America Before Page 9

  A VERY LONG TIME

  THE EXTENSIVE EVIDENCE FROM THE pre-Clovis levels at Topper clearly does not document the handiwork of any kind of lost advanced civilization. What it speaks to me of instead, like the Cerutti Mastodon Site, is a far more complex and nuanced past for the peopling of the Americas than has hitherto been properly contemplated.

  I don’t propose here to give a blow-by-blow account of the fifty or so sites in the Americas, with more found every year, presently claimed to be of pre-Clovis antiquity.18 Not all are of the same quality. Some may not be archaeological sites at all, their supposed “artifacts” perhaps being “geofacts.” Others are very strong.

  A measure of discernment is therefore needed along this continuum, and what I observe is that archaeologists who are open to the notion of greater antiquity (these days the majority apart from a few die-hards) consider the most important pre-Clovis sites in North America in addition to Cerutti and Topper to include: Hueyatlaco, Mexico;19 Old Crow and Bluefish Caves, Canada; Calico Mountain, California; Pendejo Cave, New Mexico; Tula Springs, Nevada; Meadowcroft Rockshelter, Pennsylvania; Cactus Hill, Virginia; Paisley Five Mile Point Caves, Oregon; Schaefer and Hebior Mammoth site, Wisconsin; Buttermilk Creek, Texas; and Saltville, Virginia.20 In South America, Pedra Furada in Brazil, Monte Verde in Chile, Taima-taima in Venezuela, and Tibito in Colombia are likewise singled out as convincing pre-Clovis sites of special interest.21 However, other than some anomalies, indeed some deep mysteries, connected to a select few of these sites—which we’ll come to in later chapters—most feature only rudimentary stone-working technologies similar to those of pre-Clovis Topper, although with definite evidence of increasing refinement and improved techniques between early pre-Clovis and late pre-Clovis.22 Early or late, however, the importance of all these sites, as I view them, has nothing to do with the level of technology they manifest, whether judged to be “low” or “increasingly refined”—or whatever. They really matter in that they offer compelling proof of the enduring presence of humans of some kind in the Americas from perhaps as far back as 130,000 years ago until today.

  That’s a very long time. It might even be long enough—speaking entirely hypothetically, of course—for something that we would recognize as an advanced civilization to have emerged in the Americas alongside the hunter-gatherers, foragers, and scavengers whose simple tools dominate the pre-Clovis horizons so far excavated.

  But if such a civilization was indeed present somewhere on the American landmass, how has it escaped the notice of archaeologists up to now while the hunter-gatherers have not? And isn’t it grasping at straws in the first place even to suggest that an advanced civilization could have coexisted with hunter-gatherers during the Ice Age?

  PRECONCEPTIONS ARE BLINKERS

  LET’S CALL TO MIND HOW things are in our own globally connected twenty-first century. Rio de Janeiro, Bogotá, and Lima are, by any standards, advanced technological cities; yet on the same continent, in the depths of the Amazon rainforest, uncontacted tribes of hunter-gatherers remain at a “Stone Age” level of technology.23 Likewise, in Africa, Johannesburg, Cape Town, and Windhoek are advanced technological cities, yet you can walk from them to the Kalahari desert where San bushmen, though well aware of the technological world, choose to continue a hunter-gatherer and still largely “Stone Age” way of life.

  There are no purely logical grounds, therefore, that can rule out the possible coexistence of an advanced civilization with hunter-gatherers during the Ice Age.

  Nor can this—at first sight absurd—possibility be ruled out on archaeological grounds. For more than half a century, as we’ve seen, American archaeology was so riddled with pre-formed opinions about how the past should look, and about the orderly, linear way in which civilizations should evolve, that it repeatedly missed, sidelined, and downright ignored evidence for any human presence at all prior to Clovis—until, at any rate, the mass of that evidence became so overwhelming that it took the existing paradigm by storm.

