Braving the Northwest Coast
During the Time of Icebergs
Maritime Learning and Innovation in North America
Did the first Americans use the Northwest Pacific coast to accomplish the initial settlement of the Americas? What is the archeological evidence for this coastal route? Did early Americans have to figure out from square one how to live and travel along coastal environments during the last global warming of the Late Pleistocene? Certainly, their ancient ancestors in Africa, Asia and Australia knew how to build boats and exploit a maritime economy. Yet prominent American archeologists, proponents of the Pacific Coast route theory, debate if these colonizers had boats or practiced a maritime economy. Is the implication that, by 14,700 years ago, they had forgotten their ocean lessons and technology as people moved inland and into the Arctic (like Odysseus who walks inland carrying an oar over his shoulder until someone asks what the hell is that thing for)? Does the utilitarian knowledge and technology of maritime environments continue to live on in the oral histories of people for thousands of years or does this cognitive history evaporate with time lived in other habitats?
These rarefied questions about landscape learning might appear intimidating, or perhaps a bit esoteric, to an interested outsider. This discussion, however, becomes less overwhelming when I recall my own unremarkable first adventures along the ocean coasts of North America.
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I grew up far from the sea, about as much mid-continent as anyone can get in North America. In fact, my first glimpse of an ocean was the Arctic Ocean at Point Barrow, Alaska. Peering into the fog rolling off the ice pack, I could make out an expanse of a featureless, slate-gray ocean. Just down the beach, a beluga whale had washed up. Three days later, I found polar bear tracks. I was 21 years old.
After that sighting, I visited the Pacific Ocean, both sides. Following a couple of tours as an Army medic in the Central Highlands of Vietnam, where on jungle patrols to nearby mountaintops I could see the distant South China Sea, I was repatriated to the relative safety of the Rocky Mountains. I spent that summer in grizzly bear country, and then retreated to Arizona to plan an expedition: To backpack and film the Desert Coast of the Sea of Cortez, also known as the Gulf of California, in Sonora, Mexico. The stretch of coast I had in mind was historic Seri Indian Territory, now only partially occupied by the natives. Forty years ago, big sections of this route were wilderness.
We intended to walk it. My companion happened to be a fellow Special Forces medic, on the same A-team as myself in Vietnam, a gifted linguist and natural historian—a real find, even within such an elite group as Green Beret medics whom I had always found to be the smartest of combat grunts.
The Seri Indians were small bands of sea-going hunters and gatherers, one of only two non-agricultural tribes in all of Mexico. At the time of our little expedition, most of the people lived near two small villages on the coast opposite Tiburon Island; the Seri Indians numbered in the low hundreds, having been reduced from about 5,000 by European disease and attempts by the Spanish and Mexican armies to exterminate them. They were fierce warriors, skilled hunters who ran down deer in the mountains. Most of all, the Seri were unparalleled ocean sailors, singing navigational songs at the bows of their small carrizo-woven balsas, song lines that guided them throughout the island-studded blue waters of the Gulf of California. The leatherback sea turtle was their sacred animal. The Seri language is unique, strange even to linguists; maybe it was paddled across the gulf from the Baja Peninsula of California.
The distance between Libertad and San Carlos in Sonora is less than 200 miles in raven-distance. Besides the two attractive villages, a small chunk of development scarred this coastline. We planned to bypass this as well as another agricultural section of coast.
We’d backpack gear, food, water as well as my cheap Super-8 camera gear. Though the film was ethnographic, I would film no live Indians. Instead, the two of us would stop in Seri El Desemboque to pay our respects to the people, have dinner and spend the night before resuming our coastal foraging. The point here is that we would have to live off the land for much of our food and most of our water. The terrain was semi-mountainous with small coves, rugged headlands and sheer cliffs impossible to navigate at high tide. The landscape is incredibly beautiful. On the clearest days, you could see fin whales blowing and the many islands of the gulf. I knew next to nothing about tides or coastal travel; my companion knew more but this kind of trip was new for both of us.
A few days into our filming, we had to solve the problem of fresh water; we couldn’t carry enough to see us through a week of backpacking. The Lower Sonoran Desert here received only four or five inches of rain annually, though in colder seasons the ocean dew would soak your sleeping bag. We decided to attempt to harvest the dew by sponging it off agave leaves; we didn’t get much, but it took the edge off our thirst. Next, we tried an evaporation trap—a modern idea we had heard of—whereby we spread a plastic tarp with a stone in the middle over a hole in the sand into which we poured seawater. The wind destroyed this simple notion; the most we ever got was a thin pint.
Desert flora and fauna, however, thrived here like nowhere else. Eighty-foot upside-down carrots called Boojum trees grew along a coastal strip of mountains where desert bighorn sheep browsed their leaves, which sprouted after rains like ocotillo. The immense variety of plants and cacti reflected this unique, rich life zone. Wildlife flourished along the coast, with deer grazing on seaweed at low tide while coatmundi scavenged shellfish in the inter-tidal zone. We spotted a rare jaguarundi cat in the saltbush and saw the tracks of a half-dozen species of dog and cat. These animals required fresh water. The deer and javalina trails seemingly ran everywhere, but especially up the steep canyons leading up into the coastal range of volcanic mountains. Some evenings and mornings, you could see doves flying to and from the heads of these canyons.
This is how we found drinking water: After much discussion we picked larger canyons where numerous game trails coalesced into steep walled glades and birds flew. The nature of the rock was important, as it needed to hold rainwater; the bedrock couldn’t be porous or too fractured. On this desert coast, a massive conglomerate was the best.
We followed the deer trails from the ocean up to narrow canyons. The torrential monsoon rains of summer had literally drilled out huge potholes in the bedrock; the ones that still held water are known as “tinajas.” The bigger tinajas held water for most of the year. One survival problem was solved.
Food was the other logistical hurdle. We carried some in our packs; rice and powdered gruel of some sort, sufficient not to starve but otherwise unattractive. I had brought no fishing gear and had mindlessly planned to eat stuff from the sea, though I was clueless as to what or how to get it.
Exploring the tide pools, sleeping in the wild perfect crescents of sandy bays, we had it made. Each night, we charted the stars around a roaring fire. Soon we got hungry. The most notable, familiar creature was the rock crab, a blue or red crustacean scurrying over the bedrock at low tide. Over a week, we learned to ambush these small, tasty critters at lowest tides, coming at them from the ocean side, pinning them in tiny tidal canyons and then impaling the rock crabs with fire-sharpened sticks. We boiled them over the fire in a pot and then spent hours, usually about three, picking out the white crabmeat until we had a cup of meat. In terms of caloric intake and output, we were about breaking even.
