by Bryan Sykes
The relevant statute here is the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), passed in 1990. The basis for a claim is that a tribe may have custody if it can establish a kinship or cultural link to the remains. For the Umatilla that did not present a problem since, according to their own creation myths, their ancestors had been living in the region since the beginning of time. This claim had an additional facet of argument: Were the courts, and by implication the U.S. government, to reject their claim, it would be tantamount to a rejection of their religious beliefs, in contravention of the First Amendment. Three other tribes, the Colville, Yakima, and Nez Perce, followed the Umatilla with similar claims to what was left of Kennewick Man.
While the legal battles were being fought in the courtrooms, the remains themselves were given into the care of the Burke Museum in Seattle, from where scientists were allowed to conduct some limited investigations. The skeleton was that of a man around five feet eight inches tall who had been between forty and fifty years old when he died. The spear point buried in his hip was of the Cascade Point style, which corresponded nicely with the radiocarbon date of 9,600 years. Surprisingly, however, this could not have been what killed him as it was encased by new bone growth. But what everyone wanted to know was what his DNA was like, for that, it was thought, was the key to deciding if he really was a European.
Although the legal hurdles to the scientific study of Kennewick Man were eventually cleared in 2005, no positive genetic findings have yet been published. Looking in detail at the earlier attempts to recover DNA in 1996, I have my doubts that there is any left. Just ten days after James Chatters assembled the almost complete skeleton and before the legal custody battle broke out, he contacted Frederika Kaestle, a graduate student at the University of California Davis, and asked her to try to recover DNA from the specimen. During early October of that year Kaestle took the bone samples through the various steps needed to extract DNA, designing her experiments around the mutations that defined the American mDNA clusters. She found nothing conclusive, which was especially unfortunate from a scientific point of view as, on October 19, UC Davis received a letter from the U.S. Corps of Engineers, which owned the Columbia riverbank at Kennewick, demanding that all DNA tests be discontinued. The university decided, reluctantly, to comply, handing over the unused samples to the Burke Museum to be curated along with the rest of the remains.
By spring 2000 there had been a change of heart at the Department of the Interior, and the bone samples were retrieved and distributed to UC Davis and two other centers, one of which was Dr. Kaestle’s new laboratory at Yale. Reading the detailed description of their attempts to get out some authentic DNA, I am reminded of the sheer frustration of trying to do this with any but the best-preserved material. Following a very sensible protocol, they duplicated DNA extractions as standard, but the duplicates only rarely gave the same result. Positive controls were negative, and negative controls positive. Students in my lab doing this kind of ancient DNA work with poorly preserved remains were sometimes reduced to tears. Catching the same sense of frustration in the reports on Kennewick Man, I was very sympathetic when I discovered that the only DNA that any of the investigators managed to extract reproducibly was their own.7
Kennewick Man remains an enigma and, like the Windover brains, would certainly benefit from a reanalysis using the improved DNA techniques available today. However, the circumstances have become more unfavorable for an unbiased scientific investigation because of the misguided claims that have already surfaced. I have no sympathy for the claims of the Asatru Folk Assembly and the implication that finding a typically European DNA in Kennewick Man would invalidate Native American claims to be descended from the first Americans. For one thing, no DNA result would lend scientific support to the Asatru claim since I do think it quite likely, for reasons I have explained, that there is some ancient European ancestry among Native Americans. But the legal tussles surrounding Kennewick Man also highlighted the beliefs that Native Americans have of their own ancestral origins. This, and the Native American view of genetic ancestry research, is something we will consider in depth in a later chapter, but to give you a taste of the problem—and it is a problem—let me recount the case of the Havasupai.
I was aware that the results of DNA testing had the potential to conflict with tribal oral histories, but I have never encountered this as a particular difficulty in my own research in Polynesia or in Britain. Polynesians were generally curious to discover the location of their mythical homeland, Havai’iki, and eager to help with my genetic research, which might throw some light on it. Equally, British men and women needed little persuasion to volunteer their DNA to help discover whether the ancestors of today’s Britons were Saxons, Vikings, or Celts. I always thought that I would soon become aware of any potential conflict when I visited an area and talked to the volunteers. If they didn’t want me to look into their genetic ancestry, then neither did I. However, it is pretty clear that not all genetic research has been done in this way in the past—especially when there was a rush to make new discoveries before anyone else could publish, as in the case of Native Americans. Tellingly, the influential paper on the Nuu-Chah-Nulth that we covered in the previous chapter was carried out without consent on samples collected earlier for a different purpose. There was a temptation to sidestep the collection phase, which would soon have uncovered any sensitivities, and use DNA from previous collections. I don’t think this was done in deliberate contravention of the wishes of the donors, but more because the investigators were mainly European, among whom genetic ancestry testing is largely uncontroversial. The principal author on the Nuu-Chah-Nulth paper later admitted, “The way people operated at the time, it didn’t cross anyone’s mind—we didn’t mean to be evil and we are more careful now.”8 This was a bad misjudgment in the case of Native Americans, as the protracted legal dispute between the Havasupai Indians and the University of Arizona showed very clearly. Matters came to a head in April 2010 with the New York Times putting the out-of-court settlement on the front page under the headline “Tribe Wins Fight to Limit Research of Its DNA.” The accompanying photograph of a waterfall cascading from red cliffs into a turquoise pool immediately placed the tribal home of the Havasupai in the region of the Grand Canyon.
