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The first inhabitants of the Americas
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Message 1.Â
Posted by Elkstone (U3836042) on Tuesday, 7th December 2010
Columbus was recently in the news this week, which made me raise this question. Why is it taught that the Native Americans were migrants from Asia who crossed over using the Baring sea land bridge in prehistoric times? Was it to justify the post Colombian conquest? in other words the country was always 'vacant' to whatever migrants who passed through? This argument is also used when writing about Australian history vis a vis the ABorigines, they migrated 40,000 years ago from Asia.
Now how come that same argument is not used to describe the inhabitants of Europe or Britain? The native americans and aborigines were already established and settled in their respective countries thousands of years before what became known as 'England' (and most present day European nations) came into existance. They arrived 30-40000 years ago, element of their culture and religion from paintings etc still survive. Its difficult to say the same of stone age culture of that time. Archaelogists still are not sure how stonehenge was used. Was Europe populated before the Ice Ages, or did humans migrate after the ice receded? So present day 'europeans' were migrants from Asia, or more directly, Africa? So wasn't Europe a 'vacant' plot before the migrants moved in? The present day inhabitants are migrants from elsewhere?
Is there some historical double standards, or a case of invaders or those who have power writing history from their own criteria? -
Message 2
Posted by bandick (U14360315) on Tuesday, 7th December 2010
·¡±ô°ì²õ³Ù´Ç²Ô±ð…
I’ve pondered this same question for some time myself… scoured my paperwork for past research… and delved into the wormholes within my computer to where my son tidied things away. I was nearly on the point of starting an almost identical thread but not feeling quite confident enough to take it on.
I’ve hesitated many times but can’t help wondering if given the incredible advancements and latest research into DNA profiling etc, can it now come to the aid of putting some flesh on the bones of old theories.
I look forward to see how this progresses.
Good luck… and kind regards bandick. -
Message 3
Posted by PaulRyckier (U1753522) on Tuesday, 7th December 2010
Re: Message 1.
Elkstone,
I have no detailed knowledge and I haven't the time now to seek more in depth struggling for the moment with Joseph Dupleix's India and the differences between Britain and France in their struggle for an empire.
Had a quick look in the Dutch translation of the Cassell Atlas of the World under the direction of John Haywood.
""The native americans and aborigines were already established and settled in their respective countries thousands of years before what became known as 'England' (and most present day European nations) came into existance." They arrived 30-40000 years ago, element of their culture and religion from paintings etc still survive. Its difficult to say the same of stone age culture of that time."
In the atlas the modern "Homo" reached the Americas via the Bering land bridge between 15,000 and 12,000 in 11 ,000 they were already in Patagonia...
The Homo Sapiens arrived from the Mid-East , there at some 90,000 years ago. And moved to the Far East at some 68,000 years. In continental Europe at some 40,000. Britain at some 12,000. Australia at some 40,000.
As for the physiognomy...? Where the men from out of Africa black? Was there 40,000 years ago already a difference between Americo-Indians, Indians, and Europeans (white ones
)...?
BTW. I always struggle with the word Indian in French and in English. How make you people the difference between Indians from America and Indians from India...?
Elkstone and Bandick, that's all I have for the moment.
Kind regards to you two,
Paul.
PS. Bandick, happy to see you back after all your misery in the hospital... -
Message 4
Posted by Elkstone (U3836042) on Tuesday, 7th December 2010
So Native Americans were already living there before the first humans arrived in Britain, yet we are told Colombus 'discovered' the continent just over 500 years ago! So who discovered Britain, or Europe? Are the present day inhabitants simply descendants of ancient 'migrants?'
That question is never asked, and i believe the so called crossing the Baring Sea migration theory is just as irrelevent and should be confined to the dustbin. To the Native Americans it is the final insult, first having their country stolen from them, being made strangers in their own land. Then being told it never belong to them in the first place they came from elsewhere, when they were living there, and practicing their culture and speaking their language before English was spoken.
Another point, scientists have shown elements of Aboriginal art in cave paintings dating 40,000 years are still practiced in their religion and culture. That culture and language is not found anywhere else, which is what migrants usually bring with them when they settle. That again why it is a futile as well as ridiculous argument to claim Native Americans and Aborigines are 'migrants'
Re Paul's point, what he said about the first humans leaving Africa is a good one and which I have always pondered. If the first humans looked like the San people who are in south africa, and dna tests suggest Aborigines come next, they would be black. How come we always see pre historic cave men as white? When did the pigmentation change? surely it must have been when they moved to colder climates in europe, since the early humans were used to the warmer regions? -
Message 5
Posted by cloudyj (U1773646) on Wednesday, 8th December 2010
Why is it taught that the Native Americans were migrants from Asia who crossed over using the Baring sea land bridge in prehistoric times?Â
Because it's true?
Was it to justify the post Colombian conquest?Â
No. It's because the Americas, like everywhere outside the Kenya/Tanzania border has been settled by migrants and historians are interested in the patterns of settlement.
in other words the country was always 'vacant' to whatever migrants who passed through?Â
For the initial Spanish conquerers, the countries certainly weren't empty and their chroniclers explain at great lengths about the different locals. The justification was a combination of increasing the glory of Spain and spreading the word of Catholicism.
