Source of book: Borrowed from the library
This book was recommended by not one, but two authors I love. Archaeologist R. E. Burrillo is one - his work on that side of the subject is the counterpart to Raff’s work on the genetic side. The other is anthropologist Augustin Fuentes. With those recommendations, I knew I had to read the book.
Origin is all about the ongoing quest to uncover the origin and spread of Native Americans in the western hemisphere. This is an area where the available information has greatly expanded in the last few decades, both because of archaeological discoveries, and the ability to extract and sequence DNA found in human remains from tens of thousands of years ago.
Not too long ago, the general consensus was that the “clovis” culture was the first in the Americas, and came here between 14,000 and 13,000 years ago. Then came the discovery of a number of pre-clovis sites, and the analysis of the DNA.
At this time, there is plenty of evidence that the ancestors of the Native Americans came here before the clovis period, but not yet a consensus as to the details of when. This book examines the evidence, and looks at the possibilities.
Just a general warning: this book is super nerdy, and in some places gets into significant detail about things like how DNA is extracted and sequenced - the author spent years working in the lab, so she knows. While most of the book is layperson-level storytelling and information, it does get into the weeds. For someone like me, this is great, but your mileage may vary.
The extensive bibliography and endnotes contain the primary sources for the information as well, if you want to go deeper. As the author puts it, this book is not for academics, but she hopes people will look at her sources for more information.
The book is also an interesting amalgam of sources. The author’s specialty in genetics is the core source, but she spends a lot of time talking about the archaeology as well - how they found artifacts and remains, how they are preserved from contamination, and more. Finally, she brings in the oral histories of the descendants of the ancient peoples she is studying. One of the problems of the implicit bias in favor of white supremacy is that certain folk histories are disregarded, while others are accepted without sufficient skepticism. (Just to give a few, the literalist approach to Genesis, and the way some people take the King Arthur legends as gospel truth.)
The author also spends a good bit of time, particularly at the end of the book, discussing ethical issues. I mean, how would any of us feel if our ancestors were exhumed from their graves, used for research, and stuck in a museum? Yeah, not so good.
So, policies have been put in place more recently that involve the descendants of these ancient ancestors in the process. In practice, what this has meant is that modern tribes usually allow research, but want the bones eventually reinterred respectfully, and to have input into the ways the research is used. This is a really simplified account - the book has much more, and I thought the author did an excellent job in capturing the nuance in a respectful way.
As with all of these sorts of books, I really won’t be able to get into the details - this isn’t intended to be a summary of what is in the book. The author is the author for a reason - she is far better at explaining her area of expertise than I will ever be. I hope to at least create an interest in this book so that people will read it.
With that in mind, I took some notes, and it turns out that most of them are not about the main topic and narrative, but about the many sidebars - which often contain fascinating topics adjacent to the main one - and some specific stories that I particularly liked. Because of this, my quotes will undoubtedly create a misleading impression of the book. Assume that I have left out the main points because the book makes them so much better than I could.
And also, because I love rabbit trails. Just saying.
First, in the introduction, a footnote explains something I hadn’t really understood before. When scientists talk about the past, they use a particular convention to keep dates consistent across books and research published over time.
Specifically, they use “Calibrated Dates,” which means that the present day, for purposes of calculation, is 1950 CE. So, when you see, “x years before present,” that means, before 1950.
For ancient dates, this isn’t a big deal. Ten thousand years before present is also about ten thousand years before 1950, or 2024. But for accuracy, adjust dates to add the 74 years since then.
Also in the introduction is a summary of the clovis-first idea that most of us learned in school. (Assuming we learned it at all. My Fundie curriculum assumed a 4000 year old earth, and rapid dispersal after the Flood. I learned more accurate history on my own…)
For archaeologists, [pre-clovis human remains] Shuka Kaa added a significant piece of evidence against an outdated theory: the idea that a human presence in the Americas was recent, resulting from an overland migration about 13,000 years ago. This may have been the story you learned in school.
But we have learned over the last few decades that this story is not accurate. It does not even come close to accounting for the piles of new evidence that have been amassed by archaeologists and geneticists.
She also notes that this particular discovery represents a refreshing change in how we go about investigating the evidence of the past.
The story of Shuka Kaa and the other ancient peoples who were the inhabitants of the Americas is not just ancient history. It’s also a story about the present: Shuka Kaa became the nexus of an extraordinary collaboration between different groups of people who came together to study him. This shows us how much a collaboration between Indigenous peoples, scientists, and government agencies can achieve when following an approach respectful of tribal sovereignty and values, Indigenous knowledge, and scientific curiosity. But in the story of American anthropology and genetics, this partnership has historically been the exception, not the rule. Fortunately, as we shall see, this is changing.
