Tuesday 29 March 2011

Clovis First Theory Disproved!

Clovis First Theory Disproved!

Unless you are an archaeologist of some kind (professional, in training, armchair) or – completely distinct form the first category – one of those people who can never quite manage to dig up an alien on the History Channel, you will almost certainly never have heard of the Clovis peoples of lower North America, and probably remain blissfully ignorant of the fact that they are at the centre of one of the most contentious issues in American prehistory.

This being, I assume, the case, you’ve not yet heard about the exciting new dig in southern Texas where even now evidence is being unearthed that is roiling the archaeological community, and in a surprise up-set has conclusively ended an eighty year old, strife-filled conflict that may once actually have lost some people tenure.

A Word of Explanation

We all learned in grade school that the ancestors of the Native Americans crossed over from Asia by way of a stretch of Alaska-Kamchatka that had conveniently decided to no longer be 500m below sea level. You’ll recall that the Israelites crossed the Red Sea under similar circumstances. In case your fourth grade history has gotten a little rusty, science suppose that this worked out because roundabout 15,000 years ago there was a fairly large ice age going on and all of the water that is now covering the Bering Land Bridge was busy being frozen somewhere in Canada at the time – or possibly carving out Half Dome – exposing a lovely highway for Pocahontas forebears and the occasional woolly mammoth to reach the Americas.

The prevailing theory has always been that sometime between 12,000 and 17,000 years ago, a group of roughly 500 (that’s right, 500. No zeros forgotten, no comas misplaced. 500. Crazier still, the entire genome for all Native Americans from Aztecs to Eskimos, can be traced to an ancestor group of only 70.) people crossed the Bering Land Bridge into Alaska and gradually worked their way down all the way to Chile. This gave rise to the Clovis culture, concentrated in the American Southwest, by around 13,000 years ago, and eventually the Olmecs and Aztecs in Mexico, the Inca in Peru, and any other of dozens of cultures that were later wiped out by Spaniards and smallpox.

This theory differs from its more popular relatives, evolution or gravity say, in that this is legitimately only a best guess rather than a near certainty. In fact, this is one of the least studied, least study-able periods in planetary history. Hell, until now all of our evidence of this era has been dependent on some caribou shitting on a spear head before a flood or something, so that grad students from the University of Austin can come along and dig up that spearhead and carbon test that shit and place the whole mess in a 500 year window or probability.

If you can imagine how a theory that literally includes all organic life in its evidence locker (plus finches and stuff) can be seriously opposed by a theory with no evidence of any kind (show me the ark, damnit!), then you can easily see how an idea supported only by undergraduate capacity for faecal endurance and jargon-filled gymnastics about arrowhead dimensions might have its detractors.

The above version of the story was called the Clovis First Theory, and any evidence that called it into question was lumped under the heading ‘PRE-CLOVIS’ (an acronym standing for: Please Refrain from Extending Credibility, Legitimacy or Veracity, Its all bullShit). But most people who specialise in American Prehistory are used to rejection, and those archaeologists who believed that the New World was settled before Clovis tenaciously stuck to their guns. Until very recently they had two dusty pieces of evidence in support of this belief, pulled ceremonially from trunks and crawl spaces like pictures of a real UFO or an Iron Cross, and displayed to only the most like minded. Or maybe more like pictures of a real UFO, flaunted at every available opportunity because scientists just wont see!

The Evidence:

1. Above I mentioned that the entire American genome can be traced to the same group of 70 people, and that the total migration was believed to be of only about 500. The difficulty here is that even if you assume this to be true, the genetic material of those 70 was very different from their Asian peers at the time. So different in fact that the only possible explanation for it is several thousand years of divergent evolution before any of them set foot in America. The (clumsy) orthodox explanation for this was that a group of Asian hunter-gatherers some how got split off from the rest of the herd and were then trapped in isolation by some spontaneous geologic feature or glacier or something until they were able to pick up shop and head to the promised land: Alaska. Proponents of Pre-Clovis habitation point to the fact this theory is dumb, cough something that sounds suspiciously like Occam’s Razor under their breathes, and then counter-suppose that a group of 500 settlers migrated to the Americas much earlier and spent the missing millennia proliferating rather than… right.

2. While it may seem to spoil the conspiratorial fun, dig sites do exist that seem to predate Clovis. The difficulty is that most of them have yielded only a few artefacts, or have been contaminated and mainstream archaeology has been unwilling to tip a cherished sacred cow on just that evidence. The best documented and most convincing such site is in Monte Verde, Chile. Archaeologists have uncovered more than enough proof to establish human settlement as early as 14,500 years ago, which if that math is right, leaves at most 1000 years for a group of hunter-gatherers to get all the way from northern Alaska to southern Chile, meanwhile popping out babies quickly enough to populate everything in between. Pretty damning evidence, but the site wasn’t technically Pre-Clovis and it was in Chile of all places, so let’s ignore that one.

