Graham: In your recent Rogan talk, you mentioned the deep seated bias amongst American archaeologists against the possibility of pre-Clovis inhabitants of the American continents. You may already be aware of the contribution of Ales Hrdlicka to that mindset but I think this aspect is worthy of discussion in this forum. I quote below from a file I came across some time ago to set the scene for this debate.
Ales Hrdlicka, the founder of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology
The Czech-born anthropologist Ales Hrdlicka, became the Smithsonian Institution's first curator of physical anthropology in 1903. Hrdlicka, a brilliant scientist and a devastating debater, systematically examined and confidently dismissed all evidence offered to show man's antiquity in the New World. He brushed aside . . . discoveries [of human relics found with mammoths or other ancient extinct creatures] by saying that the human relics had accidentally became mixed with those of extinct animals. . . .
As Hrdlicka, grew older his opinions hardened into prejudices, and he proclaimed his ideas so vehemently and with such a show of authority that it became professionally dangerous for any scientist to try to contradict them. Only a brave archeologist or a foolish one would dare to tangle with Hrdlicka. One archeologist of the 1920's warned his pupils, not entirely jokingly, ‘if you ever find evidence of human life [in America] in a context which is ancient, bury it carefully, but don't forget about it'.
A marvellous story about Hrdlicka is told by paleontologist, Louis Leakey: Back in 1929-1930 when I was teaching students at the University of Cambridge . . . I began to tell my students that man must have been in the New World [for] at least 15,000 years. I shall never forget when Ales Hrdlicka, that great man from the Smithsonian Institution, happened to be at Cambridge, and he was told by my professor (I was only a student supervisor) that Dr. Leakey was telling students that man must have been in America 15,000 or more years ago. “He burst into my rooms—he didn't even wait to shake hands, Hrdlicka said, ‘Leakey, what's this I hear? Are you preaching heresy?'
‘No, Sir!' said Leakey.
"Hrdlicka replied, ‘You are! You are telling students that man was in America 15,000 years ago. What evidence have you?'
"Leakey answered, ‘No positive evidence. Purely circumstantial evidence. But with man from Alaska to Cape Horn, with many different languages and at least two civilizations, it is not possible that he was present only the few thousand years that you at present allow.”
Hrdlicka had no qualms about destroying anyone that he felt endangered his views of the peopling of the New World. According to Lewin, G. Edward Lewis, a doctoral candidate at Yale University on an expedition to the Siwalik Hills of India, found fossils of a possible hominid which he dubbed Ramapithecus. Hrdlicka, “. . . chose to damn Ramapithecus in the pages of the American Journal of Science . . . where Lewis had published his claims for the fossil. In six short pages Hrdlicka tore into Lewis' work, accusing the young man of committing ‘a series of errors' and reaching an ‘utterly unjustifiable' conclusion. Ramapithecus, he said, was just an ape [and not a hominid]”
Hrdlicka, he [Lewis] says, ‘thought he was the anointed and elect prophet who had been foreordained and chosen to make such discoveries and demolish the work of anyone else.'
Hrdlicka's paper was somewhat self-contradictory, and says Elwyn Simons, of Yale ‘scattered with blunders and naivetes.'
‘The man didn't know what he was talking about,' recalls Lewis. ‘So I could not take the paper's content seriously, but did take seriously the possibility of his damaging my reputation.' As an attempt to salvage his reputation Lewis penned ‘an unhurried and temperate reply.' The rebuttal never found the printed page, however, because the editor of the American Journal of Science, Lewis' own supervisor, [Richard Swann] Lull, declined to accept it. ‘They refused to publish it,' says Lewis, ‘although they admitted that I had written nothing offensive, because they said Hrdlicka was an important man, and I was a young man whose reputation would be damaged . . . inasmuch as the baldly stated facts and courteous comments would make him look like a fool!' Lewis' thesis which is described by [David] Pilbeam [a British anthropologist] as ‘a very good piece of work' and by Simons as ‘the best opinion people could reach at the time'—was never published.
