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The Peopling of the Aleutians
Michael Balter
Few Aleuts still live in their ancestral homeland, but their genetics and archaeology offer a rare glimpse into one of humanity's last great migrations-and into the mysterious peopling of the Americas.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/335/6065/158

Recent genetic studies have tended to throw cold water on the size and decimation of American Indian populations on European contact after 1492. A new study shows the falsehood of this thinking, and perhaps we are back to using the word "conquest" instead of the euphemistic term "contact." The conqueror of the Americas was not Europeans, though, but the diseases they unleashed on Indians.

According to Science magazine, "a study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences pushes the pendulum back toward dramatic population declines. Using both modern and ancient mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) from Native Americans, an international team concludes that about 500 years ago, the number of reproductively active Native American women quickly plunged by half, indicating a 'widespread and severe' contraction in population size."

The study summarized is:  Brendan O'Fallon and Lars Fehren-Schmitz, "Native Americans Experienced a Strong Population Bottleneck Coincident with European Contact," Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (Dec. 5, 2011);  doi:  10.1073/pnas.1112563108.

Critics of the study say that the conclusions may be illusory since we do not have a lot of ancient Native American DNA. But we will never have a lot of Native American DNA. That objection seems lame, and we applaud the new study as at least a step in the right direction of rectifying the true story of the Americas and escaping the apologist blinkers of colonial "Smithsonian-styled" methodologies and mindsets.

 

For Bobbi Bacha of Blue Moon Investigations it was the chance of a lifetime. Attending a celebrity auction more than a decade ago, she put in the winning bid for some blood and semen stained sheets. Nearly 20 years old, but carefully preserved, they were reputed to come from the hotel room where Elvis Presley stayed on his Farewell Tour in 1977. She won't tell us how much she paid but says, "I could have bought a comfortable medium-sized home."

Bacha is no stranger to high-profile mysteries, crimes and misdemeanors. Part Cherokee, she is also of verifiable Melungeon descent. "As you know," she told us from her swanky glass headquarters building in Houston, "Nevil Wayland is my grandfather, and it was he who first coined the term Melungeon." We didn't know, but we soon got an earful. "We believe his wife was the daughter of Chief Red Bird as his son was the Scribe to Chief Red Bird.  Nevil built the first church in Arkansas after the family told of a great war against the Indians and he took them to Arkansas and built Stoney Creek Church. That's the name of it."

Bacha has also been in the movies, or at least her character has. The plucky Texas private eye is played by actress Sela Ward in “Suburban Madness.” This film is based on the real-life story of Clara Harris, convicted February 2003 of killing her cheating orthodontist husband by repeatedly running him over with the family Mercedes. Bacha was an eyewitness.

So what of Bacha's expensive sheet set? She tried for years to extract DNA, to no avail. The discipline had some growing up to do. Finally, she contacted DNA Consultants. Through the efforts of laboratory director Lars Mouritsen in Salt Lake City, we were able to succeed where others had failed. We obtained the first DNA profile, Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA results for what everyone believed was a thirty-year-old sample of the King.

The alleged Elvis sample turned out to have a Cherokee-specific form of mitochondrial haplogroup B on the mother's side and a Scottish Y chromosome on the father's. The autosomal profile confirmed these results with high matches for American Indian populations, Scotland and Spain.

There was not a high match for Melungeon, however, or Jewish . . . but wait! You'll have to read the whole story in Donald Yates' new book, where it is included in the DNA chapter, along with the results of our Cherokee DNA Studies.

The title of the book is The Cherokee Anomaly:  How DNA, Ancient Alphabets and Religion Explain America's Largest Indian Nation. It will be published by McFarland & Co. next year, with an introductory note by Cyclone Covey, foreword by Richard Mack Bettis, maps, figures and illustrations covering the entire history of the Cherokee from the third century BCE to the nineteenth century.

If the facts don't fit the evidence
change the facts . . .

We always suspected the genetics community of clinging to stale dogmas and being slow to acknowledge emerging new evidence about American Indians. But we did not dream that their officiousness extended to changing the information given by test subjects to bring it into conformity with preconceived conclusions.

Not until we heard Marcy's story.

"Over the years, I've heard complaints that [a DNA testing company] is not really responsive when you have questions about unexpected results," Marcy said. "They usually suggest further testing, which of course, means more revenue to them.

