Diffusionism and Race in the Arctic

2/27/2013

In National Geographic magazine’s November 2012 issue, there was a story about how the gradual disappearance of the Dorset people in the late fourteenth century. The Dorset were a Native people who inhabited parts of what is now Nunavut and Greenland from 500 to 1500 CE; they are believed to be the skraelings the Vikings met, and the Inuit have legends about destroying their culture after their arrival in the Arctic. The article discussed the work of archaeologist Patricia Southerland to unravel the story behind the Dorset’s eventual disappearance. Southerland had uncovered Norse artifacts at Dorset sites, which she interpreted as evidence of contact between the Dorset and the Norse.

This month, in the March 2013 issue, National Geographic ran a selection of correspondence from readers about this article. Even in the edited form presented in the magazine, the letters made very clear that the story touched a nerve.

Karl Hoenke of Kelseyville, California, wrote to inquire why article author Heather Pringle didn’t explore the racial implications of the cache of Norse artifacts. Hoenke concluded that the discovery of Norse artifacts implied that Dorset were actually Norse people who had explored the Arctic centuries before modern historians credit them with doing:

Rather than trying to explain all the Norse artifacts found in the Dorset context as signs of “friendly contact” and noting that the Dorset “relished trade,” why didn’t she explore the possibility that the Dorset were in fact Norse or from a common, Arctic-exploring ancestor? After all, the Norse are indisputably the most successful and capable Arctic explorers known. They didn’t suddenly gain these skills in the 800s A.D.

Regular readers will immediately recognize this argument as of a piece with the claims of America Unearthed and other diffusionists, who are quick to see the presence of artifacts as an indication of the presence of peoples, like Unearthed did in assuming that Mesoamerican motifs in Georgia implied the existence of a Maya colony. Never mind, of course, that the Dorset differed in their technology, their art, their living arrangements, etc.

National Geographic duly appended a note to Hoenke’s letter stating that archaeologist Max Friesen’s DNA study on Dorset people found clear distinctions between the Dorset and Norse, proving that there is “no shared ancestry.”

Another writer to the National Geographic, unnamed, was equally blunt: “The Norse interbred with the Dorset people, making their Inuit descendants partially European.”

The Inuit are genetically distinct from the Dorset, too. But we’ve seen other claims like this in the diffusionist literature, too, especially in New Zealand where Barry Fell, the patron saint of America Unearthed, claimed that the Maori were “really” the hybrid offspring of Greco-Egyptian colonizers; David Childress was blunter still, arguing that the Polynesians were the offspring of ancient white people and their black slaves. We’ve also seen this argument used on America Unearthed in suggesting that Native American tribes like the Mandan are the descendants of European travelers.

What confuses me is why the opposite isn’t true: Alternative writers have claimed that Native Americans “discovered” Europe in 60 BCE (the subject of my recent Skeptic article), but we don’t hear that consequently Europeans are “partially Native American.” Similarly, during the “Black Athena” controversy, there was a great uproar over the suggestion of African influence in Europe, with mutual cries of racism from advocates and opponents. (I oppose the Black Athena idea because it mistakenly attributes Near East ideas to sub-Saharan Africa.) Even today, when it is well-accepted that ancient Greece had sustained contact and influence from the ancient Near East, popular accounts of Greece are still resistant to the suggestion of intermarriage across cultural boundaries. It’s OK to say that the Greeks traveled to Asia Minor, Colchis, or India and intermarried with the locals, thus diffusing Greek culture, but the reverse is still thought shocking. Culture apparently can only diffuse from perceived high cultures to perceived lesser cultures.

14 Comments

Christopher Randolph

2/27/2013 06:07:52 am

I'm looking forward to reading the Skeptic article!

Don't know if you're aware of J.A. Rogers, but he was an African-American author in the mid-20th century.

In fact we're on the internet so I have no excuse for speculating, here he is:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joel_Augustus_Rogers

Since I sell books in part for a living, I've (very rarely) come across original prints of his work, all of which I end up keeping.

I have "100 Facts About the Negro with Complete Proof" and two volumes of "Sex and Race" and a copy of the more famous and more common "Man and Superman." The first two especially are very heavily illustrated litanies of mixed race and "negroid" (this stuff was written over a half-century ago...) figures from European and American history who are either generally assumed to have been neatly "white" or who have/had fallen into obscurity as once famed "non-whites" in Europe .