By now you’ve probably gathered that the Pre-Clovis camp has been rich in common sense and simple logic yet still reduced to begging spare proof outside of Burger King. To make matters worse there’s a perfectly logical reason why there would be very little evidence of any Pre-Clovis Americans. From the beginning of time people, from the Phoenicians to Michael Jackson, have loved living near the water. If you assume that early Americans (who were likely mostly fishermen along the lines of indigenous people in the Pacific Northwest) felt the same way, and only gradually migrated landward, you could easily imagine bustling coastal communities thousands of years earlier than Clovis that only slowly made it into Arizona and New Mexico at some time around their 13,000yrs BP (Before the Present) appearance date. So why not just dig up these coastal villages? The simple answer is that for the same reason you can’t walk to Russia anymore, these villages are at best 500m below sea level, and if you haven’t had cause to try it yourself, wooden tools and beaver hats tend not to last 15,000 years submersed in salt water. The best evidence for a Pre-Clovis migration is mostly gone and entirely inaccessible.

But leave it to the subversives to come up with the proof anyway and undermine the Archaeological Establishment. (Wait, there’s an Archaeological Establishment? I’m guessing its two stories, no plumbing and in Chile.)

The (New) Evidence:

Recently, a group of archaeologists excavating a Clovis settlement outside of Austin, Texas made a startling discovery: beneath it, by a good 2,500-4,000 years (that’s a metric measurement of dirt right?) they found a cache of more than 800 new artefacts that conclusively predated not only the Clovis people, but the supposed arrival of any kind of people on the continent. Bear in mind that these artefacts were found in Texas, thousands of miles from Alaska, and the Bering Migration has to be pushed back to at least 20,000 yrs BP. To put that in perspective, the world’s first city was founded a measly 10,000 years ago, and that makes the Bering migration doubly as old as civilisation.

The discovery single-handedly upended the orthodox prehistory of the Americas and a suitably outraged public rose up to demand the blood of those dirt-dusted dogmatics that had kept us in the dark for so long! (Or whatever happens to archaeologists when they have to throw eighty years of bullshit out the window. So, I guess Jack Nicholson sent another letter to Obama demanding that he release the Ark of the Covenant and National Geographic declined to print an article…)

But Really Now, Why Should You Care?

Well hell, I don’t know. I usually like to say a few words here about how these little pet issues of mine might be relevant to you and your life, but honestly this is the sort of quibble that even bores geologists about a group of people best known for sun worship, casino management and a fatal appreciation for shiny hats and English blankets. I guess one might theorise that if people arrived in the Americas long before we had previously thought, they may have arrived in new and interesting ways. Perhaps they were even technologically advanced than we thought. Hell, there are batty theories galore explaining things like the technically impossible construction of the pyramids and ruts in the desert that only begin to resemble animals at 500 feet. But realistically, all of the artefacts were talking about are slightly sharp rocks and charcoal, supposing that a people who were at least 10,000 years from mastering pottery could navigate the oceans, let alone fly, requires a suspension of disbelief so all-consuming that it just might get you happily through Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. So yeah, that’s it. Clovis First is down for the count!

Wednesday 9 March 2011

History

HISTORY

In 1812 Napoleon led a loose coalition of dominion states with a combined troop strength of roughly 690,000 in an invasion of the Russian Empire. Historians estimate that it was the largest army the world has seen since Genghis Khan’s Mongol hordes, and as Alexander I commanded a comparatively trifling 150,000 men there was every reason to believe that the Russians would be easily defeated in any direct engagement. The Russians of course knew this and after a single spectacular defeat they refused to engage the Grande Armee directly for the remainder of the war. It is a sort of popular misconception that Napoleon was defeated because he suddenly found himself amidst the charred wreckage of Moscow in late September and only then realised that he had failed to anticipate winter. In reality Napoleon had never intended to go to Moscow at all, let alone still be mired in an intractable war against a phantom force come September; The Russians were supposed to fight, they were supposed to lose, and the Tsar was supposed to surrender. They preferred to lead Napoleon on a wild goose chase through thousands of miles of hellish Russian hinterland and in the end he returned to Paris alone.

