American Anthropological Association Statement on Race

American Anthropological Association
Statement on Race 
May 1998

The following statement was adopted by the Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association, acting on a draft prepared by a committee of representative American anthropologists. It does not reflect a consensus of all members of the AAA, as individuals vary in their approaches to the study of "race." We believe that it represents generally the contemporary thinking and scholarly positions of a majority of anthropologists.

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In the United States both scholars and the general public have been conditioned to viewing human races as natural and separate divisions within the human species based on visible physical differences. With the vast expansion of scientific knowledge in this century, however, it has become clear that human populations are not unambiguous, clearly demarcated, biologically distinct groups. Evidence from the analysis of genetics (e.g., DNA) indicates that most physical variation, about 94%, lies within so-called racial groups. Conventional geographic "racial" groupings differ from one another only in about 6% of their genes. This means that there is greater variation within "racial" groups than between them. In neighboring populations there is much overlapping of genes and their phenotypic (physical) expressions. Throughout history whenever different groups have come into contact, they have interbred. The continued sharing of genetic materials has maintained all of humankind as a single species.

Physical variations in any given trait tend to occur gradually rather than abruptly over geographic areas. And because physical traits are inherited independently of one another, knowing the range of one trait does not predict the presence of others. For example, skin color varies largely from light in the temperate areas in the north to dark in the tropical areas in the south; its intensity is not related to nose shape or hair texture. Dark skin may be associated with frizzy or kinky hair or curly or wavy or straight hair, all of which are found among different indigenous peoples in tropical regions. These facts render any attempt to establish lines of division among biological populations both arbitrary and subjective.

Historical research has shown that the idea of "race" has always carried more meanings than mere physical differences; indeed, physical variations in the human species have no meaning except the social ones that humans put on them. Today scholars in many fields argue that "race" as it is understood in the United States of America was a social mechanism invented during the 18th century to refer to those populations brought together in colonial America: the English and other European settlers, the conquered Indian peoples, and those peoples of Africa brought in to provide slave labor.

From its inception, this modern concept of "race" was modeled after an ancient theorem of the Great Chain of Being, which posited natural categories on a hierarchy established by God or nature. Thus "race" was a mode of classification linked specifically to peoples in the colonial situation. It subsumed a growing ideology of inequality devised to rationalize European attitudes and treatment of the conquered and enslaved peoples. Proponents of slavery in particular during the 19th century used "race" to justify the retention of slavery. The ideology magnified the differences among Europeans, Africans, and Indians, established a rigid hierarchy of socially exclusive categories underscored and bolstered unequal rank and status differences, and provided the rationalization that the inequality was natural or God-given. The different physical traits of African-Americans and Indians became markers or symbols of their status differences.

As they were constructing US society, leaders among European-Americans fabricated the cultural/behavioral characteristics associated with each "race," linking superior traits with Europeans and negative and inferior ones to blacks and Indians. Numerous arbitrary and fictitious beliefs about the different peoples were institutionalized and deeply embedded in American thought.

Early in the 19th century the growing fields of science began to reflect the public consciousness about human differences. Differences among the "racial" categories were projected to their greatest extreme when the argument was posed that Africans, Indians, and Europeans were separate species, with Africans the least human and closer taxonomically to apes.

Ultimately "race" as an ideology about human differences was subsequently spread to other areas of the world. It became a strategy for dividing, ranking, and controlling colonized people used by colonial powers everywhere. But it was not limited to the colonial situation. In the latter part of the 19th century it was employed by Europeans to rank one another and to justify social, economic, and political inequalities among their peoples. During World War II, the Nazis under Adolf Hitler enjoined the expanded ideology of "race" and "racial" differences and took them to a logical end: the extermination of 11 million people of "inferior races" (e.g., Jews, Gypsies, Africans, homosexuals, and so forth) and other unspeakable brutalities of the Holocaust.

"Race" thus evolved as a worldview, a body of prejudgments that distorts our ideas about human differences and group behavior. Racial beliefs constitute myths about the diversity in the human species and about the abilities and behavior of people homogenized into "racial" categories. The myths fused behavior and physical features together in the public mind, impeding our comprehension of both biological variations and cultural behavior, implying that both are genetically determined. Racial myths bear no relationship to the reality of human capabilities or behavior. Scientists today find that reliance on such folk beliefs about human differences in research has led to countless errors.

