by Jack Hitt
Forensic reconstruction is a very iffy “science.” The problem is that the features that we look to for identification are fleshy ones—ears, nose, and eyes—and are the most difficult to know from a skull. By the way, I and every other writer call Kennewick’s head a “skull.” The implication is that it was found whole. But in fact, it was found in parts. Chatters pieced it together. When other government experts put the pieces together, they built a skull whose dimensional differences from Chatters’s version were deemed statistically significant. Again, at every stage of this story, the bits and pieces—in this case, literally—get pushed toward the Caucasoid-like conclusion.
Reconstruction is more art than science or, with its stated success rate of roughly 50 percent, about as good a predictor as a coin toss. Consider what Chatters did: By making Kennewick perfectly resemble one of the most famous pop-culture Brits of our time, he let the visual cues confirm his finding without ever having to once again repeat the term “Caucasoid-like.” Add to that the fact that leaving the clay gray-colored made it easier for the brain to fill in the skin tone. Chatters has revealed that he suggested to the artist that he not include the “epicanthic fold” of the Asian eye since leaving that out would be “neutral.” Plus, by leaving the sculpture bald, the artist produced a kind of featureless mannequin whom anyone can dress up with the hairstyle, eye color, and skin tone drawn from our deepest racial closet.
Kennewick’s skull is always described as “narrow, with a prominent nose, an upper jaw that juts out slightly and a long narrow braincase.” This description is often phrased this way: dolichocranic and slightly prognathous, marked by a lack of an inferior zygomatic projection.
Such sesquipedalianismo. Yet here’s the problem with looking at those vague features and declaring them “Caucasoid”: We don’t really know what people’s skulls looked like ten thousand years ago. We only have a few, like the pre-Clovis points, so it’s reckless to draw any conclusions. Skull shapes, like skin color, can change much more quickly than we think, especially if there’s been traumatic environmental change.
Franz Boas, the legendary anthropologist from the turn of the last century, is most famous for debunking a lot of skull science in his time by proving that the skulls of immigrant children from all parts of the world more closely resemble one another than they do their parents’. Rapid dietary shifts can cause major structural changes in skeletons—just ask the average Japanese citizen who has shot up four and a half inches in height in a single generation, or the average American man who has packed on an extra twenty-five pounds since 1960. The truth is that there exists no coherent history of skull shapes back through time, so to say a ten-thousand-year-old skull resembles a modern white guy skull is to compare apples with raisins.
In time, Chatters tried to calm the storm over his own remarks. He had repeatedly said things like this: Kennewick Man “could also pass for my father-in-law, who happens to be Scandinavian.” Then one day he was suddenly insisting: “Nobody’s talking about white here.” His contradictions are maddening. At one point, Chatters explained: “I referred to the remains as Caucasoid-like.… I did not state, nor did I intend to imply, once the skeleton’s age became known, that he was a member of a European group.” Afterward, he offered writer Elaine Dewar a coy aside: “I say you can say European. Who can prove you wrong?”
He insisted that he meant that the skull simply didn’t resemble the classic “Mongoloid” features of Asia. He said Kennewick could have been Polynesian or even ancient Japanese. It turns out that those vague Caucasoid features are also found in the Ainu people of prehistoric Japan, as well as other places outside Europe.
Don’t be confused here. The scientists themselves who fling around words like “Caucasoid” are the very ones who also admit that the “Caucasian” skull is found everywhere. That’s right. Everywhere. This Caucasian skull shape—they will admit—is found all over the planet. For example, another ancient skull always brought up alongside Kennewick’s is a female skull found in Mexico. Nicknamed Luzia, the skull was analyzed in a report that found a resemblance to skulls seen among early Australians, bones found in China’s Zhoukoudian Upper Cave, and a set of African remains knowns as Taforalt 9.