In terms of ascribing ethnicity, the Church believed all peoples were descended from the three sons of Noah who each populated a continent. The shock of "new" continents didn't make them question this view. Rather they simply asked how the one section of these three had been moved to the Americas and then been lost. There were several competing theories, one of which is that the Americans were descended from Asians. DNA has proved this conclusively. We shouldn't forget that even in the historical period migrations were common as were migration myths, both in the "Old World" and the "New World". One Scottish myth was that the Picts were descended from Skythians.
Later societies may have claimed the justification (I think it was used in Australia?), but not until large areas of the USA were empty (after the ealrier inhabitants were mostly killed by disease).
Now how come that same argument is not used to describe the inhabitants of Europe or Britain?Â
When discussing the origins of Europeans, we are also readily, and correctly, described as descending form migrants.
Was Europe populated before the Ice Ages, or did humans migrate after the ice receded? So present day 'europeans' were migrants from Asia, or more directly, Africa? So wasn't Europe a 'vacant' plot before the migrants moved in? The present day inhabitants are migrants from elsewhere?Â
There was a population in Britain before the last ice age (descendants of earlier migrantrs). They migrated away from the ice and a population (not necessarily descendants of the earlier people) migrated into Britain again as the ice receded. The latest thinking is that they migrated from the middle east and only belatedly across the Straights of Gibralter (by when much of southern Europe was inhabited). Europe was empty of Homo Sapiens before the first ones arrived and the present day inhabitants are all ultimately migrants from elsewhere. I'm not sure where where in Europe this isn't considered to be the accepted historical view.
One part of the world which still struggles to accept the "Out of Africa" theory is China, where large sums of money are spent to find a local genetic origin for the Chinese people. -
Message 6
Posted by TwinProbe (U4077936) on Wednesday, 8th December 2010
Hi elkstone
I haven't been able to follow all the logic of your thread so perhaps you could help me out. If your basic point is to criticise the Eurocentric teaching of history and archaeology then I am happy to agree with you. The question of 'who discovered America?' effectively excludes the people who had lived there for millennia as you say. Similarly the question 'who built the first blast furnace?' usually excludes the Chinese who discovered this technology centuries before Europeans. But clearly it is meaningless to ask which named individuals 'really' discovered either America or Britain since these names are irrecoverable in deep time.
Anthropological theories naturally change with time but it seems highly likely that Europe and Asia were originally populated by hominids from Africa on at least two occasions (by H.erectus & H.sapiens), and perhaps more frequently. It is also highly probable that North American was indeed populated more than once by populations moving from Asia across the Bering Straight. This process began at least 12,000 years ago, and perhaps earlier. But surely it cannot be wrong to teach this evidence based hypothesis? The implication from your OP is that this fact was used to justify the subsequent seizure of the Americas by Europeans. I have never myself heard anyone advance this argument, but if it has been employed as you say it can only have been centuries after the seizure had actually taken place.
If you are prepared to accept species of hominid other than H. sapiens as 'human' (as I would) then it is certain that Britain and Northern Europe had a human population long before America did. H. heidelbergensis existed about 500,000 years ago and evidence of such populations has been found in Britain, Spain and Germany but not in Canada or the USA. 'Neanderthals' may well have evolved from this species and they were found in Northern Europe for 100,000 years. Whether anatomically modern H. sapiens (AMS) was present in Britain & Europe before America would crucially depend on the dating of the earliest humans in America. The oldest AMS found in Britain is the Paviland Red 'lady' now dated at 26 Kyr BP which certainly long pre-dates the Clovis Culture in N. America. Naturally the last period of glaciation expunged humans from Britain completely. The islands were repopulated from southern Europe something like 14-12 Kyr BP which still could (just) be earlier than than the arrival of AMS in America. The degree to which the current population of Britain owes its genetic make-up to these Palaeolithic people, rather than to subsequent migrants, is a regularly debated point on this message board.
Perhaps you could value the Norse concept of 'landnam' or land-taking? In a sense all lands were originally occupied by migrants, but evidently some territories were empty of people when first occupied, like Iceland. This might allow certain privileges to such first migrants. Unfortunately none of the posts really address the situation of internal seizure of the of one group of Native Americans, or First Nations, people by another.
I'm not sure that 'pre-historic cave men' is an accurate description of my Palaeolithic ancestors but whether they had 'white' skin or not is difficult to answer. 'Whiteness' is a poygenetic trait and since all the genes involved are not, I believe, yet identified even ancient DNA extraction might not answer your question. Perhaps it is best to consider skin colour as a convention of portraiture like the fur skirts that 'cave women' in such illustrations invariably wear!
Best wishes, TP
PS Sorry cloudyj your post deals with most of my points but having composed it I hadn't the heart to bin it! -
Message 7
Posted by cloudyj (U1773646) on Wednesday, 8th December 2010
So Native Americans were already living there before the first humans arrived in Britain, yet we are told Colombus 'discovered' the continent just over 500 years ago! So who discovered Britain, or Europe? Are the present day inhabitants simply descendants of ancient 'migrants?'Â
As in everything else, context is king. From the European viewpoint, Colombus did discover a "New World". If Aztec sailors had pitched up in Spain, they would have discovered a "New World". There's an argument that Julius Caesar discovered Britain.
