The nation's leading newspaper is giving a high profile today to a stirring report from Brazil on evidence that people reached what is now its northeastern region at least 22,000 and perhaps more than 40,000 years ago.
- NY Times – Simon Romero: Discoveries Challenge Beliefs on Humans' Arrival in the Americas ;
Stirring, that is, to readers with little familiarity with a long-running and at times bitter debate over that very assertion. And, of course, relatively few American keep up on such things. To them this story will seem a great adventure into the early peopling of the Americas. It will offer a chance to ponder how science is extending knowledge of the epochal series of migrations to the New World, a vast settling that set the stage for the multiplicity of tribes, nations, and empires through which better-armed British and European invaders would eventually sweep.
Unfortunately, what is demonstrably true (as in accepted mainstream science) in the account is not new, and what is new is just about non-existent. There is much that is newish, perhaps in its details, but it also is merely true-ish. Brazilian researchers and some others have truly set themselves against the bulk of their colleagues in the Americas and around the world. The renegades' assert a beguiling vista of ancient human cultures in and around the Amazon Basin at a time when H. sapiens and Neanderthals may still have been eying one another warily in Eurasia. But there have been no major new developments in this stand-off that I could find this morning. Critics continue to say the case for hyper-early Brasileiros has not yet been made compelling. Until it is, to call the assembly of long-held beliefs 'discoveries' is excessive. To write that right now a 'pivotal reevaluation' is occurring is a reach. Too bad. Who wouldn't hope the ancient dates are correct? Should this construction join the list of widely respected and shared hypotheses New World paleohistory and migration paths would become a far richer, more mysterious, and thrilling saga.
Romero is the paper's chief of the Brazil bureau. His mini-bio reflects a busy and successful career covering business and politics. One wonders if the Times's science editors had much role in this story's publication. Its narrative is well constructed, and is loaded with links to sources bolstering parts of the story's elements. But one sees little here that reflects big, recent news from primary literature. Most of its helpful reference links go to other media reports in such pubs as Nature News, Science NOW, Science News, Discovery News, and the Times itself (a far less adventuresome report by John Noble Wilford). Also linked is a Q&A profile of one of the story's academic sources that is not, to these eyes, an encouraging indicator of deep expertise.
Had the story been one of plucky Brazilian researchers and a few colleagues from elsewhere struggling for decades to gain full respect and legitimacy in academia, fine. It takes character to soldier on – and nobody I've heard about has proven their thesis is just plain wrong. But this story reads like a paean to immediately incipient victors. Its enthusiastic boost for the outliers takes it below the standard of science reporting one expects from the Times. It takes only a short search to find detailed documentation that the heroes of the tale have been pleading their case for a long time. Such grit could be a swell topic for a feature such as this. But the issue remains open.
Also: to mix and mangle some metaphors, the story tilts at a straw man that is already on life support. This is the much-punctured Clovis First theory positing that the first people in the New World were ice-age big game hunters who arrived with their families from the Siberia-Alaska Beringia land bridge around 12,000 years ago. They then started eating their way south through mammoths, giant bison, ground sloths, and other mega-game – accelerating a cascade of extinction that climate change may already have set in motion. That poor theory has been put paid so many times it could star in a zombie movie. I wrote one myself in 1998. Clovis people were real and had a seminal, successful culture and may well be ancestral to most native American 'Indians' (not Eskimos, Aleuts, or Inuits for sure). But most of the usurper hypotheses posit that other and perhaps marine-subsistence cultures beat the heroic hunters by a few thousand years and may have coexisted with them for quite a while too. Romero's story does a good example citing several examples of that more modest margin before Clovis. One does not need Brazil's contentious dates for its rock shelters, wall art, and other archeological traces to cloak Clovis First in doubt.
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