Vikings had come from the east, from Greenland, and with threshing oar, drove their ships to new land. Once there, they began an ephemeral exploration of what they called Markland, Helluland, and Vinland. A thousand years ago, according to the Saga of Erik the Red, they found fields of raisin vines, and forests and bears and polar foxes. But they were also met with slingshots and howls from the fur-clad locals. The Norsemen called them Skraeling.
They were short men, ill-looking, with their hair in disorderly fashion on their heads; they were large-eyed, and had broad cheeks.
For three years the Vikings rambled on these islands, thought now to be Labrador, Newfoundland, and Baffin Island in Canada. They traded cloth for furs. The Skraeling wanted weapons too, but the Vikings forbade arming them with their swords and spears. Thorfinn Karlsefni and Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir were among the immigrant party, and around the year 1004 CE they had a son, Snorri Thorfinnsson, born in Vinland, and the first person of European ancestry to enter the world in the Americas.
There were constant skirmishes between the Vikings and the Skraeling, and after a scuffle prompted by a loose rampaging Viking bull, the Norsemen decided that though
the land might be choice and good, there would be always war and terror overhanging them, from those who dwelt there before them.
And so those famously fearsome warriors withdrew. For five centuries, Europeans would not bother the people of the Americas again.
Columbus crossed the ocean blue in 1492, and reached Central America. A few years later Amerigo Vespucci wrote a letter entitled “Mundus Novus” to his patron Lorenzo Pietro di Medici in Florence. Vespucci’s first name would be given to the continents north and south. Though it was mundus novus for the Italians, the Bahamas was not a new world to the Taíno, for whom it was simply home. Like many of the tribes of the Americas, the Taíno believed that they had always lived on those lands. In their religious tradition, their ancestors emerged from a sacred cave on what we now call Hispaniola.
At the far end of the American continent lies Tierra del Fuego, the southernmost tip of Chile. There, in 1830, Captain Robert Fitzroy docked an exploration vessel, and as part of hostile negotiations seized three Fuegians, boys named el’leparu and o’run-del’lico, and a girl named yok’cushly. They were given absurd English names—York Minster, Jemmy Button, Fuegia Basket—as part of a bizarre colonial experiment to see if these savages could be “civilized.” Fitzroy took them to England (a fourth named Boat Memory was also taken, but died of smallpox after they arrived; his real, Fuegian name is lost). Fitzroy brought them back a year later on the HMS Beagle’s second voyage. Alongside the three Fuegians was a twenty-two-year-old Charles Darwin, at the beginning of a lifelong journey that would reshape our understanding of life on Earth, and the position of humankind on it.
Europeans arriving in the New World met people all the way from the frozen north to the frozen south. All had rich and mature cultures and established languages. The Skraeling were probably a people we now call Thule, who were the ancestors of the Inuit in Greenland and Canada and the Iñupiat in Alaska. The Taíno were a people spread across multiple chiefdoms around the Caribbean and Florida. Based on cultural and language similarities, we think that they had probably separated from earlier populations from South American lands, now Guyana and Trinidad. The Spanish brought no women with them in 1492, and raped the Taíno women, resulting in the first generation of “mestizo”—mixed ancestry people. Immediately upon arrival, European alleles began to flow, admixed into the indigenous population, and that process has continued ever since: European DNA is found today throughout the Americas, no matter how remote or isolated a tribe might appear to be. But before Columbus, these continents were already populated. The indigenous people hadn’t always been there, nor had they originated there, as some of their traditions state, but they had occupied these American lands for at least 20,000 years.
The Americas, North and South, comprise a people simultaneously young and old. The “young” is especially prominent in a country such as the United States, where the genetic, political, and cultural picture of its people is defined by immigrants and the descendants of slaves. The population of all countries is in constant flux, but the modern United States is different, because of this history of slavery, as well as an ever-growing population of South Asians, East Asians, Middle Easterners, and Latinos, who are themselves of multiple lines of descent from Europe, Mesoamerica, and elsewhere. As a result, its underlying contemporary population structure is only just beginning to emerge (and discussed later in this chapter).
The genetic story of African Americans is many books all on its own. It’s hard to overstate how complicated a genetic picture they represent, not least because the slave trade compelled a mass migration that is unusual in terms of distance traveled over a short time period, but also because documented ancestry from Africa is mostly absent. Men and women were seized without regard to their birthplace or heritage. Genetics may yet yield many more precise pathways from the origin of humankind in east Africa to the New World, but for now, that picture remains largely opaque (there is further discussion of slavery in Chapter 5). Here, I will focus on the transition that occurred as the lands we now call the Americas became populated by humans for the very first time. All regions of the world are unique, but the tale of the Americas stands alone in its peculiarity and political turmoil.