I don't know where you live Elkstone, but the statement that all Britons are migrants is actually quite common here in the debate over our more recently migrated compatriots.
That question is never asked, and i believe the so called crossing the Baring Sea migration theory is just as irrelevent and should be confined to the dustbin.Â
Irrelevant to the point you're making possibly. But it certainly shouldn't be consigned to the bin because it's historical fact. If it's been twisted for political agenda then that's a wholly different problem which shouldn't be solved by denying history. Why shouldn't the Quecha, for instance, know where their long distant ancestors came from? It's no worse than knowing that mine moved north from Kenya, then turned left into Europe rather than right into Asia and onwards towards Peru.
The argument is that they were entitled to their land as they were the people living there, not that they weren't descended from migrating people.
The Aztecs were actually very proud of their migration myth and the eagle device at the centre of the modern Mexican flag remembers it to this day. Though the evidence is that Aztec culture was probably indigenous to the area around Mexico city.
Just to play devil's advocate...
The Spanish arrived in Mexico to find indigenous people subjugated by a violent neighbour. The Spanish then went on to replace a bully with a different bully. Why is subjugation by Aztecs more acceptable than subjugation by Spanish? The Tlaxcalans certainly seemed to prefer the latter (at least initially).
Another point, scientists have shown elements of Aboriginal art in cave paintings dating 40,000 years are still practiced in their religion and culture. That culture and language is not found anywhere else, which is what migrants usually bring with them when they settle. That again why it is a futile as well as ridiculous argument to claim Native Americans and Aborigines are 'migrants'Â
I'm not sure what Aboriginal art in Australia has to do with the indigenous Americans? Although I quite like the definition of migrant as one whose culture was developed elsewhere. I guess that could even be stretched to apply to me as a Northerner living in the South of England (and certainly the Scots among my ancestors). -
Message 8
Posted by Nik (U1777139) on Wednesday, 8th December 2010
I get to I get to agree with TwinProbe on every single point. I really did not get the essence of the initial question. I do not think that the developed theories about the first human colonisation of the Americas were developed to justify the latter colonisation by western Europeans. And if anything it is the same field of study which makes the same for Europe speaking of similar waves of human colonisation - Europe is in fact as diverse as Africa and Asia including different anthropologic tribes (Medierraneans (Greeks, south Italians, eastern Spanish, western Turks, Mediterranean coast Arabs etc.), Alpics (Celtics, Austrians, North Italians, central French, north Spanish etc.), Nordics (North Germans, Danish, Scandinavians etc.), Baltics (Lithuanians, Esthonians, Finnish etc.), Lapons (well Lapons and northern Finish), Dinarics (Albanians, most Slavs, Serbocroatians, Chechoslovakians, Ukrainians, Russians), Armenoids (Armenians, north-eastern Turks) - to be noted of course that no nation there derives from 1 anthropologic tribe but all nations and historic nations derive from at least 2 of them - eg. Polish mix Baltic, Nordic and Dinaric. Anthropologic tribes make reference to a time prior to the neolithic era when each of these tribes was mainly found in a more restricted area (i.e. Mediterraneans in the Aegean and Minor Asia), Dinarics in Caucasus, Armenoids in south Caucasus Alpics in central western Europe (these are considered as being of the more ancient stock in Europe though even that is debateable as Alpics show some distant link to Baltics who are of course of evident Asiatic influence - an asiatic influence that did not pare the Nordics too and one should not be fooled by blond hair and blue eyes), Nordics presumably in Danemark). So out of the movements in prehistoric and historic times Europe found to have its modern populations. What has to be noted though is that while we identify these basic anthropologic tribes in reality there existed certainly more, filling the space in between the above epicenters but which disappeared or got integrated to the tribes we can distinguish today.
As such, pretty much similar European theories that speak of the Americas getting filled with the Siberian originated tribes (we can still find today and they are visibly very close to those North American and even South American tribes), they too speak similarly for Europe. In proper scientific work, there is no ideologic distinction in the analysis of the movements of populations. -
Message 9
Posted by PaulRyckier (U1753522) on Wednesday, 8th December 2010
Re: Message 7.
cloudyj,
"Although I quite like the definition of migrant as one whose culture was developed elsewhere. I guess that could even be stretched to apply to me as a Northerner living in the South of England (and certainly the Scots among my ancestors)."
And I had to move from near Ghent (province of East-Flanders) to near Ostend (province of West-Flanders) and then to near the capital of that province Bruges. And each time I had to adapt "my culture" to the new one...with some difficulties...but I succeeded each time....
Cloudyj, if you meant with "Northern" for instance Newcastle, I can understand some difficulties, if only for the Geordie dialect...A Scotswoman from Edingburgh told me once when I was in a bed and breakfast overthere that English people were always loughing about really "nothing"....contrary to the...but it can be that I, as a continental, wasn't completely "catching" the "tenor" of the "parlance"....
Sorry for diverting a serious debate into...
