Bering Straight Theory Debunked
In today’s climate we are in the middle of an era where everyone is asking questions on who they are and where they come from. Through out the years there have been debates on who the “Real” Native people to the Americas are and were. Is it our people of today? or were we an entirely different people in the past? One of the theories many academics seem to settle on is the Bering Straight Theory. When genetic studies proposed an ancient contact between Polynesians and American Indians were NOT in conformity with the Bering Strait Theory, which was published by credible academics from the University of Hawaii such as geneticist Rebecca Cann, they were met with a swift and fierce rebuttal. Cann is a pioneer among geneticists, her research is credible and is known for developing the concept of the “Mitochondrial Eve” and the currently accepted “Out of Africa” theory of modern human origins. She was not someone to be trifled with, and she shot back in a letter in the American Journal of Human Genetics, dismissing much of her critics’ data, interpretations, and point of view; She said:
“Rather than make dogmatic statements, we feel that it is better to encourage the open exploration of this debate, with more genetic markers and the use of data already in the literature.”
An open debate has not yet happened because the debate itself has been moderated by ideologues who determine the evidence that may be used, and ignore the evidence that does not fit the theory. In order to understand why, you have to unwrap the history of the Bering Strait Theory. It is worth mentioning, other academics have supported her rebuttal such as the Institute of Molecular Medicine, University of Oxford which can be viewed here. Their research also supports how Polynesians are related to “Native Americans”. There are quotations on “Native Americans” because the United States loves to separate Polynesians from Native people. On all documentation you will see Native American OR Hawaiian, as if we are different but in reality anyone from the Americas is indigenous to the Americas. This seems to be surprising for some, but not Native people through out the Americas. The Americas are known for having imaginary boarders, and as indigenous people we are aware we had no true boarders. Our ancestors migrated up and down the Americas. This is why it’s important to have Native academics involved while discussing studies like this. These are nuances, non native academics don’t know. there is a reason why multiple tribes say “we are all related”. It’s the same nuance they lack because they separate “Native Americans” from “First Nations” (Canada) “Hispanics” or Indigenous people in Spanish speaking countries (Central & South America & the Caribbean) “Hawaiians” (Hawaii), “Alaskan Natives” (Alaska). When in reality they are ALL Native., there is no actual separation. If you lack understanding in history from the Americas then you would then assume otherwise. It’s only ignorant to think any of the demographics of indigenous people are different in terms of not being indigenous to the Americas.
The Origin Of The Bering Straight Theory
When Columbus stumbled upon the Americas in 1492, he set off an endless round of speculation in Europe regarding the lands and its people. By 1797, Benjamin Smith Barton wrote in his book New Views of the Origin of the Tribes and Nations of America that the “opinions of writers concerning the origin, or parental countries, of the Americans are as numerous as the tribes and nations who inhabit this vast portion of the earth. In those days the study of science was still a subset of theology, so in actuality all of the early theories of Indian origins were based on the Bible. Typical of these early scientists was an observer named Friar Joseph de Acosta, whose book The Natural and Moral History of the Indies, published in 1590. He was also considered one of the earliest anthropologists.
“The reason why we are forced to admit that the men of the Indies came from Europe or Asia is so as not to contradict the sacred Scriptures, which clearly teaches that all men descend from Adam; and thus we cannot assign any other origin for the men of the Indies.”
The original theory through out this pseudo science era was that humans were created around 4,000 BC and the Flood unleashed around 2,400 BC. Although it would be another century before European explorers would find the Bering Strait, Acosta and many other 16th-century scientists had already assumed that Asia and the Americas were connected. They supported this theory by using stories of the bible such as ,Noahs Arch. People in this time believed all animals in the world were descended from those saved by Noah from the Flood. The idea of how those animals survived and their descendants still lived and was found in the New World, was that they must have migrated using some undiscovered passageway.
“The race of men arrived by traveling little by little until they reached the New World, and the continuity or nearness of the lands helped in this.”
Do You Think Its Impossible For Academics To Push Psuedo Scientific Theories? Think Again, lets use the history of the BMI as an example.
As someone who has had many years in the fitness industry, when I think back on my adolescence there was always a doctor telling me I was “Over weight” when I wasn’t. When I was younger I always wondered why I was being viewed as such. It turned out that my Doctors were always basing my Body Mass Index off the BMI Chart. As a Personal Trainer I can tell you the BMI is actually useless against someone who actively trains because it does not distinguish fat from muscle but over all mass. When I was young I was doing martial arts 5 days a week while running 6 miles about 4x a week, but you guessed it. I was always still somehow being called over weight by actual doctors. Later when I was in school for Personal Training, I later encountered other BIPOC who looked visually fit but had similar stories to mine. One day I began to be curious on how the BMI was created, and found out it was built off of racism and psuedo science like the bering straight theory. It was built by the name of Jacques Quetelet who wasn’t even a physician. He also only observed Europeans bodies and not Africans or indigenous bodies because our body structure was viewed as “animal like”. Surprisingly many doctors do not know the history of the BMI but still push it due to Academic Imperialism. I will write about it more in my next article, but this is an example of academics pushing psuedo science.
What Makes The Bering Straight Theory Racist?
It was formed by ONE religious view such as Christianity
Europeans at the time looked at indigenous people as inferior so it was IMPOSSIBLE that we could be a more ancient civilization than them.
Any debate itself has been moderated by ideologues who determine the evidence that may be used, and ignore the evidence that does not fit the theory. In other words they hold an extream bias.
