Chapter 3
Archaeology and the Shape of the Journey
The parameters of this story have been delineated by a multitude
of disciplines including paleontology, geology, palynology, zoology, genetics, linguistics and Pleistocene ecology. But we can especially thank the field of archaeology for providing the major theories and framing the principal arguments that rage around human migration routes into the Americas and the causes of the Late Pleistocene extinction. This book will not feature dueling archaeologists, though the professionals do an admirable job of duking it out on their own in the academic journals and their own books. This material is not difficult to read and we live in a time when most all the hard-earned research is available to the layperson. I am grateful for this scholarship as the bedrock matrix from which to explore the decidedly less-scientific areas of the human spirit and its adaptations to change. Even the most technical of this mountain of research papers is anything but dull.
In fact, the origins of the first Americans and the extinction of the Pleistocene megafauna, including the role of climate change, are among the most attractive areas of American archaeology and exceedingly popular subjects in the mainstream press. You can read about it in the New Yorker as well as National Geographic and it’s all over the science and nature channels.
The story of these first American adventurers is perhaps the most prestigious scientific area of New World anthropology. Indeed, within the often-insular world of early American archaeology, no issue is more controversial, important or glamorous than detecting the origins of the first people in the New World and uncovering when and how they got down here from Asia or across from Europe. Where did Clovis come from? At the end of the Ice Age, the huge animals disappear forever and we see the abrupt end of the Clovis culture. The questions surrounding these issues represent America’s greatest unsolved archaeological puzzle.
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The shape of the archaeological journey begins in temporal mystery. Some time beginning or after about 30,000 years ago, a group of Siberians (most authorities believe the first Americans came from northeastern Asia) squinted into the Arctic sun that rose over the largest human uninhabited landmass in the entire history of exploration. For the first time, they glimpsed the snow-covered highlands of western-most North America, a continental expanse that constituted the longest empty frontier ever encountered in human colonization. No people lived in the two Americas—some 16 or 17 million square miles without a single footprint of Homo sapiens.
Of course the Siberians didn’t know this. They were hunters and they saw the tracks of familiar animals coming and going across the lowlands later known as the Bering Strait. This was not a casual crossing: it is notable that two huge creatures known to early Beringians, the Old World woolly rhinoceros and the American gigantic short-faced bear, stayed home, while horses, camels, mammoth and humans apparently crossed with some frequency. For two-legged hunters it was probably a matter of following animal tracks. Just as you would not explore a remote thermal area of Yellowstone Park, where you can step through a thin crust of sinter into a boiling death, without looking where the bison had walked, you wouldn’t venture across a wide stretch of ice or a strait the size of Bering—if they knew it was a bridge—without the insurance that a large animal had preceded you.
The Siberians might have waited out the winter darkness and made their initial move during early spring, when they had daylight and a few months of summer to change their minds in case the New World didn’t work out. But at some point, these people headed east and crossed the strait on ice or on the dry land bridge that would have been available several times during the major glacial advances of the last 50,000 years. This opportunity ended with the global warming period that began to melt the continental glaciers about 15,000 years ago and subsequently flooded the route four thousand years later.
When the ice-age hunters finally crossed, what they found on the Alaskan side was enough to hold them in America. We know little of these early people, how they moved around or how they survived. They were most certainly seasoned ice-age travelers who followed their prey animals, who knew how to make fire, clothing and movable shelters. We also know these Siberians hunted big game—mammoth, bison, reindeer and horses—as well as hares and birds in frigid habitats far north of the Arctic Circle 30,000 years before the present. They could travel over ice and snow, eventually with sleds pulled by dogs, whose domestication stretches back at least 15,000 years. In short, they were amazingly well adapted to this severe, unforgiving environment.
And so they arrived in America. Most remarkably, they found no one. No people were out there in front of them. Eventually—maybe right away—the first Americans would have recognized that they were alone: No tracks on the beaches or snowfields and no campfire smokes on the horizon. Every so often, these early hunters would encounter animals and plants they had never seen before. The part of North America these Siberians were about to explore was a land unoccupied by humans but far from empty. Here roamed the most impressive array of wildlife ever encountered on earth by hominid explorers. The Late Pleistocene tundra teemed with animals. Giant herbivores and huge carnivores wandered or prowled the Arctic steppes. For the earliest explorers, it must have been the wildest landscape on earth. The routes were unknown, the terrain and river crossings treacherous, the country haunted by huge beasts that could kill and eat you.