Hrdlicka had good reason to want to discredit Lewis' work, says Frank Spencer, a scholar of this period of the history of paleontology and of Hrdlicka in particular. ‘It has nothing to do with the shape of the jaw,' he suggests. ‘It had to do with where the jaw came from—namely, the fringes of Central Asia.' In Hrdlicka's view, the western part of the Old World was the wellspring of human origins. Everything in his scheme depended upon this, including his ideas on the eventual peopling of the New World. To have the first hominids appearing in the eastern part of the Old World [so they would arrive in the New World prior to 12,000 B.P.] was therefore simply unacceptable. ‘So he did a hatchet job on Lewis' work,' says Spencer.
Ales Hrdlicka blocked all research into the past for a whole generation. . . . He was ruthless in enforcing his dominance upon younger men. . . . Even in 1928, by which time the importance of the Folsom find was clear to everyone, Hrdlicka had the temerity to decree at a meeting of the New York Academy that there could not have been a Paleo-Indian (as we call the people who hunted the now extinct animals). ‘With his back to the wall, Hrdlicka was denying everything to maintain his position that man could be anything, anything at all, but not ancient in America,' [Edwin N.] Wilmsen says. But eventually the finds accumulated to such an extent that even the skeptics had to bow to the evidence.
In recent years the accumulation of DNA evidence is such that the Smithsonian now accepts that native Americans spread through both North and South America much earlier than 12,000 years ago.
[www.smithsonianmag.com]
“More than 15,000 years ago, humans began crossing a land bridge called Beringia that connected their native home in Eurasia to modern-day Alaska. Who knows what the journey entailed or what motivated them to leave, but once they arrived, they spread southward across the Americas”.
By analysing the DNA of modern native Americans and ancient human remains, a group writing in Science concluded that all present-day Native Americans arrived in a single migration no earlier than 23,000 years ago. Then, they argue, Native Americans split into two branches around 13,000 years ago: one that is now dispersed across North and South America while the other is restricted to North America.
According to Prof Reich, the discovery of Oceanian ancestry among certain Native American groups indicates that the Americas were peopled by a more diverse set of populations than previously accepted.
"The simplest possible model never predicted an affinity between Amazonians today and Australasians," he said.
"This suggests that there is an ancestral population that crossed into the Americas that is different from the population that gave rise to the great majority of Americans. And that was a great surprise," he said.
Prof Reich believes that the most plausible explanation is that there was a separate migration from Australasia, possibly around 15,000 years ago. This group, he speculates, was probably more widely dispersed across North America but was eventually pushed out by other native American groups.
Ales Hrdlicka, the founder of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology
The Czech-born anthropologist Ales Hrdlicka, became the Smithsonian Institution's first curator of physical anthropology in 1903. Hrdlicka, a brilliant scientist and a devastating debater, systematically examined and confidently dismissed all evidence offered to show man's antiquity in the New World. He brushed aside . . . discoveries [of human relics found with mammoths or other ancient extinct creatures] by saying that the human relics had accidentally became mixed with those of extinct animals. . . .
As Hrdlicka, grew older his opinions hardened into prejudices, and he proclaimed his ideas so vehemently and with such a show of authority that it became professionally dangerous for any scientist to try to contradict them. Only a brave archeologist or a foolish one would dare to tangle with Hrdlicka. One archeologist of the 1920's warned his pupils, not entirely jokingly, ‘if you ever find evidence of human life [in America] in a context which is ancient, bury it carefully, but don't forget about it'.
A marvellous story about Hrdlicka is told by paleontologist, Louis Leakey: Back in 1929-1930 when I was teaching students at the University of Cambridge . . . I began to tell my students that man must have been in the New World [for] at least 15,000 years. I shall never forget when Ales Hrdlicka, that great man from the Smithsonian Institution, happened to be at Cambridge, and he was told by my professor (I was only a student supervisor) that Dr. Leakey was telling students that man must have been in America 15,000 or more years ago. “He burst into my rooms—he didn't even wait to shake hands, Hrdlicka said, ‘Leakey, what's this I hear? Are you preaching heresy?'
‘No, Sir!' said Leakey.
"Hrdlicka replied, ‘You are! You are telling students that man was in America 15,000 years ago. What evidence have you?'
"Leakey answered, ‘No positive evidence. Purely circumstantial evidence. But with man from Alaska to Cape Horn, with many different languages and at least two civilizations, it is not possible that he was present only the few thousand years that you at present allow.”
