Bering Strait Theory, Pt. 1: How Dogma Trumped Science

Bering Strait Theory, Pt. 1: How Dogma Trumped Science

Alex Ewen

6/13/14

The discovery and examination of the ancient Mexican skeleton, Naia, has led scientists to once again rethink the origins of American Indians. While there has been a rancorous debate over some details regarding who the first peoples of the Americas might have been, the broader context is usually the Bering Strait Theory, the idea that Paleoindians walked from Asia over an ancient land bridge approximately 15,000 years ago. Among scientists, this theory appears unshakable, despite the lack of scientific evidence to support it. Indeed, a host of scientific evidence, from linguistics to genetics, does not support the theory.
RELATED: New Discovery Confirms Native American Views on Their Ancestry
RELATED: How Linguists Are Pulling Apart the Bering Strait Theory
As recent scientific discoveries have undercut the Bering Strait Theory, a new hypothesis has emerged, the “Beringian Standstill Theory.” The Standstill hypothesis, which proposes that Paleoindians lived isolated in the land bridge area for almost 20,000 years before migrating to the Americas, is also a controversial conjecture that has questionable scientific merit.
The reason for the insistence by scientists in the primacy of the Bering Strait Theory is not because of science, but because of dogma. This is well known among the scientists, many of whom have chafed under its strictures. So in 1998, Dennis Stanford, director of the Paleoindian program at the Smithsonian Institution, coined the term “Clovis Police” to refer to those “die-hard archaeologists who insist upon Clovis as representing the earliest culture in the New World.” James Adovasio, known for his excavations of the Meadowcroft Rockshelter in Pennsylvania, devoted an entire chapter of his 2002 book, The First Americans: In Pursuit of Archaeology’s Greatest Mystery, to the “Paleo-police” who have frustrated his attempts to gain recognition for the antiquity of the site.
When genetic studies that proposed an ancient contact between Polynesians and American Indians – not in conformity with the Bering Strait Theory – were published by University of Hawaii geneticist Rebecca Cann, they were met with a swift and fierce rebuttal. Cann is a pioneer among geneticists, her research having developed the concept of the “Mitochondrial Eve” and the currently accepted “Out of Africa” theory of modern human origins. She was not someone to be trifled with, and she shot back in a letter in the American Journal of Human Genetics, dismissing much of her critics’ data, interpretations, and point of view; “Rather than make dogmatic statements, we feel that it is better to encourage the open exploration of this debate, with more genetic markers and the use of data already in the literature.”
But open exploration of the debate is not going to happen, because the debate itself is moderated by ideologues, who determine the evidence that may be used, and ignore the evidence that does not fit the theory. In order to understand why this is, one must look at the history of the Bering Strait Theory, which will only shed a little light on the development of science, but offers important lessons on how and why a dogma is created.
The Birth of a Theory
When Columbus stumbled upon the Americas in 1492, he set off an endless round of speculation in Europe regarding the lands and its people. By 1797, Benjamin Smith Barton could write in his book New Views of the Origin of the Tribes and Nations of America that the “opinions of writers concerning the origin, or parental countries, of the Americans are as numerous as the tribes and nations who inhabit this vast portion of the earth.
In those days, the study of science was still a subset of theology so virtually all of the early theories of Indian origins were based on the Bible. Typical of these early scientists was the keen-eyed Jesuit observer Friar Joseph de Acosta, whose book The Natural and Moral History of the Indies (as America was then known), published in 1590, is among the first in the nascent field of anthropology. For Acosta, the evidence was clear.
The reason why we are forced to admit that the men of the Indies came from Europe or Asia is so as not to contradict the sacred Scriptures, which clearly teaches that all men descend from Adam; and thus we cannot assign any other origin for the men of the Indies.
Similarly, the colonization was believed to have taken place only in the past few thousand years. The scientific consensus at that time, held by the foremost chronologists of the Bible, such as Jesuit philosopher Benedict Pereira, Irish archbishop James Ussher, the astronomer Johannes Kepler and the physicist Isaac Newton, was that humans were created around 4,000 BC and the Flood unleashed around 2,400 BC.
Although it would be another 138 years before European explorers would find the Bering Strait, Acosta and many other 16th-century scientists had already assumed that Asia and the Americas were connected. They reasoned that since all of the animals in the world were descended from those saved by Noah from the Flood, the animals that were in the New World had to have walked over by some as yet undiscovered passageway. Acosta argued similarly “that the race of men arrived by traveling little by little until they reached the New World, and the continuity or nearness of the lands helped in this.”
Not everyone agreed with Acosta. The 16th-century Swiss scientist and father of chemistry, Paracelsus, believed the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas were a separate creation of God and not descended from Adam and Eve. His theory, however, met with little support, as there was no evidence of a separate creation in the Bible.