Kind regards and with esteem for all the contributors,
Paul. -
Message 10
Posted by lolbeeble (U1662865) on Saturday, 11th December 2010
As has been pointed out the origin of the Amerindians and how they related to the Old World populations has been of longstanding interest since first contact. The assumption that they must have migrated there derived from a belief in the common origin of all humans. Admittedly Europeans first had to accept that the Amerindians were indeed human and thus from common stock and not some perversion of humanity given the revulsion that sensational accounts of their various rituals and customs generated. Once that hurdle had been overcome, their origin had to be established within the framework of the Biblical creation story, initially being considered as descendents of Ham on account of perceived similarities to Egyptians.
However the favourite explanation was to suggest they were one of the lost tribes of Israel and had wandered there from East Asia after they disappeared from the Biblical record. This was proposed by the Jesuit Priest, Joseph de Acosta in his 1589 publication and was translated into English in 1604. The somewhat literal interpretation of many later writers that American Indians therefore spoke a version of Hebrew was parodied in both Cat Ballou and Blazing Saddles. Despite subsequent theories about their point of origin and method of arrival in the New World such as by boat across the Southern Pacific rather than walking or even across the North Atlantic rather than across Berengia, continued study has only reinforced the Northeast Asian origin hypothesis.
Rather than feeling that their own claims were insecure and open to challenge from the indigenous population through appeal to historical ties to the land, the Europeans assumed that they had been granted dominion by right. Inquiries into the first human settlement in the New World or Australia were therefore more of an academic debate rather than a desperate need to suggest moral equivalence in order to provide some form of legitimacy for European encroachment. In the case of the Americas, the Europeans tended to put their success down to various types of divine providence be it the proselytizing reconquista zeal of the Spanish and Portuguese or the Puritan notion of manifest destiny. It has been joked that the Europeans were often quite willing to recognise Indian land claims, just not their mineral rights.
As you suggest, by and large there was a very definite break between the cultural origins of colonial archaeologists and the prehistoric societies they sought to study. The primary difference between the treatment of prehistory by European archaeologists and their colonial counterparts was that the former were dealing with what they perceived to be their own cultural past. In Europe, archaeology developed in conjunction with attempts create nationalist narrative continuity, stretching as far into the past as possible and was therefore heavily reliant on classical texts in order to define the ethnic background of material remains. It had distinctly teleological aims of explaining the formation of national political entities and thus was working backwards from what was already known. Colonial archaeology was not bound by such constraints and thus by and large avoided nationalist biases and rivalries and could start from the beginning and work forwards. The model was still teleological but the end result of colonistaion was very different.
The concept of racial hierarchies formulated in the mid to late nineteenth century also meshed into beliefs of divine providence as European perceptions of their innate superiority in terms of action, intellect and innovation were believed to have been granted by God, who had endowed them with the capacity to achieve dominion over the other races. As an example the colonial view of Indians as primitive, passive and incapable of change lead to the assumption that North American prehistory was characterised by little in the way of variation from when the continent was first settled and was therefore only a precursor to the really important bit of when civilisation was introduced. One could argue that your assertions about the supposed continuity of Amerindian and Australian Aboriginal culture and language are a manifestation of this view of the passive natives, immune to change. In the light of the vast amount of work to document regional typologies identifying different material phases throughout prehistory in both Australia and the New World such a view is far more insulting to these groups even if you intend it to be used in a positive light.
Although many of the overtly racist theories had been discarded by academic anthropology by the early twentieth century as so often is the case they persisted in the popular conscience for much longer. The assumptions that were inherent to scientific racism continued to influence the treatment of American prehistory for several more decades. During the nineteenth and early twentieth century, US archaeological methods and theory often took their lead from European practices though they were far from mere slavish imitators, with the cultural typologies of Montelius, Kossina and Childe proving most influential in the early to mid part of the last century. Through the early twentieth century American prehistory ceased to be regarded as a long period of inactivity and changes in the nature of material assemblages had been catalogued into several regional sequences but with little in the way of explanation of how they developed.
Archaeologists depended on migration and diffusion of ideas and technology as the main cause of change and innovation. They did not necessarily give much thought to how the groups they proposed had migrated into their particular region had come up with the innovations in the first place. New World archaeological remains were usually linked to precursors found in the Old World or in the case of North American Indians with migration from Meso-America, perpetuating colonial stereotypes that the North American Indians were incapable or hostile to independent innovation. Such a model of transformation would certainly lead to the assumption that current North American Indian populations were unrelated to the archaeological remains in their locality. Indeed the severe depopulation after first contact as a result of disease, the increasing mobility afforded by the introduction of the horse not to mention the relocation onto reservations away from their ancestral territories suggests that it was not without basis. Oddly enough, in spite of the persistence of the supposed immutability of American Indians, the archaeological sequences that were proposed had very short chronologies crammed into no more than three thousand years duration. as well as reflecting the consensus opinion of how long the Americas had been settled it appears to be a side effect of assuming that cultural change was synonymous with changes in the ethnic population because and they did not have to allow time for cultural patterns to evolve from one form to another.
