Over the past few weeks, new scientific discoveries have rekindled
the debate over the Bering Strait Theory. Two of the discoveries
were covered recently in Indian Country Today. The first
"More Reasons to Doubt the Bering Strait Migration Theory," dealt
with the growing problem of "science by press release," as scientific
studies hype their conclusions to the point that they are misleading;
and the second, "DNA Politics: Anzick Child Casts Doubt on Bering
Strait Theory," discussed how politics can influence science, and
the negative effects these politically-based scientific results
can have on Native peoples.
RELATED: More
Reasons to Doubt the Bering Strait Migration Theory
RELATED: DNA
Politics: Anzick Child Casts Doubt on Bering Strait Theory
It is generally assumed that the Bering Strait Theory has almost
universal acceptance from scientists. So, for example, the New York
Times, in an article on March 12, "Pause
Is Seen in a Continent's Peopling" stated unequivocally that
"The first migrations to North America occurred between 15,000 and
10,000 years ago," with the new wrinkle that maybe on their way
from Asia Indian ancestors laid over in the Bering Strait region
(Beringia) for thousands of years before traveling on to the Americas.
Therefore it is usually presumed that the primary critics of
the theory must be anti-science, like the "creationists" who argue
against evolution, or New Age pseudoscientific conspiracy theorists.
Thus in 1995, when the late Sioux philosopher Vine Deloria Jr. published
Red Earth, White Lies: Native Americans and the Myth of Scientific
Fact and challenged the Bering Strait Theory, he was savagely
attacked by many scientists who lumped him in with those fringe
groups.
The vitriol that poured from some of the harshest critics, such
as John Whittaker, a professor of anthropology at Grinnell College,
who referred to Deloria's book as "a wretched piece of Native
American creationist claptrap," seemed excessive. The critics also
demonstrated that they clearly did not comprehend Deloria's argument.
Red Earth, White Lies, embroidered by Deloria's wry sense
of humor and rambling musings, shows he was not anti-science, but
rather anti-scientist. In particular, he was against those scientists
who held narrow views of the world, who had no respect for other
people's traditions, who fostered a cult of superiority either for
themselves or for their society, and who were afraid to search for
the truth unless it already conformed with established opinion.
Deloria also argued that science, when studying people, was
not neutral. In his view, some scientific theories harbored social
and political agendas that were used to deprive Indians and other
minorities of their rights. Many of the assumptions that underlay
certain scientific principles were based on obsolete religious or
social views, and he urged science to shed these dubious relics.
The issue for Deloria was not science vs. religion (or tradition),
it was good science vs. bad science, and in his view, the Bering
Strait Theory was bad science.
Nor was Deloria alone in this opinion. Since it was first proposed
in the late 16th century, and especially in its most recent incarnations
in the late 19th and the 20th centuries, the most vociferous critics
of the Bering Strait Theory have been scientists. Even among archaeologists
and physical anthropologists, generally the most dogmatic proponents
of this theory, it has always been extremely factious. And the abuse
they would heap upon each other was no less acidic than that they
spewed on outsiders.
In 1892, when the geologist George Frederick Wright published
his massive study, Man and the Glacial Period, which challenged
some of the tenets of the Bering Strait Theory as it was then formulated,
he was attacked, as David J. Meltzer pointed out in First Peoples
in a New World, "with a barrage of vicious reviews which were
unprecedented in number and savagery." One critic of the book, William
John McGee, the head of the Bureau of American Ethnology, "was especially
bloodthirsty, labeling Wright's work absurdly fallacious, unscientific,
and an 'offense to the nostrils,' then dismissing him as 'a betinseled
charlatan whose potions are poison. Would that science might be
well rid of such harpies.'"
To understand just one of the many scientific criticisms of
the Bering Strait Theory, we go halfway around the world to the
continental mass known as the Sahul, which includes Australia, New
Guinea and surrounding islands. Like the Americas, it had long been
assumed by archaeologists that the Indigenous Peoples who lived
in that region had migrated there from Asia just a few thousand
years ago. It then came as a massive shock to those same archaeologists
when in 1968, near Lake Mungo in Southeastern Australia, the geologist
Jim Bowler discovered the remains of a cremated woman who was subsequently
radiocarbon-dated to be between 25,000 and 32,000 years old. Lake
Mungo Woman, as she came to be known, was repatriated to the Aboriginal
community in 1992.
