Denali, Ongtupqa, and Other Native American Names for Landmarks

Mount McKinley was recently renamed Denali, but it's not the only one with a Native American name

Since 1917, the tallest mountain in North America has been known as “Mount McKinley” on official maps and registers. But on August 28, the Department of the Interior declared that the 20,237-foot peak would once again be officially known as “Denali,” the name it held for thousands of years.

“This name change recognizes the sacred status of Denali to many Alaska Natives,” Secretary Jewell said in a statement. “The name Denali has been official for use by the State of Alaska since 1975, but even more importantly, the mountain has been known as Denali for generations.”

Meaning “the great one” or “the high one,” Denali plays a central role in the creation myth of the Koyukon Athabascans, a Native Alaskan group that has lived in the region for centuries, Julie Hirschfeld Davis writes for The New York Times. The mountain first became known as Mount McKinley in 1896, when a gold prospector emerged from the wilderness to learn that William McKinley, a defender of the gold standard, had just been nominated as a presidential candidate. While McKinley was assassinated just six months into his first term and never set foot in Alaska, the name stuck.

Denali is one of the most high-profile cases of official mapmakers disregarding the names given to natural landmarks by Native Americans but it is far from the only one. Here are a few of the United States’ natural wonders that had names for centuries before Europeans set foot in the Americas:

The Grand Canyon

The second-most visited national park in the country and one of the United States’ most iconic natural landmarks, the Grand Canyon has been continuously inhabited by Native American groups for almost 12,000 years, according to the National Parks Service. The canyon was called "Ongtupqa" in the Hopi language and was considered a holy site and a passageway to the afterlife.

Mount Rushmore

The cliffside that bears the likenesses of George Washington, Theodore Roosevelt, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln changed several times during the 19th century. The Black Hills of South Dakota, where the presidential carvings loom, was originally Sioux holy land, with the mountain itself known as “The Six Grandfathers,” Nick Kirkpatrick writes for The Washington Post. While the land was promised to the Sioux by an 1868 treaty, it was taken back by the federal government in 1877. The mountain was officially named “Mount Rushmore” in 1930 after a New York lawyer who liked to hunt in the area.

The Everglades

Once covering over 11,000 square miles of Florida’s marshland, the Everglades were home for several Native American groups, including the Calusa, Seminole and Miccosukee tribes for more than 3,000 years. Originally called Pa-hay-Okee, meaning “grassy river” in the Seminole language, the marshes were dubbed “the Everglades” by the first Englishmen to visit the region, according to the National Parks Service.

Mount Washington

The tallest mountain in the northeast, New Hampshire’s Mount Washington was once called Agiocochook, or "Home of the Great Spirit," by the local Abenaki people. The mountain was first referred to as Mount Washington in 1784 in honor of the then-general’s military service, but was officially named by the group of mountaineers who designated New Hampshire’s Presidential Range in 1820, according to the Appalachian Mountain Club.
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Reference:

Lewis, Danny. 2015. “Denali, Ongtupqa, and Other Native American Names for Landmarks”. Smithsonian. Posted: September 1, 2015. Available online: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/president-obama-officially-renames-north-americas-tallest-mountain-denali-180956458/?no-ist

Fire ecology manipulation by California native cultures

California's tribal peoples utilized wildfire to diversify resources

Before the colonial era, 100,000s of people lived on the land now called California, and many of their cultures manipulated fire to control the availability of plants they used for food, fuel, tools, and ritual. Contemporary tribes continue to use fire to maintain desired habitat and natural resources.

Frank Lake, an ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service's Pacific Southwest Station, will lead a field trip to the Stone Lake National Wildfire Refuge during the Ecological Society of America's 99th Annual Meeting, in Sacramento, Cal. this August. Visitors will learn about plant and animal species of cultural importance to local tribes. Don Hankins, a faculty associate at California State University at Chico and a member of the Miwok people, will co-lead the trip, which will end with a visit to California State Indian Museum.

Lake will also host a special session on a "sense of place," sponsored by the Traditional Ecological Knowledge section of the Ecological Society, that will bring representatives of local tribes into the Annual Meeting to share their cultural and professional experiences working on tribal natural resources issues.

"The fascinating thing about the Sacramento Valley and the Miwok lands where we are taking the field trip is that it was a fire and flood system," said Lake. "To maintain the blue and valley oak, you need an anthropogenic fire system."

Lake, raised among the Yurok and Karuk tribes in the Klamath River area of northernmost California, began his career with an interest in fisheries, but soon realized he would need to understand fire to restore salmon. Fire exerts a powerful effect on ecosystems, including the quality and quantity of water available in watersheds, in part by reducing the density of vegetation.

"Those trees that have grown up since fire suppression are like straws sucking up the groundwater," Lake said.

