7 ms·

A Genetic Chronicle of the First Peoples in the Americas

47 points by benbreen 5y ago

RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago
> Like all their children, the 2-year-old boy was treasured by his people. To honor him, they buried him underneath a rock shelter with great care and love, sprinkling his body with red ochre. Everyone in the community contributed to the toolkit that he would take with him into the afterlife: Some placed carefully flaked finished tools—projectile points, knives, and scrapers for hides—others left the cores that he would need to make new ones. His parents placed carved elk bone rods into the grave to mark his connection to their ancestors. This burial site was honored by their descendants for generations, who paid their respects to the boy every time they passed it. To me it seems like human sacrifice. My guess is that without modern medical care, 2 year olds dying was not uncommon. The fact that his body underwent such elaborate burial routines, and he was buried with a lot of artifacts, and that his burial site was venerated, seems more likely with human sacrifice than if he had just died of natural causes.
- SkittyDog 5y ago
  "My guess is that..." Would you be able to provide some of the evidence that led you to this guess? Or maybe you could give us your credentials, whatever education and experience you have that qualifies you to make guesses in the field of pre-Columbian Neolithic archaeology? Let me make it simpler: How do YOU know that 2-year-old death was "common" among these people, at this time? What supporting sources to this putative fact? I can understand being skeptical of the article author's conclusion, if they did a poor job explaining themselves... But your counter-hypothesis is just creative writing, without something a little more solid to back it up.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    It'd be surprising if a 2-year-old's death was not common. Before 1900 or so, children in every society died like flies before reaching adulthood. It's why societies are so protective of their children, and why people had large families.
    - jeromegv 5y ago
      The issue isn’t so much about arguing about commonness of 2 years old. Of course it was common. The giant leap is to conclude that it was human sacrifice. You need some credentials or provide more information to arrive to this conclusion. That’s what the argument was about.
    - SkittyDog 5y ago
      But most infant deaths before 1900 were from infectious diseases that didn't even exist in human populations until our ancestors lived in large enough groups to become disease reservoirs. But your response just proves the meta-point I made, in my earlier comment... If you don't have any qualifications in Neolithic anthropology, and you're not citing any evidence from people who DO have those qualifications, then your uninformed speculations are just fairy tales. In not against unqualified speculation... Just don't be surprised when people point out that you have no idea what you're talking about, and that you're probably wrong.
- AlotOfReading 5y ago
  The author took some poetic license with the narrative bits. The reality is that the anzick site was completely destroyed by amateur collectors. We don't actually know if the artifacts and the bones are associated, nor do we have enough to say much about the cause of death beyond ruling out some basic diseases. However, human sacrifice is incredibly rare historically while natural deaths aren't. The balance of probabilities suggests the latter.
  - Amezarak 5y ago
    Human sacrifice was not incredibly rare, it was widely practiced all over the world going as far back into prehistory as we can see.
    - AlotOfReading 5y ago
      It certainly was compared to natural causes and our evidence for particular sacrifice is even more scarce. I've surveyed and excavated many ancient graves, but very few (1, possibly 2) had anything to suggest human sacrifice, both of which were for ideological reasons that don't make sense for Anzick. Quoting Porter's "Mortal Mirrors" from the standard book on archaeology of sacrifice, Sacred Killing: But the evidence for human sacrifice is actually very rare in the period when cross-cultural comparisons suggest it is most likely to occur—the formative stages of complex society—and when it does occur, it is very individual in practice. Dr. Porter goes on to talk about how this is of course the result of our ability to detect and recognize sacrificial activity in the material record and so on. The book is worth perusing if this topic interests you. And of course, in context we should expect it to be essentially irrelevant on a population level because population growth for most of the Paleoindian period is close to flat. A significant difference in infant mortality rates from culturally-specific factors would probably lead to pretty quick population turnover during the millennia of competition with everyone else that has similar technology and resources. So while it did occur, there's little reason to think it occurred at rates anywhere near that of non-sacrificial mortalities.
    - mushbino 5y ago
- gumby 5y ago
  Could just as likely have been a high status individual, say the child of some other high status people, or someone chosen to have been a religious figure (as happens with Lamas in Tibetan Buddhism), or someone who died in an unlucky way (so a special burial might have been to try to ward off bad luck) or perhaps they had some organic disability that doesn't show up in the bones (as some cultures consider epileptics to have been touched by a god). Impossible to tell today, though anthropologists likely have behavioral clues that makes their conjectures slightly more likely than the random ones I and you thought up.
- PuppyTailWags 5y ago
- AbrahamParangi 5y ago
  People loving their children is a cultural universal. Human sacrifice is a relatively rare cause of death. The probabilities seem in favor of the ordinary explanation rather than the extraordinary.
curious_cat_163 5y ago
- jevoten 5y ago
  It is your belief that ancient native Americans were accepting of other tribes moving into their territory? Walls are nothing new to human history - the first parts of the Great Wall of China were built ~2600 years ago.
- wheelinsupial 5y ago
  Kind of like how walls were used around city states in Mesopotamia? Or how there was a wall created in China? [1] has some discussion on walls being used for defense in each of those areas. I'm in no way an expert on history, but it seems that walled city states developed in many areas independently. People seem to generalize or abstract ideas, so if you have a city state, why not think bigger and have a nation state? From what I understand, again no expert, modern nation state borders are something that came from Europe [2], but a Sumerian king was the first to use a wall to mark a "national (rather than private) boundary"[1]. Walling off areas is in no way a uniquely European concept. [1] https://www.worldhistory.org/wall/ https://www.worldhistory.org/wall/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westphalian_sovereignty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westphalian_sovereignty