  We thus find ourselves in a place now where “Clovis First” can quite definitely be ruled out, despite the fading protests of a very few zealots still clinging on to that discredited fantasy.24

  At the same time no new ruling paradigm, let alone consensus, has yet taken its place. Several are vying for the crown, though all remain rooted in the preconception that what they must explain is limited to the presence of relatively “simple” and “unsophisticated” hunter-gatherers in the Americas much earlier than had previously been supposed. None have factored in the possibility—they would be puzzled at the very thought—that a lost civilization might be part of the missing picture as well.

  I’m reminded of Tom Deméré’s point: “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.”25

  By the same reasoning, if we don’t ever look for a lost civilization—because of a preconception that none could have existed—then we won’t find one.

  Fortunately, as we’ll see in part 3, geneticists have developed sophisticated techniques for studying ancient DNA that have overturned entrenched thinking and opened completely new and unexpected avenues of inquiry.

  SIBERIA

  A CROSS BOTH SOUTH AND NORTH America DNA studies have revealed that at some point in the remote past, in some unknown location or locations, the ancestors of Native Americans interbred with an archaic—and now extinct—human species. Only recently discovered, and closely related to the more famous Neanderthals who also produced offspring with our ancestors, geneticists have named this species “the Denisovans.” Insufficient sampling has been done to establish exact levels but the current estimate is that 0.13 to 0.17 percent of Native American DNA is of Denisovan origin1—with indications in the data that some indigenous groups, for example, the Piapoco of Colombia and Venezuela in South America and the Ojibwa of northeastern North America, can be expected to have higher levels of Denisovan DNA than others.2

  We know about the Denisovans because of paradigm-busting discoveries at the eponymous Denisova Cave in a region of rugged highlands known as the Altai at the extreme south of the Russian Federal District of Siberia. Bordered by Mongolia, China, and Kazakhstan, and extending from the Ural Mountains in the west to the Kamchatka Peninsula and the federal district of Chukotka more that 5,000 kilometers to the east,3 Siberia covers 13.1 million square kilometers—around 77 percent of the total geographical area of Russia. The Urals form a prominent part of the dividing line between Europe and Asia. Kamchatka and Chukotka stand at the junction of the Pacific and Arctic Oceans, with Kamchatka’s coast washed by the waters of the Bering Sea while Chukotka commands the Bering Strait.

  Presently 82 kilometers wide between Cape Dezhnev in Chukotka and Alaska’s Cape Prince of Wales, during the last Ice Age the Strait was drained by lowered sea levels and a tundra-covered land bridge—“Beringia”—connected Chukotka with Alaska. In other words, at that time, Europe, Asia, and the Americas were one continuous landmass. Should you have had the inclination and the stamina, there were certain periods when it would have been technically possible to walk from the Atlantic coast of what is now Spain, across western and eastern Europe to the Urals, through the Urals, through Siberia, across “Beringia,” into Alaska and Canada, down through the “ice-free corridor” dividing the two primary sheets of the North American ice cap, into the United States and thence through Central America into South America as far as Tierra del Fuego before again encountering another ocean—a narrow one during the Ice Age when Antarctica was much larger.4

  No investigation of the human story in the Americas, therefore, can ignore the role of Siberia as a crossroads in the migrations of our ancestors. Moreover, despite the fact that only a tiny fraction of its vast area has yet been sampled by archaeologists, we already know that anatomically modern humans were present in both western and Arctic Siberia at least as far back as 45,000 years ago.5 We know, too, that DNA stu
dies have revealed close genetic relationships between Native Americans and Siberians that speak to a deep and ancient connection.6

  ANOMALIES IN THE DATA

  WITH A FEW NOTABLE EXCEPTIONS,7 it was the consensus view of archaeologists and anthropologists during the period of “Clovis First” dominance that the Americas were settled exclusively by the overland route from Siberia via “Beringia” and southward through the ice-free corridor. Despite the collapse of “Clovis First,” this remains the consensus view today; however, it has been finessed to accommodate the discovery of ever more sites in North and South America predating the opening of the ice-free corridor that therefore could not possibly have been settled by migration through it.8 In addition, several subsequent studies have pointed out that for much of its duration long stretches of the supposed ice-free corridor would have been completely uninhabitable and thus most unpromising territory for a lengthy migration.9

