Episode 25: Peopling the Americas w/ Dr. Jennifer Raff!

Peopling the Americas with Dr. Jennifer Raff!

Today we are joined by geneticist Dr. Jennifer Raff to talk about genetic research, what it can tell us about the peopling of the Americas, and how it can be misused by pseudohistorians and psudoarchaeologists to promote dangerous misinterpretations of the past!

About our guest:

Jennifer Raff is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and Affiliate Faculty member of the Indigenous Studies Program at the University of Kansas. She has a PhD in Anthropology and Biology (double major) from Indiana University, and has been studying the genomes of ancient and contemporary Indigenous peoples from North America since 2001. Her book “Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas” is a New York Times Best seller.

You can order her book here: Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas

Your Hosts:

Kurly Tlapoyawa is an archaeologist, ethnohistorian, and filmmaker. His research covers Mesoamerica, the American Southwest, and the historical connections between the two regions. He is the author of numerous books and has presented lectures at the University of New Mexico, Yale University, San Diego State University, and numerous others. He is currently a professor of Chicano Studies at the Colegio Chicano del Pueblo, a free online educational institution.
@kurlytlapoyawa

Ruben Arellano Tlakatekatl is a scholar, activist, and professor of history. His research explores Chicana/Chicano indigeneity, Mexican indigenist nationalism, and Coahuiltecan identity resurgence. Other areas of research include Aztlan (US Southwest), Anawak (Mesoamerica), and Native North America. He has presented and published widely on these topics and has taught courses at various institutions. He currently teaches history at Dallas College – Mountain View Campus. 

This December, I'll be joining Skeptoid Adventures as your guide for The Mysteries of the Maya, where we'll travel through the Yucatán exploring remarkable archaeological sites, uncovering the real history behind the Maya civilization, and separating fact from fiction along the way. 

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Lignum is a haven for culture, rest, and resistance. We believe in celebrating community and honoring the land that holds us. At our urban “milpa,” we practice indigenous science that respects the natural cycles of the region, and most of our workshops are hosted by indigenous and local experts. Every project we do is grounded in collective memory, creativity, and respect for the land and its people. 

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Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:01

You must excuse me. This isn't an easy and number. But you've learned a lesson. A lesson in honesty. Honesty to yourself and honesty to others. That lesson will stand you in good step on your life. I think we've all learned a good lesson. I've always heard that honesty is the best policy. Now I'm catching on to why that's so, no, why that's so why.

SPEAKER_03 0:32

Greetings, dear listeners, and welcome to yet another episode of Tales from Ostlantis. We are your hosts, Curly Tlapoyawa. Andrew and Ariano Tla Kateka. So today we have a special guest. I'm very excited for today's show. Joining us is Dr. Jennifer Raff. Jennifer Raff is an associate professor of anthropology and affiliate faculty member of the Indigenous Studies Program at the University of Kansas. She has a PhD in anthropology and biology. Show off from Indiana University and has been studying the genomes of ancient and contemporary indigenous peoples from North America since 2001. Her new book, Origin, a Genetic History of the Americas, is a New York Times bestseller. So welcome, Dr. Raf, and congratulations on the best seller. That's awesome.

SPEAKER_01 1:33

Thank you so much. It still hasn't really sunk in, so happening to somebody else, but so how does that happen?

SPEAKER_03 1:41

Do they call you or do you get like it just pops up on online on some list?

SPEAKER_01 1:46

I got an email from my publisher and I was in the middle of a meeting on um it was on public scholarship at the university, right? So we're I'm on this um in this wonderful program where we're doing trying to encourage public scholarship. So I'm in this panel and we're talking about this and that, and then all of a sudden this email flashes across and I'm like it was really funny. I think I I really freaked out.

SPEAKER_03 2:09

That's awesome. Do they send you like a plaque or something?

SPEAKER_01 2:12

No, um, but I did get some, I did pay a ridiculous amount of money to get a book review um printed and framed, and you know, like a nice little plaque on that. So I paid for that.

SPEAKER_03 2:25

So I first became aware of your work, I think in 2016. You had done a talk at Skepticon, and I caught it on video. Uh it was the misuse of genetics in pseudoscience. And since pseudoscience and pseudo history and pseudo archaeology, that's kind of like my jam. Um, I was like, oh wow, I gotta watch this. And it was a great talk. And then I heard you, I think you appeared on Archie Fantasies, uh, the Archie Fantasy podcast. And so I was like, oh wow, I gotta, I wonder if she's on social media. So that's when I friended you, I like on on Twitter or something, I followed you. But yeah, the the the talk was great. And in the talk at Skepticon, you refer to what you called pseudo genetics. Um, I was wondering if you can explain what do you mean by that? What is pseudo genetics?

SPEAKER_01 3:23

I don't know if that's the best word, but I was kind of riffing off of pseudo-archaeology, right? So, like, how do you use genetics to support pseudo-archaeological ideas or pseudo-historical ideas? And you know, we see unfortunately all too many examples of that, and they range from kind of the wackiest, right? Which are like um, I don't know, um, gosh, it's been a while since I thought about this, but like uh DNA from aliens or angels or whatever, you know, um Nephilim.

SPEAKER_03 3:50

Yeah, the Nephilim.

SPEAKER_01 3:51

Yeah, it's always fun. Um, so like that sort of thing to, you know, stuff that legitimate archaeologists are putting out there, but is not supported by the data at all, like the Seleutrian hypothesis. There was a paper a while back um that argued that haplogroup X, which is one found in um indigenous peoples of North America at kind of low frequencies, right? There's an argument that that was evidence for the Seleutrian hypothesis. Because of course you see haplogroup X lineages in Europe as well, but of course, they are not ancestral to the ones in found in North America.

SPEAKER_03 4:29

Oh well, for our listeners who don't know, what what is the Seleutrian hypothesis?

SPEAKER_01 4:35

Yeah, sorry. So the Seleutrian hypothesis is this idea that the Seleutrian culture in Europe, which dates to, oh god, I didn't prepare uh the dates, uh, upper Paleolithic sometime. Uh okay, um dates it predates Clovis by quite a bit. And the argument is that because um Silutrian projectile points points um are bifacially flaked uh using this overshot technique. I guess I don't really know what that means, but you can expand it. It's overshot technique, and so are Clovis points, which of course date to about 13,000 years in North America, that there's a there's an ancestor-descendant relationship between them. And so therefore, Silutrian or Clovis points were actually the technology was actually brought by Europeans migrating across the Atlantic. Um, and yeah. So there are a lot of people.

SPEAKER_02 5:34

Was this before or after the aliens introduced the technology from Silutrians?

SPEAKER_01 5:38

You know, I'm not sure actually. I'm not sure. I guess I probably after. I don't know. I don't know.

SPEAKER_02 5:43

So what what part of Europe would this have been the Silutrian um culture?

SPEAKER_01 5:48

They were oh god, I'm sorry, I didn't come prepared for this. Um they were so they were in Western Europe, so like I want to say um Iberia.

SPEAKER_03 5:55

Yeah, it was Iberian peoples.

unknown 5:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 5:58

It's it's funny, one of my uh mentors at the University of New Mexico was uh Dr. Lawrence Strauss, whose main area of expertise is Iberia. And man, if you wanted to uh get out of homework or the lecture, just bring up the Seleutrian hypothesis, and that guy would just go off for like the entire class. But it was super informative because he knew how to just dissect it and tell you everything that was wrong with the Seleutrian hypothesis.

SPEAKER_01 6:29

Yep, yep. So there's there's arguments against it from an archaeological perspective. There's, you know, and then there's also arguments against it for a genetic perspective. And so um Deborah Bolnick, my postdoc mentor, and I wrote a paper refuting that. And it actually became pretty um well cited, which I was surprised about because I was mostly I mostly wrote it because I was pissed off.

SPEAKER_02 6:48

So we can confirm that the Seleucian hypothesis is pretty much dead at this point.

SPEAKER_01 6:53

Well, there are people who still believe it. I do not I the vast majority of just find it to be.

SPEAKER_02 6:59

Well, in terms of like in people who are serious about their work, not not these um pseudo-historians, pseudo-archaeologists that want to continue to massage their pit theory, you know. With serious scholars, it's pretty much dead.

SPEAKER_03 7:16

There are a couple of serious archaeologists who still really one of them is even associated with the Smithsonian, which is such a are you serious? Yeah, he passed away.

SPEAKER_01 7:26

Oh, did he? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I didn't know that. Yeah, um, so that that um but there are still others who who maintain that it's it's a viable explanation. But I would say they're in the minority of North American archaeologists for sure, for sure. Um, but it's interesting because you know, and then they try and marshal genetic evidence to support it, which is just you know, and I can get into why it doesn't support it. But um, and so that's that's been going on, and you know, it just kind of pisses me off. I mean, I guess I shouldn't bring my emotions into this whole field because that's one of the problems with our field, right? Is that we all get attached to our ideas.

SPEAKER_03 8:05

You have to be dispassionate about your work.

SPEAKER_01 8:07

Yeah, but I do feel I do feel passionate about this.