  - mason55 5y ago
    You might enjoy this series on the history of city fortifications https://acoup.blog/2021/10/29/collections-fortification-part-i-the-besiegers-playbook/ https://acoup.blog/2021/10/29/collections-fortification-part...
- wahern 5y ago
  Native Americans built walls, too. Physical walls, https://www.brandeis.edu/now/2018/june/wall-maya-trump.html https://www.brandeis.edu/now/2018/june/wall-maya-trump.html, and complex political geographies (i.e. imaginary walls), https://www.esri.com/news/arcuser/0206/aztec1of2.html https://www.esri.com/news/arcuser/0206/aztec1of2.html In both cases colonizers often built their political systems atop these preexisting walls. Many of the durable political geographies in the continental United States and Canada seemed to have collapsed (physically and figuratively) as a consequence of introduced diseases before colonizers had a chance to co-opt them, or even recognize their existence. AFAIU, this is partly why American (U.S.) culture developed a narrative of Native Americans as wild and free, savage and innocent. (Though we tend to emphasize the latter--free and innocent--these days.) They absolutely did co-opt political and cultural affinities, though, just as colonizers did elsewhere in the Americas (e.g. Mayans vs Aztecs).
gumby 5y ago
I love that the comparative genetic data can illuminate some interesting information this way. One thing that jarred to me as I read the article: the capitalization of what to me are not proper nouns, like "Indigenous peoples", "Traditional Histories", "Oral Traditions" or "Native". Other capitalizations seemed like the standard capitalization of proper nouns in English e.g. "Na-Diné". For example I consider myself an immigrant, not an Immigrant. Is this just a quirk of the author or is this a kind of jargon in anthropology? To me it certainly gave the otherwise fascinating article a whiff of "1066 and all that".
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- melolife 5y ago
  I refer to this as the "things I consider important/am passionate about" capitalization style, which happens to be popular in Government.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- oceanplexian 5y ago
  It's a form of modern institutional racism. See the AP's argument for capitalizing 'Black' but not 'white' https://apnews.com/article/entertainment-cultures-race-and-ethnicity-us-news-ap-top-news-7e36c00c5af0436abc09e051261fff1f https://apnews.com/article/entertainment-cultures-race-and-e.... It's obviously nonsense, done for political reasons and a misuse of the English language.
  - wolverine876 5y ago
    > It's obviously nonsense, done for political reasons and a misuse of the English language. Is there any chance that people who have different opinions than you might have other motives or legitimate ideas?
    - YATA0 5y ago
vdo 5y ago
Maps showing the flow of people into North America fill me with a swell of emotion deep in my heart. I’m Aleut, from Alaska, and it is very humbling to think of the thousands of years of continuous living here. To think of how related we are to other Native groups, and perhaps not so related the further off it goes, is endlessly fascinating to me. There is a sense of connectedness hard to quantify.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- nekcihc 5y ago
  Aleuts were not continuously(from times of Beringia) living on those islands. Aleuts are very closely linked to Inuits and the understanding about Inuits is that they started to expand 3000 years ago. One of the initial drives to that 3000 year old expansion was because of new technologies(at that time), that helped to survive in North and that coincides with migration of N-Tat people(most of them nowadays are living in NE Europe). Genetically Aleuts are more related to Asian Eskimos and Chukchi, than to American Eskimos and Kamchatkian natives, so their spread is "recent"(no more than 3000 years). Nowadays Aleuts by patrilinear line are more related to Europeans - which started from Russian colonisation and mixing with Russians. The thing about migratory highways is that people who live there(on migration highway) are not be able to continuously be connected to that place, due to constant influx of new people that pushes them along, like waves in ocean. But nonetheless - all people are related to other people and have very deep and long and unique ancestry. And the unique is what matters - and story that comes with it. But in this case those early Beringia inhabitants are more closely linked to American natives in Brazil, than to Aleuts.
  - vdo 5y ago
    There is not much I can say to any of that, but I do find it interesting. Unfortunate, but interesting. I would still say I am Aleut and that the Aleutian Islands are our original, true home. There has been evidence of people for thousands of years, no it’s not necessarily one singular bloodline, but I still stand by the sense of how much history there is, and I feel I have ties to it. Too often, Native claims to land are argued with, invalidated, or dismissed as far as “we’re all from somewhere else.” I am distrustful of genetic testing/results for the second to last paragraph there—we’ve really been nearly wiped out compared to e.g. Inupiat who still have a fair number of full blooded individuals. Aleuts were enslaved and carted across the coast of Alaska by Russians and our genetic history — to say little of oral history, traditions, and culture — is not perfectly clear as a result. Edit: I am not trying to sound arguing or anything—just am apprehensive for this kind of thing, I always hesitate to comment on Native-related things because it is a near and dear issue for me. I’ve always thought Far East groups had similarities in boat design and such, it makes sense to me that there are such waves of flow.
lordnacho 5y ago
I find this kind of genetic analysis fascinating. Does anyone have a tree of the other side of the gap? I'm interested in reading about the trees of Chinese and South-East Asian peoples.
mrlonglong 5y ago
the Polynesians may well have been the first from the old world to make it to the new world in South America, maybe a group got shipwrecked off the coast. The Polynesians were very good sailors who knew how to sail between far flung islands in the enormous Pacific Ocean, as can be attested by their ancestral travels outwards from Asia to Australia, the last being the Maori who made it to New Zealand in the 1300s.
BillSaysThis 5y ago
Good podcast episode interviewing the book's author: https://overcast.fm/+Jf3pmRSrw https://overcast.fm/+Jf3pmRSrw

