HENRY

Not a particularly good start to the International Year of Languages - the last traditional speaker of the Na-Dené Eyak language died yesterday, making the language extinct.

Goodbye Chief Marie Smith Jones, and goodbye Eyak.

The always wonderful Fiona has let me know that the Montenegro et al paper simulating the arrival of sweet potato (kumara) in Polynesia has come out. We first mentioned this in may last year.

Abstract:

The sweet potato is a plant native to the Americas, and its pre-historic presence in Polynesia is a long-standing anthropological problem. Here we use computer-driven drift simulations to model the trajectories of vessels and seed pods departing from a segment of coast between Mexico and Chile.

The experiments demonstrate that accidental drift voyages could have been the mechanism responsible for the pre-historic introduction of the sweet potato from the Americas to Polynesia.

While present results do not relate to the feasibility of a transfer by purposeful navigation, they do indicate that this type of voyaging is not required in order to explain the introduction of the crop into Polynesia. The relatively high probability of occurrence and relatively short crossing times of trips from Northern Chile and Peru into the Marquesas, Tuamotu and Society groups are in agreement with the general consensus that this region encompasses the area of original arrival and subsequent dispersal of the sweet potato in Polynesia.

Interesting stuff, but I think the evidence is getting stronger that the Polynesians did make it over to the Americas.

I have just read a rather wonderful paper by Robert L. Carneiro (personal website) - “Can anthropology be made a science? A retrospective glance” - which is a look back at his long career in Anthropology.

I’ve excerpted a quote here which I think (unfortunately) sums up a common viewpoint in anthropology and linguistics. The quote by Murdock is a little bit stronger than how I’d put it though!

Although warfare occurred in both the Amazon and the Andes, it had, as I said, led to very different outcomes in the two regions. In Amazonia, it often resulted in a process of ‘fight and flight,’ causing defeated villages to flee to safety and spread out over an extensive area, thus retaining their independence. On the Peruvian coast, however, the situation was very different. Here, villages were located, not in open country, but in a number of narrow valleys, hemmed in - circumscribed - by deserts, mountains, and the sea. Intervillage warfare occurred here too, as it did in Amazonia, but as population grew, and proliferating villages filled up each coastal valley, there was no longer any place for a village, defeated in war, to flee and find safety. Unlike the Amazon, warfare here led to the conquest and incorporation of the weaker villages by the stronger. In this manner, village autonomy was surmounted, and chiefdoms, the first multi-village polities, created.

The establishment of the first chiefdoms represented a quantum leap in political evolution. A Rubicon had been crossed that needed to be crossed before any further political development was possible. A qualitative advance had taken place, and after that, the building up of successively larger political units was, in a sense, but a quantitative step. It took three million years for local autonomy to be transcended, but once it was, the state followed on the heels of the chiefdom in a scant three millennia.

In a nutshell, then, this was the circumscription theory. It must have first crystallized in my mind by the spring semester of 1957, since I remember discussing it at lunch with C. W. M. Hart, a colleague of mine at the University of Wisconsin, where I was teaching. I recall the occasion vividly because Hart’s reaction to the theory took me completely aback. While never a student of Boas, Hart’s thinking was very much along Boasian lines - critical and anti-theoretical. After I’d carefully explained my theory to him, his immediate response was to say, ‘Well, we don’t know very much about the central Congo, and if we did, perhaps we would find an exception to it there.’

What a telling remark! Departure from a theory was to be eagerly sought and warmly welcomed because, it would seem, the exception was nobler than the rule. Nor was Hart’s reaction unique. I have known more than one anthropologist since then who finds irregularities more congenial than regularities. That is why, according to Murdock (1957:251), anthropologists had gained the reputation among other social scientists of being ‘a detestable bunch of bubble prickers.’

Why should such an attitude exist? Perhaps because an irregularity in behavior seems, somehow, like a perverse manifestation of human freedom, a refusal of ‘the human spirit’ to be confined within a procrustean mold.

I’ve had Carneiro’s book Evolutionism in Cultural Anthropology: A critical history strongly recommended to me, and it’s on my shortlist for holiday reading.

 A few good links have come my way in the last few days, so here they are:

• John Hawks has more information on new Middle Pleistocene hominid from Turkey, that I mentioned a few days ago, and also has a fun piece describing his recent paper about genetic introgression in humans.
• The folks over at Anthropology.net tear apart an article by Meredith Small calling personal DNA testing a scam ‘cos “if you want to know who you are, look in a mirror“
• Greater Blogazonia reviews the paper on genetic variation in Native American populations that we encountered two weeks ago  in “Genetics meets voodoo linguistics“.

Wang et al in PloS Genetics:

We examined genetic diversity and population structure in the American landmass using 678 autosomal microsatellite markers genotyped in 422 individuals representing 24 Native American populations sampled from North, Central, and South America. These data were analyzed jointly with similar data available in 54 other indigenous populations worldwide, including an additional five Native American groups.

The Native American populations have lower genetic diversity and greater differentiation than populations from other continental regions. We observe gradients both of decreasing genetic diversity as a function of geographic distance from the Bering Strait and of decreasing genetic similarity to Siberians—signals of the southward dispersal of human populations from the northwestern tip of the Americas.

We also observe evidence of: (1) a higher level of diversity and lower level of population structure in western South America compared to eastern South America, (2) a relative lack of differentiation between Mesoamerican and Andean populations, (3) a scenario in which coastal routes were easier for migrating peoples to traverse in comparison with inland routes, and (4) a partial agreement on a local scale between genetic similarity and the linguistic classification of populations. These findings offer new insights into the process of population dispersal and differentiation during the peopling of the Americas.

The full paper’s available at PLoS Genetics, and alternate coverage here.

Just a few weeks ago I was ranting about how the spread of Kumara (sweet potato) in Polynesia suggested that Polynesians travelled over to South America to get it. Now there’s a paper out that apparently has hard evidence of Polynesian contact with the New World.

The paper, soon to be released in P.N.A.S. (well, once they lift their embargo), shows that DNA found in ancient chicken remains from Valparaiso and Santiago in Chile, is similar to that found in chickens from the Polynesian triangle. The remains have been dated to 622 years before present, which fits quite nicely with the established chronology of Polynesian settlement (e.g. Easter Island around 800-900BP at earliest), and is at least 100 years before European contact with the New World.

Until the paper actually comes out, here’s a few other sites with more info: University of Auckland News Release, John Hawks Weblog, Alice Storey’s webpage.

Update: the paper is now available: Radiocarbon and DNA evidence for a pre-Columbian introduction of Polynesian chickens to Chile (doi)

An Indian tribe that has had no formal contact with Western civilization has been located in a remote Amazon region, federal authorities said Friday.The Metyktire tribe, with about 87 members, was found last week in an area that is difficult to reach because of thick jungle and a lack of nearby rivers some 2,000 kilometers (1,200 miles) northwest of Rio de Janeiro, said Mario Moura, a spokesman for the Federal Indian Bureau, or Funai.