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American historian Howard Zinn once said, “If you don’t know history, it’s as if you were born yesterday. If you were born yesterday, then any leader can tell you anything.” The American Museum of Natural History announced Friday that it will immediately close two halls showcasing Native American cultural artifacts in order to comply with updated federal regulations on repatriating indigenous remains and sacred objects to tribes, according to NBC News. The museum is shutting down its Hall of Eastern Woodlands and Hall of the Great Plains, which together contain thousands of items related to Native American tribes. Smaller objects...

New York’s venerable American Museum of Natural History and leading institutions across the country are shutting down major exhibits of Native American artifacts in response to new federal regulations limiting the display of cultural items. Under the guidelines announced recently by the Biden administration, museums must obtain permission from Native American tribes before displaying or performing research on cultural items, many of which were donated generations ago by archeologists who had stolen them after digging up sacred burial grounds. The policy led the museum to close two exhibits — the Hall of the Great Plains, which includes jewelry, tools and...

There is an interesting controversy brewing in anthropology departments where professors have called for researchers to stop identifying ancient human remains by biological gender because they cannot gauge how a person identified at that the time. Other scholars are calling for researchers to stop identifying race as a practice because it fuels white supremacy. One of the academics objecting to this effort to stop gender identifications, San Jose State archaeology Professor Elizabeth Weiss, is currently suing her school. Weiss maintains that she was barred from access to the human remains collection due to her opposition to the repatriation of human...

Gender activists argue scientists cannot know how an ancient individual identified themselves.

An anthropology professor is suing San Jose State University in federal court in California, claiming the school smeared her as a racist and colonialist, and punished her because she’s been critical of a federal antiquities law. The legal complaint (pdf) in the case, Weiss v. Perez, court file 5:22-cv-641, was filed on Jan. 31 with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The lead defendant, Stephen Perez, is being sued in his official capacity as interim president of San Jose State University (SJSU). The public university “retaliated against” SJSU professor Elizabeth Weiss “for her views,” attorney Daniel...

It wasn't until recent years that I found myself in opposition to John McCain. The once "maverick" and "hawk" was anything but. He became a bought and paid for politician that had many in his own Party, turning on him. If it wasn't enough to learn about the numerous donations from George Soros linked businesses to his campaigns, with the rise of Donald Trump, we saw a very bitter and embattled man, who lashed out in policy decisions from what appeared to be his own personal issues. Trump did what McCain could not. Trump went on the attack - even...

In a new book, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) writes that his battle with brain cancer has given him a sense of liberation to vote and speak his mind. “This is my last term,” McCain writes in his upcoming book The Restless Wave, which he co-authored with former adviser Mark Salter. An excerpt of the book was posted Monday on Apple News. “If I hadn’t admitted that to myself before this summer, a stage 4 cancer diagnosis acts as ungentle persuasion,” McCain continues. “I’m freer than colleagues who will face the voters again. I can speak my mind without fearing the...

A contentious theory that the first Americans came here from Europe - not Asia - is challenging a century-old consensus among archaeologists, and a dig in Kenosha County is part of the evidence. The two leading proponents of the Europe theory admit that many scientists reject their contention, instead holding fast to the long-established belief that the first Americans arrived from Siberia via a now-submerged land bridge across the Bering Sea to Alaska. The first of the Europe-to-North America treks probably took place at the height of the last Ice Age more than 18,000 years ago, said Dennis Stanford, ...

BISHOPVILLE, S.C. — Inside a fenced acre on the swampy Lynches River flood plain in central South Carolina, seven of Don Anderson’s primitive dogs spring into high alert at approaching strangers. Medium-sized, they fan out amid his junkyard of improvised habitat: a few large barrels to dig under, an abandoned camper shell from a pickup, segments of black plastic water pipe and backhoed dirt mounds overgrown with waist-high ragweed. These are Carolina dogs, and though they are friendly, one can instantly sense they are different from other dogs. Several rush to the gate, their whole bodies wagging eagerly. Others sprint...

Pre-Columbian origins of Native American dog breeds, with only limited replacement by European dogs, confirmed by mtDNA analysis Barbara van Asch et al. Dogs were present in pre-Columbian America, presumably brought by early human migrants from Asia. Studies of free-ranging village/street dogs have indicated almost total replacement of these original dogs by European dogs, but the extent to which Arctic, North and South American breeds are descendants of the original population remains to be assessed. Using a comprehensive phylogeographic analysis, we traced the origin of the mitochondrial DNA lineages for Inuit, Eskimo and Greenland dogs, Alaskan Malamute, Chihuahua, xoloitzcuintli and...

PORTLAND, Maine — Nearly 10,000 years ago, man's best friend provided protection and companionship — and an occasional meal. That's what researchers are saying after finding a bone fragment from what they are calling the earliest confirmed domesticated dog in the Americas. University of Maine graduate student Samuel Belknap III came across the fragment while analyzing a dried-out sample of human waste unearthed in southwest Texas in the 1970s. A carbon-dating test put the age of the bone at 9,400 years, and a DNA analysis confirmed it came from a dog — not a wolf, coyote or fox, Belknap said....

