1491_ New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus - Charles C. Mann [98]
“Some of our colleagues seem to have gone seriously wrong,” lamented Thomas F. Lynch of Texas A&M in the Review of Archaeology in 2001. Proudly claiming that he had helped “blow the whistle” on other Clovis challengers, Lynch described the gathering support for pre-Clovis candidates as a manifestation of “political correctness.” He predicted that Monte Verde would eventually “fade away.”
For better or worse, most archaeologists with whom I have spoken act as if the Clovis-first model were wrong, while still accepting that it might be correct. Truly ardent Clovisites, like Low Counters, are “in a definite minority now,” according to Michael Crawford, a University of Kansas anthropologist—a conclusion that Fiedel, Haynes, and other skeptics ruefully echo. Following Monte Verde, at least three other pre-Clovis sites gained acceptance, though each continued to have its detractors.
The ultimate demise of the Clovis dogma is inevitable, David Henige, author of Numbers from Nowhere, told me. “Archaeologists are always dating something to five thousand years ago and then saying that this must be the first time it occurred because they haven’t found any earlier examples. And then, incredibly, they defend this idea to the death. It’s logically indefensible.” Clovis-first, he said, is “a classic example of arguing from silence. Even in archaeology, which isn’t exactly rocket science”—he chuckled—“there’s only so long you can get away with it.”
HUGGING THE SHORE
Since Holmes and Hrdlička, archaeologists and anthropologists have tried to separate themselves from Abbott’s modern descendants: the mob of sweaty-palmed archaeology buffs who consume books about Atlantis and run Web sites about aliens in Peru and medieval Welsh in Iowa. The consensus around Clovis helped beat them back, but the confused back-and-forth ushered in by the genetic studies has provided a new opening. Unable to repel the quacks with a clear theory of their own, archaeologists and anthropologists found themselves enveloped in a cloud of speculation.
The most notorious recent example of this phenomenon is surely Kennewick Man. A 9,400-year-old skeleton that turned up near Kennewick, Washington, in 1997, Kennewick Man became a center of controversy when an early reconstruction of the skeleton’s face suggested that it had Caucasian features (or, more precisely, “Caucasoid” features). The reconstruction, published in newspapers and magazines around the world, elicited assertions that Indians had European ancestry. Archaeologists and Indian activists, for once united, scoffed at this notion. Indian and European mitochondrial DNA are strikingly different. How could Indians descend from Europeans if they did not inherit their genetic makeup?
Yet, as Fiedel conceded to me, the collapse of the Clovis consensus means that archaeologists must consider unorthodox possibilities, including that some other people preceded the ancestors of today’s Indians into the Americas. Numerous candidates exist for these prepaleo-Indians, among them the Lagoa Santa people, whose skulls more resemble the skulls of Australian aborigines than those of Native Americans. Skull gauging is, at best, an inexact science, and most archaeologists have dismissed the notion of an Australian role in American prehistory. But in the fall of 2003 an article in the journal Nature about ancient skulls in Baja California revived this possibility. Aborigines, in one scenario, may have traveled from Australia to Tierra del Fuego via Antarctica. Or else there was a single ancestral population split, with the ancestors of Australians heading in one direction and the ancestors of Indians heading in another. In either version of the scenario the ancestors of today’s Indians crossed the Bering Strait to find the Americas already settled by Australians. Migration across Antarctica!—exactly the sort of extravagant notion that the whitecoats sought to consign to the historical dustbin. Now they may all be back. If