America Before Read online

  “Absolutely top tier,” I agree as we step out of the elevator, “which is why it’s had such a huge impact. … I’ve been following the story of the peopling of the Americas and for a very long while there was extreme resistance around the so-called Clovis First model. I mean, that was it. It was almost dangerous career-wise to propose anything else.”

  “Apparently,” Tom says.

  “And then the evidence starts to come in and starts to just overwhelm that paradigm. We begin to open up to the possibility of 14,000, 15,000, 18,000, 25,000 years. And you can see the archaeological community kind of reluctantly embracing that, but then you come along with 130,000 years and that is a time bomb. Literally. It’s a huge explosion.”

  Tom’s expression is rueful. “It wasn’t our intention. It was just where the evidence led us.”

  We enter The Nat’s archives where the larger part of the Cerutti mastodon collection is permanently stored in a secure room in three huge cabinets. An Indiana Jones moment follows as Tom grabs a four-spoked steel wheel and spins it. Soundlessly the cabinets slide apart, avenues appear between them and then Tom is opening drawers and showing us mastodon bones and mastodon teeth and more pieces of rock and stone while Santha takes photographs and we continue talking.

  The more I see, the more persuaded I am and the better I understand why Nature published Tom’s paper. Despite the whines and quibbles of the skeptics, the evidence, once it’s laid out in front of you, once you actually look at the bones and stones, and once the technical details are properly considered, is absolutely solid and convincing.

  “What’s next?” I ask. “How do you take this further?”

  “Well, of course one of the things we’ve said all along to our critics is that if you don’t look in deposits of this age with the idea in mind that evidence of humans could be there, then you’re not going to find anything. So we’re suggesting, as a challenge, that people should start considering, should start to look in these deposits, as a way of testing this hypothesis. I know that’s a lot of work, but there are unexamined deposits of this age throughout the US.”

  “It’s also good science,” I comment. “I mean, not just to rest on a paradigm but to try to look for other possibilities. Again I’m struck by the emotional nature of the reaction your paper has provoked. Some people are quite reasonable but others almost insultingly reject the whole thing.”

  “Dismissive! So … I guess the reaction I was looking for was healthy skepticism but with the idea of—well, let’s look at this now, let’s consider this and what the implications are and what sort of predictions can we make about testing this. … But that’s been a minority of the reactions. We’ve seen the extremes of both. Some people say this is pure garbage and others say this is the find of the century, but what we’re saying to everyone, really, is open your mind to the possibility that instead of the peopling of the Americas being associated with the last deglaciation event [the so-called Bølling-Allerød interstadial, dated from around 14,700 years ago to around 12,800 years ago34] what we should actually be looking at is the deglaciation event before that—between 140,000 and 120,000 years ago. You get the same sort of scenario with a land bridge and ice sheets retreating and you get that same sweet spot between really low sea levels and a blockage by ice sheets, and ice sheets gone and the flooding of the land bridge.”

  “And yet,” I reflect, “so much else changes if you’re right. The peopling of the Americas becomes a whole different story—much more complicated.”

  “Well,” Tom suggests, “it becomes richer. …”

  “A much richer and longer story. So much so, in fact, that it’s really hard for a lot of archaeologists to swallow when they’re committed to a shorter time frame.” I hesitate before raising my next point: “Look … I know we’re not supposed to talk about this but your date of 130,000 years ago raises the possibility that it might have been Neanderthals who were at your site, or Denisovans, or anatomically modern humans—because they were all in the world at that time.”

  With this comment I’ve taken us into territory I’d specifically agreed would be off-limits when my request for an interview was accepted, but Tom seems happy to express his point of view. “As a paleontologist,” he muses, “I ask the question—why weren’t there humans here earlier? I mean, we have dispersal of Eurasian animal species into North America and dispersal of North American species into Eurasia at earlier times. So why shouldn’t humans have been here as well?”

  “And now it looks like they were.”

  “I’m certain of that from our evidence.”

