how can i be related to an amazonian?

Question

read this (fascinating) article. am i missing something? tell me how everyone on earth has a common ancestor when there are tribes deep in the amazon rainforest that have never made contact with the outside world? is it simply a thoeretical mathematical exercise?

Answer 1

The people in the Amazon have only been living there for 10, 000 years at most. Before that their ancestors lived in North America and before that they lived in Siberia

When we say that such people haven't had any contact with the outside world we mean they haven't had any contactin thelast couple of centuries. We don't mean that the people grew up their with the mushrooms and have nevere been part of a larger humanity.

All humans moved from Africa to where they are now living sometime in the last 100, 000 years. That is why everyone is related.


(BTW there are abslutely no people in the Amazon that have had no contact with the outside world. Thatis an urban myth. The last isolated Amzon tribe was contacted in the 1920s. That is why when you see pictures of these suposedly isoalted tribes they are always wearing t-shirts.)

Answer 2

They have not had contact with the outside world, recently. They had to come from some where. They may be offshoots of a larger tribe. A few families did not like the way things were being done, and left to make their own tribe, or something like that.
Anthropologists believe that the Native people of North America migrated from Asia. They use something called mitochondrial DNA to help confirn this. The people on the North American continent slowly descended down to central, then South America.

Answer 3

All human life originated in Africa.

All "original" human life in the Western hemisphere is descended from people who walked over a land bridge in the Bering straits during one of the recent ice ages.

When they say that one of these tribes of people never made contact with the outside world, they mean within the last few thousand years.

Answer 4

That tribe in the Amazon did not originally spring from nothingness.
Back in the past it split from some other tribe, and that tribe was related to another tribe. Etc. etc.

Eventually there is a common root

Answer 5

Those tribes were not always there. They, along with everyone else migrated out of the Ethiopia area in Africa.