Deadly Voyager

by James Lawrence Powell

  As to the later Folsom Culture, Hrdlička would never accept its existence, resorting to the standard claim of those who deny evidence they do not like by saying that it does not offer “conclusive proof.” They never define just what such proof would be.

  MISSED OPPORTUNITY

  In 1920s America, archeological findings could be big news. In early 1929, a young high school graduate named Ridgely Whiteman (1910-2003), avidly following the discoveries at Folsom, wrote to the Smithsonian. He informed its experts that he had found “fluted points in association with mammoth bones” near the town of Clovis, New Mexico, two hundred miles to the south of Folsom, and sent along one of the points as evidence. This was the site we know today as Blackwater Draw, mentioned several times above, near the border with Texas, which along with Gainey, Michigan became a Clovis type-site. Ridgely had an ardent interest in fossils, having visited the Colorado Museum of Natural History and the famous La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles. The Smithsonian took his letter and artifact seriously enough to send vertebrate paleontologist Charles Gilmore to inspect the Blackwater Draw site that summer. In what Mann calls “one of archeology’s great missed opportunities,” Gilmore found nothing that piqued his interest and soon high-tailed it back to Washington.

  But Ridgley was not one to give up easily. He continued his fossil collecting and explorations and, in the summer of 1932, got in touch with Edgar B. Howard, who may have been the ideal contact as he was “addicted to the pursuit of terminal ice-age man.” Howard worked at the University of Pennsylvania’s museum and was well-educated and well-placed to investigate Blackwater Draw. In a few years, he was able to announce that the site, with its artifacts and mammoth bones, showed that humans had lived in North America as early as 15,000 years ago. A group of eminent scientists who visited the site to see for themselves confirmed his finding. According to Howard’s telegraph home to the museum, “They have examined here today [and] they agree evidence obtained indicates association of artifacts with extinct elephant and bison.”

  In 1937, the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia celebrated its 125th anniversary by sponsoring a Symposium on Early Man. Several hundred scientists from around the world attended, where they saw a large reproduction of Howard’s site, complete with specimens from Blackwater Draw. Such a meeting could not have been held without Aleš Hrdlička. In his speech, Hrdlička “gave Clovis the ultimate accolade: silence.” That is, he spoke not of artifacts but only of bones, and then dismissed all reported discoveries of ancient bones. This disingenuous strategy allowed Hrdlička to continue to reject early man in the Americas: “So far as human skeletal remains are concerned,” he said, “there is to this moment no evidence that would justify the assumption of any great, i.e., geological antiquity.” This bit of scientific sleight-of-hand shows the length to which some scientists are willing to go to ward off a theory that they have long denied. But evidence always wins out, and all such scientists accomplish is first, to delay scientific progress and second, to besmirch their reputation in history.

  THE ICE-FREE CORRIDOR

  In spite of Hrdlička and other dissenters, Howard and his fellow scientists had shown the reality of Clovis, later bolstered by scores of additional sites found over North America, Mexico, central America, and northern Venezuela. As scientists discovered and investigated these new sites, and as recognition of the YD grew, it gradually became clear that Clovis artifacts were never found above the level that would later be identified as the Younger Dryas boundary layer.

  As radiocarbon dating became available, the age of Clovis was one of its first archeological applications. The pioneering work was done at the University of Arizona by a young mining engineer turned graduate student in archeology named Vance Haynes (see Figure 1). The early results showed that the Clovis people had occupied their sites from about 13,500 years ago to about 12,900, a remarkably short span of only 600 years.

  By the time Haynes wrote, radiocarbon dating had begun to reveal the chronology of the Ice Age. Putting that timetable together with the age of Clovis, it appeared that just before the Clovis people would have reached North America, sea level had fallen enough to convert what is now the Bering Strait between Siberia and Alaska to dry land. Scientists came to call this 1000-mile-wide, now drowned, Arctic steppe: “Beringia.”

  Though the Ice Age was slowly ending, two giant ice sheets, a mile or more thick, still occupied most of Canada — the Cordilleran on the west and the Laurentide from there eastward. But this presented a conundrum: once Paleo-Indians had migrated across Beringia, would they not have been stopped in their tracks by the ice? How did they get from northwest Alaska to the ice-free zone to the south?

  At about the same time as the discoveries of the 1930s at Blackwater Draw, Canadian geologists had begun to uncover evidence that at one time, both giant ice sheets had melted sufficiently to open an “ice-free corridor” between them. In 1933, W. A. Johnson of the Geological Survey of Canada proposed that people could have used this passageway to reach the plains of Southern Canada and Northern Montana, and from there to have spread widely and established Clovis. In a 1964 article, Haynes was one of the first archeologists to espouse and expand this notion. He provided a good summary of the hypothesis:

  From the glacial history of Canada and the Great Lakes area it now appears that by 12,000 years ago the eastern foothills of the cordillera and the western Great Plains of Canada were free of ice for the first time in some 15,000 years. It is possible, therefore that the Clovis progenitors entered the United States from Canada when an interglacier corridor opened up along the eastern foothills of the Canadian Rockies. From the seemingly rapid and wide dispersal of Clovis points, or of very similar forms, it appears that these people may have brought the technique of fluting with them.