SPEAKER_03 8:10

Yeah, you can't help but be. I mean, this this uh podcast is like a manifest manifestation of our of our passion uh about our work. Well, so I want to uh you know talk about specifically with some stuff that you go over in your book, because the book, first of all, the book is great. I really enjoyed it. It's very um accessible, like it's not you know, a lot of times you get these um, especially about genetics, right? You get a book about genetics, and it's just gonna be so dense and so impenetrable that you know I just read the back of the of the the the back of the book, the blurb, and be like, yeah, I'm I'm I'm not gonna understand anything in this book. But your book is written very plainly.

SPEAKER_02 8:56

Um so And it's very personal too. I mean you bring yourself into it and you explain thoroughly the different mechanisms and processes that are at play in terms of the genetics and how things are done, and and you you do a really good job of um blending both the academic approach and also uh a more sort of uh layman's approach to to the uh the scholarship that you're working on.

SPEAKER_01 9:24

Oh thank you guys for making me blush really the audience kiss, yeah, but I am turning red.

SPEAKER_03 9:29

Well, one of my favorite quotes, and I keep I I want to attribute it to Malcolm X, but I'm not sure if he said it. But there's this fit this quote that I like to use a lot that just says, make it plain. And that's always been like what I try to do with my writing, right? Just make it plain. Don't don't write in like this obtuse fashion with all of these all the nomenclature of the jargon. Yeah, all the jargon. That's the word I was looking for.

SPEAKER_01 9:55

Well we definitely, right, in our field, in at least in anthropology, anyways, really fetishize the jargon, right? And and I it doesn't, it doesn't it has its place, it really does. When you're communicating scholar-scholar, right, you know, I think it can be important, but I um that's not who I wrote the book for.

SPEAKER_02 10:12

Yeah, this is very accessible to the general public, which is good because the public needs to know about this. Yeah. It's I think it's time that that and I try to, you know, as a historian, I teach um uh American history, and in the first half of American history, we always start with Native people before contact, before the European arrival, and I try to explain these things to students, and and it's useful to know that, and I tell students from the very beginning, I tell them these conversations are still taking place, nothing is set in stone. Indigenous people have their own versions of who they are as a people, where they come from, their origins, scholars, they have scientific approaches, and these two things don't have to be in conflict, they have they can be in conversation, and the science is always evolving and and and it's also correcting itself. And so because something is true scientifically now doesn't mean that it's gonna be true a year down the road or five years down the road.

SPEAKER_01 12:57

Oh, yeah, definitely. I agree, and I think that's fantastic that you teach that. I, you know, it's funny because when I was working on this, like I really struggled with trying to figure out, okay, how am I gonna talk about these scientific approaches in a way that's respectful of indigenous histories, right? Do they differ? I mean, sometimes they don't differ, right? But sometimes they do. And like, how do you how do you talk about that? And I think a lot of my non-native colleagues would just kind of shy away from it or like, okay, like one sentence, like, okay, this is you know, here's what we're talking about. But like, I didn't want to do that. I wanted to really talk about it more throughout and kind of hold space for all these different perspectives on the past, um, even while saying, okay, look, I'm a scientist and here's the data that I'm but also like pointing out, archaeologists do not agree about interpreting the archaeological records at all. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's it's it's kind of hilarious. So, like, I'm going to the SAAs for the first time in forever, the Society for American Archaeology meetings for the first time in forever. And I am really looking forward to the lively discussions we're gonna have about, like, say, the white sand site, right? And yeah, for sure. Yeah, so that's gonna be interesting. Um, so you know, I say this, you know, people can look at the same data sets and come up with different interpretations, right?

SPEAKER_02 14:16

It's the same in history.

SPEAKER_01 14:17

So we do that already in science. Yeah, we do that already in science. You guys do that in history, and so I don't see, you know, a reason to ignore the fact or minimize the fact that Indigenous peoples have their own histories. And I try to call histories not origin stories, right? Because I think that kind of minimizes it. But at the same time, you know, how do we present all this in an integrated way? I don't know how to do it.

SPEAKER_03 14:40

But well, so Ruben had brought up teaching. Um, and I remember when I was in school, see that nice segue, you like that segue there, Ruben? Um, so when I was in school, I remember learning about the Bering Strait, right? Um, and I think most people, I don't know, we're probably all around the same age here, more or less. We probably heard the same story about the Bering Strait, about the peopling of the Americas. But I was wondering if you could go into a little bit about how was it that people first even became interested in the peopling of the Americas, right? Like people who tried to explain, you know, all these Europeans landed here and they're like, holy shit, who are all these people that we're seeing? Um what, you know, what sparked their interest and what are the different ideas that they had?

SPEAKER_01 15:31

Yeah, great. Um, so yeah, well, that's exactly what they were like. They were like, holy shit, these people aren't on the Bible.

SPEAKER_03 15:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 15:38

What does that mean, right? Um, so yeah, and so I think the European There were multiple perspectives who quote unquote. I'm doing fair quotes here, Indians were, right? And all kind of um, you know, they were all underlaid by like really ridiculous racism, like really horrible racism. And so a lot of the perspectives were on, okay, well, here's these people, we don't know who they are, but obviously they were people here earlier because we see these beautiful mounds, we see these beautiful, you know, um, in South America and Central America, we see you know structures that are made up, whatever. So, um, and beautiful artwork. Okay, well, Indians couldn't have made these, so who it must have been people before that, right? And then and then they were wiped out by the Indians, and so that gives us a justification for taking land, right? That was one of the justifications. And it's very, very I mean, I don't have to tell you guys, but I'm sure the um I don't know if all listeners know this, but I did write about my book. This this was one of Andrew Jackson's specifically cites the Mound Builder hypothesis, which is this idea of a lost race in the Indian Removal Act and has justification for that, right? Explicitly cites it, and that's really, you know. If anybody who doubts that these ideas of aliens or Seleutrians or whoever, right, are coming in and um and and we're here before indigenous peoples, like if they doubt that that's harmful, you know. I just point them back to this. I said, look, this is what this is the history.

SPEAKER_02 17:11

Um there seems to be a disconnect between the Anglophone world and the Hispanophone world in this because Jose Acosta, you mentioned him in your book, and I encountered him when I was doing my uh doctoral work as well. He was the very first person that, as you say, was looking at it from a biblical perspective because everything was based on the Bible, if it's in the Bible or if it's not, and they were checking to see make sure that that indigenous people were mentioned, and if not, why not? And and how can we explain it, right? And so Acosta is the first one that begins to say, well, perhaps these people were originally from Asia and they migrated through what is now called uh the Bering Strait, and along those lines in that part of the world. He was saying this very early on in the 1500s, and and then we have a disconnect that it that takes place, and then here we we we uh fast forward to um Thomas Jefferson, who in his notes in Virginia being famous for many things, uh one of the things is that he's he's kind of credited as being the person that starts the the white supremacist rhetoric here in the United States, right? In the in that book. And and one of the things that he's doing also, he's trying to explain, because he's responding to those European scholars who uh denigrate anything that comes from the Americas, right? It's less than, it's not as equal to, it's inferior to anything that's European, and so he's responding to those people, right? And there's a disconnect, he's trying to come up with an idea, and he also has it kind of independently. He says, Well, there had to have been some kind of migration from the old world. And so I'm I'm I'm thinking that there there's there seems to be this disconnect between what people in the Spanish-speaking world were doing versus what the the English world were doing, that there's a lack of communication taking place because these conversations were already already being had, and so by the time you you come to the Mormons who are positing that Jesus walked among the Indians, who were one of the lost tribes of Israel, there seems to have been all this previous knowledge that was forgotten, that was already taking place, and it seems like we're kind of reinventing the wheel. So, can you explain how that is? Like what is what is what is going on there with with that the difference between the the two spheres of of knowledge.

SPEAKER_01 19:29

I don't know that I have a good explanation for it. I mean, I'm not a historian of science, so I feel like even I'm even outside of my area right, but you know, what it strikes me that the mound builder hypothesis is just so popular just because it's so convenient, right? It at least in North America, right? It partitions indigenous peoples into this role of another immigrant, just another immigrant group, right? And and gives settlers an excuse to remove them from their lands and to take their lands and use it better, right, for farming and and also to relegate their ancestors to the realm of natural history as opposed to ancestors, right? So I'm sure that that contributes to the appeal of this idea and the um among scientists, because these were the leading scientists of the day, believed this, right? Um, but as to why it's different in North America than South America, I don't know. I mean, I you know, honestly, like as a I'm I'm really hyper-focused on the United States or present-day United States, and I'm really ignorant of the line in South America. I mean, I have Don Costa in my book, but you know, not not enough.

SPEAKER_04 21:59

I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 22:00

This is something I would love to read somebody write a book about. Why don't you write a book about this?

SPEAKER_03 22:05

That's our next book.

SPEAKER_04 22:06

Yeah, do it.

SPEAKER_03 22:07

Well, so when we talk about Beringia, right, because like Ruben just mentioned, um, there was this idea, like, well, these people had to come from somewhere. And what I've noticed when I when I speak to people is most people, and I don't know if you encounter the the same thing, but most people conflate Beringia with the ice free corridor. Like they they mix up the two. So when they hear criticism of the ice free corridor, they're like, oh yeah, so the Bering Strait Theory's been debunked. Like that's that's always the the answer, the thing that I hear, and I'm like, well, they're they're two different things. Um I was wondering if you could um explain for our listeners the difference between Beringia and the ice-free corridor.

