Table of Contents
Hopkins 1948 field crew amid grassy hummocks and dead willow near Imuruk Lake, Seward Peninsula, Alaska. Left is probably Bob Sigafoos; the others (with mosquito headnets) are probably Art Fernald and Jim Seitz
(Photo by Dave Hopkins, courtesy of Dana Hopkins)
FOR SARAH
THE TOAST OF KHABAROVSK
West to east, from the Ural Mountains on the edge of Europe to the Sea of Japan, the Trans-Siberian Railroad straddles a quarter of the globe. It runs across the Barabiniskaya Steppe and into the taiga, skirting Lake Baikal to the south and Manchuria to the north. One raw spring day during the Cold War, a train carrying scientists clattered east along this great thoroughfare. All across the breadth of the Soviet Union, the train stopped to collect technical specialists, all bound for Khabarovsk on the Amur River, the lines farthest east stop. There it heaved a steamy sigh, and the scientists climbed down to the platform and into waiting taxis. On the road into town, cabs from the station merged with cabs from the airport, all carrying scientists, some from as far away as Western Europe and North America. By nightfall hundreds of scientists from around the world had converged at the old hotel on the town square.
Khabarovsk in 1973 was both rustic town and modern city. Most of the buildings on the square were modern, if blocky and utilitarian. But beyond a radius of a couple blocks, a visitor inclined to stroll found log cabins and outhouses. On warm days when the wind was right, he could detect the latter before descending the hotel steps.
At Khabarovsk, Siberia, in 1973 (right photo), Hopkins stands between his Russian counterpart, Beringian geologist Oleg Petrov, and Rosa Gitterman, a Pleistocene pollen analysis expert. Encouraged by Hopkins since his student days, Russian paleoecologist Andrei Sher (left photo) became Hopkins collaborator and one of his closest personal friends (Photos courtesy of Andrei Sher)
On this particular evening, the hotel shone with lights as the darkness gathered, and the scientists assembled in the main banquet hall. The dinner party livened as vodka flowed and first one, then another Russian rose to toast political rivals united by science. Everyone got into the spirit. The Hungarians drank to the Czechs; the Czechs saluted the Finns. The East Germans hailed the West Germans, who cheered the Americans, who started the Russians going again. All around the room, bottles clanked noisily on the rims of eight-ounce water glasses, and the revelers tossed off vodka shots chased with champagne. Then one of the Russians started a kind of chant. Others joined in. Quickly it rolled through the room. Feet began to stomp and heavy glasses banged down on the tables. It grew more boisterous and polyglot as every flushed face took it up, a dozen accents calling out HOP-KINS-HOP-KINS-HOP-KINS. And it did not end until a shy, fifty-one-year-old California geologist, wearing longish hair and red pants, pushed his plastic glasses back on his nose and, with reluctance, stood.
Hopkins does not remember the moment, but archeologist Jim Dixon remembers it as if it were yesterday. It would be memorable, says Dixon, if you were a young graduate student, not one of the elite invitees, and had wangled an invitation to the Khabarovsk conference by calling up the renowned Hopkins cold and pleading to be included. It was impressive. I was very much awed by the greatness of Hopkins, and by the Russians love for the guy. When the proceedings were compiled into a book, conference chairman V. L. Kontrimavichus introduced it with special reference to Hopkins: I thank Dr. Hopkins for coming to Khabarovsk for the symposium and for maintaining correspondence later. I thank this great scientist, who is a pioneer and great enthusiast in the study of Bering Land and a great friend of all the Soviet geologists working on Bering Land.
May 1973. Early spring, too, in the incipient thaw in Cold War relations between the Soviet Union and the United States. The two governments were beginning to discover what their Northern scientists had already begun to prove: that they had common ground. Literally. Hopkins called it Beringia.
Beringia (Beh-RIN-gee-a) is the name given to the Bering Land Bridge, the surmised ancient dry land connection between North America and Asia, and to the adjacent then exposed lands, roughly between the Mackenzie River in Canadas Northwest Territories and the Kolyma (or even as far west as the Lena) River in Siberia. But did this hypothetical land bridge really exist? If so, when? What sort of climate prevailed there? Could plants grow so far north during the Ice Age? And could that probably sparse vegetation sustain the gigantic mammals of the Pleistocenethe woolly mammoth and the giant short-faced bear? Finally, can knowledge of this ecological picture, along with archeology, answer a further questionthe questiondebated for centuries: Did Asian hunters, equipped with skin sewing technology and expertly crafted stone-tipped weapons pursue the drifting aggregations of herbivores north and east across the land bridge and into North America? And were these hunters who passed through Beringia the first to enter not just a new continent, but the back side of the world, an entire hemisphere of the planet never before seen by man?
Though the first Americans discovery and colonization of half of the earth is one of the great accomplishments in human history, it has been all but overshadowed by disputes as to how they did it and who exactly they were. This debate over the last great migration of the human species, now running for more than four hundred years, has become one of the most rancorous and enduring controversies in all of science.
The story speaks to a more recent and more pressing scientific question as well. The ancient history of this Northern Atlantis (its climate shifts, the record of species exchanges across the land bridge, and the cause of the extinctions of most of the large animals) all may offer clues as to how Northern ecosystems will respond to global climate change in the future. Greenhouse warming attributable to human activities is expected to show its greatest effects in the Arctic. In fact, it seems to be happening now.
D. ONeil (After Hopkins, 1982)
Fray Jose de Acosta, a Jesuit missionary, first advanced the land bridge theory in 1590. Early Spanish settlers and other European thinkers had difficulty explaining the indigenous people. The Bible had not mentioned them, unless, of course, they were the Lost Tribes of Israel. Perhaps the answer was that they werent human at all, but had spontaneously generated from mud. That notion had the advantage of making the subsequent enslavement of the natives a less disquieting moral issue. Some speculated that the new land must be Platos Atlantis and the people Atlanteans. Those who liked to draw on the known to explain the unknown suggested the Indians looked to have the blended blood of Scandinavians, Ethiopians, Chinese, and Indonesians. Others thought, no, the mix seemed more Scythian, with a pinch of Spanish, Welsh, and Polynesian. Even the American Puritan Cotton Mather found the time (after the witch trials reached satisfactory conclusions) to weigh in. In 1702 he wrote, probably the Devil decoyed these miserable savages hither, in hopes that the gospel of the lord Jesus Christ would never come here to destroy or disturb his absolute empire over them.
