America Before
Page 43
Suppose there was an earlier “Age of Discovery” in the centuries before the onset of the Younger Dryas, when the fleets of the lost civilization set out to open interaction with tribes of hunter-gatherers all around the world and either passed themselves off as, or were mistaken for, “gods.” I’m just offering food for thought here, a pure speculation, but I submit this might have followed a period of severely restricted involvement with other peoples—such as the Ming dynasty imposed on China in the late fourteenth century—and I suggest that the renewed outreach may have been motivated by foreknowledge of the impending Younger Dryas cataclysm. This lost civilization, after all, appears to have evolved a sophisticated religion deploying powerful symbolism that emphasized the connection between heaven and earth and that envisaged an afterlife journey through specific well-charted regions of the celestial vault. Its astronomer-priests are therefore most unlikely to have missed the signs in the sky as our planet began its long journey toward intersection with a particularly lumpy and debris-filled filament of the Taurid meteor stream where the menacing serpentlike tails of the outgassing larger fragments might have served as visible omens of the terrors to come.
The astronomers and mathematicians of our hypothetical lost civilization would surely have set to work calculating trajectories and orbits and would have learned in due course that collisions with fragments of the disintegrating comet, though not an immediate threat, were unfortunately inevitable during the centuries ahead. It was not yet certain how large and how sustained the bombardments would be, or where and when the first fragments would strike. Multiple outcomes were possible, from escaping relatively unscathed, at one end of the scale, to a worst-case scenario in which civilization itself would be snuffed out. And although the worst would probably never happen, a contingency plan would certainly have been prepared on the off chance that it did.
My bet is the planners would have seen from the outset that the superior survival skills of hunter-gatherer populations might potentially make them the inheritors of the earth in the event of a true planetary cataclysm. An important strand of any contingency plan, therefore, would have been to establish connections with hunter-gatherers, to teach them, to learn from them, and in so doing to ensure that these populations were willing and able—if called upon—to offer refuge to the “gods” of the lost civilization.
It would not be until weeks or even days before the bombardments began that the areas likely to be worst hit could be pinpointed with any certainty. There must have been hope that by some miracle the impacts might be avoided altogether, but until the centuries of danger passed it was best to regard the whole world as a target and therefore to prepare safe havens on many different continents so that if some were destroyed others would survive. I speculated in chapter 10 that this process of preparation might even have involved the experimental resettlement of groups of hunter-gatherers far from their home regions with the intention that they should create places of refuge for the “gods” in their new surroundings. Such a project might account for that strange Australasian DNA signal stranded in the genes of certain Amazonian tribes.
In this scenario, therefore, hunter-gatherer populations all around the world were deliberately recruited by people from a different, more scientifically advanced culture to prepare for a coming cataclysm, to offer refuge to the “gods” should they require it, and perhaps even to serve as duplicate archives—either in oral tradition or in the safekeeping of physical records—for some of the scientific knowledge of the “gods.”
In North America the evidence is that hunter-gatherers bounced back quite successfully within less than a millennium of the onset of the Younger Dryas, and thereafter there is a thin but fairly continuous archaeological record. What is mysterious is not so much the early appearance of mound-building in this new age—perhaps as early as 8,000 years ago, as we’ve seen—or the sophistication of sites such as Watson Brake 5,500 years ago, nor even their obvious astronomical and geometrical connections to later vast earthworks such as Moundville and Cahokia, but that in this early monumental architecture of the New World memes of geometry, astronomy, and solar alignments consistently appear that are also found in the early monumental architecture of the Old World at iconic sites such as Stonehenge and the Great Pyramid of Giza. A tremendous leap forward in agricultural know-how, coupled with the sudden uptake of eerily distinctive spiritual ideas concerning the afterlife journey of the soul, also often accompanies the architectural memes. It’s therefore hard to avoid the impression that some kind of “package” is involved here.
Something designed.
Something deliberately and carefully contrived to engage future generations in specific courses of action, regarded as religious duties, that would also educate them deeply in the cycles of the heavens and in the measurement and nurturing of the earth.
It’s almost as though a guiding hand has been at work behind the scenes of prehistory. If so, whether through secret groups of insider initiates or by some other means of cultural transmission, this hidden influence appears to have been active in the Americas since before the onset of the Younger Dryas, to have undergone long periods of inactivity, and to have reemerged again and again at crucial junctures to shape the direction of civilization.
CLOVIS GIVEN A HELPING HAND?