The point of these, esp. "100 Facts" which is more a large pamphlet and printed by an early African-American-pride-type publishing house, was to instill a sense of confidence in the African-American that they did indeed have ancestors worth looking up to. Beyond this Rogers liked to make the point that indeed European culture has been influenced by others and in fact that some small percentage of Europeans in fact have at least partial non-European ancestors, and a lot more recently in time than one might expect (i.e. we're not talking all Great Rift Valley here).

I was pleasantly surprised to find a beat-up copy of "100 Facts" at a flea market for $1. I would have paid $20 without blinking. But shhh - don't tell anyone!

For the most part from what I recall the overwhelming majority of this material avoids Black Athena territory. "Sex and Race" is divided geographically and covers in one volume the results of whites and Asians and Pacific Islanders intermingling while the other focuses more on Africa and the Near East. This is not prehistory material, the focus is more on the past 500 years. I should think Rogers got the odd fact wrong here and there, but I don't think there was any malicious intent and most of his research was in libraries and archives several decades ago and without a great deal of resources behind him.

2/28/2013 08:56:57 pm

I wish I could remember the title, but recently I watched a BBC documentary about London, and they got into some interesting research on an historically black neighborhood.

Seems it's been historically black for almost 500 years. There are records of Africans who had moved there, had homes, and married locally. Not a lot, but enough to be significant.

I lived in Ireland for a few years, and there are constant digs going on -- if not from academia, from farmers cutting turf for fuel. It's not uncommon for artifacts to be unearthed and get mention in the press. One was about an ancient gold African bowl that was found in a burial on the west coast (Sub-Saharan, I believe). No one really assumed that meant Africans were necessarily in Ireland or the Irish went to Africa, but it led to a larger discussion about trade routes, ocean currents followed by sailors, and how such a piece could end up in Ireland in the first place.

John J. McKay link

2/27/2013 03:40:51 pm

"The Norse are indisputably the most successful and capable Arctic explorers known." As long as you don't count the Eskimos, Sami, Nenets, Evenks, Yukagir, Chuchki, and the people who inhabited Beringia 15,000 years ago.

It occurred to me not long ago that "diffusionism" has a very narrow meaning among the Ancient America crowd. It only means "whites first" in North America. With Hebrews and Phoenicians being honorary whites. You've written about the racial subtext of AA, but Kean Monahan made this very clear last night in his challenge to find any peer reviewed articles on diffisionism, which he limited to Europeans (later he allowed Arabs) and disallowed the two examples of pre-Columbian European penetration of the Americas that have had a great deal of peer reviewed discussion.

If you want an example of diffusionism in America, look at the Eskimos. In a few short centuries, they expanded from southwestern Alaska across the entire northern side of the continent completely replacing replacing the indigenous population. There have been many peer reviewed articles on this.

Kean sarcastically asked if we really believed the Americas were hermetically sealed off from the rest of the world after they were first populated. Of course not. Let's return to Alaska. Wen the Eskimos expanded north, they also crossed the Bering Straits and settled on the Chuchki Peninsula of Siberia. It's unlikely that communications there were ever broken. Knives of Chinese steel have been found as far east as northern British Columbia. Every couple decades after whites arrived in the Pacific Northwest, a boat load of starving Japanese fishermen would arrive on the coast after getting caught in the Black Dragon Current and dragged across the Pacific. There is no reason not to believe that this had been going on for millenia. The possibility of Polynesia contact with South America still isn't settled.

All of these topics get peer reviewed papers published because they have evidence good enough to convince peers (experts who know the subject) that the hypothesis is at least worth discussing. And, for the most part, the peers will grudgingly agree to discuss things they disagree with if there is enough evidence for a debate. If there was a massive conspiracy by professional academics to suppress anything new, there would have been no change in the sciences after they were professionalized in the Nineteenth Century. We would still be talking about the aether instead of relativity. There would be science of particle physics. Certainly the dinosaur killing asteroid would never have been given an honest hearing. Genetics, psychology, plate tectonics, feathered dinosaurs, Clovis itself, and the idea that Native Americans DID build the mounds would all have been suppressed.

Dragging the poor dessicated bones of Galileo out to beat a drum while shouting "Conspiracy! Look how I'm being oppressed!" won't make you right. It's not even good history as far as Galileo is concerned.

Myron Paine link

2/28/2013 10:07:07 am

One thousand years ago the VIKING in AMERICA were calling themselves "LENAPE." They were at Ulen, MN on the "Island in that ocean" mentioned by Adam de Bremen, 1070, because the Viking Waterway was there.
I repeat, they called themselves "LENAPE." So search for LENAPE EPIC to learn about the VIKING WATERWAY.

