America Before The Key
to Earth’s Lost Civilization
Graham Hancock
Part 2
New World?
The Mystery of the
First Americans
4
A PAST NOT SO MUCH HIDDEN AS
DENIED
ALTHOUGH HE HIMSELF IS NOT an archaeologist, Tom Deméré, curator of
paleontology at the San Diego Natural History Museum in California, does
have occasion to work with archaeologists. I was therefore not surprised
when his response to my request to interview him and have him show me
certain stones and bones in the museum’s archives was declined. My initial
approach was on September 18, 2017, and the polite refusal came on
September 20, not from Dr. Deméré himself but from Rebecca Handelsman,
the museum’s communications director. “While we’re unable to
accommodate your request for a meeting,” she wrote, “I’d like to share with
you our online press kit which has a wealth of information about the project
and the discovery.”1
Though they have their place, press kits are low on my list of priorities
when I’m researching books, and because of the very special nature of what
Rebecca called “the project and the discovery,” I was not going to be so
easily fobbed off. Deméré had been closely involved from the outset with the
excavation of a controversial site near San Diego and had published a paper
in 2017 claiming that humans had been present there as early as 130,000
years ago.2
The paper was a prominent one, since it appeared in the
prestigious scientific journal Nature, and almost immediately aroused the
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fury of archaeologists committed to a much later date for the peopling of the
Americas.
Among them was Professor Donald Grayson of the University of
Washington.3
“I have read that paper,” he sniped, “and I was astonished by it.
I was astonished not because it is so good, but because it is so bad.”4
In a response that was typical of many, David J. Meltzer, professor of
prehistory at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, also dismissed
the paper. “If you are going to push human antiquity in the New World back
more than 100,000 years in one fell swoop,” he said, “you’ll have to do so
with a far better archaeological case than this one. I’m not buying what’s
being sold.”5
Gary Haynes, professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of
Nevada, went so far as to accuse Nature of “an editorial lapse in judgment”
for publishing the paper at all.6
Jon M. Erlandson, director of the University of Oregon’s Museum of
Natural and Cultural History, said “the site is not credible.”7
Earlier, foreseeing such reactions, George Jefferson, former associate
curator of the Page Museum in Los Angeles, had warned Deméré that the
archaeological community, invested in long-established notions of the recent
peopling of the Americas, wasn’t even close to being ready for a claim of
antiquity as remote as 130,000 years. “Keep it under wraps,” he advised. “No
one will believe you.”8
But Deméré was sure of the evidence and decided to go ahead. The Nature
paper, published in April 2017, was the result and quickly caught my
attention.
DON’T SAY A WORD
ABOUT LOST CIVILIZATIONS
COULD DEMÉRÉ’S CLAIM BE TRUE? Rather than having been in America for
30,000 years or less, as archaeologists have recently been dragged kicking
and screaming to accept, could our ancestors have populated the continent
130,000 years ago or more?
If the facts checked out (and, I had to keep reminding myself, despite the
hostile reactions of some academics, that Nature would not have published
the paper without having it thoroughly peer-reviewed first), then they raised
serious question marks over how complete our understanding of prehistory
really is.
In particular, and to get right to the point, what could those very early
Americans and their descendants have been doing during all the tens of
thousands of years that archaeologists insisted they weren’t present at all? My
whole focus, since long before the publication of Fingerprints of the Gods in
1995, has been a quest for a high civilization of remote antiquity, a
civilization that can rightly be described as “lost” because the very fact that it
existed at all has been overlooked by archaeologists. I couldn’t help but
wonder, therefore, whether some traces of it might be found in those 100,000
lost years of the Americas.
So I persisted with Deméré, writing to him several times through the
formidable Rebecca Handelsman, setting out the reasons why I wanted to
interview him and providing more background on my own work. “Is it
possible,” I asked, “that missing pages in the story of the origins of
civilization might await discovery in North America—the very last place,
until now, that archaeologists have thought to look?”9
Pointing out that other, now-extinct human species had been present in the
world 130,000 years ago and had interbred with anatomically modern
humans, I also asked which species of human he thought might have been
involved at his site. “Were they anatomically modern? Were they
Neanderthals? Were they Denisovans? Or were they one of the several other
species of Homo that will likely be identified by further research in the
coming years?”10
For days I heard no more and then, on October 2, 2017, Rebecca wrote
again to report that Dr. Deméré had agreed to a “brief meeting” with me, that
he was willing to discuss his site and the evidence for an early human
presence that it yielded, but that he would not “speculate on what species it
may have been or on broader topics/hypotheses re ancient civilizations.”11
I accepted these constraints and the interview was arranged for the next
day, Tuesday, October 3. Whatever I got out of him it would surely add
something to the museum’s press kit and, besides, Deméré’s reticence made
61
perfect sense to me. The last thing he wanted while his own work was under
attack was to be associated with what archaeologists call “crackpot theories”
about a lost civilization promulgated by a “pseudoscientist” like myself. If I
were in his shoes, frankly, I would have been cautious, too. Indeed, I was
quite surprised that he’d agreed to talk to me at all.
FORGOTTEN AMERICA
AT THE OUTSET OF THE twentieth century many scholars took the view that the
Americas had been devoid of any human presence until less than 4,000 years
ago.
12
To put that in perspective, by 4,000 years ago the civilization of Egypt was
already ancient, Minoan Crete flourished, and Stonehenge and other great
megalithic sites had been built across Europe. Likewise, by 4,000 years ago,
our ancestors had been in Australia for about 65,000 years and had found
their way to the farthest reaches of Asia at almost equally remote dates.13
So why should the Americas have escaped this global migration, and this
seemingly unstoppable march toward high civilization, until so late?
The answer, perhaps, is that the most influential figure in disseminating
and enforcing the view that the New World had only recently been populated
by humans was a frowning and fearsome anthropologist named Aleš Hrdlička
who, in 1903, was selected to head the newly created Division of Physical
Anthropology at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural
History in Washington, DC. There he would remain until his death in 1943,
deploying his intimidating authority as “the most eminent physical
anthropologist of his time,” “the gatekeeper of humankind’s recent origins in
the New World” to quash any and every attempt to suggest great human
antiquity in the Americas.14 Frank H. H. Roberts, a colleague of Hrdlička’s at
the Smithsonian, would later admit of this period, “Questions of early man in
America became virtually taboo, and no anthropologist desirous of a
successful career would tempt the fate of ostracism by intimating that he had
discovered indications of respectable antiquity for the Indian.”15
But eminence can only suppress facts for so long, and throughout the
1920s and 1930s compelling evidence began to emerge that people had reached the Americas thousands of years earlier than Hrdlička supposed. Of
particular importance in this gradual undermining of the great man’s
authority was a site called Blackwater Draw near the town of Clovis, New
Mexico, where bones of extinct Ice Age mammals were found in 1929 and
assumed, rightly, to be very old. The Smithsonian sent a representative,
Charles Gilmore, to take a look at the site but—perhaps unsurprisingly under
Hrdlička’s malign shadow—he concluded that no further investigation was
justified.16
Anthropologist Edgar B. Howard of the University of Pennsylvania
disagreed.17 He began excavations at Blackwater Draw in 1933, quickly
finding quantities of beautifully crafted stone projectiles with distinctive
“fluted” points—so-called on account of a characteristic vertical “flute” or
channel cut into the base. The points were found in direct association with
(and in a few cases even buried between the ribs of) extinct Ice Age fauna
such as Columbian mammoth, camel, horse, bison, saber-toothed cat, and
dire wolf.18 In 1935, on the basis of these finds, Howard published a book in
which he concluded that it was possible that humans had been in North
America for tens of thousands of years.19 Further seasons of meticulous
fieldwork followed before he presented his findings, to widespread
approbation and acceptance, at a prestigious international forum on Early
Man and the Origins of the Human Race held in Philadelphia on March 18–
20, 1937.20
Hrdlička was there. He gloweringly ignored the implications of the
discoveries at Blackwater Draw and instead used his time onstage to reaffirm
his long-held position that, for American Indians, “So far as skeletal remains
are concerned, there is at this moment no evidence that would justify the
assumption of great, i.e. geological, antiquity.”21
But the clock was ticking. Before and after 1943, the year in which both
Howard and Hrdlička died, further discoveries of fluted points of the
Blackwater Draw type—increasingly referred to as “Clovis points” after the
nearby town of that name—continued to be made. This ever-accumulating
mass of new evidence left no room for doubt and even the most stubborn
conservatives (Hrdlička excepted) were eventually forced to agree that the
Clovis culture had hunted animals that became extinct at the end of the last Ice Age and that humans must therefore have been in the Americas for at
least 12,000 years.
