The First Americans

by James Adovasio

  But the gnats still buzz. Recently, Stuart Fiedel, a previously little-known archaeologist now working for a private salvage-archaeology firm in Virginia, has actually agreed that the Meadowcroft dates are correct butmaintains that the context and association of the artifacts and ecofacts are flawed because the stratigraphy of Stratum IIa is hopelessly mixed. Fiedel has no field experience in Paleo-Indian sites or complex late Pleistocene or Holocene sites. He has published one rarely used prehistory textbook but otherwise has no apparent credentials. Now, thirty years after the fact, he feels confident in raising a problem that was somehow overlooked by the hundreds of archaeologists and geologists who visited the site during the excavation. I haven't responded in print to his allegation, though I suggested at a public archaeological meeting that its author would be well advised to reserve some space in the State Home for the Terminally Bewildered. The last I heard, he had written another attack on Meadowcroft and was unsuccessfully shopping it around, trying to find a professional journal that would publish it.

  There is but one reason this archaeological farce continues. It is not the script—that is, the data. It is the actors, many of whom have invested so heavily in the canonical view of Clovis primacy that the acknowledgment of a new story—any new story—somehow threatens the integrity of their life's work. Depending on your point of view, this situation is either tragic or comic, but it has never been science.

  All this time we have been speaking almost entirely about North America, but south of here, beyond a land bridge far narrower than the Bering land bridge, is a huge continent. This too is a place where, recently, the murky question of the first Americans—and of course the Clovis First dogma—has received a stunning blast of light. The view from South America has always shed a somewhat different light on the entire process of the peopling of the New World.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  ANOTHER ANGLE OF VIEW

  I grew up in Youngstown, Ohio, when it held (it may still) the record for the number of car bombings in a year. In fact, according to local lore, car bombing was invented in Youngstown. It was a mob town and, despite several well-intentioned and ongoing reform efforts, still is. As a little kid growing up and going on through high school, I knew and associated with some very hard cases, which probably contributed to my being able to survive the graduate years with The Dark Lord. In any case, such a childhood instills a certain amount of pugnacity in a person, and I have always pretty much responded in kind to bullies and other people who knock the work of my colleagues, teammates, and students.

  At times the dogmatic skepticism leveled at Meadowcroft has seemed more like ad hominem harassment than science, more like abuse than a search for the truth. But the abuse I took was nothing compared to what my “colleagues” have handed out to a friend of mine, Tom Dillehay, an archaeologist from the University of Kentucky in Lexington who had the audacity to announce not only a pre-Clovis find, but one from South America.

  Tom has been accused of virtually every lapse an archaeologist can make; in fact, he has been slandered and libeled by some colleagues here in America who went so far as to accuse him of faking evidence. But by finding pre-Clovis human habitation six thousand miles from the Bering landbridge and by failing to buy into the view that it was Clovis hunters who carried All Things to the benighted regions of Central and South America, he unwittingly brought into the open the final raging, incoherent moans of the last of the Clovis First diehards. Judging by the obloquy thrown his way, one would be forgiven for thinking that American archaeologists, as a group of actual people developing a body of knowledge, may harbor just a teensy-weensy gringo-style bias against South America. European archaeologists think that the American preoccupation of these past seventy-odd years with Clovis Man is typically American in its lack of sophistication and headstrong provincialism. Through the years, Latin American archaeology has played an important if often (in North America) overlooked role in our understanding of who the first Americans might have been and when they arrived. Today, Dillehay's site in South America is one of the few stanchions on which the undisputable pre-Clovis presence of humans in the New World rests.

  Tom Dillehay.