  “Which raises the question of why in 150 years of professional study archaeologists have failed to find similar evidence.”

  “There’s always the possibility,” Tom offers, “that our site witnesses a failed colonization attempt. So you had this dispersal event. It didn’t take, maybe because population size wasn’t great enough, and they quite quickly died out—in which case they would have left almost no trace of their presence for archaeologists to find. Then thousands of years later there was a successful colonization by other migrants and naturally they dominate the archaeological record.”

  “It could be like that,” I concede. “But on the other hand, it could be there were people here all along and they’ve just been invisible to archaeology because of the particular way archaeology works and the particular things archaeology looks for.”

  “You’d have to ask the archaeologists.” Tom shrugs. “But like I say, if you go to a place and you absolutely rule out in advance that humans were there 130,000 years ago, then you’re clearly not going to find evidence that they were. But if you go with an open mind”—an impish smile—“and dig deep enough in the right places, then who knows what you might turn up?”

  MILLENNIA UNACCOUNTED FOR

  WHEN TOM DEMÉRÉ DUG DEEP enough he turned up evidence of humans in North America 130,000 years ago that was sufficiently robust to make it through Nature’s rigorous peer-review process and into print in April 2017.

  By then it was no longer news that the New World had been peopled long before Clovis. In chapter 4 we saw that Monte Verde, Meadowcroft, and Bluefish Caves had already pushed back the date of the “First” Americans from around 13,000 years ago to at least 24,000 years ago. These, however, are only three sites among a growing number that suggest a vast, complex, textured antiquity for the human presence in the Americas across ages when hitherto we’ve been asked to picture an uninhabited wilderness awaiting the arrival of Man. No matter how long it exists, an uninhabited wilderness will not produce a civilization, and it would make no sense to look for one there. But with new evidence continuing to pour forth, it’s increasingly obvious that humans were in the Americas not just for thousands of years before Clovis, but for tens of thousands of years—all the way back to the Cerutti Mastodon Site or earlier—and thus had vast expanses of time at their disposal to develop in any direction they chose.

  Wanting to get a better feeling for the time-depth of this mystery leads me, through various contacts and connections, to a walk in the South Carolina woods. It’s early November, a sunny yet cold morning. There’s a mulch of fallen leaves underfoot but the trees around us are still in foliage, mostly green with muted hints of autumnal reds and yellows beginning to mottle the canopy. I’m with Albert “Al” Goodyear, professor of archaeology at the University of South Carolina. Around 70 years of age, cheerful and in rubicund good health, he’s wearing a South Carolina Gamecocks baseball cap, a navy check shirt, a tweed jacket, and tough outdoor pants tucked into his hiking boots to keep ticks carrying Lyme disease at bay. Our ramble takes us close to the Savannah River, which here forms the border between the states of South Carolina and Georgia.

  Al is a world expert on the Clovis culture and back in 1998, having excavated an extensive Clovis layer in these woods, he dug deeper. In the end, what he found was evidence that humans had been here 50,000 years ago, not as old as the Cerutti mastodon by any means, but still a
good 37,000 years before Clovis. Unsurprisingly, Clovis Firsters were adamantly opposed and launched a campaign to discredit the find.1

  The site is now called Topper, after David Topper, a local forester. In 1981 he spotted stone tools on the ground here.2 He notified Al, who a couple of years later launched a comprehensive archaeological survey of the Savannah River watershed. As part of this larger project, excavations began at Topper in 1986 and it was immediately obvious that Native Americans had been coming here for many thousands of years. Obvious, too, was the reason why—a huge outcrop of easily accessible chert, the raw material of a form of flint ideal for making stone tools.3

  Al suddenly stoops and picks up a small, almost translucent piece of reddish flint from the ground at our feet. It is recognizably a fragment of an arrowhead, with a notch near the base. Al confirms my guess that it’s not Clovis. “It’s a nice piece,” he says. “It’s been heat treated. It’s probably about 8,000 years old.”

