My Forbidden Archaeology class will have its first meeting this Friday morning. As usual, I've waited until almost the last minute to attempt to finalize the syllabus. But that attempt has now been made, and I still have a day to spare. Go me. 

As anyone who has ever created a syllabus from scratch knows, there comes a point when the rubber meets the road and you have to cease thinking vaguely and start nailing down the specifics. I've still got a few more nails to drive in (you'll notice some "TBA's" in the day-by-day readings, and I'm still working on a couple of additions to the guest list), but this is more or less what we'll be driving this semester. Yes, I know I'm mixing metaphors. It's been a long day. One of my kids woke me up at 2:30 and then again at 3:30 and I wasn't able to get back to sleep afterwards. 

I got several offers of guest participation that I won't be able to fully capitalize this time around. If you emailed me about the class and I haven't gotten back to you yet, I sincerely apologize. As I've mentioned before, the students will be writing several blog posts. I hope that several of you that I was not able to include as formal "guests" of the class will perhaps be willing to work with one or more students individually. I'll be in touch!

Finally, I'm sure some of you out there will, for whatever reasons, be unhappy with what the students will be reading. And I'm sure some of you will tell me about it. Keep in mind that I did not chose readings to provide "answers." I chose them to illustrate points, show contrasts, spark questions, and provoke arguments. While we will be discussing and dissecting some of the readings quite closely in class, others are there simply for background. I'll learn a lot about what works well and what doesn't as I get to know the students and we work our way through the course.  

Stay tuned!

As usual, I have many more ideas for things to write about than I have time to write.  There's a backlog of material related to giants and plenty of other stuff I'd like to write about related to my research plans in the Southeast, interesting things about South Carolina, teaching, etc.  This post is just to mention a few things relevant to previous posts.

Haplogroup X2a

Based on the metrics I have access to (Facebook likes/shares, Twitter data, and the page view metrics that Weebly provides), the post I wrote on the new paper by Jennifer Raff and Deborah Bolnick was one of the more popular things I've written recently. I think the paper is very nice, and I'm glad for anything I can do to encourage people to read it.  Yesterday, Raff wrote a post addressing some questions about the paper.  I highly recommend it to anyone interested in this topic (professional or otherwise). When I looked at where my post was posted on Facebook, I was a little dismayed by some of the comments.  It is evident (and interesting) that a lot of people react to the headline and the image without even reading the content.  Anyway, I encourage you to read the original paper and Raff's answers to common questions.

Hutton Pulitzer Claims He Made Me Famous, Threatens to "Out" Professional Archaeologists

My posts about the various silly activities and statements by Hutton Pulitzer (there's a listing here) appear to be gaining a fan base. A post from September titled "The Philyaw Follies, Fall 2015 Edition" attracted Pulitzer as well as several individuals who he has apparently tangled with online before.  And I've been getting emails from some Pulitzer detractors. 

Among other strange things, Pulitzer made the following comment on my blog:

"Hey Andy, yes saw this and me calling you the "4A" made you quite famous. LOL, but yes archaeologists tend to not let themselves be interviewed. We did in fact offer you a spot to go on record with Wayne May, but yes you did decline. However, some of our new recordings are outing people like you and University coverups."

While I will eagerly await whatever "outing" he's talking about, I won't be holding my breath. If there's one thing that I can confidently identify as part of Pulitzer's M.O., it's the lack of follow-up to his grandiose statements. Anyway, his comments on my blog are worth reading, as are the comments of readers on Jason Colavito's post about a recent interview between Pulitzer and Scott Wolter.

Which brings us to the next tidbit.

Scott Wolter Is Still Participating In My Class

My plans for teaching a class about "fringe" ideas in archaeology (working title: "Forbidden Archaeology") in the Fall of 2016 are moving forward. The paperwork is currently working its way up the various steps in the chain.  I just got here, so the process is somewhat mysterious to me.  But I don't have any reason at this point to think that I won't be able to teach the course.

As I wrote in this post, Scott Wolter responded to my open invitation for "fringe" theorists to step up to the plate and participate in my class. An alert reader emailed me the other day to point my attention to Wolter's blog, where someone had made a comment about my website and Wolter had replied with something like "Who is Andy White?"  The reader questioned if Wolter would still be participating in the class.

The answer to that is "yes."  I had a cordial email exchange with Wolter and the plans for his participation in the class are still on.

I'm still looking for one or two more who like to be involved - I'd love to have a person talk abut giants and a person to make a case for any aspect of claims related to Ice Age civilization.  Send me an email if you're interested: aawhite@mailbox.sc.edu.

Boycotting Discovery and the History Channel?