It’s only because of the presence of Europeans from the fifteenth century onward that we even have terms such as Indians or Native Americans.* How these people came to be is a subject that is complex and fraught, but it begins in the north. Alaska is separated from Russian land by the Bering Strait. There are islands that punctuate those icy waters, and on a clear day US citizens of Little Diomede can see Russians on Big Diomede, just a little over two miles and one International Date Line away. Between December and June, the water between them freezes solid. From 30,000 years ago until around 11,000 BCE, the earth was subjected to a cold snap that sucked up the sea into glaciers and ice sheets extending from the Poles. This period is known as the Last Glacial Maximum, when the reach of the most recent Ice Age was at its fullest. By drilling mud cores out of the seabed, we can reconstruct a history of the land and the seas, notably by measuring concentrations of oxygen, and looking for pollen, which would have been deposited on dry ground from the flora growing there. We think therefore that sea level was somewhere between 60 and 120 meters lower than today. So it was terra firma all the way from Alaska to Russia, and all the way down south to the Aleutians—a crescent chain of volcanic islands that speckle the north Pacific.
The prevailing theory about how the people of the Americas came to those lands is via that bridge. We refer to it as a land bridge, though given its duration and size, it was simply continuous land, thousands of miles from north to south; it’s only a bridge if we view it in comparison to today’s straits.* The area is called Beringia, and the first people across it the Beringians. These were harsh lands, sparse with shrubs and herbs; to the south, there were boreal woodlands, and where the land met the sea, kelp forests and seals.
Though these were still tough terrains, according to archaeological finds Western Beringians were living near the Yana River in Siberia by 30,000 BCE. There’s been plenty of debate over the years as to when exactly people reached the eastern side, and therefore at what point after the seas rose they became isolated as the founding peoples of the Americas. The questions that remain—and there are many—concern whether they came all at once or in dribs and drabs. Sites in the Yukon that straddle the US-Alaskan border with Canada give us clues, such as the Bluefish Caves, thirty-three miles southwest of the village of Old Crow. These three grottoes are embedded in a Canadian mountain a short scramble up from the Bluefish River. The mountain terrain at this altitude is mostly balding limestone but for a thinning wig of spindly white and black spruce. Inside, just like the Siberian cave in Denisova (see Chapter 1), there is evidence of tens of thousands of years of habitation—bears in winter, foxes in summer, and for a period during the Ice Age, humans.
The latest radio-dating analysis of the remnants of lives in the Bluefish Caves indicates that people were there 24,000 years ago. Beneath the floor of the caves, hundreds of flakes of rock (with exquisite technical names such as burin spalls and lithic debris) made from the action of knapping have been found. And there is also a multitude of worked bone, from caribou, mammoths, horse, and bison.
These founding peoples* spread over 12,000 years to every corner of the continents and formed the pool from which all Americans would be drawn until 1492. I will focus on North America here, and what we know so far, what we can know through genetics, and why we don’t know more. Until Columbus, the Americas were populated by pockets of tribal groups distributed up and down both north and south continents. There are dozens of individual cultures that have been identified by age, location, and specific technologies—and via newer ways of knowing the past, including genetics and linguistics. Scholars have hypothesized various patterns of migration from Beringia into the Americas. Over time, it has been suggested that there were multiple waves, or that a certain people with particular technologies spread from north all the way south.
Both ideas have now fallen from grace. The multiple-waves theory has failed as a model because the linguistic similarities used to show patterns of migration are just not that convincing. And the second theory fails because of timing. Cultures are often named and known by the technology that they left behind. In New Mexico there is a small town called Clovis, population 37,000. In the 1930s, projectile points resembling spearheads and other hunting paraphernalia were found in an archaeological site nearby, dating from around 13,000 years ago. These were knapped on both sides—bifaced with fluted tips—and part of the tool kit used for pursuing large megafauna: horse, tapir, sloth, and a menagerie of now extinct beasts, including mammoths, bisons, elephantine mastodons and gomphotheres, and an unwieldy dromedary called a camelop. It had been thought that it was the inventors of these tools who had been the first people to spread up and down the continents. But there’s evidence of humans living in southern Chile 12,500 years ago without Clovis technology. These people are too far away to show a direct link between them and the Clovis in such a way that indicates the Clovis being the aboriginals of South America.
Nor is the journey to the southern continent consistent with the Clovis people being the founding population, either—you can’t get there from here. To make it to Chile that long ago, their path south from Beringia via land would’ve been blocked by impassable glaciers. Instead, the working theory is that people may well have gone south in boats, bouncing all the way down the western coast; this is faster, and a similar consistency of climates and geography along the western seaboard buffers against a constant need to adapt to ever-changing environments.
Today, the emerging theory is that the people up in the Bluefish Caves some 24,000 years ago were the founders, and that they represent a culture that was isolated for thousands of years up in the cold north, incubating a population that would eventually seed everywhere else. This idea has become known as Beringian Standstill. Those founders had split from known populations in Siberian Asia some 40,000 years ago, come across Beringia, and stayed put until around 16,000 years ago. Analysis of the genomes of indigenous people show fifteen founding mitochondrial types not found in Asia. This suggests a time when genetic diversification occurred, an incubation lasting maybe 10,000 years. New gene variants spread across the American lands, but not back into Asia, as the waters had cut them off. Nowadays, we see lower levels of genetic diversity in modern Native Americans—derived from just those original fifteen—than in the rest of the world. Again, this supports the idea of a single, small population seeding the continents, and—unlike in Europe or Asia—these people being cut off, with little admixture from new populations for thousands of years, at least until Columbus.