In the course of two weeks, we had pegged the water levels at low and high tide with sticks and discerned that, here in Sonora, we had two low and two high tides a day; one was higher than the other. Every day, the tide cycle lagged behind the day before by about 50 minutes. We had started camping on the beach about the time of the new moon and now it was approaching full. The highs got higher and the lows lower with the waxing moon. That was important food-wise because we had spotted some big rock scallops at lowest tide, shells that we recognized from our beachcombing.
Beachcombing meant exploring the archeological middens located in blowouts on the sand dunes; they were essentially shell mounds containing about eight thousand years of artifacts often mixed together, from historical Seri eggshell pottery and clay turtle figurines to early Archaic Armargosa points. We were less interested in the archeology than in what the Indians were having for dinner. The shell mounds mostly consisted of clam, oyster, gastropod shells, mussel and scallops, especially rock scallops. We found many opercula (the round plate that closes the shell of a gastropod) of a particular species of snail. We figured if the prehistoric coast dwellers harvested these shellfish, they had to be good to eat.
The archeological midden was our field guide to a coastal cuisine.
We could collect the snails, which we had identified by their opercula (the same ones prehistoric people ate), at any tidal level but, even after fifteen minutes of boiling, they were bitter. We pried off the operculum and dug out the snail meat with our pocket knifes. We experimented and, within a few days, discovered that the snails under the surface of the lowest tide level were sweet, actually delicious when dipped in a sauce of olive oil, native oregano and wild chiltepines, which we picked from plants up the sandy arroyos. We located a couple colonies of rock scallop at the lowest tides. With more trial and error at collecting—you had to quickly slide a Bowie knife between the scallop and the rock to pop it off—and cooking techniques, these shellfish beds became our commissary.
At night, we drew lines and circles in the sand by firelight. The circles represented the moon, the sun and earth; the lines were crude estimates of gravitation forces. Our beach astronomy resulted from mere curiosity about a simple but central event in our daily lives—the relationship of phases of the moon and tidal cycles. We incorrectly guessed the pull of the sun was greater than it actually is, since it’s big though far away. Yet you could tell, by daily observations during the two weeks, that the moon was the big dog in determining tide cycles. We spent many hours over several nights discussing the prediction of tides, a dialogue that was so unforced and obvious it seemed empirical.
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The point of these seaside yarns is that, in my experience, both the use of marine resources, and relating their collection to the cycles of tides and phases of the moon, can be a facile matter of natural curiosity. It’s intuitive: Watch what the animals do. It helps if you are hungry.
This argument about whether early Americans travelling down the northwest coast 14,500 years ago used watercraft or ate shellfish raises an older question about landscape learning, the development of human mind from its African origins and climate change.
What is the anthropological history of human adaptability, what prods our survival instincts to initiate change and can it be measured? Coastal learning shows up early in this brief chronology.
Anthropologists studying hominoid evolution suggest that it was not so much emergence onto the African savanna that drove human evolution but rapid climate change. After 4 million years of a stable environment, 200 thousand years of wildly fluctuating climate stimulated the hominoid brain to double in size and prodded the people to invent stone tools. Human evolution was nature’s experiment with diversity, they say. We are all creatures of climate change.
The fossil record indicates that our species, Homo sapiens, arose in Africa before 195,000 years ago. (Climatologists suggest a major, long-lasting drought in sub-Sahara 200,000 years ago as a causative agent.) The emergence of the modern human mind, sometimes called “cognitive modernity,” some suggest, might have flowered on a different timetable, at a much later date.
For a long time, it was assumed that symbolism, ritual, art and elaborate tool manufacture blossomed suddenly in Europe 40,000 years ago, about the time when our species first came into competitive contact with the existing Neanderthal population, who were also capable of symbolic thought. Now, scientists say, evidence of cognitive modernity has been unearthed from contexts that date much older: Anatomically modern humans may have popped up in Africa already hard-wired for modern thought processes. Previously, scientists had suggested that 50,000 years ago a genetic mutation in the brain might have rewired humans for modern thinking. No doubt, population pressure and language drove all sorts of symbolic activity and social innovation. Climatic change and geographical movement stimulated behavioral adaptation; it’s sometimes difficult to pluck single activities from the collective march towards human modernity.
Thus archeologists look for “proxies” to try to identify cognitive modernity (also called “behavioral modernity”), like using seemingly unrelated stages of production in tool manufacture, art, long-distance transport of materials, grinding tools, symbolic activity or tracking of time or seasons and then linking such moments to lunar cycles. The use of language, if you could date it, would probably underlie these activities.
So, archeologists have found signs of personal adornment, African beads 70,000 years old, and 80,000 year-old bone harpoons made to spear spawning Nile catfish, a seasonal awareness of fish migrations, called “seasonal mapping,” which they believe only a modern mind would be able to come up with. A red ochre workshop has been located on the Southeastern African coast that dates back 100,000 years; here the material from oxidized iron deposits had been mixed in abalone shells with fat from mammal marrow and a pinch of charcoal. The implication is that red ocher means paint for decoration or art, which in turn represents an effort to communicate.
Anthropologists think the most ancient claims of cognitive modernity in Homo sapiens come from southern Africa, where shellfish foraging and the scheduling of shellfish hunting to phases of the moon run back 160,000 years; these are perhaps the oldest proxies of all.
If cognitive modernity has been around for 160,000 years, then it’s quite possible such logical capability was available when the first anatomically complete humans emerged from their African roots. Something must happen to prod this innate curiosity, to awaken our creativity to solve problems like pioneering new habitats and exploiting newly available resources. Otherwise, modern humans would have raced through all prehistory like jackrabbits, inventing new tools and changing behavior at every crest of a new hill; they probably always had the necessary equipment for astounding invention buried in their gray matter, but some stressor was required to draw it out. Climate change, population pressure, paths of language and the discovery of new, unfamiliar lands remain candidates that prick the inclination for innovation. The movement of ice-age explorers into unknown, uninhabited America must have been a whopping challenge and invitation for change. The First Americans had to cope with the frigid North, survive during the Last Glacial Maximum, thrive in and travel the barren landscape of the ice-free corridor when it first opened, build boats for coastal travel, co-exist with gigantic short-faced bears or invent a brand new projectile point when confronted with giant pachyderms they wanted to eat.
The implication that there was no lag between the evolution of human anatomy and the development of the modern mind is fascinating. The difficulties, however, of seashore foraging and, likewise, the complexity of human thinking capable of linking tides to phases of the moon could be overestimated. This applies to periods 160,000 years ago in southern Africa as well as 14,500 years ago on the North American coast—I doubt the harvest of marine resources and cyclic associations of tides and the moon ever required much of a cognitive revolution.
