Vindicated, Finally

Forty some years ago, when I was a budding scholar in high school,  we were assigned the task of writing a research term paper. I think this was in an English Composition class...I really don't recall.  At the time I was very much into reading some obscure scientific or historical journals. These were probably not at all obscure but they were to the typical high school student. Sometimes I would read an article and then follow up on the cited sources. This was kind of like surfing the net but there wasn't a net...everything was in print.

I was briefly interested in Thor Heyerdahl's "Kon-Tiki" voyage and his theory that people from South America sailed west to inhabit some of the islands of Polynesia. His arguments were not very convincing and he didn't get much attention until he actually set sail in a raft and happened to barely survive the voyage to a Pacific island.

The fact that he made the voyage didn't prove much but he opened the door to discussion and consideration of the idea of trans-Pacific contact between Asia and the Americas. That was the hook that caught me and I started looking into the topic.  Could people from Asia have sailed east to North or South America? It turns out that the currents are favorable for that type of voyage. Even now we are hearing about the debris from Japan's tsunami showing up on the west coast of the United States. These currents have been doing the same thing for thousands of years. Japanese fishing floats wash up on California beaches and some go farther down the western edge of the continent.

So I started digging and eventually I found an article written by three anthropologists  in 1962 (I think) who claimed that they found evidence of the arrival of living Japanese fisherman (seafarers, at least) among artifacts found at Valdivia in Ecuador. The date of that arrival was approximately 3,000 BC. The outcome of that arrival was the introduction of pottery making to the people of South America. Pottery had not been made in the Americas prior to that time and then it arrived without any precursors...no tentative trials or "beta test" models. What's intriguing is that the style of pottery that suddenly appeared was identical to pottery being manufactured by people of the Jomon culture of ancient Japan...around 3,000 BC.  I thought they made a credible argument and I put together a terrific term paper covering the topic and some of the counter arguments from people who thought this was all hog wash. In my enthusiasm I received an 'A' on the paper and became a long-term, but quiet,  advocate of the idea as well.

Most of the professional anthropologists and archaeologists  who had anything to say took a negative view of the idea. Part of their skepticism probably stemmed from the lingering negative reaction to Heyerdahl's showboat approach to proving people could have sailed long distances in primitive boats. The Ecuador - Japan connection was too foreign to the accepted rules of how people migrated and came to inhabit the Americas. They didn't have a better explanation of how pottery suddenly appeared but it couldn't have been introduced by drifting Japanese fisherman.

Fast forward forty years. Many of those old rules and ideas have been called into question so many of today's professionals are a little more cautious in condemning new ideas. The idea that Clovis people were the first to make the migration to the Americas around 12,000 years ago is crumbling and anthropologists are looking at alternative ideas. One way to look at the question is through genetics and linguistics. A recent DNA study of indigenous males  (Y-chromosome) in South America looked at a large sample of DNA donors. I don't pretend to understand genetics or even the full implication of the project but the research found (I think) that most of the original people coming into South America came (perhaps together?) at approximately the same time  but then divided into small isolated groups who remained separate for very long periods of time. This migration took place about 15,000 years ago and genetic mutations took place during the periods of isolation resulting in the variations we see in the native populations.

The DNA study had a few unexpected findings. It happens that two indigenous groups in western Ecuador have genetic DNA markers common with (wait for it......) eastern Asia....including Japan and Korea. This is found nowhere else in the Americas among indigenous people except way up north in some groups in Alaska...who were probable late arrivals from Asia. Additionally, the research shows that the Ecuador - Japan DNA connection dates from sometime less than 6,000 years ago...not far off from the supposed arrival of the Jomon fishermen around 3,000 BC.  So the genetic evidence backs up what those other anthropologists reported way back in the 1960s.

The pottery issue may still be open for debate...was it invented independently  in the Americas or was it introduced?  The image below shows some of the similarities between Jomon and Valdivia pottery styles of the same era. It's hard to deny the similarities even if there was an earlier prototype of pottery developed elsewhere in South America.

Jomon (top)
Valdivia (bottom)