At the end of the 20th century, we now understand that human cultural behavior is learned, conditioned into infants beginning at birth, and always subject to modification. No human is born with a built-in culture or language. Our temperaments, dispositions, and personalities, regardless of genetic propensities, are developed within sets of meanings and values that we call "culture." Studies of infant and early childhood learning and behavior attest to the reality of our cultures in forming who we are.

It is a basic tenet of anthropological knowledge that all normal human beings have the capacity to learn any cultural behavior. The American experience with immigrants from hundreds of different language and cultural backgrounds who have acquired some version of American culture traits and behavior is the clearest evidence of this fact. Moreover, people of all physical variations have learned different cultural behaviors and continue to do so as modern transportation moves millions of immigrants around the world.

How people have been accepted and treated within the context of a given society or culture has a direct impact on how they perform in that society. The "racial" worldview was invented to assign some groups to perpetual low status, while others were permitted access to privilege, power, and wealth. The tragedy in the United States has been that the policies and practices stemming from this worldview succeeded all too well in constructing unequal populations among Europeans, Native Americans, and peoples of African descent. Given what we know about the capacity of normal humans to achieve and function within any culture, we conclude that present-day inequalities between so-called "racial" groups are not consequences of their biological inheritance but products of historical and contemporary social, economic, educational, and political circumstances.

[Note: For further information on human biological variations, see the statement prepared and issued by the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, 1996 (AJPA 101:569-570).]

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AAA Position Paper on Race: Comments?

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As a result of public confusion about the meaning of "race," claims as to major biological differences among "races" continue to be advanced. Stemming from past AAA actions designed to address public misconceptions on race and intelligence, the need was apparent for a clear AAA statement on the biology and politics of race that would be educational and informational. Rather than wait for each spurious claim to be raised, the AAA Executive Board determined that the Association should prepare a statement for approval by the Association and elicit member input.

Commissioned by the Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association, a position paper on race was authored by Audrey Smedley (Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview, 1993) and thrice reviewed by a working group of prominent anthropologists: George Armelagos, Michael Blakey, C. Loring Brace, Alan Goodman, Faye Harrison, Jonathan Marks, Yolanda Moses, and Carol Mukhopadhyay. A draft of the current paper was published in the September 1997 Anthropology Newsletter and posted ont the AAA website http://www.aaanet.org for a number of months, and member comments were requested. While Smedley assumed authorship of the final draft, she received comments not only from the working group but also from the AAA membership and other interested readers. The paper above was adopted by the AAA Executive Board on May 17, 1998, as an official statement of AAA's position on "race."