SPEAKER_01 22:58

Yeah, I have some trouble with this because, you know, in my book, I start by critiquing the Clovis, what we call Clovis first theory, right? The idea that this Clovis technocomplex is represents the material culture, the very first peoples of the America, right? 13,000 years ago, that they came across the Bering Land Bridge very quickly, very late, just in time to get to the America, um North America five at most 14, maybe 13,000 years ago. Um, and as you say, down an ice cream corridor. Um so I am a critic, obviously, of that. In fact, most archaeologists and most geneticists are as well. But in and I don't think this that model has been debunked for decades in archaeology. Now, there's still some holdouts, there's still some archaeologists who believe it's it's the most plausible explanation, but for most of us, it's not really the way we think about the peopling of the Americas, but it somehow has gotten conflated with what I see people calling the Bering Strait theory, right? And I'm looking over at my my book review because the headline that okay, and this is not the author's fault. He did an amazing, wonderful. I love the video of my book. Oh my god.

SPEAKER_03 24:11

I wanted to talk about that headline.

SPEAKER_01 24:12

I was done when I read it, like just literally sat. Okay, this is I promise this is going somewhere. So the headline is did the okay, I can't see, did the first Americans okay, no, I can't read it.

SPEAKER_03 24:25

It's uh it's did the first Americans arrive via Landbridge? Yes. This geneticist says no. Yes, and when I read that, I was like, oh god damn it.

SPEAKER_01 24:34

I know, I know. So obviously I didn't write that headline, and I and the and I know the author didn't write that headline. It's always an editor who does this. And I'm not faulting the editor for that, but I do think that it gives a more sensational, controversial take to what my book is really about.

SPEAKER_02 24:50

You're gonna have clicks, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 24:51

I did get like, oh, oh, it got clicks, oh boy. Yeah, we should read the comments. It's all about the clicks, it's all about the clicks, right? Well, you know, okay, so yes, I do argue simplistic notion of the of the Bering Land Bridge being a simple, you know, land bridge, right? That people raced across. What I argue. And I'm perfectly happy to be wrong about this, but what I argue is something that a lot of archaeologists and genetics are doing for a while is that the ancestors of indigenous peoples of the Americas were not just racing across Beringia, but they were living in Beringia for an extended period of time, several thousands of years. And we know that they were isolated because their genomes show us this. Models of their genomes show us that they did it for a couple of thousand years away from everybody else. During that period, that you see the emergence of genetic variants present only in the first peoples and nowhere else in the world, except maybe a little bit in Siberia where there was some back, you know, back I wouldn't call back migration, but migration.

SPEAKER_03 25:53

Yeah, people were moving back and forth.

SPEAKER_01 25:55

Yeah, people were moving back and forth a lot. Yeah. So um, so and then one of the environments, so the environmental reconstructions of Bryngia show that like the southern coast of central Bridgia, the part that's underwater right now, would have had a relatively decent climate during the last glacial maximum, during the height of the last glacial maximum, that there were plants there, there were animals there, there was a warmer environment, there were marine resources, right? So it was a pretty decent place to hang out when you're talking about desert cold conditions everywhere else on, you know, in the northern hemisphere. And so, you know, we don't have direct archaeological evidence of people being there because it's underwater, but it's a really plausible hypothesis to test. And so that's for me right now, that's my favorite hypothesis. It's the one I think the evidence supports, or at least it's one that I want to go out and see if we can argue ground truth it right with archaeological data. That's not the same thing as saying people didn't come from somewhere else.

SPEAKER_03 26:56

Yeah, and that's how it's it's interpreted, right? People say and that's the first thing I got was um hate mail. People writing to me saying, see, I told you, Curly, the burying land bridge is a is a myth. I heard similar stories.

SPEAKER_01 27:11

I'm sorry. I really I would not have phrased the hype the headline that way, and I know the author wouldn't have either. Um, on the other hand, you know, it's I'm arguing against a simplistic model that very few people in our field believe anymore, and I'm just putting that up.

SPEAKER_03 27:23

Well, but even the idea, even the phrase um bearing land bridge builds this image in most people's minds of something very narrow, right? That they just kind of sped across when in reality Beringia was massive.

SPEAKER_01 27:39

It was like Yeah, twice the size of Texas. Yeah, huge, huge. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 27:44

And it's funny you say that because when I was a kid, I I remember um one of the social studies books in elementary when they talked about Beringia, like they had an image of like people actually chasing game from through Beringia.

SPEAKER_03 27:57

So when you say this, it conjures up those images from back then. Oh yeah, and that they they got you know into basically Eastern Beringia would be like modern Alaska sort of and that's when the uh see if I can remember. Was it the Laurentide and the cordilleran ice sheets separate and that creates the ice-free corridor that that they you know, as the hypothesis went, they came down this ice-free corridor. But most people confuse the two things. Like it was this happened and then this happened, and now we're like, well, actually, that's not even how it happened at all. Yeah, which one came first?

SPEAKER_02 28:38

Was it Beringia or was it the ice free corridor?

SPEAKER_03 28:42

Well, the the the I well, I'll I'll let Dr. Raf answer that.

SPEAKER_01 28:45

I think because right, because like you know, the Costa argued that people came, right? Or maybe he thought they were using votes. No, he said land connection. I think he said land connection.

SPEAKER_02 28:53

Yeah, he said land connection.

SPEAKER_01 28:55

Yeah, as far as constructing the theory. So anyway, yeah, I um yeah, it's unfortunate. And I don't mean to, I I really, really don't mean to minimize traditional histories of coming from whatever land that, you know, yeah, absolutely. So, you know, one can look at it metaphorically, one can look at it as a tribe really literally can't coalesced and became had their identity, right? Forming in this space.

SPEAKER_02 29:25

Ethnogenesis.

SPEAKER_01 29:26

Yeah, thank you. Yeah. But it's not my place to say, right? I'm a I'm a white woman. I don't cider, I don't, I don't have a way to reconcile these things. I'm not going to. I just try to talk about it respectfully and say, like, there, let's be open to all kinds of knowledge, right? But as far as genetics goes, you know, indigenous peoples of the Americas have ancestry from Russians in Siberia and East Asia. And so, can we construct a model that combines that accounts for the biological and the archaeological evidence, right? And so what I want to argue is that um the Beringia was not a land bridge. I mean, it was a land bridge, but it wasn't a bridge in the sense that people raced across it. It was a homeland. People lived there, right, for generations and generations. Um, and probably, maybe part of this is that they became acculturated and um adaptations to marine resources while they're living there. And that facilitated then travel down the west coast.

SPEAKER_03 30:28

Yeah, the uh the kelp highway hypothesis, right?

SPEAKER_01 30:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 30:31

So can you can you talk a little bit about that, the uh the kelp highway?

SPEAKER_01 30:35

The kelp highway hypothesis is this idea that um people would have moved much more rapidly, first of all, than they would have overland. And that fits the data better, the archaeological and the genetic data better, which show evidence of very um it's also in it goes along with the observation that coastal regions have similar resources, right? And so if you're adapted to coastal resources, um you can expect to find similar resources everywhere you go, and it's consistent and it's plentiful, it's abundant, nutrition from kelp and other marine resources, and that these are present um all along not just the west coast of the Americas, but also, you know, the southern coast of Beringia and then presumably the east coast of Asia. And so there's a connection there that facilitates travel. Now I'm not one of the people, so I think the Calpaiway hypothesis, I'm all about it. I think it's great. I do, I'm not one of those people who say that um indigenous peoples have their ancestry in like the Jomon East Asia. Well, they do have East Asian ancestry, but I don't think specifically the Jomon culture um is uh we don't see that genetically, um, but there's a lot more work to be done, I think.

SPEAKER_03 31:56

So and so to to come down the west coast um relatively quickly, right? Because that's that would be easier than walking over the land, did the you know because a lot of it was just ice locked, right? Like just covered by these massive um you know ice sheets. So are you saying that the ice sheets receded first along the um along the west coast?

SPEAKER_01 32:27

Yes, I guess I should have said that earlier. Yeah. Well, we see that happening, at least I am told by paleoclimate folks, that it starts, you know, about 17, maybe 16,000 years ago, which is the the melting back of the ice sheets, the receding of the ice sheets along the coast, um, the west coast. And that in the interior, the ice-free corridor then opens up much later, like maybe 14 after 14,000 years ago. Um, there has been some genetics work done that shows so environmental DNA from the center of the corridor shows that it would not have been viable. So there weren't any plants or animals living there until much later, like 13-ish thousand years ago. Um some some archaeologists have pushed back on that and said, well, they didn't need food, they could shoot birds or breed them or whatever. Um, but then my one of my colleagues, um Scott Elias, points out, well, if you're traveling through an ice cream corridor central of center of North America and everything's melting, it would have been horrible to walk through. Like lakes and like bogs, and like, I mean, that is not an easy, it would not have you could not have gone quickly. And that seems to be at odds with what we see in the genetics record, which is very, very rapid diversification, which is a signal of population movement quickly. And um we also see well, really, the only archaeological evidence of movement through the corridor is movement northward, not southward, right? So, I mean, all to me, all the evidence really points to a to a west coast migration, and we also have white sands. So, how do we reconcile that? If it is a legitimate site, we have a lot of work to do to figure that one out.

