Well, more or less, but my frustration with all the burning straw developed into laugh-out-loud amusement - because frankly, most of this piece is so loony that I'm not convinced Hitt isn't having us on. Or, maybe, Harper's really has slid down the intellectual rat-hole as per rumor. (Haven't read it in years, myself.)
Where to start? Hitt's grassy-knoll conviction is that pre-Clovis investigation is motivated by by a "whitey #1" mentality. Yes, he regurgitates every tiresome tactic that ever demonstrated its use in confusing the issues for the muddle-minded: science and oral tradition are equivalent mythological systems, scientists are as prone as other people to pettiness and blinkered rivalries (stop the presses), 19th century anthropologists said and did racist things, popular science is often poorly written, cranky, and wildly speculative, historical fields like archeology are inexact, and anyway archeologists are always arguing and re-evaluating and changing their interpretations, ergo, ergo, ergo...ergo what? Well, nothing, despite the author's pretense that this is all somehow evidence that the Bad Guy contemporary scientists are motivated by racism and essentially just making shit up. There's no argument here, just the usual sound and light show meant to produce an atmosphere of menace and moral suspicion.
Bored yet? Don't be. The amusing daftness is yet to come. A large part of Hitt's phantasmagoria flows from his pretending to be too dim to grasp the distinction between words like "caucasoid" and "Caucasian"; he is also ideologically primed to go into hysterics at the use of either one. While I'm sympathetic to the position that a careful speaker ought to avoid the use of old, vague terms like "caucasoid", I also have the suspicion that c-word ninnies are, as they say, doing it on purpose. It's hard to read a piece like Hitt's and not conclude that if "improper" usage wasn't available to flail at, he'd have no trouble sniffing up other evidence of racial thoughtcrime, because, deeply confused - deliberately or otherwise - he convinces himself that the scientists are talking about white folks despite the clear evidence, which he himself presents in detail, that they are talking about something quite distinct. Remember, the following lines are used to support his contention that pre-Clovis scientists are trying to impose on the public a "narrative" that beautiful, superior white Europeans were the first to colonize the New World:
Don't be confused here.
("Don't be confused here". Isn't that lovely?)
The scientists themselves who fling around words like "Caucasoid" are the very ones who also admit that the "Caucasian" skull is found everywhere. That's right. This Caucasian skull shape is found all over the planet. For example, another ancient skull always brought up alongside Kennewick's is a female skull found in Brazil. Nicknamed Luzia, the skull was analyzed in a report in a report that cited the following locations for resemblance: skulls seen among early Australians, bones found in China's Zhoukoudien Upper Cave, and a set of African remains known as Taforalt 18. So we've narrowed it down to Australia, China, and Africa.
But remember, mum's the word on possible non-European origins of Paleo-americans with anomalous caucasoid skull morphology!
And wait, did our wily reporter just mix up the c words in a way that would lead the right-thinking Harper's reader to believe that such usage was attributable to the scientists? (Don't be confused here!) He also hilariously describes the Center for the Study of the First Americans as "pro-Caucasian". You can click on over and decide for yourself. If you are eagerly expecting images of Wagnerian Norsemen, be forewarned, for example, that the page on colonization models is quite disappointingly studded with speculation on pre-Clovis migration to the New World from the Pacific side.
But Hitt goes off the deep end even before he starts hallucinating that pre-Clovis investigators are championing the notion that Kennewick Man and Luzia were the King and Queen of Sweden. Try p. 46:
"The word itself is lovely. Say it: 'Caucasian'. The word itself flows off the tongue like a stream trickling out of Eden. Its soothing and genteel murmur poses quite a patrician contrast to the field-labor grunts of the hard g's in 'Negroid' and 'Mongoloid'."
Yup, there's a world o' racism twixt those voiced and unvoiced velar consonants. (Yes, if you bother to read this piece, you will find an exasperated "whatever, Jack" rising to your lips several times per page.) How about p.48:
And the story that has been told these last eight years about this 100-century-old man is marvelous in its perverse beauty. It begins with the name. Does anything sound more European, more positively British, than Kennewick? Native Americans had dubbed him the "Ancient One," but it didn't take. The mass media, which follows the meandering will of the popular mob, could sense where this story was trending..."
Excellent point, because Java Man, Neandertals, Mungo Man it is exceedingly rare Peking Man, Spirit Cave Man, Buhl Woman for archeological finds Cheddar Man, Tollund Man, Taung Child to be named for the place they were found or a nearby locale. And there is no such place as Kennewick, Washington State.