Bering Strait Theory, Pt. 2: Racism, Eugenics and When Natives Came to America

Bering Strait Theory, Pt. 2: Racism, Eugenics and When Natives Came to America

Alex Ewen

6/20/14

In Part 1 of our exclusive series we examined how the discovery and examination of the ancient Mexican skeleton, Naia, has led scientists to once again rethink the origins of American Indians.
RELATED: Bering Strait Theory, Pt. 1: How Dogma Trumped Science
Since the early 16th-century, questions about the origins of American Indians spurred a lively theological debate. By the mid-19th-century, science was taking over, but that did not end the debate, indeed, it only made it more contentious than ever.
Skullduggery
On July 18, 1866 the distinguished geologist and scion of a prominent and intellectual Massachusetts family, Josiah Whitney, wrote to his younger brother, the linguist and philologist William Dwight Whitney, of a stunning find at the bottom of a gold mine in Calaveras County, California.
The great excitement now at the office is the discovery of a human skull at a depth 153 feet below a series of volcanic beds with intercalated gravels. I have just returned from the locality, and we have the skull in the office. It is a bony fide find of the greatest interest.
Whitney, a professor at Harvard, was the first “State Geologist” of California. For his scientific achievements, the highest mountain in the continental United States, Mt. Whitney, and a glacier, Whitney Glacier, would be named after him. Whitney examined the skull, which was still partially encrusted in gravel and volcanic ash and covered with a thin sheen of calcium carbonate. Although it was anatomically similar to modern humans, the skull was almost completely fossilized, strong evidence it was probably very old.
The only way to know how old, in those days, was to determine the age of the stratum in which it was buried, but Whitney had not discovered the skull. The skull was apparently found by the mine operator who then gave it to a Wells Fargo agent, who than passed it on to a doctor in San Francisco, who then contacted Whitney. Whitney visited the site, but it was now five months after the discovery and the shaft where it was found had been abandoned and become filled with water. Despite not being able to confirm the exact stratigraphic position of the skull, and therefore its age, Whitney went ahead and announced his preliminary results in a short paper before the California Academy of Sciences.
The news hit the world like a thunderclap. If the skull had indeed been found beneath four separate layers of lava, each layer between 9 and 40 feet thick, that meant that Calaveras Man was, under the reckoning of the day, around 10 million years old.
Whitney’s discovery was met with stunned disbelief from most scientists. Although the antiquity of man had just been recently accepted, 10 million years was a big, big leap. Given the new state of the science many still held an open mind. French anthropologist Jean-François-Albert du Pouget was willing to give Whitney the benefit of the doubt, although he found it odd that the skull was indistinguishable from a modern man; “it is difficult to admit the perpetuation of a type without appreciable modifications during the incalculable ages in which all nature has undergone so complete a transformation.”
But for many scientists, the idea that American Indians could be more ancient than Europeans was impossible. At the same time the theories of evolution for natural organisms were being developed in Europe, culminating in Darwin’s work, theories of social evolution had also been percolating, finding its synthesis in the works of British philosopher Herbert Spencer, who argued that societies increase in complexity over time.
Lewis Henry Morgan, in his influential work Ancient Society, proposed that humans went through various stages of development, beginning with the “Older Period of Savagery” progressing through middle and later periods into the “Older Period of Barbarism,” which also had other stages until finally the “Status of Civilization” was reached.
Thus Canadian geologist Sir John William Dawson could state in his book, Fossil Men, published in 1880, that, “existing humanity, as it appears in the Native American, is little else than the survival of primeval man in Europe.” Dawson led the charge of those scientists who fought against the antiquity of the Calaveras Skull, calling Whitney’s discovery “fanciful and improbable.”
Nor were scientists Whitney’s only detractors; there were those who still held firmly to Biblical ideas of time and creation. “The religious papers,” paleontologist John C. Merriam wrote, “in particular investigated the case and pronounced it a hoax originating with some mischievous miners.” The stories that Whitney was the victim of a practical joke spread, becoming more and more elaborate with each telling, with more and more participants claiming to have been in on it, and making the new science a source of popular ridicule. To make matters worse, Whitney took his time defending his discovery, writing a detailed report about the skull only in 1879, a full 13 years later, which allowed the controversy to fester and grow.
With the release of his report, dissenting scientists were finally able to take a crack at dismantling Whitney’s discovery and the attacks were swift and withering. The geologist William Phipps Blake, who visited the site, argued that the calcareous sheen on the skull was not typical of a fossil washed into a gravel bed, and the skull should have been more damaged and abraded. Alphonse Pinart, a champion of the Bering Strait Theory who had actually kayaked through it, contended that the site was not pristine and so there was no way of knowing where the skull came from, all of which created “the most serious doubts regarding the antiquity of this specimen.”
Whitney replied that it didn’t really matter where the skull had been found, the gravels found encrusted with it were clearly of an ancient epoch, an argument dismissed by the prominent archaeologist William Henry Holmes, who countered that the Indians could have simply buried the person in those ancient deposits. A host of distinguished scientists rose to defend Whitney. Many, such as the paleontologist William Healey Dall and geologist George Ferdinand Becker, actually examined the skull. But the lack of proof that it had come from such a deep location made it difficult to defend its great age, and there were strong grounds to believe that even if Whitney was not the victim of some prank, the skull did not come from the bottom of the mine shaft.
