Sorry, chief

At the end of a fascinating piece on the history of the first human migrations into the Western Hemisphere about 20,000 years ago, we leave behind the scientists and linguists and archeologists and are treated to this opinion:

Perry Chocktoot Jr. is a council member and cultural historian for the Klamath Tribes in Klamath Falls, Ore., and traces his ancestry back to his great-great-grandfather who lived when the federal government ceded the land to the Yahooskin band of Paiute Indians.

"The area of the Paisley caves and what the scientists found there really does substantiate what we have always believed," he said in an interview. "It's essentially evidence that our people were created here - just as we've always believed - but that we were created long, long ago, many thousands of years ago, at the very beginning of time."

Sorry, chief. Twenty-thousand years is hardly the very beginning of time. The evidence points to an exactly opposite conclusion, that pre-American inhabitants migrated here from Asia.

But I suppose it's culturally insensitive of me to notice that.

(And thanks to my SFChronicle source, RCI, an interesting fella, although not as interesting as he thinks he is.)