Such grammar regularities among different languages suggest ancient affinities, if not from direct relatedness. They could have arisen from coincidences and not from a single ancestral language: for example, a grammatical feature might have been borrowed from a newly arriving but otherwise unrelated group of people and incorporated as a useful construct. After all, people borrow styles in such archaeological markers as ceramics and blue jeans as well. Further, as Nichols argues, it is important to remember that languages and even their subgroupings within a given stock, called families, arise and can go extinct. On average, she finds, one new family of languages occurs in a stock about every four thousand years; this gives her a form of clock that lets her date linguistic “events” far more distantly in the past than was heretofore thought possible.
Another grammatical feature Nichols and others have identified is “a numerical classifier.” In English we would say, “I see six clouds shaped something like fish.” In many Asian languages one would say, hypothetically, “I see six (bleep) cloud.” The bleep would indicate both plural and fish-shaped. A different bleep might indicate plural and round. In mapping languages that use numerical classifiers, Nichols found that they circle the Pacific Ocean, as do languages that put the verb first in a sentence, as well as languages in which the pronouns begin with m and n. Indeed, many of the languages circling the Pacific rim share all three features. Nichols interprets this to mean that there was a great wave of migration beginning in southeastern Asia about 11,000 years ago and spreading south to New Guinea, north through Asia, and from there eastward to North America, where it traveled down the west coast of the New World.
On the other hand, some of the languages of New Guinea share certain features with some of the languages of Australia: in particular, a grammar, called “concord classes,” in which verbs and pronouns have to agree with nouns as to gender. Nichols says that this is a very ancient feature, as is ergativity, and languages with both these features are found in Australia, the New Guinea highlands, and the eastern regions of North America. This suggests a much earlier and sustained wave of migration beginning some50,000 years ago (when the block of land including Australia and New Guinea was first peopled)—which over the millennia could well have put people into the interior of North America long before Clovis—easily by 20,000 to 30,000 years ago.
So, by virtue of what Nichols calls “historical linguistic geography,” a field in which she is not only preeminent but essentially alone, one can reasonably imagine several waves of people arriving in the Western Hemisphere over many thousands of years. And this would leave plenty of time for people to have fetched up in such mutually distant places as southern Chile and western Pennsylvania prior to the appearance of the Clovis tool kit.
While the linguists sort these bold innovations out among themselves and in their own manner, my like-minded colleagues such as Tom Dillehay and I naturally rejoice, and all the more so since molecular genetics, always progressing, has now lent yet further credence to the reasonableness of Nichols's scenario. It is our turn to sit on a three-legged stool.
Progress in molecular genetics in the past decade has been spectacularly rapid. Most notably, we now have the human genome spelled out before us, and we have determined at least in a preliminary way how to head off a growing list of human maladies by manipulating individual genes. Less likely to make headlines is the progress scientists have made in assessing the times and places of origin of various groups of human beings by reading mitochondrial DNA, the exclusively male Y chromosome, and other molecular markers. By the early 1990s, it was becoming clear that the molecular genetics of native populations of the Americas (particularly as revealed in mtDNA) was quite a bit more complex than it had at first seemed.
As women spread across the globe in ancient times, their mtDNA was steadily changing due to copying errors and radiation, both of which lead to small mutations in the helical strand in their mitochondria. When populations reached a place and stayed there, these mutations came to be associated with a particular region. For this reason some changes are found only in particular regions or continents. These lineages can be thought of, at least poetically, as the descendants of various daughters of Eve.
According to Theodore Schurr of the Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research in San Antonio, Texas, several laboratories, his own included, have found four main mtDNA lineages, called haplogroups,among the native populations of the Americas. Conveniently labeled A, B, C, and D, they are also found in most modern populations in Asia. The exception is Siberia, where B is absent. Importantly, the four haplogroups— A, B, C, and D—are never found among Europeans, Africans, or Australians.
The molecular genealogists have also pegged other lineages in the world, such as L, which is almost exclusively African, and H and X, which accounts for about 3 percent of the modern European sample. Today there is a scattering of both L (African) and H (European) in American Indian populations, but so little that it most likely represents intermarriage since Columbus's time. Indeed, throughout recorded history, there has always been considerable intermarriage between Indians and people of both European and African origins, and it would be highly surprising if the H and L lineages were absent. But the other European haplogroup, known as X, is another story. It is found in both Europe and the Indian subcontinent, but nowhere else in Asia nor in the native populations of South America. Instead it is scattered among North American tribes as distant from one another, at least geographically, as the Ojibway of the upper Midwest, the Zuni of the Southwest, and the Bella Coola of the Pacific Northwest.