SPEAKER_02 34:18

Yeah, white sands. What's that? Yeah, the white sands. What what what is that?

SPEAKER_01 34:23

Right. So, White Sands, this paper got published just when I was finishing up the book. I was about ready to turn in my final draft, final, final, final dot doc.

SPEAKER_03 34:34

And then you got a whole new chapter that you had to write.

SPEAKER_01 34:37

Right. Well, honestly, you know, the way it happened was I knew the paper was coming because I had heard from one of the authors, and I was like, oh my god, okay, what do I do about this? So I go to my Sean, what do I do? And he's like, Well, you can put it in the introduction. And then I didn't have time to write an introduction. Like, I have an intro, but it wasn't what I was originally gonna write. Um, so I was up against a deadline. I ended up getting an advanced copy of the paper, and I got to read it, and that was cool. And so I was able to put a little bit of it in the book, but not as much as I wanted. But here's the story about white sands. This is a site in New Mexico at the White Sands Park, um, which is it's it was discovered, it's it's these these footprints are found, are found on the on a lake bed or on the sorry, the edge of a lake. And they are they they span a period of about 2,000 years. So, like this is serious. These are a lot of human footprints and animal footprints, Pleistocene megafauna footprints. That was amazing. They're just all crisscrossing each other, and um it dates incredibly to about 20-ish,000 years ago, some somewhere in there, or 20, 20 to 22,000 years, like right smack in the middle of the peak of the last glacial maximum when nobody is supposed to be in the Americas. Everybody is either in Beringia or maybe somewhere else in Siberia, and and yet we have these footprints, and it's human footprints with Pleistocene megafauna, and they're incredible, and they're like children's footprints. They're children and young adults, um, in at least in this one part of the of the park, and they're showing doing kids stuff, like running around and jumping and you know, chasing each other and walking.

SPEAKER_03 36:24

There's even like uh adult footprints, and then you see like kid footprints appear, like if the adult was carrying the child and they set the child down, and the kids like running around, and then they pick them back up, and then it's just adult footprints again.

SPEAKER_01 36:38

Yeah, it's like you just can't. I mean, and and so I knew these were coming, they've been described to me. I was already thinking about okay, how's all this with genetic evidence, right? And then somebody sent me the paper. So I was kind of you know, it's in my intellectual mode. And then somebody sent me the paper and I saw the pictures, and I was I kind of teared up, you guys. I don't want to like I sound like a wimp, but I was really by them. I mean, they're amazing. Just it's one thing to just hear about them, it's another to see them. So I encourage everybody to go look at the pictures because they're just unbelievable.

SPEAKER_02 37:07

Well, I know that hear me out real quick. I'm sorry, Carlani. Oh, you've been trying to say something for a few minutes, but I'm gonna drop the bombshell. Uh-oh. So you ever heard of American Genesis? I haven't thought about that in by Jeffrey Goodman PhD, the startling new theory that the first fully modern men made their world debut in North America. So that could explain. That could explain white sands. I mean, you never know. So I was wondering if if we could take, um I don't know if you want to do this now, but at some point, if you could if you could explain that what the difference between what it means to be monogenetic and polygenetic. Because that seems to be a very prevalent idea among certain uh people. I think I'm saying that right, monogenetic and polygenetic? In in the sense that there's some people who believe that there's multiple origins for humanity, for Homo sapiens, polygenesis versus monogenesis, which kind of speaks to this book, right? American Genesis.

SPEAKER_01 38:17

Yeah, okay, so the idea that there's multiple origins for anatomically modern Homo sapiens, um, well, that's not consistent with the genetic or fossil records. So, I mean, the genetic genetic genetically, all humans show clear um ancestral origins in Africa. Um, the fossil record supports this. So the earliest uh hominins are obviously from Africa, the earliest anatomically modern Homo sapiens are also from Africa. Um, it looks like, and I'm gonna venture into paleoanthropology here for a minute, and I'm gonna probably get in trouble because I'm gonna say this wrong, but it looks like there are um multiple populations of anatomically modern Homo sapiens in different parts of Africa. That some of them have, you know, various features that resemble ours, and some have various features that are more similar to um earlier forms of humans, right? And so it's kind of a mosaic of features that you start to see appear in Africa. And it's really what kind of what we would expect when you see a complex, you know, population history of different groups breeding with each other and kind of developing new features. And you know, that's how evolution works, right? It tests out different different things to kind of phrase it. Um and then it looks as though there were maybe a couple of migrations of anatomically modern Homo sapiens outside of Africa. We see a couple of pop uh examples in the fossil record of like anatomically modern or at least hominins that look like anatomically modern Homo sapiens kind of popping out a bit early here and there. But the genetic record shows pretty consistently that the earliest migration of humans was, you know, uh, of anatomically modern Homo sapiens was in like one big migration, you know, and that upper peoples don't anatomically modern Homo sapiens don't get to Siberia until the upper Paleolithic. And they really don't get above the Arctic Circle 31,000 years ago, which is where we see these people at the Yana rhinoceros horn site in Siberia. And so, you know, there have been a lot of names for really, really early sites in the Americas, um, but none of them have really held up to scrutiny. And so the one that's most recently been identified or proposed is um the Suruti Mastodon site in California.

SPEAKER_03 40:50

I don't know if you guys have covered this on your podcast before, but no, well, I mean, I think we've like made jokes, passing jokes, but we haven't dug into it yet.

SPEAKER_01 40:58

I mean, all right, I'm gonna say for like the millionth time, I'm not just okay, but I have I did read the literature on Suruti pretty closely and I've talked to a lot of people about it. And you know, so the people who propose Suruti as a so it dates to a hundred, so it's artifacts from this are not artifacts. The site dates to about 130,000 years ago. Okay. Um, it it comes into the question of is this actually evidence of an archaeological site, or is what they found at Suruti really, could it be explained by natural processes, right? And so what they found is um, oh gosh, I'm gonna remember all this. So it was a mastodon tusk that had been fractured in such a way that looked like it was like a green stick fracture, like it was it looked like it was modified by humans, um or broken in a way that humans would have done. And then some some rocks that maybe were like transplant there, right? And a couple of things.

SPEAKER_03 41:51

Like they might have been hammerstones, but help me out, Carly.

SPEAKER_01 41:55

Not really okay. So there were a couple of, yeah, there's a couple things. Now, importantly, the site was excavated as I think as a um paleontological site, and it was associated with construction, like highway construction, right? So there was all this stuff going on, and then the artists who published the site had gone back to these collections and looked at them in the museum and then kind of came up with this idea that maybe they would they were modified by humans. Um okay, so published in nature, I think it was um and most archaeologists do not find this convincing. And I, you know, again, I don't want to minimize. I mean, these are real scholars who did this work, right? So, you know, I want to be respectful, but most archaeologists really push back on this idea because there were a lot of other potential for how stones got to the site or how these bones were fractured, right? Um including maybe construction equipment, driving over the state.

SPEAKER_03 42:55

Yeah, that seems to be the most obvious explanation.

SPEAKER_01 42:58

Yeah. So, you know, it fine. So I'm not protecting, I'm not pre let's say for the sake of argument, though, that that there were that Surudie is evidence of 130,000-year-old people at the site, who would they have been? They were probably not anatomically modern Homo sapiens because the earliest migrations, the major migration out of Africa really predate or uh post-dated that, right? So had to have been like another kind of human, like uh Neanderthals or Denisovans or or whoever. Um okay, so we don't see any uh other evidence of them, right? And so even assuming for the sake of argument that this they were there, okay, I was muted for some reason.

SPEAKER_03 43:42

Okay, so I I tried to mute myself so I could cough in accidentally.

SPEAKER_01 43:47

Okay, got it. All right, so even assuming for the sake of argument that there were some kind there was some kind of archaic human at this site 130,000 years ago, that does not mean that indigenous peoples of the Americas are descended from them, right? Because genetically, we don't see that. We do see evidence for Neanderthals and Denisovan DNA, you know, mixture, but it's old, it's really, really old, and it's very limited, and it it fits a pattern of this admixture happening in a population ancestral much, much older, and it's the same and admixture event that we see with all other anatomically modern Homo sapiens in Eurasia. Um, so unless you want to argue that all anatomically modern Homo sapiens in Eurasia actually originated in the Americas and then migrated across the, you know, which unlikely given that we don't have any archaeological evidence of the people in that those great numbers, right? So Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 44:43

Sorry, that's right. Well, when I hear this argument, you know, when Surudi first came out, and it's usually people who are like really big proponents of pseudo-history and pseudo-archaeology, they were like, Well, this site's 130,000 years old, therefore our ancestors with other indigenous peoples that I'm having these conversations with, and they're like, So this means our ancestors have been here s you know for at least 130,000 years. And I'm like, well, if, and it's like you said, it's a big if the this is actually accurate that you know people caused this fracturing and that that this is you know evidence of people here 130,000 years ago, they wouldn't have been our ancestors. And the argument that I always get against Beringia and and all these things is people telling me like, well, if we didn't actually come from here, then that just gives white supremacists and racists an excuse to say that, well, we were just immigrants too. And you know but if we're uh if we've been here for 130,000 years, that takes that away. And and my response is always like, yeah, but if you're saying that these people at the Suruti site were our ancestors and they weren't even anatomically modern humans, talk about handing the racists a really good argument against us, because now you're saying we're not eat we're like a different species of people.

