Invisible People
Ice-age People in the Far North
of Siberia and America
Here is a fascinating area of inquiry that has received very little attention: Humans surviving in Arctic Siberia and Alaska before the LGM, roughly the time between 15,000 and 30,000 years ago. During this period, only a single unchallenged site has been located in this vast region, the well-dated (27,000 radiocarbon years ago) Yana Rhinoceros Horn Site in far western Beringia. But that’s it. Nothing else credible has been found older than about 14,000 years old, in either Siberia or Alaska. The pervading view is that these well-adapted Arctic pioneers simply retreated south to central Siberia until the climate warmed after 15,000 years ago.
But there is another perspective: That we have yet to find the evidence that would document early colonizers in Siberia and Alaska. The Yana site is characterized by frost-heaves of blocks of frozen sediment containing fossils of extinct animals in association with human artifacts. With global warming, today’s Arctic permafrost is rapidly thawing; solifluction and other geologic processes may reveal undiscovered artifacts, encouraging fresh archaeological investigations of the Far North. We may find sign of these invisible people yet.
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So what’s the larger picture of human colonization of the Americas? Modern man and woman evolved in Africa as early as 196,000 years back and started roaming other regions of the world by at least 65,000 years ago. By 40,000 years ago, humans had penetrated nearly all habitats of every continent with the exception of South America, Arctica and North America. Why not the Americas? Maybe Homo sapiens had trouble getting here: The surrounding seas presented a formidable deterrent and the frigid Arctic made expeditions to the Bering Strait daunting. Or if they did get to America, perhaps the fierce predators of the Late Pleistocene turned them back. Early probes by Asian or European explorers could have disappeared, leaving no record of their passage. They could have drowned, died off or been eaten. Why did it take them so long to get here?
There are a number of scenarios and hypotheses for the earliest visits to the Americas. Some of these possibilities are supported by indirect evidence. Others are mostly speculative.
The presumption here is that the first Americans were modern humans, not Neanderthal or other species of hominids. And that assumption could be wrong (but most authorities doubt it): 40,000 years ago, in the European eastern Arctic, at the northern end of the Ural Mountains, someone left tools and an incised mammoth tusk. These people could have been Neanderthal.
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Australia was colonized by modern humans a number of times, perhaps beginning as early as 65,000 years ago. These migrants would have come out of Africa, probably escaping a widespread drought about 70,000 years ago, about the same time as Mount Toba in Sumatra blew—the most powerful volcanic eruption hominids have ever experienced. These people bypassed the Neanderthal occupation of Europe, slipped eastward and colonized southern Asia, then island-hopped south to Australia. That journey south took them over 55-mile stretches of open ocean, out of sight of land, and required sophisticated marine navigating capabilities. Fishing the shallow seas—assuming the use of nets—would have been a breeze.
That means people also had boats throughout Indonesia, South and Southeast Asia. Modern humans lived on the northwestern Pacific Rim. Human skeletal remains, dated 35,000 years old, were found in the Ryukyu island chain of Japan and indicate the use of boats. Would these sea-faring people have sat sunning themselves on the beaches of the East China Sea for 40,000 years without wanting to explore the rest of the Pacific Rim? Maybe Asian sailors hugged the northern Pacific coast or came across the Aleutians to take a look at the Americas. If so, what did they see: a bunch of huge cats, big wolves and gigantic bears, among the other large critters? Maybe these Pacific circumnavigators didn’t attempt a serious landing until they arrived in South America, south of the most dangerous predators. Maybe they survived, at least for a while, in small enclaves in South America. Some very old, and sharply contested, archaeological dates have been reported from South America.
Controversy entangles much of this material but one interesting suggestion by scholars is that the cognitive ability to come up with a boat/net-fishing technology 50,000 years ago is not unlike that of figuring out how to live in the frigid North where fire, clothing, shelter and storage are essential. At any rate, 40,000 years ago modern humans around the world were adapting their lives and technologies to marine, Arctic and coastal environments.
Given such ancient mariners, the Bering Strait land bridge would not have been necessary. Such boat people could have hugged the coast or, more dangerously, they could have slid across from the Kamchatka Peninsula hopping across the Aleutian island chain. Sea birds would have fed them as well as shown them the way across the bigger stretches of open sea.
Glacial cycles create rising or falling ocean levels over continental shelves. At a midpoint, like tidal pulses, shallow seas are created and these seas are biologically very productive of nutrients. The presence of a shallow sea would be a very good place for boat people to go exploring and corresponds generally to the times of settlement suggested by North American geneticists. Crossing the wide Pacific, at any time, would be a dangerous stretch of mind and sea.
Forty thousand years ago, incidentally, seems to have been a time when modern people were on the move, a warmer time of glacial interstadials and productive coastal habitats. Hordes of prototypical modern humans were pushing into Neanderthal-occupied Western Europe and also spreading eastward into continental Asia.
Some authorities think these seafaring people would have probed North America, trying to slip in, numerous times during the past 40,000 years. Except for a few dates of 50,000 and 33,000 years ago, which very few accept, there’s no American archaeological evidence of these expeditions—it could be underwater. But what kept them out? Pleistocene predators: a pride of huge lions, bears, sabertooth cats and wolves charging the boat on the beach at Malibu?
