You have all most likely heard of the Kennewick Man:
In 1996, there was a boat race on the Columbia River, near Kennewick, in Washington State, in the extreme northwestern United States. Two fans pulled ashore to get a good viewpoint of the race, and, in the shallow water at the edge of the bank, they found a human skull. They took the skull to the county coroner, who passed it to archaeologist James Chatters. Chatters and others went to the Columbia and retrieved a nearly complete human skeleton, with a long, narrow face suggestive of a person of European descent. But the skeleton was confusing to Chatters; he noticed that the teeth had no cavities and for a 40-50 year old man (the most recent studies suggest he was in his thirties), the teeth were extremely ground down. Cavities are the result of a corn-based (or sugar-enhanced) diet; grinding damage usually results from grit in the diet. Most modern people don’t have grit in their food, but do consume sugar in some form and so do have cavities. And Chatters spotted a projectile point embedded in his right pelvis, a Cascade point, normally dated between 5,000 and 9,000 years before the present. It was clear that the point had been there while the individual was alive; the lesion in the bone had partially healed. Chatters sent off a bit of the bone to be radiocarbon dated. Imagine his astonishment when he received the radiocarbon date as over 9,000 years ago. [Link]
The cover of Time Magazine this week is dedicated to new discoveries about the Kennewick Man reported inside. For many years his remains were the subject of a heated court battle. Native Americans claimed that they had the right to reclaim and bury his remains (thereby preventing scientific study) because he was one of their own. The Time Magazine article (subscription currently required) explains how forensics reveals that the Kennewick Man was not racially what we would consider Native American, but rather Polynesian or Ainu. He therefore predates existing Native American tribes. Indolink.com takes it a step further and includes speculation that he may have been from South Asia. It gets tricky because some people use “South Asia” when they really mean “Southeast Asia”:
Now it appears that analysis of Kennewick Man, places him “closer to southern Asians and nearly equidistant to modern Native Americans and Polynesians.”
That’s because the skull “appears to have strongest morphological affinities with populations in southern Asia, and not with American Indians or Europeans in the reference samples” according to one study.
The interpretations by anthropologists Joseph F. Powell and Jerome C. Rose are based on a scientific technique called craniofacial morphometric analysis. It involves detailed study of the shape of the skull and face, using a sophisticated method called multivariate analysis. In some cases, more than 60 different dimensions of a skull are measured and compared with comparable dimensions considered typical of specific racial groups. [Link]
I think it is a bit of a leap to suggest that the Kennewick man may have been part of a group that originated in South Asia (as opposed to Polynesian), but it is still a tantalizing possibility to think of how capable humans were millenia before Columbus.
Early descriptions of the Kennewick skull led to reports that the man was Caucasoid and possibly European. After a more careful analysis, the skull appeared to be longer and narrower than those of Native Americans. Dr. Joseph Powell of the University of New Mexico reports that its physical affinities appeared to be closer to those of South Asians or Polynesians than either Europeans or American Indians…Dr. Douglas Owsley of the Smithsonian Institution and Dr. Richard Jantz of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville reported…”[Other similar remains] do not have the broad faces, they do not have the big, prominent cheekbones that you think of as the more traditional features of the Chinese and American Indians.” Instead they looked more like the inhabitants of, say, Indonesia, or even Europe. [Link]
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Paging Razib Paging Razib
oh, i’m here, now
The Time Magazine article (subscription currently required) explains how forensics reveals that the Kennewick Man was not racially what we would consider Native American, but rather Polynesian or Ainu.
“polynesians” came into existence over the past 3,000 years as they expanded from austronesia (taiwan to indonesia to papua) into the pacific. how could kenn. have affinities to a group that didn’t exist when he was alive?
these questions are always the problem, out modern sensibilities and categories don’t project back into the past!!! especially over 5,000 years into the past!!! we all know the problems of “looking middle eastern” or what not as south asians, so i think we could relate.
my understanding (i haven’t read the time piece) is that some circumstantial DNA evidence as well as morphological metrics do point to the reality that kenn. might not have strong affinities to modern native americans. but, here are some issues
1) native americans are probably at least a two layer synthesis, na dene + everyone else. this dichotomy was presented by the late linguist martin greenberg, and specialists in the area rejected him by and large from what i gather, but, genetically he makes sense. the peoples of the northwest quadrant of north american seem to be a later migration into the new world than other native peoples.
2) evolution happens. 10,000 years is a long time, about 500 generations. i’ve already noted that agricultural peoples the world over have evolved simultaneously toward smaller dentition over the past 10 K, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out why!
3) even if the tree-of-life that produced kenn. is off the main branch that lead to native americans, that doesn’t mean he was an ‘ainu’ or ‘polynesian.’ ainus and polynesians share one trait: they tend to exhibit less “specialized” morphologies that other east asians. ainus traditionally “look caucasian,” but genetic tests indicate clearly they are a branch of eastnern asians. EVOLUTION HAPPENS, the way east asians look as we understand them might be a feature of the last 10,000 years, and other peoples have not taken the same track.
