America Before Read online

  FORGOTTEN AMERICA

  AT THE OUTSET OF THE twentieth century many scholars took the view that the Americas had been devoid of any human presence until less than 4,000 years ago.12

  To put that in perspective, by 4,000 years ago the civilization of Egypt was already ancient, Minoan Crete flourished, and Stonehenge and other great megalithic sites had been built across Europe. Likewise, by 4,000 years ago, our ancestors had been in Australia for about 65,000 years and had found their way to the farthest reaches of Asia at almost equally remote dates.13

  So why should the Americas have escaped this global migration, and this seemingly unstoppable march toward high civilization, until so late?

  The answer, perhaps, is that the most influential figure in disseminating and enforcing the view that the New World had only recently been populated by humans was a frowning and fearsome anthropologist named Aleš Hrdlička who, in 1903, was selected to head the newly created Division of Physical Anthropology at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC. There he would remain until his death in 1943, deploying his intimidating authority as “the most eminent physical anthropologist of his time,” “the gatekeeper of humankind’s recent origins in the New World” to quash any and every attempt to suggest great human antiquity in the Americas.14 Frank H. H. Roberts, a colleague of Hrdlička’s at the Smithsonian, would later admit of this period, “Questions of early man in America became virtually taboo, and no anthropologist desirous of a successful career would tempt the fate of ostracism by intimating that he had discovered indications of respectable antiquity for the Indian.”15

  But eminence can only suppress facts for so long, and throughout the 1920s and 1930s compelling evidence began to emerge that people had reached the Americas thousands of years earlier than Hrdlička supposed. Of particular importance in this gradual undermining of the great man’s authority was a site called Blackwater Draw near the town of Clovis, New Mexico, where bones of extinct Ice Age mammals were found in 1929 and assumed, rightly, to be very old. The Smithsonian sent a representative, Charles Gilmore, to take a look at the site but—perhaps unsurprisingly under Hrdlička’s malign shadow—he concluded that no further investigation was justified.16

  Anthropologist Edgar B. Howard of the University of Pennsylvania disagreed.17 He began excavations at Blackwater Draw in 1933, quickly finding quantities of beautifully crafted stone projectiles with distinctive “fluted” points—so-called on account of a characteristic vertical “flute” or channel cut into the base. The points were found in direct association with (and in a few cases even buried between the ribs of) extinct Ice Age fauna such as Columbian mammoth, camel, horse, bison, saber-toothed cat, and dire wolf.18 In 1935, on the basis of these finds, Howard published a book in which he concluded that it was possible that humans had been in North America for tens of thousands of years.19 Further seasons of meticulous fieldwork followed before he presented his findings, to widespread approbation and acceptance, at a prestigious international forum on Early Man and the Origins of the Human Race held in Philadelphia on March 18–20, 1937.20

  Hrdlička was there. He gloweringly ignored the implications of the discoveries at Blackwater Draw and instead used his time onstage to reaffirm his long-held position that, for American Indians, “So far as skeletal remains are concerned, there is at this moment no evidence that would justify the assumption of great, i.e. geological, antiquity.”21

  But the clock was ticking. Before and after 1943, the year in which both Howard and Hrdlička died, further discoveries of fluted points of the Blackwater Draw type—increasingly referred to as “Clovis points” after the nearby town of that name—continued to be made. This ever-accumulating mass of new evidence left no room for doubt and even the most stubborn conservatives (Hrdlička excepted) were eventually forced to agree that the Clovis culture had hunted animals that became extinct at the end of the last Ice Age and that humans must therefore have been in the Americas for at least 12,000 years.