47 points by benbreen 5y ago

> Like all their children, the 2-year-old boy was treasured by his people. To honor him, they buried him underneath a rock shelter with great care and love, sprinkling his body with red ochre. Everyone in the community contributed to the toolkit that he would take with him into the afterlife: Some placed carefully flaked finished tools—projectile points, knives, and scrapers for hides—others left the cores that he would need to make new ones. His parents placed carved elk bone rods into the grave to mark his connection to their ancestors. This burial site was honored by their descendants for generations, who paid their respects to the boy every time they passed it. To me it seems like human sacrifice. My guess is that without modern medical care, 2 year olds dying was not uncommon. The fact that his body underwent such elaborate burial routines, and he was buried with a lot of artifacts, and that his burial site was venerated, seems more likely with human sacrifice than if he had just died of natural causes.

SkittyDog 5y ago
"My guess is that..." Would you be able to provide some of the evidence that led you to this guess? Or maybe you could give us your credentials, whatever education and experience you have that qualifies you to make guesses in the field of pre-Columbian Neolithic archaeology? Let me make it simpler: How do YOU know that 2-year-old death was "common" among these people, at this time? What supporting sources to this putative fact? I can understand being skeptical of the article author's conclusion, if they did a poor job explaining themselves... But your counter-hypothesis is just creative writing, without something a little more solid to back it up.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- WalterBright 5y ago
  It'd be surprising if a 2-year-old's death was not common. Before 1900 or so, children in every society died like flies before reaching adulthood. It's why societies are so protective of their children, and why people had large families.
  - jeromegv 5y ago
    The issue isn’t so much about arguing about commonness of 2 years old. Of course it was common. The giant leap is to conclude that it was human sacrifice. You need some credentials or provide more information to arrive to this conclusion. That’s what the argument was about.
  - SkittyDog 5y ago
    But most infant deaths before 1900 were from infectious diseases that didn't even exist in human populations until our ancestors lived in large enough groups to become disease reservoirs. But your response just proves the meta-point I made, in my earlier comment... If you don't have any qualifications in Neolithic anthropology, and you're not citing any evidence from people who DO have those qualifications, then your uninformed speculations are just fairy tales. In not against unqualified speculation... Just don't be surprised when people point out that you have no idea what you're talking about, and that you're probably wrong.
AlotOfReading 5y ago
The author took some poetic license with the narrative bits. The reality is that the anzick site was completely destroyed by amateur collectors. We don't actually know if the artifacts and the bones are associated, nor do we have enough to say much about the cause of death beyond ruling out some basic diseases. However, human sacrifice is incredibly rare historically while natural deaths aren't. The balance of probabilities suggests the latter.
- Amezarak 5y ago
  Human sacrifice was not incredibly rare, it was widely practiced all over the world going as far back into prehistory as we can see.
  - AlotOfReading 5y ago
    It certainly was compared to natural causes and our evidence for particular sacrifice is even more scarce. I've surveyed and excavated many ancient graves, but very few (1, possibly 2) had anything to suggest human sacrifice, both of which were for ideological reasons that don't make sense for Anzick. Quoting Porter's "Mortal Mirrors" from the standard book on archaeology of sacrifice, Sacred Killing: But the evidence for human sacrifice is actually very rare in the period when cross-cultural comparisons suggest it is most likely to occur—the formative stages of complex society—and when it does occur, it is very individual in practice. Dr. Porter goes on to talk about how this is of course the result of our ability to detect and recognize sacrificial activity in the material record and so on. The book is worth perusing if this topic interests you. And of course, in context we should expect it to be essentially irrelevant on a population level because population growth for most of the Paleoindian period is close to flat. A significant difference in infant mortality rates from culturally-specific factors would probably lead to pretty quick population turnover during the millennia of competition with everyone else that has similar technology and resources. So while it did occur, there's little reason to think it occurred at rates anywhere near that of non-sacrificial mortalities.
