Pre-Clovis People
The Significance of People in the
Contiguous American States before Clovis
In previous chapters, a great sweep of American prehistory has been presented without the benefit of much supporting hard data. I would like to think this is less the result of the wandering naturalist’s imagination, which truncates my investigative method, than it is that the evidence just isn’t there, at least not yet. The archaeology of early North America is a vast tundra of theoretical ground and I have enjoyed the speculative inquiries and arguments, including my own.
In contrast, in the next two chapters, “Pre-Clovis People” and the “Clovis”, scientific material is available to argue the archaeological consequences: A tight fist of data has emerged to document a pre-Clovis presence and, of course, with Clovis, that record fills in exponentially. Although I have, as an informed outsider, questioned some of the professional claims, an archaeologist might come up with quite different conclusions. Because many of these particular claims directly involved the Wilsall, Montana (town near Anzick site) child burial, I have, on limited occasions, extended my cranky naturalist’s neck.
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First a layman’s perspective: I started scouring the pertinent professional archaeological literature more than a decade ago. I knew there were many sites in the Americas that were professed to be older than Clovis, older than, say 13,200 years ago. But most claims were contested, some discredited and others still actively argued. I didn’t think it was a big deal. Then I began to read the professional literature: Here was the passion that electrified the field, that intensity that so fascinated me in the first place and drew me in to attempt to write up this story. Much of the early debate was framed in terms of “Clovis First” and “pre-Clovis.” Now, that tension has eased a bit.
I prepared myself, went in and had a short talk with C. Vance Haynes (I had briefly studied anthropology at the University of Arizona after the war). I wondered, without actually asking, if there room for an educated layman’s intrusion into the professional territory of early American archaeology. Beginning with the Clovis people (this was my impression), the archaeological record of the Americas provides a long, linear set of data for most of the remainder of that prehistory. Pre-Clovis archaeology is another story. Though rich compared to the nearly barren archaeological record prior to 15,000 years ago, the hard evidence from the pre-Clovis record is scattered through several millennia across a diverse geography from a mere handful of ancient sites. The pre-Clovis claims unfold entirely in the Late Pleistocene and most, but not all, of the dates fall within the global warming period that ended that epoch, starting about 14,700 years ago. Also, during those times, the great megafauna was still around.
I don’t know a single professional archaeologist who doesn’t accept at least one or two of the pre-Clovis dates. After all, DNA from coprolites in Oregon and a mammoth butchering site in Wisconsin add up to pretty solid stuff: There were people south of the ice before the Clovis projectile point shows up. But how many pioneers, for how long did they persist and in what places? Maybe these early people ghosted through the lower 48 states in tiny, vulnerable bands that died off or were killed off by carnivores before Clovis people arrived.
It is around the claims of the size of pre-Clovis populations that some of the biggest remaining arguments about the first American colonization revolve. Some very modest pre-Clovis sites (a handful of alleged tools) come packaged with theories of a growing population base settling into a myriad of habitats to explain the origins and the astonishing spread of Clovis technology by diffusion a couple of thousand years later.
One might expect to hear cries of hype and exaggeration from the professional community, but there is mostly silence. After contesting Pennsylvania’s Meadowcroft Rock Shelter and Chile’s Monte Verde sites for over a decade, recent pre-Clovis finds don’t seem to generate such passionate criticism or as much comment as they used to, despite the fact that it’s very hot academic territory.
A portion of this quietude is due to money: Most research institutions don’t have much; a few have a lot. Modern investigations may utilize expensive laboratory tests, such as DNA analyses, CT scans and radiocarbon dates or optically stimulated luminescence dating. Replicating an archaeological analysis, as in the classic scientific experiment, might prove impossible because of costs and privileged access to materials or locations of excavations. The basic debate remains the significance of the pre-Clovis population.
Much as the Pacific Northwest coastal-route theory became necessary (despite the lack of evidence) to explain pre-Clovis sites below the ice, the size of the pre-Clovis population is argued by some to explain the relatively brief explosive event called Clovis that swept over the continent in as short a time as 250 years. How could they have moved so fast? There are two polar extremes in this argument, as well as some space in between.
