Native American mysteries

Back in the misty darkness of time - 20-25 years ago, say - I wrote a newspaper feature about how, as the last Ice Age finally was receding, ancient Lake Missoula would constantly fill with glacial meltwater and then flush, inundating much of western Washington State before rushing down through the Columbia Gorge and out to sea. In passing, I noted that while the current consensus appeared to be that Indians had not yet come to the New World in that 15,000-year-old time frame, there were increasing indications that maybe Native Americans already were plentiful. If that was the case, I said, most living in the area would have been washed away.

Now, a half-blink of geological time later, further excavations - and vast improvements in genetic investigations - have rather solidly proved that the decades-old "Clovis-point" theory that Native Americans first arrived through an ice corridor that only opened around 12,000 years ago is, as they say, history. It turns out the first Americans arrived before the last glacial maximum - well over 20,000 years ago ... maybe really well over. There remain other mysteries, like skulls that keep turning up that speak to African or Australian origins.

But despite mysteries, genetic testing has cleared up a lot (even as it raises more questions). Most of us have learned that American Indians have a "Mongoloid" appearance because their forbearers came across the Ice-Age dry Bering Straight from Siberia, chasing mastodons or whatnot. But genetic results show American Indians have varied genetic lines, including those also from the ancient "beachcombers" who settled along the east Asian coast and mid-Asian types who often contain genetic markers found in Europe.

Hence, maybe Kennewick Man.

All this is complicated (indeed, far more complicated than I've indicated. I haven't even mentioned mitochondrial DNA, or that neat part of the Y chromosome that isn't mixed up like a salad in reproduction. And so on.). But I find it cool that Native American origins, like Native Americans themselves, are a hell of lot more complicated than condescending Europeans always have supposed.

Maybe sometime in the future I'll talk about how for so many centuries, Europeans assumed that art, trade, - hell, the seeds of civilization - must have originated in Europe. I smile at the thought.

Ban babies!

Now that I'm a "man of leisure," although I may lack either the money or vigor to take full advantage, I've been studying quite a bit of American history. Many common threads appear - religion, the influence of the wide-open West, resources that put every other country to shame, and so on. Unfortunately, also up there at the top of the list comes bigotry.

In the beginning, the Puritans were bigots in a religious sense, going so far as to banish religious dissenters into the wilderness. And always, of course, there was the class consciousness brought over from England like so many pewter cups, not to mention distain for the "savages."

But it wasn't until generations later, when in the mid-1800s refugees from the Irish famine began flooding East Coast shores, that Americans really got into it. The fact that the Irish people were Catholics was a big factor, but the overriding reason had to do with fear of the "other," together, on the part of many, the fear that jobs might be lost to these newcomers.

I have no doubt that I could find countless racist comments against the Irish, but let me limit myself to the two most revered American poets so far: Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. Whitman, as a young man, spent time teaching the poor - Irish "bog-trotters'" they were commonly called. He wrote he was spending the best years of his life "among clowns and country bumpkins, fat-heads and coarse brown-faced girls ... all with crude manners, and bog-trotters ... of ignorance and vulgarity."

As a young girl, Emily Dickinson wrote about Irish kids to her older brother - then a teacher in what today would be called the "inner city" of Boston. She was child, and she was joking, but she said that "So far as I am concerned I should like to have you kill some - there are so many now, there is no room for the Americans." You know she was parroting her elders.

Whitman went on, as we know, to celebrate - to SHOUT his celebration - of American diversity. And just before she died, at only 56, Dickinson asked that six beloved Irish servants - and none of the town's gentry - carry her casket across a deep meadow to her grave.

However, the years passed and the country went on - Jim Crow, wops, ragheads, you name it. But let's skip ahead to 2010.

The author of Arizona's new immigration law, state senator Russell Pearce, wants to ban the children of illegal immigrants born in the United States from being citizens.

Back in the 1930s and 1940s, certain people in Germany invented the term untermensch, which literally meant "under-people," or "less than human," to refer to those they wanted to ... well, you know. The next time you see a racist Internet joke about immigration, think a little about U.S. and world history.