In 1681, Diego Andrés Rocha proposed in his book, A Unique and Singular Treatise on the Origins of the Indians of Peru, Mexico, Santa Fe, and Chile that Indians were the descendants of Noah’s son Japheth and had come to the Americas by way of Atlantis. Since Rocha believed the Spanish were also descended from Japheth, and thus related to Indians, the colonization of the Americas by Spain was to him a fulfillment of divine providence.
Not to be outdone, British writers such as Richard Hakluyt and George Bruder argued that ancient Indians were Welsh and thus justified the British explorations of North America. The Dutch legal philosopher, Hugo Grotius, believed they were northern Europeans who had sailed across the Atlantic, since had they come from Asia they would have surely brought their horses. Many believed Indians were descended from Canaan, the grandson of Noah who was cursed by God, or Ophir, a descendant of Noah’s son Shem who settled in a land rich with gold.
The most enduring origin theory based on the Bible was that Indians were the descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel, a belief still held today by devout Mormons. It was proposed in 1567 by both French Benedictine scholar Gilbert Genebrard in Chronicle in Two Volumes and Dutch priest Joannes Fredericus Lumnius in his book De Extremo dei Judicio et Indorum Vocatione. As evidence they produced the apocryphal Second Book of Esdras, which tells the story of how the Lost Tribes escaped their Assyrian captors and fled “to a far away country where mankind had never lived,” a region called Arsareth, or in their view, America.
Irish anthropologist James Adair popularized this notion in his book published in 1775, The History of the American Indians, bringing a wealth of (what at that time was considered to be) scientific evidence to back up the Lost Tribes theory. Adair also argued that the early migrants had crossed the Bering Strait.
The Russians, after several dangerous attempts, have clearly convinced the world that [Asia and America] are now divided and have close communication by a narrow strait, in which several islands are situated, through which there is an easy passage from the north-east of Asia to the north-west of America. … By this passage, supposing the main continents were separated, it was very practical for the inhabitants to go to this extensive new world, and afterwards have proceeded in quest of suitable climes.
Although Adair’s ideas about the Lost Tribes would largely fall out of favor, his theory about the Bering Strait would not.
Science Takes Over
On September 6, 1856, a small article appeared in the local newspaper in Elberfeld, Germany.
In the neighboring Neander Valley … a surprising discovery was made in recent days. During the breaking away of limestone cliffs … a cave was uncovered, which over the course of centuries had been filled with clay sediment. Upon digging out this clay, a human rib was found …
The news caught the attention of the distinguished naturalist and professor of anatomy at the University of Bonn, Hermann Schaaffhausen, who at first speculated that the ancient skeleton uncovered was nothing less than an ancestor of American Indians. Upon actual examination of the fossil, what he reported sent shock waves through the Western world.
Neanderthal Man, as he was dubbed, was human, but an entirely different species of human. The concept was not easy to grasp at that time. The idea that there might have existed other forms of humans had rarely been contemplated, much less fit into any existing theory of human origins. Schaaffhausen’s conclusions met with a swift rejection from most other German scientists, who argued that despite the extreme mineralization, the unusual skeleton was not old, he was either a ”poor wretch” who had been deformed by disease, or a Russian Cossack.
But others were ready to accept the possibility that ancient humans existed even if there was no mention of them in the Bible. Geologists, beginning with James Hutton in the 18th-century, had already begun to challenge the notion that the Flood had deposited the many differing layers of soils, rock, and sediments, and argued convincingly that the earth was much, much older than previously thought. In 1837 the Swiss botanist and geologist Louis Agassiz proposed his then extremely controversial theory that the earth had been subject in the ancient past to an ice age.
William Pengelly’s systematic excavations at Brixham Cave in England in 1858, where he found stone tools located alongside extinct ice age animals, was therefore seen as convincing proof of the antiquity of humans. The next year the excavations in the Somme Valley by French archaeologist Jacques Boucher de Crèvecœur de Perthes, who as early as 1847 proposed that men had lived during the ice age, were examined and confirmed, and the findings presented before a stellar assemblage of scientists at London’s prestigious Royal Society, where they were accepted.
With the discoveries of Neanderthal Man, Brixham Cave, and the Somme, antiquarians (as those who studied the human past were then called) were forced to make a choice, and out of that choice a new science, paleoanthropology, was born. The same year that the antiquity of man was confirmed and accepted by the scientists of the Royal Society, Charles Darwin published his famous work, On the Origin of Species, leading to a lasting break with long-held Biblical theories of the natural world.
Paleoanthropology, the study of ancient humans, began as (and still is) a mixture of many sciences and its founding members were composed of academics from practically every discipline: geology, anthropology, biology, archeology, anatomy, and chemistry, to name a few. They were joined by a host of amateurs: businessmen, doctors, bankers, and schoolteachers, who would search for fossils in their spare time.
In Europe dramatic discoveries rapidly followed one after another, and in America the new science was also taking off dramatically–but unfortunately, dramatically on the wrong foot.
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. 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

