I would have been lost without Mario to show me where the archaeology had been uncovered. Driving to Monte Verde itself, we pulled up beside a wooden gate which led into an insignificant-looking field. The ground was boggy and mossy, sloping down to a fast-flowing stream, with sheep grazing on its banks. There was no sign of any archaeology at this place – possibly the most important archaeological site in the Americas.
Mario and I made our way down to the stream. It curved around in a wide meander: there had been quite a significant change in its course since the last excavations in the 1980s. Mario pointed out the original bank edge, which was much straighter. The creek had moved about 20m, from the north to the south side of the archaeological site, within thirty years. We stepped down and walked into the bend of the stream, Chinchihuapi Creek, where a large log had recently been washed up on the low, sandy bank.
‘The site, like so many others, was discovered by chance,’ said Mario. ‘Local villagers were widening the creek. When they were removing the sediment, cutting the curves, they found these huge bones, and kept them. Two university students who were travelling round the place took the bones to Valdivia.’
The bones were from Pleistocene animals, and archaeologists at Valdivia University decided to investigate further, joined by Tom Dillehay of the University of Kentucky. At first, they thought this might just be a fossil site, but when patches of charcoal – evidence of old hearths – battered cobbles, cores and flakes started to appear, it was clear that it was archaeological. They had found the remains of an ancient camp.1
‘That is about where the large hut was,’ said Mario, indicating the log.
The ‘hut’ was a structure some 20m long. Digging through the sandy terraces of the creek, the archaeologists found a collection of wooden posts that had collapsed down. Some of them seemed to form divisions inside the hut: perhaps they were different living spaces. Microscopic pieces of hide were recovered from the sediment among the wooden stakes: it looked as if the hut had been covered in animal skins.
‘The hut was heated with braziers,’ explained Mario. ‘We found the remains of small holes in the sand, lined with clay, full of charcoal.’ Outside the hut, they found larger hearths that had probably been used for cooking.
As archaeological excavation proceeded, more and more remains came to light: there were digging sticks, plant remains, animal bones and skin, and even a child’s footprint in the clay next to a hearth.2
Some 30m away from the main hut there were the remains of another structure: a strange, ‘wishbone’-shaped outline that Dillehay had believed to be all that was left of another, small hut. It seemed to me to have been, at just a few feet across, a bit too small for a hut. Mario described the finds around and within the wishbone shape: mastodon bones, with cut marks from butchering, and, preserved in the wet ground, numerous plant remains. These included nine varieties of seaweed. Seaweed is an excellent source of iodine and other minerals, but Dillehay thought that some of these species may also have been used as medicines, as they are today, by the local Mapuche Indians. Rather bizarrely, some of these seaweeds appeared, combined with other potentially medicinal plants, in the form of chewed-up and spat-out cuds, in the ‘wishbone hut’.2
The plant remains from the site included nuts and berries, and showed that Monte Verde had been occupied all year round. ‘We found food from all four seasons,’ said Mario. So it seemed that this place was more permanent than just a seasonal camp.
There were also the earliest remains of potatoes ever discovered – the limp but still recognisable skins of wild potatoes (Solanum maglia) – implying that humans had developed a taste for the humble spud at least 14,000 years ago.3
The archaeological remains from Monte Verde show that the people living there were exploiting resources from a wide range of habitats: from inland forests, freshwater marshes – and, as the seaweed, salt and bitumen found at the site show – the coast. During the Pleistocene, the coast would have been further away – about 90km to the west, compared with 25km today – so Monte Verde was near the coast but not on it. The presence of seaweed at the site suggests that the people living there either made visits to the seashore or were in contact with palaeoindians living on the coast itself.2 There is certainly evidence of people living along the coast of South America, eating seabirds, anchovies and molluscs, from Quebrada Tacahuay and Quebrada Jaguay in Peru.4, 5 Those sites date to between 11,000 and 13,000 years ago, but radiocarbon dating of plant remains and charcoal from the hearths at Monte Verde place the occupation of the site even earlier: some time between 14,000 and 14,600 years ago.2 Such dates would be the final nails in the coffin of ‘Clovis first’.