  He draws my attention to an area off the path relatively free of fallen leaves where there’s quite a scatter of stones, mostly small broken pieces like this one. Al refers to them as “debitage” (the technical term for lithic debris and discards found at sites where stone tools and weapons were made). “Every flake on the ground was struck off by a human,” he says, “and you can roughly tell the age. With strong coloration they’re more recent, but if they’re white and creamy, they’re weathered and older.”

  Our next stop is the chert quarry, the reason so much was going on around Topper for so long. “For them this was like aluminum bauxite or iron ore for our culture,” Al explains. “They didn’t have jackhammers. They didn’t have crowbars. They just had to work what they could get off the surface; maybe set a fire or something to push it out. So we call this ‘Topper Chert’—the chert source for the Topper site.”

  “I find it amazing,” I say, “that there are still broken points 8,000 years old just lying around on the surface whereas you have to excavate to reach other materials from that horizon.”

  The earth is a dynamic place, Al explains, with multiple different processes of deposition and erosion under way at all times. You can make guesses based on style and weathering, but fragments of worked stone that have been in the open for an unknown period can’t be dated by their archaeological context, because there is none. Carbon-dating organic materials in the sediment in which they were found won’t work, either, because they were never entombed and preserved in sediment. And in fact no other objective and widely accepted method of dating can tell us how old they are. For these reasons archaeologists have to discount artifacts found on the surface when coming to any conclusions about the age of a site, even though the artifacts themselves may obviously be ancient. Their presence, however, does serve as a clue that much more might be awaiting discovery underground—which was precisely why Al followed up on David Topper’s 1981 suggestion to take a look.

  THERE’S A FIRST TIME FOR EVERYTHING

  AFTER THEIR FIRST SEASON OF excavation at Topper in 1986, Al and his team methodically worked their way down during the next dozen years through the levels of what was turning out to be a very extensive, detailed, and time-consuming excavation. There were a number of archaeological “horizons” here, stacked one above the other in nice, easily datable layers of sediment, containing the leavings of different cultures at different, and increasingly more ancient, periods of the past. “We found pottery down to about 2,000 years ago,” Al says. “Below that there was no pottery but there were plentiful artifacts from the period we call the Archaic. So we kept on going down and we got into the Early Archaic [around 8,000 to 10,000 years ago4]. They made these beautiful little notched points. And then below that, in 1998—bingo!—we found Clovis.”

  Topper is the only Clovis site to be excavated on the coastal plains of Georgia and the Carolinas.5 As though by way of compensation, however, the Clovis level at Topper turned out to be so massive that the excavations there would not be complete until 2013. As he tells me about the treasure trove of more than 40,000 Clovis artifacts that he and his team uncovered, Al radiates excitement. And rightly so! It was a tremendous achievement that continues to enjoy renown among archaeologists.6

  The same, however, cannot be said for what happened next. “So we got down to the bottom of the Clovis level,” Al continues, “and then we all voted to go deeper.” For the next half meter or so there was just sand and small gravels, devoid of any evidence of human presence, and then suddenly the excavators found themselves among artifacts again.

  I ask if there was a particular aha moment.

  Al laughs. “My aha was more of an uh-oh! Everybody else was going aha but they weren’t going to have to stand up at national conferences and defend what we’d found.”

  “Which was evidence of the presence of humans in America tens of thousands of years before Clovis?”

  “Exactly. After we’d done a thorough lab analysis we were certain we were dealing with artifacts.”

  I ask when he began to feel the inevitable wrath of the Clovis First lobby.

