"Jennifer Raff, who wrote our May 2021 cover story, 'Journey into the Americas,' applies her experience as an anthropologist and geneticist to a sizable task: righting the wrongs of both fields' treatment of Native peoples while addressing how modern methodologies are now closer to understanding the origins of Native Americans. Origin presents how centuries of racist thinking informed theories that were widely accepted. Interstitial case studies could merit entire chapters, from a Monacan burial mound in Thomas Jefferson's backyard to a digression on whether gender or occupation can be inferred from remains. And Raff makes ample space for Native voices through original interviews."—Maddie Bender, science journalist recognized by The New York Times
"Social and genetic history cannot be disentangled. ORIGIN also highlights the colonizers’ evolving cultural myths that shape and are shaped by their science. This is a valuable read for consumers of popular genetics who are not aware how much science is built on colonial theft, and how Indigenous peoples push back to improve science."
—Dr. Kim TallBear (Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate), Professor, Faculty of Native Studies University of Alberta, Canadian Research Chair in Indigenous Peoples, Technoscience, and Society, and author of NATIVE AMERICAN DNA: TRIBAL BELONGING AND THE FALSE PROMISE OF GENETIC SCIENCE
"Rarely does a book combine the scientific, the compassionate, and the respectful when engaging with genomes, histories, and the movement of peoples. Even more rarely does a non-Indigenous scientist listen to—and learn from—Indigenous interlocutors, past and present. Jennifer Raff’s ORIGIN deftly weaves a critical narrative of discoveries, biases, achievements, faults, and possibilities, offering an integrative, caring, and scientifically rigorous approach to thinking with and about the histories of the First Peoples of the Americas. Filled with complex but accessible archeological, historical, and genomic analyses presented in the context of honest and often difficult narratives, ORIGIN is a necessary and elegant text."
—Agustín Fuentes, professor of anthropology at Princeton University and author of WHY WE BELIEVE
"Ancient DNA, extracted from bones thousands upon thousands of years old, has the potential to rewrite the story of the human past. In ORIGIN, Jennifer Raff expertly explains the complicated science behind it, how it can tell us who the first inhabitants of the Americas really were, and how they got there. ORIGIN balances its cutting-edge command of the science and its interpretation with a deep commitment to the ethical implications of this work. The result is a lively, learned, and wonderfully told guide to a fascinating topic."—Patrick Wyman, author of THE VERGE: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World and host of Tides of History
"The deep history of the lands that became the Americas is one of the most fascinating, under-explored, and politicized branches in the story of humankind, and is being retold today with DNA as a source. In ORIGIN, geneticist Jennifer Raff tells that tale with great scholarship, respect, and the verve of a natural storyteller."
—Adam Rutherford, geneticist and bestselling author of A BRIEF HISTORY OF EVERYONE WHO EVER LIVED
“[Jennifer Raff] is at the forefront of a culture change in our science. And now she has written the book anyone interested in the peopling of the Americas must read.” —The New York Times
"Jennifer Raff, a credential dynamo in the field of paleogenomics, invites readers into her off-limits laboratory where she and colleagues are rewriting deep American history. ORIGIN is an authoritative tale from the trenches told by a fearless scientist."—David Hurst Thomas, author of SKULL WARS: Kennewick Man, Archaeology, and the Battle for Native American Identity
"Raff's book is brilliant, digging into the riveting new theories about America's first peopling, but it also does it ethically, which exposes the weird, error-riddled, and ... bonkers ideas from archeology's previous elites." —Jack Hitt, author of OFF THE ROAD: A Modern-Day Walk Down the Pilgrim's Route into Spain
"Jennifer Raff is incredibly knowledgeable, eloquent, and thoughtful, with a peerless grasp of both the complicated science of this exciting field and its difficult ethics."—Ed Yong, New York Times bestselling author of I CONTAIN MULTITUDES: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life
Tanis Parenteau's authoritative performance captures the spirit of this informative audiobook. Raff, a professor of anthropology, provides a scientifically driven update of the genetic history of the Americas. The story of the population of the Western hemisphere has been written with a framework of colonization, marginalizing the historical existence of Indigenous peoples. For example, the peopling of the Americas has long been believed to have occurred after the last Ice Age; more current research indicates people have been present long before that time. Here the intentional erasure of Native people in research is held to account. Parenteau's clear performance guides listeners through passages of scientific research and discussion, threading the work of anthropology and genetics. S.P.C. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine
Tanis Parenteau's authoritative performance captures the spirit of this informative audiobook. Raff, a professor of anthropology, provides a scientifically driven update of the genetic history of the Americas. The story of the population of the Western hemisphere has been written with a framework of colonization, marginalizing the historical existence of Indigenous peoples. For example, the peopling of the Americas has long been believed to have occurred after the last Ice Age; more current research indicates people have been present long before that time. Here the intentional erasure of Native people in research is held to account. Parenteau's clear performance guides listeners through passages of scientific research and discussion, threading the work of anthropology and genetics. S.P.C. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine
2021-11-17
A stroll through the history of the early peopling of the Americas, blending ethnography, paleontology, and genetics.
Raff, a geneticist and professor of anthropology, opens with the discovery of ancient human bones in a cave in the Pacific Northwest, a discovery that, not long ago, would have occasioned the descent of a swarm of archaeologists to excavate—never mind the wishes of the Indigenous people nearby. Now those Native people—in this case, Tlingit and Haida—are involved, deliberating how to approach the study of the bones. In this instance, the remains supported their beliefs “that their ancestors were a seafaring people who have lived in this region since the dawn of history.” At least one wave, perhaps the earliest, of humans in the Americas was made up of people from northeastern Asia who traveled on open water well before most current chronologies begin. Such facts are adduced by archaeological fieldwork but also by ethnographers beginning to pay closer attention to Indigenous origin stories and by scientists working in labs to sequence DNA, extracting it from long-buried bone. Raff writes clearly and well, but sometimes we encounter knotty technical problems, as with her formulation, “X2a is of a comparable age to other indigenous American haplogroups (A, B, C, D), which would not be true if it were derived from a separate migration from Europe.” Along the way, the author raises as many questions as she answers. So-called Kennewick Man, hailed by White supremacists a quarter-century ago as proof that Europeans got to the Americas first, is certainly ancestral to Native people, for one: “There is no conceivable scenario under which Kennewick Man could have inherited just his mitochondrial genome from Solutreans but the rest of his genome from Beringians.” So where did he come from? Readers with a bent for human origin studies will enjoy puzzling out such things with Raff.
A sturdy, readable contribution to the library of Indigenous origins and global migrations.