Genetics arms us with the tools to pick apart this model. Nevertheless, we will always rely on hard physical evidence, the traditional form of archaeology. Clovis culture is seen up and down the contiguous United States. There’s also the Folsom tradition, slightly later than Clovis, also first discovered in New Mexico; these spearheads are more leaf shaped, have finely worked edges, and were used between 9500 and 8000 BCE. Plano Points culture came next, as the hunter-gatherer tribes of North America continued to develop more efficient ways to kill big beasts. Much of their prey was Bison antiquus, a huge beast that wandered up and down the lands en masse during thousands of years of the Last Glacial Maximum. They are all extinct now, though their descendants have become iconic as the American buffalo Bison bison.
These technologies clearly served their purpose well. These hunters were seriously effective; some scholars think that the hunting of Bison antiquus drove them to extinction. Certainly their remains litter the landscape; they’re the most common skeletal remains dragged out of the La Brea Tar Pits,* bang in the middle of urban Los Angeles, a few blocks from Hollywood, but they can also be found up and down North America. Alas, we have far fewer remains of people, and because of this paucity the bodies of the ancients are somewhat iconic. Only one person has been recovered from La Brea—a twenty-five- to thirty-year-old woman from around 10,000 years ago, found with a domestic dog, and therefore thought to be a ceremonial burial. We have no DNA from her.
Elsewhere, we’ve been a little luckier. In Montana, twenty miles or so off Highway 90, lies the minuscule conurbation of Wilsall, population 178 as of 2010. Though stacks of material culture in the Clovis tradition have been recovered throughout North America, only one person from this time and culture has risen from his grave. He’s acquired the name Anzick-1, and was laid to rest in a rock shelter in what would become—around 12,600 years later—Wilsall. He was a toddler, probably less than two years old, judging from the unfused sutures in his skull. He was laid to rest surrounded by at least 100 stone tools, and 15 ivory ones. Some of these were covered in red ochre, and together they suggest Anzick was a very special child who had been ceremonially buried in splendor. Now he’s special because we have his complete genome.
And there’s the woeful saga of Kennewick Man. While attending a hydroplane race in 1996, two locals of Kennewick, Washington, discovered a broad-faced skull inching its way out of the bank of the Columbia River. Over the weeks and years, more than 350 fragments of bone and teeth were eked out of this 8,500-year-old grave, all belonging to a middle-aged man, maybe in his forties, deliberately buried, with some signs of injuries that had healed over his life—a cracked rib, an incision from a spear, a minor depression fracture on his forehead. There have been intensive studies on the dimensions of his bones, with many possible conclusions about whom on Earth he most resembled. Based on the shadows of musculature on his forearms, he seems to have been right handed. There were academic squabbles about his facial morphology, with some saying it was most similar to Japanese skulls, some arguing for a link with Polynesians, and some asserting he must have been European.
With all the toing and froing about his morphology, DNA should be a rich source of conclusive data for this man. But the political controversies about his body have severely hampered his value to science for twenty years. For Native Americans, he became known as the Ancient One, and five clans, notably the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, wanted to have him ceremonially reburied under guidelines determined by the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), which affords custodial rights to Native American artifacts and bodies found on their lands. Scientists sued the government to prevent his reburial, some claiming that his bones suggested he was European, and therefore not connected with Native Americans. To add an absurd cherry on top of this already distasteful cake, a Californian pagan group called the Asatru Folk Assembly put in a bid for the body, claiming Kennewick Man might have a Norse tribal identity, and if science could establish that the body was European, then he should be given a ceremony in honor of Odin, ruler of the mythical Asgard, though what that ritual entails is not clear.
His reburial was successfully blocked in 2002, when a judge ruled that his facial bones suggested he was European, and therefore NAGPRA guidelines could not be invoked. The issue was batted back and forth for years, in a manner in which no one came out looking good. Nineteen years after this important body was found, the genome analysis was finally published. Had he been European (or Japanese or Polynesian), it would’ve been the most revolutionary find in the history of US anthropology, and all textbooks on human migration would have been rewritten. But of course he wasn’t. A fragment of material was used to sequence his DNA, and it showed that lo and behold, Kennewick Man—the Ancient One—was closely related to the Anzick baby. And as for the living, he was more closely related to Native Americans than to anyone else on Earth, and within that group, most closely related to the Colville tribes.
Anzick is firm and final proof that North and South America were populated by the same people. Anzick’s mitochondrial genome is most similar to people of central and south America today (though it should be noted that so far we have no genomes from contemporary Montana tribes, of which there are several). The genes of the Ancient One most closely resemble those of tribes in the Seattle area today. These similarities do not indicate that either were members of those tribes or people, nor that their genes have not spread throughout the Americas, as we would expect over timescales of thousands of years. What they show is that the population dynamics—how ancient indigenous people relate to contemporary Native Americans—is complex and varies from region to region. No people are completely static, and genes less so. Just as we are discovering in Europe and Asia, the patterns of migration of people over millennia is complex and messy, and those precise clean arrows on maps that show where people came from and went are slowly being replaced by loopy, tangled circuit diagrams that reflect the new ancient genetics, and the prototypical human behaviors of movement and enthusiastic reproduction.
