Indigenous Shibboleth

"[Both Ancient Beringians and all Native Americans] descended from a single founding population that initially split from East Asians around 36 thousand years ago, with gene flow persisting until around 25 thousand years ago."
"[Human remains at Upward Sun River and modern Native Americans] derived from the same ancestral source, which carried a mixture of East Asian and Mal'ta related ancestry."
"[The Alaska study gives] direct genomic evidence that all Native Americans can be traced back to the same source population from a single Late Pleistocene founding event."
New Scientific paper, University of Alaska Fairbanks

"We're a country based on immigration, going right back to our, quote, Indigenous people, unquote, who were immigrants as well, 10, 12, 14,000 years ago."
(former) Canadian Governor-General David Johnston

"What we do when we look at the current data is we look at the patterns, and right now we have hundreds of sites that form a very distinctive pattern of slow expansion from southern Siberia to northern Siberia, into Alaska, and further south."
"It confirms itself by these multiple lines of evidence."
"It would be difficult to overstate the importance of this newly revealed people to our understanding of how ancient populations came to inhabit the Americas. This new information will allow us a more accurate picture of Native American prehistory. It is markedly more complex than we thought."
Professor Ben Potter, anthropological archeologist, University of Alaska Fairbanks

An illustration of the Upward Sun River camp in what is now Interior Alaska. Illustration by Eric S. Carlson in collaboration with Ben A. Potter

When then-Governor-General David Johnston stated that all those living in North America were, going back into ancient history, immigrants, he committed social-cultural-political Indigenous heresy. By merely iterating what has been known in anthropological and archaeological investigative circles for quite a few years, but not necessarily spoken out loud in public for fear of an Indigenous native backlash, he invited just that backlash, though he obviously hadn't intended to. He was, at the time, making an effort to reassure recent immigrants that they had joined a nation of immigrants.

The public uproar that followed, with First Nations groups lashing out at the soon-to-depart Governor-General for misreading history, lumping First Nations with European, Asian and African migrants to Canada creating intolerable insult not to be countenanced, and the dignified and learned David Johnson retreated from his scholarly lesson of migration in a follow-up public admission of inadvertently misguided linking of ancient migrants with current immigrants. Nonsense, of course, but in the greater interests of keeping the peace, a question of diplomacy.

As in science be damned; the illusions of a people convinced of their victimhood and entitlements must be assuaged in their sense of overwhelming grievance. But the science is in and it cannot be gainsaid. Most recently, to add to the knowledge already gathered, the ceremonial burial of two infants from 11,500 years past was discovered of ancient Beringians -- people who crossed the Bering Land Bridge once connecting North American to Asia -- leading to the interpretation of their DNA identifying them as having emanated out of Asia.

In a new research paper published in the journal Nature, the discovery at Upward Sun River in central Alaska was linked to a migrating group out of a population in eastern Asia isolated for thousands of years from a greater population, migrating into Alaska around 15,000 years ago. According to anthropological archaeologist Ben Potter, tool technology found among them gives additional clear linkages to Asian groups.

Though scientific investigation has not made clear how Ancient Beringians fared, whether absorbed into other Native Americans or became victims of conflict, the latest research demonstrates through this first genetic analysis of the oldest human remains in the American area of Beringia, that both Native Americans and Ancient Beringians had a common descent. The Mal'ta were an ancient population close to Lake Baikal in what is now Siberia, identified from the remains of a four-year-old boy who lived and died there 24,000 years earlier.

Scientific theory has progressed to the point where theory has been validated by new findings and investigations, along with technologically advanced genetic screening linked to archaeology. There remain instances where cultural determination and social practices overrule science and technology, however, as in Kennewick Man dating to 9,000 years ago when academic science was overruled in civil courts acceding that Native American tribes could reclaim the remains for burial, preventing additional study.

Cultural sensitivity urges caution lest the sensibilities and righteously victimized outrage of Native Americans be stricken with the insults of doubt that they have always been the original inhabitants of North America, not as science now claims, original immigrants from elsewhere, most notably Asia. Native Americans insist that their legends prove positively that their ancestors lived since time immemorial on the land co-opted by late-arrival Europeans.

Indigenous North Americans vastly prefer their version of land possession and heritage, spurning scientific enquiry that has succeeded in giving ample proof of Indigenous Americans moving across a then-accessible land bridge to North America as a racist, colonial myth whose purpose is obvious; to assault Indigenous dignity, veracity and heritage.

"We didn’t know this population existed."
"These data also provide the first direct evidence of the initial founding Native American population, which sheds new light on how these early populations were migrating and settling throughout North America."
Ben Potter, lead study author, professor of anthropology, University of Alaska Fairbanks

UAF photo courtesy of Ben Potter   Members of the archaeology field team watch as University of Alaska Fairbanks professors Ben Potter and Josh Reuther excavate at the Upward Sun River site