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How Linguists Are Pulling Apart the Bering Strait Theory

AccessGenealogy.com

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.

Hypothetical w/ only two sites extent

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.
The only area in the world that has a comparable level of linguistic diversity as the Sahul is the Americas, and in certain very important respects, the Americas were even more diverse. Since the very first period of contact between Europeans and Indians, observers had marveled at how many different languages and cultures were to be found. Thomas Jefferson, among the leading scientists of his day, wrote in 1785 in his Notes on the State of Virginia.

Imperfect as is our knowledge of the tongues spoken in America, it suffices to discover the following remarkable fact. Arranging them under the radical ones to which they may be palpably traced, and doing the same by those of the red men of Asia, there will be found probably twenty in America, for one in Asia, of those radical languages, so called because, if they were ever the same, they have lost all resemblance to one another. 

Distribution of language families and isolates north of Mexico at first contact

Today, linguists call Jefferson’s “radical languages,” language families or stocks, each made up of numerous languages and dialects. As Jefferson saw it, this diversity clearly pointed to the great age of American Indians; “A separation into dialects may be the work of a few ages only, but for two dialects to recede from one another till they have lost all vestiges of their common origin, must require an immense course of time; perhaps not less than many people give to the age of the earth.”
Based upon the linguistic evidence, Jefferson believed that “a greater number of those radical changes of language having taken place among the red men of America, proves them of greater antiquity than those of Asia,” and led him to speculate that Asians may have been the descendants of early American Indian migrations from the Americas to Asia.
Exactly how diverse the American languages were became clearer in 1891, when the famed explorer and director of the Bureau of Ethnology, John Wesley Powell, released the monumental work, Indian Linguistic Families North of Mexico. In his introduction, Powell explained that, “The North American Indian tribes, instead of speaking related dialects, originating in a single parent language, in reality speak many languages belonging to distinct families, which have no apparent unity of origin.” Powell grouped the American Indian languages in the U.S. and Canada into 58 language families (or stocks) that could not be shown to be related to one another.
Since Powell’s day his classification has been modified somewhat and attempts to link many of these language stocks together to create “super stocks” have met with mixed success. Although what constitutes a family, stock or super stock is a matter of continuing debate among linguists, today it is generally accepted that there are 150 different language stocks in the Americas. To give some perspective to this diversity, there are more language stocks in the Americas than in the rest of the world combined.
One of the 150 New World language stocks, Eskimo-Aleut, also spans the Arctic and so has Asian and European relatives. Another language super stock, Na-Dené, composed of the language stocks Athabaskan, Tlingit and Eyak, and located in Alaska and the northwest coast (but also in the southwestern U.S.), is also believed to have relatives in Asia, possibly the Yeneisian languages of central Siberia.
It has long been suggested, and the issue is not particularly controversial, that peoples speaking Eskimo-Aleut and Na-Dené moved back and forth between Asia and the Americas. A new study published on March 12 in the journal PLoS, “Linguistic Phylogenies Support Back-Migration from Beringia to Asia,” found that Na-Dené is not descended from Yeneisian (as the Bering Strait Theory would infer) but the other way around, that there was a “back-migration into central Asia than a migration from central or western Asia to North America.” (As an aside, the study, true to “science by press release” fashion, argues that this supports the “Beringian Standstill” hypothesis–that Indians paused in Beringia for thousands of years before colonizing the New World–but the study only examined the Na-Dené language stock, whose speakers still live in the Alaskan part of Beringia to this very day, and so it would seem the study would just as easily support the Na-Dené view that they have been there since time immemorial.)