So we’ve narrowed the source of this Caucasian skull to Australia, China, and Africa. Huh? Another study, of an ancient skeleton known as Spirit Cave Man, narrowed down his skull shape origin to: Asian/Pacific, the Zulu of Africa, the Ainu of Japan, the Norse, or the Zalawar of Hungary. Just to add to the confusion, in 2009, an ancient skeleton one thousand years old and identified as “Incan,” was dug up in … Norway.
What conclusion can be drawn from finding Caucasian skulls in Asia? Or finding African skulls in Brazil? Or finding Polynesian skulls at the continental divide? Is it that these “groups” traveled a lot thousands of years ago, or that skull shapes change radically and quickly over time? Of course, it’s the latter, and some anthropologists have known it for some time. In the early twentieth century, Harvard anthropologist Earnest Hooton documented the wide variety of skull shapes he found among ancient Native Americans. (That’s right. This early scientist who spoke the uncomfortable truth about race was named Earnest Hooton.) “He studied Native American skulls from pre-contact all the way to the eighteenth century and he sorted them into cranial racial categories,” said Jonathan Marks. “He called them ‘pseudo-Australoid’ and ‘pseudo-Negroid’ and ‘pseudo-Mediterranean’ because they had those features. He was smart enough not to say, Well, I guess these people encountered a stray Australian aborigine on his way to Colorado. Clearly he recognized that there was considerably more diversity in early Indian skulls than he was used to seeing. And that’s the point in all this: Once you’ve started to racialize those variations, you’ve already given your answer.”
What this suggests may not be that Africans and Mongoloids and Europeans were storming the American shores ten thousand years ago as much as that in any one group at any one time, you will find all kind of anomalies. In fact, among many nineteenth-century images of Native Americans, you can easily find lots of paintings and even photographs of Indians whose skull shape is precisely that of Captain Picard with his “Caucasoid” and dolichocranic good looks. The famous image of Chief Whirling Thunder (Google it) looks more eerily like Jean-Luc Picard than Kennewick does.
The Center for the Study of the First Americans, at Texas A&M University, is a clearinghouse for pro-Caucasian theories of early America. The center publishes a manly newsletter, Mammoth Trumpet. There one can find a set of arguments that inspire a kind of sorrow and pity. The director, Dr. Robson Bonnichsen (like so many of these academics: the look of a Norse king with a big bushy beard), commonly says things like this: “We’re getting some hints from people working with genetic data that these earliest populations might have some shared genetic characteristics with latter-day European populations.” Maybe he doesn’t know that he’s the direct heir to King Charlemagne?
What makes the claim all the more paltry is that once you start reading about the European connection to pre-Clovis man here in America, you can’t help but notice that the same essential story is getting told in other, separate fields—such as the story of when the first European evolved or when early ape creatures crossed over the line leading to humans. All of them make claims that have the contours of the same fight—the revolutionaries challenging the traditionalists, all of them finding a way to shoehorn Europeans into a story, with hints of superiority and beauty. In so many of these fights, you can find the same kinds of amateurs making the same mistakes, arriving always at the same conclusion: that European development and civilization are somehow separate from the proletarian evolution of the rest of the human race.
For instance, the current theory about the beginning of mankind—the Out of Africa theory—states that an early pre-human, Homo erectus, evolved into Homo sapiens, who then left Africa some one hundred thousand years ago and eventually evolved into the modern peoples of the world. But there is a sm
all contingent of rebel theorists—the “multiregionalists”—who hold that it was Homo erectus who spread out to various locations, in each of which he developed into a particular transitional hominid. In Asia: Peking Man. In south Asia: Java Man. And in Europe: Neanderthal Man. Each of these specimens would eventually evolve simultaneously into Homo sapiens.
According to the rebels, there was some gene mixing at the margins of these separately developing species, to keep the general hominid ability to reproduce together. It’s a serviceable theory that manages to keep all mankind barely in the same species while creating an intellectual space for racial differences and European uniqueness. It is the “separate but equal” theory of physical anthropology.
