told us that the reason why the Clovis theory was so strongly, even rigidly, held onto was to discourage the fantasy origin beliefs about Native Americans being descendants of the lost tribes of Israel or survivors from Atlantis. They wanted to adhere to only what could be established by strict scientific methods.
That was back in the mid-1980s, before DNA analyses and the knowledge of haplogroups, before the human genome had been mapped. At that time, though, the Meadowcroft Rock Shelter site in Western PA had already shown reliable dates back to 14,000 years ago and possibly earlier, so he told us that future findings were likely to upend the Clovis theory. He also believed that we would someday find evidence of Neanderthal and Sapiens interbreeding.
He passed away before the discoveries of evidence that he anticipated.
I try to follow findings as they develop, but miss some of them, which is why I was unaware of the higher incidence of Neanderthal DNA in east Asia until you mentioned it.
So I looked up more articles on it and one of them mentioned some of the hypotheses proposed for explaining it. Today's eastern Asians in Japan and China show lower levels of Denisovan DNA than southeast Asia, but have higher levels of Neanderthal DNA than elsewhere. Yet the Philippines have the highest level of Denisovan DNA in the world.
So one hypothesis was that, since Neanderthal and Denisovan were related and likely shared a common ancestor, the higher rates of Neanderthal DNA in Japan and China might have come into the population from traits that Neanderthal and Denisovans shared, in addition to Neanderthal/Denisovan crosses as well as from Neanderthals themselves.
What surprised me in that article was that it said that there was a high degree of Denisovan DNA in Iceland! Who knew? Denisovan Vikings? Talk about our ancestors traveling!
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