  This gave a huge boost to research, leading in the decades ahead to the discovery of around 1,500 further Clovis sites, and more than 10,000 Clovis points, at locations scattered all across North America.22 As the net widened, however, a number of anomalies of the culture began to be identified. A confusing outcome of this is that there are now two schools of thought around its proposed antiquity and duration. The so-called long interval school dates the first appearance of Clovis in North America to 13,400 years ago and its mysterious extinction and disappearance from the archaeological record to around 12,800 years ago—a period of 600 years.23 The “short interval” school also accepts 12,800 years ago for the end date of Clovis but sets the start date at 13,000 years ago—therefore allowing it an existence of just 200 years.24 Both schools agree that this unique and distinctive culture must have originated somewhere else because, from the first evidence for its presence, it is already sophisticated and fully formed, deploying advanced weapons and hunting tactics.25 Particularly puzzling, since it is the archaeological consensus that the human migration into the Americas was launched from northeast Asia, is the fact that no traces of the early days of Clovis, of the previous evolution and development of its characteristic tools, weapons, and lifeways, have been found anywhere in Asia.26 All we can say for sure is that once it had made its presence felt in North America the Clovis culture spread very widely across a huge swath of the continent,27 with sites as far apart as Alaska, northern Mexico, New Mexico, South Carolina, Florida, Montana, Pennsylvania, and Washington state.28 Such an expansion would have been extremely rapid were it to have occurred in 600 years and seems almost miraculously fast if it was in fact accomplished in 200 years.29

  An array of Clovis points with a Clovis blade second from left. PHOTOS: SANTHA FAIIA AND, FAR RIGHT, NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM OF UTAH.

  THE LAND BRIDGE AND THE ICE-FREE CORRIDOR

  DURING THE 1940S AND 1950S, as the fame of Clovis continued to grow, no evidence was forthcoming—or, to state the matter more exactly, none that was generally accepted, approved, and confirmed by the archaeological community—of any kind of human presence in the Americas older than the earliest Clovis dates of around 13,400 years ago.

  As regards the matter of general acceptance, despite a few dissenting voices30 a consensus soon began to emerge that no older cultures would ever be found—and what is now known as the “Clovis First” paradigm was conceived. We might say, however, that it was not officially “born” until September 1964. That was when archaeologist C. Vance Haynes, today Regents Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Arizona and a senior member of the National Academy of Sciences, published a landmark paper in the journal Science. Snappily titled “Fluted Projectile Points: Their Age and Dispersion,”31 the paper presented, and persuasively supported, a number of key assertions.

  First, Haynes pointed out that, because of lowered sea level during the Ice Age, much of the area occupied today by the Bering Sea was above water, and where the Bering Strait now is, a tundra-covered landscape connected eastern Siberia and western Alaska. Although not a particularly easy environment, it would, Haynes argued, “have presented no obstacle” to nomadic hunters who were already masters of the Siberian tundra and who would certainly have followed the herds of bison, deer, and mammoth that roamed across it.32

  Once over the land bridge, however, it was Haynes’s case that the migrant hunters could not have ventured very far before confronting the daunting barrier of the Cordilleran and Laurentide Ice Sheets, which were at the time merged into a single impassable mountainous mass covering most of the northern half of North America.

  They therefore had no access to the lands that lay beyond. As a result, prevailing in the ice-free southern half of North America during this phase of the last Ice Age were “conditions as favorable to the existence of herbivorous megafauna, which man could hunt, as conditions during the time of the Clovis occupation, yet there is not the slightest evidence of man’s presenc
e.”33

  Things changed around 14,100 years ago, Haynes claimed, when a generalized warming of global climate caused an ice-free corridor to open up between the Laurentide and the Cordilleran ice caps, allowing entry for the first time in many millennia to the rich, unglaciated plains, teeming with game, that lay to the south.34

  Some 700 years later, around 13,400 years ago, the stratigraphic record of those plains starts to include Clovis artifacts. Their “abrupt appearance,” Haynes argued, supports the view “that Clovis progenitors passed through Canada” and that “from the seemingly rapid and wide dispersal of Clovis points … it appears these people may have brought the technique of fluting with them.”35

