Facts versus convenient narratives

Two different articles within the last week but both exhibiting the dangers of epistemological closure owing to ignorance or ideological commitment.

First there was The Kennewick Man Finally Freed to Share His Secrets by Douglas Preston. After years of government obstruction and obfuscation, the eventual application of science to archaeological remains yielded interest new knowledge.

The discovery of Kennewick Man adds a major piece of evidence to an alternative view of the peopling of North America. It, along with other evidence, suggests that the Jōmon or related peoples were the original settlers of the New World. If correct, the conclusion upends the traditional view that the first Americans came through central Asia and walked across the Bering Land Bridge and down through an ice-free corridor into North America.

Sometime around 15,000 years ago, the new theory goes, coastal Asian groups began working their way along the shoreline of ancient Beringia—the sea was much lower then—from Japan and Kamchatka Peninsula to Alaska and beyond. This is not as crazy a journey as it sounds. As long as the voyagers were hugging the coast, they would have plenty of fresh water and food. Cold-climate coasts furnish a variety of animals, from seals and birds to fish and shellfish, as well as driftwood, to make fires. The thousands of islands and their inlets would have provided security and shelter. To show that such a sea journey was possible, in 1999 and 2000 an American named Jon Turk paddled a kayak from Japan to Alaska following the route of the presumed Jōmon migration. Anthropologists have nicknamed this route the “Kelp Highway.”

“I believe these Asian coastal migrations were the first,” said Owsley. “Then you’ve got a later wave of the people who give rise to Indians as we know them today.”

What became of those pioneers, Kennewick Man’s ancestors and companions? They were genetically swamped by much larger—and later—waves of travelers from Asia and disappeared as a physically distinct people, Owsley says. These later waves may have interbred with the first settlers, diluting their genetic legacy. A trace of their DNA still can be detected in some Native American groups, though the signal is too weak to label the Native Americans “descendants.”

Then today there is New Study Offers Clues to Swift Arctic Extinction by Joshua A. Kritsch.

Seven hundred years ago, the Dorset people disappeared from the Arctic. The last of the Paleo-Eskimos, the Dorset had dominated eastern Canada and Greenland for centuries, hunting seal and walrus through holes in the ice and practicing shamanistic rituals with ornate carvings and masks.

Then, they promptly ceased to exist. Modern archaeologists have scoured troves of Arctic artifacts, searching for clues to the Dorset’s sudden extinction. Did they assimilate when the Thule, ancestors of the modern Inuit, advanced from the Bering Strait with dog sleds, harpoons and large skin boats? Or did they die out, victims of either an unfortunate epidemic or a violent prehistoric genocide?

Now, scientists have begun to chip away at this and other mysteries of the New World Arctic. In a paper published Thursday in the journal Science, researchers analyzed 169 ancient DNA samples to study the origins and migration patterns of early Arctic cultures. The results point to a single, genetically distinct Paleo-Eskimo population that thrived in isolation for more than 4,000 years, only to vanish in a matter of decades.

What's the connection? A strong dose of anti-scientism when science comes up against preferred ideological positions. The spirit of curiosity and exploration, so manifest in the Age of Enlightenment and Rationalism lives on but it has to perpetually battle against trolls seeking to amass power in a zero-sum game against others.

I saw a similar manifestation out in Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde where all the park signs and education documents wanted to emphasize the role of climate change and environmental despoliation as causes of the relative sudden disappearance of Pueblan populations. They couldn't completely ignore violence, conflict and invasion, but they did their best to do so. There seemed such a strong desire to maintain the myth of the peaceful noble savage that it was standing in the way of honest representation of the known information.

The Kritsch article betrays the same desire to make inconvenient facts fit a preferred narrative. Obviously there is still much we don't know about the peopling of the Americas other than that we know our current knowledge is probably materially incomplete. Regardless of our level of certainty, there are still some facts and Kritsch does his best to disguise or subordinate those that are inconvenient. As quoted above, he does acknowledge that the paleo-Eskimo disappearance might be the result of "violent prehistoric genocide" but that is the only place in the nearly 1,000 word article where that possibility is mentioned. The discussion is about inbreeding or climate change as the primary theories for their disappearance even though both theories are weak. There is no discussion about the not improbable possibility of simple displacement by destruction. Animal and human, that is not an infrequent outcome.

What seems to be at the heart of the issue is that we have a popular (at least in academic and political circles) narrative of peaceful native Americans living an Edenic and pacific existence before the intrusion of disruptive and wilfully genocidal Europeans. The science does not support that narrative at all, it is far more nuanced and contradictory and complex with no good guys and no bad guys. But if your objective is current-day advocacy for Native Americans, then a simple morality tale is very convenient.

Were it to become widely known that Native Americans were not simple children of nature without original sin, that they also conquered and killed others who had become before them, then the morality tale for advocacy purposes is shot to pieces. It is a lot easier to complain about subjugation if you did not in turn subjugate.

I don't think stripping away myth from reality is such a bad thing. As long as we relegate people to fairy tale status, we covertly deprive them of agency and the capacity for full humanity. Crimes were committed and tragedies endured. Those are realities that have to be faced and sometimes addressed. But to distill it into a binary of childlike innocence suffering at the hands of evil is a disservice to the facts and to all individuals involved.