Category: anthropology

Neanderthals are Homo sapiens, not a different species, and may have disappeared because of repeated interbreeding with H. sapiens who emigrated from Africa to Eurasia

August 6, 2026 • 9:45 am

I came across the following post by Professor David Hillis of the University of Texas at Austin, an evolutionist I much admire for his perspicacity and malleability: his ability to contribute to several different fields, including herpetology. (He also breeds longhorn cattle on his Double Helix Ranch in the Hill Country.)  Of course one reason I respect his work is because many of his conclusions agree with mine!

One of them is his adherence to the Biological Species Concept formulated by Ernst Mayr, which basically states that two populations belong to the same species if, when they contact each other in nature, they can produce fertile hybrids. If they can’t for any reason, then they are members of different species. Nearly all evolutionists adhere to some form of the BSC, but I won’t go into the concept in depth as it, its problems and problems with alternative species concepts are covered in detail in my book Speciation written with Allen Orr.

One long-standing question in evolutionary anthropology is whether Neanderthals were a different species from “modern” Homo sapiens.  Some anthropologists say they were different species, the former called H. neanderthalensis and the latter H. sapiens. But there is ample genetic evidence for interbreeding of the two forms in Eurasia, and for fertility of the hybrids, for many people outside of Africa carry Neanderthal genes. I myself have a small fraction of Neanderthal genes in my DNA. This kind of data is prima facie evidence that when the two groups were in contact, that they produced hybrids and also that those hybrids were fertile, backcrossing to modern H. sapiens.

At best, then, I consider the two forms to be subspecies: somewhat differentiated populations that were members of the same species. Those who agree with this, like me and Hillis, see the subspecies as H. sapiens sapiens and H. sapiens neanderthalensis.

The Neanderthals evolved from a hominin population that came to Eurasia out of Africa about 400,000 years ago.  They persisted until about 40,000 years ago, when they (identifiable by fossil features; see below) mysteriously disappeared.

There have been several hypotheses accounting for the disappearance of the Neanderthals. They include demographic fluctuations or inbreeding leading to disappearance of the species, extinction due to inability to survive changes in the environment (there was glaciation when Neanderthals lived), competition (including aggression) from “modern” H. sapiens who left Africa to populate the world about 60,000 years ago, and “extinction through interbreeding”, which is the hypothesis supported by a new paper discussed below in Nature Scientific Reports. I should add that “modern” H. sapiens arose in Africa about 300,000 years ago.

Click both screenshots to go to the comment and the paper.

This paper, by Swiss and Italian authors, shows that “extinction via interbreeding” is at least possible under reasonable and conservative conditions obtaining at the known times of extinction.  Successive waves of H. sapiens coming out of Africa, they posit, interbred with Neanderthals and eventually, because the sapiens were far more numerous than Neanderthals, the Neanderthal genome became absorbed into the modern population of H. sapiens.  Click to read; it’s highly mathematical and you should read just the abstract, introduction, and conclusions:

Here are a few of the assumptions:

  • Neanderthals consisted of tribes of about 500-1000 individuals, subdivided into “bands” of 25-50 individuals.
  • The total population of Neanderthals was about 5000-7000 individuals
  • The population of H. sapiens was ten to a hundred times larger than this
  • Repeated waves of H. sapiens came out of Africa, comprising an effectively infinite reservoir of individuals and genes
  • The genetic data in modern H. sapiens shows repeated instances of introgression

The upshot:  The “genetic dilution” or “extinction through interbreeding” hypothesis can be supported by a reasonable mathematical model that takes into account evidence of population sizes and times of migration, and accounts for the genetic data. This does not mean, of course, that this is why the Neanderthals disappeared. It could have been another scenario or perhaps a combination of this scenario with others. Mathematical models can only tell us what is possible, not what is true.  But the paper does show that an interbreeding scenario cannot be ruled out.

And the genetic data we do have, including ancient DNA data from Neanderthal bones, shows that we and Neanderthals are brothers and sisters: members of the same species. There were other distinct biological species that arose during hominin evolution, but Neanderthals and modern humans were almost surely “conspecific.”

The paper’s conclusions:

The mathematical model we presented provides a plausible explanation for the gradual disappearance of Neanderthals, suggesting that their genetic assimilation with H. sapiens, a demographically much larger species, may have been a significant factor in their decline. Rather than sudden extinction, our model proposes that repeated cycles of H. sapiens immigration leading to the Neanderthal gene dilution, could account for the Neanderthals’ disappearance and the observed patterns of Neanderthal ancestry in modern human populations. Although this model provides a possible robust genetic explanation, it is important to note that it does not exclude other possible contributing factors that were not considered in our approach, such as environmental changes, competition, or demographic fluctuations. Evidence of interbreeding and genetic introgression supports the notion that H. sapiens and Neanderthals interacted extensively over thousands of years. Therefore, the interplay of genetic, demographic, and environmental factors likely contributed to the complex process of Neanderthal demise.

Future studies incorporating both genetic and archaeological data will be crucial in refining our understanding of this pivotal moment in human evolution.

Here’s a Neanderthal skull showing distinctive subspecific features (from Wikipedia):

Jason Potter at en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 2.5 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons

Readers’ wildlife photos

July 19, 2026 • 8:30 am

Today’s photos come from Dean Graetz, who notes, “I offer an unusual contribution to Readers wildlife photos.  It is an unusual personal story.” Dean’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them. 

A Wild Life Extinction

Some 50 years ago, I encountered an unfamiliar way of Life.  It was a Wild Life: the lifestyle of Aboriginal people who have lived as nomadic hunter-gatherers in the Australian deserts for the last 60,000 years.  I met three old men, likely 60+ years of age, who could recall their first sighting of ‘Whitefellas’.  Their early lives were as nomadic hunter-gatherers, one that could be perilously difficult.  So, I began to follow any published stories of the desert dwellers from then until now, 50 years later, when they have stopped.  Some photos are mine with historic others borrowed from the Public Domain.  This was the spirit of the encounter.  There were 6 people in that vehicle

The location was Amata, in South Australia:  Aboriginal land: home of the Pitjantjatjara, a language which every member of the party spoke but me.  It was in one of the 10 named Australian deserts where the landscapes are as spectacular as the night sky.  Some important Dreaming stories are based on the constellations interpreted as the activities of animals, such the Emu, or people:

Because it is customary to bring gifts to your hosts, we shot two Red Kangaroos (Macropus rufus) knowing that they would be enjoyed as ‘properly good tucker’:

Our shot kangaroo retriever (effortlessly carrying 30+ kilos) was an important ‘law’ man and hunter.  By incredible chance, I knew of him (by name) from reading an anthropologist’s (1972) account of him:

His fame came from his ability to spear eagles in flight.  An astonishing skill:

It was difficult to hide the presents that we were bringing:

The three elders were happy to receive us with our gift of kangaroos.  Note that they are smallish men, likely protein-limited in early life, now getting ‘fat and shiny’ on store-bought food.  As an intruder, I took very few photos.  I noticed they were urinary incontinent but was later told that, as a condition of manhood, they had been circumcised as teenagers, then later they had opted to be sub incised (aka ‘whistle-dicked’) and were very proud of the seniority and masculine status that conferred.  Their dress and traditional accommodation (‘Wiltja’) in the background was their choice ignoring Whitefella’s available welfare.  The desert landscape was exceptionally lush in 1974; it was the wettest year on record:

They were reluctant (hand covering mouth) to talk about their younger days when there were no Whitefellas around.  They smiled at recalling their family group’s long travels – walkabout-  to hunt and ‘see’ their country.  They admitted that they ate more lizards than fat kangaroos, and there were some ‘tough times’ that were not be talked about.  Later, the three elders and their wives – who had been hidden – plus a few friends waited, for 20 minutes of cooking on an open fire, to eat the two kangaroos at one long evening sitting.  Around the neighbouring Whitefella campfire, the considered opinion of hunter-gatherers was that in 1974, ‘there is no one out there now’.  “All gone: all finish him up!”:

This brief contact was an end point of a long personal and professional interest in the desert landscapes and in the people who surprisingly endured their harshness.  As a university student (1950s) I was intrigued by photos, such as this, of full grown Aboriginal men (beards) but with teenager-sized bodies.  It had to be the result of malnourishment.  Why did they live there?  And, more importantly, how did they live there?:

In 1974, these questions were now in the past tense.  There were no hunter-gathering people still ‘out there’, living out their ‘wild’ lives.  Because of government concern for their welfare, efforts ensured they had all been ‘contacted’.  The deserts, ‘their country’, were now empty of its intriguing inhabitants.

Not so!  In 1977, a search party located a couple hiding for 30 years in the remote Gibson Desert fearing tribal vengeance – ‘The last of the Nomads’.  Then, in 1984, a small group, The Pintupi Nine, walked out of the desert and made contact – as below on day 2, first clothes.  Next, in 1986, a family group of seven (Richters/Rictors) emerged from the Great Victoria Desert.  Now 40 years later, we can conclude that hunter-gatherers are now extinct across  the Australian continent:

 

The hunter-gatherer life requires self-sufficiency.  Your food is only what you can find or kill.  Your tools are only what you can make.  Your only ability to manipulate the landscape is the fire that you ignite, and you control.

Does it matter that this nomadic way of life is no longer pursued in Australia?  No: but an understanding of what and when it was is important for our societal memory.  This quote from a historian says it all.

“Perhaps all people on Earth need a sense of the continuing existence of ‘nomads’, for all of our ancestors were once so.  They remind us of who we are.”

Anthropology bigwig defends her field against attacks that it’s moribund, but actually proves it’s moribund.

July 16, 2026 • 9:30 am

On June 8 I posted about the “Boghossian Report,” in which ten scholars argued that the humanities are becoming overly politicized—to the detriment of universities and their ideals. The politicization came, they said, mostly from the Left, and involved the promotion of “progressive” social justice rather than a search for truth. Click below to read it:

This was not a scientific survey but a warning based on a collection of observations and anecdotes. Nevertheless, the report has received considerable pushback from humanities professors who cannot accept that their discipline could possibly be politicized. One maintained that because the humanities were in disarray in the first place, it is that disarray that led to their politicization, not the other way around. At any rate, the report was particularly hard on anthropology, singling it out for special opprobrium:

In some fields (e.g., philosophy) the problems are largely confined to a single subfield focused on a charged topic. In others (e.g., history), while there are streams of scholarship in which standards have been politicized in problematic ways, they run alongside more dominant streams in which a wide range of views is tolerated, and appropriately scholarly standards are brought to bear. In the most extreme cases (e.g., anthropology), we see a widespread deterioration in scholarly standards grounded in a pervasive repudiation of ideals of objectivity together with a toxic intellectual climate in which reasonable dissent on politically charged topics is routinely suppressed and punished.

and:

In rare cases, individual scholars and groups of scholars explicitly repudiate the idea that scholarship aims at knowledge and understanding in favor of an overtly and exclusively political conception of the enterprise.

For example, in a 2021 presidential address to the American Anthropological Association, Akhil Gupta writes that “anthropology is an outlier among the social sciences … because its political project is to challenge the culturally dominant commonsense of capitalist consumerism” (Gupta and Stoolman 2022, emphasis added). In a reply published in American Anthropologist, Fernando Villanea emphasizes the point that “the value of anthropology is not the pursuit of truth, because all truth is subjective,” but rather to “serve the interests” of people who have been harmed by anthropologists in the past (Villanea 2023). Two years later, in the same journal, José Santos argued that “all ethnographies” — the stock in trade of cultural anthropology — have as their goal “not voyeurism but advocacy” (Santos 2025), as if the goal of describing the social world and making sense of it was not only not on the menu, but that it was to be disparaged as a kind of perversion. Taken literally, such remarks call, not for scholarship in the service of a social goal, but for a rejection of the core idea that scholarship aims at understanding.

Note that one of the authors of the Boghossian et al. report is anthropologist Joseph Henrich at Harvard. More on him below.

Well, Carolyn Rouse, the president of the field’s biggest scholarly group—the American Anthropological Association—couldn’t let that rest, but has been firing back at the Boghossian report. Stephanie Lee interviewed Rouse for the Chronicle of Higher Education, and it wasn’t a puffball interview: Lee pressed Rouse hard, and it turns out that Rouse either ducked the questions, was ignorant about the author in her field, and how the Boghossian report was written, and even maintained that science showed there were not two biological sexes.  In the end, all Rouse reveals is that the accusations about anthropology in the Boghossian report are substantiated by one who tries to refute them.

You can read the article by clicking below (the photo is of Rouse), or find it archived here:

All text from the article is indented:

From Lee’s introduction:

But one field was singled out as “the most extreme case” — anthropology. Compared to philosophy, sociology, history, literary studies, and music studies, the discipline showed “a pervasive repudiation of ideals of objectivity together with a toxic intellectual climate in which reasonable dissent on politically charged topics is routinely suppressed and punished.” The authors cited writings from several anthropologists, a speech by a recent president of the American Anthropological Association, and an AAA panel about biological sex that was canceled in 2023, among other things. The report described itself as a summary of reports, specific to each field. (Only one, on literary studies, has been released; it was posted after this interview was conducted.)