The author also explains something that I myself have felt in reading and writing. As a white guy, my opinion about the issues that women and people of color face seems a bit superfluous, and perhaps not helpful. I have benefited greatly at the expense of the Indigenous peoples of this land. And yet, I also know that I should use my privilege as best I can to make the world better for those who have historically gotten the short shrift.
I am not myself Native American; I’m the great-great-grandchild of immigrants from Poland, Ireland, and England who came to the United States in the early 20th century in search of a better life for themselves and their children. I have no idea if my ancestors were aware of the long history of settlers dispossessing the Indigenous peoples of this place of their land and culture and even committing genocide…but I am. I am also conscious of the equally long history of people in my profession declaring themselves the experts on other peoples’ origins, lives, cultures, and histories, sometimes using despicable methods to get the data they needed. It’s important that I acknowledge these two facts at the beginning of the book.
I too suspect my ancestors - non-violent Mennonites fleeing persecution - were not particularly aware of the displacement they benefited from. I cannot claim such ignorance, and must do my best within the system I was born in to acknowledge those inconvenient facts, and right whatever wrongs I can.
Early in the book, Raff discusses the earliest archaeology in America, and the ludicrous - and thoroughly racist - assumptions that her forebearers made. Specifically, the belief that the Native Americans they encountered were primitive savages who couldn’t possibly have created the incredible civilization evidenced by the discoveries. This lead to the fabrication of elaborate mythologies whereby some now-lost race of white people did the building.
I’ll mention a couple of them, but this just scratches the surface. Of course, there is the Mormon myth of the lost tribes of Israel, who were wiped out by the Native Americans, who where then punished by being given dark skin. (Ouch.) Or the one which otherwise admirable author Madeleine L’Engel used in A Swiftly Tilting Planet, of Welsh explorer Madoc and his founding of the great civilizations in America.
It isn’t just fiction, though: pseudoscience continues to abound in this area.
Alongside mainstream archaeological models for how people got to the Americas lie alternative ideas for their origins. These theories are bizarre, diverse, and fanciful, encompassing everything from the notion that the first peoples in the Americas were ancient astronauts to the absurd idea that the Smithsonian curators are secretly hiding the skeletons of giants in their vaults. (I’ve been in these facilities and can assure you that there are no giant skeletons or hidden secrets.) While fringe theories about the past often pretend to be scientific, they don’t follow scientific standards, and their theories are simply updated versions of the same Mound Builder myths that Europeans used to explain away the achievements and culture of Native Americans.
As one who reads a lot of old books, I have run across so many variations on this theme. Heaven forbid we white people actually realize that the Indigenous Americans were our equal - and in many cases were ahead of Europeans in science.
Speaking of myths, another one that Raff explodes is the idea that “race” is real. It isn’t. There is only one human race, and contrary to popular belief, genetic variation doesn’t actually follow our cultural assignment of race to other humans.
Early genetic studies in the 20th century - focused on mitochondrial and Y chromosome variation - showed that the racial categories so often used by early physical anthropologists did not correspond to actual patterns of genetic variation. Our ability to sequence whole genomes - the most amount of information about a person’s genetic ancestry that it’s possible to obtain - confirmed this: While populations vary genetically, this genetic variation does not follow patterns of racial categories articulated by Blumenbach, Morton, and others. If that statement surprises you, it is because these concepts are so deeply engrained within our culture.
I highly recommend Augustin Fuentes’ book, Race, Monogamy, and Other Lies They Told You for a more detailed look at this issue.
One of the stories in the book that particularly struck me was that of George McJunkin. Ever heard of him? Me either.
In 1908, George and a fellow cowboy were out looking for cattle after a catastrophic flood had nearly wiped out the town of Folsom, New Mexico. (That flood itself has some interesting tales to be told.) McJunkin noticed a pile of bones that had apparently been unearthed, and realized that they were of a bison. A really huge-ass bison. Larger than any living one.
George was experienced and a bit of a self-taught naturalist, and he realized this find was important. Yet he was unable to get the others in the town interested.
In significant part, because he was black.
It wasn’t, sadly, until after his death that someone remembered what he had talked about, and investigated the find. This would be one of the most important archaeological and anthropological finds of the early 20th century.
Like happened far too often, huge discoveries were made by women and people of color who never got credit until decades later. And even then, their names don’t make it into the curriculum.
On a related note, there is a snarky footnote about how archaeologists of the past seem to ignore women.
Archaeologists David Kilby and J. M. Adovasio have both confirmed my impression that the archaeological literature up until the 1990s recognized women as having been around, but they didn’t really get discussed or considered as part of the theory because they obviously neither made nor used stone tools. Nuanced discussions of women in the past became more common beginning in the 1990s.
