69: Migration Routes and Genetic Groups 2. Professor Meltzer details the migration routes of ancestral Native Americans, explaining that while they crossed the land bridge during maximum glaciation, they were initially trapped in Alaska by two vast continenta
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
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🗓️ 10 November 2025
⏱️ 6 minutes
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Summary
2. Professor Meltzer details the migration routes of ancestral Native Americans, explaining that while they crossed the land bridge during maximum glaciation, they were initially trapped in Alaska by two vast continental ice sheets. The "ice free corridor" along the Rockies was not a viable route until around 13,000 years ago, so the likely path was down the Pacific coast, which may have cleared as early as 16,500 years ago. Meltzer introduces the concept of a "genetic ghost," which is evidence in the genomic record of a contributing population for which no physical sample has yet been found.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is CBSI in the world. |
| 0:06.8 | It's a great pleasure to speak to Professor David Meltzer of SMU. |
| 0:10.6 | His new book is Second Edition with information that we're now explicating in Nature magazine, |
| 0:18.9 | published by David and his colleague Eski Wilderslav, |
| 0:22.1 | about the genomics of the peoples in North America and South America |
| 0:26.3 | crossing from Siberia. |
| 0:30.1 | David's book is First Peoples in the New World, Second Edition. |
| 0:33.8 | And we've come to a point where the Basel Americans, |
| 0:36.7 | those are the fundamentals of what the Europeans find, first the North Europeans and then the Western Europeans find, in the second century millennium AD. |
| 0:50.3 | Thousands of years from now. |
| 0:51.8 | The Basel Americans are isolated by ice. There is some debate as to how |
| 0:56.4 | the Basel Americans will pass into the land of North America and the land of South America. |
| 1:02.0 | Is there an open corridor or do they come by sea? I don't settle that, although the strong |
| 1:08.2 | indication from David Ineski's presentation is, the timing doesn't work, given the record, for the open corridor. |
| 1:16.3 | It does work, however, for the sea route down the west coast of North America. |
| 1:21.9 | They divide into three groups, the ancient Beringia, the ancestral Native Americans, and most intriguing of all, David, |
| 1:30.8 | the genetic ghost. |
| 1:31.9 | What does that tell us that we're looking for something that's there and we can't find it yet? |
| 1:36.6 | Is that the idea? |
| 1:39.0 | Yeah, a genetic ghost is basically, we can see in the genomic record that there was another population |
| 1:45.1 | that contributed to a group, but we don't actually have an individual from that population. |
| 1:51.5 | We simply have DNA that is otherwise unaccounted for. |
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