Some authorities, not many of them archaeologists, think the continent was uninhabitable until some of the giant predators died off, notably the huge, pack-hunting lions, the sabertooths, maybe the cheetah and certainly the gigantic short-faced bear. Could the threat of becoming dinner and the difficulty of securing kills constitute sufficient determent to seriously curtail human colonization of the lower states? Here’s a consideration I will chip away at throughout this book.
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Before my love of this epic story carries me away, I should mention that there is precious little archaeology from the Late Pleistocene to provide details or dates for the early days of the Great Adventure. These few dates, however, tighten the noose of plausibility and provide loose parameters for the telling of this story.
The oldest Siberian sites close to the Bering Strait date to less than 14,000 years ago, and there are only a couple such records. Otherwise, only a Siberian find called the Yana Rhinoceros Horn Site in far western Beringia dates back as old as 30,000 years ago. There’s no archaeological record at all in northern Siberia between 30,000 and 14,000 years ago—the same for Alaska. The negative evidence may not mean much: Northeastern Siberia is even more remote than the Alaskan tundra.
In North America, a small handful of archaeological sites, most of which are perched along tributaries of the Yukon River, date around 13,300 years old. Very old dates, 50,000 to 30,000 years ago from South Carolina, Mexico and South America, are mentioned in the literature but are widely criticized as unlikely or outright loony. A single site way down south in Chile has yielded dates from radiocarbon samples, contested by a few prominent archaeologists, of at least 14,000 years old. Other dates older than Clovis (called “pre-Clovis”) are claimed for Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Washington, Oregon, Texas and the southeastern United States. Until Clovis people showed up 13,000 years ago, that’s about it: Very little evidence of human presence and the oldest solid date lies at the opposite end of the American continents from the presumed port of entry at the Bering Strait.
With these dates, archaeology provides at least a hint of what life was like in the last days of the Ice Age, but we are left to try to fill in the details, dangers and daring of everyday life.
Genetic studies, often ciphered in an unfathomable idiom, suggest humans slipped into Alaska from Siberia around 30,000 years ago and, in the absence of information from archaeology, constitute perhaps the strongest argument so far for very early people in the Far North. Linguists want even more time, 36,000 years, to account for the divergence of language groups in America. People of the North, if they were indeed up there, would likely want to go south, where their oral histories from the Old World told them the living was easier. Also, the flocks of waterfowl they depended upon in summer flew south for the winter. The great glaciers of the last ice-age interfered with the people’s migratory abilities.
The last big run of ice in North America climaxed 19,000 or 20,000 years ago, when the Laurentide ice sheet spread west and collided with Cordilleran glaciers of the Western mountains. Glaciologists call this event the last glacial maximum and it marks a time when most scientists think ice would have blocked all routes from Beringia down to the lower states south of the ice. The LGM is an important date in American prehistory because it blocks out the time periods and routes by which the first Americans could have colonized all lands to the south of the glaciers.
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Three routes—three main theories (there are also trans-Atlantic and Pacific hypotheses)—have been proposed for reaching the land south of the ice, to mid-America from Beringia: First, walking down before the LGM; secondly, using boats to navigate the Pacific coast after the LGM, about 14,500 years ago; and, last, using the ice-free corridor from the Yukon down along the Rocky Mountain Front sometime after 13,300 years ago.
The earliest possibility for a terrestrial way south is people walking down from Beringia before the LGM and the glacial sheets covered all routes. Archaeologists are not big on this route because there’s no firm evidence of humans in the Americas before about 14,000 years ago. The Pleistocene Beringians, if they indeed colonized the New World before the LGM, seem to have vanished into the Arctic mist until it was time to go south. So there’s no compelling reason—no data to explain—for professionals to work on this theory. The pre-LGM route meant walking down the glacial-free valleys at the eastern foot of the Canadian Cordillera between 30,000 and about 20,000 years ago. Some glaciologists think there were other routes south before about 21,000 years ago or whenever the colliding glaciers slammed the door shut. The contested key to all these routes is knowing where the ice was and when it melted. In any case, if humans occupied Alaska and eastern Beringia during the time of an open route, they could have made it down with relative ease (perhaps excepting the considerable threat of giant predators, especially the short-faced bear). How do we know this? Because a brown bear ambled down from Beringia by at least 26,000 years ago (how much prior to this time is unknown). Any route a grizzly bear could travel, so could human beings. The grizzly fossil was found near Edmonton, Alberta—not far from the southern region of the ice-free corridor.