  “Immediately!” he replies. “It began with ‘we don’t believe in pre-Clovis. There’s no such thing as a pre-Clovis culture.’ Then I think when it was realized we’d made a strong case that many of our flake-tool artifacts had been produced by the ‘bend-break’ technique, and that the media were already onto the potential significance of what we’d found, the critics moved the goalposts and said things like ‘Okay, we understand bend-breaks but we don’t know of an assemblage anywhere that has so many bend-breaks.’”7

  But the key issue remained the antiquity of the site:

  The New York Times was here, CNN, they were all holding their stories until the dates came back. And I was thinking maybe they’ll come back at 20,000 years ago maybe even 25,000 years ago, and I’ll be out of here clean. This is going to be easy. But the date that came back was 50,0008—ancient beyond all imagining and right at the limits of radiocarbon.9 Since then we have OSL-dated the deposit and those dates also came back in the range of 50,000.10 So we’ve got it dated two ways, but still the skeptics keep saying that what we’ve found can’t be a human site and that our artifacts must be works of nature because they’re so different from the artifacts found at other sites. To which my response is: “Well … you’ve never dug a 50,000-year-old site in America, right? There’s a first time for everything.”

  THEY UNDERSTOOD THE PROPERTIES OF STONE

  AFTER OUR PLEASANT HIKE WE’VE reached the main excavation area, a large rectangular pit about 12 feet deep, 40 feet wide, and around 60 feet long, where the majority of the archaeology trenches have been left open, in their original condition, and the entire area covered over with a roofed shelter. It’s tastefully done, allowing in plenty of light but keeping out rain, and it’s an education to see the stratigraphy through which Goodyear and his team dug to reach the controversial pre-Clovis levels.

  Although Topper is located on land owned by a specialty chemicals company and not open for public access, Al does occasionally bring interested groups here to explain the site to them, and to this end signs have been set up identifying the different levels. My eyes are drawn immediately to one that says “Clovis Level: 13,000 years.” Farther down another reads “Pleistocene Alluvial Sands, 16,000–20,000 years.” We step down again to the excavation floor and I see the thick band of clay where the pre-Clovis artifacts were found, labeled “Pleistocene Terrace: 20,000–50,000 years.”

  Off to the side, laid out as a display, is a row of three or four chunky fist-size rocks. Al picks one up. “The more abundant pre-Clovis artifacts are fashioned from chert cobbles like this,” he tells me, “but they’re no good to anybody as they are. They have to be cracked open first. You have to get rid of all this”—he indicates the rough, heavily patinated surface of the cobble—“to get at the stuff inside that can be turned into tools. In experiments we’ve thrown cobbles like that, slammed cobbles like that against each other, and nothing breaks.” />
  “So what does break them?”

  “When we put an 8-pound sledgehammer on them, that did the trick.”

  “But presumably the pre-Clovis people didn’t have 8-pound sledgehammers?”

  Al shrugs. “Maybe they did it the way the Australian aborigines used to deal with big slabs of quartzite. They didn’t have sledgehammers, either. They would light a small fire underneath a face of the quartzite and they would wait for it to get hot enough till they heard a tink, and then they would pull a slab off. So I think you could use fire to prepare the cobble and then maybe break it apart. The point is once you break open a piece of flint like that then you can do anything you want with it. All of the interior surfaces are susceptible to flaking but the cobble in its raw form is not. So when our critics say that cobbles like these maybe got broken by rolling down the slope of the escarpment our answer is no.11 What you need is heat or something like an eight-pound sledgehammer—and even then we had to hit them several times before they broke.”

  “In other words, only humans could have done this.”

  “Right. Human beings who understood the properties of the stone and how to work it. If nature can’t break it, it can’t make it.”

  None of the pre-Clovis tools have been left at the excavation, of course, but before we set out for the site this morning Al showed me examples kept at the South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology exhibit at its nearby regional campus in Allendale. What quickly became clear, which Al willingly concedes, was that they were, without exception, extremely simple and generally quite small, with unifacial flake tools such as burins and small blades predominating.12 The vast majority of the burins, more than 1,000 of them,13 were created by the distinctive flint-knapping technique known as “bend-break,”14 whereby two edges are “broken off at a 90 degree angle to form a sharp sturdy tip that may have been used in the engraving of bone, antler or wood.”15 Flint cores left over after large flakes had been struck off were also found in close proximity to a large anvil stone.16 It appears there were several, separate rock-chipping stations like this, resembling workstations.17