-Caveat Lector-
(many of these bits of evidence have been availlable for a long time. Why
were they suppressed?
Why now are they being made public?
John
Policy on human remains hampers new thinking on
archaeological finds
By SOLVEIG TORVIK
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
December 5, 1999
It's counterintuitive to suppose that
early humans turned up their noses at
American real estate for as long as many
learned scholars insist they did. But
scholars, unlike the rest of us, are bound
by the rules of evidence. And the evidence
of earlier human habitation on this
continent has been non-existent.
Of course, that may be because, until
recently, few archaeologists thought the
evidence was there to find. If America's
human prehistory is a blank page,
nearsightedness on the part of those who
are trying to write it has been a
contributing factor. As Dr. Albert C.
Goodyear put it at a recent archaeological
conference in Santa Fe: "You don't look
for what you don't believe in."
Now, as the 21st century dawns,
archaeologists and anthropologists are
scrambling to come to terms with mounting
evidence that suggests people may have
arrived here much earlier, and from
different places, than conventional wisdom
has dictated for most of this century.
The conference, held under the auspices of
the Smithsonian Institution and the Center
for the Study of the First Americans at
the University of Oregon, was the first in
40 years on the fractious subject of the
peopling of the Americas. Turmoil
triggered by new discoveries and sharp
disagreements about what they mean served
as the backdrop to often archly
contentious proceedings.
As a result of provocative new discoveries
that challenge their assumptions, many
archaeologists indicated they've resolved
to "dig deeper," literally and
figuratively, into the mystery, and that's
a welcome development. Getting
archaeologists to believe in the
possibility that people may have lived
here before 13,000 years ago may be too
much to ask, given the paucity of
irrefutable evidence. Simply proceeding on
the assumption that it's a serious
possibility is good enough for starters.
Happily, the profession now seems poised
to think outside the box.
But as ill luck would have it, this
seismic shift in archaeologists' mental
approach to human prehistory in the
Americas comes just as the federal
government has determined that its duty
lies in facilitating destruction of what
little evidence does exist that might
allow scientists to shed light on who came
here when.
This is a lamentable congruence of events.
Tantalizing new scientific evidence that
suggests humans may have arrived here in
many disparate waves from more than one
direction and tens of thousands of years
earlier than commonly accepted is
irrelevant, according to official U.S.
policy.
Human remains, even those many thousands
of years old, routinely are given by U.S.
Park Service officials to tribes for
reburial on the unscientific assumption
that the remains are ancestors of modern
Native Americans.
Yet those remains, some of which appear
not to resemble modern Native Americans,
may hold invaluable answers to the
peopling of the Americas puzzle.
The likely result of the government's
failure to acknowledge that the prevailing
story of the peopling of the continent may
be wrong will be that evidence to support
that assertion will be lost forever.
It's bad enough that a good deal of the
evidence already may have been lost. It's
worse that it's been by deliberate
government design. Some of it has been
buried, both literally and figuratively,
on government orders, in Idaho and
Minnesota. And if tribes have their way
with Kennewick Man's remains, soon it may
be buried in Washington state as well.
That skeleton was found in 1996 on the
banks of the Columbia River and is dated
as 8,000 to 9,300 years old.
The government's anti-scientific behavior
was a chief complaint of many of the 1,200
conference participants who came to Santa
Fe to sort through the mess that
scientists, government bureaucrats,
Congress and Indian tribes have made of
human prehistory in the Americas.
It's a complaint well worth making. The
government's unreasonable response to the
bitter battle between tribes and
scientists for possession of old human
bones - Kennewick Man most prominent among
them - threatens to deprive everyone who
lives here, Native Americans most notably,
of the truth about human prehistory on
this continent.
The Park Service's human remains
repatriation policy "is driven by
expediency," Keith Kintigh, president of
the Society of American Archaeology,
charged at the conference. The SAA
supports most Indian claims, he stressed,
but culturally unaffiliated remains - that
is, those thousands of years old - should
not be treated the same way as those that
are more recent and unquestionably Indian.
He's right.