The first position is that the continental United States was virtually unpopulated by humans, and Clovis hunters popped-out of the ice-free corridor, vaulted over the intervening hills and chased mammoth in pockets of optimal habitats until they ran out of hunting lands or hit the jungles of Central America. Few, if any, settlers resisted their intrusion or impeded their progress.
The other pole of the argument is that a preexisting human occupation of continental America provided for three thousand years of prior settlement, allowing plenty of time for that pre-Clovis population to grow in size, pioneer all the various environments and get ready to receive the Clovis lithic technology, which on arrival was passed on from one pre-Clovis settlement to the next, to people willing and able to adopt the new big-game hunting technology.
A recent corollary is that this hypothetical but presumably significant pre-Clovis population had sufficient time to develop the Clovis tool kit on their own, maybe down in Texas or the American Southeast.
This is juicy archaeological terrain, full of professional agendas, especially from discoveries during the past few years. But first a glance at some interesting so-called pre-Clovis sites.
The first candidate for a solid pre-Clovis site was Monte Verde, Chile, with dates of around 14,000 to 14,500 years ago, where butchered mastodon bones were found amid well-preserved organic artifacts. Chile is a long way from the Bering Strait and archaeologists wonder if there was sufficient time for people to come down the coast, even if they used boats. They probably didn’t walk, although of course they could have. Mariners more ancient than 15,000 years ago could have colonized Monte Verde, though this is mere speculation. Some authorities, as with the bulk of pre-Clovis sites, question the accuracy of the radiocarbon dates. Skeptics claim the possibility of contamination: A reservoir effect, such as older carbon from salt water, on radiocarbon dates at Monte Verde, like coal deposits in Pennsylvania, is the knapweed-in-the-ditch that doesn’t want to go away. Monte Verde is but a day or two walk from the sea, though seaweed is the only marine resource that has been found at the site. Most mainstream anthropologists accept these dates as a valid pre-Clovis occupation.
The Meadowcroft Rock Shelter in Pennsylvania’s coal country is a carefully excavated site that has yielded pre-Clovis radiocarbon dates over the past 35 years. That these dates have been challenged does not mean this site’s antiquity can be dismissed. The unfluted lancelate projectile points from Meadowcroft are significantly larger than those from other purported pre-Clovis sites in North America. The reported range of (contested) dates averages about 16,000 years old. This intriguing ancient camp lay close to the glacier’s edge.
The mammoth kill or butcher sites at the Hebior and Schaefer sites in Wisconsin are well accepted and date about 14,500 years old.
In southeastern Virginia, Cactus Hill lies above the Nottoway River. The site is a stratified sand dune that includes a Clovis component. Below the Clovis layer, archaeologists found what appeared to be a hearth and wood dating to around 18,000 years ago, about the time of the LGM. Above the hearth were quartzite flakes and blades. A few pentagonal points were present and some trans-Atlantic-colonizing proponents claim the bifaces of Cactus Hill are transitional between European Solutrean and Clovis lithic traditions. Experts disagree on the stratigraphic evidence and some think the older dates reflect forest wild fires, not human-made hearths. They think the artifacts could have drifted down from younger strata within the site’s sand dune. At any rate, the assemblage is composed of small flake-like blades that most think reflect a brief occupation.
Other claimed pre-Clovis sites include Saltville, Virginia and Topper, South Carolina, where similar flake tools and blades have been found. You could easily add another half-dozen pre-Clovis sites if you were an earnest advocate. Most all are small collections of non-descript stone artifacts. Most are in the eastern U.S.; none are fully accepted by the entire archaeological community, but some are bound to pass muster. The lingering impression is that, yes indeed, there was a small if transient pre-Clovis presence out there.
If that were not enough to convince the skeptic that pre-Clovis people are not a hallucination, some isolated butchering and kill evidence have recently emerged from dusty museum bins. A mastodon rib was found near the north shore of the Olympic Peninsula and was passed on to a Washington state archaeologist in the 1970s. It looked like it had a bone projectile point embedded in the rib. Thirty-some years later, the rib was re-examined with modern accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) and cat-scans. The specimen was dated at 13,800 years old, 700 years before the Clovis era. The sharp bony tip embedded in the rib was placed under a high-resolution scan. Based upon this technique, the investigators believe the needle-tip of the projectile point shaft had been whittled down and sharpened. Bone protein and DNA were extracted from the projectile point and investigators think that the bone implement was mastodon but not from the same mastodon that was killed. Critics disagree, and say, no, it’s not clear that the alleged bone point came from a different animal. The rib and the bone “point” could both be from the same animal. One Nevada professor doesn’t think it’s even a projectile point: “Elephants today,” he said, “push each other all the time and break each other’s ribs so it could be a bone splinter that the animal just rolled on.” Butchering marks on the rib, the lead archaeologist claims, indicate a human kill, though artifacts were absent from the site where the fossil was found.
