The January/February issue of the Skeptical Inquirer, “the magazine for science & reason,” includes the final installment in a three-part series of articles written by physical anthropologist Deborah Bolnick, archaeologist Ken Feder, historian Terry Barnhart (a former Curator of History for the Ohio Historical Society), and me responding to the claims put forward in the video documentary The Lost Civilizations of North America. The title of this article is “Civilizations Lost and Found: Fabricating History. Part Three: Real Messages in DNA” and it addresses the claim made in the documentary that the presence of the mitochondrial DNA haplogroup “X” in American Indian populations provides evidence for a pre-Columbian migration of Israelites to the Americas. It does not. The article concludes: “There is no credible evidence to suggest that any Old World peoples migrated to the Americas after the initial incursion from Siberia prior to the tentative forays of the Norse beginning at around 1000 CE other than limited contacts between Siberia and the American arctic.”
For more information on what we’re learning from studying ancient Hopewell DNA, check out these previous blog posts: Ancient DNA from the Ohio Hopewell http://ohio-archaeology.blogspot.com/2006/06/ancient-dna-from-ohio-hopewell.html Ancient DNA from the Illinois Hopewell http://ohio-archaeology.blogspot.com/2006/10/ancient-dna-from-illinois-hopewell.html New study of ancient DNA reveals population history of northeastern North America http://ohio-archaeology.blogspot.com/2008/09/new-study-of-ancient-dna-reveals.html
Brad Lepper