SPEAKER_02 46:09

That's what I was trying to tease out in this conversation. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 46:12

Yeah, yeah, sorry, we kind of got down a meandering way, but yeah, I you know, and it's just not supported by the genetic evidence. It really is not. I mean, indigenous peoples of the Americas have uh you know a clear connection to Eurasia too, you know, there's there's now you can say you can you can say perfectly reasonably uh you know, okay, there's genetic descent, there's archaeological evidence, right? But we also have these traditional histories, and you know, let's prioritize those, or we can, you know, or maybe people who were here are not maybe our genetic ancestors, but are our cultural ancestors, you know, you can make these our kinds of arguments, and I'm very sympathetic to that. And I'm sympathetic to the white supremacist argument. Um, I think white supremacists will find a way to denigrate.

SPEAKER_03 46:59

Yeah, it's not like they ever needed complex arguments to hate other people. A question, so we were talking earlier about the the headline. In the New York Times, right? That's you could tell was not written by a scientist. And I see this happen a lot with popular science writers or the headlines for stories. They kind of they make it like a sensational headline, and it doesn't really accurately reflect what's in the story, and it leads people to kind of misinterpret or misrepresent what's in that story. And I see this a lot. I get this article sent to me a lot. And the headline is there is no DNA test to prove you're Native American. And you know, obviously, if you read the story, they're talking about you can't just take a DNA test and then go around claiming membership in a sovereign indigenous nation. Like it doesn't work that way. Sovereign indigenous nations have criteria for who qualifies as a citizen of that nation, and it's not just based on like, oh, I got on Ancestry.com and it said I'm 50% this, so now I'm gonna run around and claim that I'm a member of this nation. But when people see that headline, there is no DNA test to prove you're Native American, the takeaway is, you know, that I hear anyway, is well, d so this means DNA is fake or that there's no such thing as a native genetic marker. And that's the thing that and and this argument gets picked up and promoted by pseudo-historians and pseudo-archaeologists to bring in all the the the uh the Seleutrian hypothesis or the you know black olmex or they try to prove, you know, put out all of these different ideas, and I'm like, but the DNA doesn't bear that out. And they're like, well, hold on, man, this this uh headline says that there's no DNA test that proves that you're Native American, so DNA doesn't even work. So I guess my question is is there such a thing as a native genetic marker? Like, can you take a test that says this person has ancestry from indigenous peoples?

SPEAKER_01 49:13

Oh, you're gonna pin me down. Okay, okay. I will preface this by saying if if you indigenous the DNA from Indigenous peoples throughout North and South America, genetically very diverse, right? So they have ancestries from Europe, from Africa, from Asia, from all over the world. And they also, many of them, to greater or lesser degrees, ancestry from the first peoples of the Americas, who themselves have genetic variants that are found nowhere else, except maybe a little bit in Siberia.

SPEAKER_04 49:48

Right?

SPEAKER_01 49:49

So pre-European contacts, they're um genetic variants, genetic lineages that you don't see anywhere else in the world. Um, and that reflects this history of during the upper Paleolithic, you know, migration, populations coming together, then during, you know, at the peak of the last glacial maximum, it coincides with that, a period of isolation. And it's that these these complex genetics um these complex evolutionary forces that result in the genetic diversity found in the first peoples of North, Central, and South America. Okay, and that nobody else has that, right? So um they show clear descent from these Asian and Siberian populations, right? But and that signal is very, very clear, but um there's no uh it's in the world, right? So yes, kind of, so and then and then some of the ancestry from those peoples is present in you know into varying degrees in indigenous peoples today. That is not to say that one can define indigenity in a genetic way, and I'm adamant that yeah, right. So I really follow Talbear and other critics of using ancestry tests for determining who's indigenous and who's not, right? You can look at a person's history and their family's history and say, okay, yes, we have some ancestry from these first people. Does that answer your question enough?

SPEAKER_03 51:19

Yes, absolutely. So basically, so for example, my because I did you know some of these tests, um and my haplogroup, my maternal haplogroup came back as A2H.

SPEAKER_01 51:33

A2H.

SPEAKER_03 51:34

And from what I was reading, you know, it was like the how the common haplogroups of indigenous peoples were like A, B, is it A, B, C, and D?

SPEAKER_01 51:44

A, B, C, D, and X.

SPEAKER_03 51:46

And sometimes X, right?

SPEAKER_01 51:47

That's kind of the sort of generalized vague way of talking about them. Like now we can sequence to like and we can get individual lineages. So like in the Arctic, it's A2A and A2B, D4B1, A2A, 1A. Yeah, things like that.

SPEAKER_02 52:02

R2D2 and C3PO.

SPEAKER_01 52:07

But sometimes it's just easier to talk about A, B, C, D, and X, right? Um, so yeah, but the problem is that's what leads to some misunderstandings, right? Because X is also present in in Europe.

SPEAKER_02 52:17

So, you know, I think part of the conversation and that Curly's alluding to is um that just because you have indigenous ancestry doesn't mean that you are part of uh an American Indian tribe that's federally recognized. So the argument is not necessarily that you're not indigenous in the sense that you don't have indigenous ancestry. That's not what's being said here. What's being said is that you don't belong to a community that recognizes you as an indigenous person. And so that's part of the the the the hesitation, uh to put it mildly among a lot of Native North American peoples that they have towards people from the South. Because in Mexico, for example, everyone's just Mexican. There's no such thing as, you know, um Mexican Indian federally recognized peoples. They have communities that pee that the government acknowledges as being indigenous, but there's no like federal recognition as right, nothing like that. And then you have all the people who are state recognized who aren't who you know aren't federally recognized, that don't have the cards either that say I am uh bona fide government recognized uh American Indian. And so the conversation gets very complicated quickly. And so I would push back a little bit on on this idea that just because someone is indigenous doesn't automatically make them Native American. Because this is all based on also how you define terms. The way that I define Native American is anyone in North and South America who descends from indigenous people is by definition someone who is Native American. Now, whether or not you are accepted by a community is a completely different story. That's a that's a political thing. And here in the United States, that's where the term American Indian comes in, because American Indian is a political designation that is used by the government to negotiate with federally recognized tribes. So it's yeah, so I can understand where some people might say that yeah, um, taking a genetic test doesn't make you indigenous, true, but that's only part of the story, right? Uh that it doesn't tell the complete story behind what that actually means to say that you're indigenous or you're not indigenous or you belong to a native tribe or you don't.

SPEAKER_03 54:37

Speaking about these tests, what are what are specific limitations of these consumer DNA tests?

SPEAKER_01 54:43

Oh, there are lots. Okay, yes. And I think your point, I 100% agree. My my argument is it's not for geneticists like me, especially because to be telling people that they're native or not, right? So, like I try to stay out of that. But I think that this is a conversation um I think would benefit from a little more um discussion. I I think people like me need to talk to. Um we need to listen, I should say, more. And I, you know, saying that having just written a book about this, right? So um, yeah. Okay, um, yeah, so what are the limitations of ancestry tests? So one of them is that when you take an ancestry test, your inferences that the test will make about your ancestry are limited by the database that they have, right? And so if sample size and also where they have been sampled, right? Where genomes have been sampled. And so if a population has not been sampled, you are not going to get that, and you are descended from that population. That's not going to show up in your report, right? Um necessarily. Uh, and then that's one of the limitations is that also another that that means the opposite of that means that you can go to an ancestry testing company and say, as has been done, I'm Cherokee. And they will count your DNA as Cherokee.

SPEAKER_04 56:17

Right?

SPEAKER_01 56:17

Okay, that's a that's a whole thing to unpack right there, right? Uh they will count your DNA as Cherokee, and then they will say anybody who takes a test who shows similar genetic um ancestry to you, oh, are therefore also that is a true thing that has happened with one ancestry test that has marked itself explicitly to people who want to claim that they are part of this tribe. And they will even give you a card and they will give you a card that says, yeah. I don't know if that that particular company is still in business or not, but oh yeah, that's shady. And those are like I like to push up, push back against. Um, because there's a whole group they're like, oh well, this group of people have said they're Cherokee, they're descended from you know Cherokee ancestors, and here's their here's their genetic, here are here's their ancestry reports, and oh, you can show that you're similar. Yeah, it's uh okay, so that's one whole thing. And there and there is a market for people who want to do stuff like that. Um, I don't know if that company is still in business. I haven't checked on them in a while.

SPEAKER_03 57:14

I hope not.

SPEAKER_01 57:15

Yeah, I don't know. I should check. Um, so that's a that's a limitation. Another limitation is um for most of these companies, when they return results, they're comparing your DNA to the database of genetic variation in population as they are today. Okay, that may or may not be true when your ancestors were there, right? That may not be what the genetic variation was like, you know, 100 years ago, 200 years ago, three, you know, however long they're gonna go back. It might be, in many cases it is, but in some cases it may not be. So unless they're explicitly including ancient DNA in their in their ants in their um uh in their databases and saying, okay, look, here is a an a genome from an ancient person who is present in, let's say, Sardinia at this particular point in time, and that you know, you show that descent from that population that that person's part of, therefore you have that.

