The Daily Stoic - Jennifer Raff on the Genetic History of America

Episode Date: March 19, 2022

Ryan talks to Anthropological geneticist Jennifer Raff about her new book Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas, how drastically our understanding of North American history has changed, the important perspective that understanding of history gives you about the world around you, and more.Dr. Jennifer Raff is an assistant professor at the University of Kansas, in the department of Anthropology. She studies the genomes of contemporary and ancient peoples in order to uncover details of human prehistory. She is a celebrated anthropological geneticist, and recently released her book, “Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas,” is the story of who the first peoples in the Americas were, how and why they made the crossing, how they dispersed south, and how they lived based on a new and powerful kind of evidence: their complete genomes.🎓 Sign up for Stoicism 101: Ancient Philosophy For Your Actual Life - https://dailystoic.com/101Try Surfshark risk-free with a 30-day money-back guarantee. Get Surfshark VPN at surfshark.deals/STOIC. Enter promo code STOIC for 83 % off and three extra months free!The Jordan Harbinger Show is one of the most interesting podcasts on the web, with guests like Kobe Bryant, Mark Manson, Eric Schmidt, and more. Listen to one of Ryan's episodes right now (1, 2), and subscribe to the Jordan Harbinger Show today.DECKED truck bed tool boxes and cargo van storage systems revolutionize organization with a heavy-duty in-vehicle storage system featuring slide out toolboxes. DECKED makes organizing, accessing, protecting, and securing everything you need so much easier. Get your DECKED Drawer System at Decked.com/STOIC and get free shipping.KiwiCo is a subscription service that delivers everything your kids will need to make, create and play. Get 50% off your first month plus FREE shipping on ANY crate line with code STOIC at kiwico.com.As a member of Daily Stoic Life, you get all our current and future courses, 100+ additional Daily Stoic email meditations, 4 live Q&As with bestselling author Ryan Holiday (and guests), and 10% off your next purchase from the Daily Stoic Store. Sign up at https://dailystoic.com/life/ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemailCheck out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookFollow Jennifer Raff: TwitterSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoke podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoke. Each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stokes. Something to help you live up to those four Stoke virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go

for a walk, to sit with your journal and most importantly to prepare for what the week ahead may bring. Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wendery's podcast business wars. And in our new season, Walmart must fight off target, the new discounter that's both savvy and fashion forward. Listen to business wars on Amazon music or wherever you get your podcasts. And some exciting news we've just reopened one of our best courses here in Daily Stoke. Stoicism 101, ancient philosophy for your actual life. It's a 14 day course designed to show you

how to integrate Stoicism into your everyday life. There's three live video office hours sessions with me, which I'm really excited to meet all of you and answer your questions about Stoicism in. There's also 14 custom emails, 20,000 words of deep dives in to the big stoic principles, who the famous stoics were. Things a stoic should do shouldn't do.

What sets stoicism apart from the other ancient philosophies, key components of living with stoicism day to day, stoic secrets to success, secrets to resilience, secrets to productivity, a whole bunch of stuff. Plus, since we've already done this course before, you get the office hours from last year. So this is roughly eight hours of video, deep dives, indostosism, plus all the text. And look, it's a live course. And it begins on Tuesday, March 22nd. And all participants will move through the course together at the same pace. We find that these cohorts are a lot more fun. And people get a lot more out of it. So registration is open now, but it closes on Monday, March 21st at midnight. So we'd love to have you sign up at dailysteoic.com-101.

I love history. I love ancient history the most. I just love touching that immensity, like some sense that man someone, someone was here a really, really, really long time ago, and you get that obviously in Europe, you walk through Rome or something and you go, oh, the Stoics were here, right? You get that sense. But America doesn't have that sense too often, most commonly, we think of America at 1600s or 1700s, but of course people have been here a lot longer than that.

And that's what I am talking to my guest today about. Dr. Jennifer Raff is an assistant professor at the University of Kansas in the Department of Anthropology, but she has written an amazing book about the genetic history of America, like how long have people actually been here? And the answer is tens of thousands of years. As she says on the description, many thousands of years ago, people crossed a great land bridge from Siberia into Western Alaska and then dispersed into what is now called America. And until we venture out to other planets, this will remain the last time our species has populated an entirely new place. And this event has been a subject of deep fascination and

controversy. No written records and scant archaeological evidence exist to tell us what happened, or how it took place. But this book does a remarkable job of guessing about exactly that, how it happened and who these people were and what they did and how we know this, which is itself a fascinating subject. We talk about this freed slave who discovered a site in New Mexico that totally upended our understanding of American history, which pushed it back like thousands of years further back than people thought. So my discussion here with Jennifer Raff was one I was very

excited to have and you can check out her new book origin a genetic history of the Americas which debuted on the best seller list this month and I hope you I hope you enjoy this book in this conversation Maybe go find whatever the oldest site is in your state or your country or where you happen to live and There's something deeply humbling and stoic about touching that. Pierre Hadot says, feeling the immensity, the insignificance of yourself in that immensity.

Mark Sirilis talks about running alongside the stars. And I think that's what that practice is and why I wanted to have this discussion. You can follow my guest today at Jennifer Raff. That's two Fs on Twitter. And of course, check out her new book, Origin, A Genetic History of the Americas. So when I was reading the book and about the book, the first thing that popped into my head, because when I read the news article about it, it struck me so much, is those footprints that they discovered in white sands.

You have kids, right? I do, I have one kid, son. What I was thinking when I saw that footprint, because it's like a parental footprints, and then a kid footprint, and then parental footprints, and then kids footprint. It just hit me so hard because it was like,

I've had that exact experience of like, you're walking, you're carrying the kid, and then they're like, I wanna walk. And then you set them down and then they walk for a little bit and then they're like, Mom, your daddy picked me back up and then you're just doing this over and over again. And it just really hit me, because obviously 20,000 years is an incredibly long amount of time.

And yet, that is such a uniquely human experience that's documented in just a handful of footprints, but it's so close to my experience, it just really struck me. Yeah, same. I'd seen a copy, sorry, I knew about the paper, I knew it was coming. We've been talking about it with some of the paper's authors. We were thinking about, okay, how can this fit into the models that we know of genetics, right?

