Are You So Obsessed With Me?

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Settler scientists have a long history of trying to understand who native americans are. The first settlers were like, well, they're not in the bible, so, you know, this is very upsetting to them and their descendants. You really need to understand the history of how we have studied them - it's deeply rooted in colonialism. And what results that we obtain from our research could potentially harm native communities.

Thousands of years ago, humans crossed a land bridge from Siberia into Alaska. They tried to move south, but a two-mile-high, coast-spanning ice wall stood between them and the rest of the continent.

How did they get past it?

Scholars have fought over that question for decades. But in her book, “Origin,” Jennifer Raff says breakthroughs in genetics have given scientists an entirely new understanding of how the Americas were peopled and what happened in the millennia that followed.

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