What archaeological evidence would lend credence to this proposal? Any substantiated date from the lower 48, or perhaps Central or South America, which proves older than the time the coastal route became passable, around 14,500 years ago. Archaeologists have found sites in Pennsylvania and the southeastern United States with dates this old (roughly 16,000 to 19,000 years ago). Those radiocarbon dates are disputed but if any pass muster (Pennsylvania is a good candidate), we need to think about people surviving with giant predators and why we have yet to find considerable evidence of humans or of their passage prior to Clovis.
Boats, the eternal wild card, could have arrived—dodging icebergs in a terrible sea—from the Pacific Rim or Atlantic ice at any time in the past 40,000 years.
The second possibility, the coastal route, also unsupported by evidence, sounds more promising: Humans could have come down the partially de-glaciated Northwest coast about 14,500 years ago, paddling watercraft around calving glaciers and living off shellfish and other marine resources. Advocates, and there are many, for the coastal-entry theory point out that grizzly fossils dating back more than 13,500 years have been recovered from islands off southwestern Alaska, indicating a refuge from the ice. Recent sediment cores from Aleutian Alaska indicate the deglaciation could have started even earlier. A few archaeologists suggest that Clovis technology evolved from the hypothetical marine-mammal hunting tools of people who could have paddled down the West coast. Smaller arguments storm over whether the first humans walked down the coast, paddled boats or partook of a maritime economy. Some authorities think the Americans would have walked down from Alaska because the sea was lower by as much as 360 feet and the route 14,000 years ago would not have been the challenging, impassible coastline of today.
But this still seems forbidding. Fourteen thousand years ago, the exposed continental shelf would have been carved into wild canyons by raging rivers fed by glacial melting. The now-drowned coastline would have been at least as difficult as today’s impossible-to-walk coast. The amount of ice calving off into the ocean 14,000 years ago was even greater than today’s flow. The retreating ice created huge fjords as the ocean flooded the huge trenches gnawed into the bedrock by the retreating glacier, miles-wide inlets and glacial heads. That greater volume of glacial melt still had to flow into the Pacific via countless forbidding rivers. And walking from Beringia to the lower states on a trail of broken mussel, clam and oyster shells, past salmon rivers and tide pools teeming with seafood: Could anyone refuse a maritime dinner? This material is discussed in Chapter 5.
The task for archaeologists trying to document the coastal route remains to find sites that predate Clovis—underwater, in dry caves or upon isostatically rebounded (from the removed weight of the melted glaciers) headlands.
The last route, migrating down the ice-free corridor (IFC), was proposed fifty years ago. The theory was a component of the “Clovis First” proposal whereby early Alaskans living along a tributary of the Yukon River dashed south down the barren landscape of the corridor, subsisting off what foods they could carry and migratory birds about 13,100 years ago or slightly before. Here, anthropology presents a hypothetical account as opposed to a rigorous model.
This theory speculates that these Clovis progenitors would have first encountered mammoth near the southern end of the corridor, on their way southward, sized them up for dinner and wondered how they might bring down one of these big animals. After all, the story goes, just centuries before, their great great-grandfathers hunted mammoth and they had all heard the stories told around the campfires of delectable mammoth feasts. They wanted to kill one to eat but their spears were too puny. Just south of the northern loop of the Missouri River, the travelers stumbled across big lithic quarries of quality knapping material where they could experiment with their stone-flaking techniques. Mammoth-necessity inspired function and these migrants invented the iconic Clovis projectile point. Fanning out from the Rocky Mountain Front, the theory suggests, they pursued their prey and maybe hunted the megafauna into extinction. Clovis technology spread throughout lower North America, within 200-300 years. The continental U.S. might have been uninhabited at this time or sparsely populated with humans co-existing with the giant predators in the mid-latitudes.