4) as for the south asian angle, well, a lot of eastern eurasians do have origins via south asia, but that doesn’t mean they are south asian, and it doesn’t mean they have anything to do with south asians over the last 25,000 thousand years.
5) working back, and we are all related, to differing extents. the language of modern history and genealogy just doesn’t work well projected far into the past.
6) part of the problem with kenn. is that it is intertwined with politics. first nations think that their standing as first nations depends on them being first nations. some of them make up stuff about how their religion says they were always here (85% of native americans are christians, that’s why i’m saying that they ‘make it up,’ i doubt these religions sensibilities are very powerful aside from a few activists across the group, but they stay silent when these activists speak because they support the political plank of native american rights and power). part of the problem is an understanding of a quasi-lockean property rights as applied to peoples defined by blood quanta has been mixed up with the paleoanthroplogy.
I’m sure he’d have something of “A+” caliber to say…. heh heh…
ok, the first comment was a bit fast & off the cuff, so i’m going to try and head off future questions about what i’m trying to get at by being more explicit.
1) morphology != phylogeny evaluated over evolutionary time. evolution happens, so convergent selective forces can drive genetically disparate populations toward the same median phenotype without any ancestral connection to admixture. humans have a fixed number of phenotypic ranges they can explore…for example, there are no blue haired peoples because blue pigment isn’t something we humans produce. similarly there are constraints in how different populations can appear to us, so some of them tend to drift into the same canals. ‘negrito’ asian peoples are very distantly related to africans, and far closer to browns and yellows, but they ‘look’ african.
2) use of modern terminology for ancient populations is problematic. polynesians, ainus, etc. are categories that are recent creations. they may have genetic realities (they do) that don’t tell us what we’re trying to find out, ie.
3) populations don’t exhibit any essences of fixed typologies, they are a flux of genes. if you look at kenn’s face, that could tell you something that contradicts his mtDNA that contradicts his dentition. genes, traits, might have histories, but the further back you go the less intelligible it is to say that a “population” has a history because populations are always a flux of genes come in and out and operated upon by selection.
4) if you go back far enough, almost all east asians and natives and australian aboriginals are indian or brown or south asian. look at the map, you could go around up through mongolia…and some east asian genes seem to have done that…but that’s a hard slog. saying that kenn. is south asian isn’t that different from saying he’s african.
5) there is a lot of weird politics involved in this.
to paraphrase da paley everything comes from india.
but my word razib! – my addled brain actually absorbed what you were saying this time – most of the time i think you and saheli should have a little sidebar devoted to you (and I mean that in the most respectful manner).
I think you said the skull is about as polynesian as cricket is indian. if so – i agree. I think i’ll make me some chai with ginger and basil. i feel quite brainy all of a sudden.
btw, i think that the cover pic. makes him look kind of like sulu.
Razib
Do they “look caucasian”? I mean they looked different but i think many ainu would probably be visualy indistinguishable from central asians assuming a basis of 3 primary races caucasiod,negroid,mongoloid ainus appear to be a mix of all 3. Not that i buy the 3 primary race theory(ies)
Do they “look caucasian”? I mean they looked different but i think many ainu would probably be visualy indistinguishable from central asians assuming a basis of 3 primary races caucasiod,negroid,mongoloid ainus appear to be a mix of all 3. Not that i buy the 3 primary race theory(ies)
they look caucasian because europeans had seen a bunch of japanese before they hit hokkaido. how you perceive people depends on how you’ve been primed. any same race adoptee can tell you that 🙂 (ie, they are often told they look like one of their parents). but, please note:
1) there are probably no ‘pure blood’ ainus left. 2) apparently one of the ainu words (i forget if their dialects were intelligible, so bear with me) to distinguish themselves from yayoi japanese was ‘one of the same socket.’ in other words, the ‘hairy ainu’ (a japanese appellation) were aware that they lacked the epicanthic fold characteristics of their southern neighbors. 3) the ainu are probably the ‘indigenous’ residents of japan, the remants of the jomon cultural complex which gave way to the yayoi rice agriculturalists 2000 years ago. 4) japanese themselve are probably about a 3:1 mix of yayoi & jomon, that is, one reason they often look “less asian” than koreans is because their east asian morphology is leavened by a healthy dose of jomon/ainu stock. this might be one reason that some japanese naturally have brown hair and large noses, as well as greater body hair vis-a-vis koreans.
with all that said, this is about a population that still exists, on an isolated island, as opposed to one other reference population. still kind of complicated. that’s why all this jabber about kenn. is all politics and bullshit.
the lakota phrase for this is mitakuye oyahsin
lakota people believe the original lakota people emerged from a cave in South Dakota. to what extent do other people have a responsibility to respect this belief?
um…what difference would it make?