Exploring inland in South America, as some suggest, might not have been such a suicidal probe for these ancient mariners with fewer great predators, namely the stouter but perhaps slower sabertooth Smilodon, on the prowl. That date of 33,000 years ago, incidentally, is from the Chilean site of Monte Verde and even the primary investigators aren’t certain the date is archaeologically solid. But if early mariners probed the Pacific Coast of the New World numerous times and were disinclined to land in North America because of zoological dangers, the sailors could have pushed on south and made land in South America.
If the 33,000-year-old hearth proves valid, where else would these people have come from (Monte Verde is about 35 miles from the Pacific Ocean)? Maybe Monte Verde represents a pocket of survivors from early boat-people, instead of the result of one of those long slow walks from Beringia postulated by archaeological models. There are other debated early dates from Central and South America: 25,000 years old from the Chapala Basin of Mexico, 16,000 years ago from Pedra Furada in northern South America and a similar date from the Taima-Taima site in Venezuela. Maritime colonization might explain these sites.
Some of the big bad Pleistocene megafauna, Arctodus simus in particular, did not make it to South America. Neither did the brown bear: The grizzly ranged down the Sierra Madres far into Durango, southeast of the deserts, not far from the Chapala Basin, and was poised for a colonization of tropical habitats that would have led the species south into the Andes of South America. European firearms put an end to the bear’s expansionism.
Arrival in America by boat from the Pacific will remain the eternal hidden possibility. Humans could have landed most any place at any time in the past 50,000 years. The Iberian connection, another well-boosted hypothesis, contends that Europeans from the Iberian Peninsula paddled across the Atlantic 18,000 years ago, bringing their Clovis-like lithic technology with them. Thus the Solutrean culture of Spain and France morphs into Clovis 13,000 years ago in the southeastern United States. Unresolved problems with this theory include that the Solutreans seem to have been landlubbers and had trouble, some authorities think, crossing European rivers; they would have had to overcome 3,000 miles of the icy Atlantic Ocean and then there’s a paucity of evidence for the 5,000 years these people hid out in Virginia.
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An overland migration before the LGM from Siberia across the Bering Strait to the Alaskan side of Beringia remains a possibility, although there’s almost no evidence of people in the Far North at this time. They survived for a while on the Siberian side. Some hunters might have hung on in Alaska during the frigid millennia before the glacial sheets spread across the North American continent. Or these speculative ice-age pioneers could have gone south to the lower 48 before the ice slammed the door shut.
We know people lived in the Siberian Arctic 30,000 years ago, only 70 miles from the Arctic Ocean. They could have pushed east and crossed the Bering Strait on ice or land into Alaska. More recent coastal people of the Arctic have been known to make long latitudinal runs along shorelines. If they did, they would have few choices: Stay in eastern Beringia until the coast or an interior corridor opened up or find a way south to mid-America before the ice sheets closed off all routes south during the LGM. These travelers would have to co-exist with lions, sabertooth cats, big wolves and short-faced bears—a formidable task. But maybe some made it south and evaded the predators, especially the gigantic bear, by moving into the forested regions of Pennsylvania or southeastern Wisconsin at a mammoth butchering site that could represent a pocket of survivors from a Pre-LGM inland route down from Beringia.
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I wanted to tell the anchoring story of this book chronologically, from the time humans first stepped foot on North America to the last days of the great megafauna and, right off the bat, I stepped into a bog of opinions and presumptions buoyed by very few facts. A huge range of possible dates covers this icy human landscape and very little archaeological evidence has been found to narrow down the guesswork.
Controversy surrounding the time of first entry still reigns. Back in the 1960s, Louis Leakey, of Olduvai Gorge fame, found what he thought were human artifacts in a southern Californian alluvial fan that appeared to date at more than 100,000 years old. A few years ago in South Carolina, a chunk of chert, believed by the excavators to be a human artifact, was dated, by associated charcoal, at 50,000 years ago. A couple of authorities believe human footprints from Mexico are 40,000 years old. Human fingerprints found in a cave in New Mexico were reported to be 37,000 years old.
Few anthropologists buy into anything that old. In fact, most archaeologists studying early Americans won’t seriously consider human entry prior to about 14,500 years ago. They have their reasons: Nothing older has been found in the Americas that mainstream archaeology accepts as unimpeachable evidence.
Yet ancient people could have come over earlier. They probably did. But where exactly should the story start? One might be tempted to reach for the science fiction here (some of it’s not half bad).
One might think that ethnographic modeling or studies of primitive hunting groups might be useful in reconstructing the unrecorded lives of these first human visitors to eastern Beringia, but applying this approach across two continents has limitations. The early Americans are a special case in a few different ways and there are no real anthropological precedents. First, no people lived in the Americas—thus no demographic pressure, no territorial squabbles. Secondly, the new land was teeming with great beasts, some never before encountered by humans. Usually when we imagine humans encountering never-before-hunted animals, we think of islands, Tasmania, creatures like the dodo on Mauritius, the great auk or the moa of New Zealand—critters we drove into extinction in record time. Late Pleistocene America was too big and new for the limitations of island biogeography theory to make a big dent in a wildlife population that contained such a large number of huge creatures—for a while anyway. Human impact, from a speculative population of unknown size, on native species (Pleistocene extinction) would take millennia to rear its ugly head.
The most important archaeological date framing the earliest possible forays into North America is from the Yana Site in Siberia, what used to be far western Beringia. Though considerably west of Alaska, no insurmountable barriers lay between the Yana people and North America. Why wouldn’t these hunters want to explore eastward, along the coast, crossing the frozen rivers in wintertime?