Parts of this hypothesis hold up and others don’t. Archaeological sites from the corridor pre-dating Clovis have not been found. Clovis people were not first (earlier dates come from Chile, Oregon, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, the southeast U. S and probably Washington and Texas) nor did they eat up those great big animals all by themselves, though they no doubt helped finish off the last mammoths. But the dates for the final opening of the IFC and the appearance of the Clovis people are uncannily close. And, as an American colonizing event, Clovis eclipses all previous human probes by light-years.
A number of big questions for archaeologists remain about Clovis culture, the first widely recognized archaeological presence in North America, big-game hunters presumably specializing in mammoth. The near-synchronous appearance of its magnificent signature artifact—a large, fluted, exquisitely flaked projectile point usually crafted from the finest cryptocrystalline rock sources—across the country from Washington State to New England, to Florida and Panama within a few hundred years, is considered one of the most amazing events in human colonization. Where did this technology come from? A remaining question is whether Clovis technology exploded across an unoccupied land, or did it diffuse across a preexisting population?
The opposition to the “Clovis First” hypothesis has been in part reactionary, as some archaeologists felt they had had this theory crammed down their throats for thirty years. Thus, the “Clovis First” idea has been attacked with scorn, ridiculed and all but dismissed by popular science and many academics. The dismissive phrase, “the final nail in the coffin of Clovis First,” shows up many dozens of times in the archaeological literature. There are reasons: Several widely accepted radiocarbon dates place humans south of the ice before the appearance of the Clovis people.
So, what route did early humans use to get around the ice? Probably, they used all three. Whether they survived or thrived is another question.
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Additionally, there are a few trans-oceanic migration notions, considered fringe theories by most, but not all, scientists. These propose that the First Americans drifted or paddled over from South Asia, Australia or—postulated by well-established archaeologists—the Iberian Peninsula of Spain and France. The lithic technology of the Solutrean tradition (people who lived in southwestern Europe about 22,000 to 18,000 years ago), they argue, is the true progenitor of the Clovis point and this very terrestrial-adapted European culture, with no evidence of maritime technology, overcame a very cold ocean over a time span of 5,000 years by iceberg-hopping in skin boats, presumably living off sea mammals in order to deliver the distinctive Clovis weapon system to the Southeastern United States. A bothersome insinuation of the primacy accorded to European lithic diffusion (technology passed on from one people to another) of the “Solutrean” theory is that Native Americans couldn’t somehow have invented the Clovis point on their own. These are troubled waters. Proponents of the European origin of Clovis claim the intentional over-shot (“outré passé”) flaking technique, whereby a flake is struck with such force that it continues over the top of a biface to the other edge, is unique to Clovis and the Solutreans.
This is a very rough archaeological map of the debates raging over the peopling of the Americas.
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Archaeological presumptions underlying much of the conjecture surrounding routes are founded on negative evidence. As in the case of Beringia, where sign of humans appears to vanish for 15,000 years, the nuanced interpretation of finding nothing is important. Absence of evidence is not, they say, evidence of absence. Having tracked Siberian wildlife, I know that this Russian piece of Beringia is an exceedingly remote place. Northeast Siberia resembles the wild interior of Alaska without the history of gold mining. Not finding evidence of humans in the fertile valleys of America’s Southeast, East coast and Midwest (more Clovis projectile points, mostly surface finds, come from this area than anywhere else), where farming and modern development have exposed the deeper sediments, carries far different implications than scarcity of sites on the empty tundra and muskegs of Siberia.
The lack of human evidence in Arctic Siberia, and across Beringia, from about 30,000 to 14,000 years ago, used by archaeologists to show that no humans lived there, has an analogous argument from paleontology. The fossil record of brown bears from Alaska shows a gap from 35,000 to 21,000 years ago. To some paleontologists, this means the grizzlies weren’t there during that time span and that maybe the short-faced bears drove them out. Until 2004, the oldest grizzly fossil in the lower 48 was thought to be about 13,000 years old. Then a grizzly skull dating 26,000 (radiocarbon) years old showed up in south-central Alberta. Twenty-six to thirteen thousand years is a big gap in the record—at least 13,000 years—and I’ve heard no claims that the brown bear vanished from the areas south of the ice during this time.
