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:

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. 

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).

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. 

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:

Here is Chouinard's Twitter page:

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

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.