Yet this discovery had already been anticipated by other scientists,
for example, the linguists. The Sahul is one of the most linguistically
diverse areas in the world, home to more than 1,000 languages, about
one-fifth of the world's total. The linguists had already predicted
that the "time depth" required to achieve this type of linguistic
diversity was clearly not in the thousands of years, but in the
tens of thousands of years. Subsequent archaeological finds have
now pushed back the date of human occupation of Australia to a minimum
of 45,000 years ago and possibly 60,000 years ago.
The only area in the world that has a comparable level of linguistic
diversity as the Sahul is the Americas, and in certain very important
respects, the Americas were even more diverse. Since the very first
period of contact between Europeans and Indians, observers had marveled
at how many different languages and cultures were to be found. Thomas
Jefferson, among the leading scientists of his day, wrote in 1785
in his Notes on the State of Virginia.
Imperfect as is our knowledge of the tongues spoken in America,
it suffices to discover the following remarkable fact. Arranging
them under the radical ones to which they may be palpably traced,
and doing the same by those of the red men of Asia, there will be
found probably twenty in America, for one in Asia, of those radical
languages, so called because, if they were ever the same, they have
lost all resemblance to one another.
Today, linguists call Jefferson's "radical languages," language
families or stocks, each made up of numerous languages and dialects.
As Jefferson saw it, this diversity clearly pointed to the great
age of American Indians; "A separation into dialects may be the
work of a few ages only, but for two dialects to recede from one
another till they have lost all vestiges of their common origin,
must require an immense course of time; perhaps not less than many
people give to the age of the earth."
Based upon the linguistic evidence, Jefferson believed that
"a greater number of those radical changes of language having taken
place among the red men of America, proves them of greater antiquity
than those of Asia," and led him to speculate that Asians may have
been the descendants of early American Indian migrations from the
Americas to Asia.
Exactly how diverse the American languages were became clearer
in 1891, when the famed explorer and director of the Bureau of Ethnology,
John Wesley Powell, released the monumental work, Indian Linguistic
Families North of Mexico. In his introduction, Powell explained
that, "The North American Indian tribes, instead of speaking related
dialects, originating in a single parent language, in reality speak
many languages belonging to distinct families, which have no apparent
unity of origin." Powell grouped the American Indian languages in
the US and Canada into 58 language families (or stocks) that could
not be shown to be related to one another.
Since Powell's day his classification has been modified somewhat
and attempts to link many of these language stocks together to create
"super stocks" have met with mixed success. Although what constitutes
a family, stock or super stock is a matter of continuing debate among
linguists, today it is generally accepted that there are 150 different
language stocks in the Americas. To give some perspective to this
diversity, there are more language stocks in the Americas than
in the rest of the world combined.
One of the 150 New World language stocks, Eskimo-Aleut, also
spans the Arctic and so has Asian and European relatives. Another
language super stock, Na-Dené, composed of the language stocks
Athabaskan, Tlingit and Eyak, and located in Alaska and the northwest
coast (but also in the southwestern US), is also believed to have
relatives in Asia, possibly the Yeneisian languages of central Siberia.
It has long been suggested, and the issue is not particularly
controversial, that peoples speaking Eskimo-Aleut and Na-Dené
moved back and forth between Asia and the Americas. A new study
published on March 12 in the journal PLoS, "Linguistic Phylogenies
Support Back-Migration from Beringia to Asia," found that Na-Dené
is not descended from Yeneisian (as the Bering Strait Theory would
infer) but the other way around, that there was a "back-migration
into central Asia than a migration from central or western Asia
to North America." (As an aside, the study, true to "science by
press release" fashion, argues that this supports the "Beringian
Standstill" hypothesisthat Indians paused in Beringia for
thousands of years before colonizing the New Worldbut the
study only examined the Na-Dené language stock, whose speakers
still live in the Alaskan part of Beringia to this very day, and
so it would seem the study would just as easily support the Na-Dené
view that they have been there since time immemorial.)
Other than Eskimo-Aleut and Na-Dené, linguists have yet
to find any connection with any language stocks of the Americas
and those of Asia. Along with the tremendous hemispheric diversity,
this created serious doubts about the dates proposed by archaeologists
and physical anthropologists for Indian origins. At the beginning
of the 20th century it was held to be at most 10,000 years and generally
only 5,000 years. In 1916, Edward Sapir, among the most important
and influential linguists in history, countered the prevailing archaeological
view; "ten thousand years, however, seems a hopelessly inadequate
span of time for the development from a homogeneous origin of such
linguistic differentiation as is actually found in America." Instead
he argued that, "the best piece of evidence of great antiquity of
man in America is linguistic diversification rather than archaeological."