KNOWLEDGE OF THE TRUE GLOBAL extent of the Younger Dryas impacts continues to grow. We’ve focused on the evidence from North America, but recent research published in Studia Quaternaria in 2018 presents evidence of a cometary airburst over Mount Viso in Europe’s Western Alps around 12,800 years ago that raised temperatures instantly, in a brief pulse, to above 2,200 degrees C—almost 1,000 degrees hotter than the melting point of steel.2 Another 2018 study, published in the Journal of Geology, reports evidence from Antarctica’s New Mountain, near the Taylor Glacier, that an “impact/airburst of the same time line as the Younger Dryas Boundary may have reached across South America and the Pacific Ocean to the Dry Valley Mountains of Antarctica.”3
As of late 2014, the Younger Dryas Boundary strewn field of impact proxies had been traced across 50 million square kilometers of the earth’s surface (above). Since then YDB impact proxies have been found much more widely distributed than previously reported in South America, and a 2018 study reports their discovery in Antarctica’s Taylor Valley (inset) linked to evidence of an impact or airburst around 12,800 years ago.
As more evidence of this quality continues to pour in, two significant observations thrust themselves to the fore.
First, this cataclysm, which we know to have been drawn out over 21 years between 12,836 and 12,815 years ago, was truly global, affecting regions as far apart as Greenland, the Pacific, the Americas, Europe, and Antarctica.
And second, it was just the luck of the draw that North America, rather than some other region, found itself at the epicenter of the peak bombardment. However, this had profound implications for the world because so much of the continent was then still covered by ice that was radically destabilized, releasing the meltwater flood that shut down the Gulf Stream and ushered in the Younger Dryas. The fact that Greenland and Europe were also severely hit and also ice covered compounded the problem by adding to the deluge of icy meltwater pouring into the Atlantic Ocean. There is no doubt, however, that it was the continental landmass of North America that suffered the worst effects of the impacts, airbursts, shock waves, and wildfires and finally, perhaps early in that 21-year episode of bombardment, of Antonio Zamora’s proposed storm of icy ejecta. The latter, we might speculate, could even have played a role in extinguishing the wildfires, thus accounting for the fact that a single massive episode of biomass burning, the largest in the entire NGRIP Ice Core, is documented for North America right at the onset of the Younger Dryas, and then rapidly dies down, never to recur on such a scale.4
Once all this is taken into account, the severity of the extinctions in North America seems less surprising and we can begin to understand how it was that the Clovis people passed fr
om abundance to nonexistence virtually overnight.
Moreover, the Clovis phenomenon is, itself, an intriguing mystery. We’ve already seen that no archaeological background has ever been found to the beautiful and sophisticated fluted points used by these remarkably successful hunter-gatherers to spear mammoths like Eloise at Murray Springs. From the moment we meet them around 13,400 years ago to the moment of their disappearance from the record about 12,800 years ago, they’re equipped with their extremely effective signature “toolkit” of which the points are part. These Clovis tools and weapons appear suddenly and fully formed in archaeological deposits across huge expanses of North America with no evidence, anywhere, of experiments, developments, prototypes, or, indeed, of any intermediate stages in their evolution.5
My guess is there’s a connection between Clovis and the lost civilization, not least because studies of ancient DNA show the Clovis genome to be much more closely related to Native South Americans than to Native North Americans (see part 3). Indeed, there’s a parallel between the rather sudden and inexplicable way that Australasian genes turn up in the Amazon basin and the equally sudden and inexplicable way that Clovis fluted-point technology turns up in North America.
Could both have the same cause?
Could the same hidden hand that transported a population of Australasian setters across the Pacific Ocean from New Guinea to the Amazon also have given technical assistance to one group among the many that we now know inhabited North America before the onset of the Younger Dryas? And since the whole Clovis First nonsense has finally been relegated to the dustbin of history, perhaps it’s time to consider another possibility—let’s call it “Clovis Most Favored” or “Clovis Given a Helping Hand.”
Though in no way “high-tech” in twenty-first-century terms, the Clovis toolkit is far superior to anything else Native Americans are thought to have been capable of 13,400 years ago when the first fluted points begin to appear south of the ice cap. I’m not proposing that these stone tools were part of the technology of the lost civilization itself—any more than jet aircraft were part of it. I’ve argued already that a more realistic parallel for the level of science and technology attained would be with Europe and the newly formed United States in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Other than that, the civilization I envisage was very different from our own, founded upon entirely different principles. Much of its science may remain opaque to us not because it is absent but because we are unable to recognize it for what it is. Nor is there any reason to suppose it would have shared its own “high-tech” with other peoples; quite possibly there were even specific stipulations against doing so. But there might have been less hesitation around the idea of devising better, more efficient stone tools to put into the hands of favored groups of hunter-gatherers, thus conferring a competitive advantage upon them.
Suppose Clovis was such a group, already present alongside many other groups that we now know to have inhabited the Americas before the Younger Dryas onset. The connection to the southern lineage of Native Americans is interesting. Perhaps it might even have been in those 5 million square kilometers of Amazon rainforest where archaeologists have not yet ventured that fluted-point technology was initially taught to Clovis ancestors who then migrated north, bringing “their” expertise with them.
