- 16/06/2025
Documentary, PBS First Peoples 2015-06-1of5 in Americas
First Peoples Americas
First Peoples Americas
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LearningTranscript
00:00200,000 years ago, a new species emerged on the African landscape.
00:12Homo sapiens. Modern humans. Us.
00:19Today there are seven billion of us living across planet Earth.
00:25This is the story of our journey from continent to continent.
00:31How we left Africa, crossed Asia, reached Australia and colonized Europe.
00:40The final frontier was America, the last continent to become.
00:48It's one of the great mysteries of knowledge.
00:52Who first set foot on the African soil?
00:56When and how did they get here?
01:03As they moved further and further south, they would know that they were truly the first people to experience those landscapes.
01:12These rivers would have provided all the resources that coastal peoples needed to explore deep into the interior and ultimately colonize all of North America.
01:22As a scientist, it's super exciting.
01:24There is a controversy because the result matters.
01:27It means something. It's important.
01:30Who were these first Americans?
01:43And what became of them?
01:45Their story is our story.
01:49First Peoples was made possible in part by a generous grant from the Anne Ray Charitable Trust, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.
02:16The Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico.
02:21Thirteen and a half thousand years ago.
02:26A ceremony takes place deep within a cave.
02:31A young woman is being buried by her clan.
02:36Archaeologists know her as Eva.
02:41When alive, she was a hunter-gatherer.
02:51Like any other prehistoric person.
02:54But Eva is special to us.
02:58She can lay claim to being the first American.
03:04No other remains have been found anywhere in the Americas as old as Eva.
03:13Eva's bones were discovered underwater.
03:27In a vast cave system beneath the forests of Yucatan.
03:36There are chambers here the size of cathedrals.
03:40And tunnels so small, it's barely possible to pass through.
03:46Mexican archaeologists have been excavating in these caves since 2008.
03:58Leading the team is Arturo Gonzalez.
04:02For me, it's like the best way to make archaeology.
04:06Because you don't need to dig.
04:08You don't have dust.
04:10And everything is clear.
04:12Most of the bones they find are from animals.
04:21But in among them are the remains of prehistoric humans.
04:29We spend a lot of time diving, exploring.
04:34When finally you find some human remains, it's like a lottery.
04:41It's a wow, thanks God, no?
04:44You have this great opportunity to touch this evidence.
04:49It's like a connection between the past and the future in the present.
04:55But why are there human bones underwater?
04:59They weren't washed in.
05:05They must have been left here, when the caves were dry.
05:13During the Ice Age, so much of the world's water was frozen in great sheets of ice,
05:20that sea levels were lower than today, up to 400 feet lower, pushing back the coastline.
05:28Changing the shape of the Americas.
05:31At that time, the cave system in the Yucatan would have been dry enough for people to enter and bury their dead.
05:47The dry phase ended 8,000 years ago.
05:52Since then, the caves have been submerged, sealing in and protecting any human remains.
06:01In total, Gonzales and his team have recovered eight skeletons from the cave system.
06:13It's the largest collection of prehistoric humans found at any one site in North America.
06:22This was the first skeleton that we found in the caves.
06:35It's also the oldest.
06:37We know that this is a young woman, because we have the hips, which are very different from those of men.
06:46The skull is also a good indicator of the sex of a person.
06:52This skull is very delicate, corresponding with a young woman.
07:04She was four foot seven inches tall when alive, and still in her twenties when she died.
07:12Radiocarbon dating of her bones suggests that happened 13,500 years ago.
07:25Archaeologists believe Eva was part of a larger clan of nomads.
07:31They lived in the forest, up to 40 miles from the cave system.
07:43They only came into the caves to bury their dead.
07:54When Eva was discovered, her skeleton was intact and undisturbed.
08:00She'd been deliberately placed there, a quarter of a mile from the nearest opening.
08:13The evidence suggests Eva was laid to rest in some kind of ritual burial.
08:20It's the earliest sign of spirituality anywhere in North America.
08:27But why go to such lengths and perform a ceremony in the dark, a quarter of a mile into the cave?
08:36Normally it's the deepest part of the cave.
08:40Normally it's very far from the entrance, but we don't know.
