Graham Hancock on science: what the evidence says · JRE #1284
“the most parsimonious explanation is that a group of people during the Ice Age crossed the Pacific Ocean and ended up in South America and settled in the Amazon and brought their DNA with them”
What the evidence says
Genome-wide studies have found that some Amazonian Native American groups carry a distinct ancestry component, dubbed "Population Y," that is more closely related to indigenous Australians, New Guineans, and Andaman Islanders than to any other present-day population; this was first reported by Skoglund, Reich, and colleagues in 2015. The leading genetics literature explains this signal as originating from a distinct ancestral population that entered the Americas from northeast Asia, likely via Beringia and the deglaciated Pacific coastal corridor, alongside or shortly after other founding lineages, rather than via a direct open-ocean voyage across the Pacific during the Ice Age. A 2021 Nature review co-authored by Willerslev on the ancient genomic record of the Americas frames the peopling process as movement "from northeast Asia," consistent with a Beringian/coastal migration model rather than a trans-Pacific crossing. Willerslev was not an author on the original 2015 paper that identified the Population Y signal, which was led by David Reich's group. Attributing a direct Ice Age trans-Pacific ocean crossing to Willerslev as his stated "most parsimonious" explanation misrepresents the mainstream genetics consensus, which favors a northern entry route for the ancestral lineage that later shows this southern-hemisphere genetic affinity; exactly how that ancestry reached Amazonia specifically remains an open research question, but a direct ocean voyage is not the standard proposed mechanism in the field. Notably, in the same conversation Hancock also recounts that Willerslev told him the trans-Pacific idea 'doesn't make practical sense' per archaeologists' assessment that no Ice Age population could have made such a crossing, an important qualification Hancock's on-air framing downplays.