Debuting film features Hopi man who traced his DNA back to Chaco Canyon

[Pivo]

“Room 33 – Chaco Canyon’s Room With A View Into the Past,” by filmmaker Larry Ruiz, will premiere at the Fort Lewis College Lyceum as part of a San Juan Basin Archaeological Society presentation on Wednesday.

Ruiz said he plans to release the film on YouTube after it premieres at FLC on Wednesday.


https://www.durangoherald.com/articles/ ... icleButton

[Hansenaz]

@Pivo
Very interesting. As I understand it DNA analysis to sort out the history and details of Native American migrations is hampered by reluctance of modern tribes to participate or allow study of ancient bones.

[Pivo]

@Hansenaz
Yes there is concern within the Native communities about that.

[Alston_Neal]

For years I've heard from Hopis tales of their migrations. Even Nampeyo's iconic pottery pattern is the migration pattern. For Mr. Tuwaletstiwa to state there is also a connection for him to Chile comes as no surprise to me. Evident today in the ceremonial use of macaw feathers. The swastika symbol was also another image used since pre- European contact time in the SW as a migration pattern, the travels to the four cardinal points. Still in use today by Hopis and other groups as migration or creation symbology.

[Jim]

I would be interested in that film, but wish we could read the study. I'm hardly a genetics expert, but given what it says here:

Tuwaletstiwa explained in the film his DNA traced back to Chile, but his closest matching relative was determined with DNA taken from human remains found within Room 33 in Pueblo Bonito, which was first excavated in the late 1800s.

Closest living relative doesn't have to mean great(20x) grandfather, it can easily mean 50th cousin, but that also doesn't mean that the Hopi are like the Navajo who came from far away relatively recently. I guess since it is concerned with oral stories, and supporting that Hopi are very closely related to the Chaco Canyon people, that is nice to know.

The article linked to: https://www.durangoherald.com/articles/ ... nyon-site/ which is interesting because when I think of the Hopi Tribe, I think of the Hopi Mesas. Is Tuwaletstiwa a tribal member of mixed Puebloan ancestry in the Sangre De Christos, too, or from one of the Hopi Mesas? That article has:

There are 19 Pueblo tribes in New Mexico. The new study does not refute the historic connections of other tribes to Chaco Canyon.

I was not aware that there was an effort to refute that most modern Tewa, Hopi or Zuni Puebloans were not descended from the earlier "anasazi" sites, though we know that the Athabaskans did come from the Slave Lake region of Canada, so much like Indo-Europeans largely replacing Early European Farmers, and the farmers replacing the Western Hunter Gatherers, there have been waves of migrations.

I was told that Hopi stories claimed they came out of the Grand Canyon, which makes sense by proximity of the Mesas to the Canyon itself. I think I heard this when visiting GCNP, maybe at the Tusayan site. In an arid region people from outside have a high likelihood of entering along a river course, and exiting at areas where possible, much like our modern trails. There is no telling how old that story could be. Assuming it is true, and it is a preservation of a band of humans entering the Colorado Plateau 10,000 years ago, those people could easily have been the ancestors to most of the ancient canyon farmers, or they mixed with other hunter-gatherers in the region who came through the Rockies. The stories could also be more recent and simply relate to people farming near the river leaving at some point. I only mention this because oral stories often say all kinds of things, but interpreting something vague to mean "we, the Hopi, are directly descended from Pueblo Bonito people", is a mistake. Has anyone ever heard a translation of these stories, since I doubt HAZ members are fluent in the language.

noted the difficulty of getting Native Americans to contribute DNA for research because of an incident in Arizona where Native DNA was collected for medical reasons and then used for other purposes, breaking trust between tribes and researchers.

Actually, I'm amazed at the lax attitude people have in any population, for wanting to donate DNA samples given the nefarious actors in our society, and how they can lie about destroying a sample after it was used for the original purpose. Native, Black, White, whatever.

Before genetics, language was used to group people and their evolution. For example, Basques speak a non Indo-European Language (though over 5,000 years since the IE arrival, more than a few probably have IE genes) which tells us they are descended from the Early European Farmers, a separate population from Indo-Europeans, who have a common ancestors in the Proto-Indo-European speaking people and who gave rise to languages from English to Sanskrit. These two people have pretty different histories, yet live in close proximity and today have many similarities. The languages tells us they came from different places.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ ... ern%29.svg That map shows the distribution of Tanoan languages, and Picuris https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picuris_P ... New_Mexico is up near Toas. Picuris being mentioned in the second article as other people descended from Chaco.

