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Recent archaeological findings have led to revolutionary new theories about the first Americans-and to a tug-of war between scientists and contemporary Native Americans
THE SETTLEMENT OP THE AMERICAS by Thomas D. Dillehay Basic Books, 2000 372 pages; $27.50
BONES, BOATS & BISON by E. James Dixon University of New Mexico Press, 1999 322 pages; $49.95, cloth/$24.95, softcover
RIDDLE OF THE BONES by Roger Downey Copernicus, 2000 202 pages; $25.00
SKULL WARS by David Hurst Thomas Basic Books, 2000 326 pages; $25.00
SOME CROW TRADITIONALISTS BELIEVE THAT the world, the animals and all humans were created by a wise and powerful being named Old Man Coyote. The Brule Sioux have a different tradition: after a great flood, the only survivor was a beautiful girl, who was rescued by an eagle. She married the eagle, and their children became the Sioux people. Where did the native people of the Americas really come from? When did they first appear in those lands, and how? Just as the Judeo-Christian tradition teaches that human beings originated when God created Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, so every Native American tribe has at least one creation story.
Archaeologists, meanwhile, take a different view of how people first appeared in the Americas. Although they are sharply divided about the details, they are convinced by the archaeological record that the original peoples of the Americas migrated there from elsewhere. Where they came from and when they arrived are questions that remain to be resolved. Some answers, however, are beginning to emerge, and they indicate a process that was far more complicated than was ever imagined.
In one sense, both scientific theories about human origins and nonscientific traditions about the genesis of a particular tribe have something in common. All people and all cultures strive to understand the world and their place in it. Origin stories-whether traditional accounts or scientific theories-help satisfy those yearnings. They describe how and when people came to be on the earth, and they explain how people survived and prospered in their surroundings. But there are key differences as well. Scientific origin theories are subject to reevaluation as new evidence emerges: indeed, in the past several years the prevailing scientific view about the origins of the first...