Six days after the report went online, the AAA fired back with a full-throated defense. “Anthropologists welcome rigorous critique of the discipline,” wrote its president, Carolyn M. Rouse. “What we cannot accept is a sweeping verdict about anthropology’s intellectual culture, scholarly practices, and professional norms built on selective evidence and issued without consultation.”

Rouse is an anthropology professor at Princeton University who researches race and inequality in religion, medicine, education, and economic development. In 2016 and 2017, she went viral for leading a walkout of a speech by the political scientist Charles Murray, and for delivering a lecture titled “F%*# Free Speech,” in which she argued that free-speech absolutism does not exist. Rouse was elected president-elect of the AAA in 2023, and assumed the role last year. The Chronicle asked her about her views on the Vanderbilt report and the questions it raises about her field. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Lee’s questions are in bold, and Rouse’s answers in plain text.

First, Rouse says that the Boghossian report was written using AI (not just for research but  “used an LLM to write this”. When pressed for evidence, she quotes an article in the Chronicle  of Higher Education, with Rouse saying, “Anthony Appiah says that they used AI.” But in that article, improperly cited in this report, Appiah actually says this:

We did a fair amount of research, including research using new artificial-intelligence methods to survey large bodies of text and see what was in them, and to identify themes and so on. My report will come with six appendices of such material, not produced by me but produced by the researchers that we were able to hire with the money that was given to us by the chancellors.

This does not say that the authors of the Boghossian et al. report used AI to write the report; it implies that they used AI to survey the bodies of text. It’s completely unfair for Rouse to accuse the authors of writing the report with AI.

To see what really happened, I contacted someone connected with writing this report who characterized that this accusation was “completely bonkers” and that the piece was a “most bizarre interview.”  This contact told me that while the report used various analytical tools (including LLMs) to get lists of syllabi, prizes, and so on, this was just the background research. The data were then debated heavily among the authors and the report was, as I expected, written entirely by humans. Rouse has come close to libel in her unfounded accusation. ​

Then Rouse ducks a question about an address given by Akhil Gupta, the previous AAA President:

Let’s talk about some of the specific critiques that were raised in the Vanderbilt report regarding anthropology, perhaps as a way of talking about these broader issues you have with its conclusion. So, in 2021, then-AAA President Akhil Gupta gave a presidential address where he said anthropology’s “political project is to challenge the culturally dominant commonsense of capitalist consumerism,” and the Vanderbilt report said that this kind of remark is an explicit rejection of “the idea that scholarship aims at knowledge and understanding.” Do you share Dr. Gupta’s conception of anthropology?

Anthropologists love to disagree with one another, so I’m not gonna say I agree or disagree with Akhil. Here’s the thing that I think they don’t understand: We are the instrument for data collection in the same way a Geiger counter detects radiation. We have to do a lot of refining of our instrument, our way of thinking, what we’re doing it for, how we’re seeing it, in order to collect data that we know is, of course, subjective, but uncover some truth. So that’s why we teach our students to be self-reflexive — why you’re doing this, what motivates you, what presumptions did you go into the field with, what do you think this information is going to do for the world?

That’s a non-response. Rouse says that the previous president was misquoted. Lee keeps on pressing Rouse, saying that she (Lee) saw Gupta’s published address and the quote is in there.  Caught out, Rouse bobs and weaves:

This is from his presidential address, or the written version of it. Not to be repetitive, but the report highlights this remark and says this remark is a rejection of the idea that “scholarship aims at knowledge and understanding.”
It’s a cherry-picked quote. They misquoted him, that’s what he says.
I mean, I wasn’t in the audience for this speech, either, but he published a version of this address —
I’ve read it, I’ve quoted from it.
So that quote is in there, you know.
But just because something’s quoted, there’s a whole context. There’s so much more than that. This is the problem with absolutist free speech. We talk in contexts. Speech is never free. Speech is always connected to something else. . . .

 

There’s that “context” defense, saying that Gupta’s quote didn’t mean what we think it did.  Also, everyone knows that free speech is never 100% free: even the First Amendment has its restrictions. Rouse’s example of speech being “connected to something else” is neither an example of the violation of the First Amendment nor does it have anything to do with Gupta’s claim. It’s evasion, pure and simple.

Here Rouse denies that the anthropologist on the report has any reputation:

Can I ask what you think about Joseph Henrich, the sole anthropologist on this commission? Had you heard of him? Were you aware of him having some kind of reputation or something prior to this?

No.

You’d think that Rouse would have looked up the only author of the report who was in her field, but she apparently didn’t.  He’s not obscure, either. He’s 57, has published five books (including two trade books) and roughly 200 papers. He’s a cultural anthropologist like Rouse, and according to Wikipedia is “a recipient of the 2003 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers[4] and the 2022 Hayek Prize.”  I think he has “a reputation”. 

There’s a lot more, but I want to get to the part where Rouse denies there’s two sexes.

In 2023, the AAA canceled an accepted panel at its annual conference, titled “Let’s Talk About Sex, Baby: Why Biological Sex Remains a Necessary Analytic Category in Anthropology.” The AAA said at the time that the panel would have harmed members’ “safety and dignity,” and that its premise contradicted “settled science.” The Vanderbilt report cited this incident to argue that when politically charged questions “are treated as settled by the scholarly community, the result is an illegitimate suppression of dissent.” You were elected president-elect of the AAA shortly after that incident. Do you regret today the fact that the AAA canceled that panel, or the justification that it gave for canceling it?

Rouse thinks that whether sex is binary is a non-issue: it’s settled that there are more than two sexes!

There’s a point in that Vanderbilt report where they talk about astronomy departments becoming astrology departments. All you need to do is literally type into Google and see that we know, factually, that there are different types of “sexes” and “genders.” You can have XY and you present as a woman, you can have XXY — they’re all variations, genetic variations. So the idea that there are two sexes is just factually incorrect, and to force biological anthropologists to teach that is the equivalent of turning an astronomy department into an astrology department. So I don’t know why we’re debating that. You may not like it. I don’t know, maybe you want to kill babies that aren’t just XX presenting XX or XY presenting XY, but that’s what we have in this world. And then we have people who identify with genders that don’t match to their chromosomes, and people like Anthony Appiah, who are gay, and so I don’t know what they want, why they want us to teach in that way — that’s the equivalent of turning an astronomy department into an astrology department.

