Peopling the Americas

A stop on the Kelp Highway?

Smithsonian Magazine for January offers "The Fertile Shore," which starts with archaeologists from the University of Victoria working along the green shores of British Columbia's Inland Passage, which increasingly "had to be" part of the passageway the first human inhabitants of the Americas worked their way into the continent. 

But as it goes on, the story focusses on just how fiendishly difficult it is to draw firm conclusions on these questions, as archaeological finds and DNA analyses keep producing more data in search of a comprehensive narrative.

The story explores how  modern sea levels have risen hundreds of metres since the last glacial maximum, but the land freed from ice has sprung back just as fast, so that there are water's-edge sites today that were water's edge sites "then."  It gets into the "Kelp Highway," the "Beringian Standstill Hypothesis," the Hakai Institute, gene flow analysis, beetle fossils, and the Yana River finds in western Siberia.  Complicated stuff.  But it gets more and more persuasive, that as the ice melted, the ancestors of the First Nations were there  --were here -- as the grass began to grow and the rivers began to run.

Image: from Smithsonian Magazine

North American prehistory -- keeps getting older

Know how these differ from Clovis points?  Well, they do.

Recent data from an archaeological site in Idaho sets out new evidence for a "pre-Clovis"  (ie, more than 12,000-13,000 years before the present) presence in western North America.

"Clovis" is largely a style of tool-making, with examples found quite widely in North American excavations back to 13,000 BP. It was long considered the oldest evidence of human presence in the Americas. There are now also some genetic data from Clovis-associated remains, which confirm Clovis people shared DNA links with other early North Americans and also with Asian/Siberian forebears.

A "Clovis" presence was compatible (just barely, maybe) with an "ice-free" deglaciated corridor east of the Rocky Mountains that could have given the first Clovisans access from Beringia and Asia into North America as the ice sheets began to recede. But human evidence south of the ice 16,000 years ago is too early for any "ice-free" corridor. So finds that date earlier strengthen the likelihood of a coastal or sea-borne migration into the Americas coming first, followed by dispersal inland from points south of the ice-sheet barrier. The archaeologist at Cooper's Ferry, Idaho, notes that the site might have been accessed by a route opening inland from the Pacific Coast more or less where the lower Columbia River now flows.

I made a documentary, 'Peopling the Americas,' for CBC Radio Ideas as long ago as 1989, and even then the best glaciological opinions I could find were dubious about an ice-free corridor as early as the archaeologists needed, and intrigued by the likelihood of a coastal migration, along a Pacific coast that might have resembled 20th century Greenland -- cold, but habitable and traversable.  Nice to see the evidence grow.

Image: from Nature.com.

Deep history news

Paleontological star John Hawks muses here on recent discoveries of what is might be a previously unknown human or hominin species. Found on the Philippine Islands and dating to some 67,000 years ago, it is a human line that links to the Denisovan ancestry previously identified in Siberia. Such finds all show how archeology and DNA analysis are rapidly splitting the long-held Sapiens/Neanderthal dichotomy in early human evolution into a rainbow of human predecessors, and not only in Africa. Hawks is also intrigued by the frequency of recent fossil discoveries on islands, which suggests some seagoing ability at a much earlier period of hominid prehistory than anyone expected. Complicated!


Meanwhile a humbler application of new DNA tools. A woman who immigrated to Newfoundland in the early stages of English colonization there seems to have had a minor genetic anomaly that is now widespread in the Newfoundland population and almost nowhere else. It was tracked by DNA analysis, but researchers there think genealogists might actually be able to identify the specific person involved, except that early records tend to be much better at naming men than women.

History of Basques and Mi'kmaq

Under the heading of cool academic conferences, I note (courtesy of H-Canada) next month's Knekk Tepaw, a two-day exploration at Cape Breton University/Unama'ki College in Sydney, Nova Scotia, focussing on connections between Mi'kmaq and other indigenous North Americans with Basques from southwestern Europe. 

From Cabot's time to Champlain's (roughly 1500-1600 CE), most European engagements with eastern North America were driven by Basque whalers and fishers., and the whole period and its cultural effects remain fairly obscure, despite some notable historical and archeological projects.

This conference seems a little more, ah, edgy, than that, with a predominance of papers addressing paleo-history (43,000 BCE being among the dates mentioned) and hints of speculation about a Basque-area "refugia" during the glaciation of Europe, and possible migrations across the Atlantic in deep pre-history. Well, hmmm.

By the conference's second day, and particularly the last afternoon, however, attention returns to to the 16th century and explorations of evidence about Basque-Indigenous contacts from Mi'kmaki to the St Lawrence River Valley.  Quebec and Parcs Canada and Mi'kmaq researchers begin to replace global pre-historians on the program, and my interest returns.

Anatolia so: where our languages came from

The New York Times reports on a new linguistic analysis positing that all the Indo-European languages from Hindi and Farsi to French and Gaelic, all got their start when farmers from the Anatolia region of what is now  Turkey started expanding their range... about nine thousand years ago.

News update for gomphothere junkies

First evidence that "Clovis" people, the first confirmed human inhabitants of North America (only some 13,000 years ago) hunted and butchered the gomphothere, a pretty wierd, elephant-like beast that was part of the North American Pleistocene megafauna that disappeared very rapidly just about that time.

Wikipedia suggests gomphotheres may have survived in South America as recently as 400 CE (1600 years ago), and butchered remains had previously been confirmed at the Chilean early settlement site Monte Verde. So now you know.

History of crowds ... really, really early crowds

The idea that human cultural development took off a hundred thousand years or so after the emergence of modern humans, cause you couldn't sustain innovations without enough population density to safeguard and transmit them.

Miscellaneous historical things this morning

1.. British historian John Burrows's history of history-writing, A History of Histories, reviewed here.

2. I only know Daniel Walker Howe's What Hath God Wrought, the big book on 19th century American history that won the Pulitzer Prize in history yesterday, from this review by Jill Lepore. Lepore made it sound pretty terrific; made her sound a pretty good historical critic too.

3. Not exactly the golden treasures of Tutankhamun -- but a fascinating story on evidence of early human presence in North America from, um, the turds they left behind.

4. Last week's post on proportional representation brought in a couple more comments, mostly questioning my character or my sanity. But one anonymous poster told me the whole policy of moderating comments, let alone discouraging anonymous comments, was "cowardly."

I don't agree. This web thing is still evolving its practices, and I've been intrigued by the arguments for and against anonymity, often via The Ethical Blogger (see link at right). So far I feel more solidarity with the blog authors who encourage signed contributions. I'm not wedded to that; I do think the practice is evolving, and I'm still thinking about it. Thanks for your notes, even the unsigned and unpublished ones.

My Life as a Dinosaur Hunter

"During the stormiest weather, when the sea thrashes the steep coastline of southern England, demolishing entire limestone cliffs, Chris Moore likes to go hunting for big game -- big, long-dead game."

This story is not about me at all, just about a Chris Moore I would suddenly like to be...

Reading List: Storck, Journey to the Ice Age

Peter L. Storck is an archaeologist at the Royal Ontario Museum. I missed his Journey to the Ice Age when it appeared in 2004 (from UBC Press). It is an autobiography of his decades of studying the paleo-Indian presence in Ontario -- "paleo" meaning the very first people who moved into this part of the world as the glacial ice gradually retreated, to Barrie, to North Bay, to north of Timmins. It's also an account of a rigorous, complicated, and often unsuccessful research program aimed first at simply finding sites that have survived 10,000 years and more, then at extracting meaning from them.

One of the book's charms arises from Storck's acute sense of landscape. He constantly describes going to places I know well -- a farm near Alliston