This gave a huge boost to research, leading in the decades ahead to the
discovery of around 1,500 further Clovis sites, and more than 10,000 Clovis
points, at locations scattered all across North America.22 As the net widened,
however, a number of anomalies of the culture began to be identified. A
confusing outcome of this is that there are now two schools of thought around
its proposed antiquity and duration. The so-called long interval school dates
the first appearance of Clovis in North America to 13,400 years ago and its
mysterious extinction and disappearance from the archaeological record to
around 12,800 years ago—a period of 600 years.23 The “short interval”
school also accepts 12,800 years ago for the end date of Clovis but sets the
start date at 13,000 years ago—therefore allowing it an existence of just 200
years.24 Both schools agree that this unique and distinctive culture must have
originated somewhere else because, from the first evidence for its presence, it
is already sophisticated and fully formed, deploying advanced weapons and
hunting tactics.25 Particularly puzzling, since it is the archaeological
consensus that the human migration into the Americas was launched from
northeast Asia, is the fact that no traces of the early days of Clovis, of the
previous evolution and development of its characteristic tools, weapons, and
lifeways, have been found anywhere in Asia.26 All we can say for sure is that
once it had made its presence felt in North America the Clovis culture spread
very widely across a huge swath of the continent,27 with sites as far apart as
Alaska, northern Mexico, New Mexico, South Carolina, Florida, Montana,
Pennsylvania, and Washington state.28 Such an expansion would have been
extremely rapid were it to have occurred in 600 years and seems almost
miraculously fast if it was in fact accomplished in 200 years.29
THE LAND BRIDGE AND
THE ICE-FREE CORRIDOR
DURING THE 1940s AND 1950s, as the fame of Clovis continued to grow, no
evidence was forthcoming—or, to state the matter more exactly, none that
was generally accepted, approved, and confirmed by the archaeological
community—of any kind of human presence in the Americas older than the
earliest Clovis dates of around 13,400 years ago.
As regards the matter of general acceptance, despite a few dissenting
voices 30 a consensus soon began to emerge that no older cultures would ever
be found—and what is now known as the “Clovis First” paradigm was
conceived. We might say, however, that it was not officially “born” until
September 1964. That was when archaeologist C. Vance Haynes, today
Regents Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Arizona
and a senior member of the National Academy of Sciences, published a
landmark paper in the journal Science. Snappily titled “Fluted Projectile
Points: Their Age and Dispersion,”31 the paper presented, and persuasively
supported, a number of key assertions.
First, Haynes pointed out that, because of lowered sea level during the Ice
Age, much of the area occupied today by the Bering Sea was above water, and where the Bering Strait now is, a tundra-covered landscape connected
eastern Siberia and western Alaska. Although not a particularly easy
environment, it would, Haynes argued, “have presented no obstacle” to
nomadic hunters who were already masters of the Siberian tundra and who
would certainly have followed the herds of bison, deer, and mammoth that
roamed across it.32
Once over the land bridge, however, it was Haynes’s case that the migrant
hunters could not have ventured very far before confronting the daunting
barrier of the Cordilleran and Laurentide Ice Sheets, which were at the time
merged into a single impassable mountainous mass covering most of the
northern half of North America.
They therefore had no access to the lands that lay beyond. As a result,
prevailing in the ice-free southern half of North America during this phase of
the last Ice Age were “conditions as favorable to the existence of herbivorous
megafauna, which man could hunt, as conditions during the time of the
Clovis occupation, yet there is not the slightest evidence of man’s
presence.”
Things changed around 14,100 years ago, Haynes claimed, when a
generalized warming of global climate caused an ice-free corridor to open up
between the Laurentide and the Cordilleran ice caps, allowing entry for the
first time in many millennia to the rich, unglaciated plains, teeming with
game, that lay to the south.34
Some 700 years later, around 13,400 years ago, the stratigraphic record of
those plains starts to include Clovis artifacts. Their “abrupt appearance,”
Haynes argued, supports the view “that Clovis progenitors passed through
Canada” and that “from the seemingly rapid and wide dispersal of Clovis
points … it appears these people may have brought the technique of fluting
with them.”35
As noted earlier, no Clovis points have ever been found in Asia,36 but
when Haynes published his landmark paper in Science in 1964 he reported
correctly that four had been found “on the surface” in Alaska and another in
the Canadian Yukon, all undated,37 with the oldest dated points south of the
former ice margin going back no further than 13,400 years. To Haynes this
looked like the last link “in a logical sequence of events, and the pieces begin
to fall into place. If Clovis progenitors traversed a corridor through Canada
… and dispersed through the United States south of the … ice border in the
ensuing 700 years, then they were probably in Alaska some 500 years earlier.
… The Alaskan fluted points … could represent this occupation and could,
therefore, be ancestral to Clovis points and blades.”38
The paper was welcomed by archaeologists,39 most of whom were already
convinced that Clovis was “First,” and virtually overnight what had been at
best a persuasive and seemingly well-constructed theory morphed into the
new ruling orthodoxy. Worse, it soon became every bit as rigid and intolerant
as the orthodoxy of Hrdlička’s time and it would retain ultimate authority
over archaeological careers and research priorities for decades to come with a
grip every bit as firm as Hrdlička’s iron fist.
In a familiar refrain, those who disagreed with “Clovis First,” or were
foolhardy enough to report possible pre-Clovis sites, did so “at significant
risk to their careers.”40 Indeed by 2012 the bullying behavior of the Clovis
First lobby had grown so unpleasant that it attracted the attention of the editor
of Nature, who opined: “The debate over the first Americans has been one of
the most acrimonious—and unfruitful—in all of science. … One researcher,
new to the field after years of working on other contentious topics, told
Nature that he had never before witnessed the level of aggression that swirled
around the issue of who reached America first.”41
CHALLENGING CLOVIS FIRST
TOM DILLEHAY, PROFESSOR OF ANTHROPOLOGY at Vanderbilt University in
Tennessee, began excavations at Monte Verde in southern Chile in 1977 and
found evidence that humans had been present there as far back as 18,500
years ago.42 The progress of science eventually vindicated him, as we shall
see, but before it did so Dillehay had to endure sustained and often deeply
unpleasant personal attacks from Clovis Firsters for more than 20 years.