America the fecund

My ankle-deep grass - hell, call it calf-deep - needs deer. If the truth be known, it also needs horses, cattle, and goats. (I leave the front gate of my fence open, but I worry enough grazers won't come.)

Actually, I plan to fire up my lawn mower soon - Wednesday, in fact, when the Weather Channel says the temperature should drop from the mid-90s to the low 70s. Think of me Wednesday morning, skipping out to cut the grass!

But now, as I gaze out of my kitchen window at tall blades of grass, the broad leaves of weeds waving in the air, the serrated growths of dandelions - together with their high-stalked puffballs of seeds - all mocking me from the ground below, I think of fecundity.

According to an article by Joel Kotkin, a Distinguished Presidential Fellow at Chapman University, America may or may not be the beautiful, but it certainly is the fecund.

It has a fertility rate 50 percent higher than Russia, Germany, or Japan, and significantly higher than most other countries of note. While the population of many other nations is destined to decline, sometimes sharply, the United States can expect a population growth of 100 million in 40 years.

Kotkin sees this as an economic boon - provided we provide the necessary education and jobs for all the young newcomers. Others have ecological worries. Me, I still see the need for deer.

Flipping the switch

Often, just reading a magazine article sets my brain off. For instance, while reading about the inadequacies of this country's electrical grid in this week's National Geographic, a memory surfaced. A decade or more ago, as an editorial-page editor, I started getting letters to the editor from a lady who was so proud that she and her husband were "off the grid." They lived in the mountains west of Helena, had solar panels on the roof, had a buried heat system, had, as a backup, nothing but biofuel.

I had to like her. Her politics were my politics. But I had to ask myself - what the hell did her "going off the grid" have to do with you and me?

The grid, as it turns out, is not a matter of politics. It literally keeps us alive.

The electrical grid across the nation is a haphazard mess of local cooperatives, Edison-inspired entrepreneurs, Gilded-age railroad barrons wishing to expand, latter-day dreamers who saw one more dam as the hope of the future, far-seeing, big-spending businessmen, and modern wind-farm dudes. Yet the grid is cool: When I turn on my TV, the electron energy zapping my machine into action was created only seconds before, hundreds or thousands of miles away. There that energy is, whenever I want it! Is that cool, or what?

Very recently, my (land-line) phone system crashed and a tech came out to fix it. He diagnosed the problem with a little hand-held device, was up on a ladder against my house, up to the top of a nearby telephone pole, and down in my basement. He installed new cables. The system worked again!

Without such service, where would my phone service be? Without similar service, where would my electrical power be?

But overall, according to the magazine article, the nationwide grid is in trouble, big time. It fails to meet modern needs. It must be upgraded to use greener power. It must get smart enough to avoid the failure of a system its builders created back when a "smart" electrical system wasn't even a dream.

I had an editor, back in the day, who sputtered in an editorial about a power outage that shut down the newspaper for hours.The power company responded in a letter to the editor, saying essentially that these things happen.

Nowadays, big power outages cost billions. The grid needs not only to avoid outages, but to better regulate power and get consumers to conserve it intelligently. The grid needs to get into the 21st Century. Unfortunately, the power grid across the country is old, antiquated, and in need of upgrading in a hurry. Think of that, next time you flip a switch. The chances keep increasing that nothing will happen.

'Deregulation' as a dirty word

Liberals may or may not take heart at the apparently congenital obtuseness of Republican office holders over the past half decade, suspecting that like dodos and passenger pigeons, they are such easy pickings they have to be on the way out, but as always there is reason to worry: What if they take us all with them?

The current spate of GOP nonsense began with Barry Goldwater, who said something a majority of Americans translated as "Extremism in defense of powerful corporations is no vice." The story goes on, too dreary to recount - Reagan through the second President Bush - but the latest dumbness came from U.S. Rep. Joe Barton, who apologized to BP for the "shakedown" it suffered from the Obama administration. Do these guys have any foot left? (Barton soon apologized, amusingly quoted in Newsweek as saying that "If anything I have said this morning has been misconstrued to the opposite effect, I want to apologize for that misconstrued misconstruction.") The apology was a laugh, but the original comment was a talking point. The day before, a press release by House Republican Study Committee Chairman Tom Price called it not just a shakedown but "a Chicago-style shakedown."