The convergence of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers was historically one of the largest salmon bearing runs on the West Coast, Lake said, and the Miwok, Patwin and Yokut tribal peoples who lived in the area saw and understood how fire was involved.

California native cultures burned patches of forest in deliberate sequence to diversify the resources available within their region. The first year after a fire brought sprouts for forage and basketry. In 3 to 5 years, shrubs produced a wealth of berries. Mature trees remained for the acorn harvest, but burning also made way for the next generation of trees, to ensure a consistent future crop. Opening the landscape improved game and travel, and created sacred spaces.

"They were aware of the succession, so they staggered burns by 5 to 10 years to create mosaics of forest in different stages, which added a lot of diversity for a short proximity area of the same forest type," Lake said. "Complex tribal knowledge of that pattern across the landscape gave them access to different seral stages of soil and vegetation when tribes made their seasonal rounds."

In oak woodlands, burning killed mold and pests like the filbert weevil and filbert moth harbored by the duff and litter on the ground. People strategically burned in the fall, after the first rain, to hit a vulnerable time in the life cycle of the pests, and maximize the next acorn crop. Lake thinks that understanding tribal use of these forest environments has context for and relevance to contemporary management and restoration of endangered ecosystems and tribal cultures.

"Working closely with tribes, the government can meet its trust responsibility and have accountability to tribes, and also fulfill the public trust of protection of life, property, and resources," Lake said. "By aligning tribal values with public values you can get a win-win, reduce fire along wildlife-urban interfaces, and make landscapes more resilient."
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References:

EurekAlert. 2014. “Fire ecology manipulation by California native cultures”. EurekAlert. Posted: July 25, 2014. Available online: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2014-07/esoa-fem072514.php

Genome of American Clovis skeleton mapped: Ancestor of most present-day Native American populations

They lived in America about 13,000 years ago where they hunted mammoth, mastodons and giant bison with big spears. The Clovis people were not the first humans in America, but they represent the first humans with a wide expansion on the North American continent -- until the culture mysteriously disappeared only a few hundred years after its origin. Who the Clovis people were and which present day humans they are related to has been discussed intensely and the issue has a key role in the discussion about how the Americas were peopled. Today there exists only one human skeleton found in association with Clovis tools and at the same time it is among the oldest human skeletons in the Americas. It is a small boy between 1 and 1.5 years of age -- found in a 12,600 old burial site, called the Anzick Site, in Wilsall, Montana, USA. Now an international team headed by Danish researcher Eske Willerslev has mapped his genome thereby reviving the scientific debate about the colonization of the Americas.

Roughly estimated some 80 % of all present-day Native American populations on the two American continents are direct descendants of the Clovis boy's family. The remaining 20 % are more closely related with the Clovis family than any other people on Earth, says Lundbeck Professor Eske Willerslev from the Centre for GeoGenetics at the Natural History Museum of Denmark, University of Copenhagen. This surprising result has now been published in the scientific journal Nature. The discovery is so decisive that Nature has chosen to send the article to the press at a later time than usual as they fear the media embargo may be broken. A comprehensive international telephone press conference has been arranged and will be held in the Crow tribe's reservation in Montana -- close to where the boy was found. Behind the results are a group of international researchers led by Professor Eske Willerslev from Centre of Excellence in GeoGenetics, Natural History Museum at University of Copenhagen, Denmark.

The missing link

It is almost like finding the 'missing link' to the common ancestor of the Native Americans. The Clovis boy's family is the direct ancestor to roughly estimated 80 % of all present day Native Americans. Although the Clovis culture disappeared its people are living today. Put simply it is a sensation that we succeeded in finding an approximately 12,600 year old boy whose closest relatives can be regarded as the direct ancestor to so many people, Eske Willerslev says and adds: This also means that Clovis did not descend from Europeans, Asians or Melanesians, a theory that a number of scientists have advocated. They were Native Americans -- and the Native American ancestors were the first people in America. This is now a fact.

Shane Doyle, a historian from the Apsaalooke (Crow) tribe, who helped the team with consultations to the Montana tribes agrees: This discovery by Eske and his team proves something that tribal people have never doubted -- we've been here since time immemorial and all the ancient artifacts located within our homelands are remnants from our direct ancestors. But the discovery is only part of the importance of this study. The other part being Eske and his team's respectful commitment to interacting face to face with tribal communities and listening to Native American leaders, which has lead directly to the reburial of this little boy."

Also Sarah Anzick, a molecular biologist in the study and the steward of the remains that were found on private land is excited: After 46 years since the discovery on my family land, we are finally hearing this child's story through his genetic legacy. I find it remarkable that the descendants of the Clovis culture, which seemed to have vanished 12,600 years ago, are still alive and thriving today. Interestingly, the teams find that Native American ancestors coming in from Siberia split into two groups. One group is ancestors to the Native Americans presently living in Canada and the other one -- which is represented by the Clovis boy -- is the ancestor to virtually all Native Americans in South America and Mexico. The US is still a white spot on the map when it comes to genome-wide data from Native Americans. The team members hope to be able to accessing such data in the future to understand the full picture.

