Review: Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas

Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas by Jennifer Raff
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

In some ways, this book is a bait and switch. The title and back cover copy tell us it is an account of how North and South America came to be peopled by prehistoric pioneers from – probably Asia but maybe from South Sea islanders – who became the ancestors of the vast and varied New World peoples.

It is that book, but only after it’s another one first.

That book is, it seems to me, Rath’s grappling with the ethics of European-descended white anthropologists doing work that can fly in the face of Native American origin myths. Who are any of us, she asks, to recover long-buried bodies, test their DNA, and then hypothesize about their distant origins.

Her answer is that we have to be respectful at all times, not simply asking for permission but entering into the work with the recognition that Native perspectives are even more valid than our scientific ones. If they tell us that Kenewick Man deserves to be reburied – despite his body’s capacity to tell us so much about nine millennia for which we have no other souce – then he deserves to be reburied.

She is right, of course, but it sometimes feels a bit heavy-handed, and it comes as introduction to the scientific work she has promised us. I’d be open to that other book, but I’d want it to be the acknowledged center of the work rather than something that, as here, comes as a long prologue – and repeated refrain – to the work she has promised us.

As far as that work, her unpacking of what the latest ancient DNA analysis suggests about the peopling of the New World, things can get a bit clunky.

I’ve read a lot of excellent science writing lately, and Raff doesn’t quite have the same facility with translating the frontiers of her field to a lay reader. She falls back a lot of acronyms which, even though she defines them, come to feel like buzzwords. She refers often to the theory that the last great ice age, which lowered sea levels to the point that there was a “land bridge” across the Bering Strait. (I put the term in quotes because, as she explains, it was not a slender piece of dry land but rather a vast space in which prehistoric humans lived rather than simply passed over.)

So, even the promised parts get hard to follow,

There are some redeeming elements, though. She does paint a good outline of the competing theories in her field, noting that she is part of a younger generation contesting the previous consensus that the New World was peopled by the Clovis group with its high-tech stone arrow- and spearheads.

She also has a nice sequence on how it feels to do the actual bench chemistry work of extracting ancient DNA. It’s laborious, and even trained scientists fail in as many attempts as they succeed in.

So, this is something of a mixed bag. I learned some from it, but I don’t find it as successful as some of the other recent work on the subject.


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