Yana is an intriguing site. The rhino foreshafts are similar to the elk foreshafts found in the Anzick Clovis burial, although separated geographically by thousands of miles and by 16,000 years of time. The lithic assemblage is unlike later Siberian sites: There are no prismatic blades. Tons of mammoth bones are scattered among the cultural materials at the Yana River. How hard was human life in this frozen land? What are the possibilities of living in the far north of western Beringia before the LGM?
The early spring wind slapped the bison skin covering the opening to the smoky yurt. The winter had been mild, but Siberia was not a forgiving land 30,000 years ago, especially here on this great river, ten degrees of latitude north of the Arctic Circle—the land that would later be called Beringia. Inside the yurt, arranged around the central hearth, sat four generations of family, seven adults and four children. One of the adults, a white-haired elder with a withered arm, was two decades older than the others. Their clothing was sewn from the skins of several animals: Sealskin covered mukluks, caribou shirts and a cape fringed at the neck with wolverine fur. One man flaked butchering tools from a river cobble. Another worked a slice of mammoth long-bone into a sharpened spear point. The women and an older girl pierced animal skins with stout bone awls carved from wolf anklebones, fashioning covers for summer yurts from bison and caribou hides. In another month, they would move the camp out of the sheltered draw of their winter site, up onto a higher terrace where the Arctic wind kept the insects at bay. During deepest winter, the sun had disappeared altogether for more than two months. Now the warming sun lingered just above the horizon during midday. The days were growing longer. Soon, it would be time to think about the spring hunt. It was almost the season for the river ice to break up.
Outside, the noon sun revealed a white wilderness with no trees. A few river terraces were visible in the numerous channels where the great river began to divide as it approached its delta. The smaller of these distributaries were frozen solid. Only a dark band of water bubbled out of the middle of the big river. A dozen yurts dotted the whiteness. This was a large band but when they left their homeland far to the south, they knew they would probably be on their own for finding mates for their children as well as feeding themselves. Fortunately they discovered a place where animals crossed a dangerous river. Many animals drowned and there was almost always a dead bison or mammoth caught up in the ice flows. (The scene is reminiscent of Lewis and Clark’s discovery of the Great Falls of the Missouri in 1805: Fat wolves and grizzly bears lounged on the bank below the falls, feeding on the innumerable carcasses of bison that had drowned crossing the river upstream.) Driftwood lined the sides of the river channels. Here they made their camp. Prowling around the mired and dying mammoth, however, prides of Pleistocene lion looked for a chance at a kill. Wolves skulked just behind the bigger cats and, once the feast began, brown bear and wolverines frequented the carcasses. Humans had to wait in line or try to force their way in to get a share of the meat. Sometimes, the hunters found a stranded reindeer, bison, horse or mammoth to finish off by themselves. They hurled bone spears mounted on foreshafts and stabbed with sharpened sticks until the animals died. If the wounded game escaped, a pride of lions would usually get it. But the lions liked to hunt for live meat and didn’t scavenge much. They didn’t compete with the people as much as the bears and wolves did.
One summer, the band sighted a rare creature caught up in the ice flows: A woolly rhinoceros struggled along the riverbank. The hunters grabbed their spears and took off running downstream. The two-horned creature pawed at the bank with his front hoofs; huge blocks of ice knocked him back into the current. The rhinoceros lunged again and finally pulled his hindquarters up onto the grassy bank. The animal just stood there, apparently exhausted from his ordeal. The hunters were wary of this fierce beast. The woolly rhinoceros of the tundra was a solitary creature that the hunters seldom encountered. When they did, the near-sighted horned monster would charge blindly at them. Once, a rhino caught a seasoned hunter by his parka, threw him to the ground and crushed the hunter’s arm. The man, now old, survived. The woolly rhinoceros, like the mammoth, had become a totem of the people, a beast both feared and revered.
The hunters carefully closed in on the stationary animal that appeared to be offering himself up as meat for the band. Four hunters hurled their spears at one side of the rhino, and then dashed away to reload with another foreshaft. On the opposite side of the beast, three men drove fire-hardened wooden spears into the rhino’s body. The animal spun around and took another volley of spears. The hunters retreated to a higher terrace and waited. They had mortally wounded their totem animal.
The entire village—two clans totaling nearly seventy people—gathered around the dead rhino. They built fires to keep the bears and lions away. The old man with the crumpled arm came forward and circled the kill, sprinkling red ochre on it with his good hand and clutching a braid of burning grass with the feeble one. The butchering began. The people used choppers, sharpened flakes and scrapers to remove all flesh from the bone. Two older hunters, probably shaman, carefully removed the big and little horns from the rhino carcass with stone tools they pulled from leather pouches, scrapers and bifaces flaked from quartz crystal. The power of the animal resided in its horns.
The days grew longer. Blocks of ice bobbed down the wide river. The herds of horses and bison returned, looking for a way across. Almost every day, people saw mammoth. The big lions were also on the scene, so hunters approached their prey with caution. But the band craved fresh meat. Much of their winter food was drawn from meat frozen and cached from the fall hunt. Wolverines and foxes sometimes raided the food caches but brown bear hibernated during the coldest months. The people could deal with wolves, wolverines and foxes though a big bear was a more challenging problem. Most importantly, the birds were back.