In December 2016, in one of his last acts in office, President Barack Obama signed legislation that allowed Kennewick Man to be reburied as a Native American. Anzick was found on private land, so not subject to NAGPRA rules, but was reburied anyway in 2014 in a ceremony involving a few different tribes. The La Brea Woman was removed from display in the tar-pit museum partially out of fear that she might be claimed by Chumash Indians from Southern California. We sometimes forget that though the data should be pure and straightforward, science is done by people, who are never either.
Other pieces of the jigsaw of the first peoples are slowly beginning to fall into place. At the end of 2016, an earlier admixture was revealed in the Inuit of Greenland. These people live in the cold, and their diet is dominated by seafood. By sampling hundreds of Inuit genomes, an area of DNA had been identified that plays a part in these very Inuit characteristics. One of the genes that sits there, TBX15 (part of a family of genes called transcription factors—more on these in Chapter 6), does a huge range of things in the body by regulating the expression of other genes. The version of TBX15 found in the Inuit appears to have a role in the distribution of fat around the body, and may help maintain warmth by fueling a particular type of fat burning. The latest work, by UC Berkeley’s Rasmus Nielsen, shows that not only had this region been undergoing positive selection in the last few thousand years, but also that this particular variant appears to be a piece of Denisovan DNA. It’s virtually absent in Africa, and different from the one we see in Neanderthals. This suggests that the people of Beringia had this Inuit version, acquired from their relations with the Denisovans, and in those cold climes it proved to help hardy fishermen.* We see a similar story in other genes relating to diet. Fatty acid desaturases (FADS) are enzymes that help convert saturated fats found in fish and meat into unsaturated fats. They’re a rich source of evolutionary intrigue, too: Many studies have revealed that this cluster of genes shows signs of positive selection in ancient populations all over the world. It’s been examined in those early Europeans Loschbour and Stuttgart (see Chapter 2), as well as in Denisovans and Neanderthals, and shows a complex distribution that is not easy to explain. But what is clear is that there have been selective sweeps around these genes in all populations, suggesting their importance in adapting to the foods available to our ancient forebears in their local environment. The Greenland Inuit have versions of the FADS genes that also look like they have been positively selected in Beringia more than 18,000 years ago. This is not wholly unexpected given that FADS appear to evolve in response to local conditions all over the world. But we can use this fact as a tracer for migration in the Americas. By examining the distribution of the Inuit version of the FADS genes up and down the Americas, Spanish gene hunters led by Tábita Hünemeier showed in 2017 that fifty-three indigenous populations in the Americas showed local adaptation in the FADS that were all derived from a founder population in Beringia. This includes a forceful presence in Amazonian tribes, where diet and lifestyle is obviously different from the Inuits’.
These gene maps powerfully suggest that that the Beringian Standstill hypothesis is correct: All Native Americans, north and south, have versions of genes relating to diet that are suited to their current environments, but born of an ancient population subject to local adaptation in the frozen north, thousands of years ago.
Just as in the rest of the world, stories are beginning to emerge that explain why people are the way they are, and how they got there. But despite this progress, understanding the genetics and the genetic genealogy of the indigenous people of the Americas, particularly North America, is proving to be far trickier than it should. Anzick and Kennewick Man represent narrow samples—a tantalizing glimpse of the big picture. And politics and history are hampering progress.* The legacy of 500 years of occupation have fostered profound difficulty in understanding how the Americas were first peopled. Two of the doyennes of this field—Connie Mulligan and Emőke Szathmáry—suggest that there is a long cultural tradition that percolates through our attempts to deconstruct the past. Europeans are taught a history of migration from birth, of Greeks and Romans spreading over Europe, conquering lands and interloping afar. Judeo-Christian lore puts people in and out of Africa and Asia, and the silk routes connect Europeans with the east and back again. In Britain we learn of Vikings and Saxons and others coming over from mainland Europe and spreading their seeds, as detailed in the previous chapter. Many European countries have been seafaring nations, exploring and sometimes belligerently building empires, for commerce or to impose a perceived superiority over other people. Even though we Brits state (with some degree of truth) that we haven’t been aggressively invaded since 1066, the European story is one in which the movement of people is inherent. Even though we have national identities, and pride and traditions that come with that sense of belonging, European culture is imbued with migration.
For Native Americans, this is not their culture. Not all believe they have always been in their lands, nor that they are a static people. But for the most part, the narrative of migration does not threaten European identity in the same way that it might for the people we called the Indians. The scientifically valid notion of the migration of people from Asia into the Americas may challenge Native creation stories. It may also have the effect of conflating early modern migrants from the fifteenth century onward, with those from 24,000 years earlier, with the effect of undermining indigenous claims to land and sovereignty.
This we have seen before in other lands subjected to colonial rule: My father was raised in New Zealand in the 1950s, where he was taught that the indigenous Maori were not the first people, but that they had conquered a more primitive tribe called the Moriori. This was in fact a fabrication perpetrated by British–New Zealander writers in the nineteenth century, who used it as justification for their own colonization: Maori superseded a less advanced society, and now Europeans are merely doing the same. These big cultural differences have been all too infrequently acknowledged in interactions between scientists and Native Americans. Together they form a suite of reasons why there is a residual, background animosity toward science from some Native American communities. There are other reasons that are far more pernicious.