He was attacked because there are no Clovis artifacts at Monte Verde, it is
5,000 years older than the oldest securely dated Clovis sites, and it is located
more than 8,000 miles south of the Bering Strait.
The reader will not have forgotten that the strait was dry during the
lowered sea level of the last Ice Age—a tundra-covered land bridge across
which the Clovis people were believed to have migrated on foot from
northeast Siberia and thence into the Americas through the ice-free corridor
between the Cordilleran and Laurentide Ice Sheets. The credibility of Clovis
First depends crucially on the supposed close chronological link between the
opening up of that ice-free corridor around 14,100 years ago and the first
appearance of Clovis artifacts south of the ice margin around 13,400 years
ago. By putting humans in the Americas more than 4,000 years before the
opening of the ice-free corridor, Monte Verde showed that “link” to be
illusory. Moreover, by putting them not in North America but in South
America, with no means of transport available to them other than boats of
some sort, it questioned fundamental assumptions about the technical and
organizational capacities of our ancestors, hitherto judged to be too low to
allow such adventures at such a remote period.
Tom Dillehay’s most dogged and determined critic, perhaps predictably,
has been C. Vance Haynes, whose 1964 paper launched the Clovis First
theory and who by 1988 had used his influence, and his outreach in the
scientific journals, to dismiss every case thus far made for supposedly pre-Clovis sites in the Americas.43
Except Monte Verde. Even for Haynes, this Chilean site was proving to be
an exceptionally tough nut to crack. Realizing that the implications for
American archaeology of Tom Dillehay being right were immense, Haynes
wrote to David Meltzer at SMU to suggest that “a panel of objective
68
conservatives should be formed and funded by NSF [National Science
Foundation] to visit the site, examine it, take samples, etc. If a positive
consensus results we can then accept the interpretation and formulate new
hypotheses for the peopling of the New World. If not, Monte Verde will have
to be relegated to the bin of possible pre-Clovis sites awaiting further data.”44
James M. Adovasio, a world expert in perishable artifacts and former
director of the Mercyhurst Archaeological Institute at Mercyhurst University
in Erie, Pennsylvania, was closely involved in the events that followed. He
tells us that he would be remiss if he “did not point out that by the oxymoron
‘objective conservatives,’ Haynes meant himself and the Clovis First
disciples.”45
In the end, however, after 7 years of haggling, a balanced group was put
together, “not configured as a panel of pre-Clovis skeptics or, conversely,
pre-Clovis enthusiasts,” says Adovasio: “rather, it was, as designed, a mixed
bag reflecting a range of views.”46
The site visit took place over 3 days in January 1997, and far from
relegating Monte Verde to the “bin,” all members of the group eventually
signed on to an official report confirming that it was indeed an archaeological
site and that Dillehay’s dates were correct. The report was published in
October 1997 in American Antiquity and left no room for any conclusion
other than that Monte Verde predated Clovis; it even considered the
“extremely intriguing” possibility that the human presence there might go
back as far 33,000 years.47
In his important book The First Americans, Adovasio, who was present at
the proceedings throughout, provides a blow-by-blow account of how the
panel arrived at its conclusions, and of the follow-up.48 It seems that Haynes
was not happy, despite being a signatory to the report, and even as it
appeared in print he began to voice doubts over it to colleagues, questioning
again the antiquity of Monte Verde and “suggesting a wondrous new array of
hypothetical events that could have contaminated the site in some previously
unperceived way.”49
Haynes and Adovasio had crossed swords before—over Meadowcroft, a
site in Pennsylvania that Adovasio had excavated in the 1970s that revealed
eleven well-defined stratigraphic units with evidence of human occupation
“spanning at least 16,000 years and perhaps 19,000 years.”50 Inevitably,
69
because it threatened Clovis First, this attracted the hostility of Haynes, who,
in the years that followed, sought to quibble away almost every aspect of
Adovasio’s evidence: “In scientific paper after scientific paper, Haynes …
asked for yet another date, yet another study, raising yet other picayune and
fanciful questions about Meadowcroft, most of which had been answered
long before he asked them—not just in the original excavation procedures but
in report after report.”51
Again, as was the case with Monte Verde, the constant quibbling and
demands for ever more evidence, when the evidence in place was already
more than adequate, was demoralizing and had the effect of slowing down
the research effort but ultimately did not prevent formal recognition of
Meadowcroft Rockshelter as a National Historic Landmark with an age of
more than 16,000 years.52
Likewise, in the 1990s, Canadian archaeologist Jacques Cinq-Mars
excavated Bluefish Caves in the Yukon and found evidence of human activity
there dating back more than 24,000 years—older than Meadowcroft and
much older than Clovis. The price he paid was high. His competence and his
sanity were questioned and when he attempted to present his findings at
conferences he was ignored or insulted.53 One colleague stated matters
bluntly: “When Jacques proposed [that Bluefish Caves were] 24,000 [years
old], it was not accepted.”54
As a result of such attitudes, funding drained away and Cinq-Mars had to
stop his work, only to be proved correct, many years later, by a new scientific
study of the evidence from the caves published in January 2017.55
That study, one of several that confirmed the existence of pre-Clovis sites
of increasingly ancient dates,56 was titled Earliest Human Presence in North
America.
Only 4 months later, on April 27, 2017, Tom Deméré’s paper announcing
the discovery of “a 130,000-year-old archaeological site in southern
California, USA,” appeared in Nature.
57
That’s about ten times older than Clovis, eight times older than
Meadowcroft, and more than five times as old as Bluefish Caves.
The resulting furor was, in retrospect, inevitable.
5
MESSAGE FROM A MASTODON
THE SAN DIEGO NATURAL HISTORY Museum, affectionately known to locals as
“The Nat,” is situated in the lush gardens of Balboa Park, which served as the
venue for the 1915 Panama-California Exposition. Originally called “City
Park,” it was renamed for the exposition in honor of Spanish-born Vasco
Nuñez de Balboa (1475–1519), who conducted a murderous exploratory raid
across Panama and became the first European to see the Pacific Ocean.1
Balboa Park was repurposed after the closure of the exposition and now
hosts seventeen museums and cultural institutions, among which The Nat
stands out for its excellent collections and for its research expertise. As
Santha and I strolled toward it on a bright Southern California morning, we
couldn’t help but reflect on the irony. In a museum in a park named after an
arriviste European adventurer, we were about to be shown evidence that
might speak to the truly vast antiquity of Native Americans in the lands that
Europeans had stolen from them with fire and sword.
