Viewing the American West as a Chicana in China

In both scholarly work and popular imagination, the American West is the final destination of migrant from Europe and Mexico. The stories of those migrants, however, obscure the first migration (12,000 BP) from Asia into North America. That migration across the now-submerged land bridge of Beringia ended humanity’s millennia-long journey across the globe that originated in Africa more than 50,000 years earlier. Using two examples, this essay reflects on how the Asian origins of the first Americans have been transformed into myths that conceal humanity’s migratory nature. First, in Chinese Communist propaganda, those origins are transformed into the myth of Peking Man as a branch of humanity originating in China rather than Africa. Second, in the writing of Rudolfo Anaya, those Asian origins are transformed into the myth of homogenous “Brown Brothers” united against white imperialists. Rather than rely on a myth of racial unity in some original homeland, this essay urges reliance on the shared experience of migration and home-making in hostile environments as the true source of our common humanity. Anaya’s Golden Carp, symbol of the life-giving fierce of water in an arid environment, captures this common human predicament stretching from Tibet and Xinjiang to New Mexico, epitomizing the American West as the place where humanity has been reunited, the home to the last wanderers of the human race.

First Peoples in a New World

Over 15,000 years ago, a band of hunter-gatherers became the first people to set foot in the Americas. They soon found themselves in a world rich in plants and animals, but also a world still shivering itself out of the coldest depths of the Ice Age. The movement of those first Americans was one of the greatest journeys undertaken by ancient peoples. In this book, David Meltzer explores the world of Ice Age Americans, highlighting genetic, archaeological, and geological evidence that has revolutionized our understanding of their origins, antiquity, and adaptation to climate and environmental change. This fully updated edition integrates the most recent scientific discoveries, including the ancient genome revolution and human evolutionary and population history. Written for a broad audience, the book can serve as the primary text in courses on North American Archaeology, Ice Age Environments, and Human evolution and prehistory.

Frances Appleton Pedestrian Bridge Design and Construction

<p>The Frances Appleton Pedestrian Bridge is an innovative steel arch bridge with a 69m main span and curvilinear approaches along the Charles River in Boston, Massachusetts. It is the first Americans with Disabilities Act fully accessible 4.3m wide bridge connecting Boston’s historic Beacon Hill neighborhood to the Esplanade Park and Charles River. An overall architectural and structural theme was followed in the design of all bridge components including the main arch, Y shaped approach piers, circular stairs and curved ramps. The bridge is light, elegant and well-integrated into the landscape complementing an adjacent historic landmark bridge and seamlessly blending into the waterfront context.</p>

No Right to Be Wrong: What Americans Think about Civil-Military Relations

An influential model of democratic civil-military relations insists that civilian politicians and officials, accountable to the public, have “the right to be wrong” about the use of force: they, not senior military officers, decide when force will be used and set military strategy. While polls have routinely asked about Americans’ trust in the military, they have rarely probed deeply into Americans’ views of civil-military relations. We report and analyze the results of a June 2019 survey that yields two important, and troubling, findings. First, Americans do not accept the basic premises of democratic civil-military relations. They are extraordinarily deferential to the military’s judgment regarding when to use military force, and they are comfortable with high-ranking officers intervening in public debates over policy. Second, in this polarized age, Americans’ views of civil-military relations are not immune to partisanship. Consequently, with their man in the Oval Office in June 2019, Republicans—who, as political conservatives, might be expected to be more deferential to the military—were actually less so. And Democrats, similarly putting ideology aside, wanted the military to act as a check on a president they abhorred. The stakes are high: democracy is weakened when civilians relinquish their “right to be wrong.”

African Heritage in Mythology

Our analytical catalogue contains information on many thousands of folklore and mythological texts. The systemic approach to this material argues in favor of an African origin of episodes and images that were recorded in sub-Saharan Africa, the Indo-Pacific border of Asia and in America but are absent in continental Eurasia. Such a pattern corresponds to genetic and archaeological data concerning the early spread of the modern human from Africa in two directions, i.e. to the East along the coast of the Indian Ocean to Southeast Asia and Australia, and to the North into Europe, Central Asia and Siberia. The natural conditions of humankind in the Indo-Pacific Tropics and in the African homeland are essentially similar; conversely, in the Eurasian North, deep cultural changes and a loss of the African heritage are to be expected. Though there are no cultures in Asia that could be considered to be related to the ancestors of the earliest migrants into the New World still being identified by archaeologists, similar sets of motifs in South America and in the Indo-Pacific part of the Old World provide evidence in favor of the East Asian homeland of the first Americans. Later groups of migrants brought those motifs typical for continental Eurasia to North America. Though we take into account conclusions reached by specialists in other historical disciplines, big data on mythology and folklore is argued to be an independent source of information on the human past.

The genomic formation of First American ancestors in East and Northeast Asia

Upward Sun River 1, an individual from a unique burial of the Denali tradition in Alaska (11500 calBP), is considered a type representative of Ancient Beringians who split from other First Americans 22000–18000 calBP in Beringia. Using a new admixture graph model-comparison approach resistant to overfitting, we show that Ancient Beringians do not form the deepest American lineage, but instead harbor ancestry from a lineage more closely related to northern North Americans than to southern North Americans. Ancient Beringians also harbor substantial admixture from a lineage that did not contribute to other Native Americans: Amur River Basin populations represented by a newly reported site in northeastern China. Relying on these results, we propose a new model for the genomic formation of First American ancestors in Asia.One Sentence SummaryAncient Beringians do not form the deepest American lineage, but harbor admixture from Amur River Basin populations.