In 1350 a Lenape sitting in James Bay, began the Lenape history that lasted 225 years until an Englishman blew a Lenape historian's brains out in 1585. You can read the first 38 (out of 144) stanzas of that history.s

Here is another hyprothesis to think about:

There is little Viking-Lenape information in history books because the 17th English in North America did not want their King and the English in England to know that the people setting on the coast were Christians. [By their own charter, Englishmen were not allowed to settle where Christians were already setting on the land.]

"Columbus was first" and "America developed in isolation" are part of the English attempt to cover up.

Americans do write that people came from everywhere and that the Americans were better Christians than the "Christians in name only" who waged a 5 year war of extermination you did not learn about in school.

intelligentheating

3/1/2013 01:06:03 pm

Myron,

Searching for Lenape Epic on google seems to return one site with Lenape Epic as a common key word - your own.

Your site links to another one of your sites:

http://www.frozentrail.org

Which links to another one of your sites:

http://www.AncientAmericanAlliance.org/

So let me guess - this is your theory right?

Do you have any academic articles you have published in peer reviewed journals?
Any evidence about your English conspiracy theory?

From what I can see the Dutch (and Swedes) were the major early trading party of the Native American Lenape people, not the English (bar maybe Jamestown?). It's not until William Penn shows up I can see any major contact between the English and Lenape people?

7/4/2013 07:58:26 am

Yes, intelligentheating, all those Blogs and Web sites are mine. I created them so you could read the content. I wrote a manuscript once. I paid over ten thousand dollars to have it printed. It became two $30.00 books. I have been able get only two bookstores to stock the books.

The reason is not because the books are bad. Two of my first dozen readers, a Shawnee (Norse Christian) and an Icelander wrote the same thing, "Someone should have written a book like this long ago." They both are still on my short list.

I am almost sure you did not read my booka. Apparently you did not read the content of my Blogs and Web site either, but that is your problem not my choice of delivering my thoughts to you.

I have over 50 academic and business articles. I have a Ph. D. in Engineering. I have been on Graduate committees. I know what it takes to get a Ph. D. in a subject matter. I have earned the equivalent of 4 Ph. D.s on Lenape in America and am going on my 5th.

You can swiftly defeat my hypothesis that the 17th century English covered up the existence of Norse Christians called Lenape by finding the words Norse Christians in ANY history book about North America.

[Exceptions are Roger Williams, Thomas Morton, and the Pilgrims. The Pilgrims knew. That is why they sent Morton back to England in chains and cut off the head of Morton's American (Indian) friend.]

You did not read the route of the Lenape Epic did you. If you had you would have seen that the Lenape came out of Greenland about 1346. They were Norse. They were Christian. They left remains of 18 churches behind. After a 4000 mile migration via the Dakota to the Atlantic Coast, they spread 1,200 miles along the coast from North Carolina (where the English killed the historian) to the source of the Hudson River.

The reason you cannot see any contact between the Lenape and the English is that the 17th century English covered the contact up.
It becomes messy to explain why you conducted a five year war of extermination, raped Norse Christian women over a wide area, and exterminated about five groups of Norse Christians including those who were willing to accept your oppressive rites.

Right now you probably prefer to argue that those things never happened. I can provide evidence and testimony that they did.

7/4/2013 07:59:06 am

7/4/2013 07:59:54 am

7/4/2013 09:26:50 am

Yes, intelligentheating, all those Blogs and Web sites are mine. I created them so you could read the content. I wrote a manuscript once. I paid over ten thousand dollars to have it printed. It became two $30.00 books. I have been able get only two bookstores to stock the books.

The reason is not because the books are bad. Two of my first dozen readers, a Shawnee (Norse Christian) and an Icelander wrote the same thing, "Someone should have written a book like this long ago." They both are still on my short list.

I am almost sure you did not read my booka. Apparently you did not read the content of my Blogs and Web site either, but that is your problem not my choice of delivering my thoughts to you.

I have over 50 academic and business articles. I have a Ph. D. in Engineering. I have been on Graduate committees. I know what it takes to get a Ph. D. in a subject matter. I have earned the equivalent of 4 Ph. D.s on Lenape in America and am going on my 5th.

You can swiftly defeat my hypothesis that the 17th century English covered up the existence of Norse Christians called Lenape by finding the words Norse Christians in ANY history book about North America.

[Exceptions are Roger Williams, Thomas Morton, and the Pilgrims. The Pilgrims knew. That is why they sent Morton back to England in chains and cut off the head of Morton's American (Indian) friend.]

