“Hey, we have a human head!” he yelled, pulling up the stone. To his shock, he found that he was indeed holding a human skull, stained brown and with mud dripping from the eyeholes and braincase. As he gaped, he instinctively held his discovery at arm’s length. “I didn’t want to get any of that skull gunk on my beer,” he later told a reporter.
Neither man knew quite what to do. While they thought about it, the other one tossed a bone he’d pulled out of the mud into the water. (It later proved to be a human femur.) They covered the skull with weeds and went drinking, then came back later to show a skeptical friend what they had found. This time they carried the skull to their truck and left it in a five-gallon bucket while they played Frisbee. Finally, they ran into an off-duty police officer, who quickly called in the county coroner while his fellow officers roped off the area with yellow crime scene tape.
The coroner, recognizing that the skull was not recent, contacted James C. Chatters, a self-employed anthropologist. Chatters looked at the long nose, slanted forehead, and prominent chin of the skull, among other features. He also examined other bones that he and the police subsequently recovered from the river mud (including that carelessly tossed femur) and concluded that the skeleton was that of a white settler buried at a nearby nineteenth-century homestead. Chatters scoffed at the rumor, already floating around Kennewick, that the bones were ancient. Sure, they looked old, Chatters told a reporter. That’s what happens to bones—they always look old, even recent animal bones.
But Chatters began to reconsider those flip remarks when he took a CT scan of the pelvis to investigate an odd object buried in it. He was stunned to find the two-inch-long base of a serrated stone spear point, of a style known as Cascade, which dates back almost 8,500 years. Because it was unlikely that anyone was still tossing such ancient weapons at modern settlers, the coroner ordered further tests, including radiocarbon dating.
The results flabbergasted everyone, including Chatters. Kennewick Man, as the remains were known, had died 9,300 years ago, making this one of the oldest and most complete human skeletons found in North America—and one of the most controversial.
The controversy grew from Chatters’s conclusion that the skull had Caucasoid features—meaning only that the skull differed to some extent from the broad category known as Mongoloid, to which Asian and American Indian skulls are generally assigned. Caucasoid skull features are found in populations ranging from northern Africa to Europe, and, notably, in much of northern Asia. Nor was Kennewick Man the only ancient human skull from the American West to show such characteristics.
But Chatters’s statements were interpreted by most folks to mean that Kennewick Man was a Caucasian—a white European—and the fallout was swift and tangled. Local Indian tribes sued under federal law to have the skeleton returned to them for reburial, and although they eventually lost, it was nine years before anthropologists got their first look at Kennewick Man. In the words of one of the experts conducting the examination, a man’s “biography is written in his bones,” and Kennewick Man’s spoke volumes.
He was probably in his late thirties when he died, robust and tall for those days, standing about five feet nine inches. He still had all his teeth, which were in generally good shape. An isotopic analysis of his bones showed that he ate a diet rich in salmon and other anadromous fish. His heavily muscled right arm, which left distinctive marks on his bones, spoke of a powerful man. The spear thrust that left that stone blade in his pelvis probably occurred when he was in his late teens. “It’s no wonder his assailant took after him with a spear,” one of the scientists said. “You wouldn’t want to tangle hand-to-hand.”
What do these Caucasoid skulls mean? It’s hard to say. Some, like that of Kennewick Man, share skeletal features with the Ainu, a distinctive, non-Japanese culture of Hokkaido, the Kuril Islands, and Sakhalin in Russia. This finding might bolster the idea of an early, pan-Pacific migration. But other remains resemble those of modern American Indians, which might support the notion of a single wave moving through Beringia.
Science aside, the debate over the origins of Kennewick Man has at times taken on surreal tones. Two years after the skeleton surfaced, and while it was still the center of a legal battle, the bones were moved to a museum in Seattle. During the transfer, members of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation sang traditional songs for the dead. Some distance away, Stephen A. McNallen, a self-styled Norse pagan from Nevada, raised a three-foot-long cow horn filled with mead and entreated the gods of ice and sun to bless the remains of “the Far-traveling One”—the name members of McNallen’s Asatru Folk Assembly gave Kennewick Man in their legal filings seeking to have him declared their Scandinavian ancestor.