  Thus developed the hypothesis of the ice-free corridor that every school-child has since encountered.

  FIGURE 19:

  The Ice-Free Corridor and the Coastal Route

  The hypothesis of the early arrival of the Clovis people was bolstered once scientists could use DNA to trace the genetic history of ancient peoples. The emerging data showed that about 80% of all living Native Americans in North and South America descend from the Clovis. But what Hrdlička had disingenuously noted remains true: scientists have found very few actual Clovis bones. One sad but scientifically important exception was the remains of “Anzick Boy,” an infant found in south-central Montana along with scores of Clovis artifacts, suggesting that his was an honorary burial. Before we turn to the science, let us pause for a moment to remember that this little boy was a living person, some grieving mother’s son.

  The Anzick remains were first dated to from 12,707–12,556 years ago, thus to the end of Clovis or even just after it, but later work gave a date several hundred years earlier, nearer the beginning. There is no doubt that Anzick was Clovis. His was the first Native American genome to be fully sequenced. It showed both a Siberian ancestry and a near connection to modern Native Americans. The youngster did not die in vain.

  PEOPLE OF THE REINDEER

  Well before the discovery of Anzick Boy, some scientists had begun to question what had become archeological orthodoxy. In 2004, Bruce Bradley and Dennis Stanford noted that the ice-free corridor hypothesis and other “ideas on New World origins are based on informed speculation and are not supported by archaeological evidence.” To wit, “After over seventy years of research, there is no evidence of an early lithic technology related to Clovis in Alaska, in spite of concerted efforts to find it.” Nor was there any direct evidence of human occupation in the putative ice-free corridor during the time period when the early migrants were supposed to have used it.

  Bradley and Stanford decided to seek the ancestry of the Clovis people elsewhere, ideally where another culture had a similar toolkit, although perhaps one not so well developed. The culture that fit the bill was located not in Asia, but in Europe.

  For decades, scholars had noted the similarity between t
he Clovis technology and that of the Solutrean people of ancient Spain. But for two seemingly insurmountable reasons, they discounted the possibility of a connection: First, Solutrean dated to 6,000 years before Clovis, and second, the ice-age Atlantic Ocean would have separated the two cultures. Scholars then had to assume that the two nearly identical toolkits had arisen coincidentally. Not impossible, but in science, coincidence is always suspect. But of the two objections, (1) the age gap between the two cultures shrank with new finds and more accurate radiocarbon dating, and (2) Bradley and Stanford proposed not that the Solutreans had sailed across the ocean blue, but rather had moved in little steps along the ice-front using small watercraft as modern Inuit do when hunting seals, until,

  Inevitably, a group following the European seals on their northward migration would have ended up at the western end of the gyre, not knowing until too late that they were hunting Canadian seals heading southward to rookeries along the Atlantic coast of North America. The entire distance along the ice bridge would have been around 2500 km, shorter than the Thule Inuit migrations from Alaska to Greenland. Some families eventually established camps along the Western Atlantic seaboard and did not return to Europe.

  The Solutrean hypothesis met a poor reception. Three opponents published a 2005 review article titled, “Ice Age Atlantis? Exploring the Solutrean-Clovis ‘connection,’” thus comparing it to a myth. They did raise legitimate objections, but also made the tiresome and unscientific argument that no new theory was necessary: “The origin and arrival time of the first Americans remain uncertain, but not so uncertain that we need to look elsewhere other than north-east Asia.”

  Undaunted by the criticisms, Bradley and Stanford expanded and updated their hypothesis in a 2012 book, Across Atlantic ice: the origin of America’s Clovis culture, published by the University of California Press. One reviewer, archeologist John Shea, wrote that at professional meetings, “Many [colleagues] rejected this hypothesis outright.” He noted that such a “pre-emptive rejection” might be understandable, “if a hypothesis proposed a scenario with no parallels in other areas of prehistory, used unconventional analytical methods to arrive at its conclusions, or its authors lacked appropriate scientific credentials.” He then debunked each objection in turn.

  “The problem,” Shea wrote, “was that Bradley and Stanford had proposed this Solutrean-Clovis connection hypothesis about a decade before, giving plenty of time for it to be “criticized by experts on both sides of the Atlantic and rejected by most researchers.” In a twist, Bradley and Stanford wrote their peer-reviewed article first and their book second, while in The Cycle, Richard Firestone and colleagues reversed the order.

  Shea noted that the two authors had not challenged the evidence of migration from Asia to North America, including the DNA of Anzick Boy, but rather had suggested, “That the Clovis populations may have merged with other populations dispersing from Asia through Beringia southward, either overland or along the Pacific Coast.”

  Shea’s balanced review also makes an important point regarding the assessment of novel scientific ideas. We will leave the Solutrean hypothesis with his cautionary and insightful words, which apply directly to the YDIH:

  In science, hypotheses that are wrong rarely improve with age or with the addition of new facts. However, the evidence of a pre-Clovis occupation of the Americas is much stronger now than it was a decade ago, and the hypothesis of a Solutrean-Clovis connection deserves a second look. If it is wrong, it should be more convincingly wrong. If it is right, we may need to rethink long-held notions about the prehistory of human dispersal and the capacities of our Ice Age ancestors.