With Whitney’s death in 1896 the gloves came off and the Calaveras skull was systematically debunked and pronounced a hoax. Unfortunately it would be another 70 years before the skull could be dated independently of the stratum it might have come from. Because it was almost completely fossilized, the skull could not be radiocarbon dated, but a fluorine test conducted by the archaeologist Kenneth Oakley of the British Museum (Natural History) found it to be approximately 5,000 years old, ancient yes, but by no means 10 million years old.
The Paleolithic War
The highly publicized battle over the Calaveras skull was just the opening salvo of a rancorous war among American paleoanthropologists that raged across the hemisphere over the next half-century. The battle lines became drawn between those who believed, or were willing to accept, that Indians in America were ancient, that is present in this hemisphere at least 10,000 years ago or even 100,000 years ago (the Paleolithic era), and those who insisted that Indians had migrated here only within the past 5,000 years.
As Anthony T. Boldurian and John L. Cotter observed in their history of the early excavations in the Southwest, Clovis Revisited, the conflict was due “in part to heated arguments over what exactly constituted acceptable evidence.” The new science was still working out its methodology for determining how old artifacts might be. But a larger problem was that, “a few of anthropology’s influential elite seemed firmly opposed to an American Paleolithic.”
Thus any archaeological site that might betray a hint of antiquity became a bloody battleground fought between competing camps of scientists. From the suburbs in New Jersey to beaches in Florida, the wilderness of Canada to the Mississippi Delta, from the Pampas of Argentina to the valleys of Mexico, the war raged without mercy. To make things worse, amateurs and dilettantes scoured the land looking for fossils, often making outlandish claims. Among the professionals there were dozens of theories as to how old Indians were and where they came from, with some even proposing an American genesis.
In Europe, spectacular finds piled up one after another: the discovery of Cro-Magnon man in southern France in 1868; the cave art of Altamira, Spain, discovered in 1879; the discovery of extensive Neanderthal tools in 1880. But in America, paleoanthropology was completely paralyzed by the infighting. By 1900, the new science did not have a single discovery that had any consensus among its members.
Paleoanthropology needed a leader, someone who could end the chaos and put it on the path to respectability. It found it in a most unlikely person, a Czech-born anthropologist by the name of Aleš Hrdlička. His impact on American paleoanthropology in the coming century would be difficult to overstate.
The Rise of an Orthodoxy
Although only 34 years old in 1903, Hrdlička was chosen to head the new physical anthropology department at the National Museum (now the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History) in Washington D.C. Physical anthropology, the biological study of humans, was at that time largely concerned with “racial classification,” often through the study of human skulls, and Hrdlička was by then one of its leading experts. Over the previous four years, Hrdlička had toured the Americas examining people and collecting skulls for the American Museum of Natural History and his skills had brought him to the attention of the curator of anthropology at the National Museum, William Henry Holmes.
Holmes, one of the most prominent critics of the Calaveras skull, was a veteran in the war among paleoanthropologists and the leading debunker of ancient archaeological finds. In Hrdlička, Holmes found a person who was an even more strident advocate of the modernity of American Indians and an unswerving devotee of the Bering Strait Theory, believing that Indians had originated in Central Europe and then reached the Americas no earlier than 3,000 BC. As the anthropologist Adolph H. Schultz wrote in 1944 in his memorial to Hrdlička,
In regard to his own conclusions, Hrdlička seems to have been rarely plagued by doubts … Thus, once having become convinced that man’s arrival in America was of comparatively recent date, he steadfastly clung to and passionately fought for this conclusion to the end of his life, even in view of evidence demanding a reconsideration of the problem of the antiquity of man in the New World.
These views were by no means a consensus among scientists then. Even conservatives like Sir John William Dawson, who was among the first to challenge the Calaveras skull and who believed that American Indians were relatively recent migrants, also believed that they had migrated through multiple routes, from Asia, the North Atlantic, and the islands of Polynesia. A host of others, like Frederic Ward Putnam, curator of the American Museum of Natural History in New York and considered the “father of American archaeology,” were firmly convinced that Indians were here in the Paleolithic, at least 10,000 years ago or more.
Hrdlička subscribed to the pseudo-scientific “eugenics” theories that were in vogue at the time. Eugenics, essentially scientific racism, was based on the work of Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, who had proposed that the perceived superiority of the white race was due to a superior genetic makeup, a theory highly controversial even then. Hrdlička worked with and was influenced by America’s leading eugenicist, Charles B. Davenport, and he received funding to conduct research and launch his magazine, The American Journal of Physical Anthropology, from Madison Grant, author of one of the most infamous works of scientific racism, The Passing of the Great Race.
Hrdlička’s theory of the Bering Strait migration was identical to that of James Adair, who had proposed it more than a century before, except for the Lost Tribes part. They were both based not on scientific evidence, but on a presumption born in religion that then migrated to science–the antiquity and preeminence of Western culture over all others.
RELATED: Bering Strait Theory, Pt. 3: The Theory Becomes a Religious Crusade
RELATED: Bering Strait Theory, Pt. 4: The Indisputable Facts in the Artifacts
RELATED: Bering Strait Theory, Pt. 5: The Theory Comes Crashing Down
RELATED: Bering Strait Theory, Pt. 6: DNA, Blood Types and Stereotypes

