Martin cites a nineteenth-century account of some five hundred African tribespeople surrounding a herd of eighteen elephants with fires and then killing off the herd with spears as they stood dazed amid the smoke. However, there is no evidence that Clovis people ever assembled in such numbers or employed fire drives. It is literally inconceivable that humans could gang up and drive mammoths off a cliff, as they would learn to do with bison, and it is barely conceivable that they could—in a communal group—have selected a member of a herd, perhaps an old or infirm member, somehow isolated it, filled it with spear points, and finally run it down, perhaps with the assistance of dogs as distractions. But that this scenario would ever be common beggars the imagination. This sentiment was shared by other archaeologists, notably Scotty MacNeish and James B. Griffin, the late longtime authority on the prehistory of the eastern United States.
Of course, Clovis people did in fact kill mammoths. In all, archaeologists have found perhaps twelve sites where hunters and mammoths definitely tangled and at least one mammoth probably died as a result. These are all in the West, mostly in Arizona and the mountain states north to the Canadian border, with one site as far east as Missouri. In addition, there are another twelve sites where men may have killed mammoths—the evidence is not conclusive—the farthest east of these being in Michigan. That there are so few actual sites of mammoth kills (and virtually none of horse, camel, or sloth kills) is a major embarrassment to the overkill theory that Martin lamely explains by saying that anything that happened that fastwould have left little evidence. On the other hand, almost no evidence has ever turned up of man killing a mastodon—those loners of the East—and one has to wonder why not. In a recent account, David Meltzer of SMU cites Jim Judge, another Clovis scholar, for his last word on the Pleistocene Overkill theory: “each Clovis generation probably killed one mammoth, then spent the rest of their lives talking about it.”
As more and more became known about the nature of the environmental changes that took place as the Pleistocene came to an end, it seemed more and more plausible that the rapidly changing climate and fragmenting ecosystems, as well as in some places the creation of the opposite— monolithic ecosystems such as the huge area of tall-grass prairie—could all have put many populations of large mammals into seriously stressful situations. It is clear that before the ice receded, populations of animals in a given place could have included some we now know as northern species and some we know as southern. They evolved together in these habitats, and as the climate changed and localized habitats changed, some species had to move out and did, and others—if they couldn't move out—went extinct. The slower reproductive rates of larger animals—cited by Martin as a disadvantage in the face of human assaults—would have been equally disadvantageous in an assault brought about by loss of habitat.
A few other researchers have recently suggested that people invading the pristine lands of the Western Hemisphere could have brought with them viral diseases that in turn could have jumped across species lines and devastated animal populations across the board. It is known that epidemics can spread very quickly and wipe out huge segments of a population—Europe lost nearly half its people to the Black Plague in less than a century. It is also well known that viral diseases can leap from species to species—AIDS evidently arose in chimpanzees, and the Spanish flu of 1918 arose in chickens, jumped to pigs, and thence to humans. In all, it killed 21 million people—twenty thousand in New York City alone—and wiped out such remote populations as Eskimo villages. Why couldn't Asians, reaching the New World, have brought some virus that could do the reverse— leap species lines to infect at least all the herbivores? The large ones would have been most likely to suffer the most, since they not only reproduce more slowly but are always much fewer in number than smaller mammals such as mice. Thus it would have been the smaller ones that survived longenough to develop immunity. On the other hand, there is no known virus that could accomplish such mayhem, none known to leap from humans to other mammals, and no trace of such a virus has ever been located in any remains of mammoths or any other now-extinct Ice Age animal. Part of the reason could be that we have only recently developed the techniques for spotting the DNA of a virus amid the DNA of its host—for example, in the tusks of a mammoth—and it is hard with such tests to find something you haven't already identified.
In any event, all the evidence for what killed off the New World's megafauna is circumstantial at best. None of it would be sufficient to actually condemn Clovis hunters, viruses, or even climate change as the sole terminator. More than likely it was a combination of at least two forces: climate change and the human coup de grâce to some (but not all) species that were greatly reduced, stressed, weakened, and isolated. For example, mastodons could well have become isolated in eastern coniferous forests, which had once been extensive but became smaller islands of forest surrounded by deciduous trees as the climate changed. Small, isolated populations of mastodons would soon have been forced to inbreed, and such inbreeding often produces drastic failures of the animals' reproductive system, leading ultimately but in relatively few generations to extinction. Hunters could, in the case of isolated and weakened mastodon populations, have administered the coup de grâce, and the fact that no one has found any human spear points or other weapons in association with mastodon remains does not prove that such kills did not happen.
Some species might have been weakened by diseases brought by humans, but it seems pushing it a bit to imagine a virus that would be equally lethal (and practically overnight) to thirty-six genera of large mammals. But various combinations of climate change (and its many deleterious effects) and selective hunting of relict populations could. At Blackwater Draw in Arizona, where Clovis points first came to light in association with mammoths, the world of the Southwest was experiencing a considerable drought. Formerly perennial streams were drying up seasonally or altogether, forcing herbivores to congregate at dwindling water holes, where they probably overgrazed the surrounding forage and, according to a persistent but mistaken myth, quite possibly got stuck in the mud at the pond's edge, and in any event were far more easily preyed on by a smallband of hunters who—no matter how elegant their stone points—were not heavily armed in comparison with a behemoth of several tons.
