A Northeast Asian Lief Erikson In Peru?

Five hundred years before Columbus, and contemporaneous with the Viking Vinland settlement in maritime Canada, new genetic evidence points to a small population with Northeast Asian genetic affinities in Peru, another chapter in the fascinating Y1K moment in world history.

Japanese physical anthropologist Ken-ichi Shinoda performed DNA tests on the remains of human bodies found in the East Tomb and West Tomb in the Bosque de Pomas Historical Sanctuary, which are part of the Sican Culture Archaeological Project, funded by Japan’s government. The director of the Sican National Museum, Carlos Elera, told the daily that Shinoda found that people who lived more than 1,000 years ago in what today is the Lambayeque region, about 800 kilometers (500 miles) north of Lima, had genetic links to the contemporaneous populations of Ecuador, Colombia, Siberia, Taiwan and to the Ainu people of northern Japan.

Neither incursion from the Old World seems to have much of a demic impact on the Americas, and it isn't obvious that any of these Asian settlers made a round trip back to Asia to share their discoveries either. The only migration in the Y1K era that stuck in the New World was the circumpolar Inuit migration. A global cold snap took out the rest.