Aquatic Indian theory
- From: "Marc Verhaegen" <fa204466@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2006 00:19:53 +0200
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-bones11sep11,0,7890755.story?coll=la
-home-headlines
DNA Ties Together Scattered Peoples
Data on descendants of the Chumash spur new ideas about the first settlers
of the Americas.
By Steve Chawkins, Times Staff Writer
September 11, 2006
Over the years, a couple of dozen descendants of the Chumash Indians have
complied with the odd requests of their old friend John Johnson, a leading
scholar of the tribe's culture and head of the anthropology department at
the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History. After all, what harm could come
from parting with a few of their hairs or letting him swab the inside of
their cheeks for a saliva sample?
What emerged from Johnson's DNA studies are tantalizing clues that link some
of today's Chumash with settlers of coastal regions from Alaska to Tierra
del Fuego more than 10,000 years ago.
"It's mind-boggling," said Ernestine De Soto, a 68-year-old nurse whose rare
strain of DNA matches that found in ancient remains thousands of miles from
the Santa Barbara area, where her family has lived for centuries. "I've
always known I was Chumash, but this is something else."
Johnson's work, along with studies by archeologists and geneticists
nationwide, adds more strong evidence to a theory that challenges long-held
assumptions about when and how the first Americans arrived.
Ever since it was articulated by a 16th century Spanish missionary to South
America, the prevailing theory has been that the first inhabitants of the
Americas were big-game hunters who crossed a 1,000-mile land bridge from
Asia, slogging down into the Great Plains through an inland corridor created
by receding glaciers.
A number of scientists believe some may have trudged from Asia and then
built boats that, over hundreds of generations, took them to spots where
they put down roots along the length of the Pacific Coast.
"We're dealing with the whole period when glaciers began melting and people
first became able to enter the Americas from Asia," said Johnson, who
addressed a scholarly conference about his findings over the weekend at UC
Santa Barbara. "Who were these first people that arrived in California?"
To Johnson and his colleagues, the answer involves centuries-old records
from California missions, bones found at sites ranging from China to Chile,
and a tooth extracted from a 10,300-year-old jawbone discovered in a place
called On Your Knees Cave on an island off Alaska.
Found in 1996, the tooth from Prince of Wales Island wound up in a lab at UC
Davis, where doctoral student Brian M. Kemp tried for two years to extract
its DNA - a feat frequently made impossible in old bones because of natural
decay. But this tooth had been protected for millennia by cave walls and
cold. Finally, Kemp succeeded.
The tooth yielded the oldest DNA sample in the Western Hemisphere.
"It was fantastic," recalled Kemp, now a researcher at Vanderbilt University
in Tennessee. "When I first got the DNA out of this tooth, it looked
different. I didn't immediately recognize it as a pattern frequent in the
Americas."
In fact, as Kemp and others pored over a database of DNA patterns from 3,500
Native Americans, they found just 1% that exhibited the same distinctive
markers. Some of the samples were drawn from living people and others from
ancient bones. More than half were from the Cayapa tribe of Ecuador. Others
were from tribes in Mexico and the southern reaches of Chile.
Four matching samples, it would turn out, were from Chumash descendants
living along California's Central Coast.
Johnson had started collecting DNA 14 years ago, approaching Chumash
descendants whose family trees he traced by painstakingly scouring records
of births, baptisms, marriages and deaths compiled over two centuries by the
Franciscan friars of California missions.
"Though there are no full-blooded Chumash left, he could go to the records
and determine that this person is a direct maternal descendant of this
particular Chumash woman in this mission or that village," said Joseph
Lorenz, a molecular anthropologist collaborating with Johnson on a paper to
be published in the Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology.
Verifying such links is important because researchers mainly seek
mitochondrial DNA - the sequence in all of us that is inherited only from
our mothers. It's easier to extract from cells. And, except for periodic
mutations, it stays much the same from generation to generation, allowing a
journey directly to a family's roots without distracting side trips.
Johnson acknowledged his sample is small but said it still points to just
one conclusion: "My hypothesis is that the Chumash descended from a very
early coastal migration that resulted in the distribution of people down to
the tip of South America."
Other experts familiar with his research agree, although they acknowledge
that physical evidence is difficult to find. After all, they note, the
melting glaciers put a lot of early prime beachfront real estate under
water.
Johnson's evidence "suggests the Pacific Coast is a primary conduit linking
north and south," said University of Pennsylvania anthropologist Theodore
Schurr. The DNA results, he said, are additional pieces of evidence in a
case that has been building for about 10 or 15 years.
In 1999, Johnson announced that human bones found 40 years earlier at
Arlington Springs on Santa Rosa Island off the Ventura County coast were
13,000 years old, making them the oldest human remains in North America.
.
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