Witch-Finder General Hitt tries the souls of pre-Clovis investigators and writers against the evidence of his hallucinations and finds white power advocates everywhere. Scientific American publishes some European-looking reconstructions of Kennewick and his honey; Scientific American is promoting a white supremacist agenda. Hitt is not off the mark in mocking these pictures - Mr. and Mrs. Kennewick Man look like a couple of Bobos searching for their SUV in a Mt.Rainier National Park parking lot. But if you want to demonstrate that the current incarnation of Scientific American is a crypto-Aryan Nation publication - hey, knock yourself out.
One has to have quite the subtle nose for sin to interpret the multiregional hypothesis as naught but an exercise in exalting Europeans above other groups. Something about the positing of Neandertal genes in modern European populations being an argument for white superiorty. (No, it doesn't make any more sense in context.) He supports this eccentric view by presenting handsome photos of reconstructions illustrating our changing perception of Neandertals, from brutes to intelligent, sympathetic cousins. Hitt tells us that this rehabilitation is motivated by an ideology of white superiority - you know, those multiregionalists. Unfortunately, though he insinuates a great deal, he provides not a shred of evidence that the changes in reconstruction have anything whatever to do with anybody's ideology, nor does he provide any evidentiary link between his claims about multiregionalists and the illustrations reproduced. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge, say nuh more...(Speaking of winky winky, Hitt not once but thrice makes snickering nudge-nudge reference to the bearded Nordic-ness of three different men. Why beards or Nordic appearance is snicker-worthy, I do not know. It's downright weird.)¹
He also throws in, as "backstory" to the Kennewick case, a lengthy aside on the often very European appearance of American Indians in European illustrations - a tendency I assume has been noted by any alert observer. I certainly noticed this phenomenon, and was puzzled by it, as a child. Of course, I was also puzzled by the appearance of Europeans in illustrations by East Asians. (Hey, I never knew that Commodore Perry was Japanese!) This common human tendency (necessity, really) of interpreting the new in terms of the already known is - yes, you've guessed it -insinuated into thoughtcrime, and the thoughtcrime plastered onto James Chatters's famous "Captain Picard" reconstruction of K-man. On the one hand Hitt acknowledges that "[f]orensic reconstruction is a very iffy 'science'", with no better than even odds of being accurate. On the other hand, he's dead sure the "Picardian" interpretation is dead wrong and could not possibly be the result of educated judgment, but only the product of Chatters's racist agenda.
For a brief space Hitt does turn himself to data rather than spinning pop-sociological potboilers, and addresses the subject of skull morphology:
We don't really know what people's skulls looked like 10,000 years ago. We have only a few, like the pre-Clovis points, so it's reckless to draw any conclusions. Skull shapes, like skin color, can change more quickly than we think, especially if there has been traumatic environmental change.Franz Boas, the legendary anthropologist from the turn of the last century, debunked a lot of skull science in his time by proving that the skulls of immigrant children from all parts of the world more closely resemble one another than do their parents'. Rapid dietary shifts can cause major structural changes in skeletons - just ask the average Japanese citizen, who has shot up four and a half inches in height since World War II, or the average American man, who has packed on an extra twenty-five pounds since 1960. The truth is that there exists no coherent history of skull shapes back through time, so to say that a 10,000-year-old skull resembles a modern white-guy skull is to compare apples and oranges.
Let us put aside for the moment the fact the Boas's debunking has been, to say the least, seriously challenged, and Hitt surely should have availed himself of Sparks and Jantz's 2002 paper, or at least the numerous press reports of its results. (Jantz does get a mention, but only in the context of pooh-poohing his and Doug Owsley's - another K-man plaintiff - database of genetic profiles based on a large set of skull measurements. Ha ha! Apparently it's silly to statistically analyze skull measurements, unless you're Franz Boas.) An excerpt from Sparks and Jantz:
In this study, we conducted a modern statistical evaluation of Franz Boas' data (2) and attempted to replicate his findings of cranial plasticity under changing environmental conditions. Instead of the large plasticity component claimed by Boas and countless others who have cited his work, our analysis reveals high heritability in the family data and variation among the ethnic groups, which persists, in the American environment. Research on this topic has shown major influences of changing environmental conditions on human stature and body-fat patterning (25, 26), but the only studies capable of dealing with effects of these changing conditions on the cranium were published 50–90 years ago (1–3, 6). Uncritical acceptance of his findings has resulted in 90 years of misunderstanding about the magnitude of plasticity. Reanalysis of Boas' data not only fails to support his contention that cranial plasticity is a primary source of cranial variation but rather supports what morphologists and morphometricians have known for a long time: most of the variation is genetic variation.