Evidence That Was Ignored
By around the 1920s, the Bering Strait Theory, created the idea that Native people had settled in the New World less than 5,000 years ago, had become a rigid dogma that no scientist who valued their career would dare to challenge. Evidence that debunked the theory was when In 1908, an African American Cow boy named George McJunkin, was tending cattle at the Crowfoot Ranch near Folsom, New Mexico, when he discovered the remains of an animal that had been uncovered after a recent flood. He identified the bones as a bison, and surmised that it was of some ancient type. McJunkin informed a local blacksmith and amateur naturalist, Carl Schachheim, who then informed his friend and fossil hunting companion, Fred Howarth, a banker. After visiting the site, they tried repeatedly to interest paleontologists into excavating it without success. Finally, their persistence paid off in 1926, when Harold J. Cook and Jesse Dade Figgins of the Denver Museum of Natural History agreed to take a look. They quickly found, not only extinct bison, but spear points. This was a “kill site,” the results of a hunt. This means that there were in fact Native people present. Since the Bering Straight Theory implies that kill sites of extinct animals did not exist, they worked very, very carefully, hoping to find something– anything–that might be conclusive. On August 29, 1927, an ancient stone spear point was found embedded between the ribs of an extinct bison. This was clearly through the results of hunting. Recognizing the importance of the discovery, the find was left intact in the ground to be witnessed by as many eminent archaeologists as they could gather evidence. The indisputable evidence had surfaced, and one glass floor had been shattered. With the acceptance of the Folsom point, it became clear that humans were in the Americas more than 5,000 years ago. No longer hamstrung by the need to overturn dogma, a flurry of sites were discovered in the next few years which began to change the picture of the origins of Native people. In 1932, near Clovis, New Mexico, a site was uncovered that featured the same type of spear point found at Folsom, and then digging deeper, a different and older set of spear points were found. Humans had been in America at least 10,000 years or more. This then create a new theory of how Native people descended from the clovis child.
Debunking The Bering Straight Theory With Linguistics
Linguists were not the only ones who recognized the importance of the linguistic evidence. The great British paleo anthropologist Louis Leakey firmly believed that the linguistic evidence showed that Indians were likely to be many tens of thousands of years old and possibly much older, and shortly before his death in 1972 he began to sponsor fieldwork in the Americas in the hopes of proving this. But most American archaeologists and physical anthropologists, were of the Bering Strait Theory is most pronounced, dismissed or ignored the linguistic evidence, leading people and the mainstream press to assume that linguists did not have evidence nor a rebuttal. In 1987, there was friction between the proponents of the Bering Strait Theory and linguists turned into open warfare as archaeologists and geneticists used a highly disputed (and now completely discredited) theory by the linguist Joseph Greenberg to claim that the linguistic evidence now (after hundreds of years of refuting it) showed that Indians migrated from Asia to the New World around 15,000 years ago. The dispute led to a torrent of scientific papers by the world’s most prominent linguists denouncing the use of “non-science” and faulty data to back the Bering Strait Theory. The dispute also led the influential linguist, Johanna Nichols, to publish “Linguistic Diversity and the First Settlement of the New World,” in the journal Language in 1990.
In her introduction, she first made two important scientific points:
The diversity of the languages of the New World is due to “the operation of regular principles of linguistic geography;”
The linguistic and archaeological evidence from the Sahul clearly contradicted the attempts to assign early dates for the Bering Strait migration, since the assignment of early dates in the New World would create a scientific anomaly; “but such a discrepancy–one of at least an order of magnitude–must be assumed if we adhere to the Clovis [15,000 years ago] or received chronology [20,000 years ago] for the settlement of the New World.” Nichols’ paper used six independent linguistic methods for calculating American Indian antiquity and she determined that it would have taken a minimum of 50,000 years for all of the American Indian languages to have evolved from one language, or 35,000 years if migrants had come in multiple waves. She concluded that, “The unmistakable testimony of the linguistic evidence is that the New World has been inhabited nearly as long as Australia or New Guinea.”
When you think about it Non-Native academics very often love to lump us all together as if we are ONE people. When in reality we all have different languages, customs, histories, our own stories of origin, and are diverse people. Lacking the understanding to acknowledge we are different although we are indigenous to this land is the type of nuance I’m constantly referring to when I say that these academics lack a Native nuance.
The Blood Type Rebuttal
In 1923, two immunologists from Cornell University, Olin Diebert and Arthur Coca, collected blood samples of “American Indians”, in part to determine “the question of the relation of the American Indian race to the northeastern Asiatic races.” As Margot Lynn Iverson wrote in her book, Blood Types, after they compared their samples to those taken from Asian peoples. Coca and Diebert anticipated finding similar blood group distributions in the Asian and Indian populations, which would further support the widely held theory that Native Americans had immigrated to the Americas from northeastern Asia. They were surprised to find that, to the contrary, the blood group distributions of the East Asian and American Indian sample groups were entirely different. Native Americans had a very high likelihood of being type O, whereas it was not common in Asians. About one-third of the Asians were type B, but this group was almost non-existent among Indians. In a pattern that would become familiar with genetic studies of American Indian origins, Iverson noted
“Despite not finding similarities between the American Indian and Asian populations, the two researchers interpreted their results as in accordance with the scientific view that Native Americans had traveled to the Americas from Eastern Asia by arguing that the blood group data was evidence of the antiquity of the separation between the two populations, before the mutations causing the A and B blood groups had occurred”
If there are so many rebuttals to the Bering Straight, Why Is It Getting No Acknowledgement?
In simple terms, its due to many things such as racism, politics, religion, and biases. It’s obvious that its origin is rather complex and to understand why the academic world is pushing this theory you have to begin to peel the many layers of its origin to soon realize it is solely through the fact of academic imperialism. It is typical for Non-Native academics to do research or speak on issues involving indigenous people, while ignoring what we have to say as a rebuttal. If academics are ignoring rebuttals such as archeology, genetics, blood type, and linguistics, this is considered a bias.