Andy White Anthropology
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Racist Britons Upset to Learn that Early Briton Had Dark Skin

2/8/2018

 
This week's announcement that a 10,000-year-old resident of Britain had dark skin and blue eyes has added another data point to our understanding of the complex and fascinating evolution of variability in human pigmentation. DNA analysis was used to give "Cheddar Man" a makeover:
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The new "Cheddar Man" reconstruction is on the left; the old one is on the right. (Image: Natural History Museum).
The portrait of a dark-complected Cheddar Man has upset many racist modern Britons, who were comfortable with a lighter-skinned ancestor.  White supremacists are attributing the change in Cheddar Man's skin tone to political correctness, cultural Marxism, and a hoax perpetrated by the UN and Jewish scientists.

These blanket rejections of the science responsible for Cheddar Man's new look come from the same crowd that, just two weeks ago, hailed the announcement of a 200,000-year-old "modern human" fossil from Israel as a significant blow to the Out of Africa theory. Oh you fickle racists.

In reality, the claim that a European from the Early Holocene probably had dark skin and blue eyes is unsurprising in light of other recent work suggesting that lightened skin pigmentation emerged relatively recently in European populations. These conclusions are not the result of agenda-driven guesswork, but of direct analysis of DNA. Have a look at the paper from the La Brana specimen for an example.

Data on the recent emergence of "whiteness" among European populations undercuts the white supremacist notion that light skin tone is ancient, "special," and somehow linked to inherent biological/cultural superiority. It's a very short step from the modern mythologies of white supremacy into numerous threads of pseudo-archaeology, many of which depend on the existence of ancient "white gods," "white giants," "white Atlanteans," etc.

​The real stories of human variability are much more interesting than the fantasy ones. I recommend embracing evidence. 

Archaeology and the Scourge of White Supremacy: We Can Do More than Share Memes

8/15/2017

 
The recent events in Charlottesville have amplified the dialogue about the resurgent boldness of white supremacists in this country. Condemnation of what unfolded there -- including the murder of a woman protesting against the "Unite the Right" rally -- was generally swift and strong. A notable exception, of course, was the milquetoast reaction of President Trump. He shot an air ball on the political equivalent of a layup. It's part of a pattern of top-down weakness on this issue.

Charlottesville has catalyzed a conversation that we need to have in this country. White supremacism is a scourge that's been present since before our country was founded. It's a chronic illness. While the problem isn't new, however, one could argue (persuasively, I think) that what's happening now has new elements that need to be discussed and factored into strategies for dealing with the problem. Social media is one. The current political climate is another.

It's a relatively simple thing to express disgust and outrage at the ideas, goals, and behaviors of white supremacists. I've seen it all over Facebook and Twitter, as well as in statements by officials at all levels of government. Some of the archaeologists I know have latched onto various memes showing Indiana Jones punching a Nazi.  We are 
forever entangled in a love/hate relationship with Indiana Jones (looting graves = bad; punching Nazis = good).
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Yes, Indiana Jones is punching a Nazi. It's not real. It's a movie.
That's all well and good, but we can do much better. Sharing a meme is -- literally -- the least you can do.

I'd like to challenge my friends in academic anthropology, archaeology, and other social sciences and humanities (e.g., sociology, history, psychology, political science, etc.) to integrate discussions of white supremacism into your classrooms. I expressed similar sentiments the day after the election. I have seen nothing in the past six months that has persuaded me that I was wrong.

As an archaeologist, my expertise lies in interpreting the human past through material remains. When evaluating a claim about the past, it is always fair and necessary to ask "how do you know?" Being a good archaeologist means being able to consider multiple explanations and interpretations and generate expectations that can be evaluated based on material evidence. It's a process that can be tedious, complex, sometimes fruitless, and often unsatisfying to those who want quick, easy answers. As disappointing as it may be to those who want archaeologists to be like Indiana Jones, developing and using scientific frameworks to figure out what, why, and how things happened in the human past is central to the project of archaeology. It's how we know what we know.

