Wednesday, July 29, 2015

Melting My Bridges

"Researchers suggest another ancestry for Native Americans" by Virgie Hoban Globe Correspondent  July 21, 2015

It has long been thought that the founders of the Americas, who traversed a frozen ice bridge across the Bering Strait 15,000 years ago, carried with them a uniform ancestry rooted in Eurasia.

But a Harvard Medical School study published Tuesday in the journal Nature upends that theory, concluding that some modern-day Brazilians in the Amazon carry traces of DNA that suggest they share a history with indigenous Australians. That finding suggests the founding population of the Americas was more diverse than suspected and arrived in separate waves.

The farther you go back in received history, the more you learn it's all a lie. 

“We found this pattern in the genetic data and were kind of very surprised and incredulous,” said David Reich, a Harvard geneticist and coauthor of the study.

The study left other questions unanswered, most prominently when and how the distant cousins reached South America.

A separate study published in the journal Science also detected traces of DNA harking to Australia, New Guinea, and other parts of Australasia in South Americans, but those researchers say that mixing is a more recent phenomenon and that there was a single burst of migration.

The two papers, and their somewhat conflicting findings, show that scientists in the 21st century are still grappling to understand one of the most basic questions about civilization: How were the Americas populated millennia ago, and who were those early residents?

Honestly, the last place I'm looking for answers to those questions....

--more--"

It's a chicken-or-the-egg question.

Thankfully, there will never be another ice bridge to Siberian Russia. People would again be on the move, this time in the reverse direction.

Blame it on:

"The present El Nino event, on the cusp of attaining ‘‘strong’’ intensity, has a chance to become the most powerful on record. The presence of a strong El Nino almost ensures that 2015 will become the warmest on record for Earth and will have ripple effects on weather patterns all over the world. A strong El Nino event would probably lead to enhanced rainfall in California this fall and winter, a quieter- than-normal Atlantic hurricane season, a warmer-than- normal winter over large parts of the United States, and a very active hurricane and typhoon season in the Pacific. The 2015 El Nino event is now neck-and-neck with the record-setting event of 1997-1998 in terms of its midsummer intensity." 

I've kind of cooled to the whole global warming "debate," sorry.

UPDATE: 

"The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the American Meteorological Society’s annual state of the climate report, released Thursday, reported record-smashing warmth globally in 2014, giving special attention to the world’s oceans. About 93 percent of the man-made heat energy from the burning of fossil fuels went into the world’s oceans, said NOAA oceanographer Greg Johnson." 

NOAA is all wet with me, as are all $cienti$ts cited by the propaganda pre$$.

Water use in parched Calif. falls 27 percent