Here, we meet the usual characters - Thomas Jefferson, Ales Hrdlicka, Franz Boas - but also folks who were new to me. The first few chapters of “Origin” detail the long history of archaeology in the Americas. Through a combination of rigorous science and a universal humanity, Raff gives ancient people a voice. She poignantly fills a page with the sorrow a family must have felt as they placed the limp body of their 2-year-old boy into the earth in south-central Nevada 12,600 years ago. Raff playfully imagines how the Yana River boys lost their deciduous teeth in a Siberian river 31,000 years ago. We do not work with lifeless old bones or inert molecules but with the precious, fragmentary remains of once living, breathing, thinking individuals who laughed, cried, lived and died.Īs Raff explains, “We have promised to treat the small scraps of bone and teeth with respect and mindfulness that they are cherished ancestors, not ‘specimens.’” Sprinkled through “Origin” are lovely vignettes of life thousands of years ago. Our job as anthropologists is to breathe life into the past, to retell the stories of our ancestors and extinct relatives. Throughout, Raff effectively models how science is done, how hypotheses are tested, and how new data are used to refute old ideas and generate new ones. She builds a persuasive case with both archaeological and genetic evidence that the path to the Americas was coastal (the Kelp Highway hypothesis) rather than inland, and that Beringia was not a bridge but a homeland - twice the size of Texas - inhabited for millenniums by the ancestors of the First Peoples of the Americas. While admittedly not an archaeologist herself, Raff skillfully reveals how well-dated archaeological sites, including recently announced 22,000-year-old human footprints from White Sands, N.M., are at odds with the Clovis first hypothesis.

In her new book, “Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas,” Raff beautifully integrates new data from different sciences (archaeology, genetics, linguistics) and different ways of knowing, including Indigenous oral traditions, in a masterly retelling of the story of how, and when, people reached the Americas.

All Native Americans can trace their ancestry back to these First Peoples.īut, according to the University of Kansas anthropological geneticist Jennifer Raff, that’s not quite how it happened.

From there, these people - often given the name Clovis, after a New Mexico site that was rich with the distinctive stone tools they made - rapidly spread and successfully adapted to the various ecologies they encountered. People from northeast Asia crossed the Bering Strait land bridge and entered a new world. At the end of the last ice age, around 13,000 years ago, retreating glaciers created an inland corridor connecting Siberia to the Americas. ORIGIN A Genetic History of the Americas By Jennifer Raff

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