One of my “crackpot” beliefs about human migration seems to be panning out:
At the height of the last ice age, Stanford says, mysterious Stone Age European people known as the Solutreans paddled along an ice cap jutting into the North Atlantic. They lived like Inuits, harvesting seals and seabirds.
The Solutreans eventually spread across North America, Stanford says, hauling their distinctive blades with them and giving birth to the later Clovis culture, which emerged some 13,000 years ago.
When Stanford proposed this “Solutrean hypothesis” in 1999, colleagues roundly rejected it. One prominent archaeologist suggested that Stanford was throwing his career away.
But now, 13 years later, Stanford and Bruce Bradley, an archaeologist at England’s University of Exeter, lay out a detailed case — bolstered by the curious blade and other stone tools recently found in the mid-Atlantic — in a new book, “Across Atlantic Ice.”
Here is much more.
Somebody owes me a casino……
Me too!
Does this mean we overpaid for Manhattan island?
Outstanding, 8
“One prominent archaeologist suggested that Stanford was throwing his career away”
Someone comment on this kind of notion. If proven correct, does he get the prominent archaeologists chair? Or at least an apology?
I have a degree in anthro and it is one of the most PC fields of study out there due in part to concerns about findings being used to justify eugenics. I’m not surprised an unorthodox theory was rejected.
I suspect the same thing happens everywhere with different details. I’m interested in that there is no risk to the gatekeeper and great career risk to the new idea proposer.
This is a standard problem in academia regardless of PC. Firing the guy who wins the Nobel 25 years later causes no harm to the shortsighted Dean/Dept head. Hiring someone whose pubs aren’t mainstream or in the right journals or not numerous enough causes local pain in the here and now, affecting rankings, funding, and prestige.
It’s hard to arbitrage good ideas if there’s no futures market in it.
I think mainly for this reasons, institutions eventually throttle any sort of meaningful intellectual inquiry. And if you look at the history of higher education instutions and academies, their normal role has been as bastions of orthodoxy. But there are occasions when this is not the case.
For society at large, I think the answer is not to somehow design a bureaucracy that is open to non-established ideas, but to make sure that intellectuals can function outside of the the established channels, and that valid ideas produced from the fringes can get into the mainstream eventually. In the context of academics, that means making sure the discussion includes amateurs from outside the academy, particularly in the social sciences where intellectual debate is at the most risk of being restricted, and the technical expertise required to make a meaningful contribution (though not non-existent) is less than in the “hard” sciences.
I think of my alma mater and I imagine it varies by subfield. Physical anthropologists would shrug and consider it interesting even if unorthodox, archaeologists would consider it possible but insufficiently supported, and socio-cultural anthropologists would shriek and denounce it as some sort of racist conspiracy theory regardless of evidence for or against.
Physical anthropologist can some of the worst. I once saw a prominent physical anthropologist from U of M actually say he couldn’t accept a theory about prehistoric man because that was a path to the Holocaust.
Yep, as note some of the very first comments in this thread: Did “we” overpay for Manhattan, indeed. There’s a lot to be concerned about in a quip like that.
The already-fallacious and flimsy argument (“this was originally their land before the evil whites showed up!”) for giving Amerindians special treatment grows even flimsier.
Throughout history and prehistory, people have migrated or grown extinct, and/or have been supplanted, conquered, assimilated, or annihated by other peoples.
Let’s get over it instead of trying to use such occurrences as justifications for hand-outs or affirmative action.
I certainly agree that history has many examples of the destruction of peoples. Does anyone see this as a good thing that we should all just accept? Is the conquest of the aborginals of North America just a working out of some mechanical historical process? What about Rwanda? What about the deJewification of Europe?
BTW, I doubt that objective data would support the contention that Native Americans live lifes of priviledge.
They live lives of privilege all right, but not lives of wealth. Nor health. Nor, I dare say, happiness. But privilege is theirs. That’s assuming you use “privilege” to mean privilege.
Strange – any not quite citizens in the country you live in? American Indians are privileged to have to deal with the federal government, as they are not citizens of the states in which they live. They are also privilieged to have that same federal government be the one that oversees the federal government’s handling of their affairs – leading to the trust fund scandal (which is undoubtedly still as ongoing as it has been for generations) -
‘If the lawsuit’s claims are correct, and there’s an overwhelming body of evidence that suggests they are, then the federal government has lost, misappropriated or, in some cases, stolen billions of dollars from some of its poorest citizens.
