Below the Folsom floor was a layer of yellow ocher, a chalky substance that is a mineral oxide of iron and which Native Americans often collected for paint or dye. Hibben interpreted this level to represent a wet, cold period, a time of glacial advance, perhaps. And below that was yet another ancient cave floor, with the fragments of wolf and other carnivore bones along with bison, camel, mammoth, and so forth. And among them were flint points that were utterly different from the Folsom points: they were leaf-shaped with a pronounced shoulder, less skillfully made, with a single notch on one side for attaching them to a shaft of wood or bone. These points vaguely resembled much earlier leaf-shaped points found in many parts of western Europe and attributed to a culture called Solutrean. With the points were a variety of other tools, including what appeared to be hide scrapers.
Below the Sandia Man level was another layer, this one of white clay— from another wet period. Geologists working with Hibben suggested that the alternating layers of wet and dry origin corresponded with the oscillating advance and retreat of the glacier over thousands of years and thus came up with the date of 25,000 years for Sandia Man, plus or minus some 30 percent—which is a margin large enough to call the entire matter into question. At the time (1946) that Hibben published a popular book about early humans in the New World called The Lost Americans, there was still some doubt as to whether Folsom points were earlier or later than Clovis points, but his date of 25,000 years certainly made Sandia Man older than anything previously found. In a book called Early Man in the New World, updated and reissued by the American Museum of Natural History as late as 1962, the authors wrote that “there can be no doubt about the meaning of Frank C. Hibben's discoveries in Sandia Cave, New Mexico, in 1936.… The Sandia point is, of course, definitely older than Folsom.”
Alas and alack for Frank Hibben and others who put their money on Sandia Man, the aforementioned Vance Haynes and his colleague George Agogino began in 1961 to reinvestigate Sandia Cave. Already there had been a good deal of controversy over Sandia Man, some saying that a mere handful of artifacts was hardly a basis for postulating an entire “culture,” while others wondered if the Sandia excavators had gotten the geology of all those layers right. Meanwhile, only one other Sandia site, known as the Lucy site, had been discovered—also in New Mexico and also excavated by Frank Hibben. By then as well, the Solutrean connection had beendeemed unlikely if not impossible. But many were still comfortable with the notion that a Sandia Man could exist.
Haynes and Agogino did not complete their written report for nearly twenty-five years, but in 1986 it appeared in Smithsonian Contributions to Anthropology, and it was devastating. In brief, the Sandia “cultural” layer immediately below the layer of yellow ocher—with its scrapers, projectile points, and animal bone fragments—was the result of what is called “bioturbation,” meaning in this case that animals had been burrowing vertically through several layers, carrying bones and artifacts down below through the ocher from the Folsom layer to the so-called Sandia layer. Nothing was found in the Sandia layer that dated earlier than about 14,000 years ago at most. Haynes and Agogino suggested that the “Sandia” scrapers and points had probably been used in more recent times by people mining ocher. Probably they had used the points to etch ocher blocks that could then be lifted out to be taken away and traded. In short, there was no Sandia Man.
The authors wrote that they had a “hope that this work will restore Sandia Cave to its rightful place in American archaeology,” by which they no doubt meant the scrap heap. Of course, within the archaeological community, the word had gotten out long before the Haynes and Agogino report saw the light of day, and there was considerable talk—not for public consumption—about the unstated conclusion Haynes and Agogino had reached.
Looking into the murk in 1994 for The New Yorker (which, it goes without saying, is a far cry from a scientific journal), writer Douglas Preston interviewed as many people as he could reach who had been present at the original digs at Sandia Cave. When early questions arose, Hibben had insisted, for example, that his findings had been independently confirmed by a leading geologist, Kirk Bryan, and an experienced archaeologist, Frank H. H. Roberts, who had both worked extensively at the site. But eyewitnesses told Preston that Roberts had been there perhaps twice, and the same for Bryan. It turned out also that each time Hibben had sent material from Sandia Cave off for radiocarbon dating, he had sent mislabeled artifacts or committed other errors. Hibben had evidently made similar inexplicable goofs in other areas such as Alaska, where he claimed to have found a Clovis point on a pebbly beach in process of being washed awaybut later investigators found no such beach, much less any other sign of human habitation.