SPEAKER_02 58:09

Um do do these companies have access to some of the genomes that have been sequenced uh that come from archaeological sites here in the Americans?

SPEAKER_01 58:19

They are open access public. I think the companies do. Um, I don't know to the extent that they put them in their databases, right?

SPEAKER_03 58:26

I assume they do, but um yeah, if it's if it's people have a real hard time understanding just the concept of deep time, I find. When I'm talking archaeology with people, like they don't understand. Um, for example, um somebody, I was a member of this Facebook group of amateur archaeologists. They were they were looters. So I I joined just so I could like keep tabs on them and see what they were doing. Because what they were doing was they were also geolocating where where they were finding this stuff, and thereby like encouraging others to go there and dig up stuff. And one of these people was claiming to be native. I don't know if you know they're recognized or what, if they're self-identified native, but it was like Comanche descent person from northern New Mexico, is what they were claiming, and they were posting pictures saying, like, well, here's what I found on our land, and these are my ancestors. And I'm like, Are you sure? Because that's like an archaic uh point that you're posting pictures of, those are not your ancestors. This was way before your people got there, and I think people have a hard time just understanding like deep history, how far back the human story goes. You know, I see people I saw a video the other day where somebody was making the claim that, well, yeah, you know, during Pangea, our ancestors walked across the earth.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:00

Oh dear.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:01

And I was like, I don't think you're right, sir. That word, I don't think you know what it means. One of the other arguments I I see made by pseudo-archaeologists and pseudo-geneticists, I guess you could call them, because I doubt they have a background in either, is they'll read these stories that say Australian genetic markers were found in South America. Therefore, the real indigenous people of South America were Australian Aborigines who came across on boats and were the first per people here. Have you um what can you tell us about those Australian genetic markers? Is that part of the Kelp Highway?

SPEAKER_01 1:00:44

I haven't heard that particular argument. So what I've heard is okay, so first what we're talking about called population why. Um and that is that was discovered in oh gosh, a couple of years ago, um by Ponti and his research group or team.

SPEAKER_03 1:01:00

Could you repeat that? You cut out a little bit.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:01

Oh, sorry, um, population why, which was um this this really shocking made by Pontus Scoglin and his research, their team that he was part of um out of Harvard. And what they found was that there was a genetic affinity, like a closer genetic affinity between indigenous peoples of the Amazonian region and Australasians. And there was this this really strange, like they shared alleles, right, from a common ancestor. And so that's in addition to all the what I'm gonna call loosely first peoples' ancestry, right? See in the rest of their genomes, right? There's this, like there are some alleles, some variants, genetic variants shared with people in Australasia. The rest is from, you know, indigenous the first peoples. Okay, so how did that get there? Um, there were a lot of debates about was this a real signal? Was it an artifact of sampling or analysis? It looks like it's held up, it's still a real signal as far as we can tell. And so then the question, and it's been expanded, so it's not just Amazonian peoples now, you see even coastal South Americans as well. So then the question is, how did it get there? Right. And so, of course, the first immediate answer is okay, there was a trans-Pacific migration by boat, and they got there. And but it turns out that's not that does not fit the pattern shown by the genetic evidence. And for very complicated reasons, which I don't really want to get into. I mean, I can try, but this signal of ancestry is much, much older and much, much weaker than would be expecting a trans-Pacific migration of people who then diffused across the continent, right? Um, and it's also present in a 40,000-year-old individual from China. So what seems to be a more likely explanation is that this signal of ancestry is present, you know, broadly in Eurasia. And then, you know, it kind of um Australasian populations receive it in, you know, as part of their ancestry. And then so do some of the people in that Beringian population, that ancestral to Native Americans, and that it just kind of you know diffuses throughout the Americas, and you see it in some places and not in others. Um and that's just kind of a stochastic kind of random thing. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:19

So so there was like a distant, distant common ancestor, yeah, perhaps.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:24

That seems to be now that's one explanation. There's another explanation, which is you know also plausible, um, which is that it was present as a group of people who were present who came to the Americas before that big Beringian group did, right? So there were people in the Americas early, probably not 130,000 years ago, but maybe before the last glacial maximum, you know, before the ice sheet's sealed and people can't get back down. And maybe what we're seeing in South Americans is that signal is is an evidence of admixture within that group, right?

SPEAKER_04 1:04:00

Oh wow.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:01

Um that's a cool, that's a cool explanation. I mean, both of these are testable hypotheses, right? For me, what I would like to find out is so we don't see the signal in the ANSIC child, right? Um, the oldest genome, right? Uh, and as far as I know, it's not been found in any of the other very, very few North American genomes that have been sequenced to date, um, ancient genomes. But I bet I would like to see if it's there. I think that I would bet money that some of the ancient genomes from North America will have this signal. I would guess. So I want to see. That's one of the things I'm testing right now.

SPEAKER_03 1:04:38

That's me. Um, I'm excited to see the results of this.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:41

Me too. I would love to see it. We're we're a little ways out from that, but you guys are.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:45

So nothing a la Thor, Higher Dahl, uh type of uh traversing the oceans.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:51

Uh I don't I I don't really buy that explanation. I mean, who knows? Uh, these are all testable hypotheses, and so let's go.

SPEAKER_03 1:05:00

Well, and that's the great thing, right? Is if you have a hypothesis that you can test, then you can show you know what what the conclusions are going to be of that. Uh just recently, I don't know if you're familiar with the work of Anne Cipers. She's a Mesoamericanist. She just did uh she was able to recently do a study on uh the DNA of Olmec remains.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:22

Oh, I should know this.

SPEAKER_03 1:05:24

And she concluded that the origins of the colossal heads are Mesoamerican, that it's not Phoenicians or Africans or you know, you know uh Japanese. I've heard uh Japanese? Yeah, I've heard Japanese, I've heard Tibetan, I've heard African. I mean it's all you know nonsense, but she did she was like, all right, I'm gonna settle this. So she sequ she sequenced the DNA. Is that am I even using the right term? Um of this old Mech remains, and she said, you know, no, the these are Mesoamerican people, they didn't come from anywhere else. This is this is evidence. And you know, this shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone, but uh a lot of pseudo-historians um just flat out dismiss her research and say, well, this is just part of a conspiracy to to hide the true origins of the Olmec people as African or Phoenician or you know, whatever. Um, the Knights Templar or whatever it is that they're claiming.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:31

What's the equivalent of the deep state for academia? Is it deep academia?

SPEAKER_01 1:06:35

Yeah, well no, we we've got this whole dark academia thing going in fashion. Dark academia, yeah, like in fashion and music or mostly fashion, right?

SPEAKER_03 1:06:45

Well, there's the intellectual dark web. Oh god, let's not even but that's like Joe Rogan. I don't know, is he part of that? Yeah, he was one of the founding members.

unknown 1:06:54

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:55

Well, I'll say that her findings surprises me about as much as the finding that Kennewick man was Native American and not yeah, yeah, right. Um that was that was Kennewick man was not was gonna was gonna be European. Never. I mean, I remember this. We none of us thought that.

SPEAKER_03 1:07:13

Yeah. Well, and then the the original reproduction looked like Patrick Stewart, I remember Stewart.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:19

I know.

SPEAKER_03 1:07:20

And I was like, wait, so Kennewick man was like on the Enterprise? I don't understand what's going on. But like this this gets to NAGPRA, and I think Ruben had a specific question about right.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:32

So at the beginning, at the beginning of your book, uh you mentioned the topic of repatriation and um which refers to the return of artifacts and human remains to Native people through NAGPRA, right? Which stands for Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. Which has been around for 30 something years at this point, right? And you know, as someone who is becoming intimately involved with uh this work of repatriation through the Indigenous Cultures Institute and the Mia Kangadasa Band of Cotecans down in San Marcos, Texas, I was curious if uh you could tell us a little bit how uh NAGPRA intersects with uh your work as a geneticist.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:11

Yeah, great question. So I am all in favor of NACPRA. I think it needs to be stronger, actually, and and updated, but and I think there's a movement to do that, so that's good.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:22

Um right. So I think, you know, my feelings on this have changed since I was a grad student. When I was a grad student, you know, I was just not, I didn't really understand the issues well. Um, but in doing work with mentors, um, including my graduate mentor and later and my postdoc mentors and kind of learning and working with tribes, I have seen the benefits of NAGPRA and how important it has been to sort of redress the harms done by these collections and in creating these collections and maintaining these collections of ancestral remains and artifacts and objects, sacred objects. And I think um the fear was on the part of archaeologists and and others that by returning these to their rightful, you know, um, stewards. That would prevent research from happening. And I think that in my experience, the opposite is true. I think there has been more research done and more understandings learned from it's just been done in better ways. And with the descendant communities and tribes being empowered to do the look through the questions they're interested in or and say no to the questions they're not interested in, right? But a lot of my work has been has intersected with uh repatriation. So in some cases, communities have had their ancestors returned to them and they're interested in then finding out what they can before revarying them and using genetics as another tool for that. Um I mean that's not true across the board, but I am have been really um gratified to work under these conditions uh where tribes are sovereign over their cultural patrimony and their own ancestors. I think it's it's really important.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:12

So do you think that perhaps um by applying uh genetics to human remains uh in regards to repatriation, if that might pose an issue with certain tribes that want to reinter remains and then through you know a genetics it's found that perhaps they're not necessarily descendant from those ancestors that they want to repatriate. And you think that might pose an issue in the future of NACPPRA and in regards to reinterring remains?

