1491_ New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus - Charles C. Mann [94]
Activist critiques like those from Denny and Deloria have had relatively little impact on mainstream archaeologists and anthropologists. In a sense, they were unnecessary: scientists themselves have launched such a sustained attack on the primacy of Clovis, the existence of the ice-free corridor, and the plausibility of overkill that the Clovis consensus has shattered, probably irrecoverably.
In 1964, the year Haynes announced the Clovis-first model, archaeologist Alex D. Krieger listed fifty sites said to be older than Clovis. By 1988 Haynes and other authorities had shot them all down with such merciless dispatch that victims complained of persecution by the “Clovis police.” Haynes, the dissenters said, was a new Hrdlička (minus the charge of insensitivity to living Native Americans). As before, archaeologists became gun-shy about arguing that Indians arrived in the Americas before the canonical date. Perhaps as a result, the most persuasive scientific critiques on Clovis initially came from fields that overlapped archaeology, but were mainly outside of it: linguistics, molecular biology, and geology.
From today’s vantage, the attack seems to have begun, paradoxically, with the publication in 1986 of a landmark pro-Clovis paper in Current Anthropology by a linguist, a physical anthropologist, and a geneticist. The linguistic section attracted special attention. Students of languages had long puzzled over the extraordinary variety and fragmentation of Indian languages. California alone was the home of as many as 86 tongues, which linguists have classified into between 5 and 15 families (the schemes disagree with one another). No one family was dominant. Across the Americas, Indians spoke some 1,200 separate languages that have been classified into as many as 180 linguistic families. By contrast, all of Europe has just 4 language families—Indo-European, Finno-Ugric, Basque, and Turkic—with the great majority of Europeans speaking an Indo-European tongue. Linguists had long wondered how Indians could have evolved so many languages in the thirteen thousand years since Clovis when Europeans had ended up with many fewer in the forty thousand years since the arrival of humans there.
In the first part of the 1986 article, Joseph H. Greenberg, a linguist at Stanford, proclaimed that the profusion of idioms was more apparent than real. After four decades of comparing Native American vocabularies and grammars, he had concluded that Indian languages belonged to just three main linguistic families: Aleut, spoken by northern peoples in a broad band from Alaska to Greenland; NaDené, spoken in western Canada and the U.S. Southwest; and Amerind, much the biggest family, spoken everywhere else, including all of Central and South America. “The three linguistic stocks,” Greenberg said, “represent separate migrations.”
According to Greenberg’s linguistic analysis, paleo-Indians had crossed over Beringia not once, but thrice. Using glottochronology he estimated that the ancestors of Aleuts had crossed the strait around 2000 B.C. and that the ancestors of Na-Dené had made the journey around 7000 B.C. As for Amerind, Greenberg thought, “we are dealing with a time period probably greater than eleven thousand years.” But it was not that much greater, which indicated that the ancestors of Amerind-speaking peoples came over at just about the time that Clovis showed up in the archaeological record. Clovis-first, yes, but Clovis the first of three.
In the same article, Christy G. Turner II, a physical anthropologist at Arizona State, supported the three-migrations scheme with dental evidence. All humans have the same number and type of teeth, but their