Read more at https://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2014/06/20/bering-strait-theory-pt-2-racism-eugenics-and-when-natives-came-america-155406?nopaging=1

Bering Strait Theory, Pt. 5: The Theory Comes Crashing Down

Courtesy world-mysteries.com

Bering Strait Theory, Pt. 5: The Theory Comes Crashing Down

Alex Ewen

7/11/14

In Part 4 of our exclusive series we looked at how the Bering Strait Theory by the 1920s had become a rigid dogma that no scientist who valued their career would dare to challenge.
RELATED: Bering Strait Theory, Pt. 4: The Indisputable Facts in the Artifacts
For most of the 20th century, new discoveries of American Indian origins that cast doubt on the Bering Strait Theory were either dismissed or ignored. But as the technology of science marched on, the cracks grew deeper and deeper.
An unintended consequence of the atmospheric testing of atomic weapons during the Cold War was that by the 1960s it had doubled the amount of radioactive carbon 14 in the environment, and this “bomb pulse” was showing up on the instruments that were used for radiocarbon dating. This led scientists to suspect that the amount of carbon 14 that is found in the environment might not have always been constant, possibly leading to wrong dates.
By the mid-1980s, dendrochronologists, those that study and date tree-rings, had manage to piece together–by matching the tree-rings of long-living species such as the bristlecone pine with those of ancient trees–an unbroken string of tree-rings over 7,000 years old. Since dendochronology can give extremely accurate dates, often to the year, matching the two dating systems found exactly that, that the amount of C14 fluctuated and that many radiocarbon dates had to be adjusted.
For Clovis First advocates, this presented a real problem, for the new calibrated radiocarbon dates pushed back the Clovis culture almost 2,000 years. It meant that the oldest reliably dated Clovis site, in Aubrey, Texas, which was radiocarbon dated at 11,590 years ago, was now approximately 13,490 years old. The Paleoindians would have had to race through the Ice-free Corridor to get to Texas in time.
But the new radiocarbon dates would give even more bad news. Geologists, also recalibrating their radiocarbon data, began to refine their estimates for when the massive ice sheets began to melt, and found them adjusting their dates between 500 and 2,000 years earlier. The Ice-free Corridor was now certainly impassable 13,000 years ago and possibly as late as 12,000 years ago. This meant that there was no way the Paleoindians could have walked over from Asia–or if they had, they would have had to done so 20,000 years earlier, a non-starter for the theory’s advocates. A central thesis of the Bering Strait Theory was now toppled, for if the Clovis culture was indeed the first peoples in the Americas, they had to have come by boat.
A Polynesian Interlude
The use of boats had always been rejected by the Bering Strait advocates, because it opened up other possible routes of migration, such as Europe or Polynesia. Thus they had dismissed any contacts between Polynesians and American Indians (and many continue to dismiss evidence of prehistoric contacts), because it would undercut the contention that “primitive people” could not cross the oceans, and that walking across the Bering Strait was the only possible way that Paleoindians could have come to the Americas.
But the presumption that primitive people cannot sail the ocean is a belief born out of the social evolutionary theories of Herbert Spencer and Lewis Henry Morgan–that societies inexorably evolve to greater complexity and skill. Since the Europeans were unable to cross the oceans until the 16th-century, no one else should have been able to do so earlier.
Yet the evidence for pre-Columbian contact between Polynesians and American Indians has always been strong. Before the Bering Strait Theory assumed its dogmatic status, many scientists believed it and few rejected it out of hand. As early as 1837, scientists such as John Dunmore Lang, a prominent Presbyterian minister and Australian politician, proposed Polynesian voyages to America. In his book, Origins and Migrations of the Polynesian Nation, Lang dismissed the Asian-American connection, stating that “there is no evidence, and not the slightest probability, of any emigration having ever taken place from Asia to America by the Behring’s [sic] Straits.”
Ever since the first proposer of this particular route for the discovery and settlement of America announced his great idea to the world, the learned of all nations, including such names as Humboldt and Dr. Robertson, have caught and adopted that idea and followed in his wake–as blindly, indeed, and as unintelligently as a flock of sheep follows its leader.
Lang, who traveled throughout the Pacific and into the Americas, argued, in a large part through linguistic evidence, that the Polynesians originated in Malaysia and spread across the ocean in a pattern largely confirmed 150 years later by genetic evidence.