I think many of my readers will agree that the overall quality of programming on The Discovery Channel and The History Channel has gone downhill in recent years. I don't have anything new to say about why that's a bad thing, but I wanted to direct your attention to a blog post by Gordon Bonnet at Skeptophilia calling for a boycott. Here is a bit of what he says:

"Look, it's not that I'm against speculation.  Sometimes people doggedly pursuing ideas that everyone has thought ridiculous has paid off in the end.  But there is nothing to be gained by formerly reputable channels airing fiction passed off as truth, and fantasy passed off as documentary.  In the end, it makes everyone's job harder, from lowly science teachers like myself who are trying to get kids to learn how to sort fact from bullshit, to the honest researchers who would like to investigate fringe claims and do so in a rational, evidence-based manner.

So it's time to turn off The History Channel and Discovery.  They've been veering off course for a while, but it's getting worse, and it's time to send a message.  Stop watching this garbage, and better yet, send a letter or an email to them telling them you're doing so.  It's time to get some good science and history programming back on the air."

Yeah . . . believe it or not there is a distinction to be made between programs honestly investigating ideas at the "fringe" and programs presenting outright fantasy that is disguised as documentary.  It's the turn toward that second kind of programming that irks a lot of us, I think.  Mermaids, anyone?  

I really think there has to be a way for media to tap into the public's interest in the human past (and a spectrum of ideas about it) without resorting to just making things up. 

If you're interested in how, when, and from where people first entered the Americas, you should be aware of a new paper by Jennifer Raff and Deborah Bolnick titled "Does Mitochondrial Haplogroup X Indicate Ancient Trans-Atlantic Migration to the Americas? A Critical Re-Evaluation" (PaleoAmerica 1(4):297-304). It is a concise, clear, and largely non-technical essay discussing what the presence of mitochondrial Haplogroup X2a in Native Americans might be telling us about the pre-Columbian migration of populations across the Atlantic. 

The answer is . . . (drumroll): not much.

Haplogroups are genetic populations that share a common ancestor.  The common ancestry of mitochondrial haplogroups is defined by differences and similarities in mitochondrial DNA, a kind of DNA that is contained in the mitochondria of cells.

Haplogroup X is found in living populations in Europe, west Asia, and northern North America.  Studies in the late 1990s began to ask whether the geographic distribution of Haplogroup X among living populations was telling us something about the origin of at least some New World peoples. A widely-read 1998 popular article titled "Genes May Link Ancient Eurasians, Native Americans" (Science 280(5363):520) helped popularize the idea that peoples from the Near East or Europe contibuted to Native American ancestry.  This idea was very popular among Mormons looking for evidence of a migration of Near Eastern peoples to the New World several thousand years ago (it is regarded with less enthusiasm now, especially after the publication of genetic data from Kennewick Man: see this blog post, for example).  

The distribution of Haplogroup X has also been proffered as evidence by proponents of the Solutrean Hypothesis (the idea that Paleolithic peoples from Europe migrated to eastern North America around 20,000 years ago). In a 2014 paper ("Solutrean Hypothesis: Genetics, the Mammoth in the Room," World Archaeology 46(5):752-774), Stephen Oppenheimer, Bruce Bradley, and Dennis Stanford argued that

"The mtDNA X2a evidence is more consistent with the Atlantic route and dates suggested by the Solutrean hypothesis and is more parsimonious than the assumption of a single Beringian entry, that assumes retrograde extinction of X in East Eurasia." (from the abstract)

Raff and Bolnick's essay strongly challenges that interpretation, concluding the following (page 301):

"We remain unconvinced by the arguments advanced thus far in favor of a trans-Atlantic migration prior to 1500 cal yr BP or so. As we have discussed, X2a has not been found anywhere in Eurasia, and phylogeography gives us no compelling reason to think it is more likely to come from Europe than from Siberia. Furthermore, analysis of the complete genome of Kennewick Man, who belongs to the most basal lineage of X2a yet identified, gives no indication of recent European ancestry and moves the location of the deepest branch of X2a to the West Coast, consistent with X2a belonging to the same ancestral population as the other founder mitochondrial haplogroups. Nor have any high-resolution studies of genome-wide data from Native American populations yielded any evidence of Pleistocene European ancestry or trans-Atlantic gene flow."

This is an interesting case where, I think, interpretations based initially solely on genetic information from living populations are and will continue to be refined as data are added from prehistoric remains.  Genetic data from living populations are great for formulating hypotheses, but they don't actually provide direct evidence about the past -- that has to come materials and skeletons that are actually from the past.  Whatever story is "true" has to be consistent with all lines of evidence.  Raff and Bolnick (page 301) mention that there are currently no genetic data from Solutrean skeletal material -- I hope someone pursues that in the near future.

As a final aside: it's a bummer that every single paper I discuss in this post is behind a paywall. I can get to them through my university library access, but the public generally can't.  A lot of people out there who are not professional academics are interested in these issues and it's a shame we can't make our work more openly available to them.  The Raff and Bolnick paper is a great example, I think, of an essay on a technical issue that is written in such a way as to be palatable to a non-technical audience (and when it comes to genetics, I include myself in that audience).  I hope that their paper can somehow be made open access so anyone and everyone can read it.​

Update (11/7/2015):  A copy of Raff and Bolnick's paper can be downloaded from Jennifer Raff's Academia.edu page.