The discovery of the Folsom site captivated the American public. King Tut’s tomb had recently been discovered in Egypt, and Americans were becoming increasingly intrigued by the deep human history of their own landscape. It was fortuitous timing that America’s burgeoning interest in archaeology happened to coincide roughly with the Dirty Thirties; across much of the West, the Dust Bowl was stripping away the land’s topsoil, and the drought was draining lakes and reservoirs. Denuded lands and dried-up lake beds revealed extinct mammal bones along with human-made projectile points that had been hidden from view for hundreds or thousands of years. Hunting for Indian arrowheads became a popular pursuit. In time, the U.S. map filled up with hundreds of kill sites where Ice Age Americans had camped or slaughtered prey.
Next to Folsom, the most interesting site to emerge was at a place called Blackwater Draw, on the western edge of the Staked Plains near the New Mexico–Texas line. During the Pleistocene, Blackwater Draw was a network of marshes and ponds amid vast and verdant grasslands, but nowadays it’s a dry and dusty pit that holds the remains of a defunct gravel quarry. The wind blows strong there, and stepping down into the draw feels like leaving a noisy room. The site first came into the national spotlight in 1932, when an official from the Smithsonian Institution, E. B. Howard, came out to investigate various local reports of interesting bones coming up out of the ground. One such claim, perhaps more legend than fact, is that a schoolgirl on a field trip found a mammoth skull with a spear point embedded in its eye socket. Another claim had a boy finding a projectile point stuck into a mammoth tooth. Whatever the case, Howard found enough evidence suggesting a direct association between extinct mammals and humans that he began an excavation. Along with the remains of extinct animals such as camels, giant turtles, Pleistocene horses, short-faced bears, giant peccaries, dire wolves, and giant beavers, archaeologists found an abundance of evidence demonstrating human activity: campsites complete with fire rings, various stone implements, scraping tools made from the bones of extinct Ice Age mammals, and drinking ladles made from fire-hardened turtle shells. Most notably, they found an abundance of projectile points buried along with the skeletal remains of mammoths. The points, now known as Clovis points, were up to four inches long, almost twice the length of the points that were found with the buffalo bones at Folsom.* The Clovis points were less intricately shaped as well; whereas the Folsom points were fluted along the entire length, the Clovis points were fluted for only a third of the length.
Initially, the Blackwater Draw site was viewed as just another piece of evidence supporting the conclusions taken from the Folsom site, that man’s history in the New World dates back to the late Pleistocene. The value of the site was amplified in the summer of 1949, when archaeologists working for the Texas Memorial Museum of the University of Texas began new excavations at Blackwater Draw. Their work focused on the stratigraphic and cultural sequences of the site, or in other words, the order by which the artifacts and bones were deposited in the sediments. The archaeologists discovered Folsom-type points and buffalo bones in the layers immediately above those containing Clovis-type points and mammoth bones. Over the next twenty years, through the 1950s and 1960s, emerging technologies in radiocarbon dating helped assign specific dates to the remains associated with specific projectile points. The Clovis-related artifacts were clustered around 13,300 years ago, and the Folsom-related sites proliferated less than a thousand years later. Subsequent discoveries at many other archaeological sites around the country buttressed these findings. A theory emerged: Ice Age hunters could be grouped into broad cultures with fairly rigid technologies that fit into some sort of time line.
These findings helped reveal something quite interesting: not only had human hunters been in the New World for much longer than previously suspected, but they were undergoing fairly rapid transitions at the termination of the Ice Age. The hunters’ prey base was changing, and they responded to those changes by evolving their technological and cultural traditions. The term “Paleo-Indian” was adopted as an umbrella term to contain the various human cultures that existed during this period, including the makers of the Folsom and Clovis points.* Several questions about Paleo-Indian hunters began to nag anthropologists: Where did they come from? How did they get here? When did they get here? The root of those questions is found in a predicament: if humans entered the New World at the oldest known site of human occupation, that means they spontaneously generated in the American West about fourteen thousand years ago. Because that is highly improbable, people have put forth ample theories ranging from the outrageous (the first Americans came from outer space) to the semi-outrageous (the first Americans were Pacific Islanders blown astray).
