The following is a guest post from Ellen Quinlan, a PhD Candidate in Biology at Wake Forest University. Ellen’s dissertation work studies the ecology and population genomics of altitudinal range limits in Andean trees.
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Who, when, and how the Americas were first peopled is one of the biggest mysteries in human history. If you’ve heard anything of this story, it’s likely the same one I learned in my college anthropology course and the same one that dominated the fields of archaeology and biological anthropology throughout the 20th century. Under this model, a small group of humans arrived in the Americas fairly recently (~13,000 ya), after walking across the Bering Land Strait, following animal and plant migrations as ice retreated. However, over the last two decades this narrative has been dismantled by new archaeological discoveries and, of course, modern paleogenomics, which have introduced new evidence and prompted the re-examination of old. Geneticist and anthropologist Jennifer Raff’s book Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas is a deep but accessible overview of the new insights yielded by paleogenomics to this rapidly evolving field.
While I admittedly came to Origin for some cool paleogenomics (of which there are plenty), the book has stuck with me because it is about so much more. Through Origin, Raff eloquently tells both the history of the science as well as the history of how colonialism and misogyny have impacted scientists’ interpretations and harmed the communities involved for centuries. Further, she demonstrates how these stories are deeply intertwined and offers a clear roadmap (with examples from her own work and others) for how the fields of anthropology and human genomics can begin to repair that harm and develop more ethical approaches for the future.
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