One of America's greatest scientists, Franz Boas, generally
considered to be the father of modern anthropology and an important
linguist in his own right, in his classic study, Race, Language,
and Culture, published in 1940, wrote that not only were American
Indian languages "so different among themselves that it seems doubtful
whether the period of 10,000 years is sufficient for their differentiation,"
but that the evidence of extremely ancient Indians would some day
be found, and that, "all we can say, therefore, is that the search
for early remains must continue." Indeed, Boas was among the first
to propose, based on the evidence from an expedition that he led
to the Bering Strait region in 1897, the "back migration" from the
Americas to Asia.
Linguists were not the only ones who recognized the importance
of the linguistic evidence. The great British paleo-anthropologist
Louis Leakey firmly believed that the linguistic evidence showed that
Indians were likely to be many tens of thousands of years old and
possibly much older, and shortly before his death in 1972 he began
to sponsor fieldwork in the Americas in the hopes of proving this.
But most American archaeologists and physical anthropologists, where
the dogmatism of the Bering Strait Theory is most pronounced, dismissed
or ignored the linguistic evidence, leading people and the mainstream
press to assume that linguists were silent on this subject, even though
the reverse was true.
Starting in 1987, the tensions between the proponents of the
Bering Strait Theory and linguists turned into open warfare as archaeologists
and geneticists used a highly disputed (and now completely discredited)
theory by the linguist Joseph Greenberg to claim that the linguistic
evidence now (after hundreds of years of refuting it) showed that
Indians migrated from Asia to the New World around 15,000 years
ago. The dispute led to a torrent of scientific papers by the world's
most prominent linguists denouncing the use of "non-science" and
faulty data to back the Bering Strait Theory. The archaeologists
and geneticists largely ignored the objections, forcing a group
of linguistsled by Lyle Campbell, author of the standard work
in that field, American Indian Languages: the Historical Linguistics
of Native America, and Ives Goddard, curator at the National Museum
of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution and the linguistic
and technical editor of the massive Handbook of North American Indiansto
write to the American Journal of Human Genetics in 2004 and condemn
the widespread use of pseudoscientific linguistic "evidence" in
genetic studies about Indian origins.
The dispute also led the influential linguist, Johanna Nichols,
to publish "Linguistic Diversity and the First Settlement of the
New World," in the journal Language in 1990. In her introduction,
she first made two important scientific points: the diversity of
the languages of the New World is due to "the operation of regular
principles of linguistic geography;" and that the linguistic and
archaeological evidence from the Sahul clearly contradicted the
attempts to assign early dates for the Bering Strait migration,
since the assignment of early dates in the New World would create
a scientific anomaly; "but such a discrepancyone of at least
an order of magnitudemust be assumed if we adhere to the Clovis
[15,000 years ago] or received chronology [20,000 years ago] for
the settlement of the New World."
Nichols' paper used six independent linguistic methods for calculating
American Indian antiquity and she determined that it would have taken
a minimum of 50,000 years for all of the American Indian languages
to have evolved from one language, or 35,000 years if migrants had
come in multiple waves. She concluded that, "The unmistakable testimony
of the linguistic evidence is that the New World has been inhabited
nearly as long as Australia or New Guinea."
The advocates of the Bering Strait Theory have countered that
the linguistic evidence, strong as it may be, is not "proof" that
Indians have inhabited the Americas for more than 15,000 years,
and granted, it is not proof, it is evidence. The demand by the
proponents of the Bering Strait Theory for "indisputable proof"
is actually a curious but important aspect of that theory. Science
is only rarely able to prove things with absolute certainty, and
it normally confines itself to mathematical probability. As one
scientist put it, "proof is not a currency of science," and virtually
all widely accepted scientific theories are based upon the preponderance
of the evidence, not proof. This strident demand for "proof" while
ignoring the evidence is abnormal in science and reflects the fact
that originally the Bering Strait Theory was not a scientific theory
at all, but a dogma. And this dogmatic stance, along with the vicious
nature of the debate surrounding it, has long been a sore point
for many scientists, not just for Indians.
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