So what does that have to do with white supremacism?

White supremacist ideology, like many ideologies, is warranted in part by claims about the past. For a taste of what underlies the modern Alt-right's basket of baloney, see this post I wrote in January about Richard Spencer's interview of Kevin MacDonald.  The old-school German Nazis loved Atlantis, as do modern Aryan enthusiasts (like this one and this one). Slavery in the early United States was justified based in part on Samuel Morton's polygenist racial hierarchy, which he constructed using cranial data. Colonialism, empire-building, use of the Mound Builder myth to justify the forced removal of Native American populations . . . the list goes on and on. Claims about the past are entangled with claims about the inherent superiority of white people in all of these cases.

While many of the most racist misuses of archaeology can be traced back to the Victorian era, they aren't ancient history for the white supremacists who inhabit our social, cultural, and political landscape today. As professional archaeologists, we need to understand where those ideas come from, what basis they claim in fact, and why they gained traction. And we need to be able to explain why they are incorrect, not just assert that they're incorrect.  We need to be able to teach others to independently and critically evaluate the claims about the past that are presented to them. I don't have any specific data, but when I look at pictures of the white supremacists in Charlottesville, I see a lot of young faces. Much of the crowd was of college age. That's the age demographic we interact with.  

In my opinion, it's not enough for us as archaeologists and anthropologists to simply repeat the mantra of tolerance. We need to dig in our heels and use our expertise to expose students to the information and processes that give us such confidence that white supremacism has no basis in fact. This is something that all four branches can participate in. Physical anthropology, cultural anthropology, linguistics . . . they're all relevant to the discussion and there's plenty to go around.

This is a four-field problem if ever there was one. I think Franz Boas would agree with me. I understand the visceral reaction of wanting to advertise that you'd like to punch Nazis. I'm asking you to think about your syllabus, also. Can you fit in a discussion of the the early history of physical anthropology? Can you find time to talk about one or two examples of how archaeology is abused for the sake of nationalism?

I'm not sure exactly what Papa Franz would do if he was alive today, but I'm sure he wouldn't have been silent. 
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Did he punch any Nazis? Probably not.
For those keeping score, punching Richard Spencer -- twice -- didn't make him go away. This is positive evidence that a simple strategy of punching is probably not sufficient.

Giantologist Goes Full Nazi, States that Trump Ascendancy "Has Been Positive" for Aryan Fringe Agenda

2/21/2017

 
For those of us that pay attention to how "fringe" claims about the human past are related to racist political agendas, the connections are often so obvious as to border on the mundane. The last time I wrote about such things (in my discussion of the cartoon-like ideas about race and prehistory that underpin the Alt-Right's vision of making America great again) I got an earful from people uncomfortable with the notion that there is or could be a real connection between the fake history promulgated by white supremacists and the decisions made by our new government. In my opinion, it's clearly evident that our interpretations of the past matter a great deal to our actions in the present.  And it's incredibly naive to assume that there's some kind of natural firewall that insulates the levers of power from the demonstrably false ideas about the past that are the stock-in-trade of "fringe" theorists.

It's an objective fact that white supremacists were not disappointed that Donald Trump was elected president. Whether they will be disappointed by what the Trump administration actually does, of course, is a different question. Whatever happens, however, it's clear that Trump's ascendancy has encouraged and emboldened white supremacists across the country.

My example today provides another data point illustrating the triangulation of white supremacy, "fringe" history, and contemporary politics.

Patrick Chouinard's book Lost Race of the Giants was published in 2013. I bought it back then as I began working to understand where all this business about giants was coming from. I read the first part of it but then gave up and didn't finish -- my impression was that it was a poorly organized, unoriginal mess that recycled much of the same material as the other books on giants that I had already been through. I got bored, so I stopped reading.