  - mushbino 5y ago
gumby 5y ago
Could just as likely have been a high status individual, say the child of some other high status people, or someone chosen to have been a religious figure (as happens with Lamas in Tibetan Buddhism), or someone who died in an unlucky way (so a special burial might have been to try to ward off bad luck) or perhaps they had some organic disability that doesn't show up in the bones (as some cultures consider epileptics to have been touched by a god). Impossible to tell today, though anthropologists likely have behavioral clues that makes their conjectures slightly more likely than the random ones I and you thought up.
PuppyTailWags 5y ago
AbrahamParangi 5y ago
People loving their children is a cultural universal. Human sacrifice is a relatively rare cause of death. The probabilities seem in favor of the ordinary explanation rather than the extraordinary.

curious_cat_163 5y ago

jevoten 5y ago
It is your belief that ancient native Americans were accepting of other tribes moving into their territory? Walls are nothing new to human history - the first parts of the Great Wall of China were built ~2600 years ago.
wheelinsupial 5y ago
Kind of like how walls were used around city states in Mesopotamia? Or how there was a wall created in China? [1] has some discussion on walls being used for defense in each of those areas. I'm in no way an expert on history, but it seems that walled city states developed in many areas independently. People seem to generalize or abstract ideas, so if you have a city state, why not think bigger and have a nation state? From what I understand, again no expert, modern nation state borders are something that came from Europe [2], but a Sumerian king was the first to use a wall to mark a "national (rather than private) boundary"[1]. Walling off areas is in no way a uniquely European concept. [1] https://www.worldhistory.org/wall/ https://www.worldhistory.org/wall/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westphalian_sovereignty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westphalian_sovereignty
- mason55 5y ago
  You might enjoy this series on the history of city fortifications https://acoup.blog/2021/10/29/collections-fortification-part-i-the-besiegers-playbook/ https://acoup.blog/2021/10/29/collections-fortification-part...
wahern 5y ago
Native Americans built walls, too. Physical walls, https://www.brandeis.edu/now/2018/june/wall-maya-trump.html https://www.brandeis.edu/now/2018/june/wall-maya-trump.html, and complex political geographies (i.e. imaginary walls), https://www.esri.com/news/arcuser/0206/aztec1of2.html https://www.esri.com/news/arcuser/0206/aztec1of2.html In both cases colonizers often built their political systems atop these preexisting walls. Many of the durable political geographies in the continental United States and Canada seemed to have collapsed (physically and figuratively) as a consequence of introduced diseases before colonizers had a chance to co-opt them, or even recognize their existence. AFAIU, this is partly why American (U.S.) culture developed a narrative of Native Americans as wild and free, savage and innocent. (Though we tend to emphasize the latter--free and innocent--these days.) They absolutely did co-opt political and cultural affinities, though, just as colonizers did elsewhere in the Americas (e.g. Mayans vs Aztecs).

gumby 5y ago

I love that the comparative genetic data can illuminate some interesting information this way. One thing that jarred to me as I read the article: the capitalization of what to me are not proper nouns, like "Indigenous peoples", "Traditional Histories", "Oral Traditions" or "Native". Other capitalizations seemed like the standard capitalization of proper nouns in English e.g. "Na-Diné". For example I consider myself an immigrant, not an Immigrant. Is this just a quirk of the author or is this a kind of jargon in anthropology? To me it certainly gave the otherwise fascinating article a whiff of "1066 and all that".