The study validates the concept of continuity in the history of Native Americans, and suggests that modern Native Americans are direct descendants of the first people occupying this land, says Rasmus Nielsen, a co-author on the study and a Professor at UC Berkeley, who developed the method used for determining that many modern native Americans are direct descendants of the Clovis boy's family.

An Asian homeland for the First Americans

The first humans came from Siberia via the so-called Beringia Land Bridge, which during the latest ice age connected Siberia with North America and did not bring the Clovis culture with them. The Clovis culture arose after they arrived in America and the boy from Anzick was more a descendant of the first immigrants.

Michael Waters, the key archaeologist connected to the study and who has worked on many Clovis and older sites in North America elaborates: The genetic findings mesh well with the archaeological evidence to confirm the Asian homeland of the First Americans, more clearly define their genetic heritage, and is consistent with occupation of the Americas a few thousand years before Clovis. The findings do not support a western European origin of the First Americans as suggested by the Solutrean hypothesis. The genetic information provided by the Anzick boy is part of the larger story of modern human dispersal across Earth and is shedding new light on the last continent to be explored and settled by our species.

Then who were the first immigrants? We don't know. Yet. Maybe a Native American, maybe an ancestor related to the Mal'ta boy from Siberia and another one who was East Asian. We don't know. But our results eliminate all other theories about the origins of the first people in America. The first people in America were the direct ancestors of Native Americans, says Professor Willerslev and continues:

We can see that the Clovis boy shares about 1/3 of his genes with the 24,000 year old child from Mal'ta at the Siberian Lake Baikal who we have analyzed previously. The same goes for all present day Native Americans. Therefore the encounter between East Asians and the Mal'ta group happened before Clovis. The human remains from the Anzick site will be reburied sometime this year in cooperation with Native American tribes in Montana. Eske Willerslev has in connection with the genome work on the Clovis boy visited several of Montana's Native American tribes with Crow historian Shane Doyle to discuss the findings.
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References:

Science Daily. 2014. “Genome of American Clovis skeleton mapped: Ancestor of most present-day Native American populations”. Science Daily. Posted: February 12, 2014. Available online: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/02/140212132807.htm

Native Tribes' Traditional Knowledge Can Help US Adapt to Climate Change

New England's Native tribes, whose sustainable ways of farming, forestry, hunting and land and water management were devastated by European colonists four centuries ago, can help modern America adapt to climate change.

That's the conclusion of more than 50 researchers at Dartmouth and elsewhere in a special issue of the journal Climatic Change. It is the first time a peer-reviewed journal has focused exclusively on climate change's impacts on U.S. tribes and how they are responding to the changing environments. Dartmouth also will host an Indigenous Peoples Climate Change Working Group meeting Nov. 4- 5.

The special issue, which includes 13 articles, concludes that tribes' traditional ecological knowledge can play a key role in developing scientific solutions to adapt to the impacts. "The partnerships between tribal peoples and their non-tribal research allies give us a model for responsible and respectful international collaboration," the authors say.

Dartmouth assistant professors Nicholas Reo and Angela Parker, whose article is titled "Re-thinking colonialism to prepare for the impacts of rapid environmental change," said New England settlers created a cascade of environmental and human changes that spread across North America, including human diseases, invasive species, deforestation and overharvest.

The researchers identified social and ecological tipping points and feedback loops that amplify and mitigate environmental change. For example, prior to the arrival of Europeans, old growth deciduous forests were rich with animal and plant resources and covered more than 80 percent of New England. Native peoples helped to sustain this bountiful biodiversity for centuries through their land practices.

"But when indigenous communities were decimated by disease and eventually alienated from their known environments, land tenure innovations based on deep, local ecological knowledge, disappeared," the researchers say. "Colonists, and their extractive systems aimed at key animal and plant species, became the new shapers of cultural landscapes. Rapid ecological degradation subsequently ensued, and New Englanders created a difficult project of stewarding a far less resilient landscape without help from indigenous land managers who would have known best how to enact ecological restoration measures."

Today's tribal members who work with natural resources, such as fisherman, farmers and land managers, can play key roles in devising local and regional strategies to adapt to climate change, the researchers say.
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References:

Science Daily. 2013. “Native Tribes' Traditional Knowledge Can Help US Adapt to Climate Change”. Science Daily. Posted: October 3, 2013. Available online: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/10/131003162944.htm

Native Americans and Northern Europeans More Closely Related Than Previously Thought

Using genetic analyses, scientists have discovered that Northern European populations -- including British, Scandinavians, French, and some Eastern Europeans -- descend from a mixture of two very different ancestral populations, and one of these populations is related to Native Americans. This discovery helps fill gaps in scientific understanding of both Native American and Northern European ancestry, while providing an explanation for some genetic similarities among what would otherwise seem to be very divergent groups.