The band moved their yurts to higher ground, but still out of sight of the prey animals who moved around the camp. Women went to work weaving fresh nets in preparation for the harvest of migratory waterfowl. Hundreds of thousands of ducks, geese, swans and cranes swept up from the south to nest on the muskegs and tundra ponds. The men posted lookouts for hunting opportunities as well as prowling lions and worked on their tool kits, shaping long, beveled rods from the larger horn of the rhinoceros. Other men carved ivory foreshafts from sections of mammoth tusk.
Waterfowl constituted a crucial summer food for the band. Some months, birds made up the bulk of the diet. Women and older children did most of the hunting. Strategies for hunting waterfowl came in many forms but the most efficient way to catch the bigger cranes and swans involved the use of nets.
Daylight lasted nearly twenty hours a day now. The sounds of geese honking and the rattled trumpeting of cranes became deafening. Nets could be strewn about the ponds and kettles at night and, by morning, would produce a few entangled waterfowl. But, more efficiently, lines of nets on poles were placed in the ponds and, under cover of the brief spring night, the women would steal into the waterways and hide by the poles until daybreak when the others would conduct a drive, frightening the birds to rise and skim the lake, flying into the nets the hunters had lifted into the air. The women and children could supply the band with most of their meat—migratory birds and an occasional Pleistocene hare—during summertime. The men loafed and waited for a mammoth or bison to get caught up in the icy river. Until one autumn day: The cries of women and screams of children startled the men at camp. Someone was in trouble. The men grabbed their weapons and surged out of camp towards the screams.
A Pleistocene lioness had snagged a child and carried her off down river. The men came running with their spears, filing down the dry channel where the huge predator was last seen. Except for the birds, it was eerily quiet.
The earliest opportunity for early Americans living in Beringia to reach the area of the lower United States would have been prior to the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), before the ice sheets slammed the door shut on routes southward. Such potential routes are sometimes called Pre-Max, or Pre-LGM. The prerequisite for the use of this passage is people actually living in the American Arctic 30,000 to 23,000 years ago. Without a human presence in Beringia, the consideration of a Pre-Max route would be pointless. But again, our inability to find conclusive proof of these fleeting ghosts of the Arctic proves little.
The events for which it would be convenient to have reliable dates are the initial crossing into North America and the times of route availability to penetrate south of the ice. But so far there’s no conclusive evidence for most of these events.
The first crossing is an arbitrary event, as humans may have crossed many times, going both directions. Still, it would be useful to know when the first Asian set foot on dry land on the eastern side of the Bering Strait. We don’t know when this happened. And, again, ancient seafarers could have visited the Americas at most any time, at most any port in the past 50,000 years.
A few hard dates provide only the roughest of parameters:
The Yana Rhinoceros Horn Site in Siberia with its ivory foreshaft has been dated at 32,000 years old, but that single find is followed by 18,000 years of silence in the archaeological record of northeastern Asia.
Eastern Beringian archaeologists have yet to find unchallenged material significantly older than Clovis times (about 13,300 years ago), though information from other disciplines suggests greater antiquity.
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Genetic studies of Native Americans suggest an earlier arrival date for people in North America. Early DNA analyses implied an entry date as old as 36,000 years ago.
A more recent DNA study concluded that the First Americans hit Alaska 30,000 years ago, lingered in Beringia for perhaps another 15,000 years, then headed southward. The single crossing, it concluded, was the founding population. This theory, also known as “Beringian Standstill,” suggests that during the first 15,000 years there was back-and-forth travel, exchanging genes between peoples in Alaska and Siberia. A cautionary reminder about the ease of travel across the Bering Land Bridge: Recall that, as far as we know, the Siberian woolly rhinoceros and the Alaskan short-faced bear never crossed, which may imply a paucity of habitat requirements in the bridge area for rhinos and scavenging bears or other factors we haven’t considered yet. Distributions of gene sequences do not dictate the actual geographical routes that may have connected them.
Around 15,000 years ago, the study suggests, the first people in the Americas hit the road for southern climes and began populating the New World. This southward migration through the Americas, geneticists think, was probably a swift pioneering process. If this thesis were true, the people would have had to use the coast as glaciers closed all other routes at this time. These geneticists conclude from their DNA data that most migration followed the coast, although others suggest that this could represent sampling bias, as Native Americans from other regions of the United States were excluded from the genetic study. There is no archaeological confirmation of this genetic map of North Americans.
I should note that there is nothing sacred about this particular reference. At this writing, a very recent study finds a “rare mitochondrial DNA haplogroup” in modern Native Americans of the Midwest that the authors believe means that the first Americans came from Asia not Europe and entered North America via Beringia through the ice-free corridor 18,000 to 15,000 years ago. The part about the IFC might have been a misstatement as the corridor was probably blocked by ice at that time. Or else the IFC opened earlier than most authorities believe.
Many anthropologists believe there were several waves of migration (previous to the arrival of Na-Dena speakers and Aleut-Eskimos), pulses of colonization, and the date of 30,000 years ago is just a starting point on a ticking genetic clock.
Other estimates of arrival times derived from mitochondrial DNA range from 20,000 to 40,000 years ago. This is complicated scientific terrain, nearly impenetrable for the half-committed layman. Recent books by professional archaeologists do an excellent job of translating genetic studies.
Linguistic modeling infers that about 35,000 years would be required for the divergence of the complex of American languages and dialects. This assumes a singular ancestral language at the time of arrival, which diverged over time at a set rate to come up with the number of Native languages at European contact. Some linguists assert that the diversity of languages in a region reflects the length of time people have lived there. The greatest diversity of Native American languages is clustered along the West Coast, from Tlingit territory in Canada to California.