Even the leading theory, that the first Americans were Siberian nomads who followed in the path of the buffalo, crossing from Asia to Alaska via the Bering Land Bridge, was plagued by a lack of proof. In a way, the mystery was fueled by one of the primary things that anthropologists understood about Paleo-Indians. Since they had evolving, codified systems for producing projectile points, there should be evidence of their technological evolution at their point of origination. There was nothing quite like that in Siberia, nothing like that in the Pacific Islands, and, as far as anyone knew, nothing like that in outer space. The closest Old World approximations to Clovis points were the spear points produced by the Solutrean Paleolithic cultures of western Europe that are best known for their cave paintings of Ice Age mammals. The similarities led to a theory called the Solutrean connection, which was plagued by logistical problems. If the North American Paleo-Indian culture was born in western Europe, how did those peoples, or their technologies, get to the New World? A water route was highly improbable. And if the western Europeans migrated through Asia, why didn’t they leave evidence of themselves?
A partial solution to these problems was discovered in the late 1970s when an archaeologist named Mike Kunz was wandering through the western Brooks Range of Arctic Alaska. Kunz worked at the Blackwater Draw site as a graduate student in the mid-1960s, and upon graduation he moved to Alaska to conduct archaeological surveys ahead of construction on the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. When the pipeline was completed, Kunz went to work for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management’s Arctic Field Office, doing archaeological surveys on the National Petroleum Reserve–Alaska. At twenty-three million acres (think Indiana), the NPR-A is the largest undeveloped block of federally owned real estate in the United States, and it occupies land that was once the eastern foot of the Bering Land Bridge. In 1978, while working in the vicinity of the Ivotuk River, Kunz climbed atop a prominent mesa and was surprised by what he saw. “When I walked up there,” he explained to me, “the first thing I saw, I said, ‘This looks a lot like a Paleo-Indian point.’ Then I found another one. And another one.” Over the next twenty years Kunz and his crew excavated 450 stone tools, including 150 projectile points, from the top of the mesa. Many of the points were mixed in with campfire charcoal from forty hearths. The charcoal yielded calendar dates from 13,600 to 11,000 years ago. While the area was not the oldest known site in North America, Kunz was the first to find tangible proof of a connection between the Bering Land Bridge and the Paleo-Indians of the mid-continental United States. In 1993, he published his findings in Science, and his discovery was covered by everyone from Sam Donaldson to the BBC.
I wanted to see the mesa for myself, and in the summer of 2006 I spent ten days getting there and back. First I flew from Anchorage to Fairbanks International Airport, and then I spent a night in town before catching an early morning cab to Fort Wainwright Army Base. I boarded a single-engine Cessna Caravan loaded with supplies and bound for “the Slope,” as locals call that vast expanse of largely unpeopled tundra lying between the Brooks Range and the Arctic Ocean. After a three-hour flight, the airplane dropped through a purple-rimmed hole in the clouds to land at a gravel airstrip on the tundra marked by a collection of tents, a Bell JetRanger helicopter dubbed 4-Papa-Alpha, and a hand-painted sign reading “When
you are here, you’re still nowhere.” I was 150 miles north of the Arctic Circle, 160 miles west of the nearest road (which was gravel), and 200 miles from Barrow, Alaska, the northernmost settlement on the North American mainland. I spent the next twenty-four hours holed up in a tent while waiting out a windstorm. The sun circled slowly overhead without ever setting. When the wind finally calmed, I flew out with Kunz and his helicopter pilot, Mad Mel Campbell, to have a look around.
