Bering Land Bridge Hypothesis
In 1948, University of California anthropologist Alfred Louis Kroeber announced that, henceforth, the "maximal period" of human occupancy in the Americas would be set at 12,000 years, a duration subsequently extended to 15,000. As he put it in his definitive Anthropology:
- "It may be said that in the opinion of most Americanists, ethnologists as well as archaeologists, the first human immigrants arrived in the Western Hemisphere in late Pleistocene times. The meagerly known Clovis, Folsom and similar cultures... represent this early level of culture... If anything earlier than Clovis and Folsom existed in America, it has not been found.
Conspicuously absent from this sweeping statement was any reference to the magnitude of the inaccuracy which had marked mainstream anthropological dating over the preceding fifty years (a factor of 400–500%). It was also false before it was uttered. It fails to mention, among many other things, the pair of so-called "San Diego Skulls" discovered by Malcolm J. Rogers, Curator of the San Diego Museum of Man, during the late 1920s.65 Well before Kroeber entered his pronouncement, George F. Carter, previously Curator of Anthropology at the San Diego Museum and later a senior geologist with the Texas A&M University, had taken up the question of the skulls’ antiquity, concluding that they were at least 40,000 years old.
While Kroeber himself opted for the most part to simply ignore such findings, the response of his "new school" establishment was to subject Carter to the most extreme sorts of ridicule, labeling his evidence "Cartifacts" and seeking to drive him from the ranks of professional anthropologists altogether. While the validity of his estimates were finally confirmed during the early 1970s when Scripps Institute geochemist Jeffrey Bada used amino acid racemization testing to date the first of the San Diego Skulls (La Jolla) at 44,000 years, and the second (Del Mar) at 48,000,68 Carter’s reputation has never really been redeemed.
Evidence of the deep antiquity of human occupancy on Turtle Island, meanwhile, continued to emerge at a steady rate. From 1951 to 1955, for instance, a series of excavations by geologist Thomas E. Lee on the Sheguiandah Reserve, on Manitoulin Island in Lake Huron, yielded materials dated at 30,000 years by the University of Arizona’s Ernst Antevs. Then, in 1956, Philip Orr, a respected paleontologist with the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, collected bone fragments from a site on southern California’s Santa Rosa Island, which were tentatively dated at about 30,000 years. Although Orr’s reports on his Santa Rosa finds were treated much like Carter’s on the San Diego Skulls, he was eventually more than borne out: in 1977, Ranier Berger, a UCLA geophysicist, established conclusively through radiocarbon dating that remains taken from the same locality were at least 40,000 years old.
Red Earth White Lies
Red Earth White Lies is a book written by Vine Deloria Jr in which he thoroughly debunks the Bering Land Bridge Hypothesis and goes further by explaning the implications of widespread acceptance of the theory:
There are immense contemporary political implications to this theory which make it difficult for many people to surrender. Considerable residual guilt remains over the manner in which the Western Hemisphere was invaded and settled by Europeans. Five centuries of brutality lie uneasily on the conscience, and consequently two beliefs have arisen which are used to explain away this dreadful history. People want to believe that the Western Hemisphere, and more particularly North America, was a vacant, unexploited, fertile land waiting to be put under cultivation according to God’s holy dictates. As Woody Guthrie put it: “This Land is your land, this Land is my land.” The hemisphere thus belonged to whoever was able to rescue it from its wilderness state.
Coupled with this belief is the idea that American Indians were not original inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere but latecomers who had barely unpacked before Columbus came knocking on the door. If Indians had arrived only a few centuries earlier, they had no real claim to land that could not be swept away by European discovery. Ales Hrdlicka of the Smithsonian devoted his life to the discrediting of any early occupancy of North America and a whole generation of scholars, fearfully following the master, rejected the claims of their peers rather than offend this powerful scholar. Finally, the embarrassing discovery that Clovis and Folsom points abounded in the western states forced the admission that the Indians might have beaten Columbus by quite a few centuries.[2]
Sources
- ↑ Ward Churchill, "About that Bering Strait Land Bridge… A Study in the Falsity of “Scientific Truth”" December 2005 Current Perspectives in Social Theory 23:3-68 https://doi.org/10.1016/S0278-1204(05)23001-3
- ↑ Deloria, V. (1995). Red earth, white lies: Native Americans and the myth of scientific fact. New York, Scribner.