http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/981012/12orig.htm

Cover Story 10/12/98

Rediscovering America
The New World may be 20,000 years older than experts thought

BY CHARLES W. PETIT

Late in the afternoon last May 17, a tired archaeological team neared the
end of a 14-hour day winching muck to the deck of a Canadian Coast Guard
vessel. It was in water 170 feet deep in Juan Perez Sound, half a mile
offshore among British Columbia's Queen Charlotte Islands. For four days,
team members had fruitlessly sieved undersea mud and gravel. Then, in the
slanting light of sunset, a deckhand drew from the goop a triangular blade
of dark basalt. Its sharp edge and flaked surface said this was no ordinary
rock. Someone long ago sculpted it into a knife or other cutting tool.

When Daryl Fedje, an archaeologist for Canada's national parks system, saw
the 4-inch artifact, his jaw dropped in amazement: "I immediately
recognized it as made by humans." For years Fedje has led efforts to find
prehistoric evidence of human occupation in the misty, fiord-laced
archipelago. This stone meant that people lived at a spot directly under
the ship well before the end of the Ice Age, at a time when the sea level
was far lower than today.

The bit of basalt is just one stone. But from Alaska to near the tip of
South America, bits of just such intriguing evidence are emerging that
suggest the standard textbook story--that humans first settled the Americas
by pouring down from Alaska about 12,000 years ago--is wrong, perhaps very
wrong. People may have gotten here thousands to tens of thousands of years
sooner, over a longer period of time, by a wider variety of routes, and
with a more diverse ancestry. If this proves true, it will force a
rethinking of the whole concept of America: a land whose human history may
be three times longer than imagined, and one where Columbus would have been
just one of the last of many waves of "discoverers."

"The bottom line is that people could have reached here a long, long time
ago," says Dennis Stanford, chairman of the anthropology department at the
Smithsonian Institution. Stanford is among a growing number of scientists
advancing the still heretical belief that the first North Americans did not
walk over in one main migration but came much earlier, and by boat. Under
fire is the time-honored "Clovis-first" theory, named after a site in New
Mexico where big, stone spear points were found in the 1930s (story, Page
60). The artifacts were left by a mammoth-hunting culture that appeared in
North America a little more than 11,000 years ago. The Clovis people were
real, but the standard textbook lessons about them may well be wrong. It
now appears that they were not the first in the New World. "I think we're
in a whole new ballgame of discovery about who the first Americans were and
when they got here," Stanford says.

That would spell the end of the heroic saga generations of schoolchildren
have learned--of a great invasion of big-game hunters showing up on a
virgin landscape. The peopling of the Americas is beginning to look more
like a continuation of another, even grander, saga: the human occupation of
the Old World that started perhaps 100,000 years ago. The peopling of
Europe and Asia was an expansion featuring multiple migrations and an ebb
and flow of cultures that, it now appears, may have washed into the
Americas in a series of waves starting well before Clovis times, perhaps as
early as 30,000 years ago.

Scholarly rejection. Despite the primacy of the Clovis-first tale, some
scientists never could quite embrace it. Over the years, hundreds of sites
have been touted as older than the 11,200-year-old early Clovis sites,
including Calico in San Bernardino County, Calif., endorsed in the 1960s by
famed African anthropologist Louis Leakey as possibly more than 200,000
years old. But each time, at Calico and elsewhere, parades of outside
experts said the "tools" were natural stones, or the dates were wrong, or
supposedly human bones weren't human, or the charcoal was from a naturally
caused wildfire, not a man-made hearth, or all that and more. The sites
"have gotten their 15 minutes of fame, then disappeared into obscurity,"
said James Adovasio, professor of archaeology at Mercyhurst College in
Erie, Pa.

