Schools have long taught that humans populated North America around 12K yrs ago by crossing the Bering land bridge.

Toastie

Schools have long taught that humans populated North America around 12K yrs ago by crossing the Bering land bridge. This story supports settler colonialism, and contradicts #Indigenous stories, which offer memories of human habitation here during the last glacial maximum.

Also, the Bering land bridge story falls apart when you find out about the century of archaeological evidence academia has vigorously suppressed.

What does ‘time immemorial’ really mean? - High Country News

If you’ve seen the phrase time immemorial used repeatedly in Indigenous affairs reporting, there are some compelling reasons why.

High Country News (www.hcn.org)

Dawn Nafus

@Toastie Thanks for writing this! I had always balked at the phrase before reading this, because I thought it was a way for white folks to imply indigenous people were somehow static, lacking "progress" and therefore in need of a white savior. Hadn't understood the usage that you describe here until now.

Toastie

@dawnnafus Very glad to clear that up!

Sara

@Toastie boats boats boats boats

boats boats boats

(you will have to imagine the little dance that goes with this song; it's the kind of dance that explains why nobody invites me to archaeologist parties)

(why would people who were EXTREMELY GOOD AT BOATS walk across an ice field)

(ugh you've heard this rant already)

Steve Felten

@Toastie I saw a film about the salmon restoration on the Columbia River at the Tamástslikt museum, and was devastated when the current administration reneged on the commitment. Wisdom from time immemorial should be shared for the benefit of all humanity. I hope we can reverse direction before it’s too late.

Toastie

@sarae I did put some effort into finding a way to shoehorn into this story that chickens got here from SE Asia (SOMEHOW (boats)) well before Europeans crossed the Atlantic.

Toastie

@stevefelten I hope so too. Except that some of that wisdom isn't meant to be shared. But the salmon, their habitat, and all American watersheds and lands are crying out to be cared for properly again.

Sara

@Toastie it's a MYSTERY and was definitely not a bunch of hypercompetent Indigenous people from maritime civilizations

(seriously I have to wonder if the problem is that not enough people have tried both snowshoeing and canoeing, because if you've done both I can't see how you argue about this land bridge crap)

Toastie

@sarae Actually now that I think about it this hemisphere is not so much the West as kinda the ultra-East.

Ricardo Harvin

@Toastie Ironic how oral histories are disregarded, considered mere tales and not real history by the white establishment, while one of the most revered written works for that establishment is Fahrenheit 451, with its book people as heroic figures.

Toastie

@ricardoharvin Only certain kinds of facts are facts.

Sara

@Toastie isn't there a part in Narnia where the talking rat explains that to us?

Don Ray

@Toastie

I was thinking about this archeological site while reading your essay. It’s one of the sites you mentioned: Chiquihuite Cave in Mexico. Artifacts that are possibly 33,000 years old.

Earliest evidence for humans in the Americas

Humans settled in the Americas much earlier than previously thought, according to new finds from Mexico.

(www.bbc.com)

Steve Moore :toad:

@Toastie Maybe folks entrenched in a European linear time concept have a hard time bending their minds around Indigenous cyclical time. Indigenous story telling often doesn’t have a beginning or end, it wraps around itself. It can give a view from the inside and the outside simultaneously. ‘Time immemorial’ fits in that landscape.
When Cortez entered Tenochtitlán, he had never seen anything anywhere that could match it for beauty & sophistication. A year later, he destroyed it.

Brian Vastag

@Toastie I appreciate you writing this. One of my thoughts is that my science journalism colleagues have been leaning on Clovis-first as a storytelling crutch for about...oh 30 years. Meaning it's very easy to repeat: "Archaeologists have long held that humans first arrived in the Americas 12,000 years ago, but new finds challenge that..."

There's so much pre-Clovis evidence now that it's time to retire that line. And I think younger archaeologists are more in tune with your view. 1/2

Brian Vastag

@Toastie I did several stories about pre-Clovis sites and found many researchers open to the evidence. There are certainly old, curmudgeonly Clovis-firsters who will never change but you've maybe heard the adage about how scientific dogma advances....one death at a time.

disorderlyf

@Toastie Funnily enough, I noticed linguistic similarities between certain East Asian languages and the one indigenous language I have any knowledge about. It seems odd there would be more linguistic similarities with peoples that would've come from thousands of miles away from the Bering Strait

Malus is here now

@Toastie
i really don't know enough about anthropology or history to say anything insightful but there is something mind-boggling to me (white, settler) in an oral history covering multiple tens of thousands of years. it would not surprise me at all if one of the reasons white scientists/anthropologists still hang onto the bering strait theory is being unable to contend with what that really means. like, just rejecting the idea because they can't envision it.

i don't think the white/colonizer frame of mind can handle the concept of being connected to a place for that long- for having a living history that goes that far back, ESPECIALLY for those of us in the americas where we've only been here a hair over 500 years- with most of us only getting here in the past hundred years or so.

(hopefully this is coherent. late-night posting)

Audun

@Toastie while this is very interesting, I don't understand how the 12k yrs ago story supports settler colonialism. Do people really argue that way?

That people who arrived 12k years are "just another batch of recent arrivals who kill everything in sight" doesn't make sense. Northern Scandinavia was populated about 12k years ago, so by European standards it is not recent in any way.

Of course, that's on the people who make such claims, but it is a very odd argument, regardless of whether North America was populated 50k years ago or "just" 12k years ago.

Germán A. Quimbayo Ruiz

@Toastie Nice essay, thanks. This reminds me, of course, the Chiribiquete findings in the Colombian Amazon. https://rtvcplay.co/peliculas-documentales/chiribiquete-un-viaje-a-la-memoria-ancestral-de-america

Wandering Adventure Party

Schools have long taught that humans populated North America around 12K yrs ago by crossing the Bering land bridge.