As theories go, however, multiregionalism can be pretty slippery. For the longest time DNA tests revealed that Neanderthal Man made no direct genetic contribution to modern man. But recently researchers in Europe—several of them sporting Viking beards—discovered that there was a genetic connection. Multiregionalists labor mightily to keep Neanderthal Man in the picture, arguing that there had to have been some sex among the different humans and that the evidence is with us. One of the arguments is that my big nose (as well as those great beaks on Jews and Arabs) is telling evidence of Neanderthal genes. That’s the theory of Dr. Colin Groves, whose very dolichocranic skull sports the requisite Nordic beard.
Remember how Neanderthal Man used to look—the ruthless brute of comic books, the near knuckle-dragger who exited around the time of the Last Glacial Maximum? Well, he’s had a complete makeover. Frank Frazetta’s neckless, club-swinging primates are now key players in the unique European formation of modern-day Caucasians, so they’ve put down their bludgeons and picked up some complex tools. One DNA study suggested that Neanderthal Man had red hair, practically Scandinavian. He’s gotten a haircut, Botoxed the beetling brow, and in the museums the Neanderthal models have replaced their murderous scowl with a pensive, more Rodinesque expression. One current display in Europe includes a cute Neanderthal boy with big eyes and the Broadway musical hair of a Dickensian street urchin. Like his dad, he’s had his Neander-snout bobbed into something that could easily develop into a tastefully trim WASP nose, and he holds a questioning expression that instinctively makes you quietly pray that he gets that ring to the volcano or it’ll spell doom for Middle Earth.
There are so many of these Euro-centric theories where the key moment of development that “makes us human” somehow occurred in France or Germany that I began to collect them, like baseball cards. Those cave paintings in Lascaux and Altamira are often held up as the threshold event revealing “abstract” thought, which made us truly human.
My personal favorite, this week, takes us all the way back to the apes. A primate specialist in Toronto named David Begun holds that he has found “the last common ancestor to the great apes”—i.e., the notorious missing link. Where?
In Europe. His theory is that African apes crossed into Europe, picked up those civilizing traits that would eventually lead to humanness, and then slipped back to the Dark Continent just under the deadline for their Out of Africa journey. A few years back, another ape, excavated near Barcelona, Spain, was heralded as further proof of Begun’s theory. The researchers remained tight-lipped about what it all meant, but popular outlets found ways to get the point across, such as this sentence in a CBS News report: “The researchers sidestepped a controversy raging through the field by not claiming their find moves great ape evolution—and the emergence of humans—from Africa to Europe.”
X. Kennewick’s True Origins
Every once in a while, one of the science magazines will ask mechanical engineers to consider the not-so-intelligent design of the human body. This chestnut of an article usually tells us that with a little more webbing in the toes we’d be great swimmers or that with slightly fleshier Yoda ears we’d be able to hear whispers a block away. These pieces usually make some reference to the naughty observation that only a third-rate architect would run “a toxic waste line through a recreation area.” We also learn that the spine is really a bit of jerry-rigging for an upright primate. A tube of flexible cartilage would result in far fewer deaths and better protection for the core piping of the central nervous system. Add to the list that our knee joints aren’t much to speak of, that our vision is actually fairly limited, and that our hips are oddly narrow (making childbirth nightmarish). If our shanks were longer, we wouldn’t be writhing hobblers when we ran. Instead we’d resemble gazelles or, more likely, ostriches. Still, we’d be awesomely fast. But it never worked out that way. The body—with its Rice Krispies knees, stumpy tibia, and dainty ears—has merely gotten us by all these eons. So, here we are, like it or not, with a chassis that’s … just fine, as is. We wish we didn’t have to spend half our culture’s resources on patching its grotty design, but what can you do already?
Our brain is like this too. Its perceptions are just as flawed in understanding the world as our body is in navigating it. Our species has a hard time wrapping its brain around this fact because we’ve devoted the last five thousand or so years of written history to convincing ourselves, through intense repetition, that we are the very best there is, the Xerox copy of an omnipotent deity. We are made in His image because nearly every Scripture and Holy Writ on earth includes that claim.