  THE COASTAL ROUTE

  As research by archeologists and geologists on the peopling of the Americans continued, the results increasingly threatened the ice-free corridor hypothesis. As we will see below, new evidence continually pushed back the date of migration until it fell into a period when, as geologists showed, there would have been no such corridor. As a 2016 article concluded, “An ice-free corridor opened too late to have served as an entry route for the ancestors of Clovis who were present by 13,400 [years ago].” The authors made the salient point that the melting glaciers would not have opened an inland corridor immediately, but rather have filled it with meltwater “for perhaps up to 2,000 years.”

  In considering alternate routes that would be consistent with their findings, these authors came up with a new one: migration down the Pacific Coast, illustrated in the figure above. The attraction of the Coastal Route is not only that is an alternative to the corridor, but that the Ice Ages, instead of preventing migration, would have enabled it. When the ice sheets were at or near their maximum, they locked up so much water that sea level fell by several hundred feet, widening the coastlines out onto the continental shelf and opening their margins for travel. Moreover, using watercraft, the pre-Clovis people could have moved down the coastline much faster and as well-fed as if they had taken an inland route.

  That Pre-Clovis people did have watercraft is shown by the discovery of projectile points and crescents on Santa Rosa and San Miguel Islands in the Santa Barbara Channel, dated between ~12,200 and 11,200 years ago. The Channel Islands were not connected to the mainland during the Quaternary and were too far away to swim to, so the only way people could have reached them is by boat.

  In 2018, a team dated the retreat of the Cordilleran ice sheet from the Pacific Coast and found that by 17,000 years ago, when the potential inland corridor was not yet ice-free, the coastal ice had indeed withdrawn enough to “Ensure that an open and ecologically viable pathway through southeastern Alaska was available [and] may have been traversed by early humans as they colonized the Americas.”

  But in an ironic twist, while melting ice may have made the Coastal Route possible, the consequent rise in sea level would have drowned the evidence. As John Shea concluded his review of Across Atlantic Ice,

  Archeologists are going to have to figure out how to investigate the archeology of now-flooded coastlines, or, failing this, how to incorporate multiple working hypotheses about coastal and marine adaptations into our accounts of human prehistory.

  16

  THE FALL OF CLOVIS

  Scientists have traditionally explained the disappearance of Clovis culture in one of two ways: (1) Climate change in the form of an abrupt return of glacial temperatures so stressed the Clovis that they no longer had time to prepare their beautiful stone points, having to focus instead on survival and in that, did not fully succeed. Many anthropologists reject this idea. (2) A dramatic fall in the number of megafauna due to overkill deprived the Clovis people of their main food supply. Others reject the overkill theory outright, some going so far as to write its Requiem. What is clear is that like the origin of the YD itself, the debate over the Fall of Clovis has been going on for decades with no resolution, though each side would likely say they have resolved it.

  Let us devote this chapter to whether climate change can explain the fall of Clovis and in the next, take up the cause of the megafaunal extinction. The less successful the traditional explanations, the more the door is open to a new one.

  CLOVIS FIRST

  We know when Clovis ended: with the arrival of the YD. But when did the Clovis progenitors arrive in the Western Hemisphere? The earlier the arrival, the more time people and cultures had to stabilize and the better adapted they would have been to the normal vicissitudes of climate change and food shortages. The better adapted the Clovis, the greater may have been the shock required to dislodge them and their culture.

  As we have seen, the ruling paradigm of archeology by mid-twentieth century was that about 13,000 years ago, sea level had fallen enough to allow Siberian Paleo-Indians to walk across Beringia and migrate down the ice-free corridor between the Cordilleran and Laurentide ice sheets onto the Great Plains, from whence they spread rapidly throughout the Western Hemisphere, bringing with them their distinctive Clovis toolkit. Given the date at which this was thought to have been pos
sible, it seems to follow that these must have been the first people to colonize the Americas, an idea that became nicknamed, “Clovis First.” That the Clovis got here first came to hold the same impregnable status in archeology as fixed continents and the impossibility of meteorite cratering had in geology: dissent at your own risk.

  Of course, anyone was free to believe in Clovis First provisionally, but archeologists went further, declaring the hypothesis beyond reasonable doubt. As one account explained, in words that will ring familiar:

  It is seemingly hard for people, even empirical scientists, to live with provisionality, and in time “Clovisfirst” hardened into a dogma. Each time some excavation turned up artifacts and other evidence of pre-Clovis Americans, the guardians of the Clovis-first orthodoxy would announce that they saw flaws in the methodology, sloppiness in the analysis, and if all else failed they would invoke the principle that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof,” as though there were something inherently extraordinary about human beings arriving in the New World before the Clovis culture took off.

  But if you think about it, Clovis First is essentially one of those “absence of evidence” claims, true only as long as scientists find no older Paleo-Indian sites. And find them they did.