The Washington mastodon find is only a single point in the West but the geography is intriguing: The location lies between the two great salmon highways, the Frasier and Columbia River systems, and along the way of the presumed early Coastal route, which people may have used to escape the ice-fields of Beringia and western Canada.
Back in 1915, a leg bone of a Jeffersonian ground sloth was found in a peat bog in northern Wisconsin. Recent examination of this femur revealed 41 “incisions,” which researchers from Canada believe could only have been made with stone tools. Artifacts and the rest of the skeleton of the sloth are missing because no one knows exactly where the femur was found. Dating indicated the femur was about 13,500 years old. Butchering marks are difficult to accurately confirm and are often contested.
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If this modest evidence of pre-Clovis indeed means human numbers remained small, what might have constrained population growth? How about the Late Pleistocene predators, the short-faced bear and lions that could have impeded or prevented pre-LGM (prior to around 19,000 years ago) colonization of the lower states? Would such beasts have presented less of a threat during pre-Clovis times (about 15,000 to 13,500 years ago)?
One difference is that pre-Clovis people might have had dogs, whose domestication dates back to at least this time. Dogs can carry packs, haul travois and also, in a pinch, serve as food. Hunting dogs make cornering big game such as mammoth easier, distracting the beast with the giant swinging tusks, while men moved in with spears. Dogs can save your life in a fight with a big predator.
A spear-wielding hunter, who would almost certainly die confronting a huge bear alone, can kill it with the assistance of a small pack of dogs snapping at the bear’s flanks and biting his heels. I knew such a man. The Inuit was with me when I carried a spear of my own into polar bear country. I was otherwise unarmed. Most people would consider this stupid, but what the hell? Not all stories are instructional.
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During the summer of 1991, I agreed to accompany a beluga whale expedition to the Canadian High Arctic, the island country west of Greenland. All this land was polar bear country and members of the expedition were understandably nervous. My job was to be the polar bear guy, to walk point in white bear country.
My companions were Bart Lewis, Rick Ridgeway and Doug Tompkins. I was taking the bear job seriously. The pay wasn’t much—the price of a plane ticket—but I figured I owed my friends and the bears a bloodless trip with no casualties.
After considerable research and some reflection, I decided to carry a spear, a well-made spear, actually a pike, mounted on a stout wooden shaft of suitable length (I measured a live, captive 1400-pound Kodiak bear in Utah to obtain the critical bear-chest-to-claw measurement). The only time this defensive weapon would be used is at the moment of truth—at the conclusion of a polar bear charge. The theory was that you anchor the stern of the shaft on the ground and aim the tip of the spear towards the narrow chest of the white bear who theoretically impales himself on his charge, if all goes according to plan. Though of course the odds are not in your favor. You’d probably die about 99% of the time.
The usual advice, which is law in many quarters, is to carry a big-bore firearm for bear. I disagreed. After all, I was recruited for this trip because of my expertise with wild bears and I had survived dozens of close calls with grizzlies, too many to buy into this fatuity about guns. Besides, I consider it unethical to voluntarily invade the last homeland of wild polar bears and then blow them away just because events might not unfold to our advantage.
The problem was I knew next to squat about polar bears. I’d seen a bunch at safe distances but hadn’t interacted with them as I had with brown bears. I didn’t tell my buddies this at first. I was resolute, if slightly delusional, and, if necessary, intended to use my spear to protect my friends. I considered myself responsible for all my companions should an encounter with a white bear grow ominous. After all, that was what I agreed to do: Walk point. The bedrock assumption, never discussed—that kept my carrying the spear from becoming something other than a campy joke—is that you had to be willing to die.