“lakota people believe the original lakota people emerged from a cave in South Dakota.”
curiouser and curiouser. now the origin myth of the sepia people, said to rarely emerge from a bunker in north dakota, makes more sense.
How is it that the gentleman on the cover of the magazine is clean-shaven? Do shaving kits go back so long in time?
Native Americans don’t grow beards AFIK.
There is a lot of evidence that all Native Americans originally came from areas now known as India, Pakistan, Mongolia, Nepal, etc… Kennewick man is pretty far north in the Americas, so I don’t have a lot of comment on him in particular. However, I believe the Native peoples of South and Central America, definitely have roots in India and surrounding countries.
I have read that there is a native language in a remote part of Peru that strongly resembles Tamil. The types of temples found in the region are architecturally similar (exact same scale) as ancient temples found in Tamil Nadu. In 2004 archaeologists from Vanderbilt University found a story painted on a cave wall in Guatemala. It reportedly tells a story that strongly resembles the Ramayana. The king of this recently uncovered kingdom was a man named, Taj Chan Ahk.
Go figure.
I agree with the previous comments on evolution. People just don’t look the same after thousands of years.
This reminds me of Chaddies and their fixation of claiming everything Indian. Looks like some other SAs try to do it too.
Can you provide a link? I’ve never heard of this.
This has to be one hell of a coincidence. “Ancient” temples of TN are certainly not more than 1000-1500 years old. Most, if not all, temples in India are from the post-Shankara period(~700AD), when Adi Shankara popularised idol-worship so that Hinduism could swallow Buddhism. There has been no documented evidence that Tamils ever went beyond Indonesia/Malaysia.
There are Greek stories that resemble Ramayana (Helen of Troy). That does not mean anything.
M. Nam
Quick! Call the California Board of Education – Historical Textbook Reform Bureau (or whatever)… tell them:
“Ancient Indian men and women had different rights because the men got to travel to America while the women stayed at home (and cooked non-corn food with grits)”
Aren’t we talking of Kennewick Man? I was just wondering why he wasn’t all bearded and hirsute for a man who lived 9000 years back.
Can you provide a link? I’ve never heard of this.
Hmm, methinks he looks for a missing link…
“Ancient” temples of TN are certainly not more than 1000-1500 years old.
True, but I think that only holds true for temples built stone-by-stone and not those carved & sculpted as caves and reliefs.
There has been no documented evidence that Tamils ever went beyond Indonesia/Malaysia.
Well, no one has been able to directly prove that Tamils or any other Indian went beyond Indonesia or Malaysia. However, there is evidence to support the theory, such as: the distinct relationship between Easter Island scripts and Indus Valley scripts; the similarity between Tamil catamarans, Polynesian canoes and seafaring navigational techniques; and the belief that Polynesia arose from Southeast Asian migratory populations, many of whom were Tamil. None of this, of course, proves anything but it does make it impossible to dismiss any hypothesis of Tamil/Indian heritage in Polynesia and subsequently, America.
Reply to # 19.
Dude, it is an artist’s impression of the Kennewick man….not his real picture, for crying out loud.
Calipers OUT, everyone!
hm. brownz are just like everyone else i guess…next i’ll hear atlantis was actually brown.
sigh
People just don’t look the same after thousands of years.
Hey, Ashley, not true–I still have hair on my knuckles, back and feet, not to mention I’m about as low-brow as they come.
Um…it was, right?
well some lakota believe that the Wind Cave is the origin of First Man and First Women into the world. Its kind of like the other thread about when religious sensibilities clash with other types of world-views. In this case maybe the world view the validates scientific experimentation as a way to get at truth-claims. So in this view, the origin of Natives — Lakota from a cave in what’s now South Dakota is termed a myth. I wouldn’t personally want to make a judgement on this, as I wonder when it would matter anyway.
But anyway, I think Lakota were in Minnesota and moved to the Great Plains at some point, so I’m not sure how they trace their history from (now)South Dakota to Minnesota back to South Dakota. I think Razib is spot on when he says comparing people from millenia according to today’s racial and ethnic categories is not really possible/smart
MoorNam, I don’t have a link, but I am pretty sure I read about the linguistic similarities in a book by Hugh Fox.
Isnt Rock, half-polynesian??
nech, I think the Kennewick is 1st race in earth before caucasoid, mong, negro,& austarloid.
This is to Dogday,
While recovering from having my hip resurfaced in Chennai (Madras) in 2007, I stayed in Mammallapuran (Mahaballapuran) down the southeast coast a ways. There I saw how the caves, temples and bas reliefs were carved and sculpted from the native rock formations and how some were interrupted and left unfinished when the ruler at the time (the 1300AD) was overthrown.