Logic aside, however, the real problem with Martin's theory turns out to hinge greatly on timing. The overkill theory depends to a great extent on the megafauna of North (and South) America being almost wholly wiped out in the brief interval when Clovis tools were in use. To begin with, succeeding and presumably more accurate radiocarbon dates have shortened the Clovis interval down to well under a half millennium, while other such dates have widened the period in which the megafauna were extinguished—now evidently an interval of several thousand years beginning 17,000 years ago with the cheetah and ending about 9,000 years ago with the end of the giant tapir.
CHAPTER SIX
THEPRE-CLOVISQUEST
When different lines of inquiry begin to coalesce and point in the same direction, and when the direction they point to is in favor of one's own cherished hypothesis, one rejoices. One also tends to guard that hypothesis with some of the attention a mother bear devotes to her cubs. Once the Pleistocene Overkill theory was enunciated in the late 1960s, an explanation existed for exactly how Clovis Man had managed to cover so much ground in so short a time. Those archaeologists who were already convinced that Clovis had been the first American culture could rejoice. After all, it was widely known that seabirds that had evolved on islands, such as the booby, had no fear of humans whatsoever. Because it had no idea how dangerous humans could be, the dodo was eaten to extinction by sailors, and the booby got its name for the same reason, though it survived. The giant mammals of North (and South) America were no different. They stood there, either astonished and presumably mute, or hardly even noticing these little bipeds, until—alas—the last of their kind went extinct.
Not everyone agreed with the overkill hypothesis, however, and
well before it and radiocarbon dating came along, plenty of archaeologists believed for various reasons that Clovis could not have been the first group of humans here. Other kinds of points, many of them large and well made though not fluted, were coming to light in numerous other locales. Some of them appeared (in those preradiocarbon days) to be contemporaneouswith Clovis or nearly so. The Clovis adherents held firm, however, buoyed by many other Clovis finds elsewhere in the West and all the way to the east coast, with some—though fewer—south of the United States. Many of the finds consisted of caches of Clovis points, leading to speculation that those highly mobile people had left what amounted to toolboxes here and there against the day they returned. Dave Meltzer and others have speculated that the caches had served some religious or ceremonial purpose. To this day, no one has satisfactorily explained the caches. Whether Clovis was first in this hemisphere or not, it remains a highly mysterious group, its characteristic tools appearing so suddenly and without evident precursors, the fluting on its points not serving any purpose that we can be certain of, not to mention the relatively abrupt end of the use of Clovis points. To people today, making the same tools for half a millennium may seem like an absurdly long time of inventive failure, an unimaginable mental stasis. But in the long, long run of human prehistory, it is really quite a small interlude, and when daily life is as dangerous as it must have been, one quite rationally hesitates to change anything as important as a tool that has so far worked well enough. Perhaps, people have suggested, the big Clovis points were made for killing truly huge beasts such as mammoths, but they fell out of use when the chief target became bison and other similarly sized prey, for which smaller points like Folsom points were better suited.
The mysteries surrounding Clovis continued to plague—or rather, puzzle and entertain—archaeologists as the decades passed, and most remained unshaken in the growing certainty that Clovis indeed represented the first Americans. The overkill hypothesis in the late 1960s made it seem all the more likely, as did the generally accepted idea that an ice-free corridor between the Laurentide and Cordilleran glaciers had opened up at just the right time to admit the first Americans. Perhaps the most important factor adding to the general sense of certainty had been present almost from the time the Clovis points at Blackwater Draw had been put into the archaeological record. That factor was the utter failure of anyone to find any site anywhere on the continent that showed people arriving here earlier than Clovis.
The failure was not for lack of trying; from the 1930s through to the end of the century, literally hundreds of pre-Clovis sites were announced— and soon fell by the wayside. They fell by the wayside for very good reasons—indeed, for the same reasons that Holmes and Hrdlíčka, theSmithsonian's deadly duo, had shot down all the sites presented for Glacial Man until the finds at Folsom. Their criteria still applied and, modified only to take into account such tools as radiocarbon dating, still apply today. It was against this long cascade of failures that the pre-Clovis dates from Meadowcroft would be judged when, willy-nilly, I found myself in the predicament of tilting at the Clovis Bar, which by the late 1960s was well established. And to make matters worse, by the mid-1970s, a new version of the Smithsonian's old deadly duo was present—in the form of C. Vance Haynes, Paul Martin's colleague at Arizona.