Humans and dogs enjoy a prehistoric relationship, a longstanding bond with its origins in a time when dogs as we know them evolved from wild animals into our domesticated companions. Now, a canine living in a manner similar to that of dogs from those ancient days may have been discovered in isolated stretches of longleaf pines and cypress swamps in the American Southeast. The Carolina Dog, a familiar-looking animal long known in the rural South as the "yaller dog," may be more than the common mutt that immediately meets the eye. I. Lehr Brisbin, Jr., Senior Ecologist at the University...

Biologists chase down pooches' genetic and social past A Shaggy Dog History Two-kilogram teacup poodles; 90-kg mastiffs; slender greyhounds; squat English bulldogs: For a single species, canines come in a vast array of shapes and sizes. Even more remarkably, they all come from the same stock. Many millennia ago, humans took in a few primitive wolves and made them man's best friend. Or so the story goes. For centuries, researchers have doggedly pursued the evolutionary and social history of canines, with mixed success. Only subtle differences distinguish dogs from coyotes, jackals, and other canids, making family trees difficult to construct...

"The Dixie Dingo" "The Native American Dog" "The American Dingo" " Southern Aboriginal Dog" "The Indian's Dog" Still living Wild in the bottom land swamps and forests of the Southeastern United States. Genetic (mitochondrial DNA) testing being performed at the University of South Carolina, College of Science and Mathematics, indicates that these dogs, related to the earliest domesticated dogs, are the remnant descendants of the feral pariah canids who came across the Bering land mass 8,000 to 11,000 years ago as hunting companions to the ancestors of the Native Americans. However, their future in the wild looks bleak. Loss ...

France - Scientists said Wednesday they had unravelled the oldest DNA ever retrieved from a Homo sapiens bone, a feat that sheds light on modern humans' colonisation of the planet. A femur found by chance on the banks of a west Siberian river in 2008 is that of a man who died around 45,000 years ago, they said. Teased out of collagen in the ancient bone, the genome contains traces from Neanderthals -- a cousin species who lived in Eurasia alongside H. sapiens before mysteriously disappearing. Previous research has found that Neanderthals and H. sapiens interbred, leaving a tiny Neanderthal...

The genome of a young boy buried at Mal’ta near Lake Baikal in eastern Siberia some 24,000 years ago has turned out to hold two surprises for anthropologists. The first is that the boy’s DNA matches that of Western Europeans, showing that during the last Ice Age people from Europe had reached farther east across Eurasia than previously supposed. Though none of the Mal’ta boy’s skin or hair survive, his genes suggest he would have had brown hair, brown eyes and freckled skin. The second surprise is that his DNA also matches a large proportion — some 25 percent —...

The strong linkage between these populations has always been empirically apparent. This finally settles what has been obvious and clearly establishes the time line. Thus later incursions merely topped up an already European palette. What has been more troubling has been the avoidance of this topic from the academics. Now DNA research is systematically reducing sophism for what it truly is. Ignoring and even denying obvious evidence should be made into a capital crime in academe. It all starts with denigrating the technical abilities of our ancients by denying them the natural wits we are all born with. We...

Affinities of the Paleoindians by Mikey Brass I would like to make it clear from the start that my knowledge of the early occupation of the Americas is very limited. It is a peripheral interest of mine. I don't feel competent enough to make many pronouncements on the late Pleistocene timing of the migration(s) from north-east Asia into the Americas. Instead I focus primarily here on showing, contrary to reports eminating from both pseudoscientific and unfortunately some portions of mainstream archaeology, that the origins of the Paleoindians lay in mainland Asia. Christy Turner has identified what he terms the "Mongoloid...

The First Americans By Sharon Begley and Andrew Murr Newsweek, April 26, 1999 New digs and old bones reveal an ancient land that was a mosaic of peoples—including Asians and Europeans. Now a debate rages: who got here first? 'Skull wars:' Facial reconstruction of the 'Spirit Cave Man,' based on bones found in Spirit Cave, Churchill County, Nevada (David Barry--Courtesy Nevada State Museum; facial reconstruction by Sharon Long) As he sat down to his last meal amid the cattails and sedges on the shore of the ancient lake, the frail man grimaced in agony. A fracture at his left temple...

Contact: Robert Sanders rsanders@berkeley.edu 510-643-6998 University of California - Berkeley Alleged 40,000-year-old human footprints in Mexico much, much older than thought Berkeley -- Alleged footprints of early Americans found in volcanic rock in Mexico are either extremely old - more than 1 million years older than other evidence of human presence in the Western Hemisphere - or not footprints at all, according to a new analysis published this week in Nature. The study was conducted by geologists at the Berkeley Geochronology Center and the University of California, Berkeley, as part of an investigative team of geologists and anthropologists from the...