Studies of pre-Columbian human teeth, like genetics and linguistics, indicate Northeast Asia for an entry point and a “dentochronological” age of arrival at about 15,000 or perhaps 20,000 years ago.
Experts tend to consider these language and tooth clocks to be rougher running than the genetic timepiece, which is itself an informed estimate of the amount of time humans may have lived in North America.
The archaeologists I talk to tend to regard these dates as guidelines, at best, awaiting confirmation by finding human material culture. There is yet no direct archaeological evidence of that occupation, except for the Yana site, which is some 3,700 miles west of the Bering Sea.
Despite this conventional interpretation, let’s say, for the sake of discussion, some people were in eastern Beringia before the LGM. Perhaps a few hunters came to America after 30,000 years ago, but not much happened until about 15,000 years ago. The Bølling-Allerød warming 14,700 years ago and the subsequent availability of the coastal route are roughly coincident with the dates provide by genetic studies.
These people would have to had survived, if not thrived, in Alaska and eastern Beringia in order to find a route down south along the unglaciated valleys of the Pacific Northwest Cordillera. Admittedly, it would have been tough to over-winter in Beringia between 27,000 and about 15,000 years ago. Hunting, scavenging and caching meat are essentially the only way to endure the long winter nights in the white wilderness. Maybe a decision to find a route south was made shortly after crossing the Strait, so that the colonizer’s time in Beringia was very brief. Some glaciologists think several routes through and around the ice were available. The Pre-Max route is a worthy possibility.
How does this translate for our speculative band of ice-age hunters hunkered down on the tundra?
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Twenty-six thousand years ago in eastern Beringia, they would have been on the move. The people had no dogs to haul sleds or travois. Dogs would be domesticated from wolves in China some 11,000 years later. Everyone capable of walking carried a pack. Several hunters fanned out in front of the advancing band, scouting the country for game, for routes and keeping an eye out for dangerous predators. The summer tundra was bountiful with grass for the huge grazing animals.
No trees or woody shrubs grew on the chilly steppes and low-lying tundra. Glacial ice covered the higher mountains. The North Slope of Alaska is flat but people would have had better hunting options up in the breaks of the lower mountains and river bottoms, especially in the interior of Alaska. This is a hunter’s habitat. Gatherers would notice only a few fruiting shrubs growing on the slopes in late summer and taproots of alpine pea vine growing on the alluvial benches and river bottoms. The people would see that grizzlies (if the bears were up there and the gap in the fossil record of 35,000 to 21,000 years ago is sampling bias) extensively harvest this food source. But big game was the major objective. Muskeg lowlands made summer travel a slog, but dry ridges and braided rivers were easy going. The people wore form-fitting skin or fur clothing, as appropriate to the seasonal weather, and carried portable shelters composed of birch and willow frame covered by animal hides. They carried big game hunting weapons. Most of all, they knew how to make fire—to keep the frigid air at bay and to ward off the fierce Pleistocene carnivores.
The ability to build a fire at any moment, during all seasons and in all landscapes, was the key to surviving the dry cold tundra of America prior to the last glacial maximum. Some modern ecologists have suggested that the absence of woody shrubs to ignite bone fuel (burnt bone in old fire pits is common in later Beringian sites) might have been a barrier that precluded early settlement (meaning the evidence archaeologists haven’t found yet) in Beringia before the LGM—the transition from arid grasslands to shrub vegetation took place about 15,000 years ago.
I’m wary of this projection of selected pollen samples onto the people’s adaptive abilities. The band of hunters, if present, could still start fires on these cold grasslands, far from spruce forests and the shrub tundra of dwarf willow and birch.
Twenty-six thousand years ago, the Arctic would have been littered with the scattered skeletal remains of bison, saiga antelope, musk ox, mammoth and other grazers along with the bones of a few of the great carnivores that stalked the herbivores. And there would have been huge piles of dung drying on the ground. Dry dung makes for a long-burning fire, though not an especially hot one. A better fire-starter is dried peat. Peat is partially decomposed, highly organic ancient vegetable material. Peat beds lie all over the Far North and their beds are exposed in the eroded banks of creeks and rivers. Such organic layers are not that difficult to locate and one outcrop of fossil peat could supply enough fuel to theoretically warm a band of hunters all year. They would have to dig it out, dry it and packed off as much as they could haul.
The challenge is carrying sufficient dry fuel on your back in order to quickly build a fire in an emergency: Like a group of big prowling Pleistocene lions, a scimitar cat or a giant short-faced bear coming over the rise to appropriate your camel kill. Such events might have daily problems 26,000 years ago. Your defensive tools are spears, throwing sticks (the earliest evidence of atlatl use is from the Solutreans of Europe) and probably nets and bolos. Most of all, they had social cohesion and fire.
Preparation is necessary: You shred the peat or dung, dry it out near a fire and then stash it in your pack for fire starter. For fuel, you need to dry out large quantities of dung, or peat, designate a few members of the band to carry a full load of fuel and have every adult carry fire-bows, flints, dry shredded peat and enough dried dung to get a blaze going. Once the communal blaze is going, bone and dung can be gathered from the surrounding locale, drying in the heat of the fire, to keep it going.
Pre-Max explorers looking for a way southward, as they would probably be inclined with their oral histories and bird lore, would have had to plan ahead, drying and stashing caches of dung, peat and bone as they traveled. In winter, they would have to store large quantities of combustibles around their winter camps.
