Jennifer Raff

Assuming that "woke" is a four-letter word for you, this might not be the book for you, since Raff is very concerned for compensating for the sins committed by Western Science against the First Nations of the Western Hemisphere; maybe a little too much. That position can be presumptuous in its own way. However, many are the sins that have been committed in the name of science and, on the whole, there's no denying that there's a lot of low-hanging fruit to be picked in terms building better relationships. The saving grace is that much of the collective tribal leadership appreciates that the scientific endeavor can help with their existential concerns about erasure.

As for that science, which is maybe buried a bit too deep in this book, Raff's position can be summarized broadly as that the "Clovis" culture were not the first modern humans in the Western Hemisphere, and that those people arrived sometime before 14000 years ago. The more interesting question is who exactly were those people, and what expands the imagination is that if you appreciate that there was a region the size of Texas that is now at the bottom of the Bering Strait (and adjacent seas) where these people likely lived, until rising water levels forced them to commit to either Asia or the Americas. Further, the genetic analysis suggests that there is a fairly large population that has not been identified with archaeological evidence, which is likely at the bottom of the sea.

Anyway, this is the sort of book you read as a snapshot of our current understanding of events, with the awareness that the next unearthed skeleton could represent the piece of information that puts a dent into current theories. There is nothing more disposable than a book on paleoanthropology.… (mehr)