Rediscovering America
The New World may be 20,000 years older than experts thought
Linguists offer a remarkably parallel analysis. Johanna Nichols, a professor in the Slavic languages department of the University of California--Berkeley, counts 143 Native American language stocks from Alaska to the tip of South America that are completely unintelligible to one another, as different as Gaelic, Chinese, or Persian are from one another. The richest diversity of languages is along North America's Pacific coast, not along the Clovis group's supposed inland immigration route. California alone has dozens of dissimilar languages.
It takes about 6,000 years for two languages to split from a common ancestral tongue and lose all resemblance to each other, Nichols says. Allowing for how fast peoples tend to subdivide and migrate, she calculates that 60,000 years are needed for 140 languages to emerge from a single founding group. Even assuming multiple migrations of people using different languages, she figures that people first showed up in the Americas at least 35,000 years ago. If archaeologists haven't found proof of such ancient events, well, "as a linguist, that's not my problem," Nichols shrugs. Clovis-first, she says, is "not remotely possible."
The glacier highway. Even some geologists are taking a punch at Clovis primacy. "Recent work shows that the corridor [through the glaciers] was not open until 11,500 years ago," says Carole Mandryk, a geologist at Harvard University. "That is a pretty major problem for ideas that it was a highway for colonization within a few centuries." Mandryk's studies indicate the corridor would have been nearly impassable for a century or more, with little game or edible vegetation, and vast, boggy wetlands. "The corridor is 2,000 miles long," Mandryk says. "Let's say you are two young guys, and you carry as much food as you can, and you walk as fast as you can. It still takes you six months to get through. And then you run around and kill a lot of animals. Then you have to go back and tell everybody else to get their families and come on down." She blames the persistence of the Clovis-first theory on these "macho gringo guys" who "just want to believe the first Americans were these big, tough, fur-covered, mammoth-hunting people, not some fishermen over on the coast."
Just this summer, one longtime Clovis-firster abandoned the idea. For years, Albert Goodyear, associate director for research at the South Carolina Institute of Archaeology, has calmly supported Clovis. Monte Verde shook him just a bit. So in July, along the Savannah River at a site called Topper, he decided, just to be responsible, to keep digging below sediments dated to the Clovis era. All of a sudden, "we found a tool, and then another." For a solid yard down, scores of blades, flakes, and other human-crafted artifacts turned up. Goodyear told students and volunteers, yes, those sure look older than Clovis. "I had a paradigm crash right there in the woods. I felt like Woody Allen, like I had to turn and say to the audience, `Why am I saying these things I'm not supposed to believe?' Just five years ago, nothing new was possible in American prehistory, because of dogma. Now everything is possible; the veil has been lifted."
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