This research was published in the November 2012 issue of the Genetics Society of America's journal Genetics.

According to Nick Patterson, first author of the report, "There is a genetic link between the paleolithic population of Europe and modern Native Americans. The evidence is that the population that crossed the Bering Strait from Siberia into the Americas more than 15,000 years ago was likely related to the ancient population of Europe."

To make this discovery, Patterson worked with Harvard Medical School Professor of Genetics David Reich and other colleagues to study DNA diversity, and found that one of these ancestral populations was the first farming population of Europe, whose DNA lives on today in relatively unmixed form in Sardinians and the people of the Basque Country, and in at least the Druze population in the Middle East. The other ancestral population is likely to have been the initial hunter-gathering population of Europe. These two populations were very different when they met. Today the hunter-gathering ancestral population of Europe appears to have its closest affinity to people in far Northeastern Siberia and Native Americans.

The statistical tools for analyzing population mixture were developed by Patterson and presented in a systematic way in the report. These tools are the same ones used in previous discoveries showing that Indian populations are admixed between two highly diverged ancestral populations and showing that Neanderthals contributed one to four percent of the ancestry of present-day Europeans. In addition, the paper releases a major new dataset that characterizes genetic diversity in 934 samples from 53 diverse worldwide populations.

"The human genome holds numerous secrets. Not only does it unlock important clues to cure human disease, it also reveal clues to our prehistoric past," said Mark Johnston, Editor-in-Chief of the journal Genetics. "This relationship between humans separated by the Atlantic Ocean reveals surprising features of the migration patterns of our ancestors, and reinforces the truth that all humans are closely related."
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References:

Science Daily. 2012. “Native Americans and Northern Europeans More Closely Related Than Previously Thought”. Science Daily. Posted: November 30, 2012. Available online: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/11/121130151606.htm

Sacred tradition of sweat lodges lives on

Just outside Bozeman, a dirt road leads to a different kind of church.

The small shelter sits atop a hill and next to a stand of aspen trees. Stacks of wood and brush, piles of blankets and gallon jugs of water surround it.

The structure is made of bent willows, blankets and tarps. A flap lifts up and serves as the entrance, and inside pieces of red cloth tied to the frame are reminders of the prayers said when each was fastened. The rich herbal odor of bear root hangs in the air, and a pit for fire-hot lava rocks is dug in the corner.

Many men have sat here, breathing in the steam and scent of roots and herbs as beads of sweat drench them, praying in the heat and feeling what it means to be part of this tradition.

Once forbidden by the U.S. government, this ceremony is sacred.

Sweat lodges are deeply rooted in Native American culture, and many tribes today still practice the rituals. The Indian community in Bozeman maintains about a half dozen lodges in the area, places where they can pray, ground themselves and feel a connection with ancestors.

Shane Doyle is a member of the Crow tribe and an adjunct instructor of Native American Studies at Montana State University. He grew up on the Crow Reservation, and in Bozeman he helps maintain the sweat lodge off the dirt road.

He runs sweat ceremonies there for himself and small groups of friends.

Not everyone can do so — the ceremony had to be passed down to Doyle from another person who had it passed down to him, and so on.

There are many ways to conduct the ceremonies, and they vary from tribe to tribe and person to person. Because they are handed down, they are run the same way today as they were centuries ago, in the time when millions of buffalo still roamed the country.

This is the oral tradition, the passing along of culture, ceremonies and histories without ever physically recording them.

“These traditions are not going to go away if they’re not written,” Doyle said.

He added that one could learn how to do a sweat from a book or the Internet, but it’s not authentic unless passed down.

As the Crow story goes, the tradition of sweat lodges originally came from bighorn sheep. Long ago, a boy’s stepfather tried to kill him by pushing him off a cliff. A band of sheep rescued the boy, and he lived with them for many years before returning to his people.

When he came back, he said the sheep told him many things, including about the sweat lodge. The boy also said the people would be safe if they named the mountains after the sheep.

That’s how the Bighorn Mountains were named and how this sacred ceremony began for the Crow people. Today, it’s still very much intact.

Running a sweat

Today when Doyle runs a sweat, the process takes at least half a day.

He has to have plenty of wood and brush gathered to build a fire, and he also needs a pile of the right kind of rocks. The best are lava rocks, which have holes in them and can expand and contract with the heat without exploding.

First Doyle will start a fire outside the sweat lodge to heat the rocks. After about an hour and a half, the rocks are hot enough.

For Crow ceremonies, men and women take part separately. The men go in naked, sitting cross-legged in a circle on the ground. A pit is dug in one corner, and that’s where the rocks will go once they’re heated.