The trust accounts in question — which hold approximately $450 million at any given time — aren’t filled with government handouts. They contain money that belongs to individual Indians who have earned it from a variety of sources such as oil and gas production, grazing leases, coal production and timber sales on their allotted lands.
Revenues from such sources are held in more than 387,000 Individual Indian Money (IIM) accounts managed — or according to detractors, “mismanaged” — by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). “The BIA has spent more than 100 years mismanaging, diverting and losing money that belongs to Indians,” Echohawk says. “They have no idea how much has been collected from the companies that use our land and are unable to provide even a basic, regular statement to Indian account holders.”‘
—————
‘Echohawk’s claim that the BIA is completely out of touch with the amount of revenues it collects or should be collecting has been confirmed by countless congressional oversight hearings covering decades.
As an example, during one such hearing — a 1987 Appropriations Subcommittee hearing on uncollected royalties — then director of the Minerals Management Service William Bettenberg told the committee he was aware that hundreds of millions of dollars that belonged to Indians was going uncollected from oil royalties each year. This is in spite of the fact that MMS, a branch of the Department of the Interior, had been made aware of the annual lost revenue six years earlier. Bettenberg’s revelation is typical of BIA behavior. ‘
—————————-
‘Several years ago, after a decade of extensive pressure from the House Committee on Government Operations, the BIA agreed to contract with Arthur Anderson & Co. to audit and reconcile both the tribal accounts and a random sampling of some 17,000 IIM accounts. The sampling of the IIM accounts was to be a precursor to a complete reconciliation of all IIM trust accounts — the first in history.
What happened next is truly astounding. After years of work and millions of dollars in fees, Arthur Anderson was only able to reconcile the 2,000 tribal accounts — not the 17,000 IIMs — and only then for the relatively short period of some 20 years from 1973 to 1992.
For this 20-year period alone, the auditor noted that at least $2.4 billion in the tribal trust accounts was unaccounted for and billions of dollars more were virtually untraceable because of the questionable nature of the government’s records.’
——————————-
‘So how did the BIA’s financial house get into such disarray and why has it been allowed to stay that way? The truth is it has never been in order, and the reasons behind the seemingly never-ending tolerance of the BIA’s fiscally irresponsible behavior may prove more sinister than mere incompetence. Critics of the bureau point out that the United States has a long history of trying to separate Native Americans from their lands and way of life.
You can choose almost any year since the BIA’s predecessor, the Indian Department, was created in 1824 and find governments reports describing poor management, no accounting system, missing money, no attempt to fulfill the fiduciary duty to the Indians as promised and required by law.
Congress has verbally demanded accountability and drastic change in the BIA’s behavior for more than 100 years. Yet as of 1996 little if anything has actually changed. A 1992 report titled “Misplaced Trust: The Bureau of Indian Affairs’ Mismanagement of the Indian Trust Fund” was prepared by the Committee on Government Operations. The 66-page report contained a scathing review of the BIA and hundreds of examples of the bureau’s blundering over the years. ‘
http://www.albionmonitor.com/free/biatrustfund.html
It goes on – this is the sort of privilege that Native Americans experience.
As I had implied in my comment, one can have privileges without having lots of nice things. On caan even have privilege in one regard and anti-privilege in some other. See? It’s not difficult, is it?
And yet, answering the point about the ‘privilege’ of being less than a full citizen of the country you reside in was that difficult, it seems. Much like the privilege of being a true DC resident – that is, in the end, Congress is the final arbiter of local revenue, and what laws are allowed to be enacted. It is a rare privilege, of course – only about 600,000 DC residents are ruled thusly.
Native Americans are not citizens of the states they live in because they have tribal governments with jurisdiction over local matters. If members of a tribe wanted to dissolve the tribe and live as ordinary citizens in the state, I’m not sure there is anything preventing them from doing so. Certainly, individuals can leave the reservation and live like anyone else anytime they want to. Native Americans have been full U.S. citizens since 1924.
This is not to deny the historical wrongs involved here but Native Americans are not citizens of the states because they don’t want to be. Do you think the owners of the gambling casinos want to be subject to state jurisdiction and state gaming laws?
Please make a detailed account of how you have been harmed by the federal government’s favorable treatment of native americans (e.g., handouts), and I will file suit. Please note that any recovery might be reduced by how you have benefitted from the federal government’s unfavorable treatment of native americans (e.g., trail of tears).
Thanks for volunteering, but surely a discerning attorney such as yourself recognized that my complaint lies in using faulty notions of ancient population migrations and their putative significance to try and justify certain elements of our identity politics spoils system.
I, as have many others, have lost or not been allowed to bid on government contracts because Native companies are awarded them due to their race.
