We live in an era where a cloak of obscurity is being drawn over science. Science is something that a few experts and institutions know about, and that the rest of us must accept when we're told about it.
We don't all have access to big numbers. But the essence of science is observation. Sometimes enhanced with experimentation, depending on the topic. The essential methods are in fact available to us all.
Adrienne Mayor's 2005 book Fossil Legends of the First Americans gains a special relevance in this time. Mayor is a scholar of natural history folklore, a fascinating field that until just now I didn't even know existed. But the native tribes of the Americas have been finding and collecting fossils for centuries, well before the bulk of European settlement. And the stories that they came up with by way of explanation have in many cases been based on good, solid observation, leading to insights on the kinds of animals that lived in the Americas in the deep past. In general they haven't really gotten credit for this, as Mayor reports.
Yet much more historical and natural knowledge has been retained and for a longer time span than is generally appreciated. To find these nuggets of genuine knowledge, the Iroquois scholar Barbra Mann suggests that one should look for the "consistent elements" in the layered matrix of storytelling over the ages. Many scholars have questioned whether oral traditions are "real history." Anthropologist Robert Lowie, for example, who studied several Native American cultures in the 1930s, famously declared in 1915 that "oral traditions [have no] historical value whatsoever under any conditions whatsoever." But Lowie's grip is loosening: today many mythologists and historians would agree with Roger Echo-Hawk, a Pawnee historian, that oral histories should be treated as "respectable siblings of written documents," as valuable sources for reconstructing "ancient American history." The most recent analyses of the mythmaking process, drawing on modern linguistics with datable historical, astronomical, or geological events, are revealing that accurate geomythology can extend back over millennia.
The Americas have a rich natural history in terms of both dinosaurs and other large reptiles and--in more recent epochs--mammalian megafauna. As far as we know now, that doesn't much extend to paleoanthropology. There are no known humans or hominids before anatomically modern humans to have lived in the Americans. Of course if this state of knowledge changes, it will be a tremendous shock and will require large amounts of scrutiny. To understand it we'll need to look at all potential sources of knowledge.