"I've had some major disagreements with [a DNA testing company] over how they list results for mitochondrial haplogroup ancestral origins . . . . I found out they were taking dozens of T2's who had listed their earliest known female ancestor as being from America or the United States, changing this and placing them in the 'unknown' category. They claimed that because our haplogroup was designated European, our ancestors couldn't be from the United States!

"Now this was nonsense, because at the same time, they allowed people to claim other similarly-colonized western countries, like Cuba. It's my opinion that if participants list a country of origin for their earliest known female relative, that should be what is on the web page, not something assigned by [a DNA testing company] because as they told me, it may 'confuse people,' or contradict current scientific data.

"As a consequence [the DNA testing company's] publicly reported ancestral origins has nothing to do with our haplogroup's ancient Cherokee clan mother. The chips should fall where they may."

Now this is not professional behavior on the part of a DNA testing company and it prevents new findings from coming to light.

In a study of 52 individuals claiming direct maternal descent from an American Indian woman, mostly Cherokee, we found that they were unmatched anywhere else except among other participants. Haplogroup T emerged as the largest lineage, followed by U, X, J and H. Similar proportions of these haplogroups were noted in the populations of Egypt, Israel and other parts of the East Mediterranean.

DNA testing companies do a disservice to their customers and to science by failing to call results as they appear without doctoring them. It is time geneticists stopped bringing all American Indians over the Bering Straits and forcing test subjects into the Procrustean bed of outmoded theory.

For more on "anomalous" American Indian haplotypes, visit our Cherokee DNA Studies, now in Phase II testing.

By Donald N. Yates
 
Capt. John Cooper

Nancy J. Cooper et al. v. The Choctaw Nation is one of the classic botched cases in the annals of the Dawes Commission, the Federal government’s attempt to deal a death blow to tribal sovereignty at the close of the nineteenth century. I had heard rumors about my Cooper relatives and how they were kicked out of the Choctaw Nation. But I never knew the whole story until recently.

J. W. Howell mentions the case in a textbook studied today in law schools. John Cooper, our ancestor, was a Choctaw chief who owned a plantation near Linden, Tennessee. The family was seated at the dinner table one evening when a vigilante mob broke in. They were told at gunpoint to leave, their possessions forfeit.

The men swam their horses across the Mississippi River at Memphis and left the women encamped under the willows on the other side while they went back to try to recover some of their cattle. John and Nancy’s old mother, who was in her eighties, died before they returned, empty-handed. The party proceeded to Indian Territory.

In 1896, the family encouraged Nancy, blind, unmarried and no longer able to care for herself, to enroll with the Choctaw Nation. They and a large group of kinsmen won roll numbers. But they were all stricken from the rolls by an adverse decision of the Choctaw-Chickasaw citizenship court a couple of years later. More than a hundred of them joined in a class action suit.

“We’re still fighting it,” says Pam Kahler of Vian, Oklahoma. "My husband and I talked to the BIA in Muskogee and found out about the old ruling. They told us the reason it was overturned was because the people named in the court ruling were not living in the Choctaw area when they were added to the Dawes rolls.” They, in fact, were living in the Chickasaw area of Duncan, Comanche area, Stephens County.

Aunt Artie Meecie was told that the family was “too poor to be on the rolls.”

In February and March 1907 matters came to a head. The Attorney General of the United States declared the lower courts out of line and ordered that hundreds of Choctaw Coopers, Browns and others were, after all, entitled to enrollment.

The only trouble was that the Attorney General’s decision of March 4, 1907, did not reach the department until March 6, 1907, two days after the rolls were closed by operation of law. There was then no authority in the Secretary of the Interior, under the law, to enroll them.

Nancy Cooper was laid in a pauper’s grave. Not only was the family too poor to be Indian, it was two days too late.

Read more on the Choctaw Pages of Panther’s Lodge at http://www.pantherslodge.com/choctaw.html.

If you think haplogroup testing for Native American DNA is in sad shape, you should look at autosomal testing. It has been practically nonexistent. Even the major 2007 study by Wang et al. has glaring gaps and methodological quandaries(1).

DNA Consultants' newest autosomal product is the Native American DNA Fingerprint Plus based on 21 published studies of Native American population groups as well as informal customer data. Results for many individuals were validated with older haplotyping methodology.