Vance Haynes was trained as a geologist and has long taken an interest in what today we call geoarchaeology. Over the years he has done highly acclaimed work in the Nile Valley in Egypt. One of his major contributions, in fact (and one that is often overlooked), is simply that he has returned a geologist's perspective to archaeological work, a perspective that most archaeologists of the twentieth century have not themselves possessed because they were not trained in it with any depth. Early on, he became a knowledgeable student of the geological subtleties of archaeological sites in the American West, and by the early 1960s he was one of the chief arbiters of any preClovis claim. His perspective on pre-Clovis sites was strongly conditioned, at least in my view as well as in his own published admission, by his experiences at Tule Springs, Nevada. Tule Springs was a paleontological and archaeological site located about ten miles north of Las Vegas. Originally excavated in the early 1930s, the site was one of the first after Folsom to produce evidence of the contemporaneity of early humans and Ice Age mammals. Subsequently excavated again in 1933, 1955, and 1956, the site yielded a radiocarbon date of 23,800 B.P. and what was thought to be charcoal from an apparent “firepit.” This date suggested to some that this was far and away the oldest archaeological site yet discovered in the New World.
In 1962–63, the Nevada State Museum conducted a major multidisciplinary excavation at Tule Springs involving archaeologists, paleontologists, a botanist, a radiocarbon specialist, and several geologists, one of whom was Vance Haynes. The objective of the excavations was to establish once and for all the age of the human presence at the site and the nature of the association of such materials with Ice Age mammals. Suffice it to note that Haynes initially bought into a great antiquity for humans at this site before it was realized that the allegedly early dates derived notfrom charcoal in firepits but rather from ancient carbonized plant material—lignite—from the bottom of spring chambers that mimicked the appearance of firepits.
Haynes was badly stung by this incident and soon afterward became one of the staunchest supporters of the Clovis Bar as well as one of the most ubiquitous critics of anyone who dared to try to move it. The Tule Springs incident also burned into his mind the twin specters of contamination and misinterpretation of supposed relationships between artifacts and dates, points that he has faithfully raised ever since. Over the years Haynes has debunked more supposedly early sites and their excavators than even Hrdlíčka could have imagined. And in at least some minds, he became a second incarnation of that implacable figure.
NEW MEXICO JONES
In the early sixties, Vance Haynes was turning the cold shower on another claim of pre-Clovis habitation in North America, made by a colorful archaeologist and zoologist (and big-game hunter) at the University of New Mexico, Frank C. Hibben. Something of a legend in his younger days, Hibben married rich (running off with a benefactor's wife) when he was quite young, made regular safaris to the best big-game hunting grounds, and was considered an unparalleled shot. He hobnobbed with the rich, famous, and powerful, often slipping away on undisclosed missions that added a patina of mystery to his life. A superb raconteur, he entertained people endlessly in his large house full of taxidermy and artifacts on the edge of the university campus. But for a stocky build, he would have been a fine model for Harrison Ford's Indiana Jones (though one hears that that honor resides elsewhere). Like that celluloid character, Hibben longed to find the holy grail—in his case the holy grail of American archaeology—namely, inhabitants of North America who had arrived before Clovis and Folsom.
In 1936, a student of Hibben's returned to the campus in Albuquerque bearing some artifacts he had found in a cave partway up into the Sandia Mountains, a ten-thousand-foot range that looms on the eastern edge of the mile-high city. The artifacts were nothing special—probably relics of Pueblo Indians from historic times—but Hibben was intrigued by the existenceof any cave that had been frequented by people. “The human animal,” he was convinced, “has from earliest times been a cave animal.” This was clearly the case in Europe and Asia, where generations of people “cowered” during thousands of years, looking nervously out at a world teeming with fearsome animals. Yet all the remains of early hunters in North America, Hibben would write later, had come from “open camp sites… along stream banks and around the edges of marshes and ponds.” Evidently, Hibben said, the earliest Americans had been unafraid of the large beasts that had roamed their world and had been unfazed by “the chilling winds that whistled down from the glacial ice walls” of their era. Or—the earliest Americans were, like Asians and Europeans, cave dwellers who simply had not yet come to light.
So Frank Hibben undertook the exploration and then the exca
vation of Sandia Cave, a 453-foot-long tunnel located high up in the limestone wall of Las Huertas Canyon. And there, in due course, he came across the signs of Sandia Man. He would propose that Sandia people had been the first Americans, a group of hunters who had roamed parts of the American West probably some 25,000 years ago.
Throughout most of its relatively cramped (nine feet in diameter) length, Sandia Cave was filled with rubble and dust, as well as bats and the remains of pack rat activity. Early on, the team came across the claw of a giant ground sloth, and, Hibben wrote later, if they found evidence of people living in the cave at the same time as the sloth, they “might yet find an American cave man.” They pressed on, excavating during four successive summers and coming across several different layers of material. Throughout the length of the cave, a layer of dust (sometimes six feet thick) had accumulated in the dry interval since the last glacier had receded. Below that was a layer of dripstone—the sort of limestone accumulation that creates stalagmites—forming a floor as hard as cement. Sledgehammering their way through it, the team found an “ancient cave floor” with scraps of flint and charcoal, the shattered bones of bison, horse, and camel, fragments of mammoth tusk, and the characteristic spear points called Folsom points. Folsom points dated back to about 10,500 years B.P. and came after Clovis points. Hibben had found his cave man. But he was only a cave-dwelling member of an already known group known collectively as Folsom Man, and therefore not so big a deal. So Hibben went deeper.
The First Americans Page 16