Hrdlicka had no qualms about destroying anyone that he felt endangered his views of the peopling of the New World. According to Lewin, G. Edward Lewis, a doctoral candidate at Yale University on an expedition to the Siwalik Hills of India, found fossils of a possible hominid which he dubbed Ramapithecus. Hrdlicka, “. . . chose to damn Ramapithecus in the pages of the American Journal of Science . . . where Lewis had published his claims for the fossil. In six short pages Hrdlicka tore into Lewis' work, accusing the young man of committing ‘a series of errors' and reaching an ‘utterly unjustifiable' conclusion. Ramapithecus, he said, was just an ape [and not a hominid]”
Hrdlicka, he [Lewis] says, ‘thought he was the anointed and elect prophet who had been foreordained and chosen to make such discoveries and demolish the work of anyone else.'
Hrdlicka's paper was somewhat self-contradictory, and says Elwyn Simons, of Yale ‘scattered with blunders and naivetes.'
‘The man didn't know what he was talking about,' recalls Lewis. ‘So I could not take the paper's content seriously, but did take seriously the possibility of his damaging my reputation.' As an attempt to salvage his reputation Lewis penned ‘an unhurried and temperate reply.' The rebuttal never found the printed page, however, because the editor of the American Journal of Science, Lewis' own supervisor, [Richard Swann] Lull, declined to accept it. ‘They refused to publish it,' says Lewis, ‘although they admitted that I had written nothing offensive, because they said Hrdlicka was an important man, and I was a young man whose reputation would be damaged . . . inasmuch as the baldly stated facts and courteous comments would make him look like a fool!' Lewis' thesis which is described by [David] Pilbeam [a British anthropologist] as ‘a very good piece of work' and by Simons as ‘the best opinion people could reach at the time'—was never published.
Hrdlicka had good reason to want to discredit Lewis' work, says Frank Spencer, a scholar of this period of the history of paleontology and of Hrdlicka in particular. ‘It has nothing to do with the shape of the jaw,' he suggests. ‘It had to do with where the jaw came from—namely, the fringes of Central Asia.' In Hrdlicka's view, the western part of the Old World was the wellspring of human origins. Everything in his scheme depended upon this, including his ideas on the eventual peopling of the New World. To have the first hominids appearing in the eastern part of the Old World [so they would arrive in the New World prior to 12,000 B.P.] was therefore simply unacceptable. ‘So he did a hatchet job on Lewis' work,' says Spencer.
Ales Hrdlicka blocked all research into the past for a whole generation. . . . He was ruthless in enforcing his dominance upon younger men. . . . Even in 1928, by which time the importance of the Folsom find was clear to everyone, Hrdlicka had the temerity to decree at a meeting of the New York Academy that there could not have been a Paleo-Indian (as we call the people who hunted the now extinct animals). ‘With his back to the wall, Hrdlicka was denying everything to maintain his position that man could be anything, anything at all, but not ancient in America,' [Edwin N.] Wilmsen says. But eventually the finds accumulated to such an extent that even the skeptics had to bow to the evidence.
In recent years the accumulation of DNA evidence is such that the Smithsonian now accepts that native Americans spread through both North and South America much earlier than 12,000 years ago.
[www.smithsonianmag.com]
“More than 15,000 years ago, humans began crossing a land bridge called Beringia that connected their native home in Eurasia to modern-day Alaska. Who knows what the journey entailed or what motivated them to leave, but once they arrived, they spread southward across the Americas”.
By analysing the DNA of modern native Americans and ancient human remains, a group writing in Science concluded that all present-day Native Americans arrived in a single migration no earlier than 23,000 years ago. Then, they argue, Native Americans split into two branches around 13,000 years ago: one that is now dispersed across North and South America while the other is restricted to North America.
According to Prof Reich, the discovery of Oceanian ancestry among certain Native American groups indicates that the Americas were peopled by a more diverse set of populations than previously accepted.
"The simplest possible model never predicted an affinity between Amazonians today and Australasians," he said.
"This suggests that there is an ancestral population that crossed into the Americas that is different from the population that gave rise to the great majority of Americans. And that was a great surprise," he said.
Prof Reich believes that the most plausible explanation is that there was a separate migration from Australasia, possibly around 15,000 years ago. This group, he speculates, was probably more widely dispersed across North America but was eventually pushed out by other native American groups.