One thing that bothers me, is that most first world archeologist keep ignoring evidence of humans in Brazil at least 40.000 years ago.

Even more interesting, there are evidence of "negroids" in Brazil at that time, while the "mongoloids" people (the current native americans, that have features shared with asians) timeline seemly match the straight theory, some Brazillian historians believe that what happened is that the first attempt of colonizing South America failed somehow, and when the current natives arrived, they early settlers were already long gone.

As for a controversial archeological dig, one with 40.000 years ago humans in it, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedra_Furada_sites

I just saw something about this last week when I was curiosity browsing:

http://rbth.com/science_and_tech/2016/02/23/its-official-nat...

According to this research, not only did they find a Siberian link to NAs, but they found a link between Australian indigenous people among some NAs.

Wikipedia says:

    Two 2015 autosomal DNA genetic studies confirmed the
    Siberian origins of the Natives of the Americas. 
    However an ancient signal of shared ancestry with the 
    Natives of Australia and Melanesia was detected among 
    the Natives of the Amazon region.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_history_of_indigenous_...

Can you expand on the evidence of "Negroids" in Brazil 40,000 years ago? I'm familiar with the idea of pre-Clovis settlements and the controversy around that, but I was under the impression these were thought to be earlier settlers from East Asia, like the Clovis people.

The only indication of Africans in South America I can think of are the much later statues and idols of faces from Olmec Mexico, circa 1000 BC, which some claim have "Negroid" features (a supposition that has to be debunked with an unfortunate degree of frequency).

The Negroid thing is more speculative, due to the lack of decent human remains with that age, but we DO have some old remains (older than 10.000) that are seemly negroid, for example the skull nicknamed "Luzia" that was found in Brazil. (there are some others too, but Luzia made international news when it was found).

Some people are trying to find more remains, and others are trying to do genetic research on those remains, one theory is that there was two (or more) waves of migration.

Another theory, is that the people that crossed the strait 22000 years ago were negroids, and "co-evolved" to have Asian features like modern Asians because of converging evolution or coincidence.

A third theory that was more popular when there was fewer evidence (when Luzia was first found) was that Luzia features were just normal genetic variation, and that she was a mongoloid that looked negroid because of randomness.

I'd never heard of Luzia, but I just read into it a bit and it's definitely intriguing. Thanks for the response and the new rabbit hole to dive into!

I'm more impressed by how the coordinated migration to Australia took place around 50,000 years ago! Thanks for the link.

And they didn't have a complete land bridge to get there. There has always been a sea gap between SE Asia and Australia/New Guinea. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallace_Line

They had to have been pretty damn smart to get a large party across a sea gap. Proud of our ancestors haha!

"Civilization is always older than we think, and below our feet were also men and women who lived and loved." -Will Durant

Beautiful quote. Never heard of Durant before. Any recommendations?

I've read The Story of Philosophy. That particular quote comes from Our Oriental Heritage. His writing is generally good, the major difficulty being that he wrote a lot

I think his "story of civilization" is considered his most famous work. https://archive.org/details/storyofcivilizat035369mbp