SPEAKER_01 1:10:46

Yeah, I think that's always a danger, right? There's so so you can't make assumptions about what you're gonna find out before you do the work, right? Um, and so I think it's on the onus is on geneticists to be extremely clear, right? Here's what we're gonna find. Or here's what we're gonna do. We may find out an answer that coincides with your um your cultural connection, right? The genetics may, the genetic results may coincide with your your descendant, your cultural connection with these ancestors, or they may not, right? I don't believe that genetic descent is the only way to measure ancestry, right? Or the or even needs to be the priority as far as determining who gets to be um uh who has a claim. But I mean, like obviously if you have two groups and they're potentially descended from an ancient population, and then they argue about what should be done, then it gets really tricky, right? Um, and if one is genetically connected to that group and another is not, what do you do? I mean, as a as a geneticist, I'm I'm like I you know, I step back and I say, look, I am not an arbiter of this at all. Um I am an outsider and I am not gonna like make decisions about that, right?

SPEAKER_02 1:11:59

So well, here I'm also thinking about in terms of the academy, with going back to Kennewickman and that whole brook ha, you could also have it in the opposite direction where um a research institution can say, well, we've determined through uh you know genetic testing that this these remains do not pertain to any of the indigenous people who are now currently claiming it because they're not directly related to that ancestor. So therefore we get to keep it for future research purposes. Do you see something like that also potentially becoming an issue?

SPEAKER_01 1:12:36

I think the pushback on it from geneticists like myself and other people would be to say, like, you know, look, genetics is one tool, it's one way to identify connections. It's just one of many, right? Like, I would never argue that, say, for example, let's say that Ken Wickman was shown not to be ancestral to the claimant tribes, right? But they have these cultural connections that are really strong and really old. And I would not that I would never try to make an argument that genetics should supersede that, right? Um, unless another tribe maybe came forward that did have a genetic connection to him, right? And then what do you do? I don't know. These are really tough questions. Um they are, I don't think that non-native geneticists geneticists should be the ones making these calls. That's my argument. That's so, you know, or or archaeologists necessarily. I mean, I think archaeologists can give really advice, right? But um I don't know who arbitrates this, but I don't think it should be non-native people.

SPEAKER_03 1:13:38

Yeah. Well, here in excuse me, here in Albuquerque, we're having uh an interesting thing happen where there was a uh an Indian school here and a uh a grave site was found, and most people knew about this grave site. There was a little plaque that was set there, and it's it's in a park now. Um the city owns it, and it recently came back into discussion because the plaque was stolen.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:08

Jeez.

SPEAKER_03 1:14:09

And so somebody reported that the plaque was stolen, and this sort of brought it back into the limelight, right? In in in light of, you know, set against the backdrop of all of these horrible things happening where they're discovering Indian schools and these mass graves and stuff. So to their credit, the city, the people at the city have been really proactive with like, okay, we gotta close off this area of the park, and we need to involve all the the Pueblos and the Navajo people and all descendant communities, and we need their input over what is going to happen. So now it's like this this, you know, what's the next step and and what what do the what do the native communities actually want to happen? Do they want repatriation or do they want it left alone? Do they you know so it's it's it's really interesting to to see this happen in real real time because you know I'm I'm curious, like wow, this is what is gonna happen because so many different uh tribal groups uh presumably could be represented within this single uh you know, graveyard. And how how does all of that get uh get dealt with? So yeah, it's a sticky uh it's a sticky situation, but luckily the city's being really respectful about it. And um I'm hopefully it, you know, there's a mutually agreed upon solution to it because you know some be prior to NAGPRA, prior to any of this, this this could have gone wrong really fast, right? Like they could have just bulldozed through it.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:54

Do you think that the climate of archaeology and and my field has changed a lot in recent years in this respect? Or do you think I do?

SPEAKER_03 1:16:04

I I I get to see it, right? Um, firsthand. Uh just even because I I I have I've only been doing archaeology for like five years. Um I was a stunt man before.

SPEAKER_04 1:16:17

Cool.

SPEAKER_03 1:16:18

So but I was able to see like even just within that five year span, going to archaeology conferences where I was like the only brown person, and I'm not a young guy, but I was like easily the youngest person at these conferences, and this is changing, right? I'll go to um like the Pecos conference, and you know, it's slowly changing. I'm not saying it's like it's the you know, it's it's shifted uh drastically in the in the five years, but it's I I have seen it change, and I've seen all of these different perspectives coming in and more indigenous archaeologists uh having a voice and being given a voice. Uh one of the things that I did, the last SAA I went to was the one here in Albuquerque, and I made this sign that just said like hashtag archie of color, and I went around and I was like, my mission is just to find archaeologists of color and take photos of them holding the sign and like blasting it out to social media just to prove that we exist. And it's funny because I I won't say who they were, but it was like kind of a big firm, a CRM firm. I was going around asking people to take pictures, and some of their archaeologists were like, Oh yeah, hell yeah, let's take some pictures. And there was some uh, you know, some European descent people, some white people there who were like, Well, why can't we take our picture holding that sign? Some Anglos. Yeah, and the other their own uh, you know, um, the people who work for the same company as them were like, What the hell are you talking about? Read it. And and they actually got offended. They were like, Well, I think that's kind of racist that you're what you're carrying this, you know. So there's still work to be done for sure, but I do see I do see the the perspective starting to change as more and more people like I I know um Joe Iraceta.

SPEAKER_01 1:18:22

Oh yeah, you know.

SPEAKER_03 1:18:23

Yeah, so so he's doing his work, which is awesome work. He has his his group of indigenous geneticists that are that are doing their stuff. We have like really good indigenous archaeologists coming up. And but you know, it's like anything, it it'll take it'll take time. But it's encouraging to see that that this change is actually happening.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:44

Well, speaking of which, uh, I have a bone to pick with you, Jennifer. Uh-oh. A bone? A bone. Yeah, you know, that's my segue. Archaeology. Yeah. So to paraphrase your indigenous anthropologist friend, why are you so obsessed with history? I love her. I'm not gonna or or phrased another way, why you hate history so much? You you rag on history a lot in your book. And I was wondering, I'm like, what books, what books is she reading?

SPEAKER_01 1:19:18

I didn't think I did.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:19

Oh, oh, where I'm saying that they're not that that's just a yes, because the field of history has changed a lot.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:26

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think that's reflecting my own ignorance as a uh of a history of science and history of history, right? Uh yeah. Um you are right. I did history and injustice there. Um and I can only explain it by saying that you know, I'm looking at textbooks that are coming out of you know high schools, and they're not the ones I saw anyway, were not good.

SPEAKER_04 1:19:47

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:47

Okay. But I know that historians are much, much, you know, better than that.

SPEAKER_03 1:19:53

We're all the these textbooks out of Texas.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:59

But when I so when I was writing about this, I you know, I'm like, okay, where do we learn our history if we're not historians, right? I'm not arguing as historians, I love historians. But when I I I when I I was like, okay, where do we where do we learn our history? Right. And we learned it in high school most of it, like the formative years, right? Unless you go on to college and say study it. And so I went and looked at history books for high schools, and yeah, there's some stuff about you know pre-contact, but it's really not enough. And yeah, I was disappointed. And then I got mad and wrote a bit of a book about that's the origin of and I I fully accept that I perhaps did not, I definitely did not do justice to the case.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:38

Yeah, because I mean the hit the the the field of history, sure, it used to be racist, it used to be very uh Eurocentric, but just like anything, um it it changes with the times. And that's what I one of the lessons that I tell my students is that history is not static, it's a field of study that changes and that is reflective of our current moment. Because the ultimate question in history is not just who, what, when, where, but why. In other words, so what? Why is this important to us? And and it's important to us because it says something about who we are in the present moment. And so post the civil rights movement, especially going into the late 60s and to the early 70s, the f the field of American history in general just started to shift, and that's when you begin to get calls for African American history, Asian history, uh Chicano history, things like that, and all those different trends that emerged from the post quote unquote post-civil rights era, all those informed future histories, and so by the time you get into the 80s and especially into the 90s, history has become um more balanced, uh less racist, and more inclusive in general. So I take I would encourage all the listeners out there to seek out actual monographs written by historians. If you have any questions, you can hit me up.

SPEAKER_01 1:21:59

I take your point, and I apologize to historians. I did not mean to slight you. It is it is the high school books that I was.

SPEAKER_03 1:22:05

I took offense.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:06

I'm so sorry. I am that's okay.

SPEAKER_03 1:22:08

I slight historians all the time. Uh before we go, because we've kept you really long, my my apologies.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:17

My pleasure.

SPEAKER_03 1:22:18

Um it's fun. I wanted to know if you have a favorite example of uh pseudo, what you called pseudo-genetics.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:28

Like, is there anything Favorite is a loaded term? Well, I okay, it's been a it's been a minute since I read his book, but Graham Hancock tries to marshal genetics evidence, and that's fun.