Lewis Binford, a man who turned out to be a major figure in archaeology, who was hired by the University of New Mexico over Hibben's objections, and who had been the one in the radiocarbon lab who had pointed out Hibben's earliest Sandia samples were flawed, was quoted by Preston as thinking of Hibben as a “curiosity.” Binford wondered why “he went through all these charades to make himself important?” In all, the weight of the evidence, however circumstantial, points to at least one, if not more, instances of what could charitably be called “scientific license” committed by the great old storyteller. Sandia Man, in the end, has now vanished from all but long-out-of-date textbooks.
THE MAIN MAN
Louis S. B. Leakey, the grand student of early human evolution from Kenya, was legendary at spotting archaeological treasures. So proficiently did he find the remains of early hominids from millions of years ago in such places as Tanzania's Olduvai Gorge (in particular, the diminutive two-million-year-old Homo habilis) that he was considered to have a special attribute: Leakey's Luck. That it had something to do with perception, not just luck, and that his perceptiveness was not restricted only to fossil remains, is attested to by his plucking a young Englishwoman essentially out of a crowd and sending her off to Africa to see what she might be able to find out about the then wholly mysterious lives of wild chimpanzees. Thus he set into motion the twentieth century's most accomplished observer of animal behavior: Jane Goodall.
That Leakey's luck in finding fossils may also have had more to do with his wife, Mary, is highly likely. She was, it turned out, by far the more technically proficient of the two and made some of the fossil discoveries that Leakey named and interpreted. However, she preferred to stay out of the limelight. As Meltzer succinctly put it, whatever its source, Leakey's luck ran out in the Mojave Desert, and again Vance Haynes would play a role.
Leakey was among those Old World archaeologists who thought their American colleagues were a bit narrow-minded, a bit provincial in theircertainty that Clovis Man had been the first American. Leakey saw no reason why human beings had not lived in the Americas long before the current American party line said, and he took great delight in saying so to American archaeologists. In 1963, while lecturing in California, he met Ruth de Ette Simpson of the San Bernardino County Museum, who had come across what she thought looked like some very old, primitive stone artifacts near Calico Hills in the Mojave Desert. Leakey enthusiastically accompanied Simpson to the site, a great fanlike accretion of soil, rock, and other debris that had washed out of a canyon. Called the Yermo Fan, it was at the time thought to be the product of the recent ice ages. Leakey marched around the site, finding Ruth Simpson's artifacts (which were chipped cobbles) unimpressive, but then he spotted a couple of chalcedony fragments in a trench someone had dug with a bulldozer.
Louis Leakey (right) and Ruth Simpson examining alleged artifacts from Calico Hills, California.
“Dig here,” he said, somewhat in the manner of Babe Ruth pointing his bat to the left field seats of Yankee Stadium prior to hitting a home run, and went back to Africa. Returning to the Yermo Fan later, Leakey chose three rocks from the thousands excavators had meanwhile selected as possibleartifacts. On a later trip he chose forty-three as probable artifacts and, seeing burn marks on some cobbles that appeared to hav
e been placed in a circle, pronounced them a hearth. All the stone “tools” Leakey found worthy were made of chalcedony, a form of quartz, suggesting that the tool-makers had been selective about materials. A geologist calculated that the rocks in the Yermo Fan were some 50,000 to 100,000 years old. To Leakey, the notion of the ancientness of mankind in America was demonstrated. (It is said that, in regard to the Calico Hill finds, Leakey's wife, Mary, thought her husband was nuts.)