The ease or difficulty of locating archaeological sites depends as much on the density of ordinary human activities as it does field surveys by professionals. Siberia and Alaska are tough archaeological nuts to crack, as is—despite surveys—the ice-free corridor where a small number of people may have passed so swiftly they left no easy markers. The modern northern Rocky Mountain Front is sparsely populated, very sparsely in key locations like the southern end of the corridor, the Plains are plowed and most of the Midwest and East farmed, developed and very accessible to arrowhead hunters. The point is that negative evidence should be weighed with caution and shaded with horse sense not cherry-picked.
There’s no direct archaeological data to support any of these migration theories, no sites older than Clovis in the corridor or on the Northwest coast, no progenitors of the classic Clovis point that could have been invented in America or come from Spain or from maritime hunters trekking inland. Indeed, we probably shouldn’t expect to find sign of the passage of a few, swift explorers who might not have left much non-perishable evidence behind.
Radiocarbon dates older than 23,000 (pre-LGM) years old from the lower 48 or South America are routinely dismissed as misinterpreted, contaminated or crazy. The three routes are default positions: if people couldn’t get down the corridor, they must have come down the coast and so on.
Here is a field where entire professional careers, major theories, fortunes and fates may turn on a single scrap of dateable refuse from an ancient fire pit. One need only mention that scientists are looking for now submerged arrowheads in the Pacific Ocean in order to conjure up the coastal route and at the same time totally debunk or otherwise discredit advocates for the corridor theory—without offering much in the way of evidence. Generosity and camaraderie are not hallmarks of this discussion. The Washington Times once described North American archaeology as “one of the nastier academic communities on the planet.”
This is not to say that early Americans did not come down the West Coast before Clovis times. They likely did. There just isn’t any archaeological evidence to prove it yet.
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Any child who has picked up an arrowhead and then wondered about the lives of the people who left it there knows the magic and excitement that fortifies the academic field of archaeology. It is perhaps the most followed profession of our popular social sciences, filling the pages of National Geographic as well as The New Yorker and occupying many hours of cable television. Yet the discipline of archaeology appears to linger on the cusp of academic respectability. This could be a holdover from the profession’s 17th or 18th century origins spent looting Mediterranean tombs or digging up thousands of Native American burials a couple hundred years later. Even the most famous of today’s professionals may mull over the founding question: Can the field of archaeology ever be pursued as a science?
Even when a valid breakthrough discovery is made, say a solid pre-Clovis date or a site that challenges conventions regarding Clovis-blitzkrieg or Pleistocene extinction, those claims must be pitched to the popular press in a scramble for publicity. The only way to keep working on a site or find is by securing funding and volunteer labor (better yet, let the volunteers pay for the privilege) for which there is intense competition. The lead archaeologist must stage a press conference (an outsider might wonder if the field of archaeology would appear more professional if it didn’t hold press conferences), announce his theory and then show his goods. Better still, one could sell the site or idea to Nova, the National Geographic Society or the Discovery channel.
This is unfortunate and unfair to the archaeologist, as the amount of the grant necessary to continue digging a site is peanuts compared to other sciences—a few hundred thousand dollars per dig versus the vast millions we dump into space projects and war toys.
We shouldn’t ask professionals to be pitchmen for their projects, to hype the importance of finds and sites by claiming the secrets of American archaeology can be unlocked by a single date or a handful of artifacts that look like they came from someone’s driveway. Still, to keep the investigations going, the diggers need grants and free laborers. Today’s smaller institutions have trouble coming up with the cash. With our current government’s support of scientific and intellectual inquiry headed for the Dark Ages, things don’t look good. But what is needed is public funding for worthy archaeological projects. For the price of a single stealth fighter jet, we could fund most all of them for years.