If that seems far-fetched, it isn’t to Dennis Stanford, former chairman of the Smithsonian Institution’s anthropology department. He and archaeologist Bruce Bradley of the University of Exeter in England have resurrected an old idea, first proposed in the late nineteenth century, that Clovis’s ancestral culture isn’t Asian, but European.
Stanford and Bradley, who are themselves expert flint knappers, see remarkable parallels between Clovis technology and the stonework of the Solutrean culture, which lived in southwestern Europe about nineteen thousand years ago, hunting many of the same kinds of big game as Clovis hunters. Although some innovations of one culture could be duplicated by chance in another place, they argue, it’s almost impossible for coincidence to explain the near-perfect match between Clovis and Solutrean manufacturing methods and the artifacts they produced. Besides, they note, the earliest Clovis sites occur not in the American West, but in the Southeast, and the three most compelling pre-Clovis sites in North America—Meadowcroft Rockshelter in Pennsylvania, Cactus Hill in Virginia, and Page-Ladson in Florida—are all along the eastern seaboard. “They were from Iberia, not Siberia,” Stanford quipped.
But how could European hunters get across the Atlantic? Stanford and Bradley note that during the last glacial maximum, the Eurasian ice sheets traveled as far south as Portugal, pushing humans to a narrow ice-free band along the coasts—and creating a solid bridge between Europe and North America, albeit one made of ice. As Arctic peoples today know, the ice margin is a biologically fecund environment, a place to hunt fish, sea birds, seals, walruses, and other marine mammals. It was seals, Stanford and Bradley believe, that lured the Proto-Europeans across the North Atlantic. “A Solutrean hunter must have been awe-struck when he watched for the first time a pristine seal colony stretching for as far as he could see, basking on an ice floe as it drifted towards the shore,” they suggest.
To Bradley and Stanford’s critics, the fact that there is no evidence of a seagoing Solutrean culture of kayaks, or similar small nimble watercraft suitable for chasing seals, makes the whole idea ridiculous. They are similarly unmoved by the argument that such objects would rot quickly along the water’s edge and that any other evidence was probably submerged by three hundred feet of rising ocean waters when the glaciers melted. Nor is there evidence that either the Clovis or Solutrean people depended on marine resources. In addition, critics say, there is a gap of five thousand to six thousand years between the disappearance of the Solutrean culture in Europe and the appearance of the Clovis culture in North America that makes the hypothesis even more improbable.
Whatever their origins, the earliest humans to reach North America would have found a land in tremendous flux, including the region that would become the First Frontier.
At the peak of the last glacial maximum eighteen thousand years ago, the nearly two-mile-thick Laurentide ice sheet, which covered more than five million square miles, surged as far south as Pennsylvania. Grassy tundra grew along the glacial fringe and down the higher elevations of the Appalachians, but most of the East was dominated by boreal forest, with spruces west of the mountains and an open forest of jack pine to the east. The presence of jack pine, a species that thrives in dry soil and with frequent fires, suggests that this was a fairly arid cli
mate, as do old sand dunes and layers of windblown dust that date to that period.
Thanks to the glaciers, which locked up tremendous amounts of water, sea levels were as much as three hundred feet lower, and the exposed continental shelf was a realm of open conifer forests as far south as Georgia. Florida had almost twice the land area it does today and was covered by low scrub, arid savanna, and sand dunes, since the dropping sea level also lowered the water table, turning portions of the region into a near desert. Hardwood forests, of the sort closely associated with the East today, were likely restricted to a narrow temperate belt along the Gulf of Mexico and southern Atlantic coastal plain.
As the glaciers began to recede, the retreating ice in effect pulled communities of plants and animals north behind it, like someone dragging a banded blanket across the floor. The newly deglaciated land must have looked like a bombed-out waste, but it was quickly colonized by the windblown seeds of tundra plants such as yellow dryas and fireweed, turning what had been rock and mud into a palette of blossoms in short order. With time, these pioneering flowers built a layer of soil and worked themselves out of a home, as larger shrubs and trees gained a foothold and crowded them out.