‘Monte Verde means we have to rethink the moment when people came to America,’ said Mario. ‘From the findings in Monte Verde, and other investigations, it’s proposed that the human entered America between 16,000 and 20,000 years ago. Any relation with the ice corridor does not make sense. The migration probably happened earlier, and along the Pacific coast.’
But Monte Verde has been a controversial site since its first discovery. By 1997, Tom Dillehay was so fed up with its detractors that he invited a crew of eminent palaeoindian archaeologists to visit the site, see the artefacts and make up their minds about it. They all agreed that the site was indeed archaeological, and that there was no reason to doubt the (pre-Clovis) radiocarbon dates.6 It means that Monte Verde is the oldest – generally accepted – site in the whole of the Americas.
So it was agreed that Monte Verde was earlier than Clovis, and indeed earlier even than the opening of the ice-free corridor. People may have moved down into North America by that route, but they can’t have been the first wave of colonisers. It seems much more likely, looking at the archaeological, geological and genetic evidence,7 that the ancestors of the people who ended up at Monte Verde had entered the Americas, perhaps along the newly ice-free coastal route, some time around 15,000 years ago, and then spread down the Pacific coast into South America. (But at this point in time we can’t ignore the possibility that the first Americans might – just might – have come across the North Atlantic. It will be interesting to ‘watch this space’ and see what evidence emerges from both the east and west coasts of Canada and the US in the future.) Once in North America, some colonisers may have spread inland, along the southern margin of the ice sheets, perhaps following dwindling herds of mammoth and mastodon to Wisconsin. The Clovis culture could have been developed by descendants of these people, or alternatively carried down later from Beringia (by people with the same genetic lineages as the first colonisers) through the ice-free corridor.8
People are still eating seaweed in Chile. I went for a rainy walk along the coast near Monte Verde, and met a man, kitted out in yellow waterproofs and sou’wester and carrying a sack: he was gathering stalks from the kelp that had washed up at the last high tide. When I took refuge from the driving rain in a small restaurant at the top of the cliffs, I sampled the local delicacy: seaweed empanadas.
Journey’s End
At this point, my own journey of discovery was over. And, in a very small way, I was going to relive prehistory. Having been a nomad for half a year, I was going to settle down. And I was looking forward to going home.
I had ended my journey on the coast, as I had begun it. My travels had taken me all around the world, from our homeland in Africa all the way to the last continents to be populated: the Americas. I had endured extremes of temperature, from the icy north of Siberia to the searing heat of Australia. And, wherever I’d gone, I’d met people like me. Very often, we couldn’t communicate directly in spoken language, but smiles and gestures were universal. And however different we all looked on the surface, those differences were superficial.
The ‘science’ of palaeoanthropology has been so misused in the past, to justify or emphasise differences between ethnic groups, to ‘rank’ people by head shape and size, skin colour and culture, but looking at the evidence objectively reveals a quite different
truth, and carries a very positive message.
We’re all members of a young species, going back less than 200,000 years. When we trace our ancestry back, we find that we’re all related, on a great family tree of humanity. You can’t rank people any more than you could rank twigs on a tree. We all have the same, very great-grandmother in African Eve. So wherever we’ve ended up, all over the world, we are all Africans under the skin.
I had also seen how our ancestors had spread over the world and survived, while huge fluxes in climate and environment transformed the face of the earth. Climate change is a feature of our world, although the length of our lifespan in comparison to the grand scale of geological time gives us a false impression of stability. But having said that, the last 11,000 years have been relatively stable, allowing us to settle down, start farming and achieve a huge population size.1 There is no doubt that the world will alter around generations of our off spring, and indeed, anthropogenic climate change may produce much more dramatic fluctuations than any experienced by recent generations of our ancestors.