Rebecca Handelsman had asked us to meet her at The Nat’s south entrance
but we were early so we spent some time in the north atrium first, which is
dominated by a looming skeleton cast of an Allosaur, a predatory dinosaur a
bit like its more famous younger cousin Tyrannosaurus rex. Scientists now agree that T. rex and the entire nonavian Dinosauria clade
became extinct virtually overnight after a large asteroid or comet—more
likely the latter 2—hit the Gulf of Mexico around 65 million years ago. There
is also no doubt that it was this sudden and cataclysmic eradication of
71
dinosaurs from the planet that opened the way for the rapid, uncontested
expansion into new niches of the hitherto-insignificant mammalian line. We
humans today are among the descendants of those early mammals.
It’s thought-provoking, isn’t it, that cosmic impacts, whether by asteroids
or by comets, can sometimes be of such magnitude that they drastically
redirect the evolutionary path of life on earth. It has happened more than
once, as we shall see. However, a cataclysm was not to blame 130,000 years
ago when a lone mastodon, perhaps old or sick, died on a floodplain in
Southern California and was subsequently scavenged, with the carcass then
quite rapidly covered by, and entombed in, a deposit of silty, sandy, fine grained sediment.3
There it remained undisturbed until November 1992,
when the California Department of Transportation undertook highway
construction on State Route 54 where San Diego borders National City.4
It
was routine practice for paleontologists from The Nat to monitor road grading in Southern California in case any important fossil material was
exposed, and Richard Cerutti, the monitor on duty at SR 54, spotted the
fossilized bones and the tusk of what he at first thought was a mammoth.5
He
halted construction in the immediate vicinity until a proper excavation could
be undertaken, and called in his boss, Dr. Tom Deméré, to lead it.6
Working together with a team of other researchers from The Nat, Cerutti
and Deméré very quickly established that the fossilized remains, including
many bones, both tusks, and several of the animal’s teeth, belonged to a
mastodon.7
Like the mammoths, to which they were closely related,
mastodons were swept from the face of the earth in the sudden and
mysterious extinction of America’s Ice Age megafauna that took place
around 12,800 years ago 8—the same epoch exactly that saw the equally
abrupt and equally mysterious disappearance of the Clovis culture.
From quite early on both Cerutti—after whom the site is now named—and
Deméré were intrigued by what the excavation revealed: “Many of the bones
were strangely fractured—or missing entirely. And there were several large
stones, found in the same sediment layer as the bones and teeth, that appeared
out of place. It looked like an archaeological site—like the preserved
evidence of human activity.”9
As well as the hefty rocks, unusual in fine-grained sediment, smaller pieces
of sharply broken stone were found peppered throughout the Cerutti
72
Mastodon Site: “This is not typically something you would see as a result of
normal geological processes. The combination of stones … together with
broken bones was interesting and instigated speculation regarding the
possibility of human activity at the site.”10
At first intriguing, the implications of the data grew worrying when it
began to become obvious that the site was extremely ancient, lying embedded
in sediments “that had been deposited much earlier, during a period long
before humans were thought to have arrived on the continent.”11 In the early
1990s, radiometric techniques capable of peering much further back into the
past than the standard 50,000-year limit for carbon dating 12 were already
available. Unfortunately, however, they had not yet attained sufficient
accuracy to give scientists a high level of confidence in the age range
suspected for the Cerutti Mastodon Site.13
The end result, after key finds were moved to The Nat where they were
housed in the archives, was that the site was reburied and abandoned. Despite
its anomalous character and suspected importance, it was just too explosive
to put before the scrutiny of hostile archaeologists while the dates remained
uncertain. “If you claim something is that old you get blasted,” Cerutti said,
referring to the Clovis First lobby, “which is why some archaeologists
stopped working on sites like this. They didn’t want to get blasted.”14
It wasn’t that the Cerutti Mastodon Site was completely forgotten in the 25
years after the excavation stopped. It’s on record that Tom Deméré invited
several other researchers to study the collection of key finds kept at The Nat,
but none did so.15
Robson Bonnichsen, founder of the Center for the Study of the First
Americans, warned him that “research that contributes to First American
Studies is a game of hardball.”16
Months ran into years with no journal article on the site even drafted, let
alone published, nor any further investigation undertaken. Cerutti, reportedly,
was so disappointed that he stopped going anywhere near State Route 54.17
The whole exciting matter seemed to have fallen into stagnation.
It was not until 2014, more than two decades after the mastodon’s
discovery, that the tide decisively turned.18 Built on improved understanding
of processes that incorporate natural uranium and its decay products in fossil
bone, a newly enhanced technique, known as 230 Th/U radiometric dating,
73
was now available that could settle the age of the Cerutti deposit once and for
all. Deméré therefore sent several of the mastodon bones to the US
Geological Survey in Colorado, where geologist Jim Paces, using the updated
and refined technique, established beyond reasonable doubt that the bones
were buried 130,000 years ago.19
Now things began to move much more swiftly and it was time to
reexamine the strange fractures on some of the bones that had been noticed
back in 1992 and also to take a much closer look at the “out of place” stones
and rocks found in the same sediment layer. To this end the large and eclectic
team of investigators who would eventually coauthor the landmark 2017
paper in Nature had already begun to form. Tom Deméré and Richard Cerutti
were at the heart of it but other members included Dr. Steve Holen, curator of
archaeology at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, a specialist in the
ancient uses of bone, Professor Daniel Fisher of the Department of Earth and
Environmental Sciences, University of Michigan, Dr. Richard Fullagar of the
Centre for Archaeological Science, University of Wollongong, and Dr. James
Paces, Research Geologist at the US Geological Survey.20
It was a formidable team, their work was meticulous, and publication of
the paper in Nature meant that archaeologists, just then cautiously emerging
from the shadow of the Clovis First paradigm and adjusting themselves with
difficulty to ages in the few tens of thousands of years for sites like Monte
Verde, Meadowcroft, and Bluefish Caves, were now obliged to contemplate a
site dating back to the Eemian, the last interglacial period that extended from
roughly 140,000 years ago down to about 120,000 years ago when the
Pleistocene ice sheets began to expand again.21
At that point in 2017 it was still believed—though new evidence would
soon substantially change the picture22—that anatomically modern humans
had not even left their African homeland 140,000 years ago.
So how could they possibly have gotten to America before they’d even set
out on the epic migrations by which they populated the world?
Having researched the Clovis First wars, and indeed the whole story of
prehistoric archaeology in the United States from the late nineteenth century
onward, I was just beginning to realize how staggering the implications of all
this really were.
TOM DEMÉRÉ’S BONES AND STONES
THE NAT’S MAIN ATRIUM, WHERE the allosaur lurks, is accessed through the
museum’s north entrance, so just before 11 am Santha and I walked around
the west side of the four-story building and presented ourselves at the south
entrance. Beyond it was a second atrium, where we were encouraged to see
that much of the space was devoted to a well-attended exhibition honoring
the Cerutti Mastodon Site.
Out of the crowd, Rebecca Handelsman appeared. Tom Deméré would join
us in a moment, she said. While we waited, she walked us over to a display
case containing a mock-up of the sediment matrix from the site into which,
point down and visible through the glass side of the case, was set a mastodon
tusk. It was a little shorter than my arm, but it was obviously not complete as
the upper part had been crudely broken off.
“This is the tusk that first attracted Richard Cerutti’s attention,” Rebecca
explained, and before I could ask she added, “Its upper part was clipped off
by the backhoe before he could stop the construction work.”
“Is the way it’s displayed here the way it was found?” I asked.