  Curiosity about when people might have arrived in Latin America was minimal in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, largely because travelers, antiquarians, and later people who could call themselves archaeologists tended to be preoccupied with the fantastic architectural remainsof the great civilizations of Peru and Central America. One exception was a Danish botanist, Wilhelm Peter Lund, who in the 1830s devoted himself to unraveling the history of mankind in Brazil. He explored hundreds of caves, eventually coming across rock paintings of “primitive” animals and also fossil bones, the remains of extinct cold-weather creatures nonetheless found there in the tropics. He came to the conclusion that there had been a great cataclysm—earthquakes followed by a gigantic tidal wave, the melting of the poles, and other global changes, not to mention the Flood— that had put an end to the antediluvian world and its creatures.

  Once the planet had calmed down and the waters had risen and subsided, God set about the great re-creation of life, leaving some creatures extinct and, of course, introducing mankind. In all, the ante- and the post-diluvian worlds must have taken about five or six thousand years each, so the earth was 12,000 years old. Lund also concluded that humans had lived in Brazil for a very long time and that they must have arrived from the Old World. For reasons that probably had nothing to do with his paleontological efforts, Lund, who was greatly admired in Brazil and Europe as a botanist, eventually went mad and died tormented by imaginary snakes and army ants.

  Little else was said or done about the origins of humans in Latin America until the late nineteenth century. The nations of South America did not develop as vigorous a tradition of government-funded science as the United States, and such marginal fields as archaeology and paleontology tended to be underfunded in the universities. Much of the actual archaeological work in South America in these centuries was carried out by foreigners, chiefly Europeans. As we saw, the German Max Uhle carried out sophisticated chronological studies of much more recent cultures than the late Pleistocene in Peru and elsewhere and thereby helped to put South American archaeology—and archaeology in general—on a firmer methodological footing.

  THE MAD ARGENTINE

  In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, there emerged on the South American scene a man whom Vine Deloria, Jr., would find acceptable if notdownright heroic. This was the Argentine Florentino Ameghino, a onetime schoolteacher and self-taught geologist, anthropologist, and paleontolo-gist, who, on his twenty-first birthday in 1875, presented the Argentine Scientific Society with the fossil bones of a human that he had found on the pampa. Pressing on with his researches, he later traveled to Europe, where he announced that not only was humanity very old in South America, but it had arisen there and spread to the rest of the world.

  His rationale was that he had found human remains from the Tertiary era (the period before the Pleistocene), and since no other Tertiary human remains had been reported from anywhere else, the Tertiary Man from the southern half of South America was obviously the first. He proposed, in chronological order, first a nonhuman progenitor, Homunculus patagonicus, then some prehominids called Tetraprohomo, followed by various species of Homo, and ending up with Homo pampaeus. According to his argument, Homo pampaeus had migrated north across the recently uplifted isthmus of Panama into North America and from there across the Bering land bridge to Asia, where one branch had become the Mongols and another branch had continued across an unidentified land bridge to Europe, where it had become the white man.

  In 1910, Ameghino described his elaborate taxonomy to an international conference of Americanists, and it caught the baleful eye of none other than the Smithsonian's redoubtable Aleš Hrdlíčka, who made a special trip south to point out the absurdity of Homo pampaeus (and all his imagined predecessors stretching back into the Miocene). One of his tactic
s was, as usual, to cast doubt on the attribution of Ameghino's “fossil-bearing” terrain as Tertiary. In 1912, Hrdlíčka and Holmes published Early Man in South America, which demolished Ameghino's thesis in an academic version of a mob hit. Poor old Florentino didn't have a chance.

  It did not take North Americans to bring doubt and scorn down on Ameghino's notions. His own countrymen—including a zoologist at the University of La Plata, Carlos Bruch—were highly skeptical as well. Bruch pointed out that Ameghino's protohuman femur was in fact that of a carnivorous mammal and that one of his primitive human skulls was, if looked at from the proper angle, that of a modern human. Many of the bones Ameghino pegged as early on the human scale were those of monkeys,and the stone tools he found (mostly irregularly chipped cobbles) were of modern manufacture, or not tools at all.