The second question: It should never have been accepted. At this point, we are demanding that people do good peer review, because that’s what happened — they slacked on the peer review.

Here Rouse is defining sex by karyotype: the chromosomes that someone has. And since there are several chromosomal types (XXY, XO, etc.), sex surely can’t be binary. But sex is defined as whether the individual has a reproductive system designed to produce large vs small gametes, not an individua’s chromosome complement. (These two things, however, align nearly perfectly.)  And even if you use chromosomes, 99.8% of people are born either XX or XY. Finally, what is this “maybe you want to kill babies that aren’t just XX presenting XX or XY presenting XY, but that’s what we have in this world”?  Who wants to kill these babies?  This is just pure confusion and ignorance mixed with performative assertions and accusations of eugenics.

But Lee, who’s done her homework, won’t let this assertion rest, either, and presses Rouse, who issues a lame response, dismissing a survey of the very organization she heads:

OK. So on the question of this particular idea being “settled science,” as the AAA said at the time, there was a survey in 2022, published in the journal Forensic Anthropology, that asked forensic anthropologists about this question, and 42 percent of them said they agree that sex is binary, and 56 percent disagreed that it’s binary. So that ratio would seem to indicate that, in the field, the question hadn’t actually been settled, and I was wondering how you explain that.

 

I don’t believe in opinion research. Not to disparage them, but a lot of forensic people, they’re coroners, they’re doing it in a practicing level, where they’re actually asked on forms to determine whether this body is male or female, oftentimes they haven’t had advanced schooling. Things are in the air. I just don’t trust opinion polling. That’s from just being an anthropologist and spending a lot of time with people in the field. People don’t know a lot.

Had enough? I won’t burden you further, but this is a sample of how Rouse refuses to give straight answers, lies about the use of AI in the Boghossian et al. report, and completely gets biological sex wrong.  She is an ideologue who twists the truth to suit her ends, and that’s exactly what Boghossian et al. see about anthropology (another person Rouse praises is her Princeton colleague, sex-is-a-spectrum miscreant Agustín Fuentes, who’s appeared often on this site for his obtuseness about the sexes.

Rouse’s interview is nothing short of embarrassing.  Over at his website Leiter Reports, my law-school colleague Brian Leiter said this:

The CHE reporter Stephanie Lee does a really good job trying to get Professor Rouse to actually answer questions, but Professor Rouse’s responses mostly serve to confirm the doubts expressed about her field in the Boghossian Report.

Brian wrote a lot less than I did above but he has a way of distilling things into pithy but true assessments.

An excellent book: “Empire of the Summer Moon”

February 1, 2026 • 9:30 am

I never would have selected this book on my own, but fortunately a reader suggested it, and I’m very glad. The book, Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History, by S. C. Gwynne III, is a history of the Native Americans of the Great Plains extending from about 1830 to the beginning of the 20th century. This is the period when all the tribes (the book calls them “Indians”, not “Native Americans”)—and there were many tribes and sub-tribes—came into conflict with Mexicans and with Americans moving West, and we know how that ends.

The history centers on the Comanches, the dominant tribe on the plains, though there was never one hierarchical tribe but a series of sub-tribes that were loosely affiliated as a “nation” and would sometimes join forces or fragment. Gwynne did a great deal of historical research using primary documents, and the result is a informative but mesmerizing tale, one that is hard to put down.

The Comanches were nomads, ranging widely over the Great Plains from Colorado to Texas.  Their “villages” were only temporary, and would be moved (by women, who did the heavy lifting) from place to place during wars or buffalo hunts.  And those were really their two primary activities: killing members of other tribes and killing buffalo, which were then so numerous then that their herds could extend to the horizon.  An important part of Comanche culture was the horse; Comanches were nearly always mounted in war or on the hunt, with horses descended from those brought to the Americas by the Spanish.  As you can see from the photo of a Comanche warrior below, the horses were small, descended from wild mustangs caught and “broken” with great skill.  Comanches also specialized in stealing horses from other tribes and from settlers and the American military. Horses were their riches.

Comanche horsemanship was superb, largely accounting for their success against other tribes and against settlers. They were able, for instance, to ride sideways on the horse’s flank, not visible to enemies on the other side, and shoot arrows (with tremendous accuracy) from below the horse’s neck. Until they managed to get firearms from the settlers and soldiers, they used arrows and lances, and that is how they brought down buffalo.  (The butchering, of course, was done by the women.)

I won’t go into detail about the lives and wars of the Comanche, except to say that the book imparts three lessons about Native Americans on the plains:

First, they did not “own” land or even occupy it. As I said, they were nomadic, and many other Native American tribes, including Apaches, Cherokees, Kickapoos, and Arapaho, roamed the same territory.  This bears on the present-day conflict about repatriating artifacts and human remains to tribes that claim them.  For artifacts or bones found on the Great Plains (and elsewhere, of course) cannot be ascribed to a given tribe without DNA analysis, which is almost never done, or if there are distinctive signs from the artifacts identifying them as belonging to a given group. Since this is rarely possible, it becomes a crapshoot about what to do about repatriating Native American artifacts, most of which now have to be returned to a tribe that claims them before scientists or anthropologists get to study them. Read the books and writings of Elizabeth Weiss to learn more about this conflict.

Second, war was a way of life for the Comanche; they were always at war with one tribe or another—even well before white settlers moved West. The view that all was peaceful among Native Americans until white settlers invaded “Indian” land and displaced the residents is grossly mistaken. Young men were trained for war beginning at five or six, and the youths were skillful with the horse and the bow.  Comanche life without war was unthinkable, and the men prided themselves, and rose in rank in their groups, largely through skill in warfare.  In the end, the Comanches were diminished not because of lack of skill in fighting, but because they were outnumbered by settlers and the Army, because the Army had superior weapons, especially cannons, and because the settlers killed off their main means of subsistence: the buffalo.  The number of Comanche is estimated to have fallen from about 40,000 in 1832 to only 1,171 in 1910.  The book describes many treaties between the Comanche and the U.S. government or its agents, but these treaties were almost always broken by one side or another—or both.

Third, their life was very hard.  They subsisted almost entirely on buffalo, had to weather the brutal cold of the Plains in tipis or on horseback, often went without food or water, and of course almost never bathed. (This was tough on the women, who became covered with blood and guts when skinning buffalo.) But they prided themselves on their toughness and bravery. (women often fought alongside the men). These features were mixed with an almost unimaginable degree of cruelty towards their enemies.  Enemies who were not killed outright were tortured, and in horrible ways: scalping, cutting, and roasting to death slowly.  These acts were considered normal and not immoral, though the white settlers (who were often tortured as captives) saw them as brutal and primitive. But the Comanche were capable of great kindness as well, especially towards other members of their tribe and occasionally towards white women and children who survived battle with the tribes and were “kidnapped’ by them, many becoming, in effect, Comanches themselves.