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How would have the knowledge of exploitation of maritime ecosystems and boats have made its way to the Bering Strait?
Beginning about 70,000 years ago, Africa endured a series of climatic downturns that brought on droughts and famine. Around the same time or just before, Mount Toba in Sumatra blew—the most powerful volcanic eruption in 2 million years. A volcanic winter ensued. All the climatic upheavals around that time may have been related to Mount Toba blowing off its top. Here, with this eruption, we have the closest human-experienced parallel to today’s dramatic climate change. The temperature may have dropped 6 or 7 degrees Fahrenheit during the 6 to 10 years of Toba’s volcanic winter. Today, greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and oceans, plus subsequent associated cascading events affecting climate change, could warm our planet by 6 or 7 degrees in a decade or more.
Seventy thousand years ago, Homo sapiens populations experienced a severe bottleneck: Some genetic evidence suggests we shrank down to the low thousands worldwide; could a fatter, but distinct, bottleneck be waiting for us modern folk by the end of the century?
Humans fled parts of Africa, crossing the Red Sea in boats some 60,000 years ago. They reached Asia, sailed south to Australia by 55,000 years ago and took their boats up the coast of southern Asia, in the direction of Beringia.
Eventually, perhaps as late as 15,000 years ago, Beringians looked at the coast of what is now Alaska, and wondered if they could get down there. Maybe they remembered their previous lives as mariners.
I should state here that there is no archeological evidence of people using the northwestern Pacific coastal route—much as there is no record for humans in America’s Far North, previous to the LGM. In the case of the coast, however, the route is no less plausible.
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A series of fortuitous accidents blew me up on the northwest Pacific coast of Canada and Alaska. Beginning with my first Alaskan king crab, wolfed down with ketchup on the old Homer Spit in 1963—a year before the tsunami took it out—this rugged coastline gradually drew me into its wild heart. Whether stumbling about as a boy paleontologist or on magazine assignment on the British Columbian coast, all jobs added up to an excuse to visit this magic, bountiful mix of sea and forest. About 25 years ago, I joined Canadian and American conservationists working with Native communities to preserve large chunks of homelands from clearcutting and mining activities. I especially thank the Round River Conservation Studies group for this opportunity. Collectively these Canadian and American organizations have helped indigenous people conserve nearly 20-million acres of intact wilderness in Heilstuk and Tlingit territory. During the last three decades, I was lucky enough to tag along on many an expedition watching these dedicated folk accomplish what I consider to be the major modern conservation success story in North America. These fragments from my notebooks bear witness to their victory.
Notebooks, 1990s
The canoe plows through the slate gray sea in the lee of an island in an uninhabited archipelago off the coast of British Columbia. A few miles ahead, I can see the full brunt of the Pacific Ocean blast through the narrow strait that separates this island from another farther south. The late afternoon sun squints through the same gap. I hug the shoreline and start looking for a suitable cove where I can find food, firewood and set up for the night. Tomorrow I’ll check out the weather and scout out a crossing down to the next island chain. It’s only a couple miles of exposure, but you have to watch the tides and weather carefully. Mornings are the best time to cross the treacherous narrows, since it must be near calm to risk these open waters and safely island-hop southward. A kayak would be better, though the canoe will do. You just need lots of time: Years to make it down all the way to the Columbia River from the Arctic, maybe more years than I have left. The toughest section would be rounding Cape Caution into Queen Charlotte Strait. You’d have to hold tight to the coastline, wait out the bad weather, camp in place during the winters and live off the land the entire trip. To paddle and walk down the coast from Alaska to the lower 48—it’s a dream but it could be done. Ancient people no doubt did it many times.
The people occupying ancient Beringia 14,500 years ago would have been watching this imposing, changing coastline for a long time. They had been living in the Alaskan Arctic since their ancestors arrived from Siberia. The controversial coastal route hypothesis is based on inferences. The lack of hard evidence doesn’t make the route to the lower 48 any less important or fascinating. The duration of their trip south may have happened in a geologic second but those ancient voyagers didn’t experience it that way. It unfolded day-by-day, people standing on a frigid beach in Alaska looking southward, watching the gigantic fronts of glaciers, which were miles across, calve into the ocean and float away as icebergs. Nineteen-thousand years ago, when the glacial advance was at its maximum, the biggest of these glaciers would have extended far out into the sea, precluding any consideration of traveling that route. By 14,500 years ago, however, the ice had begun to retreat. When the fog lifted, the people could see beyond the rivers of ice to lands the glaciers had not covered or terrain from which the ice had retreated. These ice-free areas are sometimes called refugia and, by 14,000 years ago, much of coastal southeastern Alaska and northwestern British Columbia, including large islands, were ice-free. Grizzly bears lived in these refugia, indicating that this post-glacial habitat could also support humans. Huge valley glaciers and rivers still flowed westward out of the Cordilleran ice-field into the ocean, preventing any idea of an easy stroll down the beach.
I draw the paddle through the water, J-stroking the canoe toward a broad crescent of sand, a small cove a couple of miles from the southern tip of the island. A pebbly creek trickles into a miniature estuary. I ease the craft into the gentle surf, avoid a line of black boulders and step out onto the beach. The tide is dropping but won’t be at its lowest for a few hours, just before dark. After unloading two heavy waterproof bags, I pull the canoe to the upper beach and tie it off to the root of a snag. I plunge into the forest, which is open and mossy under towering spruce trees, providing a perfect tent site. Two days ago, I watched a bear chew oysters off a big rock. Black bear swim out to these medium-sized islands but you seldom find grizzlies here. I make a cursory check for brown bear sign and, finding none, erect my small tent.
Summer living is easy on the coast, short nights yielding to mild days with salmon, steelhead and candlefish running up creeks and rivers, berries growing off lush bushes and mushrooms sprouting from fertile soils. But fierce storms blow across the Pacific and by autumn the weather can be snarly, windy and wet with days getting shorter, dark low clouds by winter, the claustrophobic night long and cold. I probably wouldn’t want to winter here, but you certainly could by building a cedar lodge and laying in smoked fish and herring roe, hunting a few deer and seals, stashing pemmican and harvesting edible seaweed and shellfish.
