Siberian-Mongolian Heritage of the Americas

Sarmat12 wrote: However, I wouldn't call it "Siberian-Mongolian heritage." Siberia is a very vague term. Mongolian is a relatively new notion only about 1000 years old. I don't think there is any Mongolian heritage in America  Perhaps it's better to say "proto Uralo-Siberian and Proto Altaic Heritage in Americas." It's just very likely that Ameridians, Uralo-Siberians and Altaics originate from the common ancestors.

Your expression "proto Uralo-Siberian� in reality means that the Siberian tribes couldn’t leave for the American Continent before 4000 BC.

Proto-Uralic is the hypothetical language ancestral to the Uralic language family, which includes Finno-Ugric and Samoyedic.
The language was originally spoken in a small area in about 4000 BCE, and expanded to give differentiated protolanguages. The exact location of the area or “Urheimat� is not known, but the Ural Mountains are usually assumed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Uralic

Anyway, IMO Ural Mountains is absolutely a wrong hypothesis for Proto-Uralic.

pinguin wrote: Quite interesting. Do you have pictures of those totem poles?

I, too, find this fascinating and after doing a little investigation on the Ainu (a native group from Sakhalin Island, part of the Japanese archipelago) there are many other apparent similarities. Even the dress is very similar to the native groups in BC/Alaska. I found some other Ainu totems:

I have no idea how 'authentic' these are or whether they have not been influenced by Haida totems, but they do have a unique style that is a little different. I think the middle one is probably an imitation of Haida styles, although it is not an exact imitation.

There is some of the bizarre Kennewick Man stuff here, but there are also some interesting observations here:

http://www.japanfocus.org/products/details/2589

We have to be careful about assuming connections, though.

Totem poles are basically just stelae in wood, and could easily have been thought of by different peoples independantly. The Maori also carved totems:

There is even some thought that there may have been totem poles in ancient European cultures, most recently among pagan Poles and Lithuanians (called "Rodnidze"). The ancient Zimbabwean civilization may have used totems (called "mitupo") and we also know of "Asherah poles" from the Canaanite civilization of the ancient Middle East.