The plants of the tundra and forest would be familiar to a modern naturalist, but the mammals would be cause for no small degree of alarm. The Ice Age megafauna, as this collection of behemoths is known, formed a bestiary of unparalleled weirdness and diversity, and sharing the landscape with these animals must have been a moving and dangerous experience for the first human arrivals.
There were the expected species, such as caribou, gray wolf, and wolverine in the tundra areas, and elk, white-tailed deer, and cougar in the forested zones. But along with the modern tundra muskox, there were three other species, including the taller, more gracile woodland muskox and the shrub-ox, another forest-dwelling browser. There were steppe bison one-third larger than today’s plains bison and another species with horns stretching more than seven feet from tip to tip; giant ground sloths rearing up ten feet on their hind legs, using their massive front claws to pull down branches to feed on leaves; piglike long-nosed peccaries three feet high; and, around the myriad lakes and bogs gouged out by the glaciers, giant beavers—much like the modern species, except they weighed more than four hundred pounds, making them the size of a black bear.
The land was a Serengeti of exotic wildlife: small, shaggy wild horses; five-hundred-pound American lions; scimitar cats and saber-toothed cats, with their wickedly curved fangs, which hunted nine-ton American mastodons or woolly mammoths measuring ten feet high at the shoulders and carrying curved tusks more than thirteen feet long. There were stag-moose, which had the huge size and long legs of their modern namesakes, but the delicate face of an elk and immense, bizarrely palmated antlers with a thicket of long tines projecting every which way.
The undisputed rulers of the post–Ice Age world, however, were the short-faced bears—measuring almost ten feet long and five and a half feet at the shoulders, weighing more than fifteen hundred pounds, and equipped with lanky legs, a long neck, and a peculiar short bulldog muzzle—the ideal build for running down huge prey such as ground sloths and young mammoths and grabbing them by the throat. There were two species, the giant short-faced bear of the West and the lesser short-faced bear of the eastern seaboard—but even against the somewhat smaller species, a Clovis-tipped spear must have seemed meager protection.
In the North, close to the fast-eroding ice sheet, the world must have looked post-apocalyptic at the end of the Pleistocene. The steadily diminishing Laurentide glacier sat in the midst of its own decay, shrinking rapidly and surrounded by enormous, ever-rising lakes of meltwater, whose drainages were often plugged by ice dams. Glacial Lake Iroquois, for example, grew to three times the size of Lake Ontario, whose basin it occupied, until it breached the ice dam blocking its escape 13,400 years ago. In short order, billions of gallons of water roared down the Champlain and Hudson valleys in a deafening cataract filled with tumbling boulders, dropping the level of the lake more than four hundred feet.
The outflow, which met the fast-rising Atlantic Ocean roughly where the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge stands today, sent a plume of frigid, muddy fresh water far out into the ocean, apparently shutting down the warm flow of the Gulf Stream and plunging the Northern Hemisphere into a sharp cold snap for 150 years.
The almost incomprehensible weight of a two-mile-thick slab of ice had compressed the very bedrock beneath it, and along what is now the St. Lawrence Valley, the glacier had forced the land well below sea level, forming a vast basin. A thousand years after Glacial Lake Iroquois drained, the ice pulled back far enough to allow the Atlantic to rush in, forming what geologists refer to as the Champlain Sea—a cold marine ecosystem extending hundreds of miles inland and encompassing 20,500 square miles. Rimmed by the tundra-clad and ice-capped Adirondacks, Green Mountains, and Laurentian Highlands, this marine world was populated by humpback and fin whales, belugas, cod, seals, lobsters, and clams.
It was into this soggy world of bare-scraped land, violent floods, and cold inland seas that the first humans in the Northeast stepped, presumably moving up from more southerly regions about eleven thousand years ago and probably following the coast and the Hudson River valley. The Paleo-Indians, as these earliest settlers are known, followed the herds of caribou that moved with the seasons from the open tundra to the patchy but ever-encroaching forests of scraggly spruce, poplar, tamarack, and birch.