  To explain how migration might have taken place at all, therefore, and to account for the growing mass of archaeological and genetic evidence suggesting that humans had been in the Americas, isolated from Asia, for thousands of years before Clovis, two theories have recently found favor:

  A “Beringian standstill” model (within which scholars continue to debate) whereby, in the simplest terms, having crossed the land bridge into Alaska perhaps as much as 30,000 years ago, the migrants found their southward progress blocked by the conjoined Cordilleran and Laurentide Ice Sheets. More or less simultaneously their return to Siberia was interdicted by the expansion of glaciers in Siberia’s Verkhoyansk Range and in Alaska’s Mackenzie River Valley.10 Their descendants were therefore obliged to spend between 10,000 and 20,000 years stranded in Beringia before further climate shifts allowed them to spread south into the Americas. During this “incubation period” the now isolated population experienced certain genetic changes that would distinguish them from their northeast Asian ancestors at the level of DNA while at the same time confirming their close ancestral relatedness.11

  A “coastal migration” theory whereby the first migrants were boat people who crossed the narrow island-strewn neck of the North Pacific from northeast Asia into the Americas.12 This coastal theory relies heavily on the so-called Kelp Highway migration model, which notes that the deglaciation of North America’s Pacific Coast presented migrants with a region rich in kelp and other aquatic resources that could support their journeys. The coastal model also relies on the unarguable presence, though scarce, of early Paleolithic northwest American archaeological sites. Such coasting could have been undertaken at any time during lowered Ice Age sea levels, particularly when Beringia was exposed, could have been achieved with extremely simple technology such as rafts and coracles, and often would not have required the migrants to lose sight of land. Since we know that other ancient peoples migrated by sea as much as 65,000 years ago—for example, the crossing of the Timor Straits by the first migrants to Australia13—there can be no objection in principle to the Americas being inhabited in the same way.

  All this seems thoroughly reasonable and I have no doubt that both things happened. Island-hopping migrants in simple vessels suitable for short open-water crossings did indeed contribute significantly to the peopling of Americas. Similarly, one need look no further than Jacques Cinq-Mars’s excavations demonstrating a human presence 24,000 years ago at Bluefish Caves in the Yukon to confirm that there is truth to the Beringian Standstill model, too.14

  But are these revised and finessed models, currently very much in vogue with archaeologists, sufficient to explain all the complexities and anomalies in the data that science offers on the peopling of the Americas?

  SERGEY AND OLGA

  IN EARLY SEPTEMBER 2017, A couple of months before visiting Topper with Al Goodyear and a month before meeting Tom Deméré at The Nat in San Diego, Santha and I applied for Russian visas and declared our destination as Denisova Cave in the Altai.

  The visas were expensive, the dauntingly opaque application forms took a great while to fill out, and in the general fog of bureaucratic time-wasting we began to wonder if we might have to postpone the trip until the spring of 2018 when the Siberian winter would have come and gone. Russia is more efficient than it looks, however, and we had our visas within a week.

  Still, it was going to have to be a very quick visit with a big American journey planned from the end of September through until close to the end of November. There was no time for sightseeing, therefore, when we flew to Moscow on September 12, overnighted at Sheremetyevo, and caught a connecting flight the next morning to Novosibirsk, the Siberian capital, a four-hour flight and four time zones east of Moscow.

  After landing and collecting our bags Santha and I were met groundside by our local connection, Sergey Kurgin. I say “connection” because you have to have one if you’re going to travel in Russia. You can’t just get up and go. Some solid citizen, or business, or tour operator must take responsibility for you and officially invite you, and you must have a prearranged and preplanned itinerary to preapproved destinations or your visa won’t be issued—nor, if you somehow manage to slip through the net, will any hotel accommodate you on your route.