Adovasio has his own tale of scholarly rejection. Since 1973 he has led
excavation of the Meadowcroft Rockshelter, a 43-foot-high jutting cliff
that provides protection from rain along its base. It looks out on Cross
Creek, in rugged country 30 miles southwest of Pittsburgh. The landowner,
Albert Miller, whose family has had the property since 1795 and operates a
colonial-era museum there, called archaeologists in the early 1970s to
investigate his hunch about Indian traces under the overhang. Miller's
instincts were right. "Everybody and his brother stopped here," marvels
Adovasio. Using razor blades to peel layers away, his crews have uncovered
a rich trove of relics--20,000 stone tools, woven goods, nearly a million
animal bones, and 300 fireplaces loaded with charcoal, making it easy for
scientists to calculate dates. (Scientists estimate the age of charcoal and
other organic material by measuring how much radioactive carbon-14 it
contains. Living things absorb this isotope from the atmosphere; when they
die, the radiocarbon begins to decay away. Although new studies suggest
that solar variations throw the scale off slightly--11,000 radiocarbon
years may be closer to 13,000 actual years, for instance--radiocarbon
dating is still the gold standard for archaeological dating.) The cave was
on a highway for traders, hunters, and migrants moving to and from the Ohio
River Valley to the West. "If you were out camping and saw this place, this
is where you'd stop, too," Adovasio says. Every accepted cultural period in
Indian history and prehistory is represented: the contemporary Iroquoian
Seneca; earlier and closely related "woodland" societies that reach back
1,000 years; the so-called archaic groups to around 8,500 years ago; and
Paleo-Indians, including the Clovis big-game hunters, to about 11,000 years
ago.

Trouble came when Adovasio began saying in the late 1970s that charcoal
from human-made fire pits deep in the excavated floor of the shelter
carried dates going back more than 14,000 years, with some indications
approaching 17,000 years. He ran into what he calls the "Clovis curtain" of
resistance. Critics told him the charcoal that he presumed came from wood
may actually have been contaminated by ancient coal or carbon in the local
sediments, which would carbon-date much earlier. Adovasio retorts that what
he calls the "Clovis mafia" peculiarly rejects only dates at his site that
are older than Clovis but not younger material. Contamination would skew
ages for everything, he points out, not just for the finds that run counter
to standard theory.

Accumulating evidence. But after years of being almost alone as a
challenger of Clovis, Adovasio suddenly has company. Similar deposits are
being reported by archaeologists at sites throughout the Americas,
including one called Cactus Hill, in coastal Virginia. That project's
leader, Joseph McAvoy of the privately supported Nottaway River Survey in
Sandston, Va., can't discuss his newest findings because he's under a gag
order from the National Geographic Society, which is helping pay for the
excavation. But in a 1996 report, McAvoy described his discovery of
possible pre-Clovis tools that Adovasio says look a lot like his at
Meadowcroft.

Evidence also has shown up in Wisconsin. For 10 years, David Overstreet,
director of the Great Lakes Archaeological Research Center in Milwaukee,
has excavated two mammoth butchery sites that he says are at least 12,500
years old, and where stone tools lie among giant bones and long, curved
ivory tusks. Nearby are bones of two more of the extinct elephants, 1,000
years older, bearing what appear to be the distinctive cut marks made by
people chopping out meat for food. The roughly shaped tools look nothing
like the precisely grooved Clovis points. Overstreet figures that by the
time any corridor through the glaciers opened, somebody had already been
living for a few millenniums along the ice front, hunting the megafauna of
the plains south of it.

But the big break that persuaded many to rethink the conventional theory
has come thousands of miles from Clovis in Monte Verde, Chile. There,
archaeologist Tom Dillehay of the University of Kentucky has, for 20 years,
been excavating wood, bone, and stone tools from rolling pasture land. Last
year he was joined by a blue-ribbon group of archaeologists, including many
who were skeptical of Dillehay's long-controversial assertions that the
artifacts probably are at least 12,500 years old. The expert panel viewed
the site and wound up agreeing with Dillehay: The tools bore no resemblance
to those of the vanished Clovis culture. Dillehay and his Chilean
colleagues now are planning more excavation to explore hints that people
were at the site as many as 30,000 years ago.

