The First Americans

by James Adovasio

  Proponents of a coastal route for the First Americans were, of course, overjoyed. Although none of the evidence put people in actual boats proceeding down the coast before 12,500 years ago, at which point some were living a bit inland at Monte Verde, it confirmed that such a route had been possible, even plausible, to some minds. Added to this came what some might claim as another kind of evidence—the mitochondrial DNA from North American brown bears.

  It had evidently long been thought that the four genetically distinct populations of brown bears in North America originated in four separate invasions of the continent. But researchers from Oxford University, studying brown bears frozen in the permafrost for 36,000 years, found that all four genetic strains were present, suggesting a single invasion some 36,000 years ago. The Oxford scientist in charge, Alan Cooper, noted that bears and humans have much the same ecological requirements and that brownbears, significantly, migrated down the coast of Alaska, not through any ice-free corridor. “Humans,” Cooper is reported to have said, “might have done the same thing.”

  Fanciful portrayal of Solutreans en route to the New World.

  I doubt that brown bear ecology has ever before been offered to further a major archaeological theory, and coastal proponents are not likely to make too much of Cooper's speculation. Still, it is nice to know. Even less likely to be taken seriously is another maritime theory for the peopling of the continent that comes to us via the Smithsonian Institution, the former home of that ferocious doubter of a century ago, Aleš Hrdlíčka. There, the head of the anthropology department, Dennis Stanford, along with Bruce Bradley, an archaeological consultant and acclaimed lithic specialist from the Southwest, have proposed an Atlantic crossing for the progenitors of Clovis Man.

  A number of phenomena that have come to light in the last fifty years or so have brought them to this astonishing hypothesis. As early as the 1950s and early 1960s, it was realized that Clovis sites were most common in the southeastern portion of the United States. Although he was not taken very seriously at the time, back then an archaeologist named R. J. Mason proposed that it was probably in the Southeast that the characteristic Clovis technology had arisen. As we have seen, the best guess now about Clovis technology is that it itself was what traveled so widely, not the people who used it. In other words, once it came into being—and it may well have been invented in the Southeast—it was exported from group to group very quickly, and as it moved throughout the hemisphere, it changed to one degree or another by virtue of either local requirements or Brian Fagan's technological drift.

  At about the same time as Mason's notion, others noted that if they weren't fluted, Clovis points would look quite a lot like the points made by people who lived from about 25,000 to 18,000 years ago along the coast of southern France, Portugal, and Spain—the Solutreans. These people seem to have arrived in Europe, perhaps from Asia, with an entirely new and unprecedented means of making stone points: pressure-flaking. By pressing a piece of bone or wood against the surface of the flint, they flaked off slivers across the tool, much as those other master flint knappers—the makers of Clovis and Folsom points—did. They made exquisitely chipped points in the shape of laurel and willow leaves, some with a stem on thebase for attaching the point to a shaft. While very well made, the Solutrean points are not quite as exquisite as Clovis points. Could they somehow have been the precursor of Clovis?

  Back then, however, the Solutrean connection seemed particularly unlikely since there was such a long hiatus between the most recent date for the Solutreans (18,000 years ago) and the oldest date for human habitation in North America (11,200). But that hiatus has now been narrowed down, perhaps to the vanishing point, by the finds at Monte Verde, Meadowcroft, Topper, Saltville, and Cactus Hill. So Dennis and Bruce reframed the Solutrean connection, postulating that near the end of their time on the Iberian peninsula, the Solutrean folk took to the sea in some sort of boat and headed north, skirting the glacial ice in places like Greenland, then south, fetching up somewhere near the Carolinas and, within give or take a few thousand years, coming up with fluting. Dennis, who has a gift of gab something like that of Jesse Jackson, likes to say, “Iberians, not Siberians.”

  The day back in 1999 that Dennis broached this to a bunch of us he had invited to the Smithsonian, most present wondered what drug Dennis was on that day. There are some people, such as Larry Straus of the University of New Mexico, a longtime specialist on Solutrean lithics, who say—not to put too fine a point on it—that Dennis and Bruce are nuts. Straus says that despite a few “superficial” similarities, the lithic technologies of Solutrean and Clovis folk are profoundly different. Additionally, the truly diagnostic Solutrean “signature” forms—the leaf-shaped, shouldered, and stemmed points—don't show up at all in Clovis sites, and while Solutreans made lanceolate bifaces shaped vaguely like Clovis points, they never fluted them. Others point out that the Solutreans lived as far east in Europe as the Rhône River, but never managed to get across it; it seems unlikely that people who couldn't get across a river would have taken to sea. In his own defense, Dennis will tell you that nothing about his idea is impossible and that he just wants to make sure that archaeologists don't overlook any possibilities now that the Clovis First model is dead, that that “boring story” need no longer be told, and that the peopling-of-America question is wide open. Fair enough, I suppose, especially since the technology to build blue-water boats with sails almost certainly existed in the upper Paleolithic, and, as Dennis's wife, Peggy Jodry, rightfully points out, archaeologists have all too often ignored water travel.

