But Loring said his measurements that compare the skulls of people all over the world suggest a resemblance among peoples living in Europe, along the coastlines of Asia and into ancient North America. He also found two distinct groups among the Native Americans. One group physically more resembles East Asians, especially modern Chinese, while the second looks a lot like the Ainu. He thinks they may have come from the same lineage as Kennewick Man did. Brace has not been allowed to examine the Kennewick remains, but thinks any measurements he could make would support his theories.
Some recent evidence tends to support Brace.
Although just a few years ago everyone agreed no humans lived in the New World until about 11,000 years ago, and that everyone trekked together over the Bering Strait into Alaska, more and more evidence suggests that people started coming over in successive waves as long as 30,000 years ago. David Meltzer, an anthropologist at Southern Methodist University, noted that huge ice sheets would have blocked any passage from the Bering Strait down through Canada until 11,500 years ago. A settlement in Monte Verde, Chile has been dated to 12,500 years ago, which suggests people must have come either a different way, or long before the ice sheets formed. Some seem to originate in southeastern Siberia, while one seems to have links with a relatively rare lineage found in a few modern Europeans. A Common Root Johanna Nichols of the University of California-Berkeley, who compared the structures of Native American languages to languages found elsewhere in the world, said some of the similarities when dated using a kind of linguistic clock, could date back to a common ancestral language 30,000 years ago.