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  Copyright © 2022 by Jennifer Raff

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  Twelve

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  First Edition: February 2022

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Raff, Jennifer, author.

  Title: Origin: a genetic history of the Americas / Jennifer Raff.

  Description: First edition. | New York: Twelve, Hachette Book Group, February 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. |

  Summary: “From celebrated genetic anthropologist Jennifer Raff comes the untold story—and fascinating mystery—of how humans migrated to the Americas”—Provided by publisher.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2021031909 (print) | LCCN 2021031910 (ebook) | ISBN 9781538749715 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781538749708 (ebook)

  Subjects: MESH: Genetics, Population | American Native Continental Ancestry Group—genetics | Whole Genome Sequencing—methods | Paleontology—methods | DNA, Ancient—analysis

  Classification: LCC QH455 (print) | LCC QH455 (ebook) | NLM QU 450 | DDC 576.5/8—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021031909

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021031910

  ISBNs: 9781538749715 (hardcover), 9781538749708 (ebook)

  E3-20211211-JV-NF-ORI

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Land Acknowledgment Statement

  Summer Solstice

  Introduction

  Part I Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Part II Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Part III Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Epilogue

  Photos

  Acknowledgments

  Discover More

  About the Author

  Notes

  Image Credits

  For Colin

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  Land Acknowledgment Statement

  This book was written on land taken from the Kaw (Kansa), Osage, and Shawnee nations.

  Many tribes were forced into and out of Kansas prior to statehood. Today the State of Kansas is home to the Prairie Band Potowatomi Nation, the Kickapoo Tribe in Kansas, the Sac and Fox Nation of Missouri in Kansas and Nebraska, and the Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska. Because Lawrence, Kansas, is the location of Haskell Indian Nations University (formerly the United States Indian Industrial Training School, which opened in 1884), many American Indian and Alaska Native people from across the United States have ties to the region.

  Summer Solstice

  In our retellings I suppose we don’t much bother

  Keeping straight the bent details, crooked roads

  In one tale after another, how we handed down

  Sidelong versions of whatever happened next

  Under ebbing oceans an ancient underground

  Somewhere in the receding past they kept saying

  Their slippery sense of community mattered, it

  Shaped them, their history, the story they filled

  Themselves with every day, waking their minds

  Connecting to the history of memory as if it all

  Felt real, seemed specific enough, logical enough

  Those changing details that give rise to the world

  In our retellings of the tale along a crooked road

  —Roger Echo-Hawk (Pawnee historian)

  Introduction

  For ten thousand years, a cave on the northern tip of Prince of Wales Island in Alaskai served as a resting place for the remains of an ancient man. But on July 4, 1996, paleontologists uncovered his mandible mingled with the bones of seals, lemmings, birds, caribou, foxes, and bears (1).

  The cave provided an extraordinary window into the past.ii Paleontologist Tim Heaton and colleagues were able to tell from the remains of animals dating back as far as 41,000 years agoiii that this regioniv and others along coastal Southeast Alaska may have served as a refuge for animals during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM)—a period in which much of northern North America was covered by massive glaciers. As the Earth warmed and the glaciers receded, northern North America gradually was repopulated by animals from these refugia, as well as by species that had crossed the Bering Land Bridge (BLB), sometime toward the end of the last glaciation. The BLB connected the continents of Asia and North America until about 10,000 years ago.

  The unexpected discovery of an ancient human presence within Shuká Káa Cave made it even more significant, particularly to the Tlingit and Haida peoples who have lived in the region for millennia. A flaked stone spearpoint had been found and reported to the island archaeologist Terry Fifield a week before, but it was assumed to be just a single isolated find. When the human mandible was found, however, Heaton immediately knew that there was much more to the site than previously expected. He stopped excavations and radioed Forest Service law enforcement to report it. The next morning, Fifield flew to the site by helicopter to assess the situation. Following the stipulations of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), Fifield brought the man’s remains back to the Forest Service and called the presidents of the Klawock and Craig tribal councils the next day to notify them of the discovery.

  Over the following week, aided by the NAGPRA specialist at the Central Council of the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska (CCTHTA), Fifield and tribal leaders set up a consultation session hosted by the Klawock tribe and invited five Tlingit and Haida tribes to help decide what should be done next.v

  The initial reaction from the communities was mixed. Some were reluctant to disturb the human bones any further. But other community members wanted to learn what information the ancient man could reveal about the history of the people in the region. “As I remember those initial talks,” Terry Fifield told me in an email, “council members wondered who this person might be, whether he was related to them, how he might have lived. It was that curiosity about the man that inspired the partnership at the beginning.”