“Exactly that way.” She paused and waved. “Look, here’s Tom. He can tell
you all about it.”
Weaving through the crowd was a man of pleasant aspect, spare and lean
after a lifetime of fieldwork, wearing blue jeans and a brick-red shirt. From
my background reading I knew he was 69 years old, though he appeared
younger, and as we shook hands I saw he had penetrating gray eyes and an
easy smile. Despite the risk to his reputation of even talking to a
“pseudoscientist” like me, he seemed relaxed and friendly.
I launched straight in on the subject of the tusk. “What’s so special about
it?” I asked Tom.
“The way it was set into the ground so it would have stood upright. The
other one lay in a natural horizontal position beside it but this one was found
like you see it in the display. Vertical. And that, to us, immediately looked
like an anomaly.”
“Why?”
“One suggestion is that it was perhaps left there as a marker to come back
to the site on a floodplain where everything is low relief. … I mean, who knows? I don’t know what sort of non-cultural process would put a tusk
vertical. I just don’t understand it.”
“So what you’re saying is that this looks like the result of human behavior?
That it’s evidence of a deliberate, intelligent act?”
“It seems like that to me, and to many others—though I have to say our
critics aren’t persuaded!”
I take this as my cue to ask Tom if he and his team had been surprised by
the level of skeptical response to the Nature paper.
“I expected we’d have pushback,” he replied. “I just hoped it would have
been more objective.”
“I suppose that in any profession and any career people get very
emotionally involved…”
“Apparently! I’m not used to it from a paleontological standpoint. I mean,
there’s passion in paleontology, too, but I’m not used to this sort of thing.”
I restrain myself from stating my view that “this sort of thing”—namely
sniping, quibbling, misrepresentation, straw-man arguments, and vituperative
ad hominem attacks leveled against anyone suggesting deep antiquity for the
First Americans—is perfectly normal among archaeologists, and Santha and I
gratefully accept Tom’s offer to talk us through the exhibits.
The anomalous tusk is just a small part of the story, he says. The stronger
evidence comes from the mastodon’s fossilized bones, and from the rocks
and stones of various sizes found distributed around the site.23
In humans the femur is the long bone of the thigh. At its upper end it has a
ball-like protrusion, the femur head, that articulates with a socket in the pelvis
and thus—wondrous nature!—enables us to walk. Though they stood on four
legs it was no different for mastodons. Their femora were their upper hind
limbs and, just like our femora, were surmounted by ball-like heads set into
their pelvic sockets.
Tom draws our attention to the hefty, almost hemispherical detached heads
of the mastodon’s two femora, one with the rounded end down, the other with
the rounded end up, sitting side by side in a display case. “This is how they
were found when we excavated them,” he says. And he points out a rock next
to them that he calls an “anvil stone,” adding that there wasn’t much left of
the femora themselves.
The significance of this is not immediately obvious to me so I ask Tom to
elaborate.
“We suggest that this was a work station,24 that both femora were
hammered and broken here on the anvil stone and that the heads were
detached and just set off to the side. It feels purposeful, like the tusk. It feels
like humans were breaking these bones and it’s not only what’s here that’s
important but also what’s not here. I mean, originally the femora from which
these heads came were three feet in length and massively thick, yet we have
just a few pieces of them …”
“So that would suggest, what, that the other pieces were taken away?”
“Yes. I mean, if it was equipment damage, you’d think you’d have the
whole femur, right? So the fact that we have missing bits suggests to us that
they were taken away, which fits this idea of human processing and
transportation.”
In the next display case are the few large fragments of femur that were
found at the site and multiple smaller flakes of bone that were found lying
around them.
“We interpret these as cone flakes,” Tom explains. “So when a bone is
struck by a stone hammer you have damage on the impact side but also you
have these flakes come out on the other side. At the point of impact you have
a small hole and the exit point of that impact is a larger hole, and so these are
flakes that are created by impacts.”
“I suppose one question would be—they took away bits of the femora, so
why didn’t they take the tusks? Because the tusks, presumably, would have
offered them useful materials, too?”
“But they’re also heavy,” Tom points out. “Whereas bones are relatively
transportable. We have a pattern and the pattern begs for an explanation and
what we feel fits that pattern is human transportation.”
“Did you find anything that was obviously a tool?”
“No.”
Tom appears untroubled by what some critics regard as a fatal
argument against his case.
I seek clarification. “So if we’re saying that humans did this, then we’re
saying that they just took advantage of natural rocks and they used those as
hammers and anvils basically?”25
“That’s one of the problems the skeptics have,” Tom admits cheerfully,
“that there are no fashioned tools, no flaked stone tools, that there are no
knives, no scrapers, no choppers.”
“But if I’m correct, you’re arguing that can be explained—because what
these ancient humans were doing was extracting the marrow from the
bones.26 They were smashing up the bones. They didn’t particularly need fine
tools for this.”
“That’s what we’re saying. We’re saying that this was a carcass. It wasn’t
killed by these humans. It wasn’t even butchered by these humans. Most
likely it was a carcass at an advanced stage of decomposition but it still had
potential for the extraction of marrow from the bones.”
“Some critics have claimed it was the backhoe or the grader or other
equipment used in the roadworks that broke the bones,” I point out.27 “Others
have argued that they were broken by being rolled against rocks carried along
in river water when the surrounding sediment was laid down.”28
Tom raises an eyebrow. “Flow velocities that are strong enough to
transport rocks like the big anvil stones are going to carry all the finer
material much farther away. And yet we still have all that fine material at the
site—small stones, small bone fragments, and obviously the associated silt
and sand, too. So there really is a disjunct in terms of the hydrology.”
Addressing the suggestion of Cerutti skeptic Gary Haynes that the bones
were broken by the road making equipment in 1992,29 Tom launches into a
long and detailed exposition. It’s too technical to try the reader’s patience
with here, but the takeaway is that a recently broken, fossilized bone has a
very different appearance to a bone broken when it was still fresh, within a
short time of the animal’s death. Experiments carried out by Deméré’s
colleague Steve Holen on the bones of a recently deceased African elephant
showed that the characteristic spiral fractures that occur when you
deliberately and systematically break fresh bone between a stone hammer and
a stone anvil in no way resemble the fractures caused by the teeth of
scavengers or predators and simply cannot occur in fossilized bones.30 The
presence of spiral fractures among the bones of the Cerutti mastodon
therefore leads to the inevitable conclusion that they must have been broken
130,000 years ago, when they were fresh.31
Meanwhile, the presence of the hammer and anvil stones, and the evidence
of how they were used to break the bones, makes it equally certain that
humans were involved.32
“Because,” I muse, “nothing else is going to smash up those bones and
take out the marrow in that way.”33
“That’s how we see it,” Tom confirms, “but I’m a scientist so I’m open to
alternative explanations if they fit the data better than ours. And so it’s
possible that we are wrong. But the evidence suggests to us that the only
explanation for the taphonomic data at this site is that humans were
responsible.”
Taphonomy is the study of the circumstances and processes of
fossilization, a field that is generally better understood by paleontologists like
Tom than by archaeologists.