Deep among the lakes of the Grand Canyon are the Havasupai. Their name means “people of the blue-green waters,” and they’ve been there for at least 800 years. They’re a small tribe, around 650 members today, and they use ladders, horses, and sometimes helicopters to travel in and out—or rather, up and down—the canyon. The tribe is rife with type 2 diabetes, and in 1990, the Havasupai people agreed to provide Arizona State University scientists with DNA from 151 individuals with the understanding that they would seek genetic answers to the puzzle of why diabetes was so common. Written consent was obtained, and blood samples were taken.
An obvious genetic link to diabetes was not found, but the researchers continued to use their DNA to test for schizophrenia and patterns of inbreeding. The data was also passed on to other scientists who were interested in migration and the history of Native Americans. The Havasupai only found this out years later, and eventually sued the university. In 2010, they were awarded $700,000 in compensation. Therese Markow was one of the scientists involved, and insists that consent was on the papers they signed, and that the forms were necessarily simple, as many Havasupai do not have English as a first language, and many did not graduate from high school. Part of the question here is really of the nature of consent. “Informed consent” is the standard phrase used in performing any medical or scientific investigation on volunteers. A properly administered study affords the volunteer full understanding of how their tissue or sample will be analyzed and used. Markow’s lawyers argued that the consent specified other uses, as per the phrase to “study the causes of behavioral/medical disorders,” but many in the tribe thought that they were only being asked about their endemic diabetes. A blood sample contains an individual’s entire genome, and with it, reams of data about that individual, their family, and evolution.
This isn’t the first time this has happened. In the 1980s, before the days of easy and cheap genomics, blood samples were taken with consent to analyze the unusually high levels of rheumatic disease in the Nuu-chah-nulth people of the Pacific Northwest of Canada. The project, led by the late Ryk Ward, then at the University of British Columbia, found no genetic link in their samples, and the project petered out. By the ’90s, though, Ward had moved to the University of Utah, and then Oxford in the UK, and the blood samples had been used in anthropological and HIV/AIDS studies around the world, which turned into grants, academic papers, and a PBS/BBC jointly produced documentary.
Ward’s conclusions about the origin of the Nuu-chah-nulth were not correct, giving them an earlier origin than via Beringia some 20,000 years ago. The use of the samples for historical migration indicated that the origins of the Havasupai were from ancient ancestors in Siberia, which is in accordance with our understanding of human history by all scientific and archaeological methods. But it is in opposition to the Havasupai religious belief that they were created in situ in the Grand Canyon. Though nonscientific, it is perfectly within their rights to preclude investigations that contradict their stories, and those rights appear to have been violated. Havasupai vice chairman Edmond Tilousi told The New York Times in 2010 that “coming from the canyon . . . is the basis of our sovereign rights.”
Sovereignty and membership of a tribe is a complex and hard-won thing. It includes a concept called “Blood Quantum,” which is effectively the proportion of one’s ancestors who are already members of a tribe. It’s an invention of European Americans in the nineteenth century, and though most tribes had their own criteria for tribal membership, most eventually adopted Blood Quantum as part of the qualification for tribal status.
DNA is not part of that mix. With our current knowledge of the genomics of Native Americans, there is no possibility of DNA being anywhere near a useful tool in ascribing tribal status to people. Furthermore, given our understanding of ancestry and family trees (discussed in more detail in the following chapter), I have profound doubts that DNA could ever be used to determine tribal membership. While mtDNA (which is passed down from mothers to children) and the Y chromosome (passed from fathers to sons) have both proved profoundly useful in determining the deep ancestral trajectory of the first peoples of the Americas into the present, these two chromosomes represent a tiny proportion of the total amount of DNA that an individual bears. The rest, the autosomes, comes from all of one’s ancestors.
In the previous chapter, I talked about how some genetic genealogy companies will sell you kits that claim to grant you membership to historical peoples, albeit ill-defined, highly romanticized versions of ancient Europeans. This type of genetic astrology, though unscientific and distasteful to my palate, is really just a bit of meaningless fantasy; its real damage is that it undermines scientific literacy in the general public. Over centuries, people are too mobile to have remained genetically isolated for any significant length of time. Tribes are known to have mixed before and after colonialism, which should be enough to indicate that some notion of tribal purity is at best imagined. Of the genetic markers that have been shown to exist in individual tribes so far, none is exclusive. Some tribes have begun to use DNA as a test to verify immediate family, such as in paternity cases, and this can be useful as part of qualification for tribal status. But on its own, a DNA test cannot place someone in a specific tribe.
That hasn’t stopped the emergence of some companies in the United States that sell kits that claim to use DNA to ascribe tribal membership. Accu-Metrics is one such company. On their web page, they state that there are “562 recognized tribes in the U.S.A., plus at least 50 others in Canada, divided into First Nation, Inuit, and Metis.” For $125 they claim that they “can determine if you belong to one of these groups.”
The list is comprehensive, from Abenaki to Zuni. Accu-Metrics is not the only company: DNA Consultants sells a Cherokee test for $99. They claim a database of sixty-two Cherokee genomes, and if your match is high enough, you qualify for a certificate (for an extra $25). If it does not match their Cherokee database but does indicate some Native American DNA, you also get a certificate (also costing an extra $25). As with all genetic genealogy tests, these may show that you share parts of your DNA with Native Americans today. If you are trying to establish immediate family relations, and they are enrolled in a tribe, then a DNA test may help your own enrollment. But otherwise, there is no biological test that alone can demonstrate tribal membership.