  As noted earlier, no Clovis points have ever been found in Asia,36 but when Haynes published his landmark paper in Science in 1964 he reported correctly that four had been found “on the surface” in Alaska and another in the Canadian Yukon, all undated,37 with the oldest dated points south of the former ice margin going back no further than 13,400 years. To Haynes this looked like the last link “in a logical sequence of events, and the pieces begin to fall into place. If Clovis progenitors traversed a corridor through Canada … and dispersed through the United States south of the … ice border in the ensuing 700 years, then they were probably in Alaska some 500 years earlier. … The Alaskan fluted points … could represent this occupation and could, therefore, be ancestral to Clovis points and blades.”38

  The paper was welcomed by archaeologists,39 most of whom were already convinced that Clovis was “First,” and virtually overnight what had been at best a persuasive and seemingly well-constructed theory morphed into the new ruling orthodoxy. Worse, it soon became every bit as rigid and intolerant as the orthodoxy of Hrdlička’s time and it would retain ultimate authority over archaeological careers and research priorities for decades to come with a grip every bit as firm as Hrdlička’s iron fist.

  In a familiar refrain, those who disagreed with “Clovis First,” or were foolhardy enough to report possible pre-Clovis sites, did so “at significant risk to their careers.”40 Indeed by 2012 the bullying behavior of the Clovis First lobby had grown so unpleasant that it attracted the attention of the editor of Nature, who opined: “The debate over the first Americans has been one of the most acrimonious—and unfruitful—in all of science. … One researcher, new to the field after years of working on other contentious topics, told Nature that he had never before witnessed the level of aggression that swirled around the issue of who reached America first.”41

  CHALLENGING CLOVIS FIRST

  TOM DILLEHAY, PROFESSOR OF ANTHROPOLOGY at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, began excavations at Monte Verde in southern Chile in 1977 and found evidence that humans had been present there as far back as 18,500 years ago.42 The progress of science eventually vindicated him, as we shall see, but before it did so Dillehay had to endure sustained and often deeply unpleasant personal attacks from Clovis Firsters for more than 20 years.

  He was attacked because there are no Clovis artifacts at Monte Verde, it is 5,000 years older than the oldest securely dated Clovis sites, and it is located more than 8,000 miles south of the Bering Strait.

  The reader will not have forgotten that the strait was dry during the lowered sea level of the last Ice Age—a tundra-covered land bridge across which the Clovis people were believed to have migrated on foot from northeast Siberia and thence into the Americas through the ice-free corridor between the Cordilleran and Laurentide Ice Sheets. The credibility of Clovis First depends crucially on the supposed close chronological link between the opening up of that ice-free corridor around 14,100 years ago and the first appearance of Clovis artifacts south of the ice margin around 13,400 years ago. By putting humans in the Americas more than 4,000 years before the opening of the ice-free corridor, Monte Verde showed that “link” to be illusory. Moreover, by putting them not in North America but in South America, with no means of transport available to them other than boats of some sort, it questioned fundamental assumptions about the technical and organizational capacities of our ancestors, hitherto judged to be too low to allow such adventures at such a remote period.

  Tom Dillehay’s most dogged and determined critic, perhaps predictably, has been C. Vance Haynes, whose 1964 paper launched the Clovis First theory and who by 1988 had used his influence, and his outreach in the scientific journals, to dismiss every case thus far made for supposedly pre-Clovis sites in the Americas.43

  Except Monte Verde. Even for Haynes, this Chilean site was proving to be an exceptionally tough nut to crack. Realizing that the implications for American archaeology of Tom Dillehay being right were immense, Haynes wrote to David Meltzer at SMU to suggest that “a panel of objective conservatives should be formed and funded by NSF [National Science Foundation] to visit the site, examine it, take samples, etc. If a positive consensus results we can then accept the interpretation and formulate new hypotheses for the peopling of the New World. If not, Monte Verde will have to be relegated to the bin of possible pre-Clovis sites awaiting further data.”44