Four is a special number in Indian culture — it symbolizes the four directions and four seasons. When the first four rocks are brought in, everyone must be quiet. As more are added, participants can relax.

There are four rounds in the sweat with breaks in between. In the first, water is poured on the rocks four times. In the second, water is poured seven times, to represent the big dipper and seven buffalo that once helped the tribe. On the third round, 10 pours represent the number of moons between conception and birth. On the last round, there can be an infinite number of pours to represent that life goes on forever.

Occasionally, there will be a fifth or bonus round, but it’s casual and not as ceremonial, Doyle said.

“It puts you in a sacred frame of mind because it’s always been done that way,” Doyle said of the ceremony.

Herbs and medicines like cedar, sweetgrass and sage are also used during the sweat. In the Crow tradition, bear root, also known as osha root, is most commonly used. Recently at the sweat lodge, Doyle held an orange chunk of it in his hand.

When the door is closed and it is thrown on the rocks, it lights up like little stars. It gives a soothing, peppery smell, and Doyle knows he’s breathing it in much like his ancestors once did.

“Sweat lodges are important and significant,” Doyle said. “They connect us to people who prayed for us before we were born. They’re part of something special and bigger than us.”

Not safe, not comfortable, but spiritual

The sweat ceremony, like other traditional tribal ceremonies, is not necessarily safe or comfortable. It gets so hot you might feel like your skin is burning. It pushes you out of your comfort zone and is physically demanding.

“The spirit and body are two different things, and people need to understand that,” Doyle said. “The body is temporary, weak. It gets old; it breaks; it gets tired. The spirit is infinite; it goes on and it never ends. It’s always the same, like water.”

But, a person can leave a sweat at anytime if they want to.

“It’s a self-discovery process,” Doyle said. “Learning about yourself is at the heart of the matter. You find that out from God.”

The ceremonies are about celebrating life and living it the best you can.

“Traditions are still very much practiced under our noses, but we don’t know or hear about it,” he said. “We continue to provide people with a high quality of life by exercising spirituality and trying to come to terms with what it means to be an Indian in the modern world.”

A person can be a full-blood Indian, but it means nothing if they don’t know about their culture or language, Doyle said. Sweats help them know who they are.

“We’re always entering into undiscovered country, which is the future,” Doyle said. ‘There are so many options. We need to figure out what to value, and we need to draw on something that’s ancient.”

Banned ceremonies

But traditional ceremonies weren’t always options for Indian people. The U.S. government essentially banned the ceremonies until the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978.

Jason Baldes is a graduate student at Montana State University and a member of the Eastern Shoshone tribe. He was raised on the Wind River Indian Reservation.

His parents grew up when the sweat lodge and sun dance were illegal. His grandparents were punished for speaking their native language. They were taught to forsake and abandon their own culture.

He is part of a new generation that is again able to practice traditional ceremonies, to speak their native language and to retain a culture that missionaries once tried to force out of people.

“It’s up to us as young people to learn to revitalize that,” Baldes said. “It’s still slipping away from us.”

He said he used to sweat in a lodge several times a week when he was on the reservation.

“To have that way of life, the ability to pray that way was critical,” Baldes said. “It gives meaning to who we are as an Indian people. I’ve seen miracles happen in that lodge. Collective prayers are answered. It’s a really sacred place.”

Baldes said he doesn’t take part in any modern organized religions and is bitter about the way religion was used in the past against his people. Instead, he follows his Indian ways, and is grateful that he is not persecuted for that.

In a recent interview, Baldes noted how an elder with the best knowledge of his native language recently died. He talked about how few genetically pure bison are left. As some parts of his culture slip away, ceremonies like the sweat lodge are even more important.

“It provides an identity that was once taken away from us and frowned upon,” he said.

When he breathes in that sacred steam again, when the beads of sweat form and the heat burns against his skin, he will pray, he will be grounded, and he will remember who he is.

This tradition will never be lost.
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References:

Flandro, Carly. 2012. "Sacred tradition of sweat lodges lives on ". Bozeman Daily Chronicle. Posted: February 1, 2012. Available online: http://www.bozemandailychronicle.com/news/sunday/article_8be235d4-4a41-11e1-bfc1-001871e3ce6c.html

Anthropologists clarify link between Asians and early Native-Americans

A tiny mountainous region in southern Siberia may have been the genetic source of the earliest Native Americans, according to new research by a University of Pennsylvania-led team of anthropologists.

Lying at the intersection of what is today Russia, Mongolia, China and Kazakhstan, the region known as the Altai "is a key area because it's a place that people have been coming and going for thousands and thousands of years," said Theodore Schurr, an associate professor in Penn's Department of Anthropology. Schurr, together with doctoral student Matthew Dulik and a team of graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, collaborated on the work with Ludmila Osipova of the Institute of Cytology and Genetics in Novosibirsk, Russia.