SPEAKER_03 1:22:41

That guy we yeah, we just did a uh Graham Hancock episode.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:45

You do, I gotta go and listen to it because I yeah, I've kind of forgotten what's in his book, but I did notice that as soon as my book came out, everybody's like, oh, she's confirming Graham Hancock, and I'm like, the hell I am.

SPEAKER_03 1:22:56

Oh yeah, his his stupid book, America Before, I think it's called.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:02

It's just should that be its own episode? Yeah, I was going through his book and his trash.

SPEAKER_01 1:23:08

I would love to listen to it.

SPEAKER_03 1:23:09

Well, so I think in your talk at Skepticon, you you mentioned somebody had claimed to that they had sequenced Bigfoot's DD.

SPEAKER_01 1:23:19

Oh yes, mama catch them. Oh my gosh. I haven't thought of forever. Um, yeah, so she had a background in forensics and veterinary science.

SPEAKER_03 1:23:33

I think so, yeah. She's like a veterinarian.

SPEAKER_01 1:23:35

Yeah, and she's so she's out of Texas and she did Dammit, Texas. My husband's a Texan. I don't want to rag on Texas too much. I it's a great state full of lovely people.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:46

It's very and I'm a good example of that.

SPEAKER_01 1:23:49

Yes, there you go. I lived in Austin before moving here to to Louis. Oh, I loved Austin, although it was very expensive.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:57

Yeah, very like that.

SPEAKER_01 1:23:58

Anyway, my my husband's family uh they're very they're very hardcore Texans and I love them dearly. Um so Melba Ketchum sequenced she was she so she was given um samples of hair, I think, um fur that was collected from Bigfoot's and she sequenced them and published a paper. I know and she published a paper, gosh, it was a while ago.

SPEAKER_02 1:24:29

Um in what journal? Wait, what how does how does a non-geneticist have access to to the equipment necessary to know to do that? Which to sequence the genome of Bigfoot.

SPEAKER_01 1:24:44

Well, I think she extracted the DNA herself and then sent it to like a you know fee for service company or something like that, or something. I don't remember the details, but she so she she sent it to Nature and Science, I think. I can't remember. Got reviews back and um it was rejected, and then she sent it to somewhere else. Oh gosh, how did this go? She somehow got some reviewers to agree that it could be published, but then it didn't get published. Like I maybe it was desk rejected by the editor or something. I don't know. Anyway, no, I know she submitted it to a journal and they then went out of business. Anyway, she ended up buying a journal.

SPEAKER_03 1:25:25

Oh, okay. So it's in her own journal.

SPEAKER_01 1:25:28

She ended up buying a journal, and if you go to it, um, there are two papers, I think only two or three papers ever published, and one of them is her Bigfoot genome paper, and one of them is like a review article that talks about Bigfoot's in the Americas and the origin of Native Americans, I think. Um it's been a while, so yeah, it's what was that journal?

SPEAKER_02 1:25:48

Bigfoot and the origin of Native Americans.

SPEAKER_01 1:25:50

Okay, I'm gonna do a Google because I gotta um sorry, I'm just Googling here.

SPEAKER_02 1:25:59

Uh I'd be curious to see what percentage of Native American Bigfoot has in the genome.

SPEAKER_01 1:26:06

Sasquatch Genome Project was what it was called.

SPEAKER_03 1:26:10

The Sasquatch Tribe. Sasquatch. He's like, I'm 36% Cherokee. Right. No offense Cherokees. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:26:19

I'm having trouble finding the actual paper. Uh all I'm finding right now are reviews saying.

SPEAKER_03 1:26:24

Well, what's funny about the Bigfoot thing is is I've actually I've always considered Bigfoot to be probably the least dangerous conspiracy theory, like cryptid belief or whatever you want to call it, because at least it's it just seems very benign, right? Like I believe I'm a Bigfoot hunter, so I'm gonna go spend a weekend in the woods with my friends and camp and look for Bigfoot. Like it seems very um harmless, but I just saw a trailer to a documentary about Bigfoot hunters, and it's showing how like a lot of them abandon their families and they become obsessed with it. That's a gateway conspiracy. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:27:09

Right? I mean, it leads to some of these people are now cueing on us.

SPEAKER_04 1:27:14

Oh wow.

SPEAKER_03 1:27:14

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So you start with Bigfoot, and then you look at something like um what's that ranch, Skinwalker Ranch, where they claim there's Bigfoot there, and it's coming from a different dimension, and there's chupacabras involved, and now aliens and UFOs and secret governments, and now it's you've gone from I'm gonna go spend the weekend with my friends looking for Bigfoot in the mountains and drinking beer and sitting around a fire, to now I'm storming the Capitoling January 6th.

SPEAKER_01 1:27:47

I had a dear friend in the Capitol on January 6th. It was really upsetting. Um yeah. Oh man. I know, I know, so worried about her. Um she's fine, but uh it look okay, it's called De novo journal, but it does not, I don't think she renewed the domain. Like I'm getting a GoDaddy.

SPEAKER_02 1:28:03

Did you say Bonobo? De novo journal.

SPEAKER_01 1:28:07

Uh yeah, I'm I keep getting I'm gonna do another Google. De novo journal.

SPEAKER_03 1:28:15

I wonder if we could buy that uh domain.

SPEAKER_01 1:28:16

Oh, we could. Here, hang on. So great.

SPEAKER_02 1:28:21

Referred to the listeners of Till from Oslantis.

SPEAKER_01 1:28:24

Yeah, okay, there you go. I I think that the you can get the domain if you wanted. So I guess she didn't really. I I wonder what's going on. So the Sasquatch Genome Project's what it's called, and you can kind of go to her website and see what the latest is. There's a lot of stuff.

unknown 1:28:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:28:39

That's wild. Well, can you when when we were talking about how humans um mixed with like anatomically modern humans would mix with Neanderthals and Denisovins and um just this concept of deep time and how long ago this happened and how it's affected us as a modern people. Like, is this something that can be um teased out genetically? Like, can you look at somebody's genetic sequence and be like, you got some Neanderthal in you grow?

SPEAKER_01 1:29:09

Totally. I have a lot of Neanderthal. That's why I have this you know cranial bossing on my forehead, you know.

SPEAKER_03 1:29:14

Well, I have an occipital bun.

SPEAKER_01 1:29:16

What?

SPEAKER_03 1:29:17

And that's like a Neanderthal uh characteristic, as far as I know, but I also have uh teeth. My my teeth are shoveled.

SPEAKER_04 1:29:26

Oh, cool.

SPEAKER_03 1:29:27

So I just thought that was cool. Like I was explaining it, you know. Of course, my my kids are like, what? What are you talking about? Nobody cares. But I was like so excited, like part caveman, yeah, but like my skull, like the phenotypes, right? Phenotypically, my skull would not have existed, you know, 20,000 years ago with the shoveled teeth, which is like an indigenous characteristic, and then having an occipital bun, which is a Neanderthal characteristic. It's it's wild. I think this stuff is amazing. It's so fast. And I'm glad that you could actually tell.

SPEAKER_01 1:30:01

Yeah, you can sequence someone's genome and see, you know, like you can see alleles descended that that archaic admixture. But um I think uh, oh, I had a thought and then I lost it. Um yeah. So one of the really hot areas of genetics right now is looking at, okay, what the functionality of some of these alleles, right? These genetic variants, like what do they do, right? So you have a say a variant in a particular gene that you inherited from a Neanderthal ancestor. Does it, how does it change what that gene, you know, what the protein made from that gene versus, you know, one from a different population. So that's a really hot area of genetics right now. It's fascinating.

SPEAKER_03 1:30:44

Can you even suss out like homo habilis and stuff? Or did we not mix with it?

SPEAKER_01 1:30:48

I don't think they can do that. Um, but I mean they have certainly inferred the presence of other hominins um who don't appear to be Neanderthal or Denisovan, right? And so like maybe that's Homo erectus or some other population of humans that's genetically outside the range of variation that we're familiar with. Um so dope.

SPEAKER_03 1:31:09

I love some of these.

SPEAKER_01 1:31:10

Yeah, I love it, I love it. And some of these are really functional. Some of them are um uh some of these variants are are selected for, right? They provide a selective advantage in certain environments. Super cool.

SPEAKER_03 1:31:22

So well, cool. Well, thank you for Jesus Christ. Well, thank you for joining us. Um, Dr. Jennifer Raff, the book Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas is a New York Times bestseller. I ordered a copy, it's still on back order. That's how hard this book is to get a hold of now. It's impressive. Flying off the shelves. Graham Hancock is currently purchasing every copy of this book. Him and Joe Rogan.

SPEAKER_01 1:31:56

Graham Hancock has no idea who I am. He doesn't care. Um I I sent you guys a PDF, didn't I? Or did I? Yeah. Okay, yeah. Okay. I was just like, I hope I did that. I hope I remembered to do that.

SPEAKER_03 1:32:05

So yeah, but I I want the printed copy.

SPEAKER_01 1:32:08

Well, I'll sign it for you and say, you know, thank you in it.

SPEAKER_03 1:32:12

Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining us. I'm so excited.

SPEAKER_01 1:32:16

What a great conversation. Thank you.

SPEAKER_03 1:32:18

Thank you for being on the show.

SPEAKER_01 1:32:20

And remember, the truth is like medicine. It doesn't always taste good, but it is always good for you.