08:44We don't know specifically why they chose these specific places.
09:01Octavio Rettig is a modern day shaman.
09:03He believes the deepest chambers were portals to a spirit world, where shamans communed with the spirits, using psychotropic drugs.
09:22It's very slow.
09:23Today, Arturo Gonzalez is simulating the effect, with a compound extracted from the glands of a Mexican toad.
09:33Like the sun.
09:35Amor, amor, amor, amor, amor, amor, amor, infinito.
09:37Gracias.
09:38Gracias.
09:39Gracias.
09:40I'm an anthropologist, I'm a paleontologist, I'm very, very sure about the rationalism,
10:08but now I understand better why they choose specific places in order to make these burials
10:14or make these connections with the source, no?
10:24Such rituals 13,500 years ago are the earliest flickerings of a culture anywhere in the Americas.
10:33But for archaeologists, that's a problem.
10:38Eva was in the Yucatan centuries before anyone was meant to have entered North America.
10:49For decades, it's been assumed that the first Americans arrived from Siberia by foot.
10:57During the Ice Age, sea levels were so low, there was a land bridge where the Bering Straits are today.
11:05But once people entered Alaska, they could go no further, because Canada was covered by two great ice sheets, an uncrossable barrier.
11:20It was only when the world warmed and the ice sheets started melting that a route to the south emerged.
11:36In Alberta, the evidence of that southern route is easy to find.
11:41A series of giant boulders scattered across the plains.
11:47They're known as erratics, because they don't belong in this landscape.
11:53So this enormous rock shouldn't actually be here.
11:57In fact, its original home is about 100 miles north of here.
12:00But it got trapped between these two enormous ice sheets, and it pushed this rock south.
12:08As those ice sheets eventually melted, it deposited this rock here.
12:12Rocks like this one, they seem isolated.
12:16But when we actually map them out on the landscape, they provide us an excellent idea of where a corridor would have opened up between these two giant ice sheets.
12:26They really mark a passageway into North America.
12:31Once an ice-free corridor opened, about 13,000 years ago, people could walk south into what is now the United States.
12:46On either side of you are enormous ice sheets that are pulling apart from each other and melting.
12:59You would have heard the rush of the meltwater.
13:02You would have probably heard cracking ice and large chunks of ice breaking off of these sheets.
13:08As they moved further and further south, they would have emerged into a landscape that no humans had ever trodden on before.
13:21There would be no signs of human life.
13:24They would know that they were truly the first people to experience those landscapes.
13:29This new world was home to herds of great beasts.
13:44None greater than the Colombian mammoth.
13:52Weighing up to nine tons, it was a bonanza for any hunter who could kill one.
13:58The first evidence mammoths were hunted by early Americans turned up in the 1930s.
14:12At a series of sites in the southwest, archaeologists found spearheads alongside mammoth bones.
14:20These spearheads became known as Clovis points after one of the sites in Clovis, New Mexico.
14:35Ever since, they've been discovered across the United States.
14:38They're so common, archaeologists describe the people who made them as Clovis people.
14:56This rock shelter in the Ozarks is a new archaeological site.
15:00Excavations have only just begun, but it seems Clovis people used the shelter as a campsite.
15:0913,000 years ago, a family group may have stayed here a few days before moving on.
15:21Life was dominated by food, finding it, processing and eating it.
15:32Hunter-gatherers are so active, they consume up to four times more protein than people today.
15:39Metin Ehren is one of the directors of the archaeological site, and an expert flintknapper.
15:48He can make a Clovis point, as it would have been made, by early Americans.
15:53This is a Clovis point, and it's an amazing piece of Stone Age technology.
16:04No one in the Stone Age had seen anything like this by the time it was made over 13,000 years ago.
16:09Incredibly razor-sharp edges along the entire blade.
16:13And because it's got these grooves on both sides, it's easily hafted onto the end of a spear shaft.
16:18And thus it could have also easily taken down the largest Stone Age beasts.
16:23In a lot of ways, you can consider this to be the first American invention.
16:34This is a Clovis point that I made, and a Clovis person would have hafted it onto a piece of wood,
16:39to which they would have attached it to a large spear like this made out of cane.
