although that did occur. It just wasn't the only way people got here, island hopping as they chased seals or schools of fish also happened. The evidence of habitation that predates the land bridge is building up in Brazil, Mexico, western Canada, and here in NM.

Clovis theory that said people crossed over the Beringian land bridge around 10,000 years ago and stayed there until an ice free corridor made it possible to move southward into the interior of North America.

But, part of the reason that archaeologists and anthropologists clung to the Clovis theory for so long is that it was the first scientific explanation that had any plausibility to counteract the unscientific ideas of Atlantis or of the Lost Tribes of Israel as the origin of Native Americans.

Now the Clovis theory is pretty well abandoned due to older dates.

They were just as funny as the idiots chasing El Dorado. Religion and greed, the twin devils of colonialism.

Turns out there might be evidence of a lost tribe in southern Africa, the Lemba people. They told anthropologists for years that they were Jews but it wasn't until anthropologists discovered the Cohen modal haplogroup among some of the men of the tribe that anyone bothered to listen to them.

Of course, not being pale, blonde and with blue eyes, they didn't particularly qualify.

a standard description of Jews, though, is it?

As an early Semitic people in the eastern Mediterranean region, they were Middle Eastern in appearance. Even then, there were intermarriages with Indo-European Hittites and with Canaanites/Phoenicians. Wars, conquests by non Semitic groups like the Persians, Greeks, and Romans, dispersal by Rome after the destruction of Jerusalem, early Jewish trading colonies in France, Spain, Italy, and Britain, and the conversion to Judaism by southeastern European and southwestern Asian tribes introduced various genetic mixes into Jewish populations, particularly among Ashkenazi Jews.

Then there were the centuries of living in eastern Europe leading to linguistic and cultural borrowings as well as intermarriages, not to mention the centuries of Sephardic Jews in Spain intermarrying with Visigothic Christians and Caliphate Muslims during the conviviencia when people in Spain converted from one faith to the other for marriages.

And Ethiopian Jews have been a known fact for centuries.

So there is a wide variation in appearance among Jews. But the South African presence of Jews is interesting. I wonder if anyone has traced how they came to be there. My guess would be the colony established there by the Dutch East India Company.

The straight black hair, dark skin, and deep brown eyes of Native Americans didn't stop people from speculating that they originated from the Lost Tribes of Israel.

People from the 16h-19th centuries who were searching in all the wrong places and looking at all the wrong people for the lost tribes were loath to admit there were Ethiopian or Chinese Jews, let alone those among the Lemba. It was the same bizarre mindset that caused them to twist themselves into logical pretzels to "prove" Great Zimbabwe was built by Mediaeval European monks with no sense of direction--it couldn't possibly have been built by Africans.

No, they wanted to find lost tribes that looked like the Nordic Jesus in most of the cathedrals.

the Native people of the Americas being the descendants of the lost tribes of Israel is that they were trying to account for the existence of two whole continents filled with people they had never heard of and were not mentioned in the Bible. So they tried to find them in the Bible.

But the Bible itself tells what happened to the ten tribes. After the conquest of Israel and dispersal of its citizens, only two tribes returned in any numbers. The rest had been so dispersed throughout the region that they blended in with the places they were split up to be sent to.

Some of them were in Samaria - the Samaritans of the New Testament - who remained related to but split from the people of Judea.

Europeans were stymied by populations that they could not account for within the framework of accepted beliefs about the world prior to Columbus.

that of thinking everything in existence can be explained by a Bronze Age book from the eastern Mediterranean.

I suppose it's why I'm a total geek with an unsympathetic view of religion. I've read the book and found nothing but a bunch of fairy stories, hazy history that suffered from too many retellings in oral histories, and true idiocy. Oh, there were a few riveting stories and some nice poetry, but it was hardly relevant outside its place or time.

I suppose I'd have been frequently fined for ditching church on Sunday or more likely burned as a witch.