Expect this to get messy. There are powerful interest groups whose self-identity relies on Clovis culture and its descendants being the first peoples of the Americas.
Uh... who? I mean, yes, it's true that almost all native americans (the exceptions being the Inuit and their relatives who are more recent immigrants) are descendants of a single wave of population motion out of asia about 12kya that coincides closely with the Clovis culture.
But hints that there were people here before that have been around for a long time, starting with the Monte Verde work in Chile a few decades back.
And I don't recall any particular "mess" from indigenous americans.
I mean, scientifically there's definitely a big question of why the population density of the earlier settlers seems to have been so low (vs. clovis, which basically exploded onto the scene and went everywhere on the continent very fast), or why they are not identifiable in contemporary DNA (which very closely supports the "clovis only" hypothesis).
Just to clarify: you're saying that genetic analysis appears to rule out current natives being (at least partially) descended from a pre-clovis population?
Correct. The evidence isn't exactly overflowing but what little there is indicates the Clovis migration was not a peaceful one and existing populations either met a violent end or were forced to move to areas where their populations couldn't be sustained and slowly died out.
The parallels to the European genocide of Native Americans has significant consequences to two groups of people. The first is the white supremacists/edgelords who think an invasion from thousands of years ago means the actions of colonial Europeans as well as ongoing social justice issues with native Americans/reservations are somehow justified or deserved. The second is the far larger but far less dangerous group of people who think native Americans are somehow inherently morally superior and/or that European colonialism is responsible for all the world's problems. To them it's an article of faith that aboriginal peoples do not and cannot commit large-scale atrocities.
These two groups can make discussing and teaching American pre-history very difficult.
I don’t understand how it would be possible for the Clovis culture to conquer an earlier people without leaving a genetic record. I mean we even have Neanderthal DNA in each of us. Surely they would have intermingled?
One answer would be that there was no conquering. That could happen via a few possibilities:
1. pre-Clovis people were so thinly spread that Clovis was able to just fill in the gaps
2. pre-Clovis people had actually essentially become extinct before Clovis arrived. It's not easy to see how that would be the case in a continent(s) of this size, but not actually implausible.
3. as a combination of the two, pre-Clovis culture was completely nomadic, and their constant migration kept them out of the way of Clovis until a point where their population was so diminished as to leave no descendants, even via inter-breeding.
Who are these interest groups? My understanding is that pre-Clovis is completely established beyond any semblance of reasonable doubt, so they're 30+ years behind the times.
From what my archaeologist friends in North America tell me, the interest group is modern native Americans. They are the direct descendants of the Clovis culture.
Clovis-Americans have certain unique rights based on legal theories that their ancestors were the first human occupants of the land, which would be weakened or voided if substantial scientific evidence established that they simply replaced a prior human culture. Due to a perverse set of incentives, native American interest groups use these unique rights to actively interfere with archaeological research that might undermine their claims to being the first occupants of the land. While it has not stopped pre-Clovis research, it has greatly impeded it.
While the scientific evidence strongly suggests a pre-Clovis people, the legal theories and legislation that presume this is not the case are still active. These are evaluated on a case by case basis currently.
I'm a (formerly working) archeologist. Native American land claims are horrifically complicated and way beyond my knowledge, but I'm not aware of anything that's legally based on the scientific consensus about the earliest inhabitants of a specific area. Instead, the term you'll commonly find used is "aboriginal title", which basically just means "we've been here a long time". It's as deliberately vague as it seems and isn't affected by pre-Clovis at all.
NAGPRA has run into complex issues with ownership being unclear when we've found ancient remains, but that doesn't mean people are rejecting the concept of pre-Clovis. It's a separate set of issues entirely.
I'll mention that many indigenous belief systems do incorporate aspects of "we've always lived here" when that's clearly not what the archaeology says. Most such people accept both sides as belonging to separate things in my experience. It's not all that different from Christians who believe Exodus happened for example. The scientific consensus isn't really relevant to that belief and that's fine.
> Clovis-Americans have certain unique rights based on legal theories that their ancestors were the first human occupants of the land
Please point to these rights and legal theories. Do you just mean NAGPRA?
As far as I know, whatever legal rights any native American people have in the Americas at this point in time are based purely on them being here when Europeans arrived near the start of the 16th century.
