Joanne Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Lee,
>
> Maybe so, but how easy would it be for the media
> to know? In the Bosnian case, it should have been
> much more obvious.
>
> Joanne
How easy for the media to know....?
At the time Kennewick hit the news, my ONLY knowledge of PaleoIndians was some occasional reading (not even overly technical at that) back in the late 1970's. Using a few scraps from that (available to ANY reporter willing to spend an hour or two in a decent library, or to call up ANY physical anthropologist & ask some specific questions WITHOUT first mentioning Kennewick) & common sense, it was immediately obvious to me that the "Caucasoid" claim was pure bullshit (go back & read the list of purported "Caucasoid" traits for yourself..... any halfway observant reader will realize that they are NOT restricted to Caucasoids, the traits were found in MANY races INCLUDING Native Americans!).
Now, I did know more about Native American physical morphology than the average person off the street.... but ANYBODY who'd ever seen old colonial era depictions of east coast tribes, or seen photos of modern Iroquois & Algonquians in the news (AKA "anybody" who was around during the militant 70's, or actually READ newspapers during the 80's & 90's), should have been able to tell that the stereotypes claimed by the anti-NAGPRA scientists the media were interviewing ("American Indians are all roundheaded, with broad faces", etc) were completely false. Anybody who'd ever perused a coffee table volume of Curtis's photographs of Indians should have known this was false!
Heck, even if the media would have just LOOKED at the people they were interviewing! It was a bit incongruous (to say the least) for all these BROADHEADED WHITE's like Steve McNallen (of the Asatru Folk Assembly) & Dennis Stanford (Smithsonian) & C. Loring Brace (U. Mich) to be repeating stereotypes about "Whites are narrowheaded & Indians are broadheaded" when they themselves were broader headed than most Indians! And nobody in the media actually tried VERIFYING the claim that "PaleoIndians were all narrowheaded", since the published literature would have quickly shown that lie for what it was.
To me, this is AT LEAST as obvious as the Bosnian case, if not more so.... because it deals with people's faces that the reporters would have seen on a frequent basis throughout their entire lives, and on information that is readily available in any college (& some city) libraries...... as opposed to being something from the far side of the world that has had far less published on it.
Come to think of it, there's no comparison.... ANYBODY who ever had a single solitary parent or grandparent that they didn't resemble facially (AKA "everybody") should be able to realize that "even if" Kennewick didn't look like modern Indians (turned out he DID resemble some of them), this did NOT mean he wasn't directly ancestral to them. So people DIDN'T need "specialized" knowledge of What other PaleoIndians had looked like, or what Native Americans DO look like..... common sense would tell them that a buncha WHITE people claiming that this one lone skull proved.... BEFORE IT WAS EVEN STUDIED..... that "White people were the first settlers of the Americas, but were replaced/wiped out by the ancestors of the American Indians".... was racist BS rather than valid science.
All it would have taken was common sense..... unblinded by racially motivated wishful thinking. MUCH simpler than knowing what was archaeologically possible some 12,000 years & 5,000-8,000 miles distant..... any who fell for the Bosnia lie at least had the excuse of scientific illiteracy (a common enough flaw in human cultures), it's NOT something that they'd neccessarily have been able to evaluate without a decent education.
Kenuchelover.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/28/2006 07:17PM by kenuchelover.