There were data for 3,583 Native Americans available in development of the product. These test results came from articles published between 1997 and 2009. They included individuals identifying with tribes or nations as follows:

Apache
Athabaskan
Huichol
Inupiat
Kichwa
Lumbee
Navajo
Salishan
Yupik

The following geographical areas were represented:

Alaska
Arizona
Brazil
British Columbia
Colombia
Ecuador
Florida
Guatemala
Mexico
Michigan
Minnesota
North Carolina
Oklahoma
Ontario
Saskatchewan

Nothing labeled as Cherokee -- the largest Native group in the U.S., with more than 400,000 representatives -- has ever been tested. Anecdotally, people of Cherokee descent often receive matches to North Carolina or Michigan Native Americans. The reason for the latter matchup is obscure. North Carolina as the Cherokee's original homeland makes a lot more sense.

1. Wang, S. et al. (2007). “Genetic Variation and Population Structure in Native Americans.” PLoS Genetics 3/11 (with good bibliog.):  http://www.plosgenetics.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pgen.0030185.

Emergence petroglyphs as featured on previous blog posts about the Hopi, Sea Peoples, Hohokam, Fremont Indians and Cherokee ("Haplogroup B and Water Clan Symbols") have also turned up now in Patagonia in southern Chile, on the tip of the South American continent's Pacific Coast. They were identified in Hawaii already. These findings suggest the stick figure of a woman giving birth, or emergence petroglyph, is Pacific-wide and confined to that hemisphere, not instanced in Europe, the Middle East or Africa.

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Patagonian emergence petroglyph is reproduced from the International Newsletter on Rock Art (INORA), no. 58 (2010), where it was reported discovered in a cave of the Madre De Dios Archipelago 2000-2008. The researchers attributed it to the Kaweskar Indians, "a nomadic sea people now vanished." Its style matches similar petroglyphs from Hawaii and the American Southwest. It was grouped with sun disks, dancing figures and a horned anthropomorph, all painted in red ochre. The name Kaweskar means simply "Mankind." INORA.

And Now in the Cherokee...

Haplogroup N1a became prominent in genetics literature when Wolfgang Haak et al.'s studies on 7500 year old skeletons in Central Europe revealed that 25% of the Neolithic European population might have belonged to this lineage. The skeletons were found to be members of the Linear Pottery Culture (LBK ware) which is credited with being the first farming culture in Central Europe.

7,000 Year-Old Linearbandkeramik (LBK ware) from Stone Age Germany.

The study was a major development in the debate on the origin of European populations, since Haak et al. argued that "The discovery of mitochondrial type N1a in Central European Neolithic skeletons at a high frequency enabled us to answer the question of whether the modern population is maternally descended from the early farmers instead of addressing the traditional question of the origin of early European farmers."

Neolithic Revolution
Two competing scenarios exist for the spread of the Neolithic from the Near East to Europe:

1. Demic diffusion (in which farming is brought by farmers), for example Renfrew's NDT - Anatolian hypothesis
2. Cultural diffusion (in which farming is spread by the passage of ideas), which is the assumption in Alinei's Paleolithic Continuity Theory.

The study's authors concluded: "Our finding lends weight to a proposed Paleolithic ancestry for modern Europeans."

N currently appears in only .18%-.2% of regional populations. It is widely distributed throughout Eurasia and Northern Africa and is divided into the European, Central Asian, and African/South Asian branches based on specific genetic markers. Exact origins and migration patterns of this haplogroup are still unknown and a subject of some debate.

Although not one of the classic Native American lineages (A, B, C, D, and X -- Schurr), N has been identified in the ancient Southwest in the Fremont Culture centered in Utah. It is one of the Middle Eastern lineages that appear in the Cherokee and other Indians; see DNA Consultants Blog, “Anomalous Mitochondrial DNA Lineages in the Cherokee”. Most investigators attribute this phenomenon to recent European admixture. But such haplotypes  if only instanced in North America without exact Old World matches could just as well be considered Native American.

It has been suggested that N is also characteristic of the Sea Peoples, who may have traveled to the American Southwest in antiquity.

Cherokee or Saponi Wedding Dish from Southwest Virginia in author's possession is glazed black, the color of the Earth Mother, and marked with the "tri-line" signifying the Triple Goddess's power of increase and plenty and rule over all life. The style of pottery is similar to Linearbandkeramik (LBK) ware. This is the female dish of a matched pair. The slightly larger male dish is marked with four lines on each handle. They were used to share food in a wedding or bonding ceremony.