In 1968, Leakey arranged to have about a hundred archaeologists and geologists meet in San Bernardino to evaluate this exciting evidence, which suggested that human beings had arrived in the New World about the time when anatomically modern human beings were emerging in Africa. In other words, the first Americans had to have been Neanderthals or some as yet unknown Neanderthal contemporaries. This was perhaps the biggest site visit in history, making the visits of the Brixham Cave experts to Abbeville look like small potatoes. Among the visiting geologists was C. Vance Haynes. Haynes was highly skeptical of the Calico Hills tools, which, he said, evidenced edge angles more appropriate to naturally shattered rocks than those created by human hands. He also faulted the interpretation of their geological setting. In fact, Haynes thought the desert fan environment a poor choice for human occupancy but an ideal setting for the creation of what archaeologists call ecofacts or nature facts. In this, Haynes was right, just as Hrdlíčka had been right.
Thereafter, except for the San Bernardino excavators and Leakey himself, no one put much stock in the Calico Hills artifacts. That the “tools” all had the artificial look of something handmade could as easily be explained by the fact that only artificial-looking rocks had been selected from the hundreds of thousands of broken ones. And the breakage was most easily explained as the result of rocks clattering and tumbling out of the canyon in a great rock-crushing cascade—that is, they were broken by natural forces. (Decades earlier, a French paleontologist, Marcelin Boule, had grown impatient with a great number of claims about such putative “paleoliths” in Europe. He threw a collection of flint cobbles into a cement mixer, which soon cranked out a splendid collection of prehistoric “artifacts.”) As for the fact that the Calico Hills “artifacts” were all made of chalcedony, it was pointedout that chalcedony was chipped more readily than the rest of the stone types in the fan and thus looked most artificial. Finally, the circle of stones Leakey had pegged as a hearth turned out to be just that, a circle of stones deposited naturally, the burn marks being the result of a brush fire. Later, the last nail to be driven in, the Yermo Fan was discovered to be 200,000 years old, meaning it had come into being prior to the existence even of Neanderthals. Into the eighties, some diehard believers soldiered on, excavating at Calico Hills, but virtually no one today thinks of the Calico Hills site as anything but a bunch of rocks. But not all sites that were taken to be preClovis needed Vance Haynes to shoot them down.
THE DEFLESHER THAT WASN ' T
For centuries, it has been widely assumed, with good reason, that humans arrived in this hemisphere via the Bering Strait. Even without being a land bridge, it is the shortest distance (ninety miles) between Asia and North America. Logic long suggested, and still does, that signs of this human migration should be visible, at least on the North American side of the strait. Somewhere up there one should find some stone projectile, a precursor of the strange and beautiful Clovis point. And in fact numerous sites of temporary human habitation have been found in Alaska. (For reasons that should be obvious, archaeological work was fairly slow to take place in Siberia.) In 1966, an Alaskan find promised to show a pre-Clovis human presence in the far north.
That year a Canadian paleontologist, Charles R. Harrington, was searching for mammal bones in the Old Crow Basin, the remains of an ancient glacial lake in the Yukon, where he soon found a caribou leg bone that had been fashioned into a deflesher, a tool used in hide processing. About ten inches long, one of its ends had serrations or teeth carved into the edge. Harrington also found some mammoth and other bones that might also have been altered by humans; they had cut marks that appeared to have been made by sharpened implements of one kind or another. He obtained a radiocarbon date on the caribou bone that said it was 27,000 years old. That meant people had to have been in the Yukon 15,000 years before the first known appearance of Clovis Man—a real shocker.
Almost immediately the skeptics were at work, casting a blanket of doubt over the entire matter. One problem was that the deflesher and the other bone objects had been found in sediments that themselves had been transported some distance by floodwaters, so exactly where they and the supposed artifacts had come from was not known. The flake scars on the bone “tools” might have been made by human hands, but they might also have been the result of predators or even just the natural grinding from glacial geological processes. Why, some asked, would the people alleged to have made the markings have only bone tools and not stone tools? There arose a quasi-experimental side dispute over the bones; Robson Bonnichsen, an archaeologist then at the University of Maine (now at Oregon State University), said that the Cree Indians left the same kinds of markings on bones from which they extracted marrow, and presumably other tribal people did the same in the Yukon. Lewis Binford, then at the University of New Mexico and known to be an implacable foe of what he considered mushy, nonscientific thinking in archaeology, pointed out that in Africa and Asia scavengers and carnivores such as hyenas and lions leave the same spiral markings on bones from which they extract marrow.
