America Before
Page 49
It’s my case that the hit humanity took then erased a remarkable civilization from the record and that we have remained mired in amnesia ever since. In the process what is being neglected, despite the increasingly urgent warnings of a handful of astronomers, is that most of the rubble from the ongoing fragmentation of the original comet remains in orbit in the Taurid meteor stream, including some pieces of enormous size capable of ending civilization again. Indeed, as we saw in chapter 25, it’s Napier’s conclusion that this “unique complex of debris” represents “the greatest collision hazard facing the earth at the present time.”24
In September 2017, drawing on imagery captured by the European Fireball Network, important new research on the Taurids, published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, gave strong support to Napier’s warning. The title of the paper speaks for itself: “Discovery of a New Branch of the Taurid Meteoroid Stream as a Real Source of Potentially Hazardous Bodies.”25
The newly discovered branch is part of the Southern Taurids, encountered by the earth in late October and the first half of November, and it is just one of many indications that humanity’s relationship with the Younger Dryas comet is not over. On the contrary, all the evidence from the close observation and investigation of the Taurids now being undertaken by astronomers is that we may be about to enter—or indeed may already have entered—an episode of enhanced danger. Ahead of us, perhaps still some decades away, lie particularly dense and turbulent filaments of the stream believed to contain “dark” fragments of the original comet, in one case with a possible world-killing diameter of 30 kilometers.26
A TIME FOR CHANGE?
THIS BOOK HAS ROOTS IN much of my earlier work, particularly on ancient Mexico, the ancient Andean civilizations of South America, and ancient Egypt. However, it was not until early December 2016, during a visit I made to North Dakota and to the protest camp named Oceti Sakowin situated just beyond the present northern boundary of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, that America Before crystallized in my mind as a definite concept, coupled with firm intent.
Readers may recall how, from July 2016 onward, a rainbow coalition of Sioux, other Native American tribes, and non–Native American people gathered at Oceti Sakowin in an attempt to stop the laying of an oil pipeline under Lake Oahe on the Missouri River half a mile north of Standing Rock in a location where it not only transgressed traditionally sacred lands, but also threatened the reservation’s water supply in the event of a spill.
Although extremely active and impassioned in the face of a clampdown by militarized security police, the protests of those who had become known as the “water protectors” failed to achieve their immediate objective, which was to have construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) halted completely. Quite to the contrary, on February 7, 2017, the official easement was granted,27 work to complete the DAPL went ahead, and the first oil began to flow on June 1, 2017.28 There were legal challenges from the Sioux and further protests and controversy following oil spills.29 In December 2017 some interim restrictions were imposed on the pipeline operator to prevent further spills,30 but as I write these words in July 2018, oil is still flowing through the pipeline and it seems that commercial interests have once again effectively trumped the interests and concerns of Native Americans.31
Central to the entire protest at Standing Rock was the notion that we live at a time when there is an urgent need to change our ways, to adopt a more humble and no longer rapacious approach to the earth, and to receive a spiritual message passed down from the ancients and held in safekeeping by the First Americans.
It’s a message that resonates profoundly for me with so much that I’ve learned while researching this book.
“This is about everyone,” Cody Two Bears of the Standing Rock Sioux told me as he explained the larger purpose of the Oceti Sakowin protests:
It’s such an important time today—why people need to know this history. Because, for one, the history books would never tell you the correct story … the reason why. I talk to a lot of elders and a lot of spiritual leaders. We had to keep our ceremonies secret. We had to keep our stories a secret for so many years to preserve that. Because the government was fearful of what we had and who we are as a people. The laws will tell you that. There’s even a current standing law today in Montana, I don’t think they’ve taken it out of their law book, that if you see three Native Americans all together then you are able to shoot and kill them. Still legal in Montana! Those are the types of laws they created because they don’t want to see Native Americans gather because for some reason they were fearful of us.
But little do they know, our ceremonies and our ways of life protected us and Unci Maka [Mother Earth]. We prayed even for those people who were afraid of us, to help them … to pray for them to make sure they were okay.
That’s what our ceremonies are based around. It’s not witchcraft … it’s not casting spells on anybody, but that’s what they thought for many, many years. … For example, the Ghost Dances we used to have in Lakota and Dakota country. When we did that, the Washi’chu [white people—literally “those who always take the largest portion”] were so fearful. They thought we were casting spells, when all in all we were trying to keep the balance with the Earth and the Stars. We need to keep that in balance, because if we don’t start doing that today, we’re not going to have anywhere to live in the next hundred years.”