  The trouble with coastal routes across either the Pacific or the Atlantic is that at present there is basically no evidence at all that either actually happened. A single point found in the water off British Columbia with a single date of 10,000 B.P. is hardly something to bet the mortgage on. In fact, as David Madsen has pointed out in a forthcoming book, Entering America, the Pacific coastal route, which is the one taken as a serious idea, has come about not from actual evidence, but chiefly as a “default” alternative necessary since the Clovis First model has been discredited. But there are yet other significant problems with the coastal theory in terms of its timing.

  First of all, even if the maritime pioneers got to the west coast of the present-day United States by, say, 13,500 years B.P., it seems unlikely that they could have reached western Pennsylvania by that same time or earlier. They would have had to march east across the Rocky Mountains, the Great Plains, and the Mississippi Valley, a distance of some 2,500 miles. Another problem with the coastal theory is that it accounts only for pioneers accustomed to coastal foraging and essentially one entry. On the other hand, genetic evidence, for starters, makes it now appear likely that there were multiple entries. Some might well have been people from a coastal, maritime tradition, but others probably started off as inland people. As Madsen points out, “It is likely that the colonization of the Americas involved continuous contact between donor populations and immigrant populations, since the probability of a single small group surviving is very low.”

  One suggestion that arises from time to time is that people came straight across the ocean. Although he does not take that idea very seriously, Dennis Stanford notes that people have in fact proven that you could float across the Atlantic without much effort. Thor Heyerdahl, who made a career out of confusing possibility with history, suggested that people from Easter Island could easily have floated over to the South American coast. Of course, even if evidence existed that they had done so (and it doesn't), it would have had nothing to do with the earliest settlement of the Americas. The settlement of Easter Island and the rest of the South Pacific islands and archipelagos took place within the last few millennia, not anywhere near time as deep as Clovis. Madsen dismisses all the notions of what might be called oceanic drift: “It is conceivably possible that a lost boat-load of seafarers could have washed up on the shores of the New World, albeit very unlikely, but the presence of continuous trans-oc
eanicexchange at this time depth will have to be demonstrated before these colonization scenarios can be taken seriously.”

  PRE - MAX

  Yet another hypothesis has recently been put forth for consideration by David Madsen and a variety of colleagues. Let us at least assume that, one way or another, the first Americans came from Asia. We can also guess with some confidence that at the glacial maximum, beginning about 20,000 years ago, Siberia was not only an awful place but for all intents and purposes, an uninhabitable one. This even applies for people who had bone needles and could sew skins together into tailored fur suits, and the same is to be said for Beringia and the better part of Alaska. People had moved into subarctic Siberia when it was warmer, between about 30,000 and 20,000 years ago, with most of the known sites dating from 24,000 to 20,000 B.P., just before the last glacial maximum (or LGM). There they developed the techniques to make a living in cold desert-steppe landscape. After that period, traces of people are not found; they all appear to have moved south again when the far north became uninhabitable. No one in his right mind would have gone there then, and people who did would likely have perished without a trace.

  So suppose people began to move across Beringia starting about 24,000 years ago, tracking the mammoths and other creatures big and small they were used to hunting. What would have awaited them on the American side? Ice. And lots of it. Starting about 30,000 years ago, the Laurentide glacier extended across the northern Canadian plains and heaved up against the Canadian Rockies. In other words, there was no ice-free corridor through that part of the continent until after 11,000 B.P.

  But it seems there was indeed one ice-free way to go south, along the north–south lowlands that lie between the interiors of Alaska and the Yukon and the unglaciated valleys of the Cordillera in the Pacific Northwest. Up until about 20,000 years ago, these valleys may well have remained habitable, even as the Cordilleran ice sheet began to coalesce out of many separate montane glaciers. Timing is, of course, everything: if the valleys were still passable by about 20,000 B.P., the colonization of theAmericas could have begun about that time or earlier. But if the valleys were impassable by about 22,000 B.P., a pre-LGM entry seems less likely.

  This pre-LGM entry also depends on the speed with which hunters and gatherers could be expected to expand into uninhabited space. Many mathematically elegant models have been devised to determine such migration rates: they include population growth rates as well as diffusion rates and figures for such arcane matters as optimal foraging theory and estimates of edible biomass in the neighborhood. A couple of early models agreed that foragers could have expanded from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, some ten thousand miles, in a thousand years; another said it would have taken two thousand years max to fill both continents. That's about ten miles a year, which hardly seems excessive when thought of as actual distance traversed each year, even when these new Americans would be passing through many different ecosystems, each with its own climate conditions, prey animals, and so forth. Presumably, people newly adapted to the subarctic conditions of Siberia 24,000 years ago could have sustained the same migratory rate across Beringia and into Alaska, especially given the fact that the same conditions (weather, animals, etc.) prevailed throughout the region. Little new would have had to be learned.

  But as David Madsen points out, if people had started traveling from Lake Baikal 24,000 years ago, headed, however inadvertently, for the New World, moving at ten miles a year would have brought them to Denver, Colorado, by the year 23,450 B.P. Even with a low-end birthrate, they would have marched to Denver by 22,900 B.P. And of course, there is no archaeological evidence to suggest that people were in Denver that early. If people got here that early, there should be a recurrent pattern of sites with carbon dates ranging between, say, 22,000 and 12,000 years ago. So what happened?

