Beringia and Geopolitics

While in graduate school I learned, via the then-new H-AMINDIAN mailing list, that Europeans had begun developing the Beringian theory of Native American origins as early as the sixteenth century. Jose de Acosta and Daniel Gookin, among others, had posited a land bridge or narrow strait between Siberia and North America well before Vitus Bering's second voyage, and had asserted Siberio-Indian kinship based on linguistic similarities and other evidence. More recently, I was surprised to learn, from Claudio Saunt's intriguing new book West of the Revolution (W.W. Norton, 2014), that eighteenth-century Europeans used this hypothesis to advance geopolitical agendas. In the 1750s the Franciscan Jose Torrubia used “Aztec tradition” and colonial documents to argue that the Indians of Mexico came from Siberia, and that very little distance separated that chilly wasteland from the northwest coast of America. When he learned of Bering's discoveries (which the Russians had kept under wraps for twenty years), Torrubia wrote a long essay warning that the “Muscovites” would shortly move into California if not checked (pp. 52-53). In the early 1770s, Spanish Ambassador Antonio de Lacy noted that the Russians were using not only geography but the Beringian hypothesis to promote colonization: Russia, according to one of Catherine II's advisers, had a clear claim to North America “because that country was once peopled by Siberians” (73-74).

Such reports exaggerated Russia's intentions. It would take another quarter-century before Russian traders established a settlement east of Kodiak Island, and several decades before some built a small trading post in northern California, on the river that a younger Saunt thought must be the “Rushin' River” (12). Spanish officials of the 1760s and '70s did not have the benefit of this hindsight, and their alarm caused them to approve the colonization of California, with, as Saunt observes, devastating consequences for Native Californians. That fear of Russian expansion drove Spain's colonial venture in California is well-established. Saunt's new contribution to the history of that venture is to note how the Beringian-origins theory changed the way the Spanish thought about geography: it made Siberia, the putative homeland of Native Americans (with whom the Spanish were quite familiar), a much more immanent reality, and helped eliminate the mental distance between Russian Siberia and Spanish America, just as Bering's discoveries were erasing the physical distance between them. For all its ivory-tower trappings and pretenses, sometimes intellectual history has a very immediate impact on political history.

The Dissolving Horizon

In several past entries, I have referred to the ongoing revolt in the archaeological community against the Clovis Horizon – the theory that there were no human beings in the Americas before the Clovis culture of 11,500 BCE (13.5 thousand years ago). Andrew Curry, writing in the May 2, 2012 issue of Nature, reports on some new developments in the campaign against "King Clovis." In Oregon, Dennis Jenkins has dated fossilized human excrement, or coprolites, to sometime between 14,300 and 14,000 years BP (Before Present). In neighboring Washington state, a 14,000-year-old site containing mastodon remains also yielded evidence of human activity, in the form of a probable projectile point made from the bones of another mastodon. In Texas, archaeologists found tools that were 1,000 years older than the earliest Clovis artifacts. Some of these findings were actually made in the 1980s, before scholars began seriously to question the Clovis Horizon, but as is so often the case with a scientific paradigm, archaeologists ignored evidence that didn't fit the model.

Meanwhile, a mitochondrial DNA study by Ripan Malhi of the University of Illinois suggests that the ancestors of the first paleo-Indians might have spent as much as 5,000 years hanging out in Beringia (the now-submerged Bering Strait land bridge) before following the coast or traversing the glaciers southward. If true, this would place the first humans in the Western Hemisphere as early as 21,500 years BP. Brian Kemp, one of the scholars studying On Your Knees Cave Man, counters with DNA mutation-rate data that place a 16,500-year limit on migration to the Americans.  Both dates, of course, are considerably older than the Clovis boundary.

Finally, the hypothesis that the earliest Americans included seafarers has been bolstered by a 2008 study identifying several species of seaweed at Tom Dillhay's Monte Verde site in Chile, and by a 2011 article "demonstrat[ing]" human habitation in the Channel Islands of California 12,000 years ago. The Clovis Horizon, in sum, is collapsing under the weight of many humble pieces of data: bone fragments, tool shards, seaweed, and poo.