I have been coming here to the outer coast of British Columbia off and on for the last couple decades. Often traveling with a few friends or family, I use whatever spare boat is available from staff and colleagues who do conservation work up here. When available, a canoe or kayak is more attractive to me than a motorized craft. Paddling solo is not recommended but I love these rare opportunities for solitude in this most fecund of New World habitats, the child’s garden of gathering that is the wild Northwest Pacific Coast.
And it was likely always this way: a very easy place to live, a paradise for hunters and collectors. Pre-contact nations, such as the Nootka, Kwakiutl, Heiltsuk, Haida and Tlingit, created civilizations from rich hunting-gathering economies, arguably the only non-agricultural people ever to accomplish such a feat. Some village sites on the coast show continuous occupation for nearly ten thousand years.
The first Americans to venture down this coast were probably more nomadic, on the move, heading southward away from the big glaciers that slipped into the ocean up the coast toward Alaska. Only huge inlets, big rivers and glaciers, that in places extended out and calved off into the ocean, blocked passage southward. And, if these people had willow-woven or skin boats, they could paddle around these icy barriers during the relatively calm days of summer. They could have literally lived off the beach, digging and harvesting shellfish with a technology composed of sticks and stones—the clams, mussels and oysters seemingly limitless. At low tide, you could find abalone, crabs and edible seaweeds. Seasonally, nesting birds provided eggs and meat. If they had boats, fishing and sea-mammal hunting enter the economy.
Of course, no one knows with certainty that they had boats or that they lived off these marine resources, though it seems logical they did. Yet, debate continues among mainstream archaeologists around these two questions—if coastal people used boats or walked down and whether they practiced a marine economy. Despite the feasibility of this attractive route, archaeologists have yet to find clear evidence of early coastal travelers. The sea would have inundated much of the evidence.
Having completed a ten-minute forage inland for a hatful of blueberries and chanterelle mushrooms, I stand on the beach near the rows of rocks and watch the rills trickle down across the shingle in the diminishing light. The lines of basaltic boulders have been stacked by ancient people, hand-moved out of the way to allow the beaching of dugout cedar-log canoes, maybe the Haida of old or marauding Nootka or some unknown people from long before. Humans have been traveling these waters and coastlines for thousands of years.
The last rays of sunlight illuminate a cloudbank to the southeast hanging over the Burke Channel, a rosy brilliance that dissipates into the approaching nightfall. On the mainland, near the junction of the Burke and Fitzhugh Sound, lies the village of Namu, where an abandoned cannery now sits on an archaeological site that dates back to 11,000 years ago.
At Namu, researchers found human tooth crowns that dated 10,000-11,000 years old. Namu, like most known prehistoric coastal villages, is located at the mouth of a salmon river. The oldest artifact from the coast, a single basalt flake dredged up from a datable context off the Queen Charlottes, is estimated to be 12,200 years old. A lithic microblade tradition elsewhere on the Northwest Coast dates only to 11,800 years ago. And that’s about it: no sites as old as Clovis anywhere on the coast.
I’d better hurry; dusk is gathering over the intertidal zone and I still have work to do. I grab a folding entrenching tool and head down to the beach. Blue mussels cling to every rock surface and little eruptions of seawater mark the retracted siphons of horse clams. I decide to go for the clams. Using the small shovel, I dig down a few inches off to the side of the siphon holes until I can see the elongated shell of the clam. I pluck out the three-inch-long shellfish and repeat the process a couple dozen times. By then the light is almost gone.
I kindle a fire between beached cedar logs, set up my cooking gear and rinse the clams. The reason I chose the embedded clams over the easier-to-harvest mussels is because of the very slight risk of paralytic shellfish disease (PSD), the toxin-producing microorganisms associated with “red tides.”
The horrors of PSD here are often greatly exaggerated, especially by government authorities, but they’re not unknown either. Up the mainland coast about a hundred miles, the ill-fated Vancouver Expedition of 1794 camped in a place now known as Poison Cove. The hungry sailors gathered and greedily ate blue mussels. Three men became violently ill. One died. PSD is not as common in the rough, cold seas of British Columbia, where strong tides and currents disperse the concentrations of toxins, as it is in warmer, calmer oceans. Nonetheless, you need to take some precaution before you forge ahead and eat a belly-full of Pacific mussels or clams in summertime.
The first humans to travel this coast would not have had to worry about poisonous shellfish. The water would have been too cold 14,500 years ago. Melting glaciers, especially in the northern part of the coastal route, were calving into the ocean and the sea level was rising.
Shellfish can live in such environments though floating icebergs may scour the ocean bottom clear of clams down to 20-40 feet in places. In the Canadian High Arctic, north of Parry Channel, I found no clams. But the walrus did, diving forty feet below the ice, grazing off siphons of shellfish sticking up from the bottom, sucking up vast quantities of clams in a single dive. Later, Inuit biologists shared walrus clam soup with me: They had opened the siphon-stuffed stomach of a freshly killed walrus, poured the mildly acidic contents into a pot, heated it up and served it with crackers and black pepper.
Fourteen-thousand-five-hundred years ago, the earliest people to venture down the coast could have found adequate maritime food almost everywhere. Fine-grained glacial sediments would have clogged littoral zones at first, reducing productivity. But, even then, pockets of shellfish could be found along headlands and rocks and the rivers would have rapidly cleared of glacial flour, allowing salmon and other anadromous fishes to pioneer runs.
Sea level was rising at an accelerated rate 14,000 years ago. The volume of glacial melt water dumping into the Pacific Ocean probably exceeded today’s flow. Sedentary coastal dwellers, if they existed, might have watched the slow rise with some alarm. Transitory travelers down the coast would not have paid as much attention.
After gathering driftwood and stoking the fire against the gathering dew, I place the clams aside in a pan of clean water as there’s grit in their digestive system. To the west, the sun has dropped behind the heavy atmosphere of the Pacific. The canoe is well stocked with condiments.
By dark, the fire is roaring and a large skillet is sizzling with olive oil, the chanterelles, a sliced onion and half a head of garlic. Diced potatoes are parboiled on the side in a backpacking kettle. I drain all but an inch of water, then add the horse clams and cover the pot. As soon as the clams open, I pluck them out and add more until finished. I blend powdered milk into the mix, add the spuds, a pinch of hot red pepper, salt, and the juice of three limes. I scrape the clams from their shell with a penknife, add them to the skillet, and heat up the whole thing until the potatoes are “al dente.” The wind picks up and I eat my chowder in front of a blaze of cedar driftwood listening to the roar of rising surf breaking on the outer coast.