Modern excavation techniques themselves are remarkable, far beyond the shovel-and-trowel work I was taught on my first professional dig fifty-five years ago. Everything is saved, logged and measured with lasers. Forensic-like sciences preserve and analyze everything organic. Modern genetics have opened another book on human origins and today’s digs sometimes resemble hospital operating rooms with gloves, masks and sterile techniques. Watching field workers devote an entire summer to excavate a few inches of a five-by-five foot grid is a thing of beauty. Despite the publicity that a new site brings to an institution, I’d love to see these analytical tools used to re-examine important older sites, mining the data, physical landscape and museum specimens for new insights.
Archaeology embraces a great deal of hard numbers from the physical sciences as well as the fields of genetics and linguistics. These latter tools are critical for inferring relationships or constructing hypotheses but languages and genes can’t be directly dated. What archaeologists want in the end is archaeological data, datable material that puts people in a place at a particular time. Scientists, including archaeologists, also prefer “replicability,” which means more than one example, site or date. The problem in the study of early Americans is that very few pre-Clovis sites have been found. Either such sites are indeed quantitatively rare or these early Paleoindians didn’t leave behind distinguishable material culture, such as Clovis spear points. Maybe they made perishable artifacts out of fibrous plants, wood or bone and used cobblestones to break open big bones or shellfish. Organic material doesn’t get preserved except under rare, anaerobic conditions such as peat bogs. It’s probably a matter of both: scant evidence left by very few people spanning two huge continents.
Along with the extreme scarcity of pre-Clovis evidence is the absence of human skeletal remains. There is the elaborate Clovis burial in Montana and parts of another Clovis-age skeleton, not associated with cultural remains, from the Channel Islands off southern California, a woman (oops, recently revealed to be a man) who dated almost 13,000 years old and who required a boat to get out there. That’s it. A very few skeletons have been located that are younger by a few thousand years, including the much touted Kennewick Man, of the Columbia River, who died a mere 11,000 years ago.
In the absence of Late Pleistocene human remains, American archaeologists must make decisions about the authenticity of artifacts, datable stratigraphic contexts, and bolster these claims with inferences from geologic and paleoenvironmental studies. Then they need to be ready to defend their conclusions from skeptics in opposing schools.
The field of archaeology has also received the unsolicited and unintended job of gatekeeper at the fortress of Native origin mythologies. The onerous part of this responsibility throws the “science of archaeology,” with the limited tools of the profession, into the mud bath of ancient Native repatriations, such as transpired with the remains of Kennewick Man. The arguments of cultural affiliation are never entirely scientific. For an open-minded archaeologist, however, here is an intriguing and exciting opportunity: To contribute to a deeper understanding of where we came from. Even fragmented origin stories are a glorious improvement on traditional European-based written history.
In the wake of the squabble over Kennewick Man, we were reminded that archaeology lingers yet as a barely disguised insult to many Native Americans. The maneuvering and sequestering behind the discovery of Kennewick Man was a media circus fed by assertions of white supremacists that the Aryan race discovered America. Whatever the intent of the anthropologists, the result was increasing polarization between the scientists and the local Umatilla people. In the past couple of years, prominent archaeologists have made end runs on the Native American Graves Preservation and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) in order to get DNA samples out of the Montana Clovis child burial with no attempt whatsoever to contact local Native American tribes. Here is an issue I clearly do not comprehend and about which I might be totally wrong: Why has mainstream archaeology appeared to stand so firmly against the broader sentiments and spirit of NAGPRA? What’s the real threat?
But these examples are selective citations, which a spectrum of the current generation of archaeologists doesn’t buy into. Twenty years ago, I co-founded an organization that works with Native communities to conserve wilderness homelands, big ones in the range of 4 or 5 Yellowstone Parks (8-10 million acres). That successful effort (now approaching 25 million acres) has made me optimistic. An especially useful bridge between Native North American and European cultures is using the natural world as a means of finding wisdom, the traditional use of the wild, as valid today as 13,000 years ago.
Might the modern mind contain an old worldview that floats above culture?
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None of these qualifications have diminished the huge popularity of early-American archaeology. It is a very attractive occupation, partly because modern excavations often take place in remote, even exotic places where the topography has remained unchanged since the retreat of the glaciers. The fieldwork is conducted in the outdoors, in a landscape that encourages us to imagine how ancient people might have lived, to look for the parallels spanning the ages. The field can be at once romantic yet mundane, probing the dirt with a delicious childishness, lunging towards discovery. A few professionals might resist such a representation, but the appeal of Paleoindian archaeology is a draw toward adventure.
