nasty, brutish & short

No arts, no letters, no society & which is worst of all, continual fear & danger of violent death & the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish & short. — Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)

overuse of hobbes' quote makes citation of it inane, even trite, but it seems a decent jumping-off point for the subject at hand.

the subject at hand is our most ancient precessors &/or ancestors here in the new world, the so-called palæo-indians. since 1996 and the discovery of kennewick man and the ensuing battle over how and why you can repatriate the body of an almost 10k year-old human to a modern tribe for reburial under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), the issue of the palæo-indian peoples has been a sharp one for scientists and laypersons alike.

i'm not going to delve into this issue today except to observe that while we must respect the bones of our dead, and there has been widespread looting of recent ancestral burials by non-native peoples, the situation starts to become ludicrous once you pass, oh, say, 3000 years, and an utterly untenable situation when dealing with the pre-5000 BCE (7k ago) specimens.

*ahem*

the skeletons discovered in north and south america that date back to before 5000 BCE do not resemble those of modern native peoples. in fact, reconstructions of the skulls of these persons using modern techniques used to reconstruct the faces of anonymous murder victims for identification show that, for example, kennewick man looks superficially like patrick stewart. (see top photo; the next one shows a computer-generated image complete with potential hairstyles.) this is not to say kennewick man was european. please do not misunderstand: i merely wish to point out that what we find in the palæo-americas is a wide range of physical appearances, of which there are many highly-distinct groups, none of which close onto modern native types.

in fact, there are more similarities between modern native peoples of the new world and any other group than between the palæo-indian groups and the post-5000 BCE populations. it seems the earliest settlers of the new world were independent and variable ethnic groups that arrived from asia, perhaps in north america most closely related to the prehistoric jomon people of japan (such as the yemishi, the 'native' people of the main character of princess mononoke) and premodern ainu. overwhelmingly large noses, tiny faces and long skulls, as well as long limbs showing they had not adapted to cold environments over time, are the commonalities in north america; in south america, we find an entirely separate norm, one that closes in on the populations of certain subsaharan african groups (which is also not a suggestion that the new world was colonised from africa).

genetics and DNA demonstrate that there remain previously unexpected mtDNA groups in modern native populations; one group is only found after 5000 BCE and is far and away the dominant group found in modern native peoples of north america.

here, i come back around again the topic i wish to discuss today in my famously circular zilchist way: nasty, brutish & short. what do the skeletal analyses of these earliest inhabitants of the new world show us?

first, while i do not claim the moral statement of brutish, clearly brutal applies. the bodies of menfolk show a remarkable similarity to those of two other populations: those of the neandertal and those of rodeo riders. this indicates that palæo-indians suffered terrible physical wounds. in the case of palæo-indians, these apparently stem from violent encounters with animals - but in the case of the americas, this was due to an appalling level of interpersonal violence between males rather than from prey animals or playing up close with bulls and horses. james chatters, who first worked on kennewick man's skeleton, describes in his book ancient encounters : kennewick man and the first americans the startling facts:

Injury in 67 percent of the men is a remarkably high proportion for hunting and gathering peoples. In fact, in a study of 209 skeletons from southern France, who died from 10,000 to 100,000 years ago, Mary Brennan, a New York University doctoral student, found just five fractures, only two of which were in anatomically modern humans. (p.208)

[snip]

[T]he pattern suggests that the large, dangerous animals with whom these fellows were interacting violently may have been other men. (p.210)

in fact, kennewick man himself was the worst-injured of all the skeletons:

Although he may have been healthy early in life, Kennewick Man seems to have had a rough time in adolescence and adulthood. I have seen only one man with more injuries. That unfortunate, a modern forensic case, had been in a helicopter crash during the Vietnam War, a head-on collision between a motorcycle and semitruck after he recovered from the war injuries, and at least one later accident. Then he had been beaten to death by a neighbor.

As I looked over Kennewick Man's remains, I saw a man who had been damaged almost as badly. Starting from his head and working down, the defects were a small depression in the left forehead, damaged and healing bone in the left temple, arthritis in the upper neck, a chip off the socket of the shoulder blade, at least six broken ribs, injuries to the left elbow, and finally the most unusual injury, the spear point in his hip. (130)

all of these injuries, mind you, were healed except for the chip off the shoulder, an injury i myself sustained playing varsity men's lacrosse in high school (FYI i received this injury while blocking the charge of an opposing team's prized player, whom we nicknamed "thor" because he was like 6'13" and had a full, flowing yellow beard that reached down his chest. in high school.)

kennewick man lived half his life with a long stone spearpoint running in one side of his hip and out the other, constantly leaking pus and blood out of a well-established 'drainage channel' and undoubtedly stinking like rotting meat. he could not use his left arm well, probably due to nerve damage, and those broken ribs never healed properly, sustained perhaps by the kick of an elk or by a particularly horrific "sabre"-style cut. every breath meant his ribs collapsed inwards along the line of the injury, causing terrible burning pain.

now for short. consider again chatters' writings:

[T]he average age at death for males who had survived early adolescence was thirty-two to forty years. [snip]

Women did not fare so well. Their remains show few bone-damaging injuries or infections but [...] [t]heir average ages at death [...] were between 18.8 and 23.3 years. Only two women, from Gordon Creek and Whitewater Draw, Arizona, appear to have been older than twenty-five, and none reached what we would now call middle age.

I have no idea what killed them but infections - of the bladder, or related to childbirth - are perhaps strong possibilities. It is also possible that the technology of these early peoples placed a disproportionate amount of physical stress on the women. Moving camp frequently, carrying equipment and a young child, cannot have been easy for mothers in the societies of early America. (211)

ah, short. the lives of women sucked, it appeared. their livespans were half that of men.

which leads to a point i've wanted to observe all along: without children, societies cannot survive. it is likely that better-adapted people from similar environments in asia were able to replace the ancients, leaving little evidence they ever existed as a unique population, simply because the population was barely holding its own. estimates of childbirth show that, with infant mortality estimated at 1/4, reproductive success for a woman was about 2.08 children under those circumstances. that's barely sufficient to replace the existing population!

in fact, some believe the high levels of violence among men was directly due to a resource shortage - that specifically being living women.

i can't imagine what life was like for women of that period. certainly in the historic period, we find north american women with significant independent power and respect - there's no coincidence that the birth of the women's movement was in seneca falls, nor that the american democratic system appears to have been influenced by the league of the iroquois. but when women died at twenty and were worth dying over, they must have been treated terribly, as possessions guarded jealously.

so that's it. i wanted to pick up a moment in time, a long one in this case, and lay it out for you: life in palæo-america, between arrival (perhaps 12500 years ago) and the appearance of the "A-haplogroup" modern peoples in about 5000 BCE from a cold, north asian homeland similar to that of north america.

questions, comments?