What do scholars say about the American Pacific coastal route? This migration theory emerged from the need to explain the 12,500 radiocarbon-14 date (about 14,500 years old) from Monte Verde, Chile, a site which is too early to have been settled by Clovis or other people coming down the corridor. Without pre-Clovis dates (there are several) from south of the ice, the necessity of arguing a coastal route loses some of its urgency. Still, coming down the coast makes common sense.
Prior to the 1990s, it had been assumed that glaciers blocked the coastal route until sometime before the dates established at Monte Verde. Since then, brown bear fossils and evidence of ancient vegetation have demonstrated that some of the islands off Alaska and British Columbia, as well as some of the mainland coast, could have supported humans by about 14,500 years ago. If grizzlies lived there so could Beringians. There is a time gap in the grizzly fossil record from Alaska’s Alexander Archipelago between about 30,000 to 15,000 years ago, perhaps reflecting a colder climate.
As the ice retreated from the coast, plants would have pioneered the beaches and thin soils of decomposing moraines. Pacific surface ocean winds would drive seeds, branches and logs from more southern climes into all these fertile niches. Soon, pine forests would sprout behind the broadest bays. You’d see thickets of alder, an understory of moss, lichen and berry shrubs. Outside the grizzly fossils, however, there is no hard data to support that people could have used these habitats. If it wasn’t the corridor, it had to be the coast—that’s the argument. As with nearly all of the fascinating unanswered questions of the peopling of the Americas, the lack of evidence has never precluded impassioned theories, some acrimony or widely argued speculation.
Mainstream American archaeologists have stated that walking down the coast was a viable option once the outer coast was free of ice and, unlike the formidable coast of today, the Late Pleistocene coastline would not have presented such a challenge. Although the sea level was lower by a few hundred feet (an average of about 360 feet), this is still a baffling statement.
Fifteen thousand years ago, rivers of ice would have occupied the channels and inlets, but as they receded ancient travelers would have had the choice of crossing on the glacier or paddling across the fjord. As a third-rate mountaineer who served a brief stint as a climbing ranger for North Cascades National Park, I’ve had the opportunity to cross some small glaciers in Wyoming, Washington, Montana and a couple larger ones in Alaska. Despite the unmistakable hazards of icefalls and crevasses, early people could have carefully wound their way around or through this dangerous topography, using sharpened staffs as ice axes and perhaps lengths of woven rope. But crossing a big glacier would give pause; paddling a boat across the inlet during good weather would be a safer choice.
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Sooner or later, coastal voyagers would reach a body of water that required boats: big rivers, fjords or wide inlets. In my own experience, this includes treacherous rivers that dump directly into the deadly rough surf of the Pacific Ocean. On the outer coast of southeastern Alaska, for instance, there are two dramatic sections of coast that are cut by narrow, short but swift rivers draining from receding glaciers. I wanted to backpack along one of these stretches of coast.
From my notebooks:
If you carried a portable raft, I pondered, you might be able to paddle or swim across the river before its current dumped you out into the pounding waves of the open ocean where you would most surely drown. It took me over a decade to get my courage up and raise enough cash for a bush plane to drop me off on this utterly stark and uninhabited coastline. I had also invested in 60 meters of thin climbing rope and a $29 small blow-up raft (lighter for backpacking than an inner-tube).
The river crossing presented itself on day three. The river was fast flowing with intermittent rapids, a mere 100 feet or so across and lined with bucket-sized boulders. The only place to swim across was a relatively flat 200-yard length a half-mile above the ocean, where the river disappeared into a white waterfall of surging death waves. Just miles upstream, towered the bluish head of the glacier.
I stripped down to long underwear and tennis shoes, blew up the tiny “two-person” plastic raft and stashed my backpack. The end of the rope was securely tied to a chain of big rocks. I walked upstream carrying the raft and rope, which I had tied in a bowline around my waist (I also carried a sharp knife in case of entanglement). If the current was too much, I figured the rope would swing me back to shore downstream. A rope’s length above my pack, I eased into the icy water keeping the raft on my downstream side. I had no intention of getting in the flimsy craft—it was merely a floatation device. I kicked off the rocks and sidestroked like hell for the opposite bank. In this glacial river, you had maybe ten minutes of lucidity before hypothermia set in. I stroked vigorously, eased off and let the current carry me down below a big rock, then swam as hard as I could for the far shore. The river carried me down beyond where I’d left my backpack. I was about to run out of rope and get swung back to the bank where I had started. I gave one last desperate lunge towards the far shore, grabbed a rock, then another, and slowly pulled myself free of the icy water. I was across.
Losing no time (hypothermia was still a concern), I walked upstream with the raft as far as the rope could stretch. I again secured the rope to a very big rock. The rope now formed an acute angle with the river that it spanned. I fastened the raft to the rope with a carabineer, hooked onto both with breakaway clips and slid back into the river. This time the angle was right and I virtually slid down the line back across the river to my waiting backpack.
Now I was truly cold. I took a break, kindled a fire and warmed to the task, which was getting my pack across the river. I hauled my pack and the raft as far upstream as the rope would reach and tied it off again, this time anchored to chocks that I could dislodge once across the river by yanking the rope from upstream (the sketch in my notebook shows two downstream-angled swim-routes across and one coming back for my pack). The backpack fit awkwardly inside the raft, but I tied it in as best I could and hitched the package to the line. I pushed off and worked my load along the rope, getting sucked under once with all my gear. Stepping out on the far bank of the freezing river, I stripped off my soggy clothes and shook like a shaggy dog.
Here, with modern mountaineering equipment and all my fancy twentieth-century gear, I managed to cross one very small river without drowning. The first Americans down the coast would have had many hundreds of such rivers to cross, with infants, grandparents and all their belongings. We can only imagine their ordeal. But if they traveled this route, it’s hard to see how they made it without boats or practicing a maritime economy.
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Travel down the Pacific coast from Alaska would have been impossible without some use of watercraft. The route is not just a long beach punctuated by headlands so much as it is a fractured coastline of inlets, river deltas, channels and archipelagos. Above all, it is and was a glacially sculptured coastline. Some of the fjords are miles across and slice inland a hundred miles or more.
What would the now-drowned coastline have looked like? When ocean breezes blow inland from the west into a mountainous landscape at latitudes greater than about 50 degrees—British Columbia, Norway, southern Chile or New Zealand—a fjorded coastline is created. The main difference between now (we may catch up soon) and 14,500 years ago is that more water was melting out of those then-larger glaciers. That means bigger, deeper rivers to cross and fjords of salt water many miles across once the glaciers had retreated. A lowered sea level would not have significantly altered the difficulty of walking the topography of this dissected coastline. It was either a wide glacier or a deep, frigid arm of the ocean.