This brings us to the centerpiece of the story: the abduction of an American woman, Cynthia Ann Parker, in a battle in 1836. She was eight years old. Parker became integrated into the tribe, learned their language (eventually forgetting much of her English) and married a Comanche chief, Peta Nocona. Among their three children was Quanah Parker, who showed tremendous skill, wisdom, and courage as a warrior, and rose through the ranks (despite being half white) to become a chief himself. The story of Quanah is the story of the decline and fall of the Comanches, limned with many battles and culminating in their surrender to American soldiers and sedentary occupation of land on a reservation, where of course they were unhappy. Quanah demonstrated his leadership skills even on the reservation and, through judicious rental of reservation land to settlers for grazing cattle, became wealthy and renowned among both whites and Native Americans. Here’s a photo of Quanah in his native clothing:

Daniel P. Sink of Vernon Texas, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Gwynne skillfully  weaves together the story of Quanah and greater historical events, so in the end you understand not just the history of the extirpation of Native Americans, but the life of Comanches and the personalities of Quanah and his mother, Cynthia Parker. Parker herself was captured by the Texas Rangers when she was 33 and lived the rest of her life with settlers, including members of her extended family. She was never happy, and tried to escape back to the Comanches several times, but never succeeded.  She had several children, including Quanah, but was separated from her sons and left with only one daughter, Topsannah (“Prairie Flower”).  Cynthia died at 40, heartbroken.  Here’s a photo of her with Topsannah. Despite arduous efforts of settlers to assimilate Cynthia back as an American, she was always a Comanche at heart. The expression on her face tells the tale.

Here’s Quanah in 1889. As you see, he adopted many of the settlers’ ways, including their clothing, But he never cut his braids:

Charles Milton Bell, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

I’ve run on too long, but I give this book an enthusiastic recommendation and thank the reader who recommended it. Although it may strike you as something you might not like, do give it a try. (Click on the picture below to go to the publisher.) You may know about the sad history of the extirpation of Native Americans, but this book tells you, more than anything I’ve read, how at least some of them lived their lives as free men and women.

Neanderthals are Homo sapiens

January 4, 2026 • 12:15 pm

UPDATE:  I can still see the viewable-by-all post of David Hillis; perhaps you have to be on Facebook yourself to read it. Here is the full text:

“Joao Zilhão, an archaeologist at the University of Lisbon, noted, with a trace of sarcasm, that the push to classify Neanderthals as a separate species frequently arises from a reluctance, especially among geneticists, to fully accept them as a geographically distinct, but interbreeding, branch of humanity.”
Exactly. Neanderthals were a geographically distinct population of Homo sapiens, rather than a distinct species. The two populations interbred extensively, and many modern people (including me) have both as ancestors.
If pure Neanderthals were around today, no one would call them a different species, which would be considered highly insulting and racist. Why does the fact that we interbred them to extinction (actually intergradation) change that? Given that much of modern humanity carries Neanderthal genes in their genomes, it is time to stop making this misleading distinction.
Neanderthals are Homo sapiens, too.
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Additional update by Greg Mayer: There was a good discussion of this issue on WEIT last June. Jerry, Matthew, and I all supported the single species view in the OP, and in the comments two prominent paleoanthropologists, John Hawks (University of Wisconsin-Madison) and Chris Stringer (British Museum (Natural History)) joined the discussion. Hawks (who agrees with Hillis and your WEIT authors) noted that there are explanations for reduced introgression on the X other than infertility of hybrids, while Stringer maintained that Neanderthals and moderns are distinct species. Interested readers should take a look at that post.
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For a long time I’ve maintained that Neanderthals, which most anthropologists seem to think are a species different from Homo sapiens, in fact constituted a population that was H. sapiens. That, at least, is a reasonable conclusion if you use the Biological Species Concept, which defines populations as members of the same species if, when they meet under natural conditions in nature, can interbreed and produce fertile offspring. And we know that’s true of  Neanderthals and “modern” H. sapiens, because we carry some Neanderthal genes (I have some), and that means the two groups hybridized and that the hybrids backcrossed to our ancestors—and were fertile.

The bogus “species” is known to some as Homo neanderthalensis, which I reject. I have no objections, however, to Neanderthals being called a “subspecies,” or Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, as a subspecies is just a genetically differentiated population that lacks reproductive barriers from other populations.

The four or five “species” of giraffes that have recently been “recognized” are in fact just like Neanderthals and modern humans: bogus entities said to be “real species”; but in the case of the giraffes they don’t meet in nature so we can’t test their ability to interbreed in the wild. But they can do in zoos (and produce fertile offspring). There is likely only one species of giraffe. You cannot rationally separate species that live in different places by their DNA divergence alone. Those who love to divide up species for any reason whatsoever are known as “splitters.”

I’m glad to see that David Hillis, a widely-respected evolutionary systematist at UT Austin, agrees with me. Here’s his post on Facebook about the topic, prompted by an article in the NYT.

Earliest evidence for humans making fire: 400,000 years ago

December 14, 2025 • 10:50 am

Although, as the authors of this new Nature article note, there is some evidence of human fire use in Africa going back 1.6 million years, they don’t consider the evidence definitive because “the evidence for early fire use is limited and often ambiguous, typically consisting of associations between heated materials and stone tools.”   They also note that there is more direct evidence but it’s quite recent:

. . . . direct evidence of fire-making by pre-Homo sapiens hominins has, until recently, been limited to a few dozen handaxes from several French Neanderthal sites, dating to around 50 ka, that exhibit use-wear traces consistent with experimental tools that were struck with pyrite to create sparks.

In this paper the authors investigate a site in Sussex, dated about 400,000 years ago, that has several lines of evidence suggesting regular use of fire, and controlled use, since there were materials like pyrite that could be used to strike sparks.  Note that the paper considers this the earliest evidence for making fire, not simply using fire.  The authors consider their work to provide pretty definitive evidence of fire-making and fire use in H. sapiens. (Note that we are the only species to use fire.)

Click the headline below to read the article, or you can find the pdf here.