An ever-darkening shadow of doubt loomed over all the “artifacts” except the deflesher, which no one disputed was a real artifact. But then another radiocarbon date was obtained on the deflesher, and it appeared that a major error had been made in the original dating. It was difficult in the early days of carbon dating to date bone accurately, bone presenting an array of problems—then and now—that charcoal does not. For one thing, labs were not sure at the time what fraction of a bone to date. The deflesher was deemed a mere 1,300 years old, quite likely a tool made by the not-so-ancient ancestors of the local Kutchin Indians. As the years passed, even Harrington himself came to doubt his early interpretation. The Old Crow site became a textbook example of the difficulties in interpreting very early American sites.
THE FAITHFUL OPTIMIST
A man who had no apparent difficulties interpreting early American sites was Richard Stockton “Scotty” MacNeish. A former Golden Gloves championand as colorful a figure as existed in New World archaeology, MacNeish worked for sixty years from the High Arctic to the Peruvian highlands and from the Atlantic to the Pacific on sites spanning the length and breadth of North and South America. By his personal estimate Scotty logged more than 5,600 days in the field.
In the 1950s and 1960s, he gained fame by mounting one of the most successful multidisciplinary projects ever in order to track the history of the domestication of maize (corn) back to the Tehuacán Valley in Mexico. Though he retained a strong interest in early domesticated plants (when he died in an auto accident in 2001, at the age of eighty-two, he was on the trail of the origins of rice), he also turned his attention to caves, rockshelters, and open sites where he hoped to find very early artifacts.
R. S. “Scotty” MacNeish (left) and J. M. Adovasio at Meadowcroft Rockshelter.
He was convinced that there was no reason why people could not have been in the Northern Hemisphere at least 30,000 or 40,000 years ago, and he began searching for pre-Clovis sites. Much of his work in subsequent years was in South America, and we will look in on Scotty in Chapter 8 on that major arena in the quest for the first Americans. There he would make a series of discoveries that were all met with a great deal of skepticism. Undaunted,he headed for New Mexico in the 1990s and a promising cave that had been discovered in 1975 and had long been on his list of places to dig. Called Pendejo Cave, it sits at the foot of a limestone cliff some three hundred feet above a normally dry arroyo near the town of Orogrande. The arroyo is part of a drainage that debouches into the eastern part of the
huge, desolate Tularosa Basin. This is the home of the deathly white gypsum sands of White Sands National Monument, and not far to the west lies the White Sands Missile Range. The cave itself is thirty-six feet wide, running approximately north–south, and is some twenty feet deep and eight feet high at its highest.
In the early 1990s, newspapers blazoned the news that MacNeish had found in this cave evidence that humans had been in New Mexico as early as 35,000 years ago. Subsequently, MacNeish and his staff identified some twenty-six separate layers containing an abundance of faunal remains as well as what MacNeish believed were unequivocal indications of a human presence. These included firepits and hearths, stone, bone and fiber artifacts, human fingerprints on unbaked clay pellets, and even a human hair. A remarkable sequence of seventy-two radiocarbon dates indicated that the cave had been used by humans from the recent past to beyond 51,000 years ago. However, as was usual with MacNeish's discoveries, what appeared unequivocal to him was extremely problematic to most other archaeologists who visited the site.
Many believed the fireplaces were really the result of natural blazes, most thought that the early artifacts either were not man-made or had sifted down from later deposits, and virtually all questioned the hair (rumor has it that it came from a bear) and the origin and dating of the alleged fingerprints. In short, while there are definitely indications of a human presence at this locality after about 12,000 years ago (which would still make it a pre-Clovis site, by the way)—including fiber artifacts analyzed by my colleague at Mercyhurst College, David Hyland—few believe the site was occupied before this time.
The First Americans Page 17