More than a hundred years later another diminutive European dictator would try almost exactly the same thing: a mad dash into the vast Russian heartland, gambling everything on securing the resource that would allow the invasion to continue only to find on arrival that the Russians had burnt it. In late June 1941, Nazi Germany launched Operation Barbarosa with almost 4 million infantry around a backbone of 3,600 Panzers and 4,400 combat aircraft. The plan was to take the petroleum reserves at Yalta, and if Hitler had been able to do so it is entirely possible that the Eastern Front could have been closed by mid autumn. People tend to think that Hitler’s problem was the winter also, but the real difficulty wasn’t the winter, it was the summer. When the snow melts Russia briefly ceases to be an unlivable arctic wasteland and becomes an unlivable festering swamp. There’s an old story that a peasant was walking down a muddy stretch of road one day when he came across a top hat. He picked it up and under the was the bald pate of the local aristocrat. He ran off to the village and came back with a crew of serfs to dig him out. Sure enough, under the pate they found the aristocrat, and under the aristocrat they found his horse. As you can imagine, a morass like would be inconvenient under the best of circumstances, and is downright embarrassing if your entire invasion plan depends on the continued mobility of 25 tonnes of steel. Hitler, like Napoleon before him was stymied, and like his predecessor he refused to cut his loses. Frost and famine cut them for him.

All in all, a classic proof of Santayana’s maxim about history, doom and repetition.

So, what’s the point? Why rehash High School World History?

I’ll tell you what the point is, damn it all! Speaking statistically you probably had no idea about any of this. You’re just as likely to think that Napoleon is a sort of striped ice-cream, and Russia is a plot device invented by Ian Fleming. In 2009 only 47% of American teenagers were sort of, slightly competent enough in history to score even a ‘Basic’ on the National History Test. By way of context, despite mothers and politicians everywhere swooning with the thought that American teens are being out scored in math and science by their international counterparts, 64% of them were able to muster a ‘Basic’ on the National Math Test. Despite this gap, federal education standards, including No Child Left Behind, and Mr Obama’s initiatives, have failed to take history into account at all.

The problem is worse, if such a thing can be conceived, at the state level. Many states teach history only once, and that in junior high, while others neglect the meat and bones of history in favour of ‘abstract concepts’ that presupposes an interpretation of facts that the students are not privy to. In Delaware for example, and I quote from the states official standards: students ‘will not be expected to recall any specific event or person in history.’ You read that correctly: Not a single specific event or person. George Washington, the Civil War, the Holocaust, Martin Luther King Jr., all of these are no more than examples of general principles, chaff clinging to the wheat of our impersonal ideals. And where the curriculum hasn’t been diluted to the point of inanity, its being outright poisoned. In Texas, students are urged to actively question the separation of church and state, and ‘evaluate efforts by global organisations to undermine US sovereignty through the use of treaties.’ Not only do these standards blatantly neglect and in some cases pervert the facts, but worse yet the students who are their victims are never given access to the unadulterated facts themselves. Taught like this, perhaps we should thank god that our students are so determined not to learn.

But why should you care?

Well I’ll tell you that too. It might not be easy to be a good worker without some math and science on your resume, but without some history in your past it is impossible to be a good citizen. History shapes the present day. It sets the precedent for our politics, foreign and domestic, patterns our relationships, from the office to the bedroom, and is whether we know it or not the unconscious bedrock of our beliefs, our principles and our national identity. History is the context in which all of these things make sense. More importantly, it is a context that is bitterly contested.

Unseen beneath the surface of the Culture Wars, in the divide between Democrats and Republicans, between Doves and Hawks, progressives and conservatives, there simmers an unrecognised battle over the right to interpret, represent and in many cases misrepresent historical fact. Democrats and Republicans alike wield a party-approved selective interpretation of history to justify a certain decisive understanding of contemporary times, and these cherry-picked, politically motivated, pictures of the past are most pernicious because the average American has nothing like the historical competence to judge for himself between fact and forgery, and this ignorance has very real consequences.

With a partial picture of Taliban rule to whet their appetites, Americans ate up the invasion of Afghanistan with a spoon and licked the dishes, perhaps if the place had been sold under its historical epithet ‘The Graveyard of Empires,’ someone might have taken pause. We’re only beginning to think of this debacle as a new Vietnam, but it might be more accurate to say that Vietnam was a new Afghanistan. Going back hundreds of years the British and Russian Empires poured men and material into the seemingly bottomless maw of Afghani guerrillas and hellish environments, and even Alexander the Great had the good sense to go around the damned place. And yet, with typical hubris and historical ignorance we fools rushed in where Kings and Emperors, Warlords and master tacticians feared to tread. We might as well of invaded Russia.

At home the situation is no better. We have Republicans fighting for creationism in school curricula, Tea Partiers using a blatantly false narrative of early American history to justify American Exceptionalism, bashing brown people, and a vision of this country as a lawless, taxless anarchy that would offend Ayn Rand, and Democrats surprised again every time any of these tries to pass off factual untruth as a legitimate difference of opinion.