Pacific Interlude

Two quick historical notes from the Pacific coast of North America:

First, an article in Science (summarized in the March 8, 2011 issue of the New York Times) reports on archaeological findings at three 12,000-year-old sites on the Channel Islands of California. The sites contained numerous "delicate" projectile points, used for a variety of marine-oriented subsistence activities: catching fish and shellfish and hunting seals and waterfowl. The most startling feature of the sites was their age: they were contemporaneous with the Clovis culture, and provide further evidence that some of the earliest human settlers of the Americas were mariners who migrated into the hemisphere via the Pacific Coast.

Second, via Newshoggers.com, an interesting observation about historical earthquakes in the Pacific. I found it neat that one can so precisely date a major earthquake off the Oregon coast in the era before European contact, based on the simple combination of radiocarbon dating of destroyed trees and plant life, and the known impact date of a tsunami that crossed the Pacific and hit Japan the following day (27 January 1700). I must confess I also didn't know how recently Mount Hood had erupted: there was apparently a major eruption in 1805, right before Lewis and Clark arrived in the Columbia Valley.

On Your Knees Cave Man

Happy New Year to all. My first entry of the year, which is based on an article from the December 28, 2008 issue of the Anchorage Daily News, takes us back 10,000 years before present, when a Native American man died in (or, perhaps, died near and was subsequently moved to) a cave in southeastern Alaska. His remains, which paleontologist Tim Heaton found in 1996, included "a male pelvis, three ribs, a few vertebrae…a toothy, broken jaw," and some tools. From this seemingly limited evidence, researchers determined that the man was in his twenties when he died, lived principally on seafood, had traveled some distance to the site of his death, and may have been a mariner.

More recently, geneticist Brian Kemp of Washington State University managed to extract mitochondrial DNA from the ancient traveler's teeth, and determined that he belonged to human genetic haplogroup D4H3. In 2008, genetic mouth-swab testing of 200 Alaska Natives proved that none of them was closely related to this early Alaskan – not surprising, since most of the region's Native Americans descend from later migratory waves. (Anthropologists have identified at least four waves of prehistoric human migration into the Americas: Paleo-Indian, Athabascan, Inuit, and Aleut. Most modern Native Alaskans belong to the latter three groups.) In fact, the only Native Americans who share haplogroup D4H3 are near-coastal peoples who live much further south: the Chumash (California), Cayapa (Ecuador), and Yaghan (Tierra del Fuego).

The discovery thus provides further support for the hypothesis that the first Paleo-Indian migrants to the Americas were seafarers, who used small boats to follow the coasts of the (now-submerged) Bering land bridge and of western Canada to the rest of the Americas. It also suggests that there was more than one wave of Paleo-Indian migrants, since Heaton's prehistoric sojourner was also unrelated to other Paleo-Indian descendents, such as Alaska's Tlingits.

The 10,000-year-old bones, incidentally, were found in On Your Knees Cave – I suspect that's how one enters the cavern – at the north end of Prince William Island. The ancient sojourner has thus received the name "On Your Knees Cave Man," which I suspect neither he nor the Geico cavemen would appreciate.

From Yenisei to Arizona

The March 4th issue of the Anchorage Daily News reported on a fascinating paper by linguist Edward Vajda, who, after ten years of research, has found a solid link between an obscure Siberian language and the large Athabascan (or Na'Dene) language group of western North America. After interviewing many of the surviving speakers of Ket, the language of a native Siberian nation from the Yenisei River valley, Vajda found "several dozen cognates" in the vocabularies of Ket and the Athabaskan languages, and identified consistent morphological rules governing the transformation of Ket words into Athabascan. His findings help to reinforce the Beringian hypothesis of Native American origins - the theory that the ancestors of Native Americans migrated from eastern Siberia during the Pleistocene epoch. If he is correct - and his peers in the field seem to think he is - Vajda has also discovered one of the most widespread human language groups. Pre-historic Ket and Athabascan speakers can be found in Siberia, in the Alaskan panhandle, in western Canada, in California, and in present-day Arizona and New Mexico, where the Athabaskan-speaking Navajos settled around 1400 AD. And they accomplished this expansion without draft animals, wheels, or sailing ships.

