The map Lowell and Jimaz posted is interesting but note it relies on the tired old we-could-not-get-across-all-that-water-so-we-KNOW-those-primitives-couldn't Bering strait theory which is now being challenged on many fronts.

The primary purpose of this theory was to categorize humans according to the widely accepted racial construct, and the unintended result was to prevent study of evidence that points to other possibilities. Some of the suppressed evidence is finally coming forth, pushing the habitation dates farther and farther back.


How Linguists Are Pulling Apart the Bering Strait Theory

Alex Ewen

3/19/14

Over the past few weeks, new scientific discoveries have rekindled the debate over the Bering Strait Theory. Two of the discoveries were covered recently in Indian Country Today. The first “More Reasons to Doubt the Bering Strait Migration Theory,” dealt with the growing problem of “science by press release,” as scientific studies hype their conclusions to the point that they are misleading; and the second, “DNA Politics: Anzick Child Casts Doubt on Bering Strait Theory,” discussed how politics can influence science, and the negative effects these politically-based scientific results can have on Native peoples.

RELATED: More Reasons to Doubt the Bering Strait Migration Theory
RELATED:DNA Politics: Anzick Child Casts Doubt on Bering Strait Theory

It is generally assumed that the Bering Strait Theory has almost universal acceptance from scientists. So, for example, the New York Times, in an article on March 12, “Pause Is Seen in a Continent’s Peopling” stated unequivocally that

“The first migrations to North America occurred between 15,000 and 10,000 years ago,” with the new wrinkle that maybe on their way from Asia Indian ancestors laid over in the Bering Strait region [[Beringia) for thousands of years before traveling on to the Americas.

Therefore it is usually presumed that the primary critics of the theory must be anti-science, like the “creationists” who argue against evolution, or New Age pseudo-scientific conspiracy theorists. Thus in 1995, when the late Sioux philosopher Vine Deloria Jr. published Red Earth, White Lies: Native Americans and the Myth of Scientific Fact and challenged the Bering Strait Theory, he was savagely attacked by many scientists who lumped him in with those fringe groups.

The vitriol that poured from some of the harshest critics, such as John Whittaker, a professor of anthropology at Grinnell College, who referred to Deloria's book as "a wretched piece of Native American creationist claptrap,” seemed excessive.

The critics also demonstrated that they clearly did not comprehend Deloria’s argument. Red Earth, White Lies, embroidered by Deloria’s wry sense of humor and rambling musings, shows he was not anti-science, but rather anti-scientist. In particular, he was against those scientists who held narrow views of the world, who had no respect for other people’s traditions, who fostered a cult of superiority either for themselves or for their society, and who were afraid to search for the truth unless it already conformed with established opinion.

Deloria also argued that science, when studying people, was not neutral. In his view, some scientific theories harbored social and political agendas that were used to deprive Indians and other minorities of their rights. Many of the assumptions that underlay certain scientific principles were based on obsolete religious or social views, and he urged science to shed these dubious relics. The issue for Deloria was not science vs. religion [[or tradition), it was good science vs. bad science, and in his view, the Bering Strait Theory was bad science.

Nor was Deloria alone in this opinion. Since it was first proposed in the late 16th century, and especially in its most recent incarnations in the late 19th and the 20th centuries, the most vociferous critics of the Bering Strait Theory have been scientists. Even among archaeologists and physical anthropologists, generally the most dogmatic proponents of this theory, it has always been extremely factious. And the abuse they would heap upon each other was no less acidic than that they spewed on outsiders.

In 1892, when the geologist George Frederick Wright published his massive study, Man and the Glacial Period, which challenged some of the tenets of the Bering Strait Theory as it was then formulated, he was attacked, as David J. Meltzer pointed out in First Peoples in a New World, “with a barrage of vicious reviews which were unprecedented in number and savagery.” One critic of the book, William John McGee, the head of the Bureau of American Ethnology, “was especially bloodthirsty, labeling Wright’s work absurdly fallacious, unscientific, and an ‘offense to the nostrils,’ then dismissing him as ‘a betinseled charlatan whose potions are poison. Would that science might be well rid of such harpies.’”

To understand just one of the many scientific criticisms of the Bering Strait Theory, we go halfway around the world to the continental mass known as the Sahul, which includes Australia, New Guinea and surrounding islands. Like the Americas, it had long been assumed by archaeologists that the Indigenous Peoples who lived in that region had migrated there from Asia just a few thousand years ago. It then came as a massive shock to those same archaeologists when in 1968, near Lake Mungo in Southeastern Australia, the geologist Jim Bowler discovered the remains of a cremated woman who was subsequently radiocarbon-dated to be between 25,000 and 32,000 years old. Lake Mungo Woman, as she came to be known, was repatriated to the Aboriginal community in 1992.

Yet this discovery had already been anticipated by other scientists, for example, the linguists. The Sahul is one of the most linguistically diverse areas in the world, home to more than 1,000 languages, about one-fifth of the world’s total. The linguists had already predicted that the “time depth” required to achieve this type of linguistic diversity was clearly not in the thousands of years, but in the tens of thousands of years. Subsequent archaeological finds have now pushed back the date of human occupation of Australia to a minimum of 45,000 years ago and possibly 60,000 years ago. ....

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