Kunz and Mad Mel had matching white scraggly beards and severely weather-beaten faces. Mad Mel was an avid gum chewer, carried a .44 Magnum for bear protection, and was missing the end of his nose, which was hacked off during skin cancer surgery; Kunz carried a 12-gauge pump for grizzly protection and kept a toothpick locked between his teeth so tightly that I thought it must be holding something in place. About six miles out of camp, Mad Mel began to circle a prominent mesa that sat on the tundra like a beached ship. It was about a hundred yards wide and maybe a little bit longer, rising 180 feet above the surrounding landscape. Kunz spoke to me through a helmet-mounted headset, loud enough to be heard over the whump-whump-whump of the chopper. “Except for some different plants down there, it looks basically the way it did fourteen thousand years ago,” he said. He leaned forward from the helicopter’s backseat and pointed to the crest of the mesa. “There’s a 360-degree uninterrupted view of forty square miles from there. I’ve seen thousands of caribou pass below that mesa. I don’t think these people actually camped on top; they probably camped along the creek, where there was cooking fuel and water. But they made fires and they sat up there and watched for game. They worked on their tools and points while they waited.”
“What do you think they were hunting for?” I asked.
“My guess—and this is just a guess—is bison,” said Kunz.
When I was hanging around with Kunz, I asked him what he thought was the absolute coolest thing that he could find in the Alaskan Arctic. He described for me an elaborate scenario by which a complete social unit of Paleo-Indian hunters was buried by a landslide twenty thousand years ago—“their clothes, their tools, their dogs, their food, everything”—and then encased in permafrost. Now, all of these thousands of years later, the earth’s warming atmosphere melts some of the ice. “And I’m flying along in my helicopter,” said Kunz, “and there’s a goddamned hand sticking up out of the ground. That would answer a lot of questions.”
Barring that rather stupendous development, work in the NPR-A comes down to the nuanced job of hunting arrowheads. I spent eight days doing such work with a sixty-two-year-old volunteer archaeologist named Tony Baker, a self-described “Indian arrowhead nut.” While Baker can’t remember how many states he’s hunted arrowheads in, he’s found them in over a dozen. His father, Ele Baker, found a flint knife at the actual Folsom site in 1936. His daughter, Traci, found a projectile point at the site in 1994—the last point to come out of the site. Together, Baker and I found dozens of artifacts. We found them on mesas, ridgelines, bluffs overlooking large river valleys—just about anywhere you could imagine yourself sitting and looking for animals. The artifacts were varied in their vintage and function: well-balanced knives that fit my hand as comfortably as a handshake; awls that could pass through my skin with the tiniest little push; and delicately crafted projectile points that seemed as though they were originally designed with the hope that they’d end up in a museum. Some of the stone tools we found were relatively new; Baker identified several as coming from an immediate cultural predecessor of the modern Eskimo. One day, while walking along a sharp ridge above an unnamed river, we found a style of projectile point that Baker described as a sluiceway. He believes such points could be very old, perhaps older than the points that Kunz found on the mesa. It was almost as long as my index finger; in cross section, it had a lenticular shape. I lay on the ground and stared at the point for fifteen minutes or so, turning it in my hands and thinking of all the things that will never be known. Was the person who made this point pleased with how it turned out? What did his clothes look like? How did he comprehend the scale of his landscape? What were his ideas of God? Was he often afraid? How did his people dispose of their dead? Which did he enjoy more, mammoth meat or buffalo meat?
I placed the point back into its divot in the ground as carefully as if it were a baby bird. The archaeologists in the NPR-A simply record and photograph their findings; the artifacts are left in place. If the archaeologists find an abundance of projectile points of an appropriate shape, they will dig in search of datable materials such as charcoal or bone. When and if that work begins, it could be big news. Mike Kunz believes that there could be ten thousand years’ worth of missing human history in Arctic Alaska; man may have entered the New World as long as twenty-five thousand years ago, or ten thousand years earlier than any scientifically accepted dates for human occupation. “They’ve found a site in Siberia that’s thirty thousand years old,” explained Kunz. He was referring to the Yana site, where human hunters camped in the ice-free floodplain of Siberia’s Yana River. They left behind the butchered remains of woolly rhinoceros, mammoth, wolf, bear, lion, hare, and Eurasian steppe bison. “Granted,” Kunz went on, “those people didn’t wake up one day and say, ‘Fred, let’s go to America.’ But they were on their way, and they were close. There was a dryland passage between continents at the time. For thousands of years there may have been only ten groups of twenty people in all of northern Alaska. That’s a wild-ass guess, mind you. And there’ve been several thousand more years of history to wash the evidence away. But we could find them. I think we will find them. It’s just a matter of time.”