Although the Asian origins of American Indians had long been suspected the timing of first settlement was far more keenly debated as the chronology rooted in the bible began to collapse in the face of evidence for the antiquity of the human species. It was the discovery that ancient European humans using stone tools had existed along side long extinct animals adapted to the extreme cold that prompted some in the US to suggest that there would be similar finds in the New World. The main proponent of the idea was Charles Abbott, an amateur archaeologist, who was vehemently opposed by the more conservative William Henry Holmes of the Bureau of American ethnology. Despite the discovery of stone tools at Folsom in 1908 and the recognition that they were in situ with animals that had become extinct around ten thousand years ago in 1927, not to mention the designation of the older Clovis typology in association with ice age animals in the following decade, the antiquity of human settlement made little impact on the short chronology attributed to later material cultures. Rather than stretch the timescale over which these sequences were used they simply extended the very earliest phases reintroducing the long periods with little in the way of innovation. It was not until the extensive use of scientific dating methods from the 1970s onwards that the typologies could be given any form of secure chronology. -
Message 11
Posted by PaulRyckier (U1753522) on Sunday, 12th December 2010
Re: Message 10.
lol,
as ever an elaborated and in depth survey. I read each paragraph with great interest and learned from them.
You have many times such philosphical sentences as for instance from your sixt paragraph:
"Although many of the overtly racist theories had been discarded by academic anthropology by the early twentieth century as so often is the case they persisted in the popular conscience for much longer."
I was awaiting for some new message about the research from the 1970 on? And I wasn't aware that the modern historiography about the population of the Americas was as recent as 1970.
Hmm, I ask something to do you to you while I don't attend the boards not so frequent anymore. For the moment busy with the French India of Dupleix, reading the debated book from Shlomo Sand: the invention of the Jewish People to start again the discussion with U-number. And involved in the work of a university student on the French boards about the emergence of science and he wants to make a difference in approach between the West and China. I am a bit sceptic about his approach as for instance the difference of the Chinese writing and the western alphabet writing. Think to speak of Egyptian writing and all that. As we have only started yesterday I come back on this on these boards when I have more information.
Kind regards and with high esteem,
Paul. -
Message 12
Posted by cloudyj (U1773646) on Monday, 13th December 2010
Hi lol,
This was proposed by the Jesuit Priest, Joseph de Acosta in his 1589 publication and was translated into English in 1604. Â
Are you sure you mean Acosta? In "Frauds, Myths and Mysteries" Kenneth Feder states that Acosta identified that the Indians migrated into the Americas via a land bridge from north-east Asia. Acosta reasoned that all human and animal life came from Noah's ark and as non-useful animals existed in the Americas, there must have been a land route for such animals which hadn't been brought by humans. Feder names Diego Duran, then Gregoria Garcia's "Origins of the Indians" for the claim that they were the lost tribes of Israel. -
Message 13
Posted by lolbeeble (U1662865) on Tuesday, 14th December 2010
Cheers for the correction. I believed that to be the case but that was mainly because the books I used to cobble the post together were more interested in modern archaeology and only gave fleeting mention to Acosta and the popular notion of Amerindian descent from the twelve tribes of Israel in their preamble. The intention being to emphasise the belief in a common origin of humanity in line with Biblical scripture. As it stands I over interpreted what was being said as Acosta as his Natural and Moral History of the Indies denied there was any such link. Acosta made his opinion abundantly clear with the title of chapter 23, How the opinion of many who believe that the Indians came from the race of Jews, is false.
However it has been pointed out that he makes no attempt to dismiss the view of Jews and Judaism used by the likes of Duran and Garcia as craven, cunning, manipulative and overly fond of money. While he makes many methodical arguments to rebut the hypothesis that the Indians were descended from the Jews, the impassioned dismissal may also have been motivated by a desire to prove that the Indians the Jesuits ministered were a pure population with no prior knowledge of the biblical tradition or a history of rejecting Christianity. -
Message 14
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Tuesday, 14th December 2010
As has been mentioned before this idea is linked to (a) the dispersal theories of human kind which now locate the first humans in Africa [though other places in the Eurasian land mass have been postulated at other times], and (b) the dispersal theories relating to "the torch of Civilization"..
The unique flora and fauna of Australisia led to the idea that this continent broke away with that stock possibly including the ancestors of the "indigenous population " = the meaning of Aborigines.
But the Amerindian theory, in the absence of the kind of archeological evidence that is used elsewhere, was based a great deal upon the study of the Amerindian languages. Philologists were able to work out the mathematics of word change over time, and measure the degree of deviation for all of the "native languages" in the Americas. This suggested that all the tribal languages did evolve from a common language, and it was further possible to work out a probable time when the original migration crossed over from Asia, and just when splinter groups broke off to populate the Americas.
I believe that this work was largely done by the end of the Nineteenth Century or during the early Twentieth , and built on the pioneer work of people like the Brothers Grimm, who only collected their German folk tales in order to detect ancient words and forms that they believed they would find in folk tales in which people inevitably tend to fall back on the received vocabulary.
