The Smithsonian Magazine has an interesting article (PDF) titled “America’s First Immigrants” that reviews the current dissolution of the solid Clovis First consensus in American paleoanthropology. I lean toward the coastal-migrants-from-Asia-scenario myself as the highest likelihood candidates for the “first Americans,” but the take home message is that the history of the populating of two continents is a complex affair. Reading the Keith Windschuttle & Tim Gillin piece, “The extinction of the Australian pygmies,” I am struck by the similarities, the confluence of political interests and the seduction of scientific parsimony converged to synthesize an extremely simple hypothesis of a few founders for an entire continent of indigenous peoples. Genetic evidence points to a more complex reality and now the evidence in the New World from the discipline of stones & bones is coming into line with the wet lab data. It seems likely to me that the Clovis First consensus will live longer simply because it is a politically elegant hypothesis as it establishes a unitary legitimacy for the First Nations, but science marches on, politics will only defer the inevitable paradigm shift.
Posted by razib at 11:40 PM