Bone burns hot. It’s the fat that makes it combustible. A fresh bone burns better than an older one and bones at freshly butchered or scavenged carcasses would be the best. Beringians would collect a pack-able quantity of such material as they roamed the land scouting for game and looking for a way southward through the glaciers.
To get a real fire going in the Arctic, the people would find a ravine out of the wind and ignite the shredded peat with an ember from a fire-bow and drill. They would add the dried dung carefully until they had a small blaze going. Then they’d pile on the greenest, fattest fragments of bones—long-legged waterfowl come to mind—until the skeletal material flamed. An improvised billow would be handy, though a half-dozen children blowing into the fire would do the job too.
I don’t think the bold bands of Pre-Max Beringians would have been stopped by lack of a shrub-tundra. Not directly anyway. These hunters could make fires of dung, peat and bone sufficient to cook their food and warm their hearths. The question is whether they could build such fires big and fast enough to keep the now-extinct huge predators and scavengers at bay.
A quarter-mile ahead, one of the advanced lookouts signals from a ridge with one hand outstretched and flat over his nose and the other arm overhead with the index finger pointed up (fictional, but similar to the grizzly bear signals I use with my traveling companions today), meaning a solitary short-faced bear (as opposed to a family group of mother and young or two adults during the breeding season) is approaching. The band of thirty-some people quickly gathers up the stragglers and looks for defensible terrain. A cliff would be best but they are far from the mountains. A steep ravine leads away from the braided river and heads up into a twenty-foot-high box. It’s a tight defile with no turning back, which means a fight, but the people prefer these odds to facing Arctodus simus on open ground.
The giant bear mostly feeds on the kills of lions and other predators but he has nothing against meat on the hoof or foot either. He might snag a human traveling solo with his superior speed. Solitary predators like mountain lions, and including some large omnivores such as bears, can’t afford to brawl casually as an injury could impede their survival—their ability to kill prey and fight for meat at carcasses—implying the people have a chance against the gigantic bear. These two species are brand new to each other. Until hitting Alaska, neither had seen anything so strange as a standing fifteen-foot-high bear or an upright hominid; the bear has no reason to fear the puny two-legged ones.
The women of the band herd the children into the ravine, almost to the end of the earthen box canyon. The men prepare their weapons and a fire near the mouth of the short ravine, just far enough up the gulch where the short-faced bear can’t drop in from the top. The women cut emergency steps in the tundra at the head of the draw where, if the giant bear overruns the men, they might scramble out of the gulch and regroup for a running fight. The two scouts rejoin the group but stay on the high ground where they can see the approaching bruin and, if the beast insists on going up the ravine after the people, throw great rocks at his head. They gather a pile of boulders.
If the band could hide downwind, the short-face bear might pass them by. It prefers rotten meat and has the best nose in the Pleistocene animal scene, so it will also likely know humans are around. The leaders of the band watch and wait until they are certain the bear knows they are there. The scouts try to draw the attention of the short-face away from the band. The two scouts hunch down near the top of the ravine. Arctodus simus doesn’t fall for the distractions. Sensing a great number of prey or another appealing smell, perhaps the meat fetor of smoky clothing, he beelines for the mouth of the ravine. Men with spears and bolos greet the bear. The Beringians poke fire-hardened spears at both sides of the great omnivore. A bolo stone strikes the animal near the snout. The bear lumbers forward. The men fall back behind the fire line and stoke the flames.
Now is the moment: two hunters hurl their burning spears at the gigantic bear. The scouts throw great rocks from above, pelting the bruin about the head and back. These wounds are minor, but the short-faced bear retreats from the blazing fire-line, twirls, and ambles back out of the ravine.
The people gather on the river terrace and watch the feared creature swing down the green Pleistocene valley. The bear will find another meal. The band most fears the short-faced bear at the moment they bring down prey, a large herbivore such as a horse or caribou. At such times, only fire keeps the scavenging wolves and bears away until they can strip as much flesh as they can from the carcass and carry the meat away to safe shelters and storage caches. The huge lions are just as dangerous as a bear. The cats hunt in prides and bring down any animal that slows or strays away from the herd. That applies to the band of hunters. They stick together and watch the children carefully.
We know that twenty-six thousand years ago plenty of big animals grazed the tundra grasses in the North and by hunting them people could in theory survive winters. The “Standstill” seen by geneticists also suggests a human presence hanging out in Beringia from 30,000 to 15,000 years ago, though archaeologists scratch their heads as to where the evidence can be found. Gold sluicing operations in Alaska haven’t washed ancient human bones from river alluvium. The few dead Beringians would have been eaten by carnivores or buried by their clansmen.
There may not be any genetic trace of these early adventures. They might have died off from disease or been wiped out by giant predators. The North American Beringian population might have been squeezed through a tight bottleneck. The colder weather setting in about 27,000 years ago must have shocked whatever human population that might have lived in Beringia and prodded them to adaptive action. The alternative strategy for these early American would be to find a route south, down where their elders told them the living was easy and from where the birds flew in spring.