Cass -
Message 15
Posted by cloudyj (U1773646) on Tuesday, 14th December 2010
As has been mentioned before this idea is linked to ... and (b) the dispersal theories relating to "the torch of Civilization".. Â
True and it's sad that now we have so much archaeological evidence from the last hundred or so years that people are still convinced that civilization can only have arisen in one place and diffused throughout the rest of the world. Particularly when it's based on "The Egyptians and Mexicans built pyramids therefore the Egyptians must have settled Mexico". -
Message 16
Posted by cloudyj (U1773646) on Tuesday, 14th December 2010
However it has been pointed out that he makes no attempt to dismiss the view of Jews and Judaism used by the likes of Duran and Garcia as craven, cunning, manipulative and overly fond of money. While he makes many methodical arguments to rebut the hypothesis that the Indians were descended from the Jews, the impassioned dismissal may also have been motivated by a desire to prove that the Indians the Jesuits ministered were a pure population with no prior knowledge of the biblical tradition or a history of rejecting Christianity.Â
Acosta was a man of his times, and those times were undoubtedly antisemitic. But he had good reasons for his theory and I think it's unfair to suggest an antisemitic motivation without evidence. After all others had also suggested Asiatic origins for the Indians simply from facial features and speculation abounded from sheer curiosity.
Was there a theological need to dissociate American Indians from the lost tribes? The church believed Jews could be "saved" by baptism, and the so-called lost tribes weren't the Jews blamed for killing Christ. -
Message 17
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Tuesday, 14th December 2010
cloudyj
Yes.. I remember a TV programme from perhaps c1960 which gave me a first view of "Great Zimbawbe" and exposure to the "great mystery" of how such a stone "city" came to be built deep into Africa.. The rounded shapes seemed very African, and the stone was readily to hand- as it was in my grandparent's Cotswolds, where my aged grandfather was one of the last (then) people in the region able to lay dry-stone walling.. Human intelligence and ingenuity is so often underestimated.
Actually this city building business reminds me of the normally excellent Francis Parkman writing c1850 about Amerindian peoples noting that there was a clear link between the larger brain-cavities of the Aztecs and Iroquois and the fact that they built cities.
Brain-cavity as an indicator of intelligence is, I believe, now discredited. But surely the reason why those two tribes built fortified cities was in order to keep hold of very advantagious locations- one in a lake, the other at the hub of the Great Lakes. As places to hunt and grow they were well-favoured, but they also were good central places from which to trade and dominate their neighbours. If they were better nourished perhaps this might have impacted on their skeletal development. (Fish and brains?)
Cass -
Message 18
Posted by cloudyj (U1773646) on Wednesday, 15th December 2010
Hi Cass,
es.. I remember a TV programme from perhaps c1960 which gave me a first view of "Great Zimbawbe" and exposure to the "great mystery" of how such a stone "city" came to be built deep into AfricaÂ
I don't want to appear an apologist for Victorian racists who assumed black Africans couldn't build such structures, but part of the assumption was that Africans of the area had stopped building such structures (which ddin't fit with the Victorian notion of progress). Mound Builder sites in the US suffered from the same assumptions. Historians didn't understand how an urban civilization could have digressed to a semi-nomadic one and therefore assumed that Cahokia and similar sites must have been built be previous inhabitants.
Actually this city building business reminds me of the normally excellent Francis Parkman writing c1850 about Amerindian peoples noting that there was a clear link between the larger brain-cavities of the Aztecs and Iroquois and the fact that they built cities. Â
I can't comment on Parkman beyond what wikipedia (sorry) says. It states that he had studied Spanish imperial history which begs the question: why single out the Aztecs? Was this his (or your) shorthand for Meso-America? Or did he use the term to mean everywhere subjugated by Aztecs? Even a basic study of the Spanish conquest would reveal a highly urbanized society beyond the Aztecs. The Spanish rigorously chronicled the peoples of the Americas - and often with a surprising degree of sympathy and unbiased* curiosity.
Obviously there was bias when it came to religious practices, but often not in terms of history and secular cultural practice. -
Message 19
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Wednesday, 15th December 2010
cloudyj
Thanks for your response..
(a) As you say Herbert Spencer's concept of "evolution" got picked up by many people in the Victorian Age with Darwinism adding an explanation of the mechanism that powered evolution. This was to lead to ideas of historical inevitability, of superior and inferior people and things, so that it was very difficult to believe that the development of new ranges of human opportunity merely meant an increased choice, and a much greater capacity to grasp the "courage to be" and to live with free will.. I suppose this goes right back to Abram/Abraham and his decision to leave Ur of Chaldea, a great urban metropolis and take all his people to live a life that would not leave them such sitting targets as was Ur when it was wasted by "Enlil".
As we are teaching the world to ape our unsustainable highly urbanised culture Dr. Schmacher's "Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Matter" is as relevant in its basic thrust as ever.
(b) As for Parkman his particular field of expertise was Canada and his works were very much about the Amerindian tribes there, and the story of the French and English up to the end of the Seven Years War. His knowledge of the Amerindians was quite exceptional because he had spent time living amongst various tribes, at a time when perhaps he could- like Sir Walter Scott amongst the Scottish Highlanders- still capture part of the essence of what they were; and in the comment that I quoted he was stressing the more advanced state of the Iroquois compared to others in the region by elevating them alongside the Aztecs. I would imagine that the brain-cavity measurements had been published by someone else.
Cass -
Message 20
Posted by lolbeeble (U1662865) on Friday, 17th December 2010
Cloudyj, it was not so much a theological issue because as you quite rightly point out the church's attitude was that baptism cleansed the soul, providing a fresh start. Christians had used Matthew 23:35 in order to justify that the Jews were tainted as it blamed them for not just Christ's murder but that of every righteous individual since Abel.