16:43They could have then attached this spear to what's called an atlatl, or spear thrower.
16:50And with the spear thrower, they would have had just a ton of oomph with which to hit any large Ice Age animals.
16:56So that's definitely a kill.
17:06Oh wow. This Clovis point went all the way through this three inch target.
17:10So you can easily imagine the sort of damage that this would have done to the prey that Clovis people were going after.
17:30It's an incredible weapon.
17:32But how did Clovis people manage to blaze a trail?
17:51Where to go? What to do? In a vast, unknown land?
17:55Bob Stevens is an Apache Indian.
17:59A hunter, a tracker, and an expert in survival.
18:06Being out here in a while, amongst this landscape, I feel the wind.
18:15And the wind blows right through me.
18:17All the sounds become a part of me, become a rhythm with my heartbeat.
18:24Not only do I become the world around me, but the world around me becomes me.
18:30And we become one.
18:35Clovis people had no instruction manual.
18:39No one to tell them where to hunt.
18:42They had to work it out for themselves.
18:44The first thing you would do is look for a high vantage point somewhere.
18:49And once you get to a high vantage point, then you can see more of the terrain around you.
18:54And the land speaks to you.
18:58All the animals are going to come down to these areas here in the bottom of the canyon.
19:03And they're going to need pathways to come down to get water.
19:06They're going to concentrate in this area here.
19:08Because anywhere up the canyon from here and down the canyon from here is a box canyon.
19:13There's no access in or out.
19:15You know they're going to come down to this one very spot.
19:18So this would be a good centralized location to establish a little semi-residence and then work your way out from here and start exploring the land a little bit further out.
19:28The first people that come from the land bridge up by Alaska.
19:35It's amazing at the speed that they come through here.
19:38Perhaps it's that urge to explore.
19:41Maybe there was something that light just beyond the next rise.
19:45Beyond the next hillside.
19:46So what I do when I come out here is I have that same urge to want to know what's just beyond that last hill that I can see.
19:55And to be able to go over there, peek over the other side and say, I know what's there.
20:00And what do I see?
20:02I see another hill.
20:04And it keeps that drive alive to keep me going beyond further and further.
20:07Part of the appeal of this story is how nicely it reflects some classic ideas about the American West.
20:22This idea of rugged individuals driven into a new landscape only to successfully sort of conquer it and colonize it.
20:31But is the story really true?
20:38Were Clovis hunters the first people in America?
20:45The oldest archaeological evidence they left behind goes back 13,000 years.
20:54But in Yucatan, Eva was alive 13 and a half thousand years ago.
20:59She's hundreds of years older than Clovis.
21:06If Eva and her kind managed to reach the southeast of the continent so early,
21:12people must have entered North America long before 13,000 years ago.
21:22So when did they arrive?
21:24And how did they get you?
21:26Jacqueline Gill believes she can date the arrival of people in North America, not by studying bones or tools, but dung.
21:44There's a type of fungal spore known as Sporomyla that thrives in the nutrient-rich dung of large grass-eating animals.
22:03The more animals, the more dung.
22:05And the more dung, the more spores.
22:07And what's so fantastic about these spores is that they last for thousands or tens of thousands of years.
22:13So you can literally dig down into the soil and go back into the past to work out how many animals were on the landscape.
22:20Jacqueline Gill takes samples of mud from ancient lake beds.
22:33She adds a solvent and spins them in a centrifuge to extract the fungal spores.
22:41She can then count the spores to work out how many animals were around in prehistoric times.
22:54Animals like mammoth and mastodon.
22:57After many hours counting these spores, I noticed something interesting.
23:0615,000 years ago, there were a lot of spores, which means there were a lot of animals on the landscape.
23:13But then something happened. By about 14,800 years ago, the number of spores started to go down.
23:20And then by about 13,500 years ago, they were completely gone.
23:24The disappearance of these spores suggests animals were being hunted long before the first Clovis points.
23:35By the time Clovis hunters show up in North America, the landscape is already pretty depleted of large animals.
23:44Which means that there had to have been people here much earlier than we previously thought.
23:49But if people were hunting animals before Clovis, where's the archaeological evidence?