Some 12,800 years ago the balance between the Earth and the Stars was lost and a key chapter of the human story was lost with it. If it happens again, if our brief chapter, too, is lost, will all that remains of us at some vast remove in the future be an unhappy myth that tells of how, through our own greed and conceit, through our own recklessness and disregard for the planet in our care, and through our own excess of hate and dearth of love, we conspired in our own downfall?
APPENDIX 1
MELAZONIA, AKA AMANESIA
Although they are “a world apart and separated by forty thousand years or more of human history,” certain “striking resemblances” and “remarkable similarities between societies in Amazonia and Melanesia” have kept scholars puzzled for more than a century.1
One of these puzzles concerns the skull shapes of indigenous Amazonians and Melanesians and an always unorthodox theory known as the “Paleoamerican hypothesis”2 that proposes, “on the basis of cranial morphology” (just a fancy name for skull shapes):
that two temporally and source-distinct populations colonized the Americas. The earlier population reportedly originated in Asia in the Late Pleistocene and gave rise to both Paleoamericans and present-day Australo-Melanesians, whose shared cranial morphological attributes are presumed to indicate their common ancestry. The Paleoamericans were, in turn, thought to have been largely replaced by ancestors of present-day Amerindians, whose crania resemble modern East Asians and who are argued to be descendants of later arriving Mongoloid populations. The presence of Paleoamericans is inferred primarily from ancient archaeological specimens in North and South America and a few relict populations of more recent age, which include the extinct Pericúes and Fuego-Patagonians.
The Paleoamerican hypothesis predicts that these groups should be genetically closer to Australo-Melanesians than other Amerindians.3
Maanasa Raghavan and Eske Willerslev, both of the Centre for Geo-Genetics at the University of Copenhagen, put the hypothesis to the test at the genetic level as part of their study (discussed in part 3) and found that the ancient and more recent Native American skulls previously identified as having Australo-Melanesian morphology in fact cluster at the genetic level “with other Native American groups” and show no affinity to Australo-Melanesians.4
Their data joined a mass of preexisting genetic evidence pointing to the same conclusion.
For example, another study found that even the most ancient skulls displaying “traits attributable to Paleoamerican crania” turned out, after genetic sequencing, to “present the same mtDNA haplogroups as later populati
ons with Amerindian morphology.”5
A third comparative study of morphometric and molecular mtDNA haplogroup data from ancient and more recent Native American skeletal remains likewise concluded that “human populations inhabiting the Americas during archaic times cannot be considered as belonging to two different groups on the basis of analyzed data.”6
In other words, although their skulls indeed might appear different, and much more like Australo-Melanesian skulls than more recent Amerindian skulls, “Paleoamericans” turn out to be genetically indistinct from more recent Amerindian populations. Since genotype trumps phenotype every time as evidence for relatedness, the “Paleoamerican hypothesis” has therefore been regarded for some years as disproved.
Following their own study, however, discussed in chapter 9, Pontus Skoglund and David Reich (both of the Department of Genetics, Harvard Medical School) seem open to reconsidering the whole question when they describe their hypothetical “Population Y” that “likely contributed to the DNA of Native Americans from Amazonia and the Central Brazilian Plateau” as “a lineage more closely related to present-day Australasians than to present-day East Asians and Siberians.”7 They go on to add:
This discovery is striking in light of interpretations of the morphology of some early Native American skeletons, which some authors have suggested have affinities to Australasian groups. The largest number of skeletons that have been described as having this craniofacial morphology and that date to younger than 10,000 years old have been found in Brazil, the home of the Surui, Karitiana and Xavante groups who show the strongest affinity to Australasians in genetic data.8
What has never been substantially in dispute is that the craniometric similarities between ancient populations from the Brazilian Amazon and Australo-Melanesian populations are real and quantifiable.9 Moreover, while equally real and quantifiable, the genetic data suggesting that these similarities are not evidence of relatedness but must be coincidental, or perhaps the result of some sort of bizarre parallel evolutionary process, seems to me—and clearly to Skoglund and Reich as well—to be directly contradicted by that Australo-Melanesian signal sending out its rather compelling message of relatedness from Brazil.