Lost Race of Giants was published by Simon & Schuster, which maintains an author page for Chouinard. Just yesterday, Simon & Schuster announced that it was dropping a book deal with Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulous in the wake of his recent remarks about pedophilia.  

Since the publication of his 2013 book on giants, Chouinard (aka Patrick Fox) has shifted his focus to positioning himself as a vocal proponent of a basket of "lost white superior Aryan giant Atlantean race" ideas that can be sold to and consumed by white supremacists. Here is a flyer, for example, promoting Chouinard's services:
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Here is Chouinard's Twitter page:
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There's no ambiguity about where Chouinard stands on the relationship between his white supremacist agenda and his claims about the human past. 

In this interview from January of 2017, Chouinard (going by the name of Patrick Fox) says that he is "forever dedicated to the pro white cause" and joined the National Socialist Movement in 2016. As far as our current political situation, Chouinard states that
". . . we should promote a reverse or counter youth culture based on NS straight-edge values that could take advantage of the increasing  awareness of pro-white values and ideas that have been launched by the success of Donald Trump. I do not  think Trump is our man by any means, but his effect is clear and has been positive for us. I see NS Straight-edge youth as the shock troops or our movement and can be used the way Tom Metzger used the skinheads several decades ago."
Setting aside questions about the quality of Chouinard's "research" and my feelings about his political views, I find myself oddly appreciative of his decision to clearly identify as a white supremacist. His forthright declaration stands in contrast to the milquetoast evasions of others who have written on a similar set of "fringe" topics in the same publications as Chouinard. Say what you want about his claims, but at least he's clear about where he's coming from. 

Does the Fan Base of the Solutrean Hypothesis Change if Upper Paleolithic Europeans Weren't White?

4/5/2015

 
The Solutrean hypothesis is the idea that Upper Paleolithic peoples from western Europe colonized eastern North America sometime during the period 21,000 to 17,000 years ago.  The idea is based largely on the purported similarities between Solutrean chipped stone technologies and those related to the later Clovis horizon in North America.  The idea does not enjoy widespread support among professional archaeologists for a variety of reasons (see this 2014 exchange for summary arguments).

While most archaeologists aren't impressed, the Solutrean hypothesis does have fans outside of the academic community. Predictably, it is very popular among white supremacists, who are fond of the idea of the original settlers of the continent being of European rather than Asian heritage. The Solutrean hypothesis is part of the white supremacist fantasy presented in the novel White Apocalypse by Kyle Bristow.  The Solutrean foundation of America is also a key component in the rhetoric of neo-Nazi John de Nugent:

"The enemy of truth has a big problem with the issue of the Solutrean whites being here first and then the red man genociding him, for the whole story is didactic and instructive for white people today. It is the story of the first whites to build a great culture, and how they were crushed and died in slavery and agony after they became a minority in their own country." (source)

More discussion of the white supremacist embrace of the Solutrean hypothesis can be found in this blog post by Jason Colavito.

But what if those Solutrean people weren't actually white?  Some new research that was presented at the American Association of Physical Anthropologists conference in St. Louis last week suggests just that:

"The modern humans who came out of Africa to originally settle Europe about 40,000 years are presumed to have had dark skin, which is advantageous in sunny latitudes. And the new data confirm that about 8500 years ago, early hunter-gatherers in Spain, Luxembourg, and Hungary also had darker skin: They lacked versions of two genes--SLC24A5 and SLC45A2--that lead to depigmentation and, therefore, pale skin in Europeans today."

If correct, that would mean that the Upper Paleolithic peoples of Spain and France - our friends the Solutreans - had dark skin. Does that put
a chill on the love affair that white supremacists and neo-Nazis seem to have with the Solutrean hypothesis? 

The quote above is from a news story on the Science website -- I'm not aware that the primary work has been published yet.
I'll look forward to reading it when it is.

    All views expressed in my blog posts are my own. The views of those that comment are their own. That's how it works.

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    Andy White

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