24:01This is a rib bone, discovered in Washington State on the Olympic Peninsula.
24:07It belongs to a mastodon, an elephant-like species related to the mammoth.
24:13The unique thing about this rib bone is this massive bone embedded into the rib itself.
24:24And we wondered what this was.
24:27So we did high-resolution CT scanning across the bone and created a 3D model of what this object looked like.
24:33The object is clearly man-made.
24:39Not a Clovis point, but a more basic type of spearhead that's penetrated the rib.
24:46It's a bone projectile point.
24:51That would have been hurled at this elephant.
24:52It would have then penetrated through the tough hide of the mastodon, gone about 20-25 centimeters into the mastodon through its tissue.
25:03And the tip end, just fortuitously, ending up becoming embedded into the rib of this animal.
25:10Then what happened is the animal was wiggling around, the tip end broke off into the rib itself.
25:15We didn't know the age precisely, so we radiocarbon dated the bone, and it came out 13,800 years ago.
25:26This animal was hunted and killed by humans almost eight centuries before Clovis appears in North America.
25:38Eight centuries before Clovis appears in North America.
25:42It's becoming increasingly clear, the earliest Americans were not Clovis hunters, who came through the ice-free corridor 13,000 years ago.
26:05There had to be another way into North America.
26:12John Erlandson believes the first Americans came by boat, as early as 16,000 years ago.
26:26While the land at that time was still blocked by ice, the coast of the Pacific Northwest was mostly ice-free.
26:35It was possible to find a route south, bypassing any icebergs and living from the bounty of the sea.
26:48One of the reasons the coastal route is so attractive is this stuff.
26:55This is bull kelp. In one form or another, kelp forests extended all around the Pacific Rim.
27:01These kelp forests are super productive. They put out billions of spores. They can grow as much as a meter a day.
27:07And they ultimately support very complex food webs, fish, shellfish, marine mammals. And ultimately, it's edible and quite tasty.
27:21Pretty good, actually.
27:25Rather than walking through an ice-free corridor, the very first Americans could have paddled down a kelp highway.
27:34There are kelp forests along the Pacific coast, from North to South America, all the way to Patagonia.
27:42Traveling down the kelp highway would have been quicker and easier than coming overland.
27:56Always going through the same terrain. Always at sea level.
28:04Anthropological theory suggested that people didn't start really fishing and develop boats until 10,000 years ago.
28:10It was always inexplicable to me. The coastlines are so productive. Why would humans ignore them for 99% of history?
28:21I still think people may have come down the ice-free corridor. I just think at this point, it's more likely they came down the coast earlier,
28:30and that the very first Americans were coastally adapted.
28:32Any archaeological evidence for a coastal migration has been washed away by the rising seas.
28:47But according to this theory, the Pacific seaboard was dotted with makeshift camps.
28:52People would have moved from headland to headland, catching fish and marine mammals, and harvesting kelp.
29:05Then they would move on, always hugging the coast, staying in sight of land.
29:11It must have been a truly amazing journey to come down the coast and explore these places where humans had never been before.
29:21These seafarers may then have headed inland, following any large river they came across.
29:35In this way, they could have navigated into the heart of the continent.
29:40For people moving down the coast, these rivers would have been like detours on the kelp highway.
29:48They would have provided all the resources that coastal peoples needed to explore deep into the interior and ultimately colonize all of North America.
30:00The U.S. river system provides a potential map of their journey.
30:04If they came inland along the Columbia River, they could have joined up with the Missouri, which flows into the Mississippi, and finally into the Gulf of Mexico.
30:23In this way, people like Eva could have crossed the continent long before the ice-free corridor opened up.
30:34But if people came along the coast, and then the rivers, where are their remains?
30:45Who were they? And what became of them?
30:51One of the most complete prehistoric skeletons in North America,
31:03North America is kept in this museum.
31:09It is of a man who may have been an early coastal migrant traveling the kelp highway.
31:17But it's impossible to film his bones, because they're a security risk.
31:22There's several layers of locked-in alarm doors and security cameras and that sort of thing.
31:30And this particular skeleton is two layers deeper into its own security system.
31:36It's the vault inside the bank, inside the secure city, I would say.
31:41It would be very, very difficult to break in and get the remains.