Thoughts about the origin of mitochondrial haplogroup B and Mother Earth symbolism among the Hopi, Zuni, Hohokam, Fremont Indians and others

I got a holiday present from my wife of an unusual little book titled On the Trail of Spider Woman. Petroglyphs, Pictographs, and Myths of the Southwest, by Carol Patterson-Rudolph (Santa Fe:  Ancient City Press, 1997). Putting this intriguing study together with a travel book by David Hatcher Childress, my son and I took a 4-day road trip into the homeland of the Indians credited with having the first civilization in the Southwest, a settled town life marked by desert agriculture, canals, pottery, baskets, ballcourts, plazas and adobe pueblos, pithouses and kivas. Previous occupants of the area were non-sedentary hunter-gatherers considered to be "paleo-Indians."

We visited Painted Rock Petroglyph Site outside Gila Bend, in the middle of nowhere, and ended the trip in the barren sands outside Phoenix, where we began it, visiting the Hohokam Pima National Archeological Monument, also known as Snaketown. The former is little seen, and the latter cannot seen, because the Pima (now Gila River Indians) had the ballcourt and other ruins reburied by backhoes in the 1970s. The caretakers of this declared national treasure decided not to open it to anyone to view or visit because of its "sensitive" nature. There are no signs, no roads, nothing left above ground.

Overview of pecked records and markings of Hohokam, 200 B.C.-A.D. 1300, on granite outcropping called Painted Rock in South Central Arizona.

At Painted Rock, the first mystery we pondered was why it was called "painted" rock when there is no paint. Petroglyphs are produced by pecking away the dark desert varnish to make a negative image on the underlying lighter rock. We wondered if it had anything to do with the Paint People, or Phoenicians, Kanawah Indians of the East Coast or Cherokee and Saponi Paint Clans.

The second mystery was the abundance of snake imagery. Famously, snakes in Indian tradition stand for boats and water. We noticed a Corn Cross, the symbol of the Feathered Serpent or Quetzlcoatl religion, supposedly introduced into Mexico from both the East and the West by white, bearded strangers in ships, who brought rule by laws and numerous arts of civilization and banned human sacrifice.

The third thing we remarked upon were the many Great Goddess or Earth Mother or birthing/fertility symbols. Such places were probably shrines where women came to be blessed and get married and give birth. Sun Park in Hopiland has numerous hemispherical carvings about two inches wide where people ground out minerals to eat. These cupmarks or cupoles at petroglyph sites puzzled archeologists until an important article in a scholarly journal clarified their meaning as part of the worldwide phenomenon of pica (pronounced "pie-ka"), "the desire to ingest nonfood substances such as rock powder, clay, chalk, dirt, and other material by some humans, especially pregnant women" (Kevin L. Callahan, "Pica, Geophagy, and Rock-Art in the Eastern United States," in The Rock-Art of Eastern North America, ed. Carol Diaz-Granados and James R. Duncan, Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2004, p. 65.

Neolithic Cupmarks in Kh. Umm El-Umdan, Israel. 

In general, petroglyphs are ignored both by archeology and anthropology, and their study is a no man's land. Sun Park has a birthing cave and birthing stone. Canyon de Chelly has the most photographed Mother Earth rock formation in the world, Spider Rock, a chthonic monument discussed on page 83 of the Spider Woman book by Patterson-Rudolph.

Who Were the Hohokam?

There were also clear images of horses, riders, people praying, spirals, axis mundi (center of the earth) symbols like the iron butterfly and cross, labyrinths, bilobed axes, irrigation plans, horned beasts, felines, palaces or villages and warriors with spears and shields. We searched in vain for anomalous depictions of whales, elephants and deep water fish, found at other similar sites, but the sun was sinking and we did not have time to make a thorough inspection of the motifs. There is a famous petroglyph of a whale at Old Oraibi.

The name Ho-ho-kam is usually explained as meaning "Those Who Are Departed," but such an etymology is more a gloss than a literal translation of its meaning and origin. Like many words in the Hopi, Zuni, Pima and Azteco-Utan languages in general it is composed of South Semitic elements. In Egyptian, it literally means "Sea Peoples" or "Foreigners." The historic Sea Peoples came from Asia Minor and once threatened to conquer the Egyptian empire. The Philistines and Phoenicians are related to them. They were remarkable for their feather bonnets and, like their relatives the Cretans (whose language also came from Asia Minor), for a long-protracted continuance of Mother Goddess worship down into the Bronze Age.