Some scientists say one needs only to study modern Indians to conclude that
their ancestors got here before Clovis time. One hint is in genetic
material passed down only from mothers to offspring, called mitochondrial
DNA. Such genes carry a molecular clock--if a single population splits into
isolated groups, the buildup of random, but distinct, mutations allows
geneticists to estimate how long the original groupings have been
separated. "For the last five years, the genetic evidence has been saying
early, early entry" into the Americas, says Theodore Schurr, a geneticist
at Emory University in Atlanta. When Schurr counts the mutations
accumulated among American Indians, the molecular data are consistent with
departures from Asia between 15,000 and 30,000 years ago. The analysis
revealed three distinct families of mutations common among American Indians
and found elsewhere only in Siberia or Mongolia. Strangely, about 3 percent
of Native Americans also have a genetic trait that occurs elsewhere only in
a few places in Europe. This could mean either that some Asian populations
migrated both west, into Europe, and east to the Americas, or that Ice Age
Europeans may have trickled into the New World many thousands of years ago,
perhaps by skirting the Arctic ice pack over the North Atlantic.

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."

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.

But the origins of these coastal people remain a mystery. It seems unlikely
that Clovis hunters could have scampered west along the ice sheet's
southern edge, transformed themselves into a seagoing, salmon-catching,
seal-spearing culture, and occupied Haida Gwaii within a few centuries of
arrival. Hence the favorite hypothesis, first proposed more than 20 years
ago but now supported by the Smithsonian's Stanford, Harvard's Mandryk,
Fedje, and many others, is that many people migrated to the New World along
the coast instead of overland. Travel may have been in small boats, perhaps
covered in skin like traditional Eskimo and Aleut kayaks. If, as seems
likely, people migrated during the height of the last Ice Age, between
about 25,000 and 12,000 years ago, they would have avoided glaciers calving
into the sea. "There was boat use in Japan 20,000 years ago," says Jon
Erlandson, a University of Oregon anthropologist. "The Kurile Islands
[north of Japan] are like steppingstones to Beringia," the then continuous
land bridging the Bering Strait. Migrants, he said, could have then skirted
the tidewater glaciers in Canada right on down the coast.

Evidence of other maritime cultures along the West Coast is coming in fast.
Erlandson has uncovered remains of seagoing peoples who lived more than
10,000 years ago in the Channel Islands off Southern California. And last
month, other scientists reported that two sites in Peru reveal people were
living along its coast, subsisting almost entirely on seafood, nearly
11,000 years ago, too long ago for the Clovis migration to have gotten
there and spawned a maritime way of life.

The Americas are big continents. Perhaps the earliest people just weren't
very numerous and left little mark of their passing. Or, maybe most of them
lived out on the then exposed continental shelf, retreating inland only
when the end of the Ice Age raised the sea. Perhaps these people, driven
inland, gave rise to the Clovis hunters. Well below the waves and under
millenniums' worth of cold sediment, may lie the footprints, remains of
meals, and discarded tools and campfire pits of a lost world. It is,
indeed, a whole new ballgame in the search for the first Americans.

MAMMOTH HUNTERS

They came from the north

The standard explanation of human arrival in the Americas is a stirring
tale with mythic overtones, of fur-clad big-game hunters marching out of
the far, frozen north to conquer a New World, an Eden whose immense beasts
had never before seen human beings. This Clovis-first theory is under
assault but has not yet crumbled, as scientists examine scanty evidence to
decipher how North and South America were first occupied. The Clovis-first
theory, named after an archaeological site near Clovis, N.M., proposes
that, perhaps 15,000 years ago, Arctic-adapted peoples moved across a
1,000-mile-wide land bridge where the shallow Bering Strait today separates
Alaska from Siberia. After being bottled up for a few thousand years by
glaciers south of Beringia--the name given the combined land mass of Alaska
and northeastern Siberia--about 12,000 years ago this vanguard moved down
into what is now Alberta, traversing an ice-free corridor that opened
through the glaciers just east of the Canadian Rockies as the Ice Age
waned. Splitting into smaller groups and developing new cultures as they
went, and bearing large families supported by the vast resources before
them, these Paleo-Indians supposedly raced all the way to the tip of South
America in 1,000 years or so. And, except for some later-arriving groups,
including today's Inuits, or Eskimos, these people would have been the
ancestors of nearly all of today's Native Americans.