For some thirty years now, I’ve had the privilege of traveling the Northwest Coast—mostly by sailboat, zodiac inflatable, kayak or canoe. My own preferred range begins in the San Juan Islands of Washington and slides up the Queen Charlotte Channel though the Hecate Strait to the mouth of the Taku River in modern day Alaska. Especially, I love the central coast of British Columbia. For anyone who likes to camp out and live off the land, it’s one of the most attractive places on earth.
But I don’t always rough it: I prepare elaborate dinners washed down by fine wine on the sailboats—lucky me—of conservationist friends who live here. Dungeness crab is a major food group. Those same sailboats have fish finders and depth sounders that I study like sacred text as we cruise the archipelagos looking for remote seamounts to fish or places to drop a shrimp pot. The fjords are flooded inlets today and I frequently note that the water depth drops down 800 to 1,400 feet as you float off the edge of one of them. I mean within a few yards; the “U” shaped trench is very steep. The bottoms of these gigantic troughs are what you might expect from glacial scouring. Like chains of glacier lakes in Glacier National Park or in any glaciated terrain, deep trenches rise into higher sills where the glacier has chewed its way into the bedrock like a giant, undulating anaconda. The sills, the shallowest place in the fjords I charted, were all 500 feet or more deep. The lower sea levels of 15,000 years ago wouldn’t have made any difference because it was still a river of ice or a salty swim.
Archaeological evidence of watercraft is reduced to inferences: The Red Sea was navigated at least 60,000 years ago. The first Australians crossed open water over 55,000 years ago. On California’s Channel Islands, a human skeleton dated back nearly 13,000 years—you couldn’t have gotten out there without a boat of some kind—and so on.
Also, boats seem almost empirical, a step of easy logic just beyond the vision: Watch the patch of floating logs and look out at the wide river that you need to cross in order to get on down the coast. Constructing a raft or a simple craft of willow or alder covered with skins or bark—once the task and vision are in place—is no more difficult than inventing a Clovis projectile point. Early people could have used willow bark ties to bind a frame of alder then cover it with sealskins. If you didn’t hunt marine mammals, you could almost always find carcasses washed up on the shore. Such simple watercraft could be hauled along on foot or discarded and re-constructed at the next big river crossing or glacier head. It seems unlikely (poor preservation of organic material) that evidence of primitive boats will enter the archaeological record.
We are left to imagine the trip down the Pacific Coast.
Fourteen thousand years ago: A long cobble beach sweeps southward into a sandy bay separated by a barren headland from yet another fjord reaching inland to the blue head of a receding glacier. People dressed in animal skins walk down the upper beach, a line of men, women and more than a dozen children, most of them carrying packs. Just beyond the big breaking waves of the Pacific, two other groups of men paddle round sealskin-covered bullboats. They tow behind them a string of unoccupied round craft—seal hides stitched around a frame of green alder branches—tied together with rawhide and strips of willow bark. Should the sea kick up in the late afternoon, the men will paddle ashore and the people will haul all their boats and other gear down the beach southward or else just make camp until the morning when the ocean surf usually settles down. The walking is a welcome break from the forced boat trips around the huge glacial heads and the broad inlets ripped by ocean waves and tidal bores.
Back up the beach loom the rugged headlands they had paddled their boats around, after waiting a week for the weather to clear and the open-Pacific rollers to shrink into waves they could handle with their bullboats. This is the eighth year of a journey they began a thousand miles to the north, where towering glaciers splintered off into the sea and giant icebergs loomed at the mouths of saltwater inlets.
The first two years were the most treacherous. They had to paddle their little skin-boats through a literal river of icebergs, across the fronts of giant glaciers that calved directly into the ocean. Where the ice had retreated, the land was young and raw; no forests yet grew from the glacial soils. Firewood was scarce. Occasionally, the voyagers found a few logs drifted onto the beach from a distant coast in Asia or from somewhere south of the ice.
It seemed the rivers of ice would never cease dumping icebergs in their path but, by autumn of the second year, the band reached lowland regions of coast that were ice-free. Thickets of alder and thin stands of two-needle pine grew in the deepest bays. The seas soon grew too rough for marine travel in their fragile craft. In a north-facing cove, in the lee of a cliff amid lodgepole pines, the people halted as winter closed in. Far to the south, another huge glacier spewed icebergs into the dark seas of November. The key to north coastal travel in Late Pleistocene America was patience: To wait out the darkness and vicious winter storms.
With driftwood for fire and using washed-up logs on the beach as building material for constructing a substantial winter shelter out of brush and sealskins, the people settled in for the long sleep of winter. They were warm in their sleeping robes. Their elders told stories of huge legendary animals and sang songs of sunny lands around the communal fires during the interminable winter nights. When the storms abated and low tides beckoned, women and children foraged in the rich intertidal zone of the broad moonlit beach. Of all the challenges and troubles this journey presented, finding food was not one of them.
Shellfish became the stable, reliable daily food source along the coast. Oysters, clams and mussels could be found most anywhere icebergs didn’t scour the ocean bottom. And even in the northern coastal regions where glaciers dominated the landscape, clams lived below the level icebergs reached under the ocean surface and mussels and oysters clung to rocky niches and headlands just miles away from the milky bays clouded with glacial flour that precluded both shellfish and runs of salmon and other anadromous fish.
The people stuffed their baskets with common shellfish at favorable tides, of which they had become acutely aware, as movement down the coast, both on foot and in the boats, depended on exposed beaches and tidal currents. Other food was available: Abalone clung to rocks at lower tide levels and crabs and octopus lived in the tide pools. The technology required for this harvest was sticks and stones; children could do most of the work. Seaweed, both brown and red, lay there for the picking; the people lightly roasted seaweed on the fire and used it to roll up crabmeat like a Pleistocene burrito.
Down the beach at the foot of a rugged headland, the hunters heard the barking of sea lions.
The third year of their journey began several weeks before the vernal equinox. At first, movement was slow as many rivers and icy inlets blocked an easy walk down the coast. The winds of spring made for a choppy ocean that was often too rough to chance a crossing of a broad inlet or glacial head by bullboat.
By summer, the party of explorers came into a coastal area with no offshore islands or archipelagos that stretched as far south as the eye could sea. Icebergs were no longer much of a problem to the boats, except near the feet of the few glaciers that ran all the way out to the ocean (one of the glaciers was huge). But an exposed coast meant dangerous surf and the people found they could travel faster on the beach, hauling the boats with them. Somewhere in the vicinity of what is today southern Alaska, they paddled across a broad bay full of small icebergs and came to a series of headlands where clouds of seabirds nested. Migratory waterfowl and seabirds had been constant companions, and sometimes dinner, throughout the journey.