You did not read the route of the Lenape Epic did you. If you had you would have seen that the Lenape came out of Greenland about 1346. They were Norse. They were Christian. They left remains of 18 churches behind. After a 4000 mile migration via the Dakota to the Atlantic Coast, they spread 1,200 miles along the coast from North Carolina (where the English killed the historian) to the source of the Hudson River.

The reason you cannot see any contact between the Lenape and the English is that the 17th century English covered the contact up.
It becomes messy to explain why you conducted a five year war of extermination, raped Norse Christian women over a wide area, and exterminated about five groups of Norse Christians including those who were willing to accept your oppressive rites.

Right now you probably prefer to argue that those things never happen. I can provide evidence and testimony that they did.

7/4/2013 09:27:51 am

7/4/2013 02:47:56 pm

" I have earned the equivalent of 4 Ph. D.s on Lenape in America and am going on my 5th."

Why do I have the feeling this means that in reality you don't have as much as an undergraduate degree in anthropology or any related field?

7/4/2013 03:00:56 pm

As someone who lives where the Lenape and Penn and the Swedes before Penn lived, and who has familiarity with the history of the region, your crackpot history fails to convince.

It's amazing that Swedes would have to converse with other Norse people via Pidgin Delaware, an Algonquin pidgin related to languages as far west as the Rockies and not in the slightest related to, say, Swedish. The Swedes apparently learned this via the Dutch. One would expect an intact ethnic group who had left Iceland 170 or so years earlier to retain some knowledge of a language which would allow them to converse with Swedes rather more directly.

Karl Hoenke

7/3/2013 04:22:58 pm

Please pardon my coming to this exchange late. Moreau Maxwell taught me in the late 60s that the Dorset culture was a 1000BC to 1000AD phenomenon characterized by a misfit nature: Their houses were rectangular, they didn't take advantage of all the available foods (like, i.e. seals) and they simply didn't seem well adapted to the climate and location they occupied. Rectangular houses (cold and unsuitable in the arctic), by the way, are typically European (and Norse) so this would seem supportive of my comments. The National Geographic carefully excluded many of my more critical remarks regarding Dr Sutherland; i.e.
"The breathless statement that “Few other traces of the Vikings’ legendary exploration of the New World came to light --- that is, until Patricia Sutherland came along” (13 years ago) is simply unprofessional and invalid. Sutherland herself participated 33 years ago on camera in the 1979 National Film Board of Canada documentary “Viking Visitors to North America” (produced by Laval University) in which she displayed a bronze balance arm from Ellesmere Island dated to around 1100 AD and declared “We believe it was part of a Norse trade Balance”. That film (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3V2-uiyGNM part 1 and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZbAOuxLlw0&feature=relmfu part 2) presented much important evidence, and much has been discovered in the 33 years since. She is fully aware of the many Viking artifacts, however controversial, found throughout Ungava, Ontario, the Dakotas, Iowa, Minnesota, and elsewhere. The present article projects the common hubris that only “my” latest work has value, and other finds and interpretations are unimportant." There evidently is a very large corpus of artifacts confirming northern Europeans' presence in North America. Contributor McKay takes a (typically) peculiar position: He brings to our attention possible interactions between North America and Asia, Polynesia, and Africa but accuses Diffusionists of a "whites only" point of view. Sorry. This is comically wrong! Diffusionists are trying to correct the "Columbus First" hubris and get the academic community, and eventually the schools teaching our children, to recognize that the world has been a small place for a long time, that people have been coming and going to North America for reasons of trade, escape, and conquering "forever" and from many, many places. The "Shan Hai Jing" documents Chinese exploration of western NA in 2200BC. Strong evidence suggests African influence on the Olmec c.800BC. And it goes on, artifacts from all kinds of sources: Roman coins, Hebrew scripts, Asian chickens -- and corn in India 500BC, tobacco and cocaine in Egypt 1000BC. It's time to get over the idea of hermetically sealed North America and accept that it was just another destination for traders and travelers, from everywhere, for a very long time. And maybe it's time to realize it was, in its time, the "politically incorrect" third world to be exploited by others with stronger technologies. That means their resources (i.e. copper) were taken and they only got in return some interbreeding and memories. It is time to let science and facts dominate the discussion.

7/4/2013 04:27:26 am

Just to be clear, you're asserting that the Norse didn't know how to live near the Arctic?

Beyond that, why would people who can't adjust to conditions keep attempting to live there?