And it was a little skeptical. I thought, okay, you know, maybe these the dates are right, who knows, we'll have to think about this, we'll have to see what the archaeologist community says. And then I saw the paper and I saw the photo of these footprints and it was just, it just hit me in the face. I was like, wow, I almost started crying. And that's kind of embarrassing to say, but you really did. I was so shocked by how visceral I felt about these footprints, how incredibly recent they were, this connection to the past, it was so tangible. And just looking at these photos, and I'm sure that many people, if you go look at them,

you'll get the same experience. And it's not just the adults interacting with the kids, as you say, but these footprints tell so many different stories. There are kids interacting with other kids, like there's some areas where no adults are present. It's just kids doing kids stuff. And there's another part of the trackways where you can see a person, and I can't remember now, whether it's an adult of some kind, I don't know if it's a man or a woman, walking across the

landscape. And then in their path is crossed, crosses like a mastodon, crosses behind it. I was in a giant sloth or something. Maybe it was a sloth. Was it a sloth? It might have been a sloth. You're right. And it's like one of the megafauna crosses the tracks shortly after they pass through

that. And then on the return journey, the person walks across the sloths, tracks again. I mean, it's incredible. These creatures are all hanging out on the landscape. These now extinct creatures and people are just walking around and seeing them and it's just amazing to me. So I don't know, I don't think there's been a site that's excited me quite so much as White Sans in a long time.

Yeah, it'd be like, you take your kids out for a walk and then you see a deer and you're like, look at the deer and you're like, you know, like it's just, it's amazing that 20,000 years can be shrunk down into essentially an indistinguishable experience from the present moment. Yeah, yeah. And yet, at the same time, be such an alien landscape, right?

All these extinct animals are just running around, doing their thing, and humans are living with them. It's just amazing. I think there's a humility in it, too too because we think we're so special and so modern and so different than everything that occurred in the past. And then yeah, you realize that humans are humans and there's this long tradition that we hail from. Yeah, exactly.

Exactly. I feel sometimes it's more approachable in the recent past, right? long tradition that we hail from. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I feel sometimes it's more approachable in the recent past, so you look at, let's say, I don't know, a thousand year structures, and you're like, wow, my mind is blown by how old this is. And yet, they lived the way we did in some ways, but looking back this far into the past,

it's a totally different world, and yet so similar, in so many ways. It really is incredible. That's what I love world and yet so similar in so many ways. It really is incredible. That's what I love about this field so much. Yeah, I was watching a YouTube video last night, actually, with my son. It was this, who I'm going to have on the podcast, his name is Steve Rinella. He was hunting the Big Bend, near Big Bend National Park. And he's walking around.

He's looking for, he's overnight camping, so he's looking for his overnight camping so he's looking for this place to camp and he finds this little cave and he gets into the cave and he notices that the cave is already sort of black with suit like someone else's had a fire there and he goes oh you know I bet someone else is another hunter has stayed here and then he finds like some arrowheads and some stone tools and then he sees petroglyphs on the walls. And he realizes that, you know, someone 500 years ago or a thousand years ago, or could be 20,000 years ago, was in the exact spot doing the exact same thing as him.

That's an amazing experience to realize that. Yeah. I'm sure you've had some of those. How do you, I know you're not always in the field, but when you touch that stuff in the flesh, what do you feel? Oh gosh, it's hard to say. I am, you know, it's different every time, but I guess I'm thinking about when I was in Alaska working up in at a cemetery called the

Novok cemetery and with Dr. Ann Jensen who's an archaeologist and we were trying to locate the burials of ancestors to the present day, people who live in the village of, sorry, I guess that's actually a city. It would be epic. That was my best attempt at pronunciation. It used to be called Barrow. It was when I lived there, or when I was working there for a couple of summers.

And I was helping excavate this site, and I say helping I was not, I'm not a particularly talented excavator, so I was just doing what I could. And at was not, you know, I'm not a particularly talented excavator. So I was just doing what I could. And at some point, you know, just casually, I happened to find a bead, a blue bead. I think it was blue or maybe green. And it was, I think, was glass. And I, you know, found it and asked the archaeologist, oh, what's, you know, what's this all about?

And she or, or actually, I think it was one of the elders was on site that day. And he said, oh, that's worth an entire dog sled team. The ancestors used to trade these. And it was essentially currency. And that was really incredible, just that connection and his knowledge of that history and seeing it for the first time, or seeing it and holding it in my hand,

it was really amazing. So, I would say that in the limited experiences I have had excavating myself, it's always just a feeling of awe and wonder and connection, but the feeling is slightly different every time. It just depends on the context, I guess. Yeah, there's some, it's like, I heard this great expression about, these are for people who are alive usually,

but like historical wormholes. Like when you touch someone, like I met a guy in Austin who was, he died two years ago, but he was 112 when he died. And sorry, did I freeze? I don't know if you can hear me. Yeah, I can do it. There's a glitch Sorry, a glitch for a second, but so I met this man in Austin before he died He was 112 so you're talking to someone who was born in 1906 and then you kind of think about who is alive

Like who was the oldest person that they met early in their life and you you realize like how connected you get to the past It feels like some of these sort of discoveries, whether it's these footprints or whatever. It's like this wormhole where you touch 20,000 years ago or you touch this beat and you think about like, who was the person that had this, right? What were they doing? What was important to them? What were their values? Did they love this child that they were picking up or were they exhausted because they'd kept

them up all night? You know, just all these sort of, it's like a wormhole, but it's also this kind of empathetic device where suddenly you're thrust into an incomprehensibly distant experience from your own. Yeah, that's really well put. I like that expression, historical wormhole. I may steal it. It's really good.

