (C-M8, O-M175*, and O-M122*) common in mainland Japanese and Okinawans. It is noteworthy that the rest of the Ainu gene pool was occupied by the paternal lineage (Y-haplogroup C-M217*) from North Asia including Sakhalin. Thus, the present findings suggest that the Ainu retain a certain degree of their own genetic uniqueness, while having higher genetic affinities with other regional populations in Japan and the Nivkhi among Asian populations.

http://heritageofjapan.wordpress.com/just-what-was-so-amazing-about-jomon-japan/1-temp-from-africa-to-east-asia-the-tale-of-migration-and-origins-emerges-from-our-mitochondria-dna/origins-of-the-jomon-jomon-connections-with-the-continent-and-with-todays-japanese/who-are-the-ainu-people/genetic-origins-of-the-ainu-inferred-from-combined-dna-analyses-of-maternal-and-paternal-lineages/

[NMDemDist2]

2. while not as ambitious, I met this guy a few weeks ago

http://outwildtv.com/

he's riding horseback from Calgary Canada to Brazil

[dipsydoodle]

3. Still impressive

[handmade34]

4. wow

and I thought my 2,182 mile hike this spring was something

[mljonfoot]

11. I am walking from Beijing to London...

Great story... Last time I spoke to this guy he said he was going to cycle the journey... This was when I told him I was going to walk from Beijing to London this year.

http://www.michaelleejohnson.com for more information.

Seems like he changed his plans... Weird. I wonder if it's because I was going to walk... Well, I won't go there, that's another subject all together (I hope not), however, good luck to him. He will need it. The straits and Darien Gap are not an easy stretch by any means.