The title of a recent National Geographic News article caught my attention because it appeared to address the subject of early human migration. The sub-title screams, “Humans first moved out of Africa about 70,000 years ago, but 30,000 years later some of them moved back.”

Apparently a group of scientists from the University of Pavia, in Italy, released this “revelation” in the December 15, 2006, issue of Science and National Geographic takes several opportunities to link these “findings” to their Genographic Project and the accompanying Atlas of the Human Journey. A quick review of the Atlas reminds you why you have to be careful when you read “news” articles published by National Geographic – they reflect and promote the theories of mainstream academia, even when data from many sources seems to prove these theories wrong.

Specifically, the Atlas claims to show the human migration routes as they evolved over time – from 200,000 B.C. through about 5,000 B.C. If you open the Atlas in a browser and click the box on the far right of the timeline, you’ll see that NG shows all migration to North and South America occurring via Beringia, the land bridge that once connected North America to Asia before it sank into the Bering Sea. However, numerous experts have presented evidence that this northern migration may not have reached any further south than the American Southwest. Most of Central and South America was probably populated by ancient mariners who sailed east across the Pacific from Micronesia.

According to academia, the Beringia migration occurred no more than 12,000 years ago and brought primitive, nomadic peoples from Asia to “the new world.” How, then, could the ancient Inca city of Tiahuanacuhave been built by a presumably civilized people 12,000 years ago? And who buried the mummies in the desert of northern Chile that have been found in vaults carbon dated to be at least 9,000 years old? Did some of the Asian nomads, who never really evolved out of the nomadic stage in North America, somehow find their way to South America, become “civilized” and develop a science of mummification more sophisticated than that used in Egypt? For many more examples of the discrepancies between the accepted theories and actual discoveries, I highly recommend the book Atlantis in America (see below) by Ivar Zapp and George Erikson.

I’m not suggesting that you cancel your lifetime subscription to National Geographic, but you should be aware that their articles, and probably the research they fund, represent a specific point of view – one that is, in my opinion, incorrect. So if you’re waiting for them to finally write that big check to fund Paulina Zelitsky’s return to MEGA (the “lost city of Cuba”) you can forget it – MEGA doesn’t fit NG’s version of world history!

Bibliography:

National Geographic News, December 14, 2006, “Humans Migrated Out of Africa, Then Some Went Back, Study Says.”

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/12/061214-humans-africa.html?source=rss

NationalGeographic.com, (undated), Atlas of the Human Journey.