Yeah, I mean, and I almost feel the same. My grandmother just turned 95 this weekend. And I haven't got to go visit her because of COVID. But she's like that, right? She's like a portal into the past in some ways. And it's really fun to learn about her experiences and things like that. And I think many of us have, are lucky enough to have that

in our families, but in some ways, if you are not indigenous, if you're not native, this is kind of a foreign land to you, right, to understand the past. If you're an indigenous person, as I understand it, talking to my colleagues, this is present, this is their history, it's living history, it's not so far away, they know this history extremely well and they have their own traditions about this

and it's not strange or exotic at all, it's their history. And so I try to be mindful of this as the same time as I'm, wow, this is so cool, I also need to understand that I'm a visitor here. I'm an outsider. Right, yeah, we're a tourist or a bystander to a tradition that when you understand what you're talking about in the book,

you realize far predates all of us. We have this sense of American history being when the Europeans arrived here, as if that's when it started, when of course, it was tens of thousands of years old at this point. Yeah, and I tried to take myself outside of that mindset because you're right, that's what I learned in school. And one of the things that I tried to do was, you know, being very deliberate

with my word choices. So, you know, in archaeology, they make a distinction between history, which is written word and prehistory. I try not to do that because the majority of indigenous nations and tribes, especially the northern ones, their histories are told orally. They're recounted orally and preserved orally, and I don't think that makes them any less historical than the written word. So I take prehistory out of my vocabulary as much as I can, which I think may annoy some of my archaeological colleagues. I'm sorry which I think may annoy some of my archaeological colleagues, I'm sorry about that, but I don't want to, I don't want to give people the false impression that these early histories are anything, any less important than present day histories or more recent histories. And I think, you know, in archaeology we use these terms very specific ways. They have very specific definitions.

But I think that's not true for the average reader. And really my focus on the book was for the average reader. So that's kind of one of the choices I made. But there are things like that throughout the book that I tried to do to convey this. It's a challenge. So speaking of this idea of making this knowledge accessible to the everyday reader, what do you think understanding where we come from, like understanding the actual sort of origins of life on this continent, what does that do for the average person?

Like, what am I, I don't want to say what am I supposed to do with this information, but how should this information change my understanding of You know where I live or what I do. What do you think about that? Um So a couple of things I think that Native Americans are quite There's a lot of erasure that goes on in our society. And I really am speaking about the United States mostly, this is my experience and what I know the most, although I think it's

different in different countries in the Americas, but there's a lot of indigenous erasure of the actual indigenous peoples. And there's a lot of portrayal of Native Americans as being in the past or extinct, right? Instead of living, breathing members of our society today, right? We tend to think of, you know, Native Americans as living in the past, extinct now. And that is a problem. And I think it's actually, you know, there's no one solution to this, but I think one of the solutions is to really understand just how long indigenous peoples have been living on these continents. And to understand that these histories are much older and that

Europeans and European Americans, your Americans, are relative newcomers here. And when you do that, it kind of flips history on its head because you think instead of history beginning with the founding fathers or whatever, you really say, oh my gosh, okay, yes, these people, these colonizers did some really foundational work in laying this democracy and really important writing and really important contributions to natural history and a bunch of subjects, but they also massacred the indigenous inhabitants here. So you've got to understand history and all of its complexity. And that really gives you a different perspective, I think, as a non-native person, on who you are,

what your role is, your relationship to other people, your relationship to indigenous peoples. And I think that's an important perspective to have. And it's not one that is really taught in school very much, at least to younger people. And so one thing I'm hoping is that people can understand a bit more about the relevance of how we do research, how we talk about indigenous peoples as scientists by understanding kind of this the depth of this history. I don't know if that makes any sense, but raising kids can be one of the greatest rewards of a parent's life. But come on, someday, parenting is unbearable. I love my kid, but is a new parenting podcast from Wondry that shares a refreshingly honest

and insightful take on parenting. Hosted by myself, Megan Galey, Chris Garcia, and Kurt Brown-Oller, we will be your resident not-so-expert experts. Each week we'll share a parenting story that'll have you laughing, nodding and thinking. Oh yeah, I have absolutely been there. We'll talk about what went right and wrong. What would we do differently? And the next time you step on yet another stray Lego in the middle of the night, you'll

feel less alone. So if you like to laugh with us as we talk about the hardest job in the world, listen to, I love my kid, but wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on the Amazon Music or Wondery app. It makes total sense. And it's actually much more exciting, I feel like. Like I was reading Jack Weatherford's book, Indian Givers, which I understand has

some, you know, is the most politically correct book. It's like 40 years old now. But anyways, he was talking about even the founding fathers that the articles of Confederation comes, that Benjamin Franklin gets this idea from the confederated tribes that were in the Northeast when America starts. And so even just the idea that, yeah, we have this idea that the founding fathers come here and create democracy, as opposed to the more interesting idea, which is that European ideas meet indigenous ideas and create something that had never before existed, right?

So it's not just racist and incorrect, right? This view of history that we have, but it closes us off from all these sources of learning and history and story and tradition that we could all benefit from. Absolutely, I think that this is so important and tradition that we could all benefit from. Absolutely. I think that this is so important. And I hope that, you know, obviously,

when you look at the popularity of media right now on this ancient history and the stories of lost cities and lost civilizations, and it's all on the history channel, it's all nonsense the history channel. It's all nonsense. And it's extremely frustrating to me, sometimes as a professional working in this area, the prevalence of pseudoscience and these sort of alternative histories,

it drives me absolutely bonkers. Because as you say, the real story is so exciting and so important and there's so much rich and important history here, that I really want people, the average reader to get a sense for that and not need these silly other alternative stories to enrich their lives, right? The real history is even more exciting.

And it's like eating a really rich dinner as opposed to eating sugar cookies all the time, right? Well, you sort of talk about that, right? That the sort of fascination we have with the law civilizations is almost itself the sort of racist refusal to see the civilizations that were there, that were incredible, that we either destroyed or refused to study close enough to understand their unique take on civilization. It's like we're refusing to look at something because to look at something would force us to accept certain things.