  Sergey owns a small private travel business called Sibalp, and I’d contacted him on the internet to help set up the trip. Negotiations were complicated by the fact that he spoke no English—he was perplexed that I spoke no Russian—but various translators got involved and a deal was done. Sergey would drive us the 600 kilometers or so from Novosibirsk to Topolnoye, a township in the Altai, where we would stay with a local family while we visited the cave about 20 kilometers farther on. When we were done he would drive us back to Novosibirsk. He would arrange all accommodation en route and find us an interpreter, without whom we would be unable to speak to anyone. Joining Sergey at the airport to meet us, therefore, was Olga Votrina, the bilingual student from Novosibirsk State University who’d be interpreting for us.

  Novosibirsk is a city of monotone drabness with an oppressive, regimented, Soviet-era feel to it. Olga was cheerful and nervous, wanting very much to be a good interpreter and guide. Thickset and grizzled, Sergey was an older man perhaps in his seventies, but solid, gruff, and strong. He owned a four-wheel-drive Mitsubishi minivan that had at some point been imported, used, from Japan and thus had its steering wheel on the wrong side. It was battered and creaky with a pronounced and disconcerting tug to the right, but as he drove us through the geometric grid of Novosibirsk’s streets, Sergey assured us it was up to the journey ahead.

  Our hotel was in the academic quarter, a stone’s throw from the Museum of the Peoples of Siberia. We spent the following morning viewing artifacts from Denisova Cave, and in the afternoon we set off on the long road south beneath leaden, wide-open skies across a remarkably flat landscape relieved by patches of muted color—black earth here, green field there, rank upon rank of hay bales set upon yellowing stubble marching toward the remote horizon. There was something lulling and dreamlike about the whole scene; I drifted off to sleep and when I awoke, darkness had fallen.

  Sergey was downing a can of Red Bull and gripping the juddering wheel tightly as he weaved in and out of the surprisingly heavy Siberian traffic. Despite his disadvantageous position on the wrong side of the road he was doing well and by midnight we had two-thirds of the journey behind us and stopped to sleep in the town of Biysk.

  We were back on the road again early the next morning—a much brighter and more cheerful day—and drove 65 kilometers farther south to Belokurikha, near which there were rumored to be some intriguing megaliths that Sergey believed he would be able to locate.15 Quite different from the flatlands of the day before, we were now on the borders of the Altai Mountains, and spent the next several hours in the region of Mt. Mokhnataya16 driving off-road through fields, circling likely looking hills covered in outcrops of granitic rocks, and asking farmers for directions. Eventually we met a man who knew a man who knew the couple, Vladimir Illych and Raisa Stepenov, both in their late si
xties, who were said to have discovered the alleged megaliths. An hour later we were sharing bread and honey with them in their home in the village of Nizhnekamenka. This was followed, quaintly, by a tour of their vegetable garden and an invitation—how could we refuse?—to pick raspberries and blackberries from the briars growing in abundance there.

  It was early afternoon by the time Vladimir and Raisa, their daughter Svetlana, and their strapping young grandson Maxim all crammed into Sergey’s groaning minivan with us. It seemed we had been in roughly the right place all morning, missing the site only by about half a mile. I was excited that we were finally going to see it, but as we set out again on the bumpy off-road drive Vladimir advised me to lower my expectations. In his opinion the media coverage had been much ado about nothing and the so-called megaliths he was about to show us were natural rock formations.

  BEHIND THE HEADLINES

  THE INFORMATION THAT THERE MIGHT be ancient megaliths here in the Altai, quite close to Denisova Cave, had come to me by way of a news item in the English-language edition of The Siberian Times published on May 8, 2017. The rather compelling headline reported the discovery of “Dragon and Griffin Megaliths” dating back to the end of the Ice Age.17 “Archaeological researchers” named Aleksandr and Ruslan Peresyolkov were cited suggesting the enigmatic monuments were likely to be at least 12,000 years old but that precise dating would be impossible until “the culture that created them is identified.”18