The evidence came from an unused clay pit in the Breckland area of Suffolk, with deposits of clay and silt as well as human artifacts like hand axes. The evidence for persistent fire use at this site (the authors suggest at least two groups of humans, and comes from five observations and experiments. I’ve put them below under the letters.

a.) Red clayey silt (RCS) in the layers, silt that seems to have required prolonged heating to form. Here’s what it looks like.  The unexcavated section is in the top photo, and the bottom is the partly excavated area which is an enlargement of the box in (a). I’ve put a red arrow in (a) at the RCS layer thought to reflect heating of the sediments by the presence of “hearths”: areas where cooking or other uses of fire regularly took place. The layer is more obvious in the bottom photo:

The authors say that the red layer reflecs heating or sediments containing iron:

The reddening is attributable to the formation of haematite—a mineral produced through heating of iron-rich sediments. Its distribution is homogeneous and not associated with particular microfacies or voids, indicating that it was preserved in situ.

b.) Experimental heating of the non-red sediments. The authors showed that the magnetic properties of material in the RCS differ markedly from unheated “control” samples of material taken from the lower layer (“YBCS” in second photo above). But by heating the YCBS layer extensively, it assumed some of the magnetic properties of the RCS, suggesting that the RCS involved heating of clays by fire. As they say (bolding is mine):

Three samples were taken from the RCS and two from the adjacent YBCS, which served as unheated control samples. The magnetic properties of the RCS (Supplementary Information, section 5) differ markedly from those of the unheated control samples, exhibiting elevated levels of secondary fine-grained ferrimagnetic and superparamagnetic minerals of pyrogenic origin, unlike the control samples. To assess whether these characteristics could result from heating, a series of experiments of single and multiple heating events of varying durations, was conducted. The aim was to determine whether the reddening could have arisen from one or multiple heating events, as repeated, localized burning is more typical of human than natural fire events (S.H. et al. manuscript in preparation).

The closest experimental analogue in terms of the minerology and grain size distribution, was observed after 12 or more heating events, each lasting 4 h at temperatures of 400 °C or 600 °C. Although the archaeological samples exhibit substantially lower magnetic susceptibility values, this may result from post-depositional mixing with unheated illuviated clay. Overall, the experiments indicate that the magnetic properties of the RCS result from an indeterminate number of short-duration heating events, consistent with repeated human use (Fig. 3).

Note that prolonged heating—nearly 50 hours of heating at 400-600 degrees C, was required to approximate the magnetic properties of the presumed fire-use layer.  This suggests also that the heating did not reflect wildfires, but repeated, localized, and intentional burning.

c.) Infrared spectroscopy of heated control samples changed in infrared absorbtion spectra of the “control” samples, making it closer to that of the presumed hearth layer of RCS.

d.)  The area contained four handaxes that showed marks of heat-shattering.  Here is a picture of a handaxe with “closeup of fractured surface caused by fire.”:

Presumably this is based on experiments using recently made handaxes, with some treated by fire and then compared to unheated controls.

e.) Fragments of pyrite were found in the heated area, and pyrite  is used with flint to produce fire (before that, people presumably had to get fire from lightning burns and somehow preserve it). Moreover, pyrite was not found in this locality; the nearest accessible mineral was about 15 km away, suggesting that people picked it up and brought it to the site to strike against flint (flint was also found in the area). As the authors note:

The occurrence of pyrite at Barnham warrants further consideration. Pyrite is a naturally occurring iron sulfide mineral that can be struck against flint to produce sparks to ignite tinder. Its use for this purpose is well documented in ethnographic accounts worldwide. Pyrite has been recovered from European archaeological sites dating from the late Middle Palaeolithic to the historic periods, occasionally bearing wear traces consistent with use for fire-making and, in some cases, found in association with flint striking tools.

Here are some fragments of pyrite; caption is from paper:

(from paper): b, Fragment of pyrite found on the surface of palaeosol in Area IV(6). c, Fragment of pyrite from palaeosol in Area VI, found in association with concentrations of heated flint.

e.) The heated sites were located in areas amenable to prolonged fire use. This is weak evidence, but I present it nevertheless. From the authors:

Notably, all three sites occupy marginal locations, away from the main river valleys and associated with small ponds or springs. In the absence of caves, these locations probably provided safer, more sheltered environments for domestic activities. Taken together, these findings present a strong case for controlled fire use across the Breckland region during MIS 11.

The upshot:  We often forget that any meat eaten by people before the advent of cooking would have to be raw, and raw meat is tough and, at least to us, somewhat unpalatable. (I do like a very rare steak, as well as steak tartare, though.) But our ancestors didn’t grind up meat, though they may have pounded it to make a kind of raw Pleistocene schnitzel. By making meat more palatable, cooking would promote eating more of it, and that itself could change the selective pressures on humans, giving them the extra nutrients they’d need if they were to evolve big brains (brains use a lot of energy!).  This is one (disputed) theory for a rapid increase of human brain size that lasted between 800,000 and 200,000 years ago, though brain size was also getting bigger, albeit at a slower pace, before then. Cooking has also been suggested to have changed human social behavior (and perhaps social evolution), with pair bonding and mutual aid increasing as a way to gather, store, and protect food that needed to be cooked. And more complex social behavior could itself have promoted the evolution of larger brains to figure out how to regulate and get along in your small social group.

These theories, while suggestive, really should be downgraded to “hypotheses,” since there isn’t much evidence to support them—only correlation and speculation. However, they are interesting to contemplate, even if we never can get strong evidence for them.  At the end of the paper, the authors do seem to sign onto some of these, but not strongly.

The kernel of this paper is the several lines of evidence that do, to my mind, support the idea that humans were making and using fire at least 400,000 year ago.  Here’s what the authors say about the advantages, evolutionary and otherwise, of controlling fire:

The advantage of fire-making lies in its predictability, which facilitated better planning of seasonal routines, the establishment of domestic sites in preferred locations and increased structuring of the landscape through enculturation. Year-round access to fire would have provided an enhanced communal focus, potentially as a catalyst for social evolution. It would have enabled routine cooking, could have expanded the consumption of roots, tubers and meat, reduced energy required for digestion and increased protein intake. These dietary improvements may have contributed to increase in brain size, enhanced cognition and the development of more complex social relationships, as articulated in the Social Brain Hypothesis. Moreover, controlled fire use was instrumental in advancing other technologies, such as the production of glues for hafting. The widespread appearance of Levallois points from Africa to Eurasia by MIS 7 (243–191 ka), often interpreted as spear-tips, provides strong evidence of effective hafting. This interpretation is supported by use-wear evidence and the identification of heat-synthesized birch bark tar as a stone tool adhesive.

