A recent article in the Daily Mail reports that genetic testing has indicated that the first group to reach North American may have numbered around seventy people. I’m always happy to see the press reporting on archaeological matters, but I have to admit I’ve got some reservations about this story.
My first question is why the Mail is publishing this as “stunning new” research when the study they refer to, by Dr. Jody Hey of Rutgers University, was published in 2005. There’s a download link for the paper, titled On the Number of New World Founders: A Population Genetic Portrait of the Peopling of the Americas, on Dr. Hey’s web site. I don’t have the background in genetics to critique the work, but I will note, as Dr. Hey himself does, that the date he came up with for the initial entry into North America is somewhat younger than is suggested by archaeological evidence.
I admit I am a little puzzled by Hey’s choice to sample people who spoke Amerind languages. The Amerind family, proposed more than twenty years ago by Joseph Greenberg, has never been widely accepted by linguists specializing in North American languages. In other words, there are no linguistic grounds for thinking that the people Hey studied are all descendents of the same group of early migrants, although that possibility certainly not ruled out.
Beyond all this, the Daily Mail then goes on to claim that, “the accepted wisdom among archaeologists is that the first people to colonise America were called the Clovis.” This, of course, has not been true for some time now. I’m not sure where this error originated, but it didn’t come from Dr. Hey, who mentions the pre-Clovis Monte Verde site in his paper. New evidence since 2005, including the incredible find of human coprolites at Paisley Cave, have placed the pre-Clovis occupation on even firmer ground. It appears that the reporter at the Mail neglected to do even the most basic homework. Like checking Wikipedia. Or even reading Dr. Hey’s paper before writing a story about it.