Still, some people are convinced otherwise. Carol Reynolds Boyce has long believed she was a member of the Beothuk, a Newfoundland tribe whose last known member died in 1829. They were driven to extinction by a combination of exposure to smallpox, tuberculosis, and persecution. But we do have some of their remains in DNA: Small fragments of genome are known from two Beothuk—Demasduit and her husband, Nonosabasut, who also died in the 1820s—extracted from their teeth. These fragments reveal two mtDNA types that are typical of Native Americans, notably another Newfoundland tribe called the Mi’kmaq. These two tribes were shown to not be particularly closely related in 2011, which is not really the point. The problem is twofold: First, the fragments of Beothuk DNA from Demasduit and Nonosabasut are not nearly enough to constitute a valuable database from which to make a comparison with DNA from anyone else. The second problem is more general: DNA is not unique to any one tribe.
Carol Reynolds Boyce received her test results from Accu-Metrics in October 2016, which to her mind confirmed her own beliefs, passed down orally by relatives: She is descended from Beothuk. She asserts that this DNA test is the basis of the creation of what she is calling the Beothuk First Nation, and has written to the Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to alert the government to her claims. In a report in the Newfoundland newspaper the Telegram in January 2017, she clarified her intentions: “Let me make it perfectly clear. Beothuk First Nation is in progress to get federal recognition.”
Accu-Metrics Lab manager Kyle Tsui told the Telegram that the “test that we do is not a legal test. . . . You can’t use it as any evidence whatsoever, it’s just for informational purposes. You can’t take it to court and so forth.” In January 2017, following media interest, Accu-Metrics decided to withdraw the Beothuk test. At the time of writing (June 2017), Accu-Metrics’ website still says this: “All tests can be done for legal purposes” and “The results of this scientific test can be used to receive a status card or tribal enrollment.”
Maybe Carol Reynolds Boyce can establish a Beothuk First Nation. But the idea that tribal status is encoded in DNA is both simplistic and wrong. Many tribespeople have nonnative parents and still retain a sense of being bound to the tribe and the land they hold sacred. In Massachusetts, members of the Seaconke Wampanoag tribe identified European and African heritage in their DNA, due to hundreds of years of interbreeding with New World settlers. Attempting to conflate tribal status with DNA denies the cultural affinity that people have with their tribes. It suggests a kind of purity that genetics cannot support, a type of essentialism that resembles scientific racism.
There is a deep history of real, murderous, nonscientific racism toward American Indians by Europeans. Native Americans have been slaughtered, have had their lands and possessions taken, and have been persecuted for hundreds of years. President Andrew Jackson enacted the Indian Removal Act in 1830, which gave the federal government the right to negotiate relocation of certain southern tribes of the Cherokee Nation. Though discussions were technically voluntary, enormous pressure was put on the tribal chiefs to relocate away from their own lands. This preceded the forced removal of other tribes, known as the Trail of Tears. Following the discovery of gold in Cherokee territory, more than 16,000 were forcibly moved, and though the numbers are uncertain, many thousands of Native Americans died en route.
The stigmatization and persecution of Native Americans continued well into the twentieth century, too. There are too many examples to name, and they span the whole of North America. Because of their proximity to the Japanese, 881 Aleuts of the Alaskan island chain were interned during the Second World War following the attack on Pearl Harbor, their houses burned by US troops to prevent the Japanese from using them. The Aleuts were housed in conditions far worse than the 700 Nazis who were captured in North Africa and imprisoned a few hundred miles away in Alaska. In Chapter 5, on the relationship between genetics and race, we’ll see how thirty-one of the United States enacted eugenics policies, and how Native American populations were disproportionately affected, with thousands being forcibly sterilized as recently as the 1970s. The stigma of a genetic predisposition to alcoholism remains among Native Americans to this day, despite the fact that it is a claim not rooted in fact.
The specious belief that DNA can bestow tribal identity, as sold by companies such as Accu-Metrics, can only foment further animosity—and suspicion—toward scientists. If a tribal identity could be shown by DNA (which it can’t), then perhaps reparation rights afforded to tribes in recent years might be invalid in the territories to which they were moved during the nineteenth century. Many tribes are effective sovereign nations and therefore not necessarily bound by the laws of the state in which they live.
When coupled with cases such as that of the Havasupai, and centuries of racism, the relationship between Native Americans and geneticists is not healthy. After the legal battles over the remains of Kennewick Man were settled, and it was accepted that he was not of European descent, the tribes were invited to join in the subsequent studies. Out of five, only the Colville Tribes did. Their representative, James Boyd, told The New York Times in 2015, “We were hesitant. Science hasn’t been good to us.”
Following the award of damages to the Havasupai, Ron Whitener, a Native American ethics expert at the University of Washington School of Law in Seattle said that it “puts every tribe in the US on notice regarding genetics research.” This is a twisted, vicious circle that nurtures a gap in our knowledge. In an article in the American Journal of Medical Genetics, Whitener added, “Other tribes see this as a disrespect to the sovereignty of tribal government. . . . As Native Americans, this case informs us that tribes need to provide effective oversight of research, especially genetic studies.”