We can’t shake the idea that the brain is special, the center of self and the storehouse of being. We want it to be constant, Gibraltarian, immortal. But just as we have come to terms with the idea that the human body is not the fixed, instantaneous creation of a celestial architect (or that the universe is not a massively static amphitheater), the same can also be said of our glorious brain.
Evolutionary science has shown us that the brain is a patched-up jalopy—an improvised, makeshift do-over. The brain is reliable enough to get you to the next place, but when you finally look under the hood, it’s a little shocking to find a collection of barely successful workarounds and ad-hoc fixes using what appear to be the cerebral equivalent of baling twine, chewing gum, duct tape, and haywire. The reptilian stub got a big makeover during the mammalian period, with an overlay of the new limbic portion of the brain, and then later the more humany stuff known as the neocortal got plopped on top of that—each a series of fixes and patches of the previous networks. For instance, two parts of the brain that evolved with Homo habilis (literally, “handy man” because he was the first tool-making hominid) were the Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas, both crucial in putting things together to make tools. These parts of the brain evolved about two million years ago. Then, about one hundred thousand years ago, scientists now theorize, these tool-making portions of the brain were hot-wired and hijacked to form the centers of the complex human language you speak every day. That’s how evolution works; parts get re-adapted for new uses (“exapted,” in the jargon), or useless bits lying around (“spandrels,” in that same jargon) suddenly get appropriated to new uses. Ancient chewing bones in the upper jaws of reptiles got taken over a good while back and now serve at the scaffolding of the middle ear—the incus, malleus, and stapes—that allows us to hear.
Evolution did not set us on a trajectory toward the perfect brain, the best possible brain, or even, arguably, a decent brain. Rather, we got the amateur version, the unendingly fiddled-with version, a flawed instrument just good enough to get us through to reproductive age. After that achievement, evolution occurs (or not) without a central mission, which might explain the onset of loopy eccentricity in middle-aged aunts and uncles.
Had that evolution failed, we would have gone the way of the Neanderthal or the Australopithecus, visible only in the fossil record. But the brain shambled its way through to right now. And so we live. Scientists studying the early brain have determined that on the savannahs of Africa, we developed thousands of shortcuts in the brain to gain a quick and usually accurate depiction of reality. Our ability to make snap judgments was very handy—evolutionarily. We oversimplify the world we see—and take shortcuts in th
e viewing of it—in order to make quick sense of it. These shortcuts are called “heuristics,” and nowadays they can make navigating our way through a modern world, dominated by rational choice, quite dicey.
Take a quick one that we all hear our parents say when we’re kids: “Know what you are looking for.” It’s easy to project how helpful that would have been a hundred thousand years ago, when the difficulty of getting food was such that being sidetracked even momentarily could rapidly become total failure or death. But today, when that primitive tic rears its ancient bias, it more likely means we miss all kinds of new opportunities. In fact, many of these ancient heuristics have survived the eons to form a kind of distortion field through which we perceive the universe. And it’s only by looking at Kennewick through such a mirror that one can see anything like a wandering Caucasoid.
Take the most basic notion known as the fundamental attribution error: We are ourselves looking out at the world. That sounds fine, but it has serious and often unavoidable repercussions. When it comes to our own actions, we easily comprehend the state of affairs around us—the situation—because we are trapped in our bodies moving through time. But when we watch other people, we don’t see their situation; rather, we see their bodies as discrete actors in the world. So we are much more likely to ascribe menacing personal motives to another’s actions (“That guy who didn’t do his homework is lazy”), while we are very understanding when judging ourselves (“I didn’t do mine because of a family crisis”), sometimes extremely understanding (“My dog ate my homework”).
I once hung out with an abortion doctor in the Dakotas as he went about his rounds. He told me that pro-life women are no less likely to have abortions than pro-choice women. He said he sometimes found the protesters in one town showing up as patients in the next town (and after the abortion they would go right back to hurling insults at him on the street). But when queried, the pro-life woman would explain away her own choice to abort, saying that her circumstances were unique and one needed to understand the pressures she was under. The other women having abortions? They were baby killers.