What about routes southward through the ice before the LGM? The earliest possible American Beringians, say 30,000 to 27,000 years ago, might have experienced relatively mild climatic conditions such as humans did at the Yana site in Siberia. But starting about 27,000 years ago, it turned colder though no less productive for the megafauna that thrived on the grasslands. For humans it must have been a challenge to remain in the Far North. Then (after 26,000 years ago) the Laurentide ice sheet began to merge with the Pacific mountain glaciers and corridor routes were closed off roughly 22,000 years ago (there’s a spectrum of opinions here). At any rate, that seems to be the range of possible Pre-Max dates—30,000 to 23,000 years ago—for people to have made it southward to mid-latitude North America.
Going south was a definite possibility.
We know it was possible because a grizzly bear did it.
In 2002, a cranial fragment of a brown bear was located in a museum collection of fossils from fluvial gravels near Edmonton, Alberta. This well-preserved bone was subsequently dated, based on two “accelerator radiocarbon dates on collagen,” at 26,000 years old (this is the average of two radiocarbon dates; a recalibrated date would be several thousand years later). The salient point is that it is decidedly before the last glacial maximum.
Grizzlies came down from Beringia before the two great ice sheets collided, the Pre-Max route. (We don’t know how much earlier. The first grizzly crossed over from Northeast Asia 70,000 to 50,000 years ago. Brown bear demographics will be discussed in Chapter 5.)
So grizzlies roamed Alberta by 26,000 years ago. DNA evidence indicates they arrived from Alaska and that this was the founding population of all present-day brown bear in the contiguous states. These conclusions are deduced from analysis of a single, credible cranial fragment from a gravel pit near Edmonton.
If a grizzly made it down, could humans not have followed? The answer is that if people were up there at that time, of course they could have.
The Pre-Max route could have been the ice-free valleys east of the Cordilleran glaciers or another, earlier passage. Any route a grizzly could use would be cushy for humans. Grizzlies colonize empty lands at the slow rate of approximately twenty miles every five years and the habitat has to be rich. Young male bears often make the first probe into new country but it is the family groups that establish occupation. This means the extension of one female home range—the grizzly daughter often sets up her own small range adjacent to her mother’s and reproduces the fifth year. People can slug over barren ground and snow with food in their packs, hunt waterfowl and make the same trip (over a thousand years for the grizzly) in a few years.
Evidence of a grizzly in Alberta 26,000 years ago strongly suggests that a route that humans—if they were in Beringia that long ago—could have used was open for several thousand years and that the habitat along that particular migratory corridor was rich and fully revegetated after prior glaciations.
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How would the trip have gone, south out of the frigid north down to the lower 48 around 26,000 years ago? How would these early Americans deal with the huge cats and bears? What would they eat? Would they hunt big game or gather wild plants? These explorers coming out of the north had to be primarily hunters in order to survive in the Arctic winter. Now, along the Pre-Max corridor route, they might have had options.
I should clarify again the distinction between an early route to the south used by grizzlies in the Pre-Max (prior to 26,000 years ago) to the later ice-free corridor postulated for the Clovis migration (before 13,000 years ago). The former would have had a passage between glaciated highlands that remained free of ice for millennia, occupied by a full range of Pleistocene plants and animals. The latter corridor had just emerged from the later-occurring ice sheets and was, at first, many scientists believe, inhospitable, inundated by meltwater lakes, barren and raked by frigid katabatic winds. Ice-age people could have traveled either route; the grizzly could not.
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Is there any evidence that those ancient Yana River hunters blasted east along the Arctic Ocean, like the Thule-Eskimos a thousand years ago, hit the Mackenzie River delta and turned south? Or stopped and lived in the North? A number of archaeological Pre-Max dates from the North American Arctic have been re-examined in past decades. Virtually all have since been questioned or discarded. But a couple of authorities cling tenaciously to Pre-LGM dates from the Yukon.
Perhaps the most famous such site is the remote Yukon’s Blue Fish caves, near the Alaska border, where archaeologists, in 1985, found what they believed was a percussion-flaked tool of mammoth bone dating around 26,000 years old. I stumbled through the area a few years later, rowing a raft down the Porcupine River from Old Crow to the Yukon River.
The country of the Blue Fish is a mosaic of old river channels, muskeg swamps and boreal forests of spruce and fir with a few ghostly cottonwoods scattered along the rivers. The caves lie upriver at the base of a limestone ridge.
I stopped by in summertime, fly-fishing the Blue Fish River for Arctic grayling before continuing downstream through limonite cliffs where dozens of peregrine falcons nested. One day I walked upstream on the alluvial channels of summer, which means easy travel in this land of taiga and muskeg. It’s gentle country but the bogs and muskegs make walking the wet flats cumbersome; you try to step on the mossy tussock heads at the risk of breaking an ankle and, when you fall off, you’re up to your knees in icy water. Dry ridges make the best walking. Otherwise, use the creeks.
Wintertime is different. A friend of mine, an anthropologist, skied upstream from Fort Yukon on the frozen Porcupine during the dark of winter, on his way to visit the Kutchin people, carrying everything on his back. He camped in the collapsed cubbies of vanished trappers, surrounded by the grinning skulls of long-departed wolverine and lynx peering in at his tiny fires of spruce twigs. This incredibly tough guy makes a good case for Pre-Max migratory possibilities.
The reason I stopped at the Blue Fish, besides wanting to smell the Pleistocene, was that I was trying to feed a few accompanying friends by living off the land and had I fished poorly. It wasn’t quite salmon-run time. An endangered whitefish lived in the Porcupine, which I wasn’t supposed to catch or eat, but an Athapaskan Indian gave me one. The fish was delicious and I could see why it needed protection from people like me. I could catch northern pike with streamers at most any time, but they were so bony I only used them for preparing ceviche. The grayling were smallish, the big ones barely a foot long, but also very tasty.