All this suggests that many different groups arrived on this continent prehistorically. Given the presumed rate of mutation of mtDNA, the A through D haplogroups could have begun arriving as early as 25,000 to 35,000 years ago and the X people between 15,000 and 30,000 years ago. In this regard, it also should be stressed that while the X group no longer exists in Asia, it may have once and thus could well be a more parsimonious source of this population in the New World than transatlantic movement. There are also five Y-chromosome groups present in native American populations, and by similar analyses these suggest an earliest arrival of 40,000 to 50,000 years ago. Obviously, all these dates need to be reconciled in some manner; given the rate at which population genetics is advancing, perhaps they will be before long.
By mapping small mutations within haplogroups, it has become possible to see in ever-finer detail human migration patterns from as far back as the dawn of modern humans in Africa. It appears, for example, that once humans left Africa for Eurasia, they took a coastal route across present-day Saudi Arabia, through Iraq and Iran and along the coasts of Pakistan andIndia, eventually reaching the island regions of southeast Asia. This may well have been the staging area for subsequent waves of migration into such realms as Australia and New Guinea between 60,000 and 45,000 years ago. (This sounds almost identical to Johanna Nichols's linguistic time map, doesn't it?)
Indeed, in Asia and other Old World regions, it appears that archaeo-logical evidence is beginning to match up in quite wonderful symmetry with both linguistic analyses of the sort Nichols is doing and molecular genetics studies. The movement of people into Melanesia and Polynesia, for example, which took place far later than any entry into the Americas, has also been mapped genetically and shown to coincide nicely with both linguistic and archaeological studies.
Although many researchers had believed that it might be the first issue of human dispersal to be solved conclusively by molecular studies, the populating of the New World remains a bit murky genetically as far as timing and the number of waves of immigrants go. Rebecca L. Cann, a professor at the John A. Burns School of Medicine at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, recently reviewed all these types of evidence for the journal Science. She wrote that it is still possible for geneticists today to look at the four main haplogroups present in native populations in the Americas and argue for all of the following scenarios: a relatively recent, sustained, continuous mig
ration; a single wave beginning some 45,000 years ago; or many movements separated by thousands of years. These studies also support speculation that some people entered the landmass called Beringia before the glacial maximum, found themselves isolated there by the growing ice, and arrived farther south only after the glaciers began to recede.
Despite all this molecular fingerprinting, plenty of uncertainty remains about who the first Americans were and when they got here. Where once there was what one of my colleagues, Dennis Stanford of the Smithsonian, has called a “boring story,” now we are presented with an exhilarating complexity, a wide-open field. As Cann says, the one thing that molecular genetics now confidently rules out is the late entry into the Western Hemisphere of only a single group—which is to say, the dispersal story that has served for nearly seventy years as the foundation of Clovis First. It's this simple: no single group of adventurers in those days could have included people of so many different haplogroups. The casting directors of Star Trekmay have seen the crew of the ship Enterprise as a multiethnic affair, but Pleistocene bands were almost surely only extended family groups.
The mtDNA research is becoming increasingly controversial in other realms—some political, some just silly. For example, researchers from Oxford, England, have taken note of the British fascination with matters of lineage and started up a company called Oxford Ancestors, which invites people to send in cells scraped from the inside of the cheek for analysis. For a fee that seems not unreasonable, they will then trace the applicant back to one of the “seven daughters of Eve” who were chief among the distant ancestors of the people of the United Kingdom. The original woman was of course Eve, and all the haplogroups from A to Z descended from her. So Oxford Ancestors enables one to find out if he or she is a “daughter” of Ursula (haplogroup U), who dwelled in Greece 25,000 years ago, or Tara, and so forth.
Though Heaven knows what this practice might do to the House of Lords, it seems harmless enough. The increasingly sophisticated studies of early humans in the New World, however, have had somewhat unexpected and politically tense ramifications. In spite of definitive evidence that all human beings are more genetically alike than two bands of chimpanzees on either side of a hill, some people believe that to look into these minuscule genetic differences is to slide down the slippery slope into Hitlerian racism and eugenics. To counter the idiotic evil of racism, it has become fashionable in some circles to deny that there are any biological differences at all among people, which to my mind is just as idiotic.
The lineages we have been talking about are almost unnoticeable, totally trivial variations among the billions of nucleotides that make up someone's mtDNA or Y chromosome. The differences that do exist, such as skin color, are all simple differences mediated by a handful of genes; essentially, they are only skin deep. Any feature that is truly significant, such as intelligence, musical talent, or, say, athletic ability, is mediated by huge arrays of genes that produce vast numbers of proteins in long and complicated developmental events. Indeed, it is science that will prove—and, in fact, already has—that all humans, whatever their apparent differences, are almost indistinguishably alike genetically.
