Bones: Discovering the First Americans

by Elaine Dewar

Overview

Award-winning journalist Elaine Dewar explores new terrain with Bones, uncovering evidence that challenges the conventional wisdom on how the Americas were peopled in early history. In her probing investigation, Dewar travels from Canada's Mackenzie River to the Brazilian state of Piaui, from the offices of the Smithsonian Institution to the Washington state riverbank where the remains of Kennewick man were found. Dewar captures a tale of hard science and human folly where the high stakes include professional reputations, lucrative grants, fame, and the resting places of wandering spirits.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780786713776
Publisher:	Basic Books
Publication date:	07/21/2004
Edition description:	First Trade Paper Edition
Pages:	640
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

Elaine Dewar is an award-winning investigative journalist whose beats include culture, international politics, science, business, and the environment. Reviewing Bones, historian Peter C. Newman has called Dewar "the Rachel Carson of Canada," whose work "is aimed always at expanding mental horizons . . . This is a must read." Dewar lives in Toronto.

Read an Excerpt

Introduction

This book begins with a simple question. Where did Native Americans come from? I know I was given an answer when I was just a child, before I had learned enough about the world, and enough about how we learn about the world, to eve ask the question for myself. This answer was a comfort to immigrants and the children of immigrants as they broke ground, built towns and cities from one end of the hemisphere to the other, and muscles aside the descendants of people who were in the Americas before them. It often popped up before the question could be formed, particularly in those scarce moments of moral hesitation when new immigrants came face to face with those they had displaced, and recognized that Native Americans were suffering and dying even as they, the newcomers, prospered. For more than a century this answer was ready for anyone who needed it: Native Americans came from somewhere else—from Asia. All are descendants of the same immigrant people.

I was born in the middle of the twentieth century on the Great Plains—in the city of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. I am the grandchild of immigrants from Eastern Europe who arrived there when it was still a frontier called the Northwest Territories. The government of Canada promised free land if my grandparents would go to the Prairies and bust the sod. And so they left the wars and racism and religious hatreds of Russia and Romania, migrating halfway around the globe to the New World. They helped to colonize the beautiful and frigid prairies. Their first homes were sod houses, built of the thick squares of turf they cut out of the ground. They were known as pioneers, as if no one had ever been therebefore them.

If they had regrets about being part of a process that ended the ancient and complex relationship between Native peoples and their lands, I never heard them discuss it. By the time I came along, they were city folk with their own businesses (although my mother’s father held fast to his northern farm for many years, not letting go even after his tractor fell on him, when he was eighty-five). Native people had been pushed so far to the margins of society that my contact with them came mainly at fairs and parades and multicultural festivals where ethnics of all sorts came forward, in costume, to sing their foreign songs and dance their foreign dances. We were all immigrants together in the New World and therefore in my mind we were equivalent: we came from Eastern Europe, they came from Asia. I did the hora, they had their powwows, their drums and their fancy dancing. We came on boats and built the railroads. Exactly how they came was a matter to be determined by science because they had no written histories, just stories about their origins, encased in languages that no one but the old people spoke anymore. Governments and church schools tried to wipe those languages away because they interfered with the process of making Native Americans just like everybody else. If the Native people were unhappy about that we didn’t hear of it. (How could they complain? Status Indians in Canada only got the right to vote in 1960.) It was up to science to dig up the Truth — and teach it to them.

Copyright 2001 by Elaine Dewar

Table of Contents

Contents

Introduction

Part One

1 Asian Origins? • Clovis First Across the Bering Strait

2 Bones 101 • A Sordid History Begets a Compromised Science

3 Found and Lost • The Misplaced Remains of the Accepted Path

4 The Battle for Monte Verde • Rewriting the First American Story–by Committee

5 The Founding Mothers • The Spectral Trail of Mitochondrial DNA

6 Virtual Bones • Are Reburied Remains Hard Evidence?

7 The Kennewick Chronicles • Science, History, Politics, Religion . . . and the United States Army

8 Excavating the Museum Shelves • Weaving a New Image of Ancient Americans

9 We were Always Here • Some Native American Histories

10 Pendejo Cave • Indiana Jones Digs Down to the Foundation

Part Two

11 Beneath the Southern Cross • The Road Leads Back in Time

12 Lunch with Luzia • The Fine African Features of the Oldest Woman in the Americas

13 Proof Parasite • A Wormhole in the Bering Strait Theory

14 Revisionist Prehistory • Bones Beyond the Bounds of Accepted Theory

15 Brazilian Edens • The Sheltered Finds of Minas Gerais

16 Science Contender • Dispatches from the Most Ancient Trenches

17 Pedra Furada • Ancient Arts of the Little People Part Three

18 Science under Fire • The Inquisition of Karl Reinhard

19 The Kennewick Shuffle • Dancing Around the Hard Questions

20 The Reverse Migration • North, by Boat

21 The Corridor That Wasn’t • The Cold Facts Behind the Absence of Evidence

22 Hard Science, Hardball Politics • Kennewick Reevaluated

23 Going Home • Burying the Bones, Treasuring the Past

Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Endnotes
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

Where did North Americans come from way back when, asks Canadian journalist Dewar (Cloak of Green, not reviewed, etc.), in this eye-opening study for laypeople that debates the merits of archaeological theories swirling about the question.

Kirkus Reviews

"Elaine Dewar is the Rachel Carson of Canada, in the sense that her work is aimed always at expanding mental horizons, preserving the sanctity of the national conscience, and telling a fresh and interesting story. This time she's taken on nothing less than a revised history of the original peopling of the Americas, and with typical thoroughness she goes back, not to their roots, but to their bones which tell a much more fascinating story. This is a must read." —Peter C. Newman

"This is an important book, because it debunks a scientific orthodoxy that has determined not only how those in the western hemisphere approach their history but also the place aboriginal people occupy within that history. Dewar is a sharp-minded questioner [with] a novelist's eye for describing people and places…Bones is a delightful read." —Quill & Quire

“ Dewar’s book is bound to shake archeologists out of their complacency.” —Heather Pringle, Canadian Geographic

“…exhaustive and compelling…Like a true forensic anthropologist, [Elaine Dewar] builds her case a brush-stroke at a time…she is a superb writer, and her book is as much a travel book as an account of a spell-binding scientific journey….Bones ought to stir up the pot…” —Wayne Grady, Montreal Gazette

“ a compelling account…the peopling of the Americas is one of the epic chapters in the human story.” —Maclean’s

“Elaine Dewar is a Canadian journalist with an excellent eye for hidden stories…Dewar flawlessly captures the atmosphere of academic rivalry, gossip, infighting for grants and professional reputation, competition for access to important finds, and even the legal manoeuvres, which characterize a field of study at a time when new finds and new techniques are transforming old views….Dewar has written a fascinating exploration of the political and academic implications of the unburied skeletons and the potential information they contain.” —Robert McGhee (curator of archaeology at the Canadian Museum of Civilization) in The Globe and Mail

From the Publisher