Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 380

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas," by Jennifer Raff.

 

The initial reaction from the communities was mixed. Some were reluctant to disturb the human bones any further. But other community members wanted to learn what information the ancient man could reveal about the history of the people in the region. “As I remember those initial talks,” Terry Fifield told me in an email, “council members wondered who this person might be, whether he was related to them, how he might have lived. It was that curiosity about the man that inspired the partnership at the beginning.” 

After much discussion and debate, community members eventually agreed that the scientists could continue their dig and study the ancient remains. They stipulated that excavations would immediately cease if the cave turned out to be a sacred burial site. They also mandated that the scientists were to share their findings with them before they were published and consult with community leaders on all steps taken during the research—and the community members would rebury their ancestor following the work.

So while this book is about how scientific understandings of the origins of Native Americans have changed, we cannot tell that story without also scrutinizing how scientists have arrived at these understandings. This is not a pleasant history to recount. The Indigenous inhabitants of the Americas have been treated with disrespect, condescension, and outright brutality by a number of scientists who have benefitted at the expense of the people they were so curious about. This is the legacy that contemporary anthropologists, archaeologists, and geneticists need to confront head-on; there can be no honest progress in the scientific study of the past without acknowledging those threads of human history we have dismissed, neglected, or erased in the past. The journey to knowledge has to involve self-scrutiny; scientific progress cannot be divorced from the social context in which it takes place.

It had become evident to physical anthropologists of the early 20th century that the scenario that José de Acosta had originally proposed on the basis of biblically inspired logic in the 16th century was, in fact, supported by multiple lines of biological evidence.

But evidence kept appearing that didn’t quite work with the model. Even as better dating methods pinpointed the earliest appearance at Clovis to 13,200 years ago, the Clovis First model still couldn’t quite satisfy everyone. From time to time, a maverick archaeologist would come forward to present a site that didn’t fit the model; evidence that showed people were present in the Americas before Clovis. These supposed pre-Clovis sites irritated most senior archaeologists, who, like my professor, already knew how the Americas were peopled. Like annoying pebbles working their way into the shoes of a runner, the archaeologists had to keep stopping to clear away these distractions before they could make progress on their research. My generation of students was inculcated with the belief that every single site proposed to predate Clovis had one or more fatal flaws. The attitude at the time, one of my colleagues told me, was basically “We know the answer. Don’t bother us with data.”

In return for your respect, caves offer you the unique experience of seeing unparalleled treasures of nature: speleothems of the most astonishing beauty created over thousands of years by what began as a tiny accretion of minerals in water droplets. You have to move with utmost care to avoid touching them as you scramble over rocks or crawl through tunnels. Since your light source is usually a focused beam from a headlamp or flashlight, you learn to maintain a constant state of alertness in the underground world. As a child (and later as a teenager) I loved feeling this single-minded focus for hours, listening to the small sounds of water, our own footfalls, and the occasional flutter of bat wings, and glimpsing something ancient and beautiful in the beam of my flashlight every time I turned a corner. 

Entering a sacred burial space like Actun Tunichil Muknaliii requires an additional level of respect: for the place itself, for its history, for the ancestors interred there, and for the living people who still consider it sacred. It’s an important consideration when visiting such places as tourists; one must be mindful of how the vocabulary of “discovery” and “adventure” and the opportunity to gawk at the remains of ancient peoples may be demeaning to them and harmful to their descendants.

One possible refuge for humans during the bitterly cold Ice Age was the southern portion of central Beringia—a region that is presently under about 164 feet of ocean but would have been lowland coastline 50,000 to 11,000 years ago. Unlike the steppe-tundra regions, the southern coast of the land bridge would have been much warmer and wetter because of its proximity to the ocean. 

Paleoenvironmental evidence shows that it actually contained wetlands, with peat bogs and trees like spruce, birch, and adler that people could have burned for fuel. Waterfowl would have visited this place, and they and other animals would have provided a reliable supply of food for the Beringians. This model for Native American origins explains the genetic evidence of isolation. To some archaeologists, it also meshes well with the archaeological evidence. Beringians living on the south coast of the land bridge had access to Pacific marine resources, including kelp, shellfish, fish, and marine mammals. A prolonged stay in a coastal region would have required the population to develop adaptations for these new resources. If true, this period of isolation meant that the First Peoples already had the culture and knowledge needed for thriving in coastal environments by the time routes into the Americas became accessible a few thousand years later. It means that Beringia should more properly be viewed as a lost continent than as a land bridge. The term land bridge gives the impression that people raced across a narrow isthmus to reach Alaska. The oceanographic data clearly show that during the LGM, the land bridge was twice the size of Texas. If the Out of Beringia model is correct, Beringia wasn’t a crossing point, but a homeland, a place where people lived for many generations, sheltering from an inhospitable climate and slowly evolving the genetic variation unique to their Native American descendants.