These were people who, understanding the ebb and flow of their prey, haunted the barren, windswept heights, from which they could watch for the gray, rippling movement of thousands of migrating caribou funneling through the river valleys and along the lakeshores. Leaving little to chance, they pitched their hide tents on the eastern, downwind sides of valleys, so the caribou wouldn’t be spooked by their scent, often picking sand dunes for their bivouacs, perhaps because this was the only dry land amid an eternity of boggy muskeg.
The whole band was involved in the hunt, a carefully executed ambuscade. It’s easy to imagine the scene, since less than a hundred years ago, subarctic cultures such as the Ihalmiut of Nunavut and the Gwich’in of Alaska and the Yukon still hunted caribou in much the same fashion.
Along the traditional migration routes, the people likely built picket lines of stone cairns, which the modern Inuit call inuksuit. To the caribou, these cairns looked like people lining the treeless ridges on either side, channeling the herd closer and closer together, keeping the animals penned up. A few men trailed the herd to keep the nervous animals from bolting back and escaping. Finally, at a signal, women, children, and the elderly leapt from hiding on either side, shouting, flapping hides, and releasing the camp dogs. Now in a blind panic, dozens of caribou raced toward a narrow, preselected defile, where the hunters waited, throwing-spears poised.%5
Because good stone was as critical to their survival as fresh meat, when the Paleo-Indians moved into new areas—where the glaciers had scraped away rock, then dropped it as they melted—the people kept a sharp watch for nodules of glossy, fine-grained chert, from which they could knap tools. Once they found the scattered lumps, they could follow the trail of the vanished ice sheet back to the source of the stone. At such outcroppings, they established quarries, where generations of Indians subsequently obtained the raw materials needed to make spear points, scrapers, and drills.
No one knows if these were the direct ancestors of the Wapánahki—in fact, there is good reason to suspect they were not. But all the peoples of the Northeast had long memories, and their myths and legends retain what may be a glimpse of the postglacial world. The Wapánahki of mid-coast Maine, for instance, long preserved a legend of the wə́skwekkehs, or “stiff-legged bears,” animals that had enormous teeth and looked like mountains covered in shaggy brown vegetation. Similar monsters, which may be echoes of the mammoths and mastodons, appear in the stories of other Woodland cultures, including the Naskapi of Labrador and the Cree and Ojibwa of the upper Grea
t Lakes.
The Paleo-Indians of the Northeast lived in a fast-changing world. By about ten thousand years ago, the bedrock was rebounding from the weight of the vanished ice, draining much of the Champlain Sea and cutting off its connection to the Atlantic. By one modern estimate, once the seaway to the Atlantic was blocked, rain and snowmelt may have flushed all the salt water out of the Champlain Sea in as little as a decade. This would have caused an ecological catastrophe for the marine life in the lake, and what must have been a rich source of food for the Paleo-Indians would have become far less bountiful, even after freshwater species established themselves.
The land was also changing. About 9,500 years ago, the forests of New England closed in and took on a more temperate character, with a lot of hemlock and oak and less boreal spruce and fir. Most of the big Ice Age mammals—including mammoths, American mastodons, saber-toothed cats, shrub-oxen, steppe bison, and short-faced bears—had become extinct or were, like the American mastodon, rapidly on the way out.
The cause of this mass extinction has been debated for decades. Traditionally, it was ascribed to climate change as the earth emerged from the most recent glacial period. But most of these species had weathered similar flip-flops from glacial to interglacial climates for millions of years with few losses. In addition, scientists noted, most of the extinct species were big—about one hundred pounds or larger; there were few extinctions among smaller mammals.
Perhaps climate wasn’t the culprit, but human hunters. Geoscientist Paul S. Martin first proposed what he called the overkill hypothesis (more melodramatically dubbed the “Pleistocene blitzkrieg”) in the 1960s. This theory contends that humans, armed with Clovis weapons and facing naive prey with no innate fear of people, swept across the continent, wiping out the Ice Age megafauna. Martin and his supporters note that similar mass extinctions occurred in Australia and Madagascar shortly after humans arrived there, too.
The First Frontier Page 7