Decades of offensive behavior by arrogant
scientists indifferent to Indian
sensitivities about remains of their
ancestors tempt one to say that the
prohibition on research on ancient human
remains serves scientists right.
But this isn't about scientists; it's
about us. The public has every right to
know the truth, and the U.S. government
has no brief to hide it.
Nor does the government have any business
promulgating public policy on the basis of
anyone's religious belief. Yet that's
exactly what the Park Service's flawed
interpretation of the 1990 Native American
Graves Protection and Repatriation Act has
led to. The Park Service says, in effect,
that any human who died here, no matter
how long ago, had to be Indian.
"This view has become increasingly
improbable," Dr. Robson Bonnichsen, a
conference organizer and director of the
Center for the Study of the First
Americans, told the conferees.
The only survivors of ancient inhabitants,
present-day Native Americans, believe they
were the continent's first and only
people. That belief is grounded in
religious faith. Many tribes strenuously
object to scientific examination of
ancient remains. They say they don't need
science to tell them who these ancient
beings were.
But the rest of us do.
Indians have every legal and moral right
to rebury remains that clearly are their
ancestors. But they have no right to human
remains that are so old that claims to
them have to be taken on religious faith.
Science - in effect, the public - has the
right to learn all it can from those
remains.
Ironically, this controversy over
ownership of old bones - really a fight
over ownership of the human prehistory of
the Americas - comes at a moment when
technology can reveal an astonishing
amount about who these people were.
A little background:
For 60 years, U.S. archaeologists
steadfastly have clung to the rubric that
humans didn't arrive on American soil
until about 11,000 to 13,000 years ago.
The long-presumptive First Americans were
called Clovis because of a distinctive
11,500-year-old spear point first found
near Clovis, N.M. That same type of point
later was found in many places across the
country.
Here is the archaeologists' old story
line: The Clovis people came from Siberia
across the Bering Land Bridge that joined
it to Alaska. Just east of the Rocky
Mountains they found their way south via
an opening in the thick ice sheet that
covered most of the rest of the northern
continent. Once inside the borders of the
present United States, they hiked west,
east and south as far as Chile.
Trouble is, now there's compelling -
though hotly disputed - evidence that a
people whose culture bore no relationship
to Clovis already were living in Chile
12,500 years ago. Recent discoveries
suggest humans many have been in South
America 34,000 years ago and possibly even
40,000 years ago, though evidence for that
is hardly conclusive.
In any case, if the First People really
didn't get into Montana before 13,000
years ago, it would have been an
impressive feat indeed to hike from there
to Chile by 12,500 years ago.
And as for the ice-free corridor, forget
about it. The door into what is now the
United States was closed by a huge ice
sheet between 30,000 and 18,000 years ago,
some geologists have concluded.
If so, then how to explain persuasive
indications, recently unearthed by
researcher Steven R. Holen, of human
butchering of mammoths on the Midwest
plains 19,000 years ago? If that
radiocarbon dating is correct, the First
People would have had to have come down
the ice-free corridor before the door
froze shut 30,000 years ago.
And that's just part of the problem with
the old story. There's also evidence that
humans were in Pennsylvania perhaps as
early as 16,000 years ago.
Most contentious is the fact that ancient
skulls found in Idaho, Nevada, California,
Minnesota and Washington state do not
appear to resemble those of the
present-day American Indians long assumed
to have been the first people to inhabit
the continent.
The skull in Idaho belonging to Buhl Woman
is dated at 10,675 years old, the oldest
date yet for human remains in the country.
Her skull, as well as several others from
California, are more Polynesian than
Indian, said Douglas W. Owsley, a
respected forensic anthropologist at the
Smithsonian Institution. He's part of a
group of scientists who have sued for
access to Kennewick Man.
But the Park Service nonetheless deemed
Buhl Woman an ancestor to the
Shoshone-Bannock at Fort Hall, and she was
given to the tribe for reburial.
And this fall, the state of Minnesota
repatriated to a coalition of Sioux tribes
numerous ancient remains found in that
state. Among them was Minnesota Woman,
whose striking skull bore no resemblance
whatever to modern Indians, Owsley said.