Many of Lang’s ideas were fanciful, but no more so than any one else’s at the time. He believed the Polynesians landed near Copiapo in Chile in some distant past and from there colonized the Americas. The historian George Bancroft (whose dubious accomplishments include instigating the Mexican War as acting Secretary of War under President James Polk), wrote about Lang’s theory in 1841 in his influential book, History of the Colonization of the United States, “It would not be safe to reject the possibility of an early communication between South America and the Polynesia world.” The distinguished French naturalist Jean Louis Armand de Quatrefages also considered American voyages likely in his 1866 work, The Polynesians and Their Migrations.
There was little doubt in those days that the Polynesians could have made a trans-Pacific voyage. The early settlement of Hawaii, more than 2,500 miles from the northernmost islands of French Polynesia and over 3,000 miles from Tahiti, required a tremendous feat of sailing and navigation. European explorers often recorded meeting Polynesian sailors in the open ocean, including an encounter in 1615 by the Dutch navigator, Willem Cornelisz Schouten, who came across a party of Polynesians in a double-hulled ship more than 3,000 miles from their home in the Marianas.
Lang noted physical and cultural similarities between the two peoples, many of which today would be seen as the result of simple prejudice, but others, such as similar types of fishhooks, canoes, and harpoons used by Indians in California, Chile, and among the Polynesians, were not to be dismissed lightly.
The most important evidence was biological. As early as 1770, Spanish explorers wrote that maize, manioc, and white potatoes, all indigenous to the Americas, had been grown on Easter Island. Similar varieties of coconuts, bottle gourd (calabash), bananas, and chickens, were all seen as evidence of voyages back and forth. Most significantly, the sweet potato, clearly indigenous to the Americas, was found across Polynesia, including Hawaii and New Zealand. In 1866, in the journal Botany, the German botanist Berthold Carl Seemann wrote that the Polynesian name for sweet potato, “Kumara or umara, of the South-Sea Islanders, is identical with cumar, the Quichua name for sweet potato in the highlands of Ecuador.”
As if that evidence was not indisputable enough, in 1841, while digging through an ancient Inca temple in Cuzco, Peru, the director of the National Museum of Lima, Mariano Eduardo de Rivero, and the Swiss explorer, Johann Jakob von Tschudi, discovered a distinctive “green amphibole stone ax,” that was soon identified as a Maori patu-pounamu, or jade war club, from New Zealand. But as the Bering Strait Theory became predominant in the late 19th-century, the idea of Polynesian-American contact began to lose favor.
By the early 20th-century, only a few anthropologists, such as Roland Dixon, were willing to accept, and even then only half-heartedly, that trans-Pacific voyages by Polynesians might have occurred. Thor Heyerdahl’s highly celebrated voyage from South America to Polynesia in the light raft Kon-Tiki in 1947, along with his equally celebrated but extremely doubtful ideas of Polynesian origins, created a huge scientific backlash that basically killed any lingering discussion of trans-oceanic contact.
But the Polynesians did sail to the Americas. Recent DNA studies of sweet potatoes and chickens now confirm that they were traded before contact with Europeans. A flurry of recent articles, including “The Polynesian Gene Pool: an Early Contribution by Amerindians to Easter Island,” published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 2012; a 2013 article from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, entitled “Identification of Polynesian mtDNA Haplogroups in Remains of Botocudo Amerindians from Brazil;” and a 2010 article in Current Geonomics, “The Origin of Amerindians and the Peopling of the Americas According to HLA Genes: Admixture with Asian and Pacific Peoples” have pretty much settled the debate for everyone except the most dogmatic Bering Strait advocates.
The new version of the Bering Strait Theory, what is now known as the “Coastal Migration,” has the first Americans using boats, presumably small primitive craft that then skirted the massive ice-sheets along the coast on their way to Aubrey, Texas. But that assumption completely dismisses the reality of the region of the Bering Strait.
As it is presently, even without being surrounded by the massive ice-sheets that would have reached out well into the open ocean back then, the seas around the Bering Strait are among the most treacherous on the planet. European explorers had, for 200 years after they had already circumnavigated the globe, attempted to reach the area without success, failing time and time again because their ships were not capable of even coming close to it, much less crossing it. Navigating those seas requires tremendous technological skill, every bit as daunting as crossing the open ocean.
