Rediscovering America
The New World may be 20,000 years older than experts thought
Finds such as Goodyear's are cause for celebration among long-suffering Clovis doubters. "The Clovis-first model is dead," proclaims, with some overstatement, Robson Bonnichsen, director of the Center for the Study of the First Americans at Oregon State University. He has made the center a clearinghouse for information about alternatives to Clovis-first. "I've felt there were people here more than 12,000 years ago from the start," he says. "We're finally getting the evidence to back that up."
But not all Clovis-firsters are throwing in the towel. "I find Monte Verde quite unconvincing," says Frederick Hadleigh West, director of archaeology at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass., and editor of a recent 576-page compendium on the archaeology of Alaska and eastern Siberia. "There is really no credible, undisputable evidence of anything prior to Clovis. But with Clovis you have an undeniable outburst of people, appearing on an empty continent, spreading like mad. There is absolutely no [incontrovertible] evidence of people coming into the New World before 12,000 [years ago], or 15,000 if you keep them in Alaska." For Monte Verde to unseat Clovis-first, he said, "would be like Sudan conquering the United States."
Not enough stuff. Another longtime Clovis-first adherent, geoarchaeologist Vance Haynes of the University of Arizona, was among the experts who last year endorsed the 12,500-year-old Monte Verde finds as legitimate. But he argues there isn't enough evidence to support the Meadowcroft and Cactus Hill material. And even if he can't rule out Monte Verde, Haynes says it should take more than one site--scientific fallibility being what it is--to refute the primacy of Clovis. "It has just six artifacts [stone tools]. If it is as old as it looks, and the dates do look solid, then there should be others like it. Until we find those, there are still questions."
Those questions are profound. The Clovis people were real, but where did they come from? No tools in Alaska or Asia seem to foreshadow their distinctive fluted spear points. And how and when did people get to South America? Many authorities believe it would have taken people 7,000 years to have reached southern Chile from Alaska. Others say it could have been faster by boat. But the fact remains that while Clovis traces are abundant, evidence of older cultures is terribly hard to find. "Where are they?" asks David Meltzer, an archaeologist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, who thinks the Monte Verde dates are accurate but remains puzzled. "I don't know. That is the exciting part about all this."
No single, simple theory has yet emerged to replace Clovis-first. But some of the stories that are emerging in attempts to answer those questions are as arresting as the original Bering land bridge and inland invasion saga. For one, there's the mystery of the people who chipped that basalt point Daryl Fedje's team found this spring off Canada's Pacific shore.
The recovery of the tool was no random plunk with a bucket into the sea floor. Fedje and marine geologist Heiner Josenhans of the Geological Survey of Canada spent four years mapping the sea floor around the Queen Charlotte Islands. An array of sonar receivers revealed it as though it were viewed from a low-flying plane without any distortion from water; computer software let the researchers soar and loop low at will, as in a video game, among now-submerged valleys and hills. Fedje knew that if people were here more than about 10,000 years ago, they lived on that farther shore, near salmon, seals, shellfish, and other key food sources. Tribal lore of the present-day Haida nation includes tales of times when the islands were far larger and surrounded by grassy plains, and of subsequent, fast-rising oceans when a supernatural "flood tide woman" forced the Haida to move their villages to higher ground. Geologists agree with the traditional Haida view of their past: The islands were twice as large 11,000 years ago, and the Pacific rose more than an inch per year for a millennium after that, as the glaciers melted. The Haida have been on the islands, which they call Haida Gwaii, a very long time. Whether it was their ancestors who left the stone point is unknown. Fedje and Josenhans are now poring over the maps of the vanished landscape, hoping to return in the next year or so, if they get the funding, with remotely controlled submarines to prowl the places some of the earliest Americans may have called home.
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