Heavy artillery. Clovis-first arose from discoveries, starting in the
1920s, of chipped and shattered bones of bison and mammoths. These bones
were the first proof that people had arrived in time to see, and kill, the
last great beasts of the Ice Age, and that hunting may have contributed to
the animals' extinction.

Distinctive long spearheads, called Clovis points after the New Mexico site
where they were discovered, have been found with bones of prey dated as
much as 11,200 years ago. Hundreds of Clovis sites have been identified
throughout North America, implying that wherever the hunters came from,
their culture exploded across the landscape with astonishing rapidity. The
robust Clovis points bear grooves or "flutes" carved in their bases where
they attached to wooden shafts. Propelled with powerful atlatls, or
throwing sticks, the stone-tipped spears served as heavy artillery as the
newcomers butchered their way across North America's great plains in a
virtual blitzkrieg.--C.W.P.

KENNEWICK MAN

A fight over the origins of ancient bones

The hunt for the first Americans does not go without resistance: Witness
the bitter court battle over the mysterious "Kennewick Man."

The central figure is a 9,300-year-old skeleton that has been packed in
sealed plastic bags in a government lab for more than two years. Frustrated
scientists, hoping desperately to scrutinize its bones and analyze its DNA,
are up against an American Indian group that believes the bones belong to
an ancestor and should be reburied with no further study.

It is clear that the remains, named after a town near the spot on the
Columbia River in southeast Washington where two college students found
them in July 1996, are of a slender, middle-aged fellow bearing scars of a
very rough life, including multiple fractures, a crushed chest, a withered
arm, and a healed skull injury. It is the most complete and among the
oldest of skeletons found in North America.

When the bones were found, the Benton County coroner asked James Chatters,
a local forensic anthropologist, to examine what looked like a possible
homicide victim. Chatters thought the bones were older than that, but he
thought they might belong to a 19th-century settler. Then Chatters made
what he now says was a big mistake: He labeled some of the man's facial
features "Caucasoid," based on the fact that the narrow face, long head,
and jutting chin were not an Indian's typically broad face, prominent
cheekbones, and round head.

But when Chatters spotted a stone projectile buried in a hip bone, he
realized the bones were much older--that type of point disappeared from the
region at least 4,500 years ago. A quickly arranged carbon dating test
revealed the bones' age, and significance. Word got out, and all hell broke
loose. Some people of European ancestry claimed Kennewick Man as a
long-lost brother, even though the "Caucasoid" label now looks wrong.
Instead, Chatters and physical anthropologists say, Kennewick Man looks
more Asian than anything--a bit like the ancient Ainu people of Japan.
These bones argue that the people who lived in the New World 9,000 years
ago were more physically varied than today's Indians.

Conflict. The legal battle over Kennewick Man was prompted by a 1990
federal law, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act,
under which Indian relics found on U.S. property are to be offered to
tribes affiliated with them. The bones were found on Army Corps of
Engineers land. After Chatters had studied the bones for two weeks, the
corps locked them up and offered them to the local Umatilla Indians, who
said they w
ould rebury them without further study. "Our elders have taught us that
once a body goes into the ground, it is meant to stay there," said Armand
Minthorn, a member of the tribe's board of trustees, who is sure the man is
an ancestor. "We do not believe that our people migrated here from another
continent, as the scientists do."

Eight scientists, including Chatters and two from the Smithsonian
Institution, sued the Corps of Engineers to block reburial, arguing that
there is no evidence the bones are related to any living Indians. That is
where things stand. A federal judge has ordered the Corps of Engineers and
the Department of the Interior to figure out who gets the bones. It may be
a year before the dust settles.

Chatters said he has been painted as some "evil person" by Indian leaders.
"They say it is their history, but I think when people start to try to
control their own history and deny anybody from studying it, that's a
mistake." Besides, his wife is partly of Indian ancestry, as are their
three children. "It's my family history, too," he said.--C.W.P.