The BP oil spill - the worst in U.S. history - may be fodder for GOP talking points, but the credibility of those points is on a rather severe downward spiral.

I try to steer clear of politics, but sometimes that task resembles tiptoeing across a pig sty. The pigs are thinking about eating me; never mind the state of my shoes.

Liberals and conservatives alike deplore the government's slow response to the oil disaster. Conservatives, hypocritically, demand more government action, while liberals blame the problem on the desecration of agencies like the Minerals Management Service by GOP ideology.

The long-term answer, of course, is to junk as ancient, failed history the Reagan chant of "deregulation" as the disinformation and obtuseness it is. Deregulation, as Newsweek's columnist Jonathan Alter pointed out in a separate article, "must be transformed into an epithet."

But where did I park my car?

I was in the editorial-page business for roughly a decade and a half, handling letters to the editor as well as writing editorials, and one thing you learn in that game is that opinions are a dime a dozen. Opinions are cheap, a colleague once said: Walk into any bar - you can get as many as you want.

But reading an article about aging and the brain reminded me that those alcohol-soaked, fuzzy opinions found in any bar aren't limited to old folks nodding on their bar stools. The opinions - the quality of thinking - hardly get better as you progress down the age scale. Bar talk is bar talk, regardless of age.

Abandoning the tavern for the laboratory, it has long been thought that, unlike in a bar, thinking ability sharply and quickly declines with age. A graph plotting the proportion of people of various ages scoring in the top 25 percent of standard lab tests of reasoning ability drops like a brick with age. Just 6 percent of people in their 50s are top scorers. For people in their 60s, it's only 4 percent.

That sounds grim, but we all know that in real life it doesn't hold water. We know too many people in middle age and beyond whose thinking, savvy and all-around smarts usually put younger people to shame. Hell, these "old farts" are running most every big company, government agency and important activity in the country.

Sharon Begley, the acclaimed science writer who wrote the Newsweek article I refer to, can't help bringing up what she calls that "inchoate thing called wisdom," But she is a font of other, more specific, information. For instance, studies show that while aging brains begin to lose the type of dendrites that do new-thing learning (old dogs, etc.), the dendrites for long-term learning never go away. That's why, perhaps, self-control and social and emotional intelligence improve with age.

Other studies suggest that there is little that is more important to keeping the brain healthy than exercise, just as it is for one's other organs.

Hmm. Exercise. I'll have to consider that. True, it is boring. But not as boring as bar talk.

Cave-man sex

For years now, ever since genome analysis discovered such things as the fascinating fact every human can trace his or her ancestry (at least in small part) to a single "Eve" back in Africa some 190,000 years ago, it has been common knowledge among anthropologists that humans (Cro Magnons) and Neandertals could not interbreed. For instance, a book I am reading called "The Real Eve: Modern Man's Journey Out of Africa" (copywrited 2004 - my paperback was reissued in 2007) states confidently that "there is no evidence among the tens of thousands of non-Africans who have had their (male and female specific) chromosomes studied for even a minimal degree of this kind of mixing."

Well, oops.

It turns out this common knowledge ain't. Up to 4 percent of the DNA of people today (who live outside Africa) came from Neandertals. (Ah, the power of sex!)

The news - shocking to investigators - came from new studies of the Neandertal genome based on 38,000-year-old Neandertal bones from a cave in Croatia. The work was reported in the May 7 "Science." Back in 1997 the lead scientist of the new study, Svante Paabo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, wrote that his studies at the time showed Neandertals had made no such contribution.

So it goes.

Many people like to research their family trees looking for famous or accomplished forbearers. Few find them. But all can be sure that, going back far enough, they will find folks with huge jaws, flattened craniums, and pronounced brow ridges. (On the bright side, remember that Neandertals, on average, had bigger brains than humans do.)