Other than Eskimo-Aleut and Na-Dené, linguists have yet to find any connection with any language stocks of the Americas and those of Asia. Along with the tremendous hemispheric diversity, this created serious doubts about the dates proposed by archaeologists and physical anthropologists for Indian origins. At the beginning of the 20th century it was held to be at most 10,000 years and generally only 5,000 years. In 1916, Edward Sapir, among the most important and influential linguists in history, countered the prevailing archaeological view; “ten thousand years, however, seems a hopelessly inadequate span of time for the development from a homogeneous origin of such linguistic differentiation as is actually found in America.” Instead he argued that, “the best piece of evidence of great antiquity of man in America is linguistic diversification rather than archaeological.”
One of America’s greatest scientists, Franz Boas, generally considered to be the father of modern anthropology and an important linguist in his own right, in his classic study, Race, Language, and Culture, published in 1940, wrote that not only were American Indian languages “so different among themselves that it seems doubtful whether the period of 10,000 years is sufficient for their differentiation,” but that the evidence of extremely ancient Indians would some day be found, and that, “all we can say, therefore, is that the search for early remains must continue.” Indeed, Boas was among the first to propose, based on the evidence from an expedition that he led to the Bering Strait region in 1897, the “back migration” from the Americas to Asia.

Linguists were not the only ones who recognized the importance of the linguistic evidence. The great British paleo-anthropologist Louis Leakey firmly believed that the linguistic evidence showed that Indians were likely to be many tens of thousands of years old and possibly much older, and shortly before his death in 1972 he began to sponsor fieldwork in the Americas in the hopes of proving this. But most American archaeologists and physical anthropologists, where the dogmatism of the Bering Strait Theory is most pronounced, dismissed or ignored the linguistic evidence, leading people and the mainstream press to assume that linguists were silent on this subject, even though the reverse was true.

Starting in 1987, the tensions between the proponents of the Bering Strait Theory and linguists turned into open warfare as archaeologists and geneticists used a highly disputed (and now completely discredited) theory by the linguist Joseph Greenberg to claim that the linguistic evidence now (after hundreds of years of refuting it) showed that Indians migrated from Asia to the New World around 15,000 years ago. The dispute led to a torrent of scientific papers by the world’s most prominent linguists denouncing the use of “non-science” and faulty data to back the Bering Strait Theory. The archaeologists and geneticists largely ignored the objections, forcing a group of linguists–led by Lyle Campbell, author of the standard work in that field, American Indian Languages: the Historical Linguistics of Native America, and Ives Goddard, curator at the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution and the linguistic and technical editor of the massive Handbook of North American Indians–to write to the American Journal of Human Genetics in 2004 and condemn the widespread use of pseudo-scientific linguistic “evidence” in genetic studies about Indian origins.
The dispute also led the influential linguist, Johanna Nichols, to publish “Linguistic Diversity and the First Settlement of the New World,” in the journal Language in 1990. In her introduction, she first made two important scientific points: the diversity of the languages of the New World is due to “the operation of regular principles of linguistic geography;” and that the linguistic and archaeological evidence from the Sahul clearly contradicted the attempts to assign early dates for the Bering Strait migration, since the assignment of early dates in the New World would create a scientific anomaly; “but such a discrepancy–one of at least an order of magnitude–must be assumed if we adhere to the Clovis [15,000 years ago] or received chronology [20,000 years ago] for the settlement of the New World.”

native american languages map

Nichols’ paper used six independent linguistic methods for calculating American Indian antiquity and she determined that it would have taken a minimum of 50,000 years for all of the American Indian languages to have evolved from one language, or 35,000 years if migrants had come in multiple waves. She concluded that, “The unmistakable testimony of the linguistic evidence is that the New World has been inhabited nearly as long as Australia or New Guinea.”
The advocates of the Bering Strait Theory have countered that the linguistic evidence, strong as it may be, is not “proof” that Indians have inhabited the Americas for more than 15,000 years, and granted, it is not proof, it is evidence. The demand by the proponents of the Bering Strait Theory for “indisputable proof” is actually a curious but important aspect of that theory. Science is only rarely able to prove things with absolute certainty, and it normally confines itself to mathematical probability. As one scientist put it, “proof is not a currency of science,” and virtually all widely accepted scientific theories are based upon the preponderance of the evidence, not proof. This strident demand for “proof” while ignoring the evidence is abnormal in science and reflects the fact that originally the Bering Strait Theory was not a scientific theory at all, but a dogma. And this dogmatic stance, along with the vicious nature of the debate surrounding it, has long been a sore point for many scientists, not just for Indians.

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