The Bering Strait Theory To Whom It May Concern
Native American oral traditions have long been ignored and passed off as superstitious myths. Although the theoretical objective of anthropology is to implement the ideology of cultural relativism to all cultures, anthropologists have often failed to do so. Unfortunately, anthropologists have been especially indifferent to the case of Native Americans. Anthropologists in general are guilty of ethnocentricism but archaeologists are definitely leading the pack. Although some archaeologists have good intentions, most are unwilling to consider that Native Americans have preserved an ancient history in their oral traditions. The unwillingness to reach a compromise between archaeological and Indigenous knowledge is a tragedy that the field should work hard to overcome otherwise archaeology will forever rely upon inaccurate data. The Bering Strait theory is the holy grail of archaeology. This theory first conceptualized by Spanish priests who believed the natives to be the lost tribe of Israel is the backbone of many other theories and if it were to fall, the currently accepted model of human history would have to be reconstructed. Because it was believed at the time that primitive people couldn’t travel across water, the only logical conclusion was that they crossed over from the Bering land bridge that was supposedly exposed after the last ice age 12,000 years ago. According to Jeffrey Goodman, “the host of more or less fanciful theories on Indian origins put forth over the past four hundred years exemplifies a still-discernible tendency to draw large, often misrepresentative conclusions about Indians from an inadequate store of facts.”1 These fanciful theories are a result of the method that anthropologists employ: they begin research with a pre-conceived notion of what they will find and where their discoveries will fit into human history. The absurdity of this method is apparent when archaeologists argue that the Bering Strait theory is valid. Not only are their arguments illogical, they contradict the plethora of evidence that has been found. According to Kenneth L. Feder, an archaeologist who accepts this theory, “when Beringia became exposed as sea level fell, people adapted to their interior habitats of northeast Asia would have been able to expand their territories by moving east through the interior of the land bridge and then into the interior of northwestern North America.”2 Assuming this statement is true, these people must have had a motive to leave their homes in Siberia and travel across the ice-free corridor. Jared Diamond proposes that “…when the first Clovis hunters emerged from the ice-free corridor, they saw before them the Great Plains stretching to the horizon, empty of humans but teeming with herds of mammoths and other beasts.”3 The great herds of megafauna was thus the motive for these Paleolithic hunters to leave their homes and enter the New World in order to hunt a land teeming with prey. If this were true, one would expect there to be evidence that these travelers were megafauna hunters and that the megafauna actually crossed Beringia beforehand. To the dismay of archaeologists however, this has not been the case. Archaeologists tell us there was an ice-free corridor that was formed after the last ice age around12,000 B.P. Geologists and Biologists have gathered substantial evidence demonstrating that although Beringia may have been ice-free, the weather conditions were not suitable to accommodate a migration of megafauna or humans. First of all, “… it was not until just 8,000 years ago that the ice-free corridor opened up – 4,000 years too late to make the Bering route scenario work.
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