The sad fate of human evolutionary biology in Australia

October 20, 2025 • 11:30 am

Although the times when Homo sapiens reached Australia are under revision, the latest data suggests that they arrived between 45,000 and 60,000 years ago—about the time that our species left Africa for parts east.  And although changes in water levels made it easier to get to Australia by water then now humans still had to use boats of a kind. What kind of boats they used is a mystery.

But there are a number of other questions that remain about the colonization of Australia. How many colonizations were there? Did any of the colonizing H. sapiens carry genes from H. erectus?  How much genetic material in the colonists came from Denisovans? (There are some suggestions of both of these possibilities based on aspects of skull morphology.) Did the aboriginal colonists evolve in the last 50,000 years? Regardless of how many colonizations were there, what was the population structure of indigenous people since they arrived here? And based on artifacts, what were the cultures of the early indigenous people?

All of this can be studied not just by digging up skull or artifacts, but also now by genetic testing: looking a “fossil DNA” from specimens. Unfortunately, what is happening in the U.S. and Canada is also happening in Australia: people who identify as “aboriginal” (and you can do this by self-identification, not necessarily by ancestry) are preventing the scientific study of skulls and artifacts by claiming that fossils or artifacts were from their ancestors, even though, as in the U.S., determination of “ancestry” of fossil remains can be dubious. Further, some indigenous people living today want to know their history, but are blocked by the reburial policy adopted by the some state governments. Further, many people recognized as aboriginals today also claim that their ancestors have been in Australia forever,  and don’t want data that dispels the myth.

The article below, in Palladium Magazine, recounts the tremendous loss to science of specimens that, even without firm ancestral documentation, get reburied without study.  This is even true of material found in the Willandra Lakes region of New South Wales, which is in fact a World Heritage Site and contains important human remains:

The Willandra Lakes Region is a World Heritage Site in the Far West region of New South Wales, Australia. The Willandra Lakes Region is the traditional meeting place of the Muthi Muthi, Ngiyampaa and Paakantyi Aboriginal peoples. The 2,400-square-kilometre (930 sq mi) area was inscribed on the World Heritage List at the 5th Session of the World Heritage Committee in 1981.

The Region contains important natural and cultural features including exceptional examples of past human civilization including the world’s oldest evidence of cremation. . . .’

. . . . Aboriginal people lived on the shores of the Willandra Lakes from 40,000 to 35,000 years ago. It is one of the oldest known human occupation sites in Australia. There is abundant evidence of Aboriginal occupation over the last 10,000 years.

Interesting and controversial fossils like WLH-50 have been found in Willandra, but now many fossils are being reburied, and fossils found weathering out of that region cannot be excavated or studied scientifically.

Click the headline to read the article:

I’ll give some quotes to apprise you of the situation. In toto, it seems that the study of human evoution (not, as the title implies, “evolutionary science”) is dying in Australia. But there are many other creatures besides humans, including the many marsupials.

Quots from the article are indented, while bold headings are mine:

Possible evolutionary change from the earliest inhabitants until now:

As more fossilized remains were discovered [after WWI], sometimes hidden within collections of recent bones, comparisons could be drawn between ancient Australians and the ones first encountered by Europeans. While sharing some skeletal similarities with recent populations, ancient individuals were often distinguished by “heavy-boned faces, enormous teeth and jaws, receding foreheads and flask-shaped skulls.” The mosaic of modern and archaic traits, seen to a lesser degree in contact-era skulls, emphasized the importance of these fossils to evolutionary history. The largest collections included Kow Swamp (c. 20,000 years old), Coobool Creek (c. 14,000 years old) and Willandra Lakes (c. 43,000 to c.14,000 years old).

One exceptional specimen was designated “Willandra Lakes Human 50,[WLH-50] also known as Garnpung Man. It shared traits with Javan Homo erectus and was more similar to ancient humans from Skhūl Cave in Israel than contact-era Australian foragers. At an estimated 26,000 years old, it may have had significantly more Denisovan ancestry than the 2-4% seen in recent Melanesians and Australian foragers.

The morphological variability seen in the fossil record led some researchers to hypothesize multiple migrations into Australia, with some genes coming from Homo erectus and some from ancient Chinese Homo sapiens. Others argued for local adaptation of a single Homo sapiens founding population. This debate featured significantly in the global discourse between proponents of “multiregional evolution,” which claims that modern Homo sapiens evolved simultaneously in multiple parts of the world, versus the “Recent Out of Africa” theory, which holds that Homo sapiens first evolved in Africa and then spread into Europe and Asia, replacing older human species.

What made these collections particularly valuable was their status as a comparative series. The ability to compare a group’s average morphology across eras and regions allowed scientists to track evolutionary changes and adaptations in ways that singular remains could not.

Who counts now as “aboriginal”? Bolding in the text below is mine.

Today, three separate groups are often conflated under the single term “Aboriginal.” These are:

  1. The ancient humans who first settled the continent.
  2. The contact-era foragers encountered by British colonists.
  3. The citizens currently classified as “Aboriginal” by the government.

This third category was formed when Australia’s 1967 constitutional referendum empowered the federal government to make laws for people of the “aboriginal race.” The government subsequently changed its definition of Aboriginal from requiring over 50% forager ancestry to a new standard based on self-identification, any degree of biological descent, and community recognition. This pivotal change meant even those with minimal forager ancestry could join the Aboriginal “class.” A separate legal class, “Torres Strait Islanders,” was eventually split off, with both classes now subclasses of the “Indigenous” slash “First Nations” class.

Before 1967, “Aboriginal” was a legal class with restricted rights. To avoid stigma, many mixed-descent Australians kept their forager ancestry a secret. But as membership criteria relaxed, and additional rights and privileges granted, more people publicly claimed forager ancestry. The Indigenous population exploded and is still growing faster than birth rates can explain. This is the result of people joining the class as adults, sometimes inspired by family legends or personal conviction. Also notable is that most Indigenous-class Australians marry non-Indigenous-class partners, but 90% of children from these unions are assigned Indigenous at birth. Archaeologist Josephine Flood observes that “Many people who identify as Aboriginal have white skin, blue eyes, narrow noses and blond, brown or red hair. Others resemble Japanese, Chinese, Melanesians, Polynesians, or Afghans.” In 2015, a government official estimated that 15% of Indigenous citizens had no forager ancestry whatsoever. 

This of course means that many people can have a claim to have ancient aboriginal ancestry, and then bring lawsuits against scientists taking and studying skulls.  There need be no genetic evidence of ancestry to bring such suits, as the genetic ancestry has been muddied by state-specific laws that prevent the study and excavation of the skulls or DNA analysis.