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
melolife 5y ago
I refer to this as the "things I consider important/am passionate about" capitalization style, which happens to be popular in Government.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
oceanplexian 5y ago
It's a form of modern institutional racism. See the AP's argument for capitalizing 'Black' but not 'white' https://apnews.com/article/entertainment-cultures-race-and-ethnicity-us-news-ap-top-news-7e36c00c5af0436abc09e051261fff1f https://apnews.com/article/entertainment-cultures-race-and-e.... It's obviously nonsense, done for political reasons and a misuse of the English language.
- wolverine876 5y ago
  > It's obviously nonsense, done for political reasons and a misuse of the English language. Is there any chance that people who have different opinions than you might have other motives or legitimate ideas?
  - YATA0 5y ago

vdo 5y ago

Maps showing the flow of people into North America fill me with a swell of emotion deep in my heart. I’m Aleut, from Alaska, and it is very humbling to think of the thousands of years of continuous living here. To think of how related we are to other Native groups, and perhaps not so related the further off it goes, is endlessly fascinating to me. There is a sense of connectedness hard to quantify.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
nekcihc 5y ago
Aleuts were not continuously(from times of Beringia) living on those islands. Aleuts are very closely linked to Inuits and the understanding about Inuits is that they started to expand 3000 years ago. One of the initial drives to that 3000 year old expansion was because of new technologies(at that time), that helped to survive in North and that coincides with migration of N-Tat people(most of them nowadays are living in NE Europe). Genetically Aleuts are more related to Asian Eskimos and Chukchi, than to American Eskimos and Kamchatkian natives, so their spread is "recent"(no more than 3000 years). Nowadays Aleuts by patrilinear line are more related to Europeans - which started from Russian colonisation and mixing with Russians. The thing about migratory highways is that people who live there(on migration highway) are not be able to continuously be connected to that place, due to constant influx of new people that pushes them along, like waves in ocean. But nonetheless - all people are related to other people and have very deep and long and unique ancestry. And the unique is what matters - and story that comes with it. But in this case those early Beringia inhabitants are more closely linked to American natives in Brazil, than to Aleuts.
- vdo 5y ago
  There is not much I can say to any of that, but I do find it interesting. Unfortunate, but interesting. I would still say I am Aleut and that the Aleutian Islands are our original, true home. There has been evidence of people for thousands of years, no it’s not necessarily one singular bloodline, but I still stand by the sense of how much history there is, and I feel I have ties to it. Too often, Native claims to land are argued with, invalidated, or dismissed as far as “we’re all from somewhere else.” I am distrustful of genetic testing/results for the second to last paragraph there—we’ve really been nearly wiped out compared to e.g. Inupiat who still have a fair number of full blooded individuals. Aleuts were enslaved and carted across the coast of Alaska by Russians and our genetic history — to say little of oral history, traditions, and culture — is not perfectly clear as a result. Edit: I am not trying to sound arguing or anything—just am apprehensive for this kind of thing, I always hesitate to comment on Native-related things because it is a near and dear issue for me. I’ve always thought Far East groups had similarities in boat design and such, it makes sense to me that there are such waves of flow.

lordnacho 5y ago

I find this kind of genetic analysis fascinating. Does anyone have a tree of the other side of the gap? I'm interested in reading about the trees of Chinese and South-East Asian peoples.

mrlonglong 5y ago

the Polynesians may well have been the first from the old world to make it to the new world in South America, maybe a group got shipwrecked off the coast. The Polynesians were very good sailors who knew how to sail between far flung islands in the enormous Pacific Ocean, as can be attested by their ancestral travels outwards from Asia to Australia, the last being the Maori who made it to New Zealand in the 1300s.

BillSaysThis 5y ago

Good podcast episode interviewing the book's author: https://overcast.fm/+Jf3pmRSrw https://overcast.fm/+Jf3pmRSrw