Among the people who may have emerged from the Altai region are the predecessors of the first Native Americans. Roughly 20-25,000 years ago, these prehistoric humans carried their Asian genetic lineages up into the far reaches of Siberia and eventually across the then-exposed Bering land mass into the Americas.

"Our goal in working in this area was to better define what those founding lineages or sister lineages are to Native American populations," Schurr said.

The team's study, published in the American Journal of Human Genetics, analyzed the genetics of individuals living in Russia's Altai Republic to identify markers that might link them to Native Americans. Prior ethnographic studies had found distinctions between tribes in the northern and southern Altai, with the northern tribes apparently linked linguistically and culturally to ethnic groups farther to the north, such as the Uralic or Samoyedic populations, and the southern groups showing a stronger connection to Mongols, Uighurs and Buryats.

Schurr and colleagues assessed the Altai samples for markers in mitochondrial DNA, which is maternally inherited, and in Y chromosome DNA, which is passed from fathers to sons. They also compared the samples to ones previously collected from individuals in southern Siberia, Central Asia, Mongolia, East Asia and a variety of American indigenous groups. Because of the large number of gene markers examined, the findings have a high degree of precision.

"At this level of resolution we can see the connections more clearly," Schurr said.

Looking at the Y chromosome DNA, the researchers found a unique mutation shared by Native Americans and southern Altaians in the lineage known as Q.

"This is also true from the mitochondrial side," Schurr said. "We find forms of haplogroups C and D in southern Altaians and D in northern Altaians that look like some of the founder types that arose in North America, although the northern Altaians appeared more distantly related to Native Americans."

Calculating how long the mutations they noted took to arise, Schurr's team estimated that the southern Altaian lineage diverged genetically from the Native American lineage 13,000 to 14,000 years ago, a timing scenario that aligns with the idea of people moving into the Americas from Siberia between 15,000 and 20,000 years ago.

Though it's possible, even likely, that more than one wave of people crossed the land bridge, Schurr said that other researchers have not yet been able to identify a similar geographic focal point from which Native Americans can trace their heritage.

"It may change with more data from other groups, but, so far, even with intensive work in Mongolia, they're not seeing the same things that we are," he said.

In addition to elucidating the Asia-America connection, the study confirms that the modern cultural divide between southern and northern Altaians has ancient genetic roots. Southern Altaians appeared to have had greater genetic contact with Mongolians than they did with northern Altaians, who were more genetically similar to groups farther to the north.

However, when looking at the Altaians' mitochondrial DNA in isolation, the researchers did observe greater connections between northern and southern Altaians, suggesting that perhaps females were more likely to bridge the genetic divide between the two populations.

"Subtle differences here both reflect the Altaians themselves — the differentiation among those groups — and allow us to try to point to an area where some of these precursors of American Indian lineages may have arisen," Schurr said.

Moving forward, Schurr and his team hope to continue to use molecular genetic techniques to trace the movement of peoples within Asia and into and through the Americas. They may also attempt to identify links between genetic variations and adaptive physiological responses, links that could inform biomedical research.

For example, Schurr noted that both Siberian and Native American populations "seem to be susceptible to Westernization of diet and moving away from traditional diets, but their responses in terms of blood pressure and fat metabolism and so forth actually differ."

Using genomic approaches along with traditional physical anthropology may lend insight into the factors that govern these differences.

Provided by University of Pennsylvania
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References:

Physorg. 2012. "Anthropologists clarify link between Asians and early Native-Americans". PhysOrg. Posted: January 26, 2012. Available online: http://www.physorg.com/print246803062.html

DNA highlights Native American die-off

Genetic evidence now backs up Spanish documents from the 16th century describing smallpox epidemics that decimated Native American populations.

Native American numbers briefly plummeted by about 50 percent around the time European explorers arrived, before rebounding within 200 to 300 years, say geneticist Brendan O’Fallon of ARUP Laboratories in Salt Lake City and anthropologist Lars Fehren-Schmitz of the University of Göttingen in Germany. Population declines occurred throughout North and South America around 500 years ago, the researchers report in a paper published online December 5 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

O’Fallon and Fehren-Schmitz analyzed chemical sequences in ancient and modern mitochondrial DNA, which is inherited from the mother, to calculate the number of breeding females in the Americas over time. Based on those results, O’Fallon estimates that a Native American population of several million fell to roughly half that size once European explorers entered the continent.

“If disease was the primary cause of mortality, surviving Native Americans would have been more resistant to infection after initial epidemics, helping them bounce back quickly,” O’Fallon says.

Researchers disagree about when people first reached the Americas. Whenever initial human settlers arrived, Native American numbers expanded rapidly between 15,000 and 10,000 years ago, several thousand years later than previous DNA-based estimates, the scientists say. Population size then stabilized until suddenly plummeting as the era of European contact dawned, they find.