Of course the government disagreed: They assigned an Inuit hunter to accompany us with his bear gun. Once our Inuit checked out my spear, he decided I was serious and we became friends. As the midnight sun headed into the west, he’d share a belt of Canadian whiskey from his flask with me.
We ended up with a lot of time on our hands in this magic landscape of ice and whales and caribou and musk ox: The sun circled the landscape and our expedition leader, after attaining his beluga whale objective in the first couple hours, settled into his dome tent for days reading a thick book entitled Reality.
I learned to spot polar bears out on the ice pack; their coat has a slight yellowish hue, off-color from the ice. One day, I spotted seven at once. I impressed my Inuit friend by predicting when other bears were present based on the behavior of a mother polar bear and her two cubs. I knew this from my grizzly bear work. One time, we spotted another family coming from the far edge of the fjord, where hundreds of belugas rolled and narwhals occasionally crossed tusks. From my notebook:
A quarter-mile to the south of my tent three immaculate white flecks are moving directly towards me across a contrasting canvas of brown and green tundra. They are bears. Through my binoculars I can see a mother polar bear and her two cubs. They will pass inland of my tent a hundred feet away near the foot of the bluff. I pick up my spear and head to a better vantage point, a moss-covered hummock of ancient bowhead whale bones, remnants of a thousand-year-old Thule Culture sod house.
The white bear family ambles into a little ravine a hundred yards away, still heading my way. They move fluidly with unimaginable grace and beauty. Holding the eight-foot-long spear in my right hand, I grab a handful of lichen and moss with my left.
Like Anteaus, the giant of Greek mythology, invincible while touching the earth, I have to be on the ground, holding tight to the world, always sharing the land with wild animals who hold down the same living skin of the Earth with the fierce weight of their paws.
I await their passage.
I never got to try out a spear on a polar bear. But the Inuit had once. When he was thirteen, a bear wandered in from the ice to within sight of his village. The boy and his cousins unchained the dogs, then rushed out with their spears to meet the bear. While the dogs circled and nipped at the big bear, the boys thrust with their spears. My Inuit pal finally threw his spear and was given credit for the kill.
The Inuit hunt polar bear for fur and food, one of the few remaining traditional peoples who intentionally and regularly seek out big predators.
You wouldn’t want to try this without some really good dogs.
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Finally, two recently reported sites from the contingent states illustrate the difficulty of journalistic interpretation of solid pre-Clovis evidence, which often comes blended with overreaching contentions. I imagine this is a problem for some professionals as well as laymen like myself. Yet, when the last chaff is blown from the grains of truth, two more pre-Clovis claims emerge from the dust.
The normal procedure for reporting such sites is to publish a peer-reviewed paper, usually in Science, then orchestrate a series of public releases citing the material and what it means. Professional critics chip-in with reservations and sometimes outright rejection. Then the popular press reports all the finding and conclusions with a wide range of accuracy.
The most recent pre-Clovis site to hit the airways and headlines comes from Texas. A Texas A&M team excavated two blocks of alluvium about 250 yards downstream from the well-known Gault site of Clovis fame. One block produced results. The Science 2011 report, published as “The Buttermilk Creek Complex and the Origins of Clovis at the Debra L. Friedkin Site, Texas,” claims an assemblage of 15,528 artifacts and dates between 13,200 and 15,500 years ago.
For the outsider, the interested layperson, this is perhaps the most remarkable pre-Clovis report of all: It’s high-stakes poker with all the elements of extrapolated claims and meticulous interdisciplinary reasoning to lend credibility to those claims.
These early dates, the report argues, allow ample time for people to settle into the various habitats of North America, colonize South America all the way down to Monte Verde, Chile, invent the Clovis tool kit and propagate a base population through which the Clovis technology later explodes. The popular press received the unfiltered claims with a unanimous embrace.
If these dates and artifacts are eventually authenticated and claims verified, many of the mysteries of Clovis and pre-Clovis could be illuminated by this single site. It’s a brilliant choice for an archaeological dig—very close to the Gault site, which has already produced pre-Clovis tools, but apparently across a symbolic fence line.
Very few establishment archaeologists have commented on this site. There should either have been a celebratory parade or the usual barrage of criticism. They probably have their reasons: Of the artifacts, 85% are microdebitage, tiny flakes less than a millimeter in any direction. Criteria exist to tell the fine flakes of microdebitage by pre-Clovis people from naturally produced particles from alluvial erosion of the local chert but I don’t know if they apply here.