Not all human remains or artifacts must be repatriated: WLH-50, for example, is still in the hands of scientists. But AI says this about laws, and I’ve verified the claims by looking at several other sites:

In Australia, laws prohibit the burial of Aboriginal ancestral remains, sometimes referred to as fossils, by anyone other than the relevant Aboriginal community with traditional or familial linkes to them.  The legal and ethical framework is centered on the principle of repatriation: the return of ancestral remains from museums, universities, and private collections back to their Traditional Owners for culturally appropriate care and reburial.

This system is governed by a combination of federal and state or territory legislation.

Reburials began en masse in the 1980s, though there were some that were earlier. Now, it seems, the Australian government, perhaps infused with a view of the “sacralization of the oppressed,” seems ready to rebury fossils and artifacts in view of simple and poorly documented claims.  And given the difference in time between modern aboriginals living in the same area as ancient aboriginals, the claim of “ancestry” giving one rights over fossils from tens of thousands of years ago seems weak, especially because no genetics is involved. But it’s strong enough to overrule the scientists:

By 1984, the massive Murray Black skeletal collection had been transferred following legal action by the Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service and, in 1985, remains of thirty-eight foragers were buried in a public ceremony in Melbourne’s Kings Domain park.

The movement now targeted fossilized remains with only tenuous connections to contact-era foragers. The ancient skulls from Eagle Hawk Neck and Mount Cameron West (c. 4260 years old) were transferred to the TAC in 1988 and cremated. In Victoria, the Coobool Creek collection was reburied in 1989, followed a year later by the Kow Swamp collection. In 1991, Alan Thorne voluntarily surrendered Mungo Lady, the first individual excavated at Willandra Lakes. During the handover, he implored the 3TTG (Three Traditional Tribal Groups) to preserve the fossils for future generations.

But as the voices of opposition grew weaker, the burials continued: in 2022, both Mungo Man and Mungo Lady were reburied, secretly. The final blow came in March 2025 when the rest of the Willandra Lakes collection, 106 fossilized individuals, was buried in an unmarked grave, despite a last-minute legal appeal from Gary Pappin, a local Mutthi Mutthi man, and efforts by archaeologist Michael Westaway, who compared it to the Taliban’s destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas. As of this year, Australia’s human fossil record, as well as the biological history of many extinct contact-era populations, has been effectively erased.

The rationale for reburial is weak, and even involves the supernatural. Get a load of this:

In general, the activists won the war of words. They used language that bolstered ownership claims like “repatriation,” “return,” and “ancestors,” which implied already-proven connections. While scientists used rigorous but dry terminology, activists referred to bones as “our Old People” whose “spirits cannot rest,” claiming that the mere existence of museum collections caused unverifiable harms like “cultural trauma.” Opponents who accepted this linguistic frame found it hard to argue without appearing callous.

Michael Mansell soon took the campaign overseas, convincing European institutions to hand over remains they had acquired during the colonial period. By the 2000s, the removal movement had won widespread support from museums, governments, and even previously-opposed archaeologists. This shift in attitudes resulted in formal policies and funding that allowed the transfer of thousands of forager remains to Aboriginal-class organizations.

The upshot is indeed the dying of ancient human anthropology in Australia. Even new Willandra Lakes fossils, which are important ones, cannot be removed or studied:

Happily, local Aboriginal land councils have allowed a few accidental discoveries to be briefly studied and dated, such as Kiacatoo Man (c. 27,000 years old), the largest Pleistocene skeleton ever found in Australia. But no intentional excavations have taken place for decades. At the Willandra Lakes UNESCO World Heritage Site, fossilized skulls are occasionally observed eroding from the ground but study is forbidden and they soon disintegrate.

According to archaeologist Colin Pardoe in 2018, “The repatriation of skeletal collections has meant that student access to teaching collections containing Australian material has become almost impossible…. This has resulted in researchers moving into other fields or other parts of the world.” And Vesna Tenodi explains, “Replicas or even drawings cannot be displayed, or discussed, as that also is too offensive without ‘Aboriginal permission.’”

Replicas and drawings have been forbidden in the U.S. too, as Elizabeth Weiss documents. She wasn’t even allowed to photograph the boxes containing fossil bones found in the U.S.! The article continues

Other archaeologists note that “fieldwork in Australia essentially ground to a halt as much of the modern debate over the origins of modern humans was beginning to take shape.” Just as DNA analysis, 3D imaging, and other revolutionary techniques were entering the field, the fossil record of an entire continent was wiped clean. Only a handful of specimens were ever studied by geneticists. Archaeologist Steve Webb estimated that the Pleistocene series from Willandra Lakes contained 38 individuals suitable for DNA testing. But that analysis was never done and the window of opportunity has now closed.

This kind of “anthropological activism” has been extensively documented by Elizabeth Weiss  in other countries (see her books here), and the power of indigenous peoples to impede scientific study is strong. They have tried compromises in Australia, like allowing scientists to study remains over 7,000 years old, but these have failed. And there is virtually no possibility of compromise in the United States or Canada.

Now that these activists have acquired most of Australia’s human fossils and bones, they have expanded their removal and censorship campaigns to “include the return of cultural heritage materials, including objects, photographs, manuscripts, and audio-visual recordings.” Each concession leads to more expansive claims rather than resolution. They claim ownership over what questions can be asked about the past and the very words that can be used to ask them.

And the same script is being followed in Canada and the United States, with Indigenous-class activists reburying ancient remains and artifacts under NAGPRA legislation, censoring photographs, and even asserting ownership over dinosaur fossils based on creationist mythology. In 2017, the 9,000 year-old fossil Kennewick Man was buried after years of controversy. In Europe as well, museums and universities face shrinking collections and pressure to censor information.

Everyone agrees that the loss of ancient hominin fossils during World War II was a tragedy. Someday, hopefully, they will feel the same way about the artifacts and fossils currently being destroyed.

The future.  As the article notes, not every state government has bowed to these demands, and some museums are refusing to surrender their collections. Other people are trying to forge productive relationships between “colonists” and modern aboriginals to permit research, including DNA research.  More compromises could be forged that allow at least some scientific study, including extraction of DNA, which takes only a bit of earbone, before remains are reburied. But governments have been all too timorous to stand up to the increasingly strong demands of modern aboriginals to force reburial.  In the absence of demonstrating recent ancestral-descendant relationships between modern and older aboriginals, or to set cutoffs to allow study of older remains, science should trump mythology.  In the end, this seems to be more about power than anything else.

h/t: Coel, Luana