  Madsen is not about to buy the quick-march-to-Denver scenario. In fact, he suggests it as a way of casting doubt on all the blitz-through-the-Americas migration models. Instead, he suggests the possibility that archaeologists simply may not be seeing many pre-Clovis sites for the same reasons noted by Gamble: they are the sites of pioneering people, both insubstantial and few and far between. For example, had it not been for the lucky break of anaerobic preservation under the peat in Monte Verde, the only artifacts that would exist there for archaeologists to look at would have been a handful ofbroken rocks, only a few of which were clearly shaped by the hand of man. Much of the Monte Verde tool kit was, of course, made from perishable materials, and it is highly likely that the major portion of the tool kit of early Americans is much the same—invisible by virtue of no longer existing. Also, as noted earlier, finds of rocks that appeared to be fashioned into choppers and hand axes and that were assumed to be ancient as often as not turned out to be the products of more recent Indian people. The flip side could also be true: hastily described sites could be seen as having modern Indian material that is in fact Paleolithic in origin. There are, in short, many ways that we might be blind to pre-Clovis, pre-LGM sites.

  Of course, this is pretty weak tea for an archaeologist to suggest, and Madsen says that overlooking sites may well play a small part. What is needed as a matter of theory here is something that would explain why candidate pre-Clovis sites are quantitatively so rare. It may well have to do not so much with archaeologists' general myopia but with the fact that their minds are still clouded somewhat by one aspect of the old story: the notion that a group of people arrived at some point in what was a land of plenty, pumped out babies at an astonishing rate, and spread across the landscape faster than an invasion of dandelions. This notion of blitzkrieg migration is an inheritance from the mathematical models of migration that were “tweaked,” Madsen says, in order to make sense out of theories that bring humans to these shores later rather than earlier. Part of this presupposition is another—that the New World was a grand cornucopia, a world where all the major food groups were present and easily harvested, begging to be mowed down, offering themselves up for the good of the newcomers in the manner of modern Indian tribes' most cherished stories.

  It might not have been that welcoming a place in those days—as Madsen says, not exactly the Garden of Eden or Paul Martin's Clovisia the Beautiful. For one thing, short-faced bears would have been around before the glacial maximum and might well have eaten a whole lot of pioneers. The first Americans may not have made out like overkilling Clovis bandits; instead they may pretty much have huddled in familiar ground, hunting familiar animals and collecting familiar plants for long, long periods of time, even as they experienced lower birthrates and a lot more mortality—especially, but not only, child mortality. In a situation in which a band of people—essentially a large extended family—found that itsmembership was likely to be depleted every now and then by disease, accident, or large predator, the likelihood of their setting off happily (or even unhappily) for points totally unknown, far away from other potential mates, would seem unlikely. Just because they did not have computers yet doesn't mean that these people were stupid.

  Most models of forager migration rates are of necessity based on ethnographic information derived from, at the earliest, the nineteenth century on into today, a period when most hunter-gatherers surely have faced a different world than the first Americans did. Today, there are no saber-toothed cats and no gigantic predatory bears that can run as fast as a horse. The bands and tribes studied in modern times by anthropologists and others have had thousands of years to work out a way of life based on the ecosystems in which they find themselves, not to mention the benefit of metal tools and trinkets supplied by neighboring sedentary folk, missionaries, traders, and curious anthropologists. For pioneers arriving from generations of living in subarctic conditions, most of the New World would have been staggeringly new, and probably bewilderingly so at first.

  Looking at all this from another angle, if early folk with Siberian lifestyles were in such an all-fired rush to get to Tierra del Fuego, why weren't early anatomically modern folk i
n a similar rush to populate Europe and Asia once they left Africa, or to fill up Australia at a rate of ten miles per year once they got there from southeastern Asia? Evidently it took more than 13,000 years for anatomical moderns to fill Europe from its southeastern margins, and this is also about the rate at which Australia filled up. It seems that in Australia, once people got there by boat, there was a period of some 30,000 years when the population size remained nearly stationary, growing very slowly. The result is relatively few Aussie archaeo-logical sites dating to before the Holocene—just as in the New World.

  This, then, is what Madsen calls the Pre–Late Glacial Maximum hypothesis. Like all the others, it is filled with ifs and maybes. It has the advantage of according with such nonarchaeological insights as Nichols's linguistics, which suggest that people arrived in the New World in plenty of time to have moved eastward across North America and to reach Mead-owcroft. Nor does it necessarily preclude arrivals via other routes in later times. Currently, there are five certain pre-Clovis sites in the Americas, and there may be as many as twelve in all. Except for Cactus Hill and Meadowcroft, where the tool kits are similarly manufactured though of different materials, all these pre-Clovis sites and candidate sites manifest very different technologies from one another (as well as from Clovis). So we do not have what archaeologists would call a Pre-Clovis culture: we have a number of pre-Clovis cultures, none of which appears to be the parent technology of Clovis or even a distant relative. So at present we still have no idea where Clovis and its fluted points came from; this remains a worthy question for today's and tomorrow's archaeologists.