And the American people know no better. It’s gotten so that Michele Bachmann can tell an audience of credulous thousands that the Founding Fathers ‘worked tirelessly until slavery was no more.’ Nevermind that most of the Founding Fathers owned slaves, many worried publicly that counting a black person as 3/5ths of a human being might be too generous, George Washington cut his teeth on a plantation in Virginia, and Thomas Jefferson fathered more illegitimate black children than Will Chamberlain.

The Tea Party likes to present themselves as the heirs of our tax-hating, freedom-loving, gun-toting, bible-belting Founding Fathers, when the only real similarity between them is that both created a stink about legitimate taxes (lower now than they’ve been at any time since the 1950s) to disguise ulterior motives that would embarrass their progeny.[1]

Where does this leave us?

The sad fact is that virtually none of this, from Napoleon to ‘The Smuggling King,’ is taught in schools with any real dedication. It’s not terribly surprising that American schools are wary of painting the Founding Fathers as farcical pirates, but it seems inexcusable that they fail to give their students a view of the broad sweep of history that would put this sort of thing, and more importantly the longstanding debates in modern politics their proper context.

The Second Amendment was written at a time when the most advanced firearm on the market had a range of 500yds, fired once and took nearly a minute to reload. It was also a time when you had a halfway decent chance of coming home to find a bear in your living room.

We keep the Establishment Clause around not out of some inherited sympathy for atheism but because Democracy and Theocracy have been proven incompatible. It’s a matter of historical record.

We like to contort our history to justify some sort of American monopoly on Freedom and we like to forget that Cities on Hills tend to spark resentment in the slum-dwelling valley folk, especially if the city rose on their backs and is founded on their bones.

But we don’t study this sort of thing. American children to-day are growing up thinking that World War II ended when Hitler was machine-gunned by Italian Americans in a movie theatre, and that Vietnam is some sort of necrotic STD that leads to homelessness, heroin addiction and the mange.

Santayana aside, history may be no great predictor of the future, but when we as a people decide to simultaneously forget the facts of our past and invoke the mythology of it, we willingly invite exploitation and the very tyranny that we have been bred to reject.



[1] Rant: The government line on the revolution is that freedom loving American patriots threw off the yoke of oppression when the tyranny of unfair taxation finally became unbearable. It would be more accurate to say that profit loving American smugglers fomented rebellion when the British government threatened the black market’s commercial monopolies.

It’s a simple story. In 1754 Major George Washington of the Virginia Militia started a world war over control of the Ohio territory by massacring a French scouting party on French soil. The resulting war lasted seven years, sprawled across three continents and almost bankrupted the British government. Great Britain decided that it would be reasonable to expect the colonists to shoulder a small part of the cost of a war waged in their defence and began enforcing taxes. Mark that, they began enforcing taxes, they did not begin by levelling new taxes, they enforced existing taxes that up unto this point the colonists had simply refused to pay, and the Crown had never taken issue with that. (It should be noted that the full amount of taxes levied in the Americas, of which a minute fraction were paid, amounted to 1/27th of the taxes paid in full by British citizens at home. 1/27th. That’s right, 1/27th). The Americans responded by taking to the streets, burning customs offices and tar and feathering tax collectors (which despite sounding like some sort of a sticky pillow fight typically killed its victims). But that’s a proportional response; dislike taxes, burn property and kill civil servants. Simple. Rather than prosecuting the colonists, the British repealed the taxes. Take a moment to think about that – The British government repealed taxes vital to their national security based solely on the fact that the colonists preferred not to pay them. Is this some sort of volunteer tax code??

But the British weren’t about to give up on their fiendish plan to provide for the common defence and improve the lives of their subjects. Their next plan was the now infamous Tea Act. Most people think that the Tea Act was a tax on tea, and that this was why the colonists opposed it. In fact the Tea Act was a contract with the East India Company for the provision of high-quality, low-cost tea to the colonies carrying a small tariff that would go into government coffers. Up unto that point the colonists had gotten the bulk of their tea from smugglers working between the Virginia coast and Barbados. The East India Company’s tea was both better and cheaper (even with the tax) than the smuggled tea. (Also the tax was less than 1/4th of what native Brits paid in taxes for their tea). Seemed like a win-win, but just to be sure, the Crown presented the proposal to Benjamin Franklin, America’s REPRESENTATION in London and he approved it enthusiastically.

The only group that Britain thoughtlessly risked offending was the smugglers. As luck would have it that group included John Hancock (AKA ‘The Smuggling King’) and John and Samuel Adams. They collaborated on a smear campaign to paint the Tea Act as a covert attempt to wring taxes out of the colonies, and the rest is history.