Haplogroup B is the signature lineage of certain Indians in North America. Its ultimate source is Southeast Asia (not Mongolia, as has been suggested for the other three classic Native American haplogroups A, C and D), whence it took multiple circum- or trans-Pacific migratory routes to the Americas (Eschleman et al. 2004). It has high frequencies in Polynesia, which was settled from Southeast Asia, and among the Western Indians of the U.S. such as the Hopi, Zuni (77%), Anasazi (78%), Yuman, and Jemez Pueblo (89%). It is also found in frequencies approaching 70% in the Cherokee and Chickasaw.

We believe Spider Woman is simply an aspect of the Stone Age Great Goddess worshiped by those who came from Southeast Asia through Polynesia and helped colonized the American Southwest. She is the same as the Earth Mother. As in other cultures, she was replaced by sky and sun deities and male hierarchies. But her religion seems to have persisted in the Hohokam, Cherokee and Hopi tribes in a similar fashion to the survival of her cult in the Cretans, Phoenicians and Sea Peoples. 

According to Hopi and other traditions, at the end of the last age, the Mother Goddess ceased to be the leader of the people in their wanderings and went back "under the sea" to the east and west whence she and they had emerged. We can only infer from this that Spider Woman, as she was called in Asia and the Pacific, and the Great Goddess, as she was known in the Old World of the Middle East, relinquished her role as supreme deity to the new male pantheons and withdrew across the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans to the distant origins of civilization outside the Americas. Ironically, her memory survived better among the Indian nations than in the war-torn empires and materialistic cultures that dominate world history elsewhere. Indian societies today exhibit rare examples of matriarchy as opposed to patriarchy.

Why You Do Not Have (and Don't Want) Enemy Ancestors

When I first visited Chaco Canyon in northern New Mexico I got a creepy feeling. Who were these people? The staff, mostly Navajo and not descendants of the original inhabitants of the site, said they were the Anasazi, a Navajo term meaning "enemy ancestors." When I pressed for more answers, I was told they belonged to the Chaco Culture. They were Chacoans.

Anthropologists are used to calling people they don't understand a culture, but as I learned more of this one I don't think they had much of it. The culture of the Anasazi turns out to be one of head-hunting, terrorizing human slaves, drug use and cannibalism.

 

 Hamatsi, a Kwakiutl Indian of the cannibal spirit. Feldman.

In a book subtitled A History Forgotten, George Franklin Feldman dispels the parlor concepts and sanitized history surrounding Native American practices and pieces together the frightful truth. It is the only book on its topic:  Cannibalism, Headhunting and Human Sacrifice in North America (Hood:  Chambersburg, 2008), and the author's work was an uphill battle against political correctness.

Forget about the Donner Party. When anthropologists and explorers first encountered the monuments and ruins of the people politely called the Ancestral Pueblo they found widespread evidence of a cannibalistic society that had gotten out of control and succumbed to its own inhumanity.

"The best documented indication that the Baskemakers were headhunters is . . . Kinboko Canyon, evidence discovered by archeologist Samuel J. Guernsey of the Peabody Museum of Harvard in 1915, and reported in a 1919 publication of the Smithsonian Institution's Bureau of American Ethnology," writes Feldman in the chapter on the Anasazi. He goes on to describe this and other early excavations in the Four Corners area that were quickly hushed up and reburied in horror, including Battle Cave in Canyon del Muerto, now part of the Canyon de Chelly National Monument inside the Navajo Indian Reservation. We read now of flesh-stripping, bone crushing, roasting pits, and sliced off mastoids.

Around 950 A.D., eleven persons, including women and children, were killed and butchered, cooked, and eaten on Burnt Mesa in New Mexico north of the San Juan River. At a site near the Hopi villages in Arizona, a group of thirty individuals, forty percent under the age of eighteen, were slaughted and eaten. In a Colorado rock shelter, a large jar was found filled with splintered human bones. . .

The grisly record goes on and on. Feldman writes that by the year 2000 the number of such sites in the San Juan drainage where the Chaco Culture was centered had risen to forty (p. 136).

To their credit, the Indians who were the Chacoans' food supply eventually overthrew their masters and left the area to settle far away, on the three Hopi mesas in Arizona and along the Rio Grande in new pueblos that survive today such as Taos and San Juan. We suggest that the aristocrats of Chaco may have been subject to degenerative neurological disorders like kuru or mad cow disease. But whether they self-destructed or were destroyed by their subject population, it doesn't seem to make a lot of sense to claim them as ancestors.