No radiocarbon dates are provided; apparently organic material is absent. The clay where the artifacts were found was dated by 49 optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) procedures, measuring when quartz (sand) particles were last exposed to sunlight. OSL is less precise than Carbon-14 dating and is normally used on older materials. The results are said to be variable; one prominent archaeologist called OSL precision “unimpressive,” saying it has a greater margin for error than radiocarbon dates. Critics point out that the OSL-test results come from quartz particles around the artifacts but not from the “tools” themselves.
The Buttermilk Creek complex appears to be an important archaeological benchmark whose credibility won’t be objectively evaluated for a while. The lay press is not particularly useful here: Discovery magazine says it’s the sheer number (thousands) of well-dated tools—“thousands of small stone tools” repeats Scientific American—that is special about the Buttermilk site and that alone should settle the debate (pre-Clovis versus Clovis or Clovis-first). But less than one-half of a single percent (56) of the “artifacts” found at Buttermilk Creek are tools and they don’t look much like the Clovis kit (the principal author concedes that “it’s not Clovis in the strict definition”). The rest of the 15,528 artifacts are flakes. The proto-Clovis projectile point or the Clovis lithic progenitor, as smoking gun, remains at large.
But, taken as a whole, the Buttermilk Creek site, and its attendant claims, presents serious challenges to a spectrum of theories. Unless the entire site is dismissed, the mere geographical presence of humans in central Texas 15,000 years ago (assuming the contested dates hold up) challenges the notion of the danger of living with North American animal predators and difficulties of overland travel within the contiguous states.
The discovery of 56 “tools” spread over two-thousand years of Texas prehistory, can be argued either way: People, as the authors contend, settling into the environments of North America with plenty of time to develop the Clovis tool kit. Or, perhaps this central Texas site, if confirmed, just indicates another small and transient pre-Clovis population.
Also, why pre-Clovis in central Texas and not, say, in California? Of course, the Edwards Plateau is a very nice place to live: lots of springs and quality chert outcrops. The presence of humans in Texas 15,000 years ago—the date itself has not been broadly accepted—begs the question of how they got there? The Gault region is far from the standard coastal routes and most all the Pleistocene predators, including the short-faced bear, lived in those habitats during the claimed human occupation.
The final nail in the Clovis First coffin comes up again in the discussion of the Buttermilk Creek site, as it does ad nauseum in reportage of all the pre-Clovis sites, including Paisley Cave in Oregon. Reasonably, there should be a last, even of final last coffin nails.
In any case, it’s hard to see the relevance: There were Clovis and there were pre-Clovis people. No one I know believes the Clovis people were the first humans to step into the lower 48. Although the popular press gobbles up the death of “Clovis First” drivel for monthly installments in otherwise credible magazines, the debate is artificial. There’s little or no audible opposition and it’s possible that Clovis and pre-Clovis have no significant archaeological or cultural connections. Pre-Clovis people may have hung around in small numbers in selected locations for several thousand years. Maybe these isolated settlements had little contact with one another—Meadowcroft never shook hands with Buttermilk Creek. Maybe none of them survived long enough to greet the Clovis hunters who possibly represent a totally separate migration down the IFC beginning around 13,300. Of course, some of the later pre-Clovis dates could overlap with the time of the Clovis big game hunters and that is fascinating. Meanwhile, we await further scrutiny from the professional archaeologists. It looks like we won’t be getting to the bottom of these claims anytime soon.
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The second important date comes from Oregon and it’s arguably the most solid of all pre-Clovis dates. Scientists have isolated human DNA from coprolites (fossilized or at least desiccated excrement) excavated during the late 2010s from the Paisley Caves in the south central part of the state, located near the ancient shoreline of a Pleistocene pluvial lake. Since genetic material cannot be directly dated, seeds and plant fibers from the same coprolite were used to determine the radiocarbon date. The stone tool assemblages are small, suggesting brief occupation. People probably dropped by the cave seasonally, on and off, for a couple millennia to camp and to take a dump. If the occupation lasted months and consisted of a dozen or more people, they might have maintained a separate latrine.