What makes the tiny differences in one or a handful of related genes important to know is the genetic predispositions of some groups to certaindiseases, and of course to deny these differences or impede investigation of them is to shoot oneself in the foot. Cultural differences are another matter altogether. It is fashionable to say that all cultures are adaptive, meaning that they are all intelligent responses to the environment at hand, but it cannot be denied that, in the course of time, some cultures have proven less adaptive than others. I would argue that a culture that opts for ignorance over knowledge is asking for trouble just as certainly as a language that resists growing with the times will soon go extinct—as many have.
Another real-world issue raised by the debate over these genetic matters is whether it is appropriate, moral, or even legal for someone to take DNA samples from some people within a group—say, the Amish in Pennsylvania, the !Kung of the Kalahari Desert, or the Iroquois—or to make genetic profiles of the group without its express approval. This raises a whole hornet's nest of issues—such as the right of the individual over the group and vice versa—not to mention the practical dilemma of who is to speak for the group. From there the philosophical and legal questions cascade: Who among a group with an identifiable culture owns that culture? Is a culture to be construed as property, similar to the intellectual property rights of an artist or inventor? Or is a person's (ethnically distinct) genetic material group property?
It is pretty safe to say that no such questions ever occurred to earlier generations of archaeologists who sought enlightenment about the first Americans; however, no archaeologist working in the Americas today can be isolated from such considerations, mostly because of another kind of evidence long pursued: bones.
BONES
The face plastered on the cover of a national newsmagazine never would have appeared there had it not looked so much like the British actor Patrick Stewart and so little like what people think American Indians look like. In fact, the face was an illusion—an illusion within an illusion, surrounded by yet another illusion. First off, it looked like Patrick Stewart only from one angle, and that was the angle in the famous photograph. Turned from the three-quarter view to a full-face shot, its jaw looked muchheavier, its face wider, and it presented an altogether different mien from the unmistakably Caucasian, indeed northern European face of the star-ship Enterprise's second commanding officer, Jean-Luc Picard. That is illusion number one.
Illusion number two arises from the fact that the face was constructed by a statistical method of adding clay in certain thicknesses to the model of a skull. This is a forensic technique that the police use to reconstruct a general idea of the appearance of someone's face after the actual face is long gone, only sometimes leading to an identification. But a slight change in, say, the angle of an eyelid or the turn of the lip in the corner of the mouth, or the presence or absence of facial hair, can make someone look quite different, even unrecognizable. So at best, the face was a plausible but generalized statistical projection of a face no one alive had ever seen.
The third illusion was that the skeleton behind all this was that of a European. That's the way it was reported in the press, so people who looked at the reconstruction kept that preconception in mind. Why elsewould editors of national magazines have selected the one view of the reconstruction that most clearly fit the stereotype of a European? So that uncounted numbers of Americans could persist in the absurd belief that it was a white guy, not an Indian, who got to the Americas first. Even more inappropriately, most people—and even some of the scientists involved in the Kennewick caper—overlooked the astounding diversity of facial features within any strain of humans such as “Caucasian,” not to mention the fact that such strains change greatly, feature by feature, over the millennia.
Reconstruction of the Kennewick skull.
This was Kennewick Man, the nearly complete skeleton found in southern Washington State in July 1996 and the most famous American skeleton ever found. Another error in much of the press coverage was that, at an age of 9,300 years B.P., Kennewick Man represented one of the first Americans. Given his age, he was in fact 2,000-odd years younger than Clovis, and at the time of his discovery, there were already sound reasons to believe that humans had arrived in the Americas more like 20,000 years ago—some ten millennia before Kennewick Man met his end. Even so, 9,000-year-old “Patrick” was widely seen as the first here, and a group of Norwegian Americans calling themselves the Asatru Folk Assembly, Aryan loonies from California (where else?), publicly considered suing the U.S. government for the return of the skeleton. Even if this was merely a publicity lark, it worked remarkably well, as they were featured in The Sunday New York Times Magazine. They dropped the suit and almost immediately dropped out of sight as well. Of course, many vociferous Indian groups took all of this a
s yet another gigantic slur on the part of the dominant society, not to mention another salvo in the ongoing scientific assault on their religious beliefs.
Before long a dispute over the proper disposition of the skeleton reached federal court. Under the Native American Graves Preservation and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) of 1990, human remains that are ancestral to Indian tribes are to be returned to the tribes in question. The Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, located some seventy-five miles from the spot where Kennewick Man emerged from an eroding bank of the Columbia River, claimed him as an ancestor. Meanwhile, physical anthropologists and archaeologists, who said he was too old to be directly ancestral to any modern local tribes, wanted to go further than the initial examination (which had led to the Patrick Stewart reconstruction, amongother things). The matter ended up in court, but not before the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which is in charge of the land where the skeleton was found, destroyed the site in the name of “stabilizing” it.
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