Here’s an argument against the Solutrean Hypothesis. I’ve been meaning to look for something like this. The Solutrean Hypothesis is that one wave of prehistoric migration to the Americas came from Europe, the people perhaps traveling in boats along a northern “coast” of sea ice.

I like the idea. The experts do not. It’s one of those things that falls seemingly in the same category as Mary Magdalen as wife of Jesus. Crackpot enthusiasm. The experts still prefer the idea America was populated by people from Asia traveling across what is now the Bering Strait.

Jokers like me stoutly maintain that our ancestors came up from the underworld through a hole (“sipapu“) in the bottom of the Grand Canyon, then spread to the so-called Old World from here.

The primary evidence for the theory seems to be the similarity between arrowheads made by the Solutrean people in Europe with arrowheads made by the Clovis people in America slightly. But it’s debatable whether there’s a genuine similarity. And that debate is the location of most of the action here.

But there’s another piece of evidence. I came up with the idea on my own, before I knew the Solutrean Hypothesis was already a thing.

My inspiration was the distribution of mtDNA haplogroup X2. It appears in both Northern Europe and in the Americas. A small-ish group. Look at a map, and you’ll see why some people (like me) have thought some group must have gone from Northern Europe to America. A nifty solution, but probably wrong. The experts think X2 probably spread to both Northern Europe and the Americas from a common center in Asia. In other words, they took the long away around.

• Stefan Milo, Criticisms of the Solutrean Hypothesis (May 18, 2019), at YouTube, visited Oct. 20, 2019.

From Jacqueline Kehoe:

“When I first visited a year ago, I felt an intense sense of home. These streets I had never walked, these smells my nose shouldn’t recognize, this terra incognita — it all seemed strangely familiar and comforting. But how is that possible? I have Norwegian heritage, sure, but generations back. What makes a foreign place feel like home?”

Read more: Why visiting your ancestral home feels so familiar: It’s literally in your bones, at Matador Network, visited Oct. 16, 2019. 

When I think of genealogical frauds I usually think about those quirky amateur genealogies published in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Lofty connections with little or no evidence. Lots of oral history.

Then too, I think of the defenders of this old material. Generally people who fulfilled the requirements for a high school diploma some time in the ancient past, but never again gave a thought to study or thinking.

But now we have a new cottage industry of genealogical fraud. The new style of fraud uses DNA testing but piles on particular kinds of pseudo-science.

Like their predecessors, they aren’t setting out to deceive, nor are they (usually) profiting from it.

And, like their predecessors, the main problem is that they don’t actually have the education it would take to evaluate the claims they are making so confidently.

One example is Finding Ancient Ancestors with Chromosome Mapping. I spent some time with them in their Facebook group Chromosome Mapping of Ancient Bloodlines Project. Enough to see from the inside that they really are doing what it looks like they’re doing. This particular group is creating new, generally fake or at best highly speculative, lines to medieval royalty and nobility by “matches” among their members.

Other groups use the same methodology to create new and fake lines to the Native Americans of the Colonial American seaboard. I’ve seen quite a bit of activity among the so-called “Cheraw Nation” and among those claiming descents from Pocahontas.

The basic sleight of hand used by these groups is easy to spot. Scientists say short DNA segments are useless for mapping relationships. Anything smaller than, say about 5 to 7 cM, is just as likely to be the result of a new combination as it is to be something inherited from an ancestor who lived generations back. A common way of expressing this difference is to say the matching segment might be Identical by State rather than Identical by Descent.

These groups disdain that evidence. For them, a match is a match.

One very easy way to think about this problem is to ask yourself whether the two people who match know all their ancestors in the generation where they are speculating a common ancestor. This is pretty straightforward. If they don’t know all their ancestors, how do they know they don’t have some other relationship that would account for the match?

I plan to write more on this topic in the future. I have some detailed notes on individual scenarios but I want to make sure I’m handling personal information appropriately. And I want to find the right way to talk about a couple of cases where proponents of these frauds are claiming (falsely) that they have buy-off from prominent genetic genealogists.

More Information

• Blaine Bettinger, Essential Considerations for DNA Evidence, Roots Tech 2019 (Mar. 1, 2019), visited Apr. 30, 2019.
  
• Blaine Bettinger, A Small Segment Roundup (Dec. 29, 2017), visited Apr. 30, 2019. Why small segments are like poison M&Ms.
• Roberta Estes, Concepts – Identical by…Descent, State, Population and Chance (Mar. 10, 2016), visited Apr. 30, 2019.
• Andy Lee, Are You Genetically Related to Charlemagne?, Family History Fanatics at YouTube (Dec. 1, 2016), visited Apr. 30, 2019.
• Andy Lee, Why am I only genetically related to 120 ancestors?, Family History Fanatics at YouTube, visited Apr. 30, 2019.
• Wanda Marie Pierce, Chromosome Mapping of Ancient Bloodlines, slide show, visited Apr. 30, 2019. Use with caution.
• Wanda Marie Pierce, Examples of Chromosome Mapping, visited Apr. 30, 2019. Use with caution.