Several earlier genetic investigations uncovered no signs of mass deaths among Native Americans around the time they first encountered Europeans (SN: 2/16/08, p. 102).

“These new results confirm what’s known from historic sources, but the quality of ancient DNA data raises potential concerns,” remarks geneticist Phillip Endicott of Musée de l’Homme in Paris. An unknown number of chemical sequence changes in mitochondrial DNA preserved in Native Americans’ bones may have resulted from contamination in the ground or after being handled by excavators, Endicott says. These sequence configurations, if intact, provide crucial clues to population trends.

O’Fallon and Fehren-Schmitz analyzed partial sequences of ancient Native American DNA ranging in age from 5,000 to 800 years old. The researchers also examined mitochondrial DNA of 137 people representing five major Native American sequence patterns found in different parts of North and South America.

In the new analysis, only one, relatively rare mitochondrial DNA group repeatedly branched into new genetic lineages over the past 10,000 years. The other four groups display genetic splits bunched within the past few hundred years.

Reasons for these population differences are unclear, O’Fallon says. A closer examination of each of the five Native American genetic groups is needed to confirm that the new estimate of contact-era population losses is accurate, comments anthropological geneticist Connie Mulligan of the University of Florida in Gainesville.
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References:

Bower, Bruce. 2011. "DNA highlights Native American die-off". Science News. Posted: December 5, 2011. Available online: http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/336707/title/DNA_highlights_Native_American_die-off

Native American Blankets Made With Dog Hair

To Native Americans known as the Coast Salish, the hair of the dog isn't a dubious hangover cure—it's a key ingredient in the large, beautiful blankets woven by their ancestors more than a century ago. A molecular analysis of some of these venerable textiles now confirms they are made partly of yarn spun from the fur of an unusual canine, verifying oral accounts handed down through the Pacific Northwest tribe over generations.

The Coast Salish live in northern Washington and southern British Columbia, and according to tribal lore, their ancestors raised a strange breed of canine. The Salish woolly dog was bred, the story goes, specifically for its fleecy undercoat and long outer hairs, which were woven into the famous Salish blankets. Salish oral tradition about the canine is corroborated by historical accounts, such as the journal of 18th century explorer George Vancouver, who wrote that the Salish dogs had coats that were "a mixture of a coarse kind of wool, with very fine, long hair, capable of being spun into yarn."

Recent research shows the woolly dog probably resembled a current breed called the Spitz, a thick-coated, curly-tailed dog native to Finland. By 1900, however, the Salish woolly dog had vanished. Today the only known physical evidence of it is a single pelt—rediscovered in 2004 in a drawer at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.—of a woolly dog named "Mutton," the pet of a 19th century ethnographer who studied the tribes of the Pacific Northwest.

Despite the tribal lore and other ample evidence, some have dismissed the claim that Salish blankets contain canine hair as just a shaggy-dog story. A survey of more than 100 items woven by the Salish found no dog hair, according to a seminal 1980 book on Salish textiles. And a 2006 DNA analysis that analyzed a small sample of textiles was inconclusive.

The new work, published in the December issue of Antiquity, sheds light on why past studies could have missed dog hair. Using mass spectrometry, a molecular technique for revealing the components of complex mixtures, biochemist Caroline Solazzo of the University of York in the United Kingdom and colleagues analyzed nine blankets woven in the 19th or early 20th centuries by the Coast Salish. They found protein fragments, or peptides, matching peptides from the hair of sheep and mountain goats, as expected. But some of the peptides in five of the nine blankets matched ones from the pelt of Mutton, indicating that the blanket peptides comes from dog hair. Only the older blankets—those woven in the first half of the 19th century—contained dog yarn, and none of them was pure dog. (The earlier DNA analysis had looked at only more recent blankets, which the new analysis showed did not have dog hair.) In most cases, the weavers had combined dog fiber with the highly prized fiber from mountain goats to make a mixed yarn.

Canine hair was easier to come by than mountain goat hair, which could be obtained only by trading with nearby tribes with access to goats, the researchers say. "Dog hair was probably used for less important blankets, blankets with less value, and for common usage, [not] ceremonial usage," Solazzo says. She and her colleagues found, for example, two very plain ceremonial blankets that contained only goat hair. The weaver might have avoided dog hair because the blankets' stark design shows off all their fibers rather than concealing some of them.

Klaus Hollemeyer, a researcher at Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany, who developed the mass spectrometry technique used by Solazzo's team, believes the new work is definitive. The protein analysis is "well done and documented," he writes via e-mail.