31:53The skeleton was discovered in 1996.
31:58It's a man who was buried over eight and a half thousand years ago,
32:03beside the Columbia River, near Kennewick, Washington.
32:07He's become known as Kennewick Man.
32:10But right away, local tribes wanted him reburied.
32:21Native Americans have a federal right of return on ancient remains.
32:26If they can prove an ancestral link, the authorities are meant to hand over any bones for reburial.
32:37A process known as repatriation.
32:41But with Kennewick Man, it has never happened.
32:46Despite the efforts of tribal leaders like Armand Minthorne.
32:50Our way of life is different.
32:54We have unwritten laws that we pass generation to generation.
33:00But in the meantime, we have to follow the letter of the law.
33:05We worked with the federal agency.
33:08We were ready for repatriation.
33:11And then that's when the scientists stepped in.
33:15And they wanted to do studies.
33:17And then this is where it went to court.
33:23Anthropologists believe the fossil is too important and intriguing to be reburied.
33:33They took out a lawsuit to stop the repatriation.
33:39Ever since, Kennewick Man has been in a state of limbo.
33:43His fate undecided.
33:48Hidden from view.
33:56In 2004, the courts allowed the bones to be scrutinized by Doug Owsley.
34:03Based at the Smithsonian, he's one of the world's leading forensic anthropologists.
34:07His team was given two weeks with the body to do a definitive examination.
34:18They generated so much data, it took nine years to publish the results.
34:23When we summarize Kennewick Man, for one thing we'd say he's about 160 pounds, he's five feet seven and a half inches.
34:32He's about 40 years of age.
34:34He's a very sturdy man, he's very strong, he has very robust bones, he's very wide-bodied.
34:41He has a much larger, much stronger right arm than left.
34:48We link that up to the use of an atlatl.
34:53That's a very quick, rapid motion.
34:58As you do this, you've got to catch yourself so you'll throw the left leg forward and that's going to be the one that will catch you.
35:04And it's amazing, but you can actually see a difference in the strength of the left leg versus the right leg.
35:17But the same weapons, a spear and atlatl, seem to have been used against Kennewick Man.
35:25When you look at his pelvis, his right hip bone has an embedded spear point.
35:38It would have just knocked him down hard.
35:40It sliced into the right pelvic bone, it sheared off part of the pelvic crest.
35:54But as far as being a lucky shot, it really was because if it had gone just a little bit more in, it would have gone into the internal organs.
36:02Certainly would have killed him.
36:06He also had five broken ribs.
36:08He may have got them at the same time as the spear.
36:15The type of injury that you see in the ribs, it's the kind of thing that I see in my forensic case identification when somebody kicks somebody.
36:22Whoever the assailant was, could have been close enough to him to actually be able to give him a good stomp and then break these ribs.
36:32But he was just tough as nails and survive. He was able to get away and he lived a good 20 years after this happened.
36:48What more can the bones of Kennewick Man reveal?
36:55Owsley has analyzed their chemical content, their isotope signal.
37:02This can show what Kennewick Man ate and where his food came from.
37:08When we run his isotope signal, he's got a marine signature. And the first thing you'd think of is there's lots of salmon going up and down the Columbia River drainages.
37:22And this fellow is found along the Columbia River, you'd think that's a natural thing.
37:27But some of the carbon levels are so high, they cannot have come from eating any amount of river fish.
37:34Instead, Kennewick Man seems to have lived on a diet of marine manners.
37:45This man is coming actually from the coast and he's heavily dependent in terms of his isotope signal.
37:52Reading his isotope signal, he's heavily dependent on seals.
37:56He is coming from as far north as central Alaska.
38:00According to the forensic evidence, Kennewick Man had a lifestyle similar to other early coastal migrants, feeding himself from the sea.
38:17He would only have headed inland to the Columbia River later in life.
38:22That surprises the Dickens out of me.
38:25I would have never predicted that.
38:27Anybody that looked at this would think this is his home.
38:30It is not his home.
38:31He's not from there.
38:35Native Americans reject this idea.
38:38They call him the Ancient One and believe he was one of their own.
38:44His burial at the Columbia River suggests he was not a lone traveler, but part of an established community.
