Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas

of the interior route. While traveling southward through the interior of the
continent would have required serially encountering and adapting to new
ecosystems (mountains, deserts, plains), people traveling southward via the
coast would have had reliable access to food resources with which they
were already familiar. Coastal resources are fairly consistent regardless of
latitude, and people would have encountered similar ecosystems along the
Pacific coast from Southeast Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. In recognition of
the significant role that nutritionally valuable and abundant seaweeds might
have played in a coastal dispersal, this ecological model has come to be
known as the Kelp Highway hypothesis (30). While much more work needs
to be done to fully test the ecological hypothesis, it’s supported by the fact
that people who lived at Monte Verde ate algae and seaweed over 14,000
years ago and by the dietary evidence associated with Shuká Káa that we
discussed at the very beginning of this book.
Out of Japan?
The Kelp Highway or Coastal Migration hypothesis is widely accepted by
archaeologists and geneticists for the various reasons outlined in this
chapter. In the next chapter, we’ll discuss an alternative model and its
evidence. Some archaeologists have suggested a hypothesized starting point
of this migration: Japan.
The Out of Japan model rests primarily upon very striking similarities
between Western stemmed points found at sites along the Pacific Coast and
western interior of North America, and those found at sites throughout
Japan and Northeast Asia. These Incipient Jomon sites date to between
about 16,000 and 14,000 years ago. The people who lived at these sites
hunted pigs, fish, dolphin, and turtles. They made bread from a flour
composed of ground nuts and bird eggs, and nurtured the growth of wild
plants, including beans and a kind of millet. These hunter-gatherers also
made some of the earliest known pottery in the world after about 15,000
years ago, which was decorated with cord patterns (called Jomon, the origin
of their name).
At the end of the LGM, proponents suggest, Incipient Jomon huntergatherers
moved northward into Northeast Asia. From there, they spread