Jefferson and the Beringian Migration

In commemoration of Thomas Jefferson's 266th birthday, and as a follow-up to my post of March 15th, let me note that the Sage of Monticello was one of the earliest English-speaking Americans to speculate that American Indians originated in Siberia and migrated to North America via the Bering Strait. "From whence came those aboriginal inhabitants of America?" Jefferson asked in Query XI of Notes on the State of Virginia, his only book. "The late discoveries of Captain Cook, coasting from Kamschatka to California, have proved that, if the two continents of Asia and America be separated at all, it is only by a narrow strait...The resemblance between the Indians of America and the Eastern inhabitants of Asia, would induce us to conjecture, that the former are the descendants of the latter, or the latter of the former." (Merrill Peterson, ed., The Portable Thomas Jefferson [New York: Penguin, 1977], 142.)

Jefferson was not, however, the first European to hypothesize a Siberian origin for Native Americans. The concepts of a Bering land bridge and a Siberian migration to the Americas had been germinating for two centuries before Jefferson published them in his book. In Historia Natural y Moral de las Indias (1589), the Jesuit Jose de Acosta argued that since European animals were present in the Americas, they must have crossed over using a land bridge (which human beings could also have used). In the early 1600s the Spanish engineer Enrico Martin concluded that if such a land bridge existed, it must be in far northeastern Asia and the emigrants who used it must be Siberian. Around 1650, Bernabe Cobo asserted that the physical similarities between the various Indian peoples in North America pointed to a common origin, while in 1674 Daniel Gookin of Massachusetts noted that the most believable theory about the origins of Native Americans was that they were descended from the "Scythian" peoples of northeastern Asia and crossed into America via a land bridge. (Thanks to Charles Martijn, Daniel Mandell and John Faragher for the above information.)

Thomas Jefferson was a man of many talents: writer, inventor, lawyer, diplomat, scientist, naturalist, university founder, and, of course, president of the United States. Originality, however, wasn't necessarily his strongest suit.

The First Surfer Nation

This week's TIME Magazine has a good cover story on Kennewick Man, the 9,400-year-old skeleton discovered in Washington in the 1990s. The essay had two main points of interest: A) recent analysis of Kennewick Man indicates that he probably resembled an Ainu or native Siberian, not a European as previously thought, and B) he probably belonged to a coastal culture that relied on fishing and shellfish-collecting for its livelihood. The latter observation links Kennewick Man to a growing body of evidence that early Americans migrated from Beringia down the Pacific coast of North America, thereby bypassing the glaciers that covered Canada and the northern United States during the last Ice Age.

The coastal-migration thesis makes it unnecessary to assume that early Americans reached the non-glaciated parts of the Americas by using an "ice-free corridor" through the ice sheets, a hypothesis advanced by W.A. Johnston and Ernst Antevs in the 1930s and popularized by C. Vance Haynes in the 1960s. Johnston, Antevs and Haynes postulated that the ice-free corridor appeared about 12-13,000 years ago, shortly before melting ice caps submerged the Bering Land Bridge. They used this odd hypothesis to support the notion that there could not have been any human presence in the Americas prior to 10,000 BCE, a belief that archaeologists held for decades before it was finally discredited by Tom Dillehay.

The article notes that researchers are now pushing the date of first human migration to the Americas as far back as 28,000 BCE, based on mitochondrial DNA studies. That said, it is startling to realize that the first Americans may have been primarily boaters and beach dwellers. I suspect it's only a matter of time before we find the first Native American surfboards.