Red Earth, White Lies

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Red Earth, White Lies: Native Americans and the Myth of Scientific Fact (ISBN 1-55591-388-1), published in 1995, is a book by Native American author Vine Deloria.

The book's central theme is to criticize the scientific consensus which has, in his words, created "a largely fictional scenario describing prehistoric North America".

Its particular focus is on criticism of current models of migration to the New World, in particular the Bering land bridge theory. Deloria attempts to expose fundamental weaknesses in this theory by detailing archeological inconsistencies and positing alternative hypotheses that align better with existing archeological data. He argues that archeological evidence supports an earlier presence for indigenous peoples of the Americas than mainstream scientific models propose. Deloria likens the dominant migration theory to "academic folklore" and contends that it is regularly cited as fact, but in fact has not been critically examined even within the field of archeology. Further, he charges that prevailing theories do not mesh with Native American oral traditions, which contain no accounts of inter-continental migration.

In a similar vein, he criticizes the so-called "Overkill Hypothesis", which suggests that humans migrating into the Americas are partially responsible, by overhunting, for the sudden and rapid extinction of North American megafauna during the Pleistocene epoch. Deloria argues this view is racist, and that the Pleistocene extinction has no parallel on such a scale in Eurasia, which also experienced the sudden arrival of human hunters.