In so doing they burst in upon—and in a brief few centuries radically changed—a cultural landscape that archaeologists are now beginning to realize had previously been stable and continuous for thousands of years. Just as Al Goodyear discovered at Topper when he took the decision to dig down below the lowest Clovis occupation level (see chapter 6), recent excavations at the extremely prolific Clovis site of Gault, Texas, have likewise revealed deeper, pre-Clovis levels. Reported in the journal Science Advances in July 2018, these levels contain an assortment of stone tools—“the Gault Assemblage”—so far confirmed to be at least 2,000 years older than Clovis. Significantly, what archaeologists have identified in the assembly is “a previously unknown, early projectile point technology unrelated to Clovis.”6
Of note also is that:
There is a ~10-cm-thick zone of decreased cultural material between the Clovis and Gault components. This suggests a reduction in site activity or possible occupational breaks between … cultural depositions.7 … The distinct technological differences between Clovis and Gault Assemblage, together with the stratigraphic separation between the cultural depositions, indicate a lack of continuity between the two complexes.8
In other words, Clovis just rather inexplicably appears and replaces preexisting native North American cultures, and pretty soon its occupation levels are imposed over other, earlier occupation levels all across the continental United States until suddenly, and mysteriously, in the big bang of the Younger Dryas onset, Clovis itself is gone—dead and buried beneath the black mat.
Yet in the brief few hundred years of its florescence, Clovis sparkled and shone as the most successful and widespread hunter-gatherer culture thus far seen in the Americas. Archaeologists and flint knappers who have studied the matter are in no doubt that the distinctive points, and the way that fluting was deployed in their manufacture, would have given the Clovis people a significant technological edge over other hunter-gatherers.9 The question, therefore, has to be why they were wiped out while other less prominent and capable cultures were able to emerge from the shadows of archaeological invisibility and survive.
Perhaps they grew too close to the “gods” of the lost civilization and shared their fate?
This is a serious proposition, not a frivolous question, and we may anticipate the skeptical response. If Clovis benefited from contact with a more advanced civilization, then we should find the skeletal remains of those more advanced people intermingled with the Clovis remains, and we do not—therefore, there was no advanced civilization. Similarly, if Clovis benefited from contact with the people of a more advanced civilization, then we should find at least some traces of their higher tech among the Clovis assemblages, and we do not—therefore, there was no advanced civilization.
I’ve already responded to the second argument. There might have been very good reasons why people from a more technologically advanced civilization would have decided not to share their high-tech with hunter-gatherers, while at the same time choosing to favor a particular group with the know-how to work existing raw materials like stone, antler, and bone into more efficient hunting weapons and tools than they’d ever made before.
As to the first argument, although Clovis were not the “first Americans,” their culture has been the subject of intensive archaeological study for more than 80 years and we’ve seen that Clovis artifacts have been discovered in great quantities at sites scattered far and wide across North America.
But how many Clovis bones have been found alongside the artifacts? How many skeletons, crania, tibia, phalanges, or teeth? I had imagined there must be quite a collection for such a famous and well-understood culture. I was therefore surprised to learn during the research for this book that apart from the incomplete skeleton of a single individual—the Anzick-1 child excavated in Montana and discussed in chapter 9—there are no human remains at all from the Clovis period.10 Even in the case of Anzick-1, as we’ve seen, the Clovis provenance was questioned by some until sophisticated dating techniques in 2018 resolved an apparent discrepancy between the age of the infant’s bones and the age of the Clovis tools found with him, placing both firmly at the onset of the Younger Dryas around 12,800 years ago and confirming the Clovis identity of the buried child.11
Here then is the conundrum. At locations scattered all across North America from Alaska to New Mexico and from Florida to the state of Washington, more than 1,500 Clovis sites have been found. These sites have yielded more than 10,000 Clovis points12 and tens of thousands of other artifacts from the Clovis toolkit (40,000 at Topper alone, as we saw in chapter 6). Yet among all these archaeological riches, it bears repeating that the sum total of Clov
is human remains found in 85 years of excavations is limited to the Anzick-1 partial skeleton.13
In short, if the homeland of our hypothetical advanced civilization were in America, and if it became a lost civilization during the tumultuous earth changes of 12,800 years ago, then the Clovis case suggests that a dearth of skeletal remains is a normal state of affairs by which we should not be surprised. Certainly it does not constitute disproof of the lost civilization hypothesis.
By contrast, the sudden appearance of Clovis fluted-point technology with no evidence of prior trial and error, buildup of skills, experimentation, or prototypes14 cries out for an explanation. So, too, does the Australasian DNA signal in the heart of the Amazon rainforest. So, too, the shared geometry and astronomy, and the shared earthwork designs across the Old World and the New. So, too, the incredible overlaps of symbolism, spiritual inquiry, and beliefs.
The only viable explanation is a remote common source behind them all—a lost civilization, in my view. And although that civilization had established self-perpetuating memes that would keep the flame of its influence burning for thousands of years, it is clear that it did not survive the Younger Dryas cataclysm itself.
Let’s look at North America, therefore, with the possibility in mind that it might be the “crime scene” from which a great civilization of prehistoric antiquity—the stuff of myth and legend all around the world—vanished without a trace.