So we'd rather look for the lost city of Atlantis than these enormous civilizations, the millions of people that we know for a fact were spread out all of her North America. Right. I don't think that most people realize this, but they definitely by sort of accepting these pseudo, these alternative histories, I'm using air quotes alternative, that by accepting them, they're buying into this really long tradition in the United States specifically of inserting X in the place of Indigenous ancestors, where X could be ancient

Phoenicians, ancient Samarians, ancient Israelites, ancient Irish monks, whatever it is, anything as long as it's not actually Native Americans, get slotted in aliens even, right? Get slotted in as the true ancient law civilization and that then is responsible for all the amazing achievements. That has been going on since Europeans first came to the Americans, right? Since they've started colonialism, they have been looking for, they started looking for somebody else to have done all, to have created all this history and all these monuments and this beautiful artwork. And anybody but the ancestors of Native Americans because they were racist, they didn't believe that the ancestors of Native Americans could have made these things. But also, if it was somebody else, especially if it was a European group, that's very convenient

for making claims to the lands that they wanted. So, people don't, I don't think people realize this, I don't think that most people are inherently wanting to buy into racist narratives, but it is an old racist and colonialist trope, and it's unfortunate. It is an old racist and colonialist trope and it's unfortunate. Yeah, no, I think it's the the less you think of the ancient civilizations and then the more modern Native Americans, the less guilt you have to feel about what happened to them or the less grievous the crimes or genocide that was done to them has to look historically. I feel like that's the cognitive dissonance, right? It's like if we don't, if we accept them as being minor or uncivilized or an insert any number of stereotypes or conceits, then we don't have to wrestle with the

enormity of what happened over 400 years. Yeah, I mean, that's very true. Simply put, that is the case. And I anticipate that a lot of the critiques I'm going to get about this book and and I'm expecting these are going to be, oh, she's too woke. Oh, she's, you know, and I'm fine with are going to be, oh, she's too woke, oh, she's saying, you know. And I'm fine with that because this is the history. You cannot dispute that this is what happened. And it is far better if we want to do better, if we want to do science in a better way,

if we want to understand history in a more accurate way, we have to accept this. We being non-native people's obviously indigenous peoples know this very well. And we have to understand this history and we have to accept it. We have to learn from it and the lessons that we can take from it and how to do research better and how to be living in the Americas in a better way, be living in the Americas in a better way, in a more compassionate, to more engaged way, and to really understand our histories

in a more accurate way. So. No, and you make a very strong argument in the book that this is, there's sort of a moral reason for doing it, and an intellectual reason for doing it, but it also strikes me, there's just like a self-interested reason for doing it. Like I remember I was reading about

the first Europeans who come into the Gulf of Mexico and so that you know that they limp into America, you know, they're at the end of their supplies, they're all dying of scurvy, you know, they've run out of their stores and And they see these Native Americans on the coast who are tall and healthy and don't have to work super hard. And the first people are like, you gotta eat some of the shellfish. Like they're looking at these like lobsters and oysters, all the stuff that grows,

that grew then in the Gulf of Mexico. And the colonists were like, and the explorers were like, no, that's disgusting. You can't eat that. And they like literally prefer to die than to try to like learn from what these people would lived here for thousands of years for doing. And it does feel like, again,

but by closing ourselves off to this understanding, you're not just like doing something that's wrong or incorrect, but you're also preventing yourself from learning from a tradition that survived for thousands of years for a reason, because there's validity in it or insights into it or, you know, that it's not a perfect civilization, but you punish yourself by refusing to see what's in front of you. I guess is what I'm saying. Yeah, I think that's, there's a lot of wisdom in that. I think that, you know, especially, and this is, we're wandering outside my area of expertise. So I'm going to pull myself back in a minute.

But I think there is lots to be learned about environmental stewardship and relationships with land. From the indigenous peoples who have been here for you know maybe 20,000 years So perhaps we might you know we none native people might take a step back and listen more than we talk So walk me through the broad strokes of the origins that I know I'm asking you to give me the entire history of of the origins that I know I'm asking you to give me the entire history of people's now on this continent, but as you look at the data, what is it that we need to understand? Yeah, okay. So I think about this, well, okay, so the first thing you need to understand is that this is all going to be incorrect in a few years, maybe even this year, because there's going to be, there's going to be a study published, there's going to be new evidence found.

White Sans is still being excavated, right? So what I'm going to tell you right now is at this moment in time, or rather, last November when I stopped working on the book, is when we know that. Okay. So from genetics, we know that we think we know that. Okay. So from genetics, we know that we think we know that Native Americans are descended from two, I was a broadly speaking populations in Eurasia. One of them was a population that lived in what's now

northeastern Siberia and then also a bit north through north and central Siberia. And so we called this ancient population who lived there during the upper paleolithic. So starting around 39,000 years to about 30,000 years and somewhere in there, this group we call the ancient north Siberians. So we've got the ancient East Asians, ancient north Siberians, upper paleolithic, it's cold, it's dry. At some point they come together and they mingle. And out of the children

that result from this, this contact produce several different branches of populations. And one of those branches becomes ancestral to Native Americans. That branch is isolated for a period of a few thousand years. We don't know exactly where. In my book, I make the case for potentially one place that we can look would be the southern coast of what would have been the bearing land bridge. Of course, now it's underwater. But at the height of the last glacial maximum, which was this period of global coldness and dryness, that land bridge was obviously up, it was accessible, it was land, it was land connecting the continents,

and most of it was rather inhospitable, but one of the places that paleoenvironmental reconstructions has shown us could have been a place for people to live, Was this the southern coast of the central region because of ocean currents, it would have been warmer, wetter, plant life, animal life, it would have been a decent place to live relatively speaking. And so maybe this population, the San Sustor population, was isolated there. We don't really know for sure. We need some archeological ground truthing to kind of tell us. And of course it's underwater so that presents

challenges. Anyway, during this period of isolation which is happens to coincide with the maximum of the last-slacial maximum, right? So it's about 20,000 years-ish or so. this population begins splitting into some branches. And again, these are things we can only detect genetically. We don't really know if these are separate populations, if they're separate cultures, if you know what the deal is, what the relationship is here. But we see one group of descendants stays in Alaska and we call them confusingly the ancient Bringians. The other group then gives rise to population south of the ice sheep that cover Canada during the LGM. And that branch basically we, moves down the west coast, possibly.