The new study also helps erase doubts about the accuracy of the Salish oral tradition, says textile conservator Susan Heald of the National Museum of the American Indian's Cultural Resources Center in Suitland, Maryland, and a co-author of the new study. "It's been close to 10 years since Coast Salish community curator Marilyn Jones asked me if I could find out if dog hair was used in any of the Coast Salish blankets" displayed in a particular museum exhibit, Heald writes via e-mail. "I'm pleased that we can finally tell Marilyn that we did find dog hair in the older blankets, corroborating the oral history."
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References:

Watson, Traci. 2011. "Native American Blankets Made With Dog Hair". Science. Posted: November 23, 2011. Available online: http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/11/native-american-blankets-made-wi.html

Ancient ways and modern times

The Kumeyaay people practice their traditions and revive native crafts in remote areas of Mexico and California as encroaching civilization brings electricity and running water.

In the high table land, a small, rawboned woman picks her way across ash and sand to a cave where she slept as a girl when her family came to harvest pine nuts every August.

Teodora Cuero is 90 years old, half-blind behind her sunglasses, with skin like crinkled wax paper.

She moves her fingers over the lichen-mottled rock, and the memories flood her with emotion. She talks of lost friends and family members, how they used to live.

Her friend Mike Wilken, an anthropologist, listens with rapt attention. What she describes are final scenes from the Indians' ancient yearly migration between the sea and desert, a pattern of life in Southern California and northern Baja long before the Spanish set foot here.

The territory of Cuero's people, the Kumeyaay, extended along the coast from what is today Carlsbad in the north, to the Santo Tomas Valley in Baja in the south, and over the mountains to the desert. The international boundary that was drawn across that terrain would put the tribe on separate trajectories. So unlike the many native peoples of Southern California whose language and customs were extinguished, hers found a measure of refuge in the remote, dusty valleys just south of the border.

Ancient ways remained not only relevant but necessary to get by in areas that had few staples from the modern world. They endure in many forms today.

No one embodies this more than Cuero, who didn't have shoes and spoke only Kumeyaay until she was a teenager, living 80 miles from downtown San Diego.

Today she lives in a rock house for which her husband traded a horse, speaks mostly Kumeyaay, cooks on an antique wood-burning stove in the garden, uses plant remedies for ailments and relies on food she gathers from the land to supplement her rice and beans. Goats andhorses roam the dirt roads of her village, La Huerta, which got electricity seven years ago.

Her life is not a simple snapshot of the past, but a complex amalgam of old and new. Cuero has a cellphone and refrigerator. She naps on a bench seat extracted from a recently deceased Ford pickup. She drinks inky black coffee and smokes Marlboros.

Over the last three years, Wilken has worked with Kumeyaay elders like Cuero to document their language and those traditions they adapted to the times. His material goes to a National Science Foundation project on documenting endangered languages and a museum in Tecate he helped establish.

"There are certain stories people want to hear about the Indians," Wilken said. "That they are living a way of life that hasn't changed in thousands of years. They want to know about shamans and go to a sweat lodge. We have to get over some pre-formed idea of who they are and experience them as they are."

He began working with the Kumeyaay 15 years ago as an "applied" anthropologist, meaning he not only studied them but worked with them to make endangered traditions more useful to them. He helped find markets for their basketry and native medicines, and arranged cultural exchanges with the Kumeyaay in the United States, who wanted to learn more about their heritage.

"When people from the California communities meet Kumeyaay from Baja they say, 'This is how we lived 50 or 100 years ago,' " Wilken said.

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The Kumeyaay greeted the first Spanish expedition in California in 1769. They had been here for at least 1,300 years, anthropologists say, maybe many thousands more. The Kumeyaay lived in temporary brush huts and moved throughout the year in search of food.

While many ended up in the Spanish missions and later on reservations, many others did not.

Into the early 20th century, clans of outliers still roamed the margins of the expanding Yankee society, following their old trails, speaking little English or Spanish and crossing the border without even knowing there was one.

Their exile was searingly documented in the autobiography of Delfina Cuero, who was born near Jamul in 1900 and told her story to an anthropologist in the 1960s.

As a child, Delfina, a cousin of Teodora Cuero's father, followed her parents around San Diego County, looking for ranch work while hunting and foraging. They collected shellfish and crabs on the rocks of Point Loma. They speared fish in the coastal waters and harvested greens and roots from the black mud of what is now called Mission Bay.

In spring, they went to the desert for agave stalks, which they roasted in pits for food. In summer, they moved to the mountains to collect pine nuts, then down into the valleys for acorns in fall.

When her father had ranch work, they would build a brush hut in a nearby arroyo. But as more and more ranches were cleared, ranchers told them to go away. They lost access to the coast, then Mission Valley, then the foothills. Their migration routes were cut off.
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References:

Mozingo, Joe. 2011. "Ancient ways and modern times". Los Angeles Times. Posted: September 26, 2011. Available online: http://articles.latimes.com/2011/sep/26/local/la-me-adv-kumeyaay-20110927