There are some problems with the interpretation of this site, but the presence of humans visiting the caves 14,000 years ago is not one of them. This inland site is almost 200 raven-miles from the Pacific Ocean, flying west over the Cascade Range via Crater Lake.
Where on earth did these people come from and why haven’t we found evidence of more of them?
Analysis of broken DNA sequences from presumably human coprolites, or feces, indicated people living in this high-desert country 14,000 years ago. Archaeologists cautioned that the modern DNA from the excavators might contaminate the site, but this proved not to be the case. Others noted that the presumed human coprolites could be either canine or mixed with material from other animals. The cave produced few human artifacts. Additionally, the critics asserted that intact stratigraphy of sediments was lacking, that carbon isotope anomalies rendered the radiocarbon dates unreliable and leaching from ground water and rodent burrows contaminated DNA results. The archaeologists at Paisley maintained the morphology of the coprolites suggest human origin. This seemed questionable expertise in an unusual arena. All such scat—whether dropped in the cave by humans, other omnivores or pure carnivores—is gnawed by rodents and insects over millennia into similar looking clumps of fossil poop.
Despite these reservations, the lead University of Oregon archaeologist calls the coprolites “the perfect artifact.” He maintains the contents—bone, hair and vegetation—of the ancient feces reflected “a human diet,” including desert parsley, a plant that grows six inches under the ground, which further indicates these people were not explorers but living there, at home, and “very well-adapted to their environment.” Additionally, they found remnant tiny threads in the coprolites suggesting: “Clearly, people were sewing their clothing, form-fitting clothing just like we have shirts, pants, those kind of things, perhaps moccasins.”
Canine DNA—coyote, fox or wolf but most likely coyote—is also found in the coprolites. The archaeologist says this is probably because pre-Clovis people ate canines or the coyotes urinated on the human scat.
I’d suggest another possibility. As any desert-rat knows (Edward Abbey first pointed this fact out to me four decades ago), there’s no real point in burying your poop in the desert.
“Douglas, the coyotes just dig it up and eat it anyway,” Ed said.
Coyotes, and other canines, routinely consume the scat of other omnivores and even herbivores. And, in the case of a dry cave, the canine usually gets the last bite. In other words, coprolites in a desert cave could have easily passed through two digestive tracts before final deposition.
So the presence of human DNA from ancient hair or cells in a coprolite doesn’t necessarily mean it is human feces nor that everything in the coprolite is something a person ate. You’d have to be certain the fossilized feces are entirely human, not canine or some other animal. I don’t know how you’d establish that. As for desert parsley or other seeds or vegetables, bears, coyotes and other meso-predators routinely dig up the grass and seed caches of rodents. I’ve filmed both grizzlies and coyotes doing exactly this in Yellowstone National Park. If the animal in question ate the grass or seed cache and also some human excrement, you could not conclude the human diet included such vegetation.
The distinction is that DNA from human-produced coprolites is not the same thing as coprolites containing human DNA. Let’s say a coyote ate human excrement some 14,000 years ago. Does this possibility invalidate either the identification of human DNA from a hair in the coyote’s scat or the accompanying radiocarbon date from a seed in the canine coprolite? Absolutely not. Coyote don’t eat ancient human poop, they’re only interested in the contemporary stuff. People and coyotes were visiting the Paisley Cave at the same time. Paisley’s most important claims stand. It doesn’t matter if the coprolites are human or not.
To answer their critics, the original excavators returned with a fresh crew wearing sterile gloves and began to shift through the layers of wood-rat shit. They confirmed the stratigraphy and recovered DNA that they believe was shared by people in Asia. Though artifacts are rare, the investigators found three broken so-called Western Stemmed points from datable strata roughly coeval with Clovis times, but almost 2000 years younger than the dated coprolites; they speculate that Clovis people and the nomads at the Paisley Caves represent separate populations with distinctly different lithic technologies. The scientists believe this scant evidence suggests two migrations to North America—the Northwest coastal route for Paisley and the ice-free corridor for Clovis. Again, these far-reaching claims are based on but three fragmented projectile point stems.
One of the authors felt the need to gratuitously add that their “investigations constitute the final blow to the Clovis First theory.” Why bray for attention when you are holding such serious science in your lap?