Many thousands of horned puffins nested among the rocks and cliffs. Most birds were still incubating eggs laid around the summer solstice to be hatched out five weeks later. The people raided the rookery robbing the faithful bird couples of their single egg. They could simply pop the egg, in all stages of development, into their mouths or fry them on hot rocks around the fire. Three years later, they will find grizzly bears far to the south pillaging other such puffin colonies the people coveted. That winter, the voyagers found a dry cave high on a cliff. Firewood was now abundant. By January, they ran short of food and moved back to the beach and built a winter lodge, closer to the shellfish and seal colonies. Land mammals had yet to appear on the scene.
The hunters had an array of weaponry. Bolos and slings could be assembled from wave-polished beach cobbles. Spear points were fashioned from bone, sometimes notched as serrated harpoons; the hunters had found that seal and sea lion hunts were more often successful with barbed and detachable projectile points tethered by a line to a float. They could hurl their spears from the bullboats or sneak up on the marine mammals at the base of headlands. Sea lions hauled out and slept on rocks and approachable sea otter floated on their backs among giant kelp fronds with dismembered crabs on their bellies.
The people craved the fat of marine mammals to supplement their lean diet of shellfish and seaweed. Hauling their gear and bullboats along the beach or arduously padding across dangerous bays was hard work and a metabolic drain. Crossing a wide inlet could be more treacherous than avoiding icebergs. The tidal bores of several inlets sometimes combined with ocean rollers to create near-maelstroms, converging waves that crashed into one another and that could toss a skin boat like a seed spinner. At such places, the Pleistocene mariners searched out a beached log of suitable bulk and length and attached it with cross members to the bullboat as an outrigger. The paddling was made more difficult but this inconvenience was more than compensated for by the assurance of stability in the violent currents.
At night, the elders whispered around the fire. They wondered if the ocean was rising.
The people used boats for most of the seventh year as they reached what is now the central coast of British Columbia. Here lay a vast archipelago of big islands, inlets many miles across and deep channels. For the first time since pushing off from Beringia, navigation presented a challenge; an inside passage southward was maze-like on a big scale. Which channel would prove a true passage down the coast protected from the rough outer ocean? To make the wrong choice meant going up a dead-end inlet stretching hundreds of miles to the interior. Fortunately, most of dead end inlets terminated in an active glacier, shedding icebergs that served as a kind of do-not-enter sign. To scout out a water channel around an island, and differentiate a true route from an arm of the sea, could take many days. The navigators consulted the elders of the band who believed they could tell the difference by subtle variations in the flow and timing of tides. The elders contributed their collective wisdom and advised the band on big decisions, like when to go on or stop for the winter.
As they moved southward, this coastal region of islands and straits became increasingly ice-free. Pine forests rooted in the bigger low-lying valleys. Sometimes a grove of spruce and fir grew at the mouth of rivers. Some of the rivers ran clear of glacial-scour clouding and throbbed with salmon. The people found they could build rock walls at low tide in shallow river estuaries and trap the salmon when the high tide retreated. The land was rich. The people brined and smoked much salmon and scraped delicious herring roe off shallow, submerged kelp fronds and seaweed.
Whales seasonally breached in the sounds: minke, orca, gray, fin and humpback. As the people paddled across a great bay, two huge blue whales surfaced and spouted alongside the bullboats. The biggest of these graceful swimmers was nearly a hundred feet long.
The people beached their boats at the edge of a river delta in a broad, wooded bay. In the silt they saw the tracks of caribou and dire wolves. Their elders recognized the tracks from their boyhoods spent in Beringia.
By the eighth year of the journey, the people knew that they would be sharing the new land with other animals, some of the great and fierce beasts their elders had warned them about. Now the band gathered around the tracks and spoor of a legendary beast: The oval prints measured a foot across. Huge cylindrical dung boules were scattered along the animal’s trail. No member of the band had seen a mastodon but all had heard the old campfire stories of these great tusked giants.
The people had hunting in their blood, an innate curiosity that drew them to constantly wonder how to harvest the largest mammals, even though they could easily survive off marine resources. But with the prey prowled the big Late Pleistocene predators. As the voyagers walked and paddled southward along the coast and into the forested regions of southern British Columbia, they encountered some creatures they knew from north of the ice and others they didn’t: horses and camels, but also sabertoothed cats and bears.
Some of the men began to modify the bone harpoon points they used to hunt seals, fashioning sharpened, sturdy eight-inch-long daggers that they hafted to detachable foreshafts. These they would launch with a heavier spear shaft.
Weeks passed before the band found a young mastodon mired in a spruce swamp. The hunters crept close and delivered two spears to the ribs of the big mammal before the mastodon broke free and ferociously drove them away, swinging his giant tusks like clubs. The men followed the wounded animal for two days and finally finished him off. They started the butchering process. During the night, a gigantic bear approached the carcass, driving the men away. The men fled back to their fire and cowered as the short-faced bear fed on the remains of the mastodon only a few hundred yards away. During the night, the wide-eyed hunters listened as the huge bear cracked bones with his massive jaws. Come morning, they got the hell out of there.
The hunters returned to their ocean-side camp and told the elders of the encounter with the new fearsome creature. These older guardians of the people’s future were thrown back on the quandary that had been haunting them throughout the long journey southward: Should the band try to settle down and live anywhere on this uninhabited coast or just keep on moving?
The coast was bountiful. Food from the sea was endless, the gathering easy. Dried and smoked salmon would support the band for an entire winter. Huge trees now dominated the lowland coast—spruce, fir and cedar. They could chop, burn and hollow out the center of a cedar log and make a big dugout canoe as well as use the same wood (cedar logs split true for a hundred feet using stone wedges) to build permanent long houses. The country crawled with game: huge herbivores but also new and formidable predators.
The temptation to stay in one place was countered by the presence of the big carnivores who threatened them in camp, when out foraging and, especially, at kill sites. Also, the farther south they reached, the more benign the winters became. The land was rich, beautiful and promised to only get more merciful.
By the next spring, the people were hugging the coastline of what would become the United States of America.
This fictional portrait of a journey down the Pacific coast invites some modern reflection. Despite the lack of archaeological evidence, it makes sense early Americans could have embarked on such a Pleistocene adventure, and wondering about human adaptation to changing environments is not entirely empty speculation. The climate was warming, although not as rapidly as it is today, the oceans rising and the Pleistocene mariners were moving south fast, escaping the iceberg clogged seas off southern Alaska, past the conifer forests of the Pacific Northwest and on down into the live-oak grasslands of California. They might have paused on the Olympic Peninsula to hunt mastodon or popped up the Columbia River to look at the great basaltic plateau and the high deserts of Oregon.