Perhaps the lesson from the tale of the Havasupai—and other examples of the sometimes troubling interactions between modern science and Native Americans—is not in the details of whether consent was explicit or explicitly informed, or the legal ping-pong over Kennewick Man, but that the engagement between the geneticists and the tribe was neither respectful nor courteous. It was also scientifically shortsighted. With culturally inept engagement, and documented, subsequent animosity from tribes to science, scientists can’t access the DNA that would answer so many burning questions that are now easy to address.
However broad consent was, understanding of why the Havasupai were disturbed by the further use of their blood does not appear to have been sought. It is my suspicion that this was clumsy rather than willful exploitation. But maybe it demonstrates a lack of grace in understanding that people have different views about their cultures and traditions. I don’t pretend to understand Native American culture. It is not one thing; they are not a monolithic people. I can read about it, and talk to Native Americans, but a lived life is shaped by history and culture. For many, the land is sacred. For many, DNA is viewed as part of the body, which of course it is, and this makes it sacred, too. It ties a person’s identity to the land and to their ancestors. Genetics has become a historical subject, but as argued elsewhere in this book, DNA is a historical source that is complementary to others, and geneticists should avoid the temptation to assert its supremacy over other ways of knowing the past and of knowing a people. Human genetics is the study of humans, who should not be viewed simply as specimens, but as people.
The scientific—if naïve—desire to know the Americas is itself problematic, revealing a form of colonialism that persists within science. Whether it is malicious or simply flat-footed is difficult to ascertain, and probably deserves scrutiny on a case-by-case basis. Data is supreme in genetics, and data is what we crave.
But we are the data, and people are not there for the benefit of others, regardless of how noble one’s scientific aims are. To deepen our understanding of how we came to be and who we are, scientists must do better, and invite people whose genes provide answers to not only volunteer their data, but to participate, to own their individual stories, and to be part of that journey of discovery.
This is beginning to change. A new model of engagement with the first people of the Americas is emerging, albeit at a glacial pace. The American Society for Human Genetics meeting is the annual who’s who in genetics, and has been for many years, where all of the newest and biggest ideas in the study of human biology are discussed. In October 2016 they met in Vancouver, and it was hosted by the Squamish Nation, a First Nations people based in British Colombia. They greeted the delegates with song, and passed the talking stick to the president for the proceedings to begin. The relationship between science and indigenous people has been one characterized by a range of behaviors from outright exploitation to casual insensitivity to tokenism and lip service. Perhaps this time is coming to an end and we might foster a relationship based on trust, genuine engagement, and mutual respect, so that we might work together and build the capacity for tribes to lead their own research into the histories of these nations.
Today, we live in this age of ancient genetics where we can wheedle out the DNA of peoples long dead and reconstruct past lives. The genomics of Europe is building up the most detailed prehistory we have ever known. Asia is following suit. Africa will always be more difficult because the heat provides a less-than-ideal protector of DNA, fragile and capricious as it can be in the bones of the dead.
Though the terms Native American and Indian are relative, the United States is a nation of immigrants and descendants of slaves who have overwhelmed the indigenous population. Less than 2 percent of the current population defines itself as Native American, which means that 98 percent of Americans are unable to trace their roots, genetic or otherwise, beyond 500 years on American soil. That is, however, plenty of time for populations to come and breed and mix and lay down patterns of ancestry that can be enlightened with living DNA as our historical text. A comprehensive genetic picture of the people of postcolonial North America was revealed at the beginning of 2017, drawn from data submitted by paying customers to the genealogy company AncestryDNA. The genomes of more than 770,000 people born in the USA were filtered for markers of ancestry, and revealed a picture of mish-mash, as you might expect from a country of immigrants. Nevertheless, just as in the People of the British Isles project (described in Chapter 2), genetic clusters of specific European countries are seen. Paying customers supply spit harboring their genomes, alongside whatever genealogical data they have. By aligning these as carefully as possible, a map of post-Columbus America can be summoned with clusters of common ancestry, such as Finnish and Swedish in the Midwest, and Acadians—French-speaking Canadians from the Atlantic seaboard—clustering way down in Louisiana, close to New Orleans, where the word Acadian has mutated into Cajun. Here, genetics recapitulates history, as we know the Acadians were forcibly expelled by the British in the eighteenth century, and many eventually settled in Louisiana, then under Spanish control.
In trying to do something similar with African Americans, we immediately stumble. Most black people in the United States cannot trace their genealogy with much precision because of the legacy of slavery. Their ancestors were seized from West Africa, leaving little or no record of where they were born. In 2014, the genetic genealogy company 23andMe published their version of the population structure of the United States. In their portrait we see a similar pattern of European admixture, and some insights into the history of the postcolonial United States. The Emancipation Proclamation—a federal mandate to change the legal status of slaves to free—was issued by President Lincoln in 1863, though the effects were not necessarily immediate. In the genomic data, there’s admixture between European DNA and African that begins in earnest around six generations ago, roughly in the mid-nineteenth century. Within these samples we see more male European DNA and female African, measured by Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA, suggesting male Europeans had sex with female slaves. Genetics makes no comment on the nature of these relations.