In the wake of the mass conversions to Christianity in the late medieval period, Spanish converso's were increasingly regarded with suspicion. The response of traditional Spanish Christians was to look at purity of blood rather than the cleansing of the soul with the admission of so many former Jews into areas they had traditionally been excluded from. The impurities that Jews were supposed impart, their corrupting influence that was believed to manifest itself in the form of a smell and so on, went from being regarded as the result of their spiritual taint that would cease on conversion to a direct heritable manifestation that could not be removed now they had converted. Therefore the descendants of the Jews were increasingly regarded as irredeemable by many traditional Spanish Christians.
Like many of his fellow churchmen Acosta had a distinctly paternalistic attitude towards the Indians and regarded them as being childlike and thus innocents. The growing belief in the biological nature of the Jewish taint would thus challenge the notion of Indian innocence in the popular mind if they were descended from one of the lost tribes. -
Message 21
Posted by shivfan (U2435266) on Friday, 17th December 2010
I also have a problem with the description that Columbus 'discovered' the Americas....
Rather, it's best to argue that Columbus was the first European to make contact with the Americas.
<quote> If your basic point is to criticise the Eurocentric teaching of history and archaeology then I am happy to agree with you. The question of 'who discovered America?' effectively excludes the people who had lived there for millennia as you say. -
Message 22
Posted by lolbeeble (U1662865) on Friday, 17th December 2010
Paul, I presume you were expecting more on developments related to understanding the settlement of the New world as opposed to the changing scope of North American archaeological theory. In the main there have been a series of challenges to the consensus of where, when, how and how often the New World had been populated.
The assumption that Clovis assemblage represented the earliest traces of human activity in the New world, promoted most enthusiastically by Paul Martin, had been under pressure since the 1970s with several archaeologists claiming to have found evidence that people were there far earlier. There was recognition of unequivocal proof of settlement fourteen thousand five hundred years ago, predating the earliest Clovis assemblages by at least a millennium, in the final excavation report of Monte Verde, Chile in 1997. Unqualified reports have suggested there is a possibility that human activity at the site may stretch back more than thirty thousand years. Since then sites further north with pre-Clovis remains have been tentatively identified although by and large we are still looking at evidence of no more than a few thousand years before the Clovis typology, useful for filling in what could have been a rather worrying spatial and temporal gap between the route into the Americas and the site of Monte Verde.
With the age of the initial colonisation being pushed further back by the site of Monte Verde, the issue of when and how it was possible for East Asian settlers to populate the New World has come to the fore given the variation between sea levels and the extent of the ice caps. The Clovis first hypothesis was reliant on both Berengia and the Mackenzie river system being passable within a relatively short period of time so that these big game hunters could not only cross from Asia but migrate southwards following the herds on foot. Geological studies had identified that this could really only have occurred around fifteen thousand years ago as Berengia was traversable between twenty two and fifteen thousand years ago and the glaciers covering the Mackenzie corridor retreated from fifteen thousand years onwards. However settlement in Chile some fourteen and a half thousand years ago only allowed the first migrants five hundred years to spread down the length of the Americas. If Clovis big game subsistence is a secondary adaptation of north American populations and not part of the suite of behaviours associated with the very first settlers in the Americas then it removes the need for a direct route on foot and thus allows the possibility that the initial dispersal was accomplished with the aid of boats along the Pacific coast. Whatever the case, evidence for the early presence of humans in the far North of America has so far proved illusive and there is a similar dearth for settlement in North East Asia around the time of the crossing.
Challenges to the prevailing consensus were not limited to the examination of physical remains. Moving away from the idea of a common origin for all the languages in the New World, Joseph Greenburg proposed that the presence of different language families represented separate migration events, an idea he published in association with anatomical and genetic evidence in 1986. He was influenced by migration models like Binford's Indo European dispersal hypothesis. In his view the Aleut-Eskimo and Na Dene groups in North America were preceded by the Amerind family, distributed across most of the continent who were thus descendants of the first settlers in the Americas. Johanna Nichols went further in 1990 by suggesting that not only was there more than one migration event but in order to derive the current level of linguistic diversity among the Amerind family, it required tens of thousands of years of development. Both were challenged over their methodology with Greenburg's attempts to link language, anatomy and genetics, suggesting close linguistic and biological correlation even after fifteen thousand years being viewed as overly simplistic. Nichol's assertion about the deep antiquity of American language likewise received short shrift from David Nettles who suggested her uniform rate for the diversification of language families simply did not reflect the way languages evolve. Far from suggesting a much longer history, the growth in the number of languages implied a fairly rapid radiation across the continent that could easily be accommodated within the existing model of migration.
Whereas the linguistic debate often ran aground due to lack of historical verification for the proposed theories, biology seemed to offer a more definite line of inquiry. Christy Turner's comparison of pre Columbian dentition with examples from across Eurasia, eventually published in 1994, revealed that they had the greatest affinity with North East Asian populations, apparently verifying the hypothesised link with the Old World. Pre Columbian Dental remains also appeared to fall into three distinct groups and this was used to support the notion of three migration events. Although the study had attempted to screen out possible influence from European settlement by its use of pre Columbian examples, they still came overwhelmingly from individuals that had lived within the last few thousand years. Very few human remains had been found in association with the earliest signs of human activity in the Americas.