  After much discussion and debate, community members eventually agreed that the scientists could continue their dig and study the ancient remains. They stipulated that excavations would immediately cease if the cave turned out to be a sacred burial site. They also mandated that the scientists were to share their findings with them before they were published and consult with community leaders on all steps taken during the research—and the community members would rebury their ancestor following the work.

  The scientists involved agreed to all of these stipulat
ions and updated the tribes regularly on their findings as the work progressed. Terry Fifield attended tribal council meetings and sought permission from the council whenever a journalist or filmmaker wanted to do a story on the site. Archaeologist E. James Dixon from the Denver Museum of Natural History developed a National Science Foundation–funded research project to excavate the cave, which also funded internships for tribal citizens to participate directly in the excavations. In subsequent years Sealaska Corporation, the Alaska Native Regional Corporation for the area, provided additional funding for internships to students working with the project.

  This partnership between community members, archaeologists, and the Forest Service was fruitful. Over five seasons of archaeological fieldwork, seven human bones and two human teeth were recovered from inside the cave. All belonged to a single man. His bones were scattered and damaged by carnivores and were distributed across approximately 50 feet of a passage in sediments that had been churned up by water from a small spring. It was clear to archaeologists and community members alike that this was not the site of a deliberate burial; excavating his remains would not only help people learn more about the past, but it would also allow the communities to provide him with a respectful burial.vi

  Archaeologists were able to determine from the shape of the man’s pelvis and teeth that he had been in his early 20s when he died. A chemical analysis of his teeth revealed that he had grown up on a diet of seafood. Artifacts at the site suggested that he (or someone else who had left them in the cave) engaged in long-distance trade of high-quality stone, which was used to make tools that were specially designed for hunting in the challenging Arctic environment. Radiocarbon dates from his bones revealed something astonishing: He was over 10,000 years old. These remains were from one of the oldest people in Alaska.vii

  The Tlingit maintain that their ancestors were a seafaring people who have lived in this region since the dawn of history. The discovery of this man, whom the Tlingit called Shuká Káa (“Man Ahead of Us”), was consistent with oral histories that they descend from an ancient, coastally adapted people who engaged in long-distance trade. As the project progressed, the idea that this man could be their ancestor—or at least lived in ways similar to those of their ancestors—grew increasingly plausible.

  Shuká Káa’s story didn’t end with the archaeological examination of his remains. Prior to his reburial in 2008, the tribes allowed geneticists to sample a small portion of his bones for DNA analysis. Initial tests showed that the man belonged to a maternal lineage that is very uncommon in present-day Indigenous communities, suggesting that contemporary people in the region may not be direct descendants of Shuká Káa’s population.

  But there’s been another twist to this story over the last few years. A technological revolution has taken place within the field of paleogenomics—the study of ancestral genomes—allowing the reconstruction of an ancient person’s complete nuclear genome from small samples of bone or tissue. This development allowed researchers (again with permission from the tribes) to reexamine Shuká Káa’s DNA on a vastly more detailed level than the original study. His complete nuclear genome, which includes all the DNA in his chromosomes, showed that his people were the ancestors of present-day Northwest Coast tribes after all, again reaffirming their own oral histories (2).

  Since the publication of Shuká Káa’s genome, the Tlingit have continued to use genetics as a tool for studying their clan and moiety systems,viii finding additional places where their lineage (as revealed by DNA), archaeological evidence, and the clan histories preserved in their oral traditions (3) speak with a unified voice.

  For archaeologists, Shuká Káa added a significant piece of evidence against an outdated theory: the idea that a human presence in the Americas was recent, resulting from an overland migration about 13,000 years ago. This may have been the story you learned in school.

  But we have learned over the last few decades that this story is not accurate. It does not even come close to accounting for the piles of new evidence that have been amassed by archaeologists and geneticists.

  The old theory is clearly out of date, but the history of how people first got to the Americas remains a mystery, a complex puzzle to be solved. In this book, we will follow archaeologists as they draw connections between different sites across the Americas. Looking at the genetic evidence, we will examine the ways in which DNA has challenged and changed our understanding of Native American history, with a special focus on the events that are only indirectly understandable with the archaeological record. We will join scholars of both disciplines in their struggles to integrate these different clues into new models for how humans first arrived in the Americas. As we’ll see later in this book, many archaeologists and geneticists now believe that people were present in the Americas far earlier than was previously thought: perhaps by 17,000–16,000 years ago, or even as early as 30,000–25,000 years ago, and that the peopling of the continents was a complex process.