Just as so many Europeans want to discover that DNA will unveil Viking blood, the discovery of Native American ancestry offers cachet and kudos. But matters are not so simple.
This is a story with no end, but instead I offer you a coda—an intriguing but cautionary tale of the messy business of genealogy. Genetic ancestry tests will not tell you what tribe you are a member of. But we do know enough about the genomes of indigenous Americans for it to show up in a blurry, highly generalized way.
The company 23andMe color-codes its maps, which show where on Earth DNA similar to yours can be found today. My map is almost entirely predictable. 50.1 percent is yellow, which is their code for southern Asia, meaning India. Forty-nine percent is hues of blue, meaning European. My mother is Indian, though she was born in South America (we don’t know her deeper family history; her ancestors were dispatched to Guyana as indentured laborers, but records were lost in a fire). My father is British, born in Yorkshire, where I still have relatives, and they have drawn out much of our family tree back a few centuries, which meanders around the UK, London, bits of Ireland, but mostly in the northeast of England and into Scotland, as befits the Clan Rutherford.
Some of the missing 0.9 percent is marked red, the color code for the Americas. This fraction of my genome is identified as “Native American.” This was not expected.
My family’s tree was compiled by my father’s cousin, a keen amateur genealogist. In Yorkshire, Kevin O’Byrne has been using the traditional forms of family detective work to make his way up our family tree—births, deaths, and marriages, church records, military service records, business receipts, and so on. He has been compiling a family tree for the branches we can trace back into the eighteenth century and beyond. At the time of writing, he had found one of my great-great-great-grandfathers, a man with the splendid moniker Lycurgus Handy. We know little of Lycurgus, other than that his life did not match the grandeur of his name. He died destitute and diseased in the poorhouse in Hackney, east London, in 1920, a stone’s throw from where my own son was delivered by me in haste in our bedroom. I carved notification of this event into wet concrete when the foundations were later reset, for some future historian to ponder. Kevin had to look harder, though, as genealogical records are rarely written in wet concrete. Nevertheless, he kept digging and found that Lycurgus’ grandfather was one Benjamin Handy. Ben had a professional nickname: He was known as “the greatest horseman in the world.”
Ben Handy was proprietor and star performer in Handy’s Traveling Circus, a popular touring act that made its business by bringing wonder all over Britain and Ireland in the eighteenth century. He was married to another performer, Mary Huntley. On their wedding certificate, dated 1818 in St Paul’s in Covent Garden, London, it describes her as “savage.” We believe (so far, as this investigation is currently active) that Mary was the daughter of Neil Huntley, one of two “chiefs” from the American tribe called the Catawba, who were brought from America to join the show for their exotic native horse skills. The Catawba are a federally recognized tribe whose land is on the border of South Carolina. Could this be the source of the flash of Native American DNA in my genome?
Elsewhere in this book, I express skepticism about what genomes can tell us about families and our pasts. Generally, with commercial genetic genealogy testing companies, the data is good, but the interpretation of that data can be extremely creative. If real, then this proportion of Native American DNA will tell me nothing about myself, and it’s less than the amount of Neanderthal DNA I bear. Still, it’s quite exciting, because it has the beginnings of an interesting tale.
But here’s the kicker: It could be just noise. The genetics of Native Americans are poorly understood, and there are no specific tribal markers in DNA. These commercial databases are primarily populated with the data of paying customers. Contribution to the 23andMe database is low for these diverse peoples—1 percent in the aforementioned study from 2015. So it could be that my red flash is a very small percentage that is misidentified due to a small sample. The raw data is not easily accessible, so even for a geneticist, it isn’t easy to check.
Narrative satisfaction is what we crave, and as mentioned elsewhere, genetics rarely delivers. This tale is no different. I include it here because it is interesting and exciting, but also because it highlights the intrigue that family genealogy invites, only to be matched with the cold reality of the messiness of family histories, and genetics. It is likely that those very low numbers of genetic markers that look like this and are found in the Americas are simply noise. Other members of my family have done their own ancestry analyzed by the same method, but not by the same company, and have so far drawn a blank. That may not mean mine is incorrect, but it doesn’t help it to be true. If it is correct, if I am descended from a Catawba chief, it doesn’t make me a Native American, and it doesn’t afford me any of the cultural or political valences that come with membership of a tribe. Neil Huntley, if indeed he was Catawba, is one of 128 male ancestors from that tier of my family tree.
Even if the genetics and the genealogy are correct, it is equally possible—and indeed in my opinion more likely—that the sliver of supposedly Native American DNA in my genome is merely noise in a file comprising hundreds of thousands of data points. Even if the family tree is correct, it is quite possible that I harbor literally no DNA from Neil Huntley and the Catawba people, as it has been diluted through generations. It’s exciting to discover circus performers in one’s family tree, but I must be very careful not to fall into the trap I am decrying throughout this book, that DNA has some power to determine identity.
The truth is that it means next to nothing. Ancestry is a matted web. There would be thousands, probably millions, of Europeans with similar claims, if their family trees could be drawn in such detail.
The cachet of having interesting ancestors is compelling, whether they are Catawba, or Beothuk, or Vikings, or Aleut, or Skraeling. But do not be disheartened if you can’t find warriors, hunters, or royalty in your tree. In the next chapter, we will find out that we are all descended from kings.