In the kind of domestic economy suggested by these traces, women (and even children) aren't condemned to sit at home waiting for the hunters to bring home the bacon. They're part of the action. The cover story in the April issue of Discover showing a club-wielding cave mama closing in for the kill is just one of a spate of recent publications professional and popular that reject old-fashioned cave-man macho for a newly feminized interpretation of prehistory.
But wait a minute: Isn't this story starting to sound awfully familiar? The epic, continent-conquering Clovis suited the unexamined subscientific world view of the scientific storytellers of post-frontier, imperial America. Is the new, downscaled, less macho, more domestic conception of early humankind in the Americas just a projection of the prejudices of the educated classes of our own day? A nonviolent, granola-fied, feminized world view just as blinkered and misleading as what preceded it?
Well, up to a point, yes. What happened in the past happened, all right, but "The Past" as we humans conceive it is a human invention to serve human needs, constantly subject to revision as those needs change. In the words of Norman O. Brown, one of the great shamans of our tribe, "Everything is only a metaphor; there is only poetry."
But the genre of poetry we call science lays down a few rules for its practitioners that help ensure against metaphors that mislead, poetry that prevaricates. If the old Clovis paradigm was way too confining and blinkered, it at least covered the facts as they were known at the time. Any new paradigm, if it's to qualify as science at all, has to explain those facts as well as new information acquired later. Scientists, unlike poets and preachers, aren't allowed to ignore the factual bits and pieces that don't fit their rhyme scheme or scheme for salvation. Speculation's fine, so long as you recognize that it's worthless until you find a fact to back it up.
Whatever justification in morality or law there may be for the Corps of Engineers' stubborn refusal to let scientists have a look at K-Man's remains, its stonewalling has encouraged exactly the same kind of inflamed and irresponsible speculation that our media-saturated society seems to thrive on. In that context, a discovery like "Kennewick man" can be as much a curse as blessing for the science of archeology if the evidence it offers is not interpreted cautiously and responsibly. A skeleton as old and just as significant, Nevada's "Spirit Cave Mummy," has been submitted to thorough study without generating a fraction of the heat surrounding the Kennewick remains. The reason is simple: In Nevada, lawmakers, scientists, and Native Americans worked together to find ways of satisfying all their needs.
One reason it's important—imperative in fact—that K-Man get a thorough scientific going-over is to dispose of all the racialist and racist nonsense that polluted the cheaper press and the crannies of the Internet since Chatters' unfortunate use of the archaic and misleading term "Caucasoid" to describe him. Whatever human strain he ultimately proves to be related to, he didn't come from the Caucasus Mountains, or from anywhere in Europe, not a "white man" in the modern sense at all, though possibly remotely related to the Ainu people of Japan, remains of the people who inhabited the archipelago before being conquered by invaders from Korea.
East Asia was home to as many strains of humankind 15,000 years ago as it is today. Anthropologists, with the blinkers of Clovis taken from their eyes, are beginning to suspect that human history in the Americas may go back not just 10,000 or 12,000 years but 30,000 or 40,000: to the ice age before last, in fact. (Dillehay's digs at Monte Verde turned up tantalizing traces of 30,000-year-old charcoal deep below the occupation layer, but with nothing to prove they came from a human fire pit.)
In that vast span of time there has been opportunity for not just one or three but an indefinite number of "invasions" of North America, by an indeterminate number of people of different genetic makeup and cultural affiliation. But all over the Americas, on Aleutian beaches, in the tundras of the oil-rich North Slope, in freeway road cuts in the US Southwest, in the Amazon jungles, diggers are on the trail of early humankind. No longer need you be Don Quixote to believe there's something to find. We were there: and almost certainly as various, as cranky, as full of trouble and conflict and passion as we are today.
Related Links and information:
Letter- questions of science and empiricism, racism and archaeology, court documents relating to case
http://www.quilters.com/science/
kennewic/floyd.htm
http://www.watersupply.com/
science/kennewic.htm
Archaeology on the web - links and articles
http://www.archaeology.org/wwwarky/
wwwarky.html
Monte Verde/Tom Dillehay
http://intarch.ac.uk/
antiquity/adovasio.html
Clovis/Folsom Points
http://www.ele.net/art_folsom/
preclvis.htm