If you were to actually follow through on your claim of filling a lawsuit, failure would be inevitable.
Just like everybody else here, I think that people should be thankful for what they have, and pull themselves up by their bootstraps and stop blaming others for their failures.
@Flaw Really. Ok you offer to file a suit if it is shown that people are directly harmed. Mutiple small busnesses are harmed by the uncontested contracts that go to Native American companies. When this is pointed out you jump to a bootstrap arguement. Are you saying then that Native Americans should pull themselves up and stop blaming others? If so I agree.
Here’s some advice: stop blaming others for your problems. Nothing is more pathetic than a bunch of white guys crying over affirmative action. I’m white. I’m successful. No quota stood in my way. I have no sympathy whatsoever with men who have been handed the world and get their panties in a wad because some native fucking american of all people got a job when we got the whole goddamned country. Suck it up and deal.
Flaw,
Not everyone against affirmative action is white.
The chip on your shoulder and the emotion you displayed in that reply was a bit jarring.
You being successful and looking down upon whites who are against affirmative action and who have not enjoyed a high level of success is reminiscent of a hot girl looking down at mediocre-looking girls getting denied club entrance for not having “social skills” (illustrated by first 20 seconds of http://www.collegehumor.com/video/3895433/pov-hot-girl)
There will be successful people no matter how large the obstacle; doesn’t make the obstacle “right,” much less an obstacle rooted in race.
In any case, as unveiled by Espenshade and Chung, affirmative action is most deleterious to Asians when it comes to college admissions with almost no affect on whites (underrepresented minorities gain at the expense of Asians); a similar pattern probably holds for white collar jobs.
Shorter Miley Cyrax:
Poor white people when will they ever catch a break in this country.
Well, Steko, if you read my replies on this thread, it’d be the poor Asians who have the steepest hill to climb when it comes to opportunity. “Poor” as in the socioeconomic sense, not the moral-pity sense.
You mean if I agreed with your replies.
“it’d be the poor Asians who have the steepest hill to climb when it comes to opportunity.”
Which is why Asians are so hard to find at top colleges. The reason the crybaby conservatives have no credibility is because for every “underqualified” black or native american admission at top colleges there are a larger number of underqualified white legacy applicants. You rarely hear a peep about that, because really the whole anti-affirmative action movement is coded dogwhistle racism because overt racism is no longer orthodox.
Pretty simple to see that just because there’s a high proportion of Asians at colleges doesn’t mean there wouldn’t be more if not for discrimnation against them via AA.
Espenshade and Chung (2005) addressed the impact of legacies and athletes, and they’re much less significant than the discrimination against Asians. I’d link but I’m on iPhone, but it can be found via Google.
But I suppose shrieking and calling those opposed to AA racist and denigrating whites and conservatives is much more fun than reading even the most basic research on the topic.
I thought events like Gnadenhutten were why we give American Indians special treatment.
The “giving birth to the later Clovis culture” part seems to be a contention for which there is no evidence at all.
I mean, why don’t the recent findings demonstrate that Solutreans may very well have come to the Mid-Atlantic roughly 20,000 years ago, tooled around the area for a good long while, and then either died off, left, returned, drowned, or whatever? Why are Stanford/Lowery seeing these tools as the start of the eventually permanent cultural and racial status in the Western Hemisphere before the 15th Century?
The hypothesis of free and fair communication if ideas in academia is soundly rejected.
How? They came up with a non-mainstream theory and yet every single one of the proponents of the theory in that article had an academic job and none of them had lost it. Is your model for free and fair communication that every random theory gets immediately accepted by academia regardless of proof or evidence? These guys have half a dozen sites with no artifacts which are directly dateable. That’s hardly an open and shut case.
Exactly. They published a book. That’s it. Maybe a small minority of experts agrees with them. Fine. But it’s hardly a verdict. Why is everyone getting so excited?
For all we know these two might be another set of cranks in the long list of scientific history.
You really don’t know why they’re getting excited?
Tell me why every paper can’t be published on the internet – all of them, with both positive and negative critiques. We do this with many working papers.
We no longer have the constraint of the space between two book covers to limit journal entries. Internet journals will still be sorted by quality within the profession. What we won’t have is fewer than ten people deciding that the world will not get to see a certain paper for many years.
Even bad papers can provide insights that can motivate better research. Some people are very bright at identifying relationships, but they lack the technical skills and access to data to adequately research the topic.
As for cranks, there are plenty of those despite the supposed rigors of peer review.
Finding stone tools in the mid-atlantic must be tough. Thank gods for James Cameron.
