Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas

above as well as the American Society of Human Genetics’s statement
“ASHG Denounces Attempts to Link Genetics and Racial Supremacy,”
American Journal of Human Genetics 103, no. 5 (2018): 636, doi:
10.1016/j.ajhg.2018.10.011; Lynn B. Jorde and Stephen P. Wooding,
“Genetic Variation, Classification and ‘Race’,” Nature Genetics 36
(2004), S28–S33; Garrett Hellenthal, George B. J. Busby, Gavin Band,
et al., “A Genetic Atlas of Human Admixture History,” Science 343, no.
6172 (2014): 747–751, doi: 10.1126/science.1243518; and a blog post
written by Ewan Birney, me, Adam Rutherford, and Aylwyn Scally
entitled “Race, Genetics and Pseudoscience: An Explainer”
(http://ewanbirney.com/2019/10/race-genetics-and-pseudoscience-anexplainer.html).
37. See “The Biology of Racism,” a published discussion by Leith
Mullings, Jada Benn Torres, Agustín Fuentes, et al., American
Anthropologist (2021), doi: 10.1111/aman.13630.
38 Redman, Bone Rooms
39. Hrdlička, Physical Anthropology of the Lenape or Delawares, vol. 3.
More than 100 years later, I’m struck by how much Hrdlička got wrong
about these individuals. Contrary to Hrdlička’s assertion, disease and
malnutrition have left extensive evidence on the bones of these
ancestors. It’s actually quite hard to read about these pathologies,
knowing how much the people who carried them would have suffered,
and given that these conditions were not present to nearly the same
extent on remains from this region prior to European contact, it’s hard
not to attribute them to the effects of colonization. Techniques for
studying the human skeleton and identifying the effects of disease and
trauma began in the nineteenth century but became far more
sophisticated and standardized in the second half of the twentieth
century. For introductions into the history of this field, see: Jane
Buikstra, “Paleopathology: A Contemporary Perspective,” in A
Companion to Biological Anthropology, edited by Clark S. Larsen (John
Wiley & Sons, 2010), pp. 395–311; Della C. Cook and Mary Lucas
Powell, “The Evolution of American Paleopathology,” in
Bioarchaeology: The Contextual Analysis of Human Remains, edited by
Jane E. Buikstra and L. E. Beck (Academic Press, 2006), pp. 281–322;
Anne L. Grauer, “A Century of Paleopathology,” American Journal of