One could argue, using the example of European or Polynesian voyages, that it would have been just as easy for Paleoindians to have crossed the Pacific or Atlantic, than to try to sail or paddle the seas around the Bering Strait. The presumption had been that Paleoindians walked across a land bridge into the Americas because they were incapable of doing anything else, but if Paleoindians did indeed use boats 15,000 years ago, then they could have come from anywhere.
Time Waits for No One
Now that it became evident that the land passageway to the Americas was effectively blocked, even during the Clovis period, the Bering Strait Theory should have died a natural death, but being a dogma and not a scientific theory, its advocates would simply not let go. After Aleš Hrdlička’s retirement in 1942 from the National Museum, a number of sites potentially older than Clovis had been excavated, but all had been vigorously challenged by a new generation of archaeologists, and all had been dismissed. The demand for “indisputable proof,” whatever that might entail, was simply too great an obstacle to overcome. But one man had figured out the game, and in doing so, brought down the Clovis First version of the Bering Strait Theory.
 In 1976, Tom Dillehay, an American anthropologist who at that time was working at the Universidad Austral de Chile, began excavating an ancient site in southern Chile. Quickly recognizing the antiquity of this site, his excavation became arguably the most meticulous ever undertaken. It had to be, for when he first announced his findings in 1988, and claimed that the samples of wood from houses, charcoal from hearths, and other artifacts that he had excavated had been radiocarbon dated to be almost 15,000 years old, it sent a massive shock wave through the archaeological community. It meant that this site in South America was more than 1,000 years older than any accepted site in North America. Dillehay’s findings were immediately and bitterly attacked by the Clovis First advocates, but he had expected it, and the detail and quality of his work made his conclusions virtually irrefutable. Despite this, it took almost 10 years for the archaeological community to–extremely grudgingly–accept the Monte Verde site.
The fact that the oldest site in the Americas was located almost 8,000 miles from the presumed gateway did not go unnoticed. One might have assumed that if the Bering Strait Theory were correct, and Paleoindians migrated from Asia, then the sites in South America would be much younger than those in North America, and the further north one excavated, the older the sites would be. But that had never been the case, as the accepted sites in Canada were even younger than those in the U.S. Indeed the archaeological evidence was pointed towards a migration, but a migration the other way.
With Clovis First now dead and with it the Ice-Free Corridor, Coastal Migration was now the only alternative. The new dates from Monte Verde had pushed back human occupation of the Americas to 14,800 years ago, but geologists had already determined that 17,000 years ago the coastal route was completely blocked by ice from Russia all the way to Seattle. The Paleoindians would have had to have sailed a distance of almost 3,000 miles alongside the massive ice sheets without being able to land. Even 16,000 years ago the coastal route would have been largely clogged with ice. Once again the Paleoindians would have had to race, this time in tiny boats through treacherous waters, if they were to reach Monte Verde in time to leave traces of their occupation.
The line was drawn once again by the Bering Strait advocates at 15,000 years ago, and it could not go back much further than that without the collapse of the whole theory. So this meant that according to the newest version of the Bering Strait Theory, the Paleoindians essentially sailed down the coast directly to Monte Verde, Chile, before later deciding to settle in the Americas. But as absurd as that idea was, new evidence was making even that far-fetched concept impossible.
RELATED: Bering Strait Theory, Pt. 1: How Dogma Trumped Science
RELATED: Bering Strait Theory, Pt. 2: Racism, Eugenics and When Natives Came to America
RELATED: Bering Strait Theory, Pt. 3: The Theory Becomes a Religious Crusade
RELATED: Bering Strait Theory, Pt. 6: DNA, Blood Types and Stereotypes

Read more

Clovis First

Bering Strait

Bering Strait Theory

dendrochronologists

Paleoindians

Herbert Spencer

Lewis Henry Morgan

John Dunmore Lang

Origins and Migrations of the Polynesian Nation

George Bancroft

Mexican War

President James Polk

History of the Colonization of the United States

Jean Louis Armand de Quatrefages

The Polynesians and Their Migrations

Willem Cornelisz Schouten

Berthold Carl Seeann

National Museum of Lima

Mariano Eduardo de Rivero

Johann Jakob von Tschudi

Roland Dixon

Thor Heyerdahl

Coastal Migration

Ales Hrdlicka

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Ice-Free Corridor

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