Drops, trickles, waves, and tides : North American anthropometrics and the peopling of North America

It is widely accepted by scholars that North America was settled by Asian immigrants. What is not at all clear is how it proceeded. Many researchers have looked at the relationships between Amerindian groups based on genetic, linguistic, non-metric, anthroposcopic, anthropometric, or craniometric data, each with tradeoffs in reliability and application, with widely divergent results. Fewer have examined Amerindian relationships with Asiatic groups, mainly due to a lack of data from Siberia. The Jesup North Pacific Expedition (1897-1902) was intended by Boas to provide material for trans-Pacific comparisons. It uncovered tantalizing ethnographic similarities between groups many thousands of miles apart, from the Northwest Coast of America to the Amur river in southeast Siberia. The anthropometric data collected by the Jesup North Pacific Expedition was never analyzed as Boas intended, namely, to ascertain biological relationships between peoples on both sides of Bering Strait. This was due primarily to the immense time involved in statistical analyses in the pre-computer days, but also because few sophisticated statistical procedures were available early in this century. Despite these acknowledged handicaps. Boas made sure anthropometries were collected. More recent approaches utilizing biological data have produced the ubiquitous "wave" theories. The vast majority of these are merely "reasonable assertions" based on statistically unreliable results made believable through an appeal to linguistic or archaeological authority. The best known of the wave theories comes from Greenberg, Turner and Zegura (1986). They maintain that analyses utilizing linguistic, dental, and blood marker data independently point to three waves of humans migrating into the New World. The dental analysis, however, is methodologically and statistically flawed, the linguistic analysis is oversimplified, and the genetic data are inconclusive. It is far from a valid holistic analysis. A modem analysis of the Boas anthropometric data, integrated with archaeological, linguistic, and ethnographic evidence, much of which comes from the Jesup expedition, reveals patterns of sporadic and recent gene flow between groups across the North Pacific independent of mother tongue. This multidisciplinary analysis gives results opposed to linguistically based "waves" that were cut off from Siberia after the submergence of Beringia.