Sometime between 22, 18,000 years ago, 17,000 years ago, when that area becomes accessible, they move down and then begin to split into different major population branches that constitute the major subdivisions of Native Americans that we see today. Genetic subdivisions. There are more complex aspects of this, so there are some really interesting findings recently showing perhaps an even older branch of ancestry that's present in as far as we know right now, South Americans. And that's referred to by geneticists as population of Y. What's really interesting

about this strain of ancestry is that it is related to present day peoples of Australasia. So regions and there. It's not consistent. The distribution of this ancestry is not consistent with a trans-Pacific migration by boat, right? Which is the normal thing everybody would be like, okay, people came by boat across. It doesn't seem to be the case, at least genetically.

It might be an indication that people were in the Americas. There was another population in the Americas earlier than this major migration event that I just talked about. And that's one working hypothesis that there were people there earlier. They may have been the ones responsible for making those footprints at White Sands. We don't know. But it's quite... I'm one of those people who's really on board

with the possibility that there was an even earlier migration of ancestors to the Americas. We just don't really know much right now. And one of the reasons for that is we don't have a lot of genomes from a lot of populations across the Americas. There are many groups who are disinclined to work with geneticists. For the reasons we've been talking about,

first half of this, right, that there's been this really problematic history of exploitation. So until that is resolved, we don't really know the full extent of genetic diversity in the Americas, and we can't really know the complete picture of history. But those are kind of broad strokes, what we know right now. And so when you say that, you know, a year from now or 10 years from now, this will all be changed or different based on the information. What it sounds like what you're saying is almost certainly we'll get moved back further and further the more we learn.

I think so, or at least it'll get more and more complicated the model, right? In the history of genetic study of the people of the Americas, which has been going on for quite some time, Earlier models were extremely simple and really we were, they were really based only on the mitochondrial genome, which is a materially inherited genome. That was much easier, is much easier to get from ancient sources than the nuclear genome or what's in your chromosomes. And that provides a very limited window into the past. It's accurate. You do get, you know, good information about population history from mitochondrial DNA, but it's limited because it's just the history of you and your mother and her mother and her mother and her mother,

and so on. That excludes a lot of people. And so those early models, or earlier models in the, like late 90s, early 2000s,, early 2000s, they were very simple. There was mostly arguments about, okay, was there one wave of migration, were there three waves of migration, and when did that happen? They weren't wrong necessarily, but they were simple. And as nuclear DNA became accessible to us, I say us, but it's mostly like these big, big labs that are doing most of this work. So these stories got more and more complex. We see these, this population structure,

so these different branches of populations that we had no idea existed, because we didn't have a good understanding of the total genetic variation in a population, and that limits what kinds of analyses you can do and what kinds of models you can create. And we're coming up against a limit now, again, where we've got huge swaths of geography, from which we have no genomes. And that's understandable.

It also means we have to accept that our models are limited. I think based on the evidence of white sands, if it holds up, right? And there's a very active discussion about this in archaeology right now. Are the dating methods accurate? You know, there's not everybody is on board with white sands. So, so we have to wait and see. But if it holds up, evidence of white sands and potentially these traces of maybe earlier populations, that we'll see confirmation of that in the future

with more data or not, that's the beauty of science, right? Well, I was also reading, I guess this is sort of the earlier narrative, which is, which was sort of, this is when science gets turned on his head in a different site in New Mexico. This is the Clovis site. And what's the guy's name, Mick Junkin? George Mick Junkin.

So just one guy sort of walking through this like Canyon in New Mexico discovers a site that totally changes our understanding of how long we've been here. Yeah, I really, really love that story. And I actually saw there's been a couple of new details at the store that I found out just today from an article on Atlas Obscura of All Places. But yeah, George McJunkin was a cowboy who was born in

slave in Texas, right before, like, 10 years before the Civil War. And he became free after the Civil War and took up the life of a cowboy. And there's this really wonderful picture of him that you can find easily on his Wikipedia page or I have it in my book where he's sitting on a horse and I recently, I've recently started taking horseback rating lessons.

So I'm so envious of his beautiful posture. I'm just like, wow, look at that. So he was an incredible cowboy and horsebreaker, renowned horsebreaker, and he traded horse breaking lessons and riding lessons for, for reading lessons. And he became a voracious reader and was obsessed with natural history. And so all of this natural history he taught himself and this curiosity that he had as he was going about his, you know, ranching duties, his cowboy duties, he encountered these remains of, most people would have just thought, oh, it's just another dead cow, but he realized that these were,

this was not a cow, this wasn't a living bison, this was something different, it was extinct, and he investigated it, took some of the bones, tried to get other people interested in it for something like 14 years, he tried to get scholars to come visit the site, and nobody would do it until after he died and then the site was visited and they realized that not only were there extinct

plyce to sea-naged pison here but also they eventually found stone tools, stone projectile points, the Fulsome Points, named after the town nearby. And this association between these Fulsome Points and these extinct Pleistocene animals demonstrated that people were in the Americas much older than 5,000 years ago, which was the then prevailing idea. And so that was really the start of a paradigm shift in the history of archaeology to develop this model. What I refer to as Clovis, lots of us refer to as Clovis first, this model that dominated much of 20th century archaeology, but has since been, you know, disproven by, in my opinion, anyway, by the discovery of older than Clovis sites and genetics as well.

It's kind of this timeless theme, right? We have our model, our framework for seeing the world and someone discovers something that pricks at that or potentially undermines it or just challenges it. And we again refuse to see it often at our peril. For years and years and years, we just can't change our minds and we just can't integrate new information. As if, again, as if, not that it really matters, but I mean, it doesn't change whether it's

5,000 years or 20,000 years, it's just a fact, right? It doesn't, it doesn't, it's no skin off your back, I guess is what I'm saying. You know, like, what we're so close minded about stuff that we should actually be fascinated with and really interested in trying to hear these different, different, potentially paradigm-shifting ideas. Absolutely. And my favorite archaeologists, the ones who I love to work with

again and again, are the ones who are just totally excited about a new finding like this. And they're just like, oh wow, okay. All right, if we provisionally accept that this is true, then what do we do with that? Right? And that's where you really get to have fun. That's where science becomes really fun. And so, but it is all too easy to, I think, get hung up on your favorite model. I mean, I've been guilty of this too. And so I've been trying very hard to consciously distance myself from that mindset, right? So what I talk about in the book is not my model. These are models that other people have developed.

