American genesis: The American Indian and the origins of modern man

True, Goodman seems to prophesy the apparent discovery of what looks like a "caucasoid" skull in Washington State, "Kennewick Man," more than a decade after his own publication of discoveries of similarly suggestive human remains dating back HALF A MILLION YEARS IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA. And to this scholar, his tale of anthropological politics rings true. But just because KM's face was cast in whitish clay doesn't mean he really looked like Jean-Luc Picard! In fact, it seems to me his skin probably looked more Southwest American Indian than Swedish...but until we invent a time machine, we'll never know for sure.The biggest name Goodman is able to "drop" is that of Leakey...pretty big indeed. But since his best-known other work (I've heard) is a wacked-out tale of outside intervention in human evolution - Divine, extraterrestrial, take your pick - it seems even KM has been unable to redeem Goodman's name.Be that as it may, his apparent find of anthropologically-modern human beings with affinities to Peking Man, Java Man, Australian Aborigines, and European Cro-Magnons, IN NORTH AMERICA, IMMENSELY OLDER THAN THESE, deserves to be addressed by other researchers as a legitimate challenge to the "standard account" of evolution, and not just ignored as it seems largely to have been, outside the American Indian activist and White Supremacist communities.Goodman found no evidence of pre-sapiens humans in the Western Hemisphere, apart from a "beetle-browed" skull of "uncertain provenance" in a Brazilian museum. This suggests that Homo Sapiens Sapiens evolved elsewhere we haven't located yet, but spread to the rest of the known world from North America, so that all modern humans are descended from PALEO-INDIANS.Say you don't buy his main thesis as stated above. Then his biggest service to the world may be at least highlighting the appalling lack of evidence in support of - and preponderance of evidence against - the usual (ie, West-to-East) Bering Land Bridge Theory, whose only basis seems to be the presumption that Modern Humans evolved anywhere but the Americas! (Ironically this leads to Goodman's biggest logic flaw: SOMEBODY came down through Alaska, explaining the "mongoloid" characteristics and linguistics of *some* [but far from all] Native Americans. Or kayaked back across the North Pacific. Or whatever. See what I mean?)Still, if I were an archeologist with a grant, I'd start digging far deeper than ever before!

With the recent discovery of Kennewick Man in 1996, this book has taken on added significance. It discusses evidence that man was in American 50,000 years ago--not 12 thousand or 30 thousand like some averr. The book also recounts how the academic establishment in anthropology refused to accept the ancient date of origin. In both the cases of Kennewick Man, a Causcasoid skeleton found in Washington State, which is 9500 years old and the find described in American Genesis, politics seems to prevail over science.