But leave all this aside and grant for the sake of argument that Hitt is completely correct about the meaninglessness and uselessness of skull morphometrics. What exactly, after kicking up all that racism-alleging dust, is Hitt's case against the Kennewick Man plaintiffs and for the tribal claimants? He straightforwardly admits the reasonableness of the pre-Clovis research project: "Chances are that Adovasio and his colleagues are right about the basic assertion of an ancient arrival of Homo sapiens to this continent. It easily fits in with what else is known."
Not that I'd recommend that the layman take Hitt's word for any of this, but if this is so, why exactly is he so bent out of shape by anyone's so much as suggesting that pre-Clovis migration may have come not only from the west but from the east? Fear of beards? Why the kitchen-sink reiteration of (legitimate in their own context) histories of conquest, racism, abandoned theories, all stirred into an incoherent tarry mess and presented as "evidence" that the paleoanthropologist at the local university keeps a set of white sheets with eye cut-outs in the bottom of his sock drawer? (This is not a practice unique to Mr. Hitt - though his is an unusually florid sample.) There's no sign that he recognizes any obligation to produce a coherent argument; he knows that pre-Clovis investigators, and even the courts that found in favor of the Kennewick plaintiffs, do what they do, and find what they find, because of a psychological craving for a Euro-centric, white supremacist "narrative" of history.
Well, let us grant him even this nutty view, and see where it leaves us. If "it's reckless to draw conclusions" based on so little available data, why exactly is he implicitly assailing the desire of scientists to add to the tantalizing but meager amount of information from the past? And if, as is surely correct, race is not an eternal category but a temporally fluid distribution of gene frequencies, why is he holding a brief for the Platonic essentialism of the defendant tribes? (In fact, aside from some boilerplate about "competing narratives" and a bit more toasty straw about the uses of oral tradition, Hitt shows little interest in exploring the defendants' side of the case.) If we don't know what was what 10,000 years ago, we don't know what was what 10,000 years ago. How exactly does all this gossipy hand-waving put the Kennewick plaintiffs in the wrong for wanting to know more about millenia old skeletons?
Hitt gives some inkling of understanding the foolishness of claiming descent through hundreds of generations. Or then again, maybe not - perhaps he only "understands" genealogical arithmetic when he's busily flattering and confusing himself into believing that pre-Clovians are all about claiming personal descent. Throughout, Hitt misses the obvious implications of his own commentary: at the beginning of the piece, he relates how, as a youngster, he believed that a relative's demonstration that he was "a direct lineal descendant of Charlemagne" was actually meaningful, and a legitimate point of pride. As a young man he was disabused of his arithmetic misapprehensions by a helpful professor, and the scales fell from his eyes about the nature of genealogy.
Now, this is a useful anecdote - people will pridefully relate that they are the great to the googleth grandson or the umpteenth cousin elebenty times removed of some kahuna (you and Bonzo, toots) - but, as usual, Hitt has obscure uses for straightforward information. When the late Robson Bonnichsen (who is beardedly Nordic, winky winky) makes an innocuous statement about the possibility of early New World populations sharing some genetic characteristics with later European populations, Hitt gleefully squeals, "Maybe he doesn't know that he's the direct heir to King Charlemagne" - as always, trying to pass off as an oh-so-clever aperçu a comment that, on examination, doesn't really make any sense (unless you've already bought Hitt's slanderous assumptions), or imply what he thinks it implies. Bonnichsen was one of the Kennewick Man plaintiffs. There were indeed persons peddling the equivalent of the "I am the direct heir of Charlemagne" line in support of their views in this case. But neither Bonnichsen nor any of the other plaintiffs were among these persons. Hint hint, nudge nudge, winky winky, Mr. Hitt.
¹Hitt is very fond of winky winky. Apparently he considers the sexual exploitation of his black slave ancestress by white men a subject for chatty innuendo. (Footnote 3 p. 46) Razib has pointed out to me that this bit of drollery also suggests he doesn't understand the genetic tests he's discussing: there is no ambiguity about the sex of the ancestor in NRY or mtDNA lineage testing.
(More Kennewick/NAGPRA.)