I am talking about them. I try to cover all of them fairly, as fairly as possible. I mean, except for the pseudoscientific ones. And I'm sure I'm going to get lots of people yelling at me about that, but really, there's no evidence. So, but, and that's why I say very, very bluntly in the book. This book is going to be out of date in a few years, right? It may even be out of date by the time people read it, depending on what gets published in the scientific literature. But it's true at the time it was written, this is what we think, and there's a lot of different perspectives on the past, depending on what kind of evidence you prioritize. And, you know, that's where it is. And so by saying, okay, here you go, this is

what we've got. Use it to understand up until this point, you know, then we can kind of, I hope, be more open minded about accepting evidence that comes in in the future. Yeah, it's amazing to the degree to which certainty prevented these people from seeing interesting things. One of my favorite stoke quotes is, it's impossible to learn that

which you think you already know. And when you are convinced this is the model, then anything that doesn't confirm the model is incorrect, when really these should be independent variables and you should be able to see them, your model is irrelevant. What matters is what is the new fact set? Yeah, I have a colleague, a senior colleague who has been there for all of us, seeing this

arc of history, not all of it, but you know, and he asked not to be named, I'm sorry, I won't, but because this quote is a bit provocative, but he said, the attitude all too often is we know the answer, don't bother us with data. And unfortunately, it's true. Now, I don't wanna say that all archaeologists are like that because that's not here. They are not. There are a few people who are resistant to new ideas,

but for the most part, I think what's going on in both archaeology and genetics is that we have this very rigorous way of assessing evidence, and we apply that rigor, and there's kind of a natural conservatism. And, you know, okay, if there's a new exciting finding, what supports it? You know, you need to have some pretty good backing for that, which is, I think, what's going on really with white sands right now.

New exciting finding. Clearly these are human footprints, no question. The real question is just the dates. And are the methods used for obtaining these dates? Are they valid? Can we support them? Because there is some controversy about marine reservoir effects

and all this technical stuff. And so I'm, you know, I'm provisionally accepting it because I'm very excited about it. And so I'm using that as to try to understand, okay, what are some new models that we can think of? But, you know, always trying to be open to the possibility that this could be wrong. These dates could be wrong. Maybe it wasn't 20,000 years. Maybe it was more like 15,000 years, and that is more in line with the rest of the evidence that we see. Same thing with, you know, there's this acclaim of this extremely old site, 130,000 years ago, in California, the Ossuuri Mastodon site. And that's very controversial as well. And it was, but it was published, I think, in nature. I mean, it was a big, in a big journal.

And, you know, I'm much worse, I'm not a sold on that one, because it's not clear that there were humans involved in the breaking of these bones or, you know, the movement of these rocks into the area, they could be explained by natural processes, right? And so when I kind of look at both of these sites, it compares into each other and say, okay, why do I favor this one and not this one? Is it just because I believe that this is more likely in terms of dates? It's really more about the strength of the evidence of, you know, these are clearly human footprints versus,

okay, these green stick fractures, maybe there are caused by people, but maybe they're caused by construction equipment, right? But time will tell, right? More evidence will come out that will show us one way or the other, and that's reassuring that I like the scientific process in that way. Well, isn't there a big difference between going,

I need to see more evidence about this or I question some of the research methodologies or whatever, and then what we often do, or what we've historically done for thousands of years, is going, that can't be true because X. That can't be true because the Bible says X. Or that can't be true because actually everyone knows human beings have been here only since this, right? There's a difference between,

I'm skeptical about that and here's what you would need to do to prove that to me. And that can't be true because I already know this other thing. Yeah, absolutely. The thing I try to do with myself, it's a sort of a self-discipline, right? Yeah, this is very stoic, right? What evidence would change my mind about that, right? So let's take, for example, this idea

that's been floating around in archaeology for a while, it's very, it's pretty fringe, but there are some legitimate archaeologists who believe this. That Clovis points, these really beautiful, fluted points, were made actually by salutarians, which is a culture in Europe, right, in Western Europe, and that it was salutarians who crossed this massive ice sheet across the Atlantic and came to North America that were the at least contributed to the original people in the Americans. Right? You know, I never bought

that idea never ever ever. And it's because archaeology. And now I'm not an archaeologist. I'm not a lithic specialist, but ones who I have talked to say, okay, this is hinging on this technique called overshot flaking that that we see both in solitary and tools, and we also see in Clovis tools. But that doesn't necessarily mean, it doesn't have to be explained by an ancestor descendant relationship, right? This could have been invented independently in the Americas, it was totally fine. Genetically, we see no evidence for any European contributions to Native American genomes

at this point. So I see the weight of evidence much way, way, way against this, but what would change my mind, right? That's what I got to say, right? Because what if, you know, I don't want to just dismiss things without coming up with that idea. And in this case, it would be if we found evidence of European DNA or European DNA, I hate to simplify it over simplify it like that. But if we found evidence of a European genetic contribution to pre-contact Native Americans back then and we could trace it genetically to this group, then okay fine, I would change my mind. Put that back.

Sure. But until I do, I'm just not sold on it. So, same thing with Suridi, like what would change my mind if we found more sites like that, I think would be, would be a fear. Well, getting a little bit more personal, I was reading that you train in martial arts, you did for a long time.

How has that changed, or how has that informed how you pursue your academic work? I imagine the world views influence each other. Yeah, they do. More than I realize, I think. I have been on hiatus from training for far too long, mostly because of this book and because I have a child. And now the pandemic.

But hopefully those things are changing. I cannot wait to get back on the mats. It's a part of my life that I really deeply miss. I think as far as the ways it's influenced me, you would think that being a martial artist or specifically training and mixed martial arts and kickboxing and jujitsu would make you more aggressive, more assertive, more,

I don't know, the stereotypes. And it's actually the opposite in my case. So I have found, you know, sort of martial arts for me in parts, a sort of quiet confidence, but never, but it makes me less violent than then. Sure. I would be otherwise. Because you're more secure in yourself, probably. Yeah, yeah. I mean, right now in yourself, probably. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, right now, again, just to qualify, just because I haven't been training, that security has been gradually eroding and it's kind of depressing, actually. But it really has given me that sort of center that I really have valued in myself and a much more sort of gentle, non-confrontational approach. It's kind of funny.