IF YOU DON’T LOOK,
YOU WON’T FIND
AFTER WE’VE COMPLETED OUR TOUR of the exhibits Tom takes us behind the
scenes at the museum into areas off-limits to the public. As we ride the
elevator up to the fourth floor I ask him if it was a struggle to get the Nature
paper accepted.
“Well, it was a yearlong review process,” he replies, “rigorous, which
you’d expect. I’ve tried publishing in Nature before. It’s not an easy journal
to get into. So we were excited when they sent it out for review. That’s really
the first hurdle—if it gets off the editor’s desk. Then we went through several
rounds of revisions and re-review and re-revision but eventually it was
accepted. So that was really exciting. It’s a terrific journal. And that’s the
other thing, of course, it’s Nature, it’s not some third- or fourth-tier
publication.”
“Absolutely top tier,” I agree as we step out of the elevator, “which is why
it’s had such a huge impact. … I’ve been following the story of the peopling
of the Americas and for a very long while there was extreme resistance
around the so-called Clovis First model. I mean, that was it. It was almost
dangerous career-wise to propose anything else.”
“Apparently,” Tom says. “And then the evidence starts to come in and starts to just overwhelm that
paradigm. We begin to open up to the possibility of 14,000, 15,000, 18,000,
25,000 years. And you can see the archaeological community kind of
reluctantly embracing that, but then you come along with 130,000 years and
that is a time bomb. Literally. It’s a huge explosion.”
Tom’s expression is rueful. “It wasn’t our intention. It was just where the
evidence led us.”
We enter The Nat’s archives where the larger part of the Cerutti mastodon
collection is permanently stored in a secure room in three huge cabinets. An
Indiana Jones moment follows as Tom grabs a four-spoked steel wheel and
spins it. Soundlessly the cabinets slide apart, avenues appear between them
and then Tom is opening drawers and showing us mastodon bones and
mastodon teeth and more pieces of rock and stone while Santha takes
photographs and we continue talking.
The more I see, the more persuaded I am and the better I understand why
Nature published Tom’s paper. Despite the whines and quibbles of the
skeptics, the evidence, once it’s laid out in front of you, once you actually
look at the bones and stones, and once the technical details are properly
considered, is absolutely solid and convincing.
“What’s next?” I ask. “How do you take this further?”
“Well, of course one of the things we’ve said all along to our critics is that
if you don’t look in deposits of this age with the idea in mind that evidence of
humans could be there, then you’re not going to find anything. So we’re
suggesting, as a challenge, that people should start considering, should start
to look in these deposits, as a way of testing this hypothesis. I know that’s a
lot of work, but there are unexamined deposits of this age throughout the
US.”
“It’s also good science,” I comment. “I mean, not just to rest on a paradigm
but to try to look for other possibilities. Again I’m struck by the emotional
nature of the reaction your paper has provoked. Some people are quite
reasonable but others almost insultingly reject the whole thing.”
“Dismissive! So … I guess the reaction I was looking for was healthy
skepticism but with the idea of—well, let’s look at this now, let’s consider
this and what the implications are and what sort of predictions can we make
about testing this. … But that’s been a minority of the reactions. We’ve seen
the extremes of both. Some people say this is pure garbage and others say this
80
is the find of the century, but what we’re saying to everyone, really, is open
your mind to the possibility that instead of the peopling of the Americas
being associated with the last deglaciation event [the so-called BøllingAllerød interstadial, dated from around 14,700 years ago to around 12,800
years ago 34] what we should actually be looking at is the deglaciation event
before that—between 140,000 and 120,000 years ago. You get the same sort
of scenario with a land bridge and ice sheets retreating and you get that same
sweet spot between really low sea levels and a blockage by ice sheets, and ice
sheets gone and the flooding of the land bridge.”
“And yet,” I reflect, “so much else changes if you’re right. The peopling of
the Americas becomes a whole different story—much more complicated.”
“Well,” Tom suggests, “it becomes richer. …”
“A much richer and longer story. So much so, in fact, that it’s really hard
for a lot of archaeologists to swallow when they’re committed to a shorter
time frame.”
I hesitate before raising my next point:
“Look … I know we’re
not supposed to talk about this but your date of 130,000 years ago raises the
possibility that it might have been Neanderthals who were at your site, or
Denisovans, or anatomically modern humans—because they were all in the
world at that time.”
With this comment I’ve taken us into territory I’d specifically agreed
would be off-limits when my request for an interview was accepted, but Tom
seems happy to express his point of view. “As a paleontologist,” he muses, “I
ask the question—why weren’t there humans here earlier? I mean, we have
dispersal of Eurasian animal species into North America and dispersal of
North American species into Eurasia at earlier times. So why shouldn’t
humans have been here as well?”
“And now it looks like they were.”
“I’m certain of that from our evidence.”
“Which raises the question of why in 150 years of professional study
archaeologists have failed to find similar evidence.”
“There’s always the possibility,” Tom offers, “that our site witnesses a
failed colonization attempt. So you had this dispersal event. It didn’t take,
maybe because population size wasn’t great enough, and they quite quickly
died out—in which case they would have left almost no trace of their
presence for archaeologists to find. Then thousands of years later there was a
81
successful colonization by other migrants and naturally they dominate the
archaeological record.”
“It could be like that,” I concede. “But on the other hand, it could be there
were people here all along and they’ve just been invisible to archaeology
because of the particular way archaeology works and the particular things
archaeology looks for.”
“You’d have to ask the archaeologists.” Tom shrugs. “But like I say, if you
go to a place and you absolutely rule out in advance that humans were there
130,000 years ago, then you’re clearly not going to find evidence that they
were. But if you go with an open mind”—an impish smile—“and dig deep
enough in the right places, then who knows what you might turn up?”
6
MILLENNIA UNACCOUNTED FOR
WHEN TOM DEMÉRÉ DUG DEEP enough he turned up evidence of humans in
North America 130,000 years ago that was sufficiently robust to make it
through Nature’s rigorous peer-review process and into print in April 2017.
By then it was no longer news that the New World had been peopled long
before Clovis. In chapter 4 we saw that Monte Verde, Meadowcroft, and
Bluefish Caves had already pushed back the date of the “First” Americans
from around 13,000 years ago to at least 24,000 years ago. These, however,
are only three sites among a growing number that suggest a vast, complex,
textured antiquity for the human presence in the Americas across ages when
hitherto we’ve been asked to picture an uninhabited wilderness awaiting the
arrival of Man. No matter how long it exists, an uninhabited wilderness will
not produce a civilization, and it would make no sense to look for one there.
But with new evidence continuing to pour forth, it’s increasingly obvious that
humans were in the Americas not just for thousands of years before Clovis,
but for tens of thousands of years—all the way back to the Cerutti Mastodon
Site or earlier—and thus had vast expanses of time at their disposal to
develop in any direction they chose.
Wanting to get a better feeling for the time-depth of this mystery leads me,
through various contacts and connections, to a walk in the South Carolina
woods. It’s early November, a sunny yet cold morning. There’s a mulch of
fallen leaves underfoot but the trees around us are still in foliage, mostly
green with muted hints of autumnal reds and yellows beginning to mottle the
83
canopy. I’m with Albert “Al” Goodyear, professor of archaeology at the
University of South Carolina. Around 70 years of age, cheerful and in
rubicund good health, he’s wearing a South Carolina Gamecocks baseball
cap, a navy check shirt, a tweed jacket, and tough outdoor pants tucked into
his hiking boots to keep ticks carrying Lyme disease at bay. Our ramble takes
us close to the Savannah River, which here forms the border between the
states of South Carolina and Georgia.
