It’s one of the most contentious debates in anthropology today: Where
did America’s first peoples come from — and when? The general
scientific consensus is that a single wave of people crossed a
long-vanished land bridge from Siberia into Alaska around 13,000 years
ago. But some Native Americans are irked by the theory, which they say
is simplistic and culturally biased.
The first European explorers to reach the Americas looked to the Bible to explain the origins of the people they encountered and misnamed “Indians.” Biblical tradition holds that humans were created some 4,000 years ago and that all men descend from Adam — including indigenous peoples whom Europeans regarded as primitive.
Indians in Virginia. Engraving by Theodore de Bry, 1590, based on a watercolor by John White in 1585.
“Dominant science believed in a concept of superiority,” said
Alexander Ewen, a member of the Purepecha Nation and author of the
“Encyclopedia of the American Indian in the Twentieth Century.”
“And that created an idea that either people were genetically inferior or that there were stages of civilization, and Indians were at a lower stage,” he said.
Since “primitives” weren’t sophisticated enough to have sailed the oceans, early scientists concluded Indians had reached North America by some unknown land route. They found their answer in the Bering Strait.
Map of eastern Russian and Alaska with a light
brown boarder depicting Beringia, where archaeolosits believe ancient
Americans crossed from Siberia into Alaska around 13,000 years ago.
Courtesy, U.S. National Park Service.
Ewen says that theory cemented into dogma and persists to this day,
even in the face of new discoveries and technology that suggests Indians
arrived much earlier and by different routes.
“In the first place, it’s simplistic,” said Ewen. “The people in this hemisphere were -- and are -- extremely diverse, more than any other place in the world.”
Chipping away at a theory
In the 1930s, scientists examined a pile of mammoth bones in Clovis, N.M., where they found distinctive spear points. Since then, tens of thousands of “Clovis points” have been found across North America and as far south as Venezuela. Scientists decided the Clovis people must have been America’s first peoples, arriving 13,000 years ago.
Excavations in the 1970s pushed the date even further back, to as much as 16,000 years ago. Archaeologist James Adovasio dated artifacts found at Pennsylvania’s Meadowcroft Rockshelter to be up to 16,000 years old, to harsh criticism.
The Meadowcroft Rockshelter in Washington County, Pa., where archaeologists found artifacts dating back 16,000 years.
Other branches of science have weighed in: In 1998, University of California-Berkeley linguist Johanna Nichols
argued that it would have taken up to 50,000 years for a single
language to diversify into the many languages spoken by modern Native
American groups. That meant ancient Indians would have to have arrived
19,000 years ago.
Geologists have complicated matters by suggesting that the Bering Strait wasn’t passable until 10 or 12,000 years ago. This gave way to theories that early humans might have sailed down the Pacific coast into the New World.
Meanwhile, in 2015, Harvard University geneticist Pontus Skoglund discovered DNA links between Amazon Indians and the indigenous peoples in Australia and New Guinea.
An elderly member of Brazil's Surui Nation.
Researchers found the Surui bear a genetic relationship to indigenous
peoples of Australia and New Guinea.
In the past decade, Smithsonian Institution anthropologist Dennis
Stanford met scathing criticism for suggesting Stone Age Europeans
paddled across the Atlantic thousands of years before Columbus. In April
of this year, researchers in California analyzed crushed mastodon bones
they said were butchered by humans 130,000 years ago, a theory the bulk
of scientists, including Adavasio, rejects – not because it’s not
possible, he stipulates, but because the data isn’t conclusive.
Native American accounts
Should science consider the origin beliefs of tribes themselves?
Montana’s Blackfoot tradition holds that the first Indians lived on the other side of the ocean, but their creator decided to take them to a better place. “So he brought them over the ice to the far north,” the account reads.
The Hopi people of Arizona say their ancestors had to travel through three worlds, finally crossing the ocean eastward to a new and final new world. And Oklahoma’s Tuskagee people believe the “Great Spirit” chose them to be the first people to live on the earth.
File--This July 23, 2008, photo was taken from
inside the Paisley Caves near Paisley, Ore., where archaeologists found
stone tools and human DNA dating back more than 13,000 years, evidence
humans settled North America earlier than previously thought.
Stories like these aren’t given much weight by science, said Joe Watkins, supervisory anthropologist at the National Park Service and a member of the Choctaw Nation.
“They are generally believed to be anecdotal,” he said. “The deep time depth and the possibility of multiple interpretations seem to make scientists uncomfortable.”
That isn’t to say Watkins believes every tribal tradition is “true.”
“But I do believe most of them carry within them kernels of truth of use to researchers. It seems imprudent to dismiss any possible line of evidence," he said.
The first European explorers to reach the Americas looked to the Bible to explain the origins of the people they encountered and misnamed “Indians.” Biblical tradition holds that humans were created some 4,000 years ago and that all men descend from Adam — including indigenous peoples whom Europeans regarded as primitive.
“And that created an idea that either people were genetically inferior or that there were stages of civilization, and Indians were at a lower stage,” he said.
Since “primitives” weren’t sophisticated enough to have sailed the oceans, early scientists concluded Indians had reached North America by some unknown land route. They found their answer in the Bering Strait.
“In the first place, it’s simplistic,” said Ewen. “The people in this hemisphere were -- and are -- extremely diverse, more than any other place in the world.”
Chipping away at a theory
In the 1930s, scientists examined a pile of mammoth bones in Clovis, N.M., where they found distinctive spear points. Since then, tens of thousands of “Clovis points” have been found across North America and as far south as Venezuela. Scientists decided the Clovis people must have been America’s first peoples, arriving 13,000 years ago.
Excavations in the 1970s pushed the date even further back, to as much as 16,000 years ago. Archaeologist James Adovasio dated artifacts found at Pennsylvania’s Meadowcroft Rockshelter to be up to 16,000 years old, to harsh criticism.
Geologists have complicated matters by suggesting that the Bering Strait wasn’t passable until 10 or 12,000 years ago. This gave way to theories that early humans might have sailed down the Pacific coast into the New World.
Meanwhile, in 2015, Harvard University geneticist Pontus Skoglund discovered DNA links between Amazon Indians and the indigenous peoples in Australia and New Guinea.
Native American accounts
Should science consider the origin beliefs of tribes themselves?
Montana’s Blackfoot tradition holds that the first Indians lived on the other side of the ocean, but their creator decided to take them to a better place. “So he brought them over the ice to the far north,” the account reads.
The Hopi people of Arizona say their ancestors had to travel through three worlds, finally crossing the ocean eastward to a new and final new world. And Oklahoma’s Tuskagee people believe the “Great Spirit” chose them to be the first people to live on the earth.
“They are generally believed to be anecdotal,” he said. “The deep time depth and the possibility of multiple interpretations seem to make scientists uncomfortable.”
That isn’t to say Watkins believes every tribal tradition is “true.”
“But I do believe most of them carry within them kernels of truth of use to researchers. It seems imprudent to dismiss any possible line of evidence," he said.
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