  James M. Adovasio, a world expert in perishable artifacts and former director of the Mercyhurst Archaeological Institute at Mercyhurst University in Erie, Pennsylvania, was closely involved in the events that followed. He tells us that he would be remiss if he “did not point out that by the oxymoron ‘objective conservatives,’ Haynes meant himself and the Clovis First disciples.”45

  In the end, however, after 7 years of haggling, a balanced group was put together, “not configured as a panel of pre-Clovis skeptics or, conversely, pre-Clovis enthusiasts,” says Adovasio: “rather, it was, as designed, a mixed bag reflecting a range of views.”46

  The site visit took place over 3 days in January 1997, and far from relegating Monte Verde to the “bin,” all members of the group eventually signed on to an official report confirming that it was indeed an archaeological site and that Dillehay’s dates were correct. The report was published in October 1997 in American Antiquity and left no room for any conclusion other than that Monte Verde predated Clovis; it even considered the “extremely intriguing” possibility that the human presence there might go back as far 33,000 years.47

  In his important book The First Americans, Adovasio, who was present at the proceedings throughout, provides a blow-by-blow account of how the panel arrived at its conclusions, and of the follow-up.48 It seems that Haynes was not happy, despite being a signatory to the report, and even as it appeared in print he began to voice doubts over it to colleagues, questioning again the antiquity of Monte Verde and “suggesting a wondrous new array of hypothetical events that could have contaminated the site in some previously unperceived way.”49

  Haynes and Adovasio had crossed swords before—over Meadowcroft, a site in Pennsylvania that Adovasio had excavated in the 1970s that revealed eleven well-defined stratigraphic units with evidence of human occupation “spanning at least 16,000 years and perhaps 19,000 years.”50 Inevitably, because it threatened Clovis First, this attracted the hostility of Haynes, who, in the years that followed, sought to quibble away almost every aspect of Adovasio’s evidence: “In scientific paper after scientific paper, Haynes … asked for yet another date, yet another study, raising yet other picayune and fanciful questions about Meadowcroft, most of which had been answered long before he asked them—not just in the original excavation procedures but in report after report.”51

  Again, as was the case with Monte Verde, the constant quibbling and demands for ever more evidence, when the evidence in place was already more than adequate, was demoralizing and had the effect of slowing down the research effort but ultimately did not prevent formal recognition of Meadowcroft Rockshelter as a National Historic Landmark with an age of more than 16,000 years.52

  Likewise, in the 1990s, Canadian archaeologist Jacques Cinq-Mars excavated Bluefish Caves in the Yukon and found evidence of human activity there dating back more than 24,000 years—older than Meadowcroft and much older than Clovis. The price he paid wa
s high. His competence and his sanity were questioned and when he attempted to present his findings at conferences he was ignored or insulted.53 One colleague stated matters bluntly: “When Jacques proposed [that Bluefish Caves were] 24,000 [years old], it was not accepted.”54

  As a result of such attitudes, funding drained away and Cinq-Mars had to stop his work, only to be proved correct, many years later, by a new scientific study of the evidence from the caves published in January 2017.55

  That study, one of several that confirmed the existence of pre-Clovis sites of increasingly ancient dates,56 was titled Earliest Human Presence in North America.

  Only 4 months later, on April 27, 2017, Tom Deméré’s paper announcing the discovery of “a 130,000-year-old archaeological site in southern California, USA,” appeared in Nature.57

  That’s about ten times older than Clovis, eight times older than Meadowcroft, and more than five times as old as Bluefish Caves.

  The resulting furor was, in retrospect, inevitable.

  MESSAGE FROM A MASTODON

  THE SAN DIEGO NATURAL HISTORY Museum, affectionately known to locals as “The Nat,” is situated in the lush gardens of Balboa Park, which served as the venue for the 1915 Panama-California Exposition. Originally called “City Park,” it was renamed for the exposition in honor of Spanish-born Vasco Nuñez de Balboa (1475–1519), who conducted a murderous exploratory raid across Panama and became the first European to see the Pacific Ocean.1