To explain the background to the case, American Indians have among the highest rates of type 2 diabetes in the world. The best known of these are the Akimel O’odham, or Pima Indians, who live alongside the Gila River in southern Arizona and have been studied intensively since 1965 by an offshoot of the National Institutes of Health in nearby Phoenix. The prevalence is frightening, with half of those over thirty-five years having the condition.
I don’t view this form of diabetes as a disease in the usual way because I subscribe to the “thrifty gene” explanation first put forward by the geneticist Jim Neel in 1962.9 This explains diabetes as a genetic condition that has advantages when food is short and only becomes a problem when high-carbohydrate foods become abundant in the diet. When times are hard, as they have been for the ancestors of all Native Americans, as we have seen, the individuals carrying the thrifty genes are favored by natural selection because, with their more efficient metabolism, they can survive on less food than their contemporaries. But when food, especially carbohydrates, which were virtually unknown to our hunter-gatherer ancestors, becomes more plentiful, the thrifty genes are a distinct disadvantage. Unaware that starvation is now no longer a threat, these genes continue to direct the body to store fat in preparation for the winter shortages that never come. I have seen the same pattern in Polynesia, where thrifty genes helped the original settlers survive the long voyages across the vast Pacific but now make the modern-day descendants of these intrepid navigators prone to obesity and diabetes when consuming a high-carbohydrate diet. The same is true, I am convinced, in Europeans, whose hunter-gatherer ancestors also faced the threat of starvation every winter. As we are all aware, the incidence of type 2 diabetes is on the in
crease in the well-fed West, and there is every reason to find out the genetic cause. I would not go so far as to say that it is for this reason alone that diabetes among the Pima has received so much research attention: It is a very real problem for them, not withstanding the universal interest in the outcome.
Although the Pima are by now the textbook example of diabetes among indigenous peoples, and I have included them in my genetics lectures to medical students, it was only natural to be curious whether the same thrifty genes, whatever they were, were to be found in other Indian tribes where there was also a high incidence of diabetes. That is where the Havasupai first became involved. According to the New York Times article, it was the Havasupai themselves who asked an Arizona State University anthropologist who had been working with the tribe for several years whether he knew of anyone who could help discover the cause of the condition that was forcing tribal members to have limb amputations and to leave the canyon for kidney dialysis. As a direct result of this request, Dr. Therese Markow began working with the Havasupai shortly afterward, aware that finding a common genetic risk shared by the Pima might help to pinpoint the diabetes genes. She began to collect samples in 1990, basing herself at the tribal village of Supai, deep in the Grand Canyon.
Over the next four years Dr. Markow collected blood samples from about a hundred tribal members, who, having had the aims of the project explained, signed a broad consent to their samples being used “to study the causes of behavioral/medical disorders.” As she was also interested in the genetics of schizophrenia, the consent was broader than diabetes alone. Back at Arizona State University, DNA was prepared from the blood, and Dr. Markow’s team started the long process of looking for genes among the Havasupai that might be implicated not only in diabetes but also in schizophrenia and alcoholism. Not unusually for the 1990s she did not discover any strongly associated genes for any of these conditions, and the unused DNA remained in the lab freezer.
Several years later, by which time the techniques for locating susceptibility genes had improved, Dr. Markow assigned a student to have another go at the Havasupai samples. It was when the student had finished the work and was about to present it for public examination in 2003 that the trouble erupted. Carletta Tilousi, one of the Havasupai who had volunteered her DNA back in the 1990s, was invited to attend the public examination. According to her account, what she heard bore no relation to the diabetes project she thought she had been invited to join. She asked bluntly whether the student had permission to use Havasupai blood for her research. At this point the presentation was halted, and subsequently the offending chapter was removed from the dissertation and the university launched an investigation. This revealed that the Havasupai DNA samples had been used for several projects unconnected with the original diabetes investigation.
Two of these caused particular offense to the Havasupai. One was that the genetic data were used to calculate the degree of inbreeding within the tribe. The subject of inbreeding among the Havasupai and other Indian tribes is extremely sensitive, as indicated by their belief that if it is discovered, a relative will die. Second, and the reason I raise it here, is that the Havasupai samples were also included in research that explored the ancestral origin of Native Americans. As was already evident in the claim by the Umatilla for custody of the Kennewick remains, they, like the Havasupai, do not believe that their ancestors came from Siberia or Europe or anywhere else. In their tradition, which is shared by many if not most Native American nations and tribes, their ancestors have been living where their descendants are now living since the beginning of time. As we shall see later, the Havasupai case illustrates the conflict between traditional beliefs and modern science, which has serious consequences for Native Americans and geneticists alike.