But at the same time, I don't back down if it comes to it, right? So, you know, if I get white supremacists or whatever, when they... Every now and then, I have it easier than a lot of people, a lot of women on the internet. But every now and then, they sort of get into a tussle with me and I just don't, it doesn't bother me as much as it would have otherwise, I think. But one of the most important lessons that I've learned from martial arts and from my coaches, both in martial arts and my conditioning coaches, at Jim Jones and other places is the hard work and in a sound so cliche, right? But you confront yourself in the gym every time you're on the mat, every time you're training at an extreme level.

And doing that again and again gives you again a value, a value and appreciation for how much hard work you're capable of doing and how much the little things add up. So in writing this book, which is one of the hardest things I've done since my dissertation, probably even harder than my dissertation, honestly, just showing up at my desk again and again no matter how I felt to just sit down and even if all I wrote was a paragraph that day, I tried to make it a good paragraph and I kept coming back and kept doing it. And it added up eventually. You know, there's a little 25-minute blocks of writing really do add up and I could not

have done that if I didn't know that I was capable of it already from physical training. Yeah, I feel like also having a physical discipline balances out the various cerebral or cognitive discipline, and they, but they fuel each other, right? So to be able to like, you know, you're working on a book and it's not going well or it's going slowly, to go be able to do this physical thing that you can feel yourself getting better at, that you can put yourself into, it's like a way to have a win every day. Absolutely. And then, which is, you know, I think for my next book, if I write one, I'm definitely

going to maintain my training while doing it. It was just the perfect storm of circumstances of having a small child and also this, and also going up for 10 years and all in the pandemic, right? All those things together made it impossible for me to train. But I think my life would be better if I was training while writing. But there's one other thing that training taught me, a really valuable lesson that is not immediately obvious.

It took a while for me to realize, which was who I write for. So when you're writing for the public and you're trying to convey complex technical information in a way that is accessible, finding your voice or who you're writing for, the imaginary person in your head is so critical and it took me a while, but I figured it out kind of in my blogging phase. The person I write for was, is an imaginary MMA fighter who maybe has, you know, his high school education, maybe a little bit of college, loves MMA, loves training curious about the scientific world,

but doesn't necessarily have that advanced degree. And I write for that person. And I know many people like that through, especially through my sister's MMA connection, she was a professional fighter. She's retired now, but she fought for the UFC and I would go and train with her colleagues. that through, especially through my sisters MMA connection, she was a professional fighter. She's retired now, but she fought for the UFC and I would go and train with her colleagues. And I write for those people, I write for that person. And that seems to hit the right spot.

Yes. So, yeah. No, I know exactly what you're talking about. From the training that I've done and then the worlds that I'm in, it's like when you manage to reach someone who ordinarily, or maybe they straight up tell you they're like, I've never read, I have a read of books in high school, or I thought this would be so boring, or I thought this had no bearing or influence on my life at all, and then they're like, oh, I did it. I actually

did what I was supposed to do, which is I made this thing that's very interesting to me that I would obsess and nerd out about all the little details. I managed to make that accessible and practical and entertaining to someone who has none of those predilections. Yes, yes, exactly. It's a very satisfying feeling when you've accomplished that and very frustrating when you realize that you haven't. So we keep working. Yeah. No, and also disappointing that that that is not the norm, right? That the vast majority of the work in one's industry or area or specialty has absolutely zero impact on people's lives. You know what I mean?

That we're in our little bubble and what a shame that is. Yeah, and it is the disconnect that the non-specialists have from the archaeological, from the genetics literature, at least in my discipline, is disappointing because people are hungry to learn this stuff. People want to know what happened. They're fascinated by this history. And it is a shame that they can't access this,

either physically because there's a paywall or understand it because of the technical jargon that we use. And there's a reason for this jargon, we have to use it. I really feel for people who want to read this and want to learn it. There are some incredible writers in my field or in archaeology who do a great job of writing about this in an accessible way. I'm sorry that they're not getting more attention because they're outstanding. I'm just kind of, I don't know, I would like

to see more of that. I would like to see more attention being focused on the people who are getting away. We shouldn't just be talking to each other. We should be trying to talk to, yes, totally. Yeah, exactly. So the last thing I wanted to talk to you about it it sort of goes to what you were talking about of what do I need to see that would change my mind or what you know how do you deal with challenging information and I had actually read this when it first came out because it sort of spread and I also have young children but you were unfortunately very

prescient in the piece that you wrote, was it 2018 or 2019 about children's vaccines? Oh, yeah. And the anti-vax movement. I don't think anyone could have foreseen just generally how destructive that movement would be across society. But how would be a cross-society. But how do you think about that now? You know, on the other side of a two-year pandemic that's killed millions of people, this sort of, it's not just anti-scientific, it's more than that.

But it comes from a place of both ignorance and fear and then deliberate misinformation. But I just thought we'd kick that around a little bit. Yeah, I feel just incredible sadness. I mean, I know of at least one person who died because he did not get vaccinated. And I had a conversation with him about vaccination and it didn't go well.

And I feel like, oh, I should have tried harder. I should have kept talking to him, you know. But people are not receptive when their minds are poisoned by this rhetoric. And it really is, I don't blame regular folks who are more vaccinated or afraid of vaccines or resistant to vaccination. I blame the leaders of this movement

and they've been around for as you say a long time. Far longer than I was writing. I took a haidus from blogging and I haven't written about vaccines for the entirety of this pandemic and now I'm really regretting it because I think, well, what if I could have changed somebody's mind by writing more about it. At the time I was, you know, I've been really overwhelmed over the last couple of years and so I had to step back from blogging but really overwhelmed over the last couple of years and so I had to step back from blogging but now I really feel guilty of guests about that. I feel like, oh, but at the same time, you know, there were a lot of really, there have been a lot of incredible science writers writing about this exact topic and I look and I see people like Ed Young writing about this and I'm like, okay, he's got this.