Whether they had been the occupants for 400 years or 40,000 years wouldn't make any difference to the treaties that were signed (and generally abrogated).
As of 1995 more than 50% of people who identified as Indigenous preferred the term "American Indian".[0]
It's interesting how people outside of a group can erase that group's identity just by taking away the name that they use to define themselves. Any politically correct American has to say "Native American" or use the even more generic term "Indigenous People" while the majority of the people being referred to understand themselves to be "Indians" or "American Indians". Hundreds of years being known as Indians and having that taken away by scholars and academics. It's a sad final twist on an exceptionally sad story.
What is the correct terminology: American Indian, Indian, Native American, or Native?
All of these terms are acceptable. The consensus, however, is that whenever possible, Native people prefer to be called by their specific tribal name. In the United States, Native American has been widely used but is falling out of favor with some groups, and the terms American Indian or indigenous American are preferred by many Native people.
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This also provides a good overview through a series of personal viewpoints:
I don't get where this "has to" business is coming from. If they want to be called Indians or American Indians, then I'll call them that. There's no need to get wound up.
"From our oral histories, we know that our people have been part of this land since the beginning of time," a leader of the Umatilla tribe wrote in a statement at the time. "We do not believe that our people migrated here from another continent, as the scientists do."
I hesitate to try to engage in this nonsense, but it's worth pointing out that the Kennewick remains were 9k years old. He was all but certain a clovis descendant, just like modern native americans.
This is actually a different claim that one in the comment you're replying to.
Being "the first humans to migrate to the Americans" is quite different from "we didn't migrate from anywhere at all, we've been here forever".
I've never understood human cultures that use oral histories. The oral history of the US from 6 months ago is completely unreliable. Who could possibly put much stock in an oral history of several thousand years ago, and why?
Generally, I'd say that any group of Native Americans (or folks who profit from them either emotionally or financially) wants to be thought of as the 'first' people who ever lived on that piece of land. Perhaps they popped up from the earth like the skeletons in Jason and the Argonauts.
There's a legitimacy angle here that's become super important in the last decade or so. Then there's the argument about 'nobody lived here when my people moved in' that's allowed for some people, not for others.
It isn't like the Sioux or the Navajo have been in their current location all that long. It's all so tiresome.
I still don't understand why the question of originality or whatever is anything but a red herring. Europeans came and nearly wiped out the existing peoples and destroyed their cultures. Are we really going to split hairs and say that's a fine and dandy thing to have done? Because if so you'll have to follow it up with an argument for why that same logic does not apply to a hypothetical future invader of the United States, and good luck with that.
>Europeans came and nearly wiped out the existing peoples
The existing peoples wiped out the existing peoples in many cases.
What this all rotates around is a simplistic (and Victorian) view of 'peoples'. 'Red' = the Americas, 'White' = Europe, 'Black' = Africa, etc.
Truth is, a Navajo is not a Hopi, a Celt is not a Saxon is not a Norman. Most of these current fights are simply wordgames played to achieve political power or to suit some peoples' needs for self-flagellation.
> It isn't like the Sioux or the Navajo have been in their current location all that long. It's all so tiresome.
Are there particular reasons that you use the Sioux or the Navajo in this? Is this a general claim that "no populations stay in a particular location for more than X years", or something more specific?
Various Sioux tribes were pushed west of the Mississippi around 1600-1700 by various wars that took place between natives at the time. It's probably the most well-known pre-contact migration of Native American tribes (at least those that live in US/Canada; the Mexica migration into the Central Mexico Valley is probably even more well-known, as it's a very key part of their own histories).
Neither the Sioux nor the Navajo were on the Trail of Tears, which affected the tribes who lived in the US Southeast, most notably the Cherokee, but also the Muskogee, Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw.
But hints that there were people here before that have been around for a long time, starting with the Monte Verde work in Chile a few decades back.
And I don't recall any particular "mess" from indigenous americans.
I mean, scientifically there's definitely a big question of why the population density of the earlier settlers seems to have been so low (vs. clovis, which basically exploded onto the scene and went everywhere on the continent very fast), or why they are not identifiable in contemporary DNA (which very closely supports the "clovis only" hypothesis).
But there's no politics at work here. Stop it.