  Nonetheless, the notion of Tertiary Man in South America breathed on, if fitfully. As late as 1934, a paleontologist at the Buenos Aires natural history museum claimed on the basis of a couple of molars found near the Atlantic Ocean in Miramar and a piece of jaw found elsewhere that there had been a South American creature, Homo chapadmalensis, that was far older than any such human species in Europe.

  South Americans then tired of the entire area of prehistoric archaeology before the great Peruvian and other Latin American civilizations, and dropped it for a few years. No one heard any more of Tertiary Man in South America. Of course, by this time Clovis Man had come to light from Blackwater Draw in Arizona, and soon enough it had become largely unarguable, at least in the United States, that he had descended upon South America with overpowering speed. As the prevailing theory went, some battalions from the greater Clovis force must have charged across the isthmus at Panama and blitzed yet another continent in a matter of centuries, or maybe just decades. In a calendrical trice, all the big mammals of South America were said to have been slaughtered or made extinct. And the only proof was that small but—significantly—fluted points were scattered here and there across the continent, even as far south as Tierra del Fuego. Q.E.D., right?

  A HINT OF IMPERIALISM

  Most archaeologists in South America are not especially uncomfortable with the idea that humans probably arrived in the New World from Asia via the Bering land bridge, which is to say they reached North America first and only then migrated into South America. But a rapid-fire blitzkrieg by Clovis hunters seemed a bit too much like a familiar story in Latin America: Yankee imperialism.

  By the late 1950s, Latin American archaeology was faced with the same partisan climate as existed in North America: those who swore by the Clovis First school of thought and those who, for various reasons, soughtpredecessors to Clovis. Danièle Lavallée, a French archaeologist with more than thirty-five years of work in South America, has pointed out that some in the conservative camp “have insinuated that less rigor is displayed in excavation methods and that there is less fuss over the validity of data, especially absolute dates, in South America and Europe. This argument,” she adds with a nearly audible sigh, “borders on arrogance.” And as she points out in her recent book, The First South Americans, the conservatives of the North have long had the weight of evidence on their side—dozens of Clovis sites and hundreds of carbon-14 dates—while those who envision earlier arrivals have a mere handful of sites, some of which have only a few or even just one carbon-14 date to go on. The story, then, is not unlike that in the United States: many sites alleged to be pre-Clovis are greeted with great skepticism, especially from those north of Mexico.

  Perhaps the most merciless of the skeptics has been Thomas Lynch, once of Cornell University and now of the Brazos County Museum of east Texas. Lynch spent much of his professional life working in South America and commenting on the work of others there. In 1972, he found some skeletal remains in a northern Peruvian cave that were thought to date to 10,500 B.P. This was duly announced with the proper fanfare, although subsequent work showed that the radiocarbon date was far too old and that the stratigraphy had been significantly disturbed. Burned by the criticism that arose over his error, he became a relentless and highly influential critic of all such early dates, finding disturbed stratigraphy and other flaws everywhere he looked. He has been joined from time to time by the familiar bête noire of northern pre-Clovis claims, Vance Haynes, who, as noted earlier, also became a Clovis First stalwart after being similarly burned. It is said that converts to a religion are the most zealous, and accordingly these two converts have done their best to make mincemeat of much of the South American archaeology directed at the earliest inhabitants of that continent.

  It is important to keep in mind, though, that whatever actually took place in the peopling of South America, it happened in a place much different from North America. In South America, very different effects derived from the glacier's advance to its maximum some 18,000 to 20,000 years ago, and the subsequent climatic changes as it receded had very different effects. Here was a very different stage for life from the one up north.