It seems that we may have been storing up trouble for ourselves since the time we invented agriculture and populations really took off. We have cleared vast swathes of woodland for agriculture, flooded huge areas to grow rice, and released ever-increasing quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. If it weren’t for the man-made emission of these greenhouse gases, and the removal of carbon sinks, we could reasonably expect the world to start cooling down into a major glaciation within the next 50,000 years. But the scientific evidence for anthropogenic global warming is now irrefutable, and we just don’t know what effect this disruption, or, as Chris Stringer put it, this ‘tinkering with the Earth’s climate machine’, will have on the natural climate cycles in the longer term.1
Some of the changes we have to face may be catastrophic; some may even threaten to wipe us out in certain places, as they have done in the past. Some assessments of what will happen to the world and our place in it in the future are incredibly gloomy, but, taking the long view and looking at how early humans managed to survive and colonise the globe, it appears that we are a flexible and adaptable species. Chris Stringer points to the example of the Gravettians, who prevailed despite the deteriorating climate in Europe at the LGM, through new technology and extensive social networks.1
But in some ways we’re different from the Gravettians. Very few hunter-gatherers remain in the world today. In the developed and the developing world, most people are settled, and there are billions of us on the planet. There’s not much room for people displaced by rising sea levels or failing crops or lack of water,2 but while our settled existence may make us less flexible, we surely have the capacity to come up with global solutions to the challenges ahead.
For instance, we can each, individually, aim for more ‘low-tech’, less energy-hungry lifestyles, but we need a worldwide, cooperative effort to tackle the problems of climate change. And any such plan needs to make economic sense. We could end up spending a vast amount trying to shave a fraction off the global temperature increase, whereas that money could be better spent now in developing countries, which are also likely to be hit hardest by the effects of climate change. Political scientist and ‘Skeptical Environmentalist’ Bjørn Lomborg points out that every person in the developing world could be guaranteed access to clean water and education for half the predicted cost of implementing the Kyoto Protocol. Cutting back hard on CO2 emissions may not be the most beneficial approach, for us and future generations; we may be better off investing in research and development into renewable forms of energy, and in supporting developing countries.3
I think it would be fascinating, but probably quite scary, to come back in 200,000 years’ time and see how our descendants are doing. I do hope we manage not to wipe ourselves out, and I’d like to think that we’ll find a way to mitigate the damage caused by climate change and develop new technologies that mean we’re not still pumping out such vast amounts of CO2. It will require far-sighted and magnanimous politicians to achieve this. I hope that we’ll learn to look after our environment better, and our own Palaeolithic bodies. And, of course, it would be lovely to think that all our achievements in literature, music, art and science will be passed on and built upon by future generations. I think the lessons of the past give us grounds for optimism. We are, after all, survivors. But perhaps the near future will be less rosy, and our civilisations will crumble. Our descendants might eventually be forced to go back to the ways of the ancients, to become hunter-gatherers once again.
Who knows? Stephen Jay Gould said, ‘Life is a copiously branching bush continually pruned by the grim reaper of extinction.’4 But I don’t think the human lineage is about to get pruned just yet.
I have a vision of the Songlines stretching across the continents and ages; that wherever men have trodden they have left a trail of song (of which we may, now and then, catch an echo); and that these trails must reach back, in time and space, to an isolated pocket in the African savannah, where the First Man opening his mouth in defiance of the terrors that surrounded him, shouted the opening stanza of the World Song, ‘I AM!’
Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines
References
Prologue
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In: Yasuda, Y. (ed.), The Origins of Pottery and Agriculture, Roli Books, New Delhi, pp. 217–27 (2002).
Introduction
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1. African Origins
Meeting Modern-Day Hunter-Gatherers: Nhoma, Namibia
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2. Marshall, L. The !Kung of Nyae Nyae, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts (1976).
3. Smith, A. B. Ethnohistory and archaeology of the Ju/’hoansi bushmen. African Study Monographs, supplement 26: 15–25 (2001).
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5. Bramble, D. M., & Lieberman, D. E. Endurance running and the evolution of Homo. Nature 432: 345–52 (2004).
6. Lieberman, D. E., Bramble, D. M., Raichlen, D. A., & Shea, J. J. The evolution of endurance running and the tyranny ofethnography: a reply to Pickering and Bunn (2007). Journal of Human Evolution 53: 434–7 (2007).
The Incredible Human Journey Page 41