In such a scenario, the bands of coastal travelers would have experienced a half-dozen distinct habitats perhaps requiring specialized technical and social adaptations to hunt and forage on coastlines, in forests, along the great salmon rivers, in deserts or mountains valleys and the rich chaparral of California. I don’t think the early adventurers would come down the coast to South America without wanting to explore inland and exploit the resources they found there. Unless something like a giant bear, lion or sabertoothed cat loomed up out of the interior mist, intimidating the people, forcing them to stay tethered to the relative safety of the coast and offshore islands.
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What are the scientific arguments for the coast? The Pacific Coast route for early or First Americans is normally presented as an alternative to the ice-free corridor route. This tale of brave voyagers and navigators has received a great deal of attention in the popular press as well as television documentaries. Advocates for the coastal entry argue that the interior corridor through the ice opened too late to account for either the date of 14,500 years old from Chile or the earliest Clovis sites (a contested 13,500 years ago) in the lower U.S. Why proponents for a coastal route feel a need to deny any use of the IFC for later Clovis people is beyond me. But there’s a stack of edgy papers, many Canadian, denying human movement in the interior corridor until well after Clovis times.
Since evidence from the now-submerged coast has yet to surface, advocates for the coastal theory debunk the ice-free corridor (some authorities call it “the corridor that never was” and therefore everyone had to use the coastal route). The case against early people using this route is inferred from the dates and abundance, or absence, of fossils and pollen samples, which can add one or two thousand years to the magical time when people could have comfortably lived there. The argument is that the deglaciated corridor was inhospitable and uninhabitable for several thousand years until the land was re-colonized by plants and animals that allowed people to subsist there. Other scientists think the re-vegetation of the corridor was a more rapid process, but still too slow to allow for Clovis people to make it down in time. Many of these dates come from old melt-water lakes, where radiocarbon methods are reportedly less reliable due to bulk sample sizes and calcium, magnesium and iron in the water. In short, these radiocarbon dates are used broadly to imply the unlikelihood or impossibility of humans traveling through or living in such cruel habitats until well after Clovis times.
What this argument misses is that early pioneers during the Ice Age didn’t need a landscape teeming with game and grass to pass down the corridor. Using dogs for hauling sledges and as pack animals or food, they could carry what they needed to get through the most barren sections and hunt waterfowl all the way down. Consumption of waterfowl—swans, cranes, geese and ducks—is ubiquitous from Siberia’s Lake Baikal to the Yukon River in pre-Clovis times. Duck harvesting presumes use of nets—a reasonable assumption. The journey would only take a very few years. The elk-antler foreshafts buried with the Clovis child in Montana, at the southern end of the IFC, point to use of the corridor. It would have taken centuries for the corridor to grow enough grass to feed an elk. Thus, the IFC would have been open to human travelers, who could have made the migration in a few years, as early as 13,300 years ago or before. It’s a serious mistake to underestimate the adaptive abilities of the founders of what some of us call the greatest human adventure of all time. A more credible argument comes from geology.
On the edge of Blackfoot country in northern Montana and southern Alberta, sprawls one of the most spectacular landscapes on earth. The High Plains sweep up to the roof of the Rocky Mountains and, at the juncture, vast grasslands run northward along the Rocky Mountain Trench. Here the landscape is studded with huge boulders as if dropped by giants from outer space. Glaciers transported these rocks, known as “erratics” and deposited them along the edge of the ice as moraines when the glacier shrunk. A technique known as cosmogenic chlorine-36 has been used to date these large glacial boulders (the Foothill Erratic Trains, as they call it) that marked the edges of the most recent glaciation in the southern part of the ice-free corridor. This sophisticated method has been used to measure the approximate length of time these quartzite erratics had been exposed to bombardment by cosmic rays by the sun.
The bottom line is that this study strongly suggested that the erratic train was a product of the ice sheets coalescing—a very important contribution. Here are some technical details: Many variables and assumptions are involved in this dating technique, such as the rate of cosmic ray production over millennia, snow cover, whether the boulder was suddenly exposed at the surface or bounced along on the glacier for a while. Even the software programs chosen to calculate the dates—that some researchers warn may result in age discrepancies in the 20 to 40% range—are contentious.
In 1997, the journal Geology published a paper establishing that the Foothills Erratic Train in southern Alberta is the byproduct of mountain glaciers moving eastward into the continental ice-field, and then turning southward. Most of the boulders date from 11,000 to 18,000 years ago, “erosion years” (as they call it). Of course, there are margins of error, uncalculated variables and other uncertainties that could add or subtract factors of 1,500 years or more for the youngest date and about a 5000-year margin of error for the oldest samples. Still, the pattern was unmistakable; the authors concluded that their analysis of the Foothills Erratic Train “argues strongly against the entry of humans into the Americas from Beringia during the climax of the last glaciation (LGM) via an ice-free corridor.” So be it.
By 2004, however, one of the “Foothills Erratic Train” authors was pushing his conclusions to say that the ice-free corridor wasn’t available for human travel until 13,500 years ago, too late to account for Clovis south of the ice, and that Clovis technology probably spread northward not southward. Later, others would use the same information to push the initial date of the corridor opening all the way down to 13,000 years ago, making the use of the corridor by Clovis people “moot” or “untenable.” Once again, this research would be cited as: “the final nail in the coffin of the corridor as the route taken in the first peopling of the Americas.”
The two problems in nailing down the time for traveling the ice-free corridor so tightly is that in this case geology comes up with dates that are just fine for glacial epochs or stages but shouldn’t be squashed into hundred-year segments. And, secondly, that twenty-first century social scientists seem to think the first American pioneers attacked the icy passageway with the same determinism as Mall-of-America strollers.
The discussion of the Northwest Coast route is a good example of the problems faced by archaeologists when they feel a theory is probably correct but they can find no direct supporting evidence. The tendency of proponents of the coast route has been to lash out at competing alternatives or established hypotheses—in this case to discredit the route down the ice-free corridor. The real work to buttress the coastal route, the productive work, still waits up on those elevated, rebounded headlands and inland caves along the coast. Anthropologists are currently sifting away at the sediments and it is likely that they will, in time, come up with the goods to bolster their theory.
What are we left with from this discussion of a route for pioneers coming down America’s Pacific Northwest Coast? Pretty much what we started with: Unexplained pre-Clovis dates from south of the ice-sheets.