38:53We believe the Ancient One lived similar to how we live today as far as eating the same kinds of foods, speaking the same language, fishing from the same river.
39:09And more than likely, he was buried with ceremony.
39:16There were other people.
39:19They took care of him and they put him in the ground, just like we do today.
39:26Us, as Indian people, believe that when our body goes to the ground, that's where it's to stay until the end of time.
39:43That's what we believe.
39:44And even if it's 9,000 years ago, it doesn't matter.
39:52When a body is taken out of the ground, like the Ancient One, their journey is interrupted.
40:00It's stopped.
40:03To prevent any further excavations, federal authorities covered up the grave site at the Columbia River with rubble.
40:18But they've not yet returned any bonds.
40:29Tribal groups claim that Kennewick man is their ancestor.
40:34And the scientists cannot accept the fact that just because it's not written down in a book, it's not fact.
40:41It's fact to me, because I live it every day.
40:48Doug Owsley disagrees.
40:51He thinks there's no ancestral link between modern-day Native Americans and Kennewick man.
40:58Their skulls are the wrong shape.
41:03This is a skull of a Native American, and it has very broad cheeks.
41:07And you combine that with a fairly short, broad cranium.
41:13It's very different from what we see in these skulls like Kennewick man.
41:18Kennewick man, instead of being a short, broad cranium, tends to be much longer and narrower.
41:26And when you look at his face, the width of his face here is just not quite as heavily built as what we see in modern-day Native Americans.
41:34And we can ask, for instance, well, who is Kennewick man most like?
41:39Who in the world does he fit with?
41:41When we do that, when we ask those questions, what we see is that on a worldwide basis, this is what we see in Polynesians.
41:48The facial reconstruction of Kennewick man is modeled on Polynesian-looking people known as the Ainu.
41:59They are traditional hunter-gatherers from northern Japan who were all but wiped out in the 20th century.
42:08Their skulls were long and narrow, similar to that of Kennewick man.
42:17Well, you have to realize I'm not saying he's Polynesian.
42:21What we're saying instead is that 10,000 years ago, 15,000 years ago, this is what people look like in the coastal Asia maritime, these are maritime hunter-gatherers and this is what people look like.
42:32The skeletons from Yucatan are the same.
42:37Eva's skull is long and narrow, like Kennewick man.
42:43She's not a match with modern-day Native Americans.
42:48According to this theory, the first wave of migrants into the Americas were those people like Kennewick man and Eva with long, narrow skulls.
43:05But around 8,000 years ago, another wave must have swept in.
43:10People with wide, round skulls.
43:13They wiped out the first wave and went on to populate the Americas.
43:23If true, then today's Native Americans are not directly related to Kennewick man and have no claim on his bones.
43:32But there is a sure-fire way to test ancestry, using DNA.
43:41The bones of Kennewick man were thought to be too degraded to provide any genetic data.
43:55But Esker Willerslev is a pioneer in the field of ancient genomics.
44:08His team has managed to extract some usable DNA, which could prove whether or not Kennewick man was related to today's Native Americans.
44:18As a scientist, it's super exciting if there is a controversy, because that means that the result, if that can solve that controversy, the result matters, right?
44:32It means something. It's important.
44:36Once they have the DNA, they make millions of copies and feed them into a high-throughput sequencing machine.
44:44By bathing them in dyes, the machine sets off a series of chemical reactions.
45:01Constellations of light from across the genome can be photographed and analyzed in fantastic detail.
45:09I mean, I am, of course, a geneticist, so I am biased, but I really do think that genetics today, especially genomics, as we are undertaking here, is a very, very powerful tool to address these kinds of questions of ancestry.
45:27Willerslev has invited Armand Minthorne and other tribal leaders to visit his laboratory and find out the latest about the sequencing of Kennewick man.
45:40But first, he takes them to the clean room to show them how DNA is extracted from ancient remains.
45:53Today, they're working with a 500-year-old tooth of a Viking.
45:57There is very, very little DNA in such materials, and in order to really be able to read the genetic code, then you will have to crush it, and then you are extracting, so to speak, the DNA from it.