Al is a world expert on the Clovis culture and back in 1998, having
excavated an extensive Clovis layer in these woods, he dug deeper. In the
end, what he found was evidence that humans had been here 50,000 years
ago, not as old as the Cerutti mastodon by any means, but still a good 37,000
years before Clovis. Unsurprisingly, Clovis Firsters were adamantly opposed
and launched a campaign to discredit the find.1
The site is now called Topper, after David Topper, a local forester. In 1981
he spotted stone tools on the ground here.2
He notified Al, who a couple of
years later launched a comprehensive archaeological survey of the Savannah
River watershed. As part of this larger project, excavations began at Topper
in 1986 and it was immediately obvious that Native Americans had been
coming here for many thousands of years. Obvious, too, was the reason why
—a huge outcrop of easily accessible chert, the raw material of a form of flint
ideal for making stone tools.3
Al suddenly stoops and picks up a small, almost translucent piece of
reddish flint from the ground at our feet. It is recognizably a fragment of an
arrowhead, with a notch near the base. Al confirms my guess that it’s not
Clovis. “It’s a nice piece,” he says. “It’s been heat treated. It’s probably about
8,000 years old.”
He draws my attention to an area off the path relatively free of fallen
leaves where there’s quite a scatter of stones, mostly small broken pieces like
this one. Al refers to them as “debitage” (the technical term for lithic debris
and discards found at sites where stone tools and weapons were made).
“Every flake on the ground was struck off by a human,” he says, “and you
can roughly tell the age. With strong coloration they’re more recent, but if
they’re white and creamy, they’re weathered and older.”
Our next stop is the chert quarry, the reason so much was going on around
Topper for so long. “For them this was like aluminum bauxite or iron ore for our culture,” Al explains. “They didn’t have jackhammers. They didn’t have
crowbars. They just had to work what they could get off the surface; maybe
set a fire or something to push it out. So we call this ‘Topper Chert’—the
chert source for the Topper site.”
“I find it amazing,” I say, “that there are still broken points 8,000 years old
just lying around on the surface whereas you have to excavate to reach other
materials from that horizon.”
The earth is a dynamic place, Al explains, with multiple different processes
of deposition and erosion under way at all times. You can make guesses
based on style and weathering, but fragments of worked stone that have been
in the open for an unknown period can’t be dated by their archaeological
context, because there is none. Carbon-dating organic materials in the
sediment in which they were found won’t work, either, because they were
never entombed and preserved in sediment. And in fact no other objective
and widely accepted method of dating can tell us how old they are. For these
reasons archaeologists have to discount artifacts found on the surface when
coming to any conclusions about the age of a site, even though the artifacts
themselves may obviously be ancient. Their presence, however, does serve as
a clue that much more might be awaiting discovery underground—which was
precisely why Al followed up on David Topper’s 1981 suggestion to take a
look.
THERE’S A FIRST
TIME FOR EVERYTHING
AFTER THEIR FIRST SEASON OF excavation at Topper in 1986, Al and his team
methodically worked their way down during the next dozen years through the
levels of what was turning out to be a very extensive, detailed, and time consuming excavation. There were a number of archaeological “horizons”
here, stacked one above the other in nice, easily datable layers of sediment,
containing the leavings of different cultures at different, and increasingly
more ancient, periods of the past. “We found pottery down to about 2,000
years ago,” Al says. “Below that there was no pottery but there were plentiful
artifacts from the period we call the Archaic. So we kept on going down and
we got into the Early Archaic [around 8,000 to 10,000 years ago4
]. They made these beautiful little notched points. And then below that, in 1998—
bingo!—we found Clovis.”
Topper is the only Clovis site to be excavated on the coastal plains of
Georgia and the Carolinas.5
As though by way of compensation, however, the
Clovis level at Topper turned out to be so massive that the excavations there
would not be complete until 2013. As he tells me about the treasure trove of
more than 40,000 Clovis artifacts that he and his team uncovered, Al radiates
excitement. And rightly so! It was a tremendous achievement that continues
to enjoy renown among archaeologists.6
The same, however, cannot be said for what happened next. “So we got
down to the bottom of the Clovis level,” Al continues, “and then we all voted
to go deeper.” For the next half meter or so there was just sand and small
gravels, devoid of any evidence of human presence, and then suddenly the
excavators found themselves among artifacts again.
I ask if there was a particular aha moment.
Al laughs. “My aha was more of an uh-oh! Everybody else was going aha
but they weren’t going to have to stand up at national conferences and defend
what we’d found.”
“Which was evidence of the presence of humans in America tens of
thousands of years before Clovis?”
“Exactly. After we’d done a thorough lab analysis we were certain we
were dealing with artifacts.”
I ask when he began to feel the inevitable wrath of the Clovis First lobby.
“Immediately!” he replies. “It began with ‘we don’t believe in pre-Clovis.
There’s no such thing as a pre-Clovis culture.’ Then I think when it was
realized we’d made a strong case that many of our flake-tool artifacts had
been produced by the ‘bend-break’ technique, and that the media were
already onto the potential significance of what we’d found, the critics moved
the goalposts and said things like ‘Okay, we understand bend-breaks but we
don’t know of an assemblage anywhere that has so many bend-breaks.’”7
But the key issue remained the antiquity of the site:
The New York Times was here, CNN, they were all holding their stories until the
dates came back. And I was thinking maybe they’ll come back at 20,000 years ago
maybe even 25,000 years ago, and I’ll be out of here clean. This is going to be
easy. But the date that came back was 50,0008—ancient beyond all imagining and right at the limits of radiocarbon.9
Since then we have OSL-dated the deposit and
those dates also came back in the range of 50,000.10 So we’ve got it dated two
ways, but still the skeptics keep saying that what we’ve found can’t be a human
site and that our artifacts must be works of nature because they’re so different
from the artifacts found at other sites. To which my response is: “Well … you’ve
never dug a 50,000-year-old site in America, right? There’s a first time for
everything.”
THEY UNDERSTOOD THE
PROPERTIES OF STONE
AFTER OUR PLEASANT HIKE WE’VE reached the main excavation area, a large
rectangular pit about 12 feet deep, 40 feet wide, and around 60 feet long,
where the majority of the archaeology trenches have been left open, in their
original condition, and the entire area covered over with a roofed shelter. It’s
tastefully done, allowing in plenty of light but keeping out rain, and it’s an
education to see the stratigraphy through which Goodyear and his team dug
to reach the controversial pre-Clovis levels.
Although Topper is located on land owned by a specialty chemicals
company and not open for public access, Al does occasionally bring
interested groups here to explain the site to them, and to this end signs have
been set up identifying the different levels. My eyes are drawn immediately
to one that says “Clovis Level: 13,000 years.” Farther down another reads
“Pleistocene Alluvial Sands, 16,000–20,000 years.” We step down again to
the excavation floor and I see the thick band of clay where the pre-Clovis
artifacts were found, labeled “Pleistocene Terrace: 20,000–50,000 years.”
