Windover Archeological Site

The Windover Archeological Site is an Early Archaic (6000 to 5000 BC) archaeological site and National Historic Landmark in Brevard County near Titusville, Florida, on the central east coast of the state. Windover is a muck pond where skeletal remains of 168 individuals were found buried in the peat at the bottom of the pond. The skeletons were well preserved because of the characteristics of peat. In addition, remarkably well-preserved brain tissue has been recovered from many skulls from the site. DNA from the brain tissue has been sequenced. The collection of human skeletal remains and artifacts recovered from Windover Pond represent among the largest finds of each type from the Archaic Period. It is considered one of the most important archeological sites ever excavated.

Quotes

• While Hauswirth et al. [55] claimed to have isolated both nuclear and mitochondrial DNA from a number of the Windover brains, their data are suspect as the mtDNA lineages they reported are absent in all other prehistoric and contemporary Native American populations studied to date
  • January 1994, Ancient DNA: Recovery and Analysis of Genetic Material from Paleontological, Archaeological, Museum, Medical, and Forensic Specimens chapter "DNA Analysis of the Windover Population" (pp 104-121)

• Time estimates for the arrival of X in North America are 12,000–36,000 years ago, depending on the number of assumed founders, thus supporting the conclusion that the peoples harboring haplogroup X were among the original founders of Native American populations. To date, haplogroup X has not been unambiguously identified in Asia, raising the possibility that some Native American founders were of Caucasian ancestry.
  An ancient arrival of haplogroup X in the Americas could be corroborated by the presence of haplogroup X in pre-Columbian human remains. Two studies on mtDNA variation in pre-Columbian samples have reported partial CR sequences that include the 16223T-and-16278T motif (Hauswirth et al. 1994; Ribeiro-Dos-Santos et al. 1996).
  • 1 December 1998 mtDNA Haplogroup X: An Ancient Link between Europe/Western Asia and North America? from Volume 63 issue 6 of American Journal of Human Genetics

• I have also had a close look at the Windover data. Unlike the Norris Farms sequences, which are overwhelmingly drawn from the four known Native American clusters, the Windover sequences are highly variable and contain only one that is anywhere near a Native American sequence in cluster A. The rest either have no matches that I can find or they are European
  • 14 May 2012 page 51 of DNA USA: A Genetic Portrait of America by Bryan Sykes

• Windover DNA testing indicates that the people of the Windover bog were of European descent, not Asian descent as had been previously thought. If this DNA testing is accurate, the Windover bog inhabitants were not descendents of people who migrated across the great land bridge. Rather they were Europeans who must have somehow managed to migrate across the Atlantis Ocean centuries before their descendants.
  • 12 August 2014 page 21 of Cocoa, Florida: A History by Bob Harvey

• The Windover Bog people, dating from 9,000 to 7,000 years ago, appear to be contemporary or slightly earlier predecessors to the Ancient Canal Builders. Their DNA and Haplogroup sequence tests indicate they are of European rather than Native American ancestry.
  • 20 April 2015 page 123 of Earth Epochs: Cataclysms across the Holocene by John M. Jensen Jr.