These remains nonetheless were repatriated
for burial by a people who haven't been in
the area for more than 1,000 years, he
complained.
Adding to the avalanche of startling new
information is the recent assertion by Dr.
Walter Nevis of the University of
SUgftildeUao Paulo in Brazil that an
11,500-year-old skull of a woman that
scientists named Luzia - the oldest human
remains yet discovered on the continent -
appears Negroid.
Closer to home, experts also have tagged
Kennewick Man's skull as of Japanese Ainu,
Southeast Asian or perhaps Polynesian
genetic lineage. Polynesians and Southern
Asians may well have traveled along the
West Coast en route south in skin boats,
according to adherents of that theory.
None of that is to say that a biological
phenomenon scientists call "genetic drift"
could not over time have altered the first
Americans' skulls - be they Polynesian,
Southern Asian or whatever - so their
descendants would look as modern Indians
do today, some scientists rightly argue.
That's just one more reason to keep
ancient skulls accessible for future study
with better tools.
Aside from battles over bones, there's
also a heretical theory that those pesky
French - heaven help us - got here first.
Projectile points and other items found
both here and on the Iberian Peninsula
bear striking resemblances.
That has led Smithsonian anthropology
curator Dennis Stanford to contend that
early Americans were an Iberian-based
people scientists call Solutreans. They
hopscotched, perhaps in small boats made
out of hides, from modern-day Spain,
Portugal and southwestern France along the
icy edge of southern Greenland and Iceland
18,000 years ago, he postulates. They then
spread down the Eastern Seaboard over six
millennia into the American West, South
America and north to Canada. Despite
Stanford's eminence, few take him
seriously -- yet.
None of these theories is proven, of
course. So what are we to believe?
All of it, provisionally. Science is best
served by open minds.
One thing is certain: The ground is
shifting dramatically under the feet of
anyone who clings to the so-called
"Clovis-First, Clovis-Everywhere" theory
of the peopling of the Americas that has
hobbled scientific vision for so long.
Because so much new information that
demands to be taken seriously is emerging
with the advent of new technologies for
scientific analysis -- a single ancient
human hair subjected to DNA testing can
reveal volumes about its owner, for
example -- it's no longer heretical in
scientific circles to suggest that the
Americas were peopled many times by many
different folk from different places. In
fact, it's well on its way to becoming
what scientists call the prevailing
paradigm.
"There has been a shift in the burden of
proof to those who think Clovis was
first," David B. Madsen, an anthropologist
with the Utah Geological Survey, rightly
stated.
And with that shift should also come a
concomitant shift in the government's
policies for dealing with human remains
that, for reasons of great age or racial
characteristics, cannot be affiliated with
modern Indians. Government policy needs to
catch up with science.
Unfortunately, there's little sign
Congress is willing to correct a profound
flaw in the 1990 law that permits
repatriation of unaffiliated remains to
modern tribes.
SAA president Kintigh spoke in support of
a "clarification" of the law pertaining to
unaffiliated remains in a measure
sponsored by Rep. Doc Hastings, R-Wash.
Regrettably, that bill languishes in
Congress.
The 1990 law was passed before evidence of
earlier human presence on the continent
had come fully to the fore. So it's a safe
bet that most members of Congress who
supported the act didn't understand that
they were voting to bar access to
knowledge of America's prehistory. Any
responsible lawmaker should welcome the
opportunity to correct such a profound
error.
Francis McManamon, the Park Service's
chief archaeologist, is the target of
unhappiness among scientists who think he
and his agency have misinterpreted the
law. He had his ears warmed by numerous
critics at the conference.
After making a game but ultimately
unpersuasive case for his agency's
blinkered reading of the law, McManamon
told the group, "We'd be happy to have
congressional clarification, of course."
Park Service officials should take the
lead in seeking that clarification of this
ill-considered law.
---------------------
Solveig Torvik is an editorial writer and
a member of the Post-Intelligencer
Editorial Board. E-mail:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Send comments to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
� 1999 Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
All rights reserved.
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