Off to the side, laid out as a display, is a row of three or four chunky fistsize rocks. Al picks one up. “The more abundant pre-Clovis artifacts are
fashioned from chert cobbles like this,” he tells me, “but they’re no good to
anybody as they are. They have to be cracked open first. You have to get rid
of all this”—he indicates the rough, heavily patinated surface of the cobble
—“to get at the stuff inside that can be turned into tools. In experiments
we’ve thrown cobbles like that, slammed cobbles like that against each other,
and nothing breaks.”
“So what does break them?”
“When we put an 8-pound sledge hammer on them, that did the trick.”
“But presumably the pre-Clovis people didn’t have 8-pound
sledge hammers?”
Al shrugs. “Maybe they did it the way the Australian aborigines used to
deal with big slabs of quartzite. They didn’t have sledgehammers, either.
They would light a small fire underneath a face of the quartzite and they
would wait for it to get hot enough till they heard a tink, and then they would
pull a slab off. So I think you could use fire to prepare the cobble and then
maybe break it apart. The point is once you break open a piece of flint like
that then you can do anything you want with it. All of the interior surfaces are
susceptible to flaking but the cobble in its raw form is not. So when our
critics say that cobbles like these maybe got broken by rolling down the slope
of the escarpment our answer is no.11 What you need is heat or something
like an eight-pound sledgehammer—and even then we had to hit them several
times before they broke.”
“In other words, only humans could have done this.”
“Right. Human beings who understood the properties of the stone and how
to work it. If nature can’t break it, it can’t make it.”
None of the pre-Clovis tools have been left at the excavation, of course,
but before we set out for the site this morning Al showed me examples kept
at the South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology exhibit at
its nearby regional campus in Allendale. What quickly became clear, which
Al willingly concedes, was that they were, without exception, extremely
simple and generally quite small, with unifacial flake tools such as burins and
small blades predominating.12 The vast majority of the burins, more than
1,000 of them,13 were created by the distinctive flint-knapping technique
known as “bend-break,”14 whereby two edges are “broken off at a 90 degree
angle to form a sharp sturdy tip that may have been used in the engraving of
bone, antler or wood.”15 Flint cores left over after large flakes had been
struck off were also found in close proximity to a large anvil stone.16 It
appears there were several, separate rock-chipping stations like this,
resembling workstations.17
THE EXTENSIVE EVIDENCE
FROM THE pre-Clovis levels at Topper clearly does
not document the handiwork of any kind of lost advanced civilization. What
it speaks to me of instead, like the Cerutti Mastodon Site, is a far more
complex and nuanced past for the peopling of the Americas than has hitherto
been properly contemplated.
I don’t propose here to give a blow-by-blow account of the fifty or so sites
in the Americas, with more found every year, presently claimed to be of pre-Clovis antiquity.
18 Not all are of the same quality. Some may not be
archaeological sites at all, their supposed “artifacts” perhaps being
“geofacts.” Others are very strong.
A measure of discernment is therefore needed along this continuum, and
what I observe is that archaeologists who are open to the notion of greater
antiquity (these days the majority apart from a few die-hards) consider the
most important pre-Clovis sites in North America in addition to Cerutti and
Topper to include: Hueyatlaco, Mexico;
19 Old Crow and Bluefish Caves,
Canada; Calico Mountain, California; Pendejo Cave, New Mexico; Tula
Springs, Nevada; Meadowcroft Rockshelter, Pennsylvania; Cactus Hill,
Virginia; Paisley Five Mile Point Caves, Oregon; Schaefer and Hebior
Mammoth site, Wisconsin; Buttermilk Creek, Texas; and Saltville,
Virginia.
20
In South America, Pedra Furada in Brazil, Monte Verde in Chile,
Taima-taima in Venezuela, and Tibito in Colombia are likewise singled out
as convincing pre-Clovis sites of special interest.
21 However, other than some
anomalies, indeed some deep mysteries, connected to a select few of these
sites—which we’ll come to in later chapters—most feature only rudimentary
stone-working technologies similar to those of pre-Clovis Topper, although
with definite evidence of increasing refinement and improved techniques
between early pre-Clovis and late pre-Clovis.
22 Early or late, however, the
importance of all these sites, as I view them, has nothing to do with the level
of technology they manifest, whether judged to be “low” or “increasingly
refined”—or whatever. They really matter in that they offer compelling proof
of the enduring presence of humans of some kind in the Americas from
perhaps as far back as 130,000 years ago until today.
That’s a very long time. It might even be long enough—speaking entirely
hypothetically, of course—for something that we would recognize as an
advanced civilization to have emerged in the Americas alongside the hunter gatherers, foragers, and scavengers whose simple tools dominate the pre-Clovis horizons so far excavated.
But if such a civilization was indeed present somewhere on the American
landmass, how has it escaped the notice of archaeologists up to now while the
hunter-gatherers have not? And isn’t it grasping at straws in the first place
even to suggest that an advanced civilization could have coexisted with
hunter-gatherers during the Ice Age?
PRECONCEPTIONS ARE BLINKERS
LET’S CALL TO MIND HOW things are in our own globally connected twenty-first
century. Rio de Janeiro, Bogotá, and Lima are, by any standards, advanced
technological cities; yet on the same continent, in the depths of the Amazon
rainforest, uncontacted tribes of hunter-gatherers remain at a “Stone Age”
level of technology.23 Likewise, in Africa, Johannesburg, Cape Town, and
Windhoek are advanced technological cities, yet you can walk from them to
the Kalahari desert where San bushmen, though well aware of the
technological world, choose to continue a hunter-gatherer and still largely
“Stone Age” way of life.
There are no purely logical grounds, therefore, that can rule out the
possible coexistence of an advanced civilization with hunter-gatherers during
the Ice Age.
Nor can this—at first sight absurd—possibility be ruled out on
archaeological grounds. For more than half a century, as we’ve seen,
American archaeology was so riddled with pre-formed opinions about how
the past should look, and about the orderly, linear way in which civilizations
should evolve, that it repeatedly missed, sidelined, and downright ignored
evidence for any human presence at all prior to Clovis—until, at any rate, the
mass of that evidence became so overwhelming that it took the existing
paradigm by storm.
We thus find ourselves in a place now where “Clovis First” can quite
definitely be ruled out, despite the fading protests of a very few zealots still
clinging on to that discredited fantasy.24
At the same time no new ruling paradigm, let alone consensus, has yet
taken its place. Several are vying for the crown, though all remain rooted in
the preconception that what they must explain is limited to the presence of
relatively “simple” and “unsophisticated” hunter-gatherers in the Americas
much earlier than had previously been supposed. None have factored in the
possibility—they would be puzzled at the very thought—that a lost
civilization might be part of the missing picture as well.
I’m reminded of Tom Deméré’s point: “If you go to a place and you
absolutely rule out in advance that humans were there 130,000 years ago,
then you’re clearly not going to find evidence that they were.”25
By the same reasoning, if we don’t ever look for a lost civilization—
because of a preconception that none could have existed—then we won’t find
one.
Fortunately, as we’ll see in part 3, geneticists have developed sophisticated
techniques for studying ancient DNA that have overturned entrenched
thinking and opened completely new and unexpected avenues of inquiry.
next part 3
the genes
SIBERIA
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