This is not a frivolous notion of adventure. Unlike extreme snowboarding or recreational skydiving, this subject, the surge of the first people into the Americas during a time of global warming, lies close to the reoccurring, central themes of human evolution—bold migrations and technological adaptation to climate change. Life and death decisions were a piece of the daily menu in the American Late Pleistocene. The perception of risk was palpable around every bend of the creek. I can imagine a great concentration of selection occurring during this brief period and the part of the organism it would have most influenced is the human mind. In this tiny fragment of time, with our clumsy tools of analysis, we will of course find no record of such evolution. Yet in piecing together this story—and this is my own interest—by anthropology or raw speculation, we look in at ourselves, at what is possible and what we are still capable of.
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It has been my purpose in exploring the earliest colonization of the Americas—a story constructed of interpreted scientific investigations and reconstructed tales of adventure—to ask questions that appear relevant to the 21st century—an effort to draw the Pleistocene past into present day climate change at every appropriate twist of the trail.
I believe in the value of wilderness and it is that wildness which bridges these two worlds. The greatest wilderness ever glimpsed by humans was the uninhabited Americas at the time of first entry into the New World. We all are children of the Pleistocene: Will we dare face the hot future with the ballast of those pilgrims who charged out of the Ice Age?
An important reason this ancient story resonates well today is that it was lived by people much like ourselves who braved New World habitats whose considerable remnants are still with us. They are the familiar landscapes of Alaska and Canada as well as the American West. It’s the same American wilderness I have been writing about for four decades. And though the mammoths and sabertooth cats are gone, grizzlies, musk ox, caribou and bison are still around. The post-glacial landforms are also unchanged and those ice-age plants still grow here arranged in slightly different vegetative communities. It’s a life a few of us still live and all of us can imagine. We may not know what language these first Americans spoke but we know by inference they were bands of big game hunters, families traveling through this brand new land. We could, if we choose, comprehend much of what these people went through. There are scores of scientific papers describing the climate, the geology, the flora and fauna of the landscape through which these ice-age explorers may have traveled. We know something about their technology, what tools they carried. What is lacking is a more intimate picture that vitalizes this breathtaking landscape, a sense of what it felt for individual humans to face the crossing of a raging river, a glacier, hunt a mammoth or co-exist with huge predators.
A practical bridge to the lives of these people, wondering what it must have been like 13,000 years ago, is comparing the perils of that era with the challenge of today’s wilderness. It’s a reasonable way of thinking since many of the habitats and most of the landforms are the same. Contemporary archaeology realizes the value of this comparison but in general lacks the experience; it offers up the image of buzzing tundra grizzly bears with a helicopter to conjure the wild (it’s unfair to pluck out a single example but it’s very close to my own home). Having spent much of my adult life on foot with grizzlies, I believe we can improve on this approach. One small edge I have as a chronicler of this tale is my own experience in the wild: Five decades of camping out and traveling the same routes on foot as these ancient pioneers, tracking grizzlies, polar bears, wolves, a few jaguars or tigers and foraging off the land as much as practical in all these habitats. As a life-long advocate for wildlife, I have, in particular, spent a lot of time tracking and living with brown bears throughout North America. The places grizzlies still live are the wilderness regions of Alaska, the Yukon, British Columbia and the Rocky Mountains all the way down into Mexico (I saw sign in Chihuahua in 1985). This vast area is exactly where the story of the First Americans unfolds.
I intend to bring some of the lore of the land into the telling of this story, infusing natural history into speculative scenes of early American life. I’ll inject a few stories from my field-notebooks, intended to illustrate the difficulty, or ease, of land navigation and resource use. We’ll see how they wash. This material is aimed at a general audience from the viewpoint of an informed outsider and hopefully will ground the older tale of the Pleistocene in a familiar natural setting we can all recognize. If modern Paleoindian archaeology is to be of any value to understanding and facing 21st century climate change, we must somehow connect the literal terrain. The key, I believe, lies in the original landscape that survives as today’s wilderness.