The Paisley site’s most important contribution remains its credible date on human DNA samples. Though it makes no difference in the dating or confirmation that humans were present in Paisley Cave, one cannot assume all these are human coprolites; you’d have to somehow definitively prove it. On the contrary, it might be more prudent to consider most of the coprolites as canine scat that contains scavenged human feces. Reliance on morphology alone becomes inexact when the scat in question lies in a dry cave for 14,000 years. This is a small site with few artifacts that could indicate a place where a few nomadic humans just stopped in for short visits. Short-faced bear remains were found 45 miles north of Paisley at Fossil Lake, Oregon. The quest for that substantial pre-Clovis population remains elusive. Yet the geography and solid dates from this site mark Paisley as one of the most important finds in pre-Clovis archeology.
The tantalizing question of where these people came from lingers. Paisley constitutes the only confirmed pre-Clovis date from the far-interior West. Fourteen-thousand years ago, the great glaciers of North America had just begun to melt and most scientists believe the IFC still lay swallowed by ice. Early Americans could have boated down the Pacific Coast, landing sporadically to explore inland for food and to check for dangerous beasts, but those travelers would have likely consisted of small bands who already had dined at the great salmon rivers of the Northwest Coast. Perhaps a few of them came up the Columbia River, turned right at the Deschutes River following the steelhead, and ended up wandering the high-desert of Oregon looking for a place to camp and get away from the short-faced bears.
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In the end, one large question hangs over the peopling of the Americas like a mammoth in the corner of a sod-house: Given the ease of maritime travel down the Northwest Coast, the effortless living off the beaches and estuaries from Beringia to Chile and maybe even across Panama and around to the southeastern United States, given the richness of Late Pleistocene landscapes and the abundance of harvestable game roaming all over the Americas, why don’t we see more signs of pre-Clovis people using this land?
Conventional answers include rising seas that inundated coastal sites or non-perishable artifacts that were left in locations in which archaeologists have not yet looked with productive methodologies. Either the evidence for a significant pre-Clovis presence is not there or we haven’t quite figured out how to find it yet.
Once south of the ice, coastal travelers probably wandered inland. The pre-Clovis sites in Chile and Oregon lie, respectively, 36 miles upriver in Chile and some 220 miles inland on the Oregon high desert. Another cluster of pre-Clovis possibilities has been located in the southeastern United States, where people could have arrived via one of the coasts and moved inland. Other places south of the ice where people lived include a mammoth butchering site in Wisconsin and a rock shelter in Pennsylvania, both pretty far from any coast. Maybe these folk represent pockets of survivors, remnants of people who came down before the glaciers closed the route south 21,000 years ago. Others think these early settlers might be European in origin.
This isn’t much evidence and what it means to many archaeologists is that the human population in the Americas was very small, nearly invisible in the record, until around 13,000 years ago. Monte Verde, Paisley and a few other sites have been occupied earlier but Clovis was a huge, explosive cultural event that dwarfs all earlier arrivals. There are other factors but that’s the big one: A human presence so small it seems to hang on with the tiniest toehold in a land so resplendent in marine and terrestrial resources that it defies reproductive logic.
Coastal travelers prior to the appearance of Clovis could have settled almost any place they wished between Beringia and Chile, say south-central California, living off the chaparral, on salmon and an otherwise maritime economy, pumping out children in semi-sedentary villages. But, apparently, they did not. Maybe something kept them on the move.
People living in Arctic habitats need animal fat and protein to survive; you need to kill game, especially big game. Pre-Clovis adventurers traveling from the north into the lower states would have been in a hunting frame of mind. But again, there is scant evidence they came south, and very little to suggest that pre-Clovis people hunted big game, even with a landscape teeming with big wildlife.
What stopped them? We could be missing something huge here. The astute University of Oregon archaeological team was on to something. They had the good sense to go for the gold standard: human DNA in a datable context, in their case coprolites. What about looking for fossilized/desiccated poop in other dry caves or anywhere that conditions preserve such an ancient record. There must be such sites scattered about the West, or in eastern caves or in anaerobic peat deposits. They don’t have to be human coprolites, just those of animals that lived with them, like coyotes. Pre-Clovis people were not living at the top of the food chain. Perhaps field workers could look for coprolites of Pleistocene lion and short-faced bear and, when they find them, test for human DNA.