Poor bastards were yesterday’s polar bears.
I imagine the latecomers just ate them.
Are humans megafauna?
When I was a wee lad, we were taught that our ancestors were woad-covered, head-hunting cannibals.
Those Iberians might have actually been North Africans (as defined in today’s terms).
What is an “Inuit”? And what did they do with the Eskimos? Genocide!
Eskimos and Inuits still live in Alaska. The definition of Inuit changes depending on location. Largely Inuit covers all arctic peoples, in most places other than Alaska. In Alaska, Eskimo is used because some of the tribes are not Inuit. It’s convoluted.
What amazes me about spearpoints and arrowheads is how they made them one way for several centuries, then switched to another way for several centuries, then another and so on. How did that work? Does every few centuries some Steve Jobs comes along who rethinks the spearpoint? I can see how it spreads. As soon as the Apple tribe introduces the iPoint, the Google and Samsung tribes copy it and within a few years it’s everywhere.
It’s amazing to see similar tools in parts of the world that never had any contact with one another. It doesn’t surprise me that the spear is universal, but worldwide development of the bow and arrow is quite a surprise.
It’s even more amazing to see common sense inventions overlooked for millenia such as the stirrup on a saddle or the porpax on a Greek shield.
Think of the courage (or desperation) of some humans who got into small boats and sailed or paddled to lands beyond the horizon such as Australia and Pacific islands.
I’d also note how odd it is that some inventions didn’t catch on everywhere. The most interesting example that occurs to me is the wheel, which was known in antiquity in South America, but it was only used on children’s toys. They never made carts or wagons with it.
As far as paddling off into the ocean goes, I’d speculate many of those people were manic-depressive or schizophrenic and believed that some higher power was calling them. I’d be curious how the rates of these mental disorders among native Americans compare to Siberians (or Iberians, as the case may be).
Another article on these guys suggested there are some European genetic markers in some groups of todays Amerindians. I had never heard that before and would like to know more. Other than that, i don’t find these guys theory too excited (the tool proof is though) and suspect these explorers died out or were integrated, whatever remained of them. It’s likely this may have happened a couple times in history. The biggest surprise (and it should be no surprise) is that humans were clever and capable of great travel even a long time ago.
There is also evidence of polynesian trade with Amerindians in S America and one of my ‘crack pot’ beliefs is that there were some later ‘by sea’ waves of trade and immigration to the Americas from Asia.
The admixture is attributable to Colonial-era Europeans, I’m fairly sure. Though more archaeological support for the Solutrean hypothesis could lead to geneticists looking deeper for prehistorical European genetic signals in Amerindians. A lot of “aboriginal” populations globally show admixture from other populations from the past few centuries.
So Kennewick Man was a cracker after all.
Whether he was of European origin or not, it has very little to do with this article. The finds here are of stone tools all found near the Chesapeake Bay. Kennewick Man was found in Washington State. It’s a long way between these two places.
The whole “Bering land bridge entrance 13,000 years ago” theory has been generally weakening in recent decades. I’m very curious as to what will ultimately replace it as the consensus scholarly opinion.
The article in Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solutrean_hypothesis) about this hypothesis lists some strong points against it that the Washington Post article leaves out:
* The genetic evidence suggests an all-Asian origin for current native populations. There’s one haplogroup that was thought to possibly have a European origin but later research has made that unlikely. So if Solutreans came here, none of their genetic markers survived.
* Oceanographic evidence suggests that there was not enough ice in the area at the time to enable the crossing as hypothesized.
* Sites in North America that are claimed as Solutrean show none of the cultural markings of known Solutrean sites in Europe.
So, at most, you can postulate a fringe cultural subgroup of Solutreans, small in number, who got lucky and managed to cross the ocean despite unfavorable conditions. They arrived in North America in numbers too small to survive on their own, and were taken in by natives. They passed on their technology, but they or their descendants died out before any of their distinct haplotypes passed into the general population. The natives then developed into the later Clovis culture (or passed on the technology that the Clovis adapted). Basically, it’s a real stretch. It would make a nice novel but it’s hardly a robust challenge to Asia-first theories.
I do think it’s worth putting this in context with the long history of Europeans denying the possibility that non-Europeans could have possibly figured out clever technology on their own. It’s not being PC to be skeptical of new theories that follow the same Eurocentric path. They might be right, but they should be greeted with at least as much skepticism as any novel archaeological theory.
I believe the Solutrean discussion nowadays is whether or not Europeans were in the Americas before Asians, not whether the former or the latter were the ancestors of modern day Amerindians (as genetic evidence overwhelmingly points toward the latter).