In his sobering 2010 presidential address to the American Society of Human Genetics, Dr. Roderick R. McInnes condemned the carelessness and cultural ignorance of geneticists that led to the mistakes of past decades of research on indigenous people.10 There can be no more excuses after such a high-level intervention.
5
The Europeans
The Mayflower in heavy seas.
In complete contrast to the suspicion and hostility with which, for understandable reasons, Native Americans now regard genetic research, European Americans have welcomed such investigations with open arms. But before I explore the results of this enthusiasm, let me just briefly go over the events that brought so many Europeans to America in the first place. Though these will be more than familiar to most readers, I do not want to assume that everyone has them at their fingertips.
In the modern era, by which I mean since the last ice age, the first European known to have visited America was the Norseman Leif Erikson in AD 1002 or thereabouts. Born in Iceland, Erikson was the son of the Norwegian explorer and outlaw Erik Thorvaldsson, who founded the first settlements in Greenland. Erikson sold plots of land to gullible Icelanders who fell for his description of a green and fertile land, which though wildly misleading, has stuck in the name. He was also a born explorer and set off north and west from Greenland in an oceangoing longship to look for new land that a friend of his had reported seeing. He soon came across Baffin Island, then headed south, sighting the coast of Labrador, and finally landing on the tip of Newfoundland. Here he established a temporary settlement, called Vinland, after the wild vines he found growing there. Despite the hospitable surroundings, and rivers full of salmon, Erikson sailed back to Iceland, never to return. Being a great admirer of the Viking spirit of adventure, I find it very hard to believe that news of this voyage did not spread and was not followed up, if not by Erikson then by someone else. But apparently not, and it was another five hundred years before another European was to step ashore. Nevertheless Leif Erikson’s exploits are celebrated in the United States every October 9 with a special commemorative day, although the great majority of Americans today are not aware of it.
By some accounts the story of Erikson’s discovery was still well-enough known when Christopher Columbus visited Iceland in 1477, fifteen years before his first transatlantic voyage in 1492, hoping to reach India and encouraged to do so by a severe underestimate of the world’s circumference. Instead he landed first in the Bahamas and then in Cuba, before finally running aground on the island of Hispaniola, now shared between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. In all, Columbus made four transatlantic voyages between 1492 and 1504, all of them sponsored by the Spanish crown, exploring more Caribbean islands and the coast of Central America but never sighting the North American mainland. For the next hundred years it was Spain and Portugal that were behind most new European colonies, though they concentrated more on South and Central America than the North. They soon eliminated opposition in Mexico, when they defeated the Aztec, and in Peru, where they destroyed the empire of the Inca. In North America the Spaniards built outposts in Florida in 1565 and then in Arizona and New Mexico, establishing Santa Fe in 1610. By the middle of the eighteenth century they had founded colonies along the coast of California, centered on Monterey.
Although the Spaniards were the first Europeans to settle in America, other European powers were not far behind. France, Holland, and even Sweden founded colonies on American soil, but it was the British who, after a protracted start, eventually became the predominant European influence, particularly along the eastern seaboard. The first English colony was established in August 1585 on Roanoke Island, among the shoals that guard the entrance to Albemarle Bay, North Carolina. Five years later, in 1590, a relief ship found the colony deserted with no sign of the 120 inhabitants. There was no evidence of a struggle, and the buildings had been deliberately dismantled, as if the colonists had decided to relocate. They were never seen again, and their fate remains a mystery to this day.
The first permanent English colony was begun at Jamestown, Virginia, in May 1607 on the James River, forty miles upstream from Chesapeake Bay. The site was swampy, regularly inundated by brackish sea water, and infested with mosquitoes. E
ighty percent of the colonists died within two years. Yet Jamestown survived—barely—and became the center of the Virginia Colony, with the population growing to forty thousand by 1670. Its survival was only marginal in the early days (and Bostonians claim Jamestown was formally abandoned for a short while, thereby ceding the title of first permanent settlement to their own city). All the expected crops of sugarcane, oranges, and lemons failed, and it was only the introduction, in 1612, of tobacco, which thrived in the damp heat, that saved the colony. By the 1650s the Virginia Colony and the neighboring colony of Maryland at the north end of Chesapeake Bay were exporting annually five million pounds of tobacco back to Europe.
Farther north the English Puritan colonies of New England also got off to a shaky start following the arrival of the Mayflower and its complement of a hundred Pilgrims at Plymouth in Massachusetts Bay in November 1620. Famously they survived the winter thanks only to the help they received from the local Wampanoag Indians. Unlike the commercial motivations of the Virginia Colony, the Plymouth Colony was started to escape religious intolerance in England. More colonies followed. In 1630 John Winthrop arrived on the Arabella with a royal charter to establish the Massachusetts Bay Colony, centered on Boston, with himself as governor. Others, like Rhode Island, were started as result of fierce internal theological disagreements. By 1640 there were about twenty thousand colonists living throughout New England.