Amid the cobbles and pebbles, I picked up what looked like a fragment of fossilized long-bone: Camel, horse? I had no idea: The animal lived beyond my paleontological prowess. I replaced the fossil, having long ago lost any interest in collecting. Incised in the drying mud were tracks of caribou, moose, wolverine, lynx, wolf and a single grizzly. Willows lined the creek and, beyond, a boreal zone of spruce and fir. Higher up, the sparse conifer forest faded into tundra.
Earlier, say 26,000 years ago, this land would have been vast tundra grassland, rich in plant food for mammoth and other Pleistocene mega-fauna, which over the millennia gave way to birch and then the boreal forest we see today. This site would have been a beautiful place to live.
A few miles upstream, perched below a cliff, lay the dry limestone caves of the Blue Fish where scientists found fossils from horses, bison, caribou and lions. Some bones looked like predators had dragged them into the cave. Others looked like they had the cut-marks from human butchering. Over the years, tools were discovered to suggest the presence of humans dating back 11,000 to 18,000 years ago, maybe older. Archaeologists pondered the scars and fractures on the fossil fragments in Blue Fish and wondered whether people inflicted them or if non-human processes could have produced them (the marks on the alleged bone tools could have resulted from predator gnawing or natural geological grinding in glacial or permafrost deposits). There is still no consensus and the credibility of the older dates remains in limbo.
I should add that the claim of human butchering marks on ancient bones is sometimes difficult to accept at face value. Predator gnawing and other natural processes have duplicated butchering marks, based on experiments by anthropologists.
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Otherwise, and this includes a site north of Old Crow 35 miles to the northeast of Blue Fish caves (from where there is a contested 40,000-year-old date), there are simply no reliable dates, no butchered bones older than the LGM from Beringia. Although many anthropologists think the climate was impossibly cold and bleak, Homo sapiens had survived and lived well with grace and ease in such Arctic environs. There are other lines of reasoning that may indicate that humans could have occupied North America long before a coastal route or an ice-free corridor was available.
What would lend archaeological credibility (besides a site in Beringia) for the Pre-Max theory of humans coming down out of Beringia before the glaciers slammed shut? How about a date from south of the glaciers earlier than 15,000 or 16,000 years ago? That would be the key: A solid date, preferably in North America, earlier than anyone thinks people could have come down the coast. A number of radiocarbon dates, from 16,000 to 33,000 years ago, have emerged from New World archaeological literature. Many of the earlier dates have been debunked and the credibility of all have been questioned. There’s a date from Mexico of 23,150 BP and more from Brazil averaging around 17,000 that some take seriously.
There are, however, a few possible candidates from Virginia (about 18,000 years ago) and Pennsylvania (perhaps 19,000 years ago). Additionally, a number of dates from mammoth-butchering sites (Hebior-Schaefer) in Kenosha County, Wisconsin average over 14,000 years old and Wisconsin is pretty far inland from any coastal route. Although no firm consensus on the validity of most of these radiocarbon samples exists, if just a single date or a future one holds up that would mean people reached the lower states before the coast was passable or the ice-free corridor opened.
These most likely sites for Pre-Max entry come from the forested eastern United States, especially Pennsylvania. Short-faced bears, who may have run down and devoured two-legged immigrants or appropriated the hunter’s kills, were likely a problem for migrants, especially in the open landscapes of the American West. Maybe these small groups of early pioneers died out.
It would be interesting to look at the Pennsylvania rock shelter, the Wisconsin mammoth-butchering places and the earliest sites from the southeastern United States in terms of co-existing with the short-faced bear. The fossil record of Arctodus simus indicates a few bears were on the scene—in certain places like Utah, Kansas, Wyoming and maybe Texas—when Clovis showed up. What about the Pre-LGM East? A short-faced bear specimen from the Saltville Valley of Virginia radiocarbon dated almost 15,000 BP. There are recently recovered fossils of short-faced bears from central Florida. But up north in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin: What is the paleontological record of the particular site, the area or region? Are there short-faced bear fossils? If so, what are the dates from those bones? What’s the best guess about how these people lived? Assuming they hunted and foraged, would the huge Pleistocene cats and bears have interfered with the people’s livelihood? What, given the terrain and vegetation, would be a strategy for foraging? I tried to look up this information in the literature but didn’t get far.
Recently, a 50,000-year-old date on charcoal from a South Carolina site has been reported, but the authenticity of the “tools” found in the same sediment layer has been questioned. Many archaeologists think freezing and thawing or other natural processes created the alleged artifacts.
Thus, very few scientists believe the very early dates—33, 000 to 50,000 years ago—are credible and, even if you did, where would these people have come from?
Of course, there’s always that slow boat from China.
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From this scanty evidence, one could conclude that there were very few people—maybe none—south of the ice sheets prior to about 15,000 years ago: The archaeological record is extremely thin for this time and, indeed, as we will see, even if people boated down the Pacific Coast to reach Oregon and Chile 14,500 years ago, scientific evidence of substantial occupation remains scant until the Clovis show up.
Nearly 50,000 years after Australia is colonized, North America remains virtually empty of humans.
Why? This fascinating puzzle will be with us a long time. Ice and the frigid climate are considerations. And zoology still lurks in the early American thicket as a compelling argument against settlement.