What Europeans have said historically should have no place in either discussion.
Saying “Europeans were in the Americas before Asians” is a silly anachronistic argument. As Sailer points out below, the Solutreans were most likely not the ancestors of today’s Europeans, or white Americans. Nor does it make a lot of sense to say that Lakota or Algonquin or Mayans are “Asian peoples”. Even 8,000 years is a lot of time – plenty of time for an inbreeding human group to evolve its own defining characteristics.
Peter,
You’re preaching to the choir. Saying the ancestors of today’s Amerindians were from Asia != saying modern Amerindians are Asian. Saying the Solutreans were from Europe != saying Solutreans are ancestors of modern Europeans or modern white Americans. It would be an elementary mistake to think otherwise, yet I suspect many people still make this blunder, which is why you sought to elucidate.
” They arrived in North America in numbers too small to survive on their own, and were taken in by natives”
Time traveling natives showing up thousands of years before they were supposed to be there would be an even bigger story.
“the long history of Europeans denying the possibility that non-Europeans could have possibly figured out clever technology on their own”: are you entirely off your rocker?
There’s a lot of nutty people in Europe. Bound to be one or two who made that claim over the years.
It’s not clear how closely related Ice Age hunter-gatherer Europeans were to modern agriculturalist Europeans, who have a lot of ancestors who were farmers in the Middle East.
Indeed. ME agriculturalists were the predominant ancestors of modern-day Europeans, not the hunter gatherers that were there before. Maybe descendants of hunter gatherers should rally for some sort of political favoritism from the descendants of the ME agriculturalists? Maybe the first resurrected neanderthal should demand the same thing from all us sapiens?
Modern Europeans are also largely the descendents of steppe herders from Eastern Europe/Central Asia i.e. Indo-Europeans whom many scholars believe may have completely or almost completely replaced the hunter-gatherer Europeans.
Greg Cochran writes about how the genetic evidence suggests near-complete replacement of the hunter-gatherer Europeans: http://westhunt.wordpress.com/2012/01/28/and-your-little-dog-too/
So as you suggest it’s not clear how closely related these hunter-gatherer Europeans are to modern Europeans. They may have been almost completely replaced.
I think the idea is that the Mesolithic hunter gatherers in Northwest and Central Europe were almost completely replaced by neolithic agriculturalists of Near Eastern origin before those guys were replaced (but possibly not so much) by more pastoralist Indo-European cultures who were (at least largely) descendants of steppe herders from North-Eastern Europe and who were more closely related to the Mesolithic hunter gatherers in North and Central Europe than the Near Eastern neolithic.
http://dna-forums.org/index.php?/blog/2/entry-118-new-craniometric-data-sheds-light-on-neolithic/
“contrasting the central picture of incoming farmers from the Near East with the scene on the fringes of Europe, where pieces of the farming package suited to the terrain were adopted by foragers, in some cases long after the rest of Europe had taken up farming. These fringe areas were around the Eastern Baltic (Latvia, Russia) and the forest steppe zone north of the Black Sea. ”
“Their results are remarkably neat, showing two clearly distinct lineages, with comparatively little inter-mixture, confirming the picture from the archaeology of the LBK, for example, which seems to indicate that farmers and foragers kept to their own zones.
This helps to explain why the presumed Neolithic Y-DNA haplogroups G, E and J do not dominate Europe today, and decline in frequency the further one moves from the Mediterranean. The farming pioneers in Europe, though initially successful, eventually encountered problems which led to population crashes. Then after the Neolithic, Europe had two great bursts of migration, both from fringe regions where farming had been adopted by foragers. One came from the European steppe in the Copper and Bronze Ages. The other was the spread of their Germanic and Slavic descendants in the Migration Period.”
There’s little difference, at least in terms of skull shape between the Western European Mesolithic foragers and Eastern European Mesolithic foragers, which explains why it looks like there is continuity in the West, even when there may not in fact be.
Rather convulated to say the least…!
There is very little positive evidence for the established “land bridge to Siberia” hypothesis. In fact there is surprisingly little evidence backing up many of the accepted facts in history before 1400, even for many settled, bureaucratic societies with writing, let alone periods where we have to rely on whatever we dig up. It would be nice if textbooks acknowledged more how much of this is guesswork.
That said, there is more evidence for the land bridge hypothesis than anything else, and it makes a sort of sense. Its just not strong enough to exclude even investigating other explanations. I suspect that the pre-Columbian population of the Americans descedended from small groups of people who washed up in the hemisphere by lots of different routes.
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