The Hopi language is part of a very different language branch: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopi_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uto-Aztecan_languages more common in the Great Basin and Mexico, but which also includes the Tohono O’odham and even the Comanche who were first reported as small basically non-threatening farmers in the eastern USA before they got horses and became mostly meat eating raiders on the plains, though that is totally unrelated. The Hopi seem to speak an Isolate or different branch from the Numic branch of the parent language group, different from the other local languages, so they're probably distinct from the nearby Utes. Point is, the Hopi having a different language branch from the NM Puebloans raises questions about the this being about the Hopi Tribe, or being about a man who has tribal affiliation but is descended from a population that is not the primary source of the Hopis. It doesn't matter unless the claim is being made that the Hopi are descended from Chaco, which would raise all kinds of questions since the Puebloans also do, and they speak a completely different language.

I find that interesting, since like the Basques, the Etruscans spoke a non Indo-European Language, and gave us many of the cultural traits that are associated with IE Latin speaking Romans into the early Imperial Period. However, it's a dead language. Why would Hopi be distinct from the Puebloans, unless the Hopi are not mostly descended from Chaco, which seems more likely.

I guess I have a lot of questions, and maybe they are answered in the film.

[Pivo]

The swastika symbol was also another image used since pre- European contact time in the SW as a migration pattern, the travels to the four cardinal points.

Downtown Farmington, NM

[Alston_Neal]

@Jim
About 30 years ago I did a chart of 80 tribes and their language base to help me understand the art and culture interaction of the west and down into Mexico and up to Northwest coast. You are spot on with the Pueblo and nomadic groups which shows migration and in the Pueblo cases spreading and becoming the dominate language possibly by absorbing the fractured ancient Pueblo cultures. One of my favorites in doing this chart was the Zuni Pueblo. Where the other pueblos in NM. to the east speak Tewa, Towa and Tiwo and to the west the Hopi speak Uto-Aztecan. So the Zuni? Penutian. Their language groups are Cascade/Plateau and Northern CA. This to me and others shows how a group came in and absorb what is left of these ancient cultures that have provided the agricultural and natural resource platform. If you really want to go down the rabbit hole about the the Zuni enigma, there is a book titled just that. It makes connections to the Native people of Japan, the Ainu. This could explain why a large part of our business base are the Japanese. Many feel tied to the SW.

[xsproutx]

@Alston_Neal
Why in the world are you teasing about a really cool chart but not sharing. How dare you.

[Alston_Neal]

Sprout.... it ain't fancy, but it really helped me in our biz to see the connections of the people we worked with. Also notice that Hano at Hopi is Tewa based language separate from Hopi. They came to Hopi during the Pueblo Revolt. As Jim pointed out Commanche is indeed Uto-Aztecan of the Shoshonean branch like Hopi. Could explain the importance of the Komantci Katsina in their ceremonies and basketry.

[Hansenaz]

@Pivo
Seen sometimes in petroglyphs too.
@Jim
@Alston_Neal
Interesting stuff. I think I've read more about genetics+language studies relative to how people spread across Eurasia than here. And I've always been bothered that the genetic studies are really hampered here. I'm not familiar at all with the language tracing scholarship you guys refer to (other than the Athabascan and the fact there are a bunch of other "root languages"). While we all should abide by the Native wishes regarding privacy (current and ancestral) I'm always struck by the cultural differences: watch the old British "Time Team" episodes where they're stumbling onto and digging up graves all the time. And I was surprised just this morning to see a YT channel of a guy in Peru who looks for ruins and the surface is just littered with bones and grave goods dug up by pothunters (though I'll admit that was disturbing).

Anyway I think (but am not sure) that an analysis of ancient DNA from Alaska to Patagonia would tell a lot about how people got there. The last scholarly paper I saw on the subject had a big blank area for the US because of the cultural taboos.

BTW I expect this film will be nice but short on science (Hopi and Chile?). I recognize the name of the film maker. My brother knows him from the old days in Durango and had previously sent me links to stuff he had done on Chaco.

[Hansenaz]

The Youtube version of the film just popped up. As expected, high quality, nicely done, but the DNA discussion is "slight".
[ youtube video ]

[Jim]

Yeah, kind of a let down. Although, the part around 12:10 about the differing populations is interesting. A worker caste, and a religious priest or ruler caste, if you will.

Didn't really answer my questions, but I guess you can't expect that.

[mudlugs]

The web site GEDmatch dot com has an archaic DNA comparison feature allowing users to compare their DNA with a number of archaic DNA samples. Most of the samples are from Europe and Asia but does have the Clovis and Kennewick samples. Almost anyone, Native American, European or Asian will share some DNA with these samples. The image shows a comparison using 1 cM as the threshold which is a relatively tiny amount (by comparison you share 3400 cM or so with each parent.) Change the threshold to 2 cM and the amount of shared DNA in the display drops to a few segments here and there.