In view of this I’d say, at the very least, that the earlier craniometric data needs to be revisited, particularly a study by Walter A. Neves and Mark Hubbe published in December 2005 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in which “the largest sample of early American skulls ever studied”—eighty-one skulls from Brazil’s Lagoa Santa region—is compared “with worldwide datasets representing global morphological variation in humans, through three different multivariate analyses.”10
In their paper Neves and Hubbe point out:
Whereas late prehistoric, recent, and present Native Americans tend to exhibit a cranial morphology similar to late and modern Northern Asians … the earliest South Americans tend to be more similar to present Australians, Melanesians, and Sub-Saharan Africans.11
After conducting detailed measurements and analyses of their collection of eighty-one ancient Brazilian skulls and running their global comparisons, Neves and Hubbe are confident that “the results obtained from all multivariate analyses confirm a close morphological affinity between South-American Paleoindians and extant Australo-Melanesian groups.”12
They then go on to offer two different hypotheses to explain “the morphological differences observed between early and late Native South Americans:”
One is a local microevolutionary process that transformed, in situ, the Paleoamerican morphology into that prevailing today among Native Americans. The other is that the Americas were successively occupied by two morphologically differentiated human stocks, with the Paleoamerican morphology entering first.
We believe the second hypothesis is more plausible for three reasons: first, it would be very unlikely that the same evolutionary event … happened in the Americas and in East Asia in parallel at approximately the same time; second, because in South America, at least, the transition between the two morphological patterns was, as far as we know, abrupt; and third, cranial morphology has recently been shown to respond adaptively only to extreme environmental conditions, being therefore much less plastic than originally thought.13
In short, as Neves and Hubbe summarize elsewhere in their paper, their results support the hypothesis “that two distinct biological populations could have colonized the New World in the Pleistocene-Holocene transition.”14
This, of course, is a conclusion arrived at from the craniometric data, but it is also precisely the conclusion arrived at by Skoglund and Reich from their reading of the genetic data; namely, as the title of their 2015 Nature paper indicates, that there is “genetic evidence for two founding populations of the Americas.”15
On the other hand, as we’ve seen, Raghavan and Willerslev disagree. In their Science paper they favor, instead, a single founding population.16
Clearly in a state of affairs like this where the experts come to radically different conclusions based on nuances within essentially the same data, it would be unwise to go with one side or the other. Whether in the form of skulls or genes, though, it seems to me that the clues so far point in the direction of—to say the least!—some sort of forgotten connection.
There’s more.
TWO TOWERS OF BABEL
Several researchers have noted that Australo-Melanesia and the Americas both manifest extraordinary “linguistic diversity” featuring much greater numbers of languages than in all other parts of the world. An implication of this, argues anthropologist German Dziebel, is that:
measured by the number of independent linguistic stocks, linguistic divergence in the Americas must have taken at least 35,000 years. Of course, this figure cannot be taken literally but there’s a marked contrast between language diversity in the Americas (and in places like Papua New Guinea, with human archaeological record of some 40,000 years) and language diversity in Africa.17
Austin Whittall, an author and regular blogger on ancient South American genetics and anthropological issues, also comments on the surprising phenomenon of high levels of linguistic diversity in Australo-Melanesia and the Americas:
Why do Native American people speak so many languages? They supposedly reached the New World recently … yet evolved over 40% of the global languages! A figure higher than that found in Africa, the “Cradle of Mankind.”
Africans have had the time … and the advantage of not going through bottlenecks. … so they should have evolved more languages than any other group of humans. But they have not.18
New Guinea, Whittall points out next, has “the highest language diversity in the whole world.”19 Indeed, authority on world languages Ethnologue confirms that there are 841 living languages in Papua New Guinea, which make up 11.85 percent of living languages in the world.20
Whittal finds this quite reasonable:
the island is a jungle, with many mountain ranges that isolate populations and keep them from mixing. New Guinea has been considered as one of the first places reached by mankind during our epic trek out of Africa.
But America is different. … The Papuans had 50 ky to develop their languages, the Amerindians had less than 15 ky. So how do we explain this?21
The linguistic diversity of the Americas is an anomaly—Whittall is absolutely right about this—and its parallels with the linguistic diversity of New Guinea and Australasia in general are intriguing. The following table,22 reproduced in Whittall’s blog, makes the anomaly clear:
Total numbers of separate language families by macrocontinent
AFRICA & EURASIA 87 (25%)
AUSTRALASIA 110 (32%)
AMERICAS 144 (42%)
Source: The Autotyp database (Bickel and Nichols 2002ff; Nichols et al. 2013)
“I do believe,” Whittall concludes, “that we should look into language diversity as an indicator of an older origin for mankind as a whole and for an earlier date for the peopling of America.”23
Number of language families Number of languages Average number of languages per family
NORTH AMERICA 13 220 16.9
CENTRAL AMERICA 6 273 45.4
SOUTH AMERICA 37 448 12.1
Once again, therefore, Melanesian New Guinea and Amazonia seem to parallel one another. Each has the highest level of linguistic diversity within its own macrocontinent and together they occupy first and second place among the world’s most linguistically diverse regions.26