This is why I get frustrated in discussing diversity with right wingers. There is this “DEI initiatives mean more qualified white males don’t get the job, while unqualified women and minorities do.” Leaving aside a whole host of other issues like implicit bias, access to opportunities, and so on, there is a truth that diversity itself is a positive good, for the reason illustrated by that quote. If all you have are a bunch of dudes, it is likely that they won’t even notice their assumption that ancient women didn’t make or use tools. Which, WHAAAT? Seriously? And ditto with the “brown people couldn’t have built that” assumption above.
And on another related note, there is an excellent sidebar that starts with our current knowledge that the assumption that men hunt and women gather is as faulty as the assumption that women weren’t warriors. We have significant evidence to the contrary.
But also, as the sidebar continues, even that way of putting it probably misses some things. The idea of a gender binary, for example, is very Western - and indeed very Aristotle. I’ll quote some of the passage.
Gender, in anthropology, refers to both a person’s internal identity and the socially constructed roles that people practice. Gender and sex may be aligned, or they may not. Many societies in the past and present recognize multiple ways in which gender is defined. We can’t confidently assume that we know what a person’s gender was simply because we can determine their biological sex from their DNA or the shape of their pelvis.
We don’t know whether the first Wilamaya Patjxa individual was considered a woman by herself and others. Although she was biologically female according to her skeletal features and DNA, that may not have been her gender identity. Contemporary and historical Indigenous groups of the Americas - as in other societies around the world - have diverse conceptions of gender that don’t necessarily align with the male/female duality imposed by Christian colonizers.
Yet another bit of wisdom we lost from the Native Americans at the hands of white supremacist patriarchal colonizers.
By the end of the book, the author has gone back in time to far before the settlement of the Americas. One fascinating discovery was of two baby teeth from a pair of boys in Siberia. They were eventually dated to around 39,000 years ago.
Even more shockingly, the dry cold preserved them so well that not only was DNA able to be extracted, eventually the entire genomes of both boys was sequenced. The whole freaking genome, from nearly 40,000 years ago!
That’s pretty amazing, and in the context of the book, provides significant evidence of the place where the ancestors of the Native Americans started their journey.
There is a quote in that context that I wanted to note.
One piece of technology in particular made the difference between living above and below the Arctic Circle: The humble sewing needle, which today we can buy in packs of 16 for about #4 at a craft store, was a wondrous device 38,000 years ago. The eye in the needle, which required complex planning and dexterous craftsmanship to make from mammoth ivory, allowed people to tailor insulated clothing, sleeping bags, gloves, and house coverings. Imagine standing on the windswept plains of northern Oklahoma on a December evening, or walking by Lake Michigan in the depths of a Chicago winter. Now imagine the temperature about twice as cold. It’s easy to see how tailored fur clothing would have allowed you to spend many hours each day outdoors hunting and gathering food, making the difference between life and death in these climates.
It seems likely, given the evidence we have, that the Indigenous Americans initially spent many years - a few thousand perhaps - living in what we can Beringia, which is the land bridge between Russia and Alaska.
“Land Bridge” doesn’t really capture it, however. This was no narrow passage, but in fact a place with twice the area of Texas. That’s larger than any country in Europe by more than four times. It was a big place, and because of its location, its long coasts would have been largely free of the ice that covered the continents.
I did find the discussion of ethics to be quite interesting. It doesn’t make for quite the stories of the other chapters, but as a way of thinking, it is compelling. And also far from simple. Which isn’t always easy to get the average person - particularly the MAGA and religious fundamentalist sorts who want easy, black and white answers to everything - to understand. The same applies to genetics in general.
Many of the programs that compare genomes are complicated to use and can lead non-experts to overly simplistic (or outright incorrect) assumptions about history and race.
I’ll close with a bit from the epilogue, which really captures the heart of the ethical landscape.
The disconnected view of ancient human remains as simply part of natural history, like the fossils of extinct trilobites - the legacy of Thomas Jefferson and the scientists that followed him - underpins the history of genetics and anthropology.
But when scientists turn our lens onto our own history, we are forced to examine ugly things: science used to justify racism, insensitivity in the pursuit of high-impact publications, and atrocities committed in the name of research.
We who work in this field cannot erase our past mistakes - and many of us, myself included, have done research in the past using approaches we now recognize as wrong. We must acknowledge this, as well as the fact that we have benefited from an unjust system. Only then can we conscientiously address our practices so that our quest to understand ancient humanity helps us maintain our own. In doing so, we must be cognizant of what we are asking for from Indigenous peoples when we design our research.
There is a lot of wisdom in this that applies to life in general, and how we live in a diverse world.
I really enjoyed this book - I find archaeology and anthropology fascinating subjects. If that applies to you, definitely give this book a try.