Unfortunately, it's been very challenging, but there are people who have far greater expertise and far greater ability at writing working on this subject. And I'm like, well, who am I to write about this? What if I say something wrong? I don't know. I felt very conflicted about this. But mostly I feel sad. I am fortunate that nobody in my family has was that true? Yeah, nobody in my family has died from COVID. A lot of us have gotten it, but none of my relatives have died from it. And we've been really lucky, but that's not the case with everybody. And especially in the period before we had a vaccine, that was so, so scary. I mean, it still is. My son's still not vaccinated. He's only four. And so I'm so, yeah, you get it, right? I'm so frustrated with, you know,

everything and people refusing to wear masks and, and, and closed indoor settings, just because, well, it's over. And I'm like, it's not over. The very least we can do is protect others. And I've been very disappointed in the rhetoric I've seen, and it has gotten so politically polarized. And we call in, my husband did see this coming. He was talking about, and he wrote an article for our blog about the polarization and how wrote an article for our blog about

the polarization and how vaccine anti-vax positions were suddenly tracking along political party lines and how distressing that was and what a problem that could be. And yeah, it turns out that did happen, unfortunately, and very much to our detriment. So I have a lot of conflicting emotions about this and I feel like, you know, part of me feels like, okay, I really maybe I should get back out there and start writing about vaccines again. But then I'm also thinking, well, there are other people who are doing this work and better than I could.

So. No, I mean, look, I think the article you wrote many years ago now are not that many years ago, but a few years ago, now I'm sure it influenced people who are starting to go down a certain rabbit hole and maybe it prevented them, so maybe they made better decisions. And it's still there for anyone who wants to read it. It strikes me as it's kind of related to some of the same trends that we're talking about though, where it's like, it's almost as if people don't want to see certain things because it would force them to do certain things or accept certain things. So the evidence may be overwhelming and it may seem like the costs are very low, but

people don't want to see it because they don't want to have to care or they don't want to have to change or they don't want to have to wrestle with the magnitude of it. I mean, I was thinking about this with a parent with young kids. I think a lot, and I know I have a five-year-old, so I have on both sides of it. The parents I know who have kids who are old enough to be vaccinated but won't do it, it's not that they're anti-vaxx because they themselves are vaccinated, but when you have a frame of reference that you need to go through the world, like, for instance, COVID-19 doesn't affect kids, right? That's the frame of reference that people have because

to have to carry the fear of something happening to your kid is really scary, right? You don't want to, you're sending your kid to school, you have to tell yourself, they're going to be okay, this isn't dangerous, right? And so then once you internalize one frame, to then have to accept another thing that they need to be vaccinated, challenges part of the assumptions of the other frame. And I think it's so hard for us to wrestle with that cognitive dissonance that requires, you know, us to change our minds about things. Yeah. And in this milieu, we're being inundated with terrible, terrible, harmful

information about vaccines, right? And so parents are freaked out. And I really feel for them. I mean, becoming a parent is one of the scariest things I've ever done. And you know, you're constantly obsessing about, what am I doing? What could harm my child? What, you know, am I doing this right? And if you're being told again and again that masks are hurting your kids somehow,

and or that vaccines could be dangerous to your kids, you know, it is, it is understandable that a lot of parents would choose, make the choices that they're making and not realize that the choices are making are far more harmful to their children. But they're being given bad information. So how do we counter that? I think, you know, it really is about it's about community. It's about presenting people with clear, good, reliable information about based on relationships that they trust, so talking to your neighbors, talking to your family members. And it's a long term thing. You know, I have this conversation with this person who's anti-vax. I'm not going to change.

I got to be realistic. I'm sad, but I can't change. I just mind with one conversation. And I don't think, I think it's incredibly frustrating, but it is a slow, deliberate process that I think, you know, we're all kind of, I feel morally obligated to do. Not in a pre-G way, but, you know, just try to show up and be there for my friends and neighbors who have concerns. Yeah, it's like the information is confusing and overwhelming. And then when you introduce contradictory information,

it's even harder. Like I was thinking about this, we took my two kids to Dinosaur Valley State Park here in Texas, which is this where they have footprints of like these 100 million year old dinosaur prints. And so you show that to your kid, he was fascinating, he loved it. But as you drive into the park, there's a creationist museum that sits on the edge of the park that denies the, you know, so, and it presents itself as a dinosaur museum, right? Like you go in and they're like, we're going to tell you all about the dinosaurs, and then it, you know, in bad faith lies to your face over and over and over again. And,

and you just realize going back to the idea of the MMA fighter in the gym who doesn't have time for any of this, how easy it is for those people to get caught in the crossfire and be misled and and and abused or mistreated as a result of that, it's a tragic thing. Especially when so many people you trust are telling you something. Who are you to question that, right? When your purchase and your parents and your teachers

are all saying, oh, this is harmful, who are you to say? Well, Dr. Fauci says, it's just, it's really a lot to ask of people, and it's all very depressing, I can't say. It is, it's tragic, but I think it goes to your point, which is that we need people. So if you're on the fence about it, I hope you do it again, but you need people who can communicate effectively to a lay audience, these really complicated, difficult ideas, whether they're academic or has to do with vaccines,

because otherwise it seeds the field to the people with bad intentions or who are just playing crazy at this point. That's true, yeah. And we can't let that persist, right? We always have to kind of push back where we can't. So yeah, that's that's our that's our job, I guess. Well, this was this was an honor to talk. I'm really excited about all the all the things you have me thinking about and I'm

hoping we're going to do a road trip and visit some of these places in New Mexico with the kids next time. Oh, thank you. Yeah, this has been wonderful. And I will be in Texas probably in a few weeks, so I can't wait. Yeah. It makes me nostalgic thinking about the dinosaur park. And that's so. Yeah, thank you so much for having me on.

I appreciate it. Of course, congrats on the best soloist. And I hope you hit it again. Thank you. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoog podcast. I just wanted to say we so appreciate it. We love serving you. It's an honor.

Please spread the word, tell people about it, and this isn't to sell anything. I just wanted to say thank you. Hey, Prime Members! You can listen to the Daily Stoic early and ad-free on Amazon Music, download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad-free with Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts. Thanks for watching.