Skip to main content

John J. Miller on Archeology on National Review Online

John J. Miller on Archeology on National Review Online: If a lucky paleoanthropologist ever unearths hobbit bones on federal land, scientists won’t get to study them — at least not if Sen. John McCain and his allies have their way........When a team of Australian and Indonesian scientists found the first Homo floresiensis, in a cave on the Indonesian island of Flores, its members started referring to her as a “hobbit.” The nickname stuck.
How did she get to be so short? And why does John McCain care?

The first question is easy to answer. In biology, there’s a form of natural selection known as “island dwarfing.” Take a species, put it on an island, and watch it shrink over time.....
It also has been documented here in the United States — on the Channel Islands, off the coast of southern California. If hobbit bones were to turn up on Santa Rosa, however, we might never have a chance to learn about them.
That’s because McCain has proposed adding two words to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, a law Congress passed 15 years ago to defend American Indian burial sites and cultural objects from grave robbers and pot hunters.

..Their boldest attempts to cover up the past have involved Kennewick Man, a set of bones discovered in 1996 near Kennewick, Wash. The remains are more than 9,000 years old, and physical anthropologists find them intriguing because their morphology is said to differ significantly from that of North American Indians. Kennewick Man may be more closely related to the Ainu, an ethnic group indigenous to Japan, than to any modern Indian tribe. If true, it would mean that the story of human migration is much more complicated (and fascinating) than we have realized.

The only way to learn more, of course, is to let scientists take a close look at old bones. Several local tribes, however, invoked NAGPRA and demanded that Kennewick Man be turned over to them on the grounds that they were “affiliated,” as if any living person can claim a genuine “affiliation” with someone who died nine millennia ago. Their stated intention was not to examine Kennewick Man, but to rebury him

.....“If this becomes law, then anything prehistoric that’s found on federal land would have to be given up,” says Alan Schneider, a Portland, Ore., lawyer who has litigated the Kennewick Man case.

By this new NAGPRA definition, even the bones of Adam and Eve would be classified as “Native American.”

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Josh Nimoy @ ITP - BallDroppings

Josh Nimoy @ ITP - BallDroppings : "BallDroppings is an addicting and noisy play-toy. It can also be seen as an emergence game. My brother Marc takes this software seriously as an audio-visual performance instrument. Balls fall from the top of the screen and bounce off the lines you are drawing with the mouse. The balls make a percussive and melodic sound, whose pitch depends on how fast the ball is moving when it hits the line."

New York Post Online Edition

news : "December 29, 2003 -- WASHINGTON - Startling new Army statistics show that strife-torn Baghdad - considered the most dangerous city in the world - now has a lower murder rate than New York. The newest numbers, released by the Army's 1st Infantry Division, reveal that over the past three months, murders and other crimes in Baghdad are decreasing dramatically and that in the month of October, there were fewer murders per capita there than the Big Apple, Chicago, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. The Bush administration and outside experts are touting these new figures as a sign that, eight months after the fall of Saddam Hussein, major progress is starting to be made in the oft-criticized effort by the United States and coalition partners to restore order and rebuild Iraq. 'If these numbers are accurate, they show that the systems we put in place four months ago to develop a police force based on the principles of a free and democratic society are starting to ...

USATODAY.com - NASA docks contractor $45.2 million for Columbia

USATODAY.com - NASA docks contractor $45.2 million for Columbia : NASA penalized the contractor that maintains and operates the space shuttle fleet $45.2 million for its role in the shuttle Columbia accident, according to a letter NASA released Thursday. The United Space Alliance, a partnership of Boeing and Lockheed Martin, had to forfeit the money even though NASA said the contractor did nothing specific to cause the accident. But a letter from a NASA official said the contractor was "an integral member" of the "team that reached flawed conclusions about the relative safety of Columbia and crew before and during the flight." The letter from NASA deputy associate administrator Michael Kostelnik was sent Jan. 7 to United Space Alliance president Michael McCulley, a former astronaut. The contract spells out performance bonuses based on safety, cost-effectiveness and other factors. For Oct. 1, 2002, through March 31, 2003, the alliance was eligible for $81.2 ...