The provisional identification of Kennewick man as Caucasian after its discovery in 1990 caused some consternation when dating revealed the body was around nine thousand five hundred years old. This lead some to cast doubt on the idea that modern native Americans were directly descended from the very earliest migration into the new world. Subsequent analysis of the anatomical features suggested the individual bore most resemblance to modern Polynesians or the Ainu of Hokkaido and the Kurile islands in Northern Japan.
The idea that the earliest settlers arrived across the Atlantic rather than from the Pacific gained traction with the proposal that the Clovis stone toolkit was related in style to Western European Solutrean material assemblages dating to between twenty one and seventeen thousand years ago. The Solutrean hypothesis put forward in 1998 also provided a solution to one of the niggling problems that had arisen with the study of Native American genetics. A variant of a particular mitochondrial haplotype group, X, with no antecedents in North East Asia yet present in low frequencies across Western Asia, Europe and North Africa was commonly found among Native Americans in the North East of North America. It was suggested that migrants travelled across the pack ice relying on marine resources like seal blubber fuel for survival. It was quickly pointed out that neither the Solutrean or Clovis subsistence patterns appeared to exploit the sea. There also appeared to be no further points of stylistic similarity between the Solutrean and Clovis assemblages beyond the presence of fluted spear heads.
Obviously genetics is perhaps the most fundamental development over the past forty years and geneticists lost no time in attempting to apply their skills to the question of where the first migrants came from and when they arrived. It also allowed the probability of the size of the ancestral group or groups that moved across from Asia to be calculated by examining the level of genetic diversity between various sub families of each haplotype present in modern populations. Although it promised much, initially it proved to be far from a precise tool given the poor understanding of the rate of genetic change; the limited number of base pairs that it was possible to examine and the variation in the analytical methods employed by teams in the emerging discipline.
As hinted above, debate surrounded how to interpret the distribution of the major mitochondrial haplotype groups, A,B,C, D and the fore mentioned X, within modern North American populations. Haplotype A is found in high frequencies among Na-Dene and Aleut-Eskimo speakers whereas all the haplotypes represented in the Americas were found among speakers of the various languages that made up the controversial Amerind family. A 1993 Japanese study concluded that the four most common mitochondrial haplotypes found among Native Americans, groups A-D that show the greatest affinity with North East Asians, differed in their respective levels of accumulated diversity and that this meant each was derived from a separate dispersal occurring over a time frame of between twenty one and fourteen thousand years ago. The following year a study by a team from the University of Atlanta suggested two possible migrations, the first carrying A,C and D between twenty nine and twenty two thousand years ago with B arriving at a later date.
However recent studies such as the 2008 article by Nelson Fagundes and his team came to the conclusion that all five Amerindian haplotypes require similar time frames to reach their current level of diversity. This would thus fit just one dispersal event from East Asia. They suggested that the migration caused a slight population bottleneck around the period of the last glacial maximum before spreading across the New World using boats to traverse the Pacific seaboard as the last glacial maximum came to an end eighteen thousand years ago. The number of effective individuals that contributed towards populating the Americas, that is those among the initial pioneers who actually had offspring with modern descendants, could have been as few as eighty although a figure of around five hundred effective individuals gave off the highest rate of probability. -
Message 23
Posted by NormanRHood (U14656514) on Friday, 17th December 2010
they say all people came from Africa and i dont believe it
i say it was Iraq or turkey or Afghanistan
some say cherokees have the same dna of people in Filipino islands -they look similar
there is kennewick man found near kennewick wa usa
id say the native americans came from siberia
the lapps or sami are Asian i think -
Message 24
Posted by cloudyj (U1773646) on Friday, 17th December 2010
lolbeeble, I'm a little wary of commenting on such a good summary!
Kennewick man, if I remember correctly, was jumped on by white supremecists as justification for white ownership of the Americas. Looks like we're back to Elkstone's original question!
The discussion on wikipedia makes an intersting point that the popular press failed to distinguish between caucasian and caucasoid and that Chatters who originally studied the skeleton never intended the world to think Kennewick man was a white European settler! -
Message 25
Posted by PaulRyckier (U1753522) on Friday, 17th December 2010
Re: Message 22.
lol,
thank you very much for "such a good summary" as Cloudyj said. Read some related articles on Google sparked by your "exposé"?
Till today I wasn't aware of all these controverses. Since the Seventies, or perhaps since the Fifties (my time of learning), a lot is added by modern investigation and rigid logic.
Reading for the moment the book from Shlomo Sand "The invention of the Jewish people", I was surprised to read how much new and completely otherwise than the narrative of the Bible (up to now, sometimes a base for history), was found in Israel (the nowadays state) and the new occupied terittories. And all that from excavations and theories from the international community and! from Israeli historians....
On another subject I was also surprised how the fall of the Roman Empire in the West was studied under complete other "angles" than in my time "the Fifties". And have to agree that a lot changed even from the "Seventies" on..
Kind regards and with high esteem,
Paul.
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