  At the same time as we discuss the results and models from Westernix scientific approaches, it’s important to acknowledge that Indigenous peoples of the Americas have diverse oral histories of their own origins. These traditional knowledges—like the Tlingit’s understanding of their origins and their relationship to Shuká Káa—convey important lessons about the emergence of their identities as people and their ties to the land; they may or may not agree with the models presented in this book.

  Histories of the Americas written by non-Native scholars tend to be dominated by the story of how Europeans colonized the continents. In the stories of Christopher Columbus reaching San Salvador, or the Pilgrims founding Plymouth Colony, or Hernán Cortés conquering the Aztecs, Native Americans are often relegated to marginal roles as supporting characters, bystanders, victims, or antagonists. Precontact histories of Indigenous peoples are given far less prominence, and many of those that do exist in popular culture are rife with outdated scholarship (at best) or blatant pseudoscience (4). With some notable exceptions, Native Americans preserved their histories in oral, rather than written, stories. European colonists did not view these oral traditions as equivalent to their own histories.

  In these frameworks, Native peoples are marginalized or forgotten, excluded from public conversations, and portrayed as inhabitants of the past rather than contemporary members of society. Their own knowledge too often is ignored by non-Native scholars. This ultimately contributes to the erasure or marginalization of Indigenous peoples in society at large. The contributions of Native artists, politicians, writers, traditional knowledge keepers, and scholars are unappreciated. Indigenous knowledge, sacred practices, and regalia are appropriated and commodified by white people. In some cases, academics repackage and re-interpret traditional knowledge as their own scholarship without credit to Native experts.

  None of this marginalization is accidental. Since the beginning of colonialism in the Americas, Native peoples have been removed, enslaved, or eliminated from their lands in order to make way for settlers. One way for colonizers to justify their claims to Native lands was to portray them as empty. The Native peoples who did remain were characterized as “savage” and backward, in need of the “civilizing” that the settler nation could provide. Disregarding or expunging Native histories from the broader narrative has been a crucial part of the larger strategy to discount the validity of age-old Native rights to lands the settlers wanted. Sadly, this practice of historical marginalization continues into the present day; as we shall see later in this book, DNA has been increasingly used as a tool for promoting narratives that disenfranchise Native peoples.

  A greater awareness of the histories of Indigenous peoples on the American continents—that gives as much weight to the time before 1492 as after it—won’t fix these issues alone. But it is an important step in itself.

  This book covers a small but exciting piece of the vast and complex arc of Indigenous histories in the Americas: the very beginning, when people first came to these continents.
Thanks to information we have learned both from the archaeological record and the genomes of ancient peoples like Shuká Káa, the way scientists think about this event has changed radically in recent years.

  We are living through a revolution in the scientific study of human history. Geneticists and archaeologists have been working together for decades to learn from the histories archived in DNA of both present-day and ancient peoples. But because of recent technical developments in approaches for recovering and analyzing that DNA, our ability to ask and answer questions about the past has improved dramatically. New results—some surprising, others that confirm long-standing ideas about the past—are piling up at a rate so fast it’s hard even for experts to keep up with each new discovery.

  In the Americas the revolution has upended a long-standing model that describes the final steps that humans took on their journey from Africa across the globe. As I mentioned earlier, scientists once thought that the peopling of the Americas occurred around 13,000 years ago, following the last ice age, when a small group of people crossed the Bering Land Bridge from northeast Asia to northwestern Alaska. From Alaska they were thought to have traveled southward through a corridor that had opened up between the two massive ice sheets that blanketed northern North America. On their journey, these intrepid travelers invented new stone tool technologies for surviving in the novel environments they encountered. These technologies, which include a distinctive kind of stone spearpoint called a Clovis point, appear widely across the North American continent 13,000 years ago. The conventional model for explaining their appearance suggested that the people who made them migrated very quickly across the Americas once they passed the ice sheets.

  We know today that this scenario—which dominated American archaeology for decades—is wrong. People had already been in the Americas for thousands of years by the time Clovis tools made their appearance. The updated story of how humans arrived here is still being assembled piece by piece, from clues left all over the continent: deep below the surface of a muddy pond in Florida, within the genome recovered from a tooth in Siberia, in layers of dirt baked by the hot Texas sun.