Author lounging at the foot of what was once the Bering Land Bridge. Western Brooks Range, Alaska, July 2006.
HERE’S A SLIGHTLY CONTROVERSIAL, fairly easily challenged version of events that just might be true: Humans first crossed into Alaska sometime around twenty thousand years ago, and the tools of these first immigrants did not readily resemble the projectile points that Folsom hunters used to kill buffalo, or that Clovis hunters used to kill mammoth. Instead, they hunted a similar suite of animals with projectile points that were certainly different, and perhaps more varied and less intricate. These first Americans were prevented from moving southward by the glacial ice sheets spanning central Canada—the same types of ice sheets that had prevented the southward migration of buffalo some hundred thousand years earlier. In the meantime, additional humans, with other technologies, continued to arrive from Siberia sporadically for thousands of years. Northern Alaska and portions of northern Canada became a cultural incubator, or a melting pot. As the climate changed, the hunters continued to develop a tool kit and hunting method that were specifically tailored to the conditions, raw materials, and animals of North America. Soon their projectile points looked like nothing found anywhere else in the world. They had evolved into what we now know as Paleo-Indians.
By fourteen thousand years ago, the Canadian ice sheets had receded enough to allow southward human migrations. As people moved south, they encountered more animals and perhaps the weather became nicer. The first people to arrive mid-continent might have followed the Pacific coast with the aid of boats made from wood and skin, but it’s more likely that they traveled through an inland ice-free corridor that opened onto the Great Plains in the vicinity of Edmonton, Alberta, perhaps in the same general location where the buffalo first emerged. By the time of their arrival, they had assumed a cultural identity that we now know as the Clovis hunters.
The day that the Clovis hunters arrived was a very bad day for mammoths but, one could argue, a good day for buffalo. What happened stretches the limits of human imagination, but at the same time the evidence is utterly compelling. In short, what is known as the Rancholabrean Land Mammal Age came to a very sudden and dramatic close upon the arrival of man. The continent lost 50 percent of its large mammalian biodiversity. All existing species of land mammals weighing over four thousand pounds vanished; literally dozens of species between four hundred and
four thousand pounds disappeared; all of the wonderful animals that we discussed earlier—the elephants, horses, saber-toothed cats, ground sloths, American lions, short-faced bears, camels, American cheetahs—all gone.*
Some people have argued—and continue to argue—that the preponderance of blame for these extinctions lies with global climate change. The earth entered the interglacial period that continues today, and it started to get very warm. Rain patterns changed and the land dried up. Mixed forests disappeared; large herbivores couldn’t adapt and died out; predators and scavengers had nothing to eat, so they died, too. If man had anything to do with it, they argue, he was simply there in time to mop up the stragglers.
The climate change theory has problems. First and foremost, most of these vanishing species had already survived dozens of glacial and interglacial episodes, some as severe as (or more severe than) the one that coincided with their demise. What’s more, the extinctions across North and South America followed a sequence that had already occurred across Europe, Asia, and Australia; that is, most of the large mammals on those continents vanished at a time that was contemporaneous with the arrival of man. In several cases, large mammals survived drastic climate change on remote islands where physical distance and isolation prevented colonization by man. While mammoths had vanished from North America and Siberia by twelve thousand years ago, they survived on Russia’s Wrangell Island until thirty-seven hundred years ago—right about the time that the island’s archaeological record begins. Ditto with a few Greek islands, where pygmy elephants survived until the arrival of man about four thousand years ago. Of course, Africa is a notable exception to this rule, because that is where man evolved and coexisted with large land mammals for millions of years. There was no Surprise, we’re here! moment. In Africa, man and beast adapted to each other’s presence.
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