  GLACIAL SOUTH AMERICA

  The route from North to South America was straightforward, even at the time of the glacial maximum, and it hardly presented a problem for migratory people or other animals. The isthmus of Panama was a far wider thoroughfare than it is now because the waters of the sea were far lower. What glaciers existed were confined to the Andean cordillera and specifically to the mountains of Peru and then, south beyond a largely ice-free region, along the southernmost part of the chain and Patagonia down to Tierra del Fuego. At about 14,000 years B.P., the glaciers began to recede, and by 10,000 B.P. they had melted to the present configuration of snowcapped peaks. The effects were profound, except, oddly enough, in the great Amazon rain forest—a densely packed forest of stunning diversity of plant and animal species and a nearly debilitating humidity. Before widespread clearing for cattle raising and agriculture began in the twentieth century, it stretched for mile after mile after mile, a huge green carpet drained by thousands and thousands of streams and rivers, all tributaries to the huge Amazon River. Here and there are pockets, like islands, of drier savanna lands or areas of grass and sparsely sprinkled trees—the sort of environment where today in Africa you see lions and gazelles.

  Until quite recently, paleoecologists felt that at the end of the Pleistocene, the picture was the opposite, something like a photographic negative, with large areas of savanna and pockets of rain forest. Today, up-to-date paleoecological studies have shown that the forest covered much the same area as today, meaning that it has long been more resistant to relatively minor climatic changes than previously expected. But most other parts of the continent were subject to fairly rapid change brought on by the sudden melting of what comparatively little glacial ice there was, combined with a bout of volcanic action that struck the western side of the continent and the flooding of the coasts as sea levels rose. (This was, of course, quite different from in the north, where, as we saw, what had been a busy mosaic of habitats gave way, especially west of the Mississippi, to a large area of relatively uniform and comparatively species-poor prairie.) Such changes would have caused displacements of whatever humans and animals were present and broughtabout major changes in the way people went about the business of making a living. Even without local or regional upheavals, though, the continent was already a place of vast ecological diversity.

  As the ice melted back to its present state in the mountains, for example, a new realm opened up for both animals and humans to exploit. The now ice-free highlands in the Andes and elsewhere offered opportunities for species and summoned physiological changes in human groups, such as much larger lungs and new foraging strategies, just as the frozen wastes of the Arctic favor circulatory systems more conserving of heat. The biggest game animals at such heights were llamas and their relatives—hardly big game in any Pleistocene sense. Hunters no doubt chased down mammals of various sizes and species, using various means depending on the prey and the nature of the habitat. The bolo surely did not originate in the close quarters of the rain
forest. And surely Clovis Man, that turbocharged hunter with the big, beautiful spear points, the fearless killer of giants, would almost surely have expired from frustration in a tropical rain forest. There the longest straight shot he could achieve would have been less than a first down in football, and his sun-dappled prey would have disappeared in the shadows while overhead the monkeys and parrots screeched and squawked in cosmic derision.

  Logic aside, what is the modern archaeological evidence for Clovis-style and pre-Clovis people in South America?

  THE NEED FOR TIME

  A great deal of prehistoric archaeological work has been done in South America in the latter part of the twentieth century. Large numbers of sites have been excavated, and it has become clear that by about 11,000 years ago, people had made their way to most parts of the South American continent and had developed a variety of ways of making a living in response to the variety of landscapes they found themselves in.

  That they could have accomplished this all in two hundred or even five hundred years strains credulity. This seemingly impossibly short time to travel some ten thousand miles has been a point of contention ever since the 1930s, thanks to Junius Bird, an archaeologist at the American Museumof Natural History in New York (some think he was the actual prototype of Indiana Jones, though Bird was far more mild-mannered in real life). In the late thirties, he found so-called fish-tail fluted points, along with some big mammal bones, sealed off by a rock spall in Fell's Cave in Tierra del Fuego. He assumed these points were some 5,500 years old, but when, after World War II, carbon dating put them at more than 10,000 years B.P., a few people began to question the speed of the Clovis migration. Tierra del Fuego seemed an awfully long way for Clovis Man to go in something like a thousand years, but the points were indeed fluted. And then, essentially burying the questioners, Paul Martin's Clovis blitzkrieg theory came along shortly thereafter—indeed, in the nick of time.