46:12It's similar to the process that the ancient one went through, but, of course, for the ancient one, it was bone rather than tooth.
46:19It bothers us a bit to be here and to see this, what's being done.
46:46That human remains like this are treated this way.
46:53Human remains need to be treated as sacred.
47:02But it is science, and us as tribes, we're still coming to understand what science is.
47:09This meeting of science and tradition ends with a prayer.
47:16We're always thinking of the ancient one, wherever he may be, whatever, whatever he may be.
47:22When I saw how much it meant to them, I actually got really emotional about it.
47:27I'm sure they are feeling that they are making a sacrifice, even with me taking samples of the kinetic man.
47:35But it's a sacrifice that needs to be done for them to potentially get the remains back.
47:43Basically, what I have in this tube here...
47:46Whatever doubts they have about genetic research, the tribes are about to get some good news.
47:51This is the DNA of the ancient one, and we have sequenced parts of the genome already.
48:01And based on those analyses of that part, that's where we can see that the ancient one is closer related to contemporary Native American people than to any other peoples in the world.
48:13And I think this is really important in regards to what has been claimed about the ancient one.
48:24Because there has been claimed that the ancient one, you know, is something different than present-day Native Americans.
48:32Right? And if that was the case, if that was really the case, then the DNA of the ancient one should group with other peoples in the world.
48:39For example, with other Asian groups or something like that. And that's not the case.
48:46Okay, he's basically falling spot on into Native Americans.
48:51It's really encouraging to hear you say that.
48:57Us as Indian people, we've always known that.
49:01And it only confirms and reconfirms what we've said all along.
49:06If any of this stuff we find out can be of help to you in terms of getting the ancient one back, I'll be happy to do what I can.
49:17You know, and also go out there to the court or whatever and argue for the reliability, et cetera, of the results.
49:25The DNA could be a game changer.
49:38Once Kennewick Mann's genetic sequence is complete, it will be new evidence in the campaign for his repatriation.
49:45If the genetics is right, there weren't two separate waves of migration into the Americas. Just one.
50:00Eva, the Clovis people, Kennewick Mann. They're all from the same gene pool as modern day Native Americans.
50:12They are all one people.
50:19Today's Native Americans may look different to their ancestors, but that's not unusual.
50:26Around the world, almost everyone looks different from their prehistoric forebears.
50:35None of us are the people we once were.
50:38None of us are the people we once were.
50:42John Hawkes has studied the way human biology has changed over the last 10,000 years.
51:05The First Peoples fascinate us, which is natural, because they are us, ancestors of everybody today.
51:15But we've come to realize that when we look at their skulls, their faces, they're not our faces.
51:21We've changed. The obvious question is, why?
51:24Hawkes believes that humans are acutely responsive to changes in lifestyle.
51:37Once we stopped hunting and gathering, we started eating different foods.
51:43That alone was enough to change the shape of our skulls.
51:47And living in cities, our brains aren't having to work so hard.
51:56We rely on the intelligence of others.
52:01It may be surprising, but when we started to settle down, our skulls not only changed in shape, they began to shrink.
52:09Presumably our brains shrank as well.
52:12The First Peoples, they lived in very tiny groups.
52:14Anything that they wanted to make, they had to know how to make it.
52:18Any food that they needed to find, they needed to know where it was in their environment.
52:23The knowledge accumulated over generations, they had to have it all right here.
52:31Living by their wits, these pioneers opened up a new world.
52:35Whether they came by sea or by land, we now know they arrived at least 2,000 years early than previously thought.
52:48And populated the Americas at breakneck speed.
52:52The same spirit of exploration was shared by other First Peoples of the world.
53:05Geneticists believe they were driven by their genes to take risks, embrace change, and seek out what's good.
53:17Some have called these explorer genes.
53:22And they're still in our DNA today.
53:27The First Peoples were explorers.
53:30They were blazing trails.
53:32They created the world that we're now living in.
53:34And that genetic link between us and them is what has come down through the years, connecting us to them and pushing us out to where we haven't been before.
53:46No other species does what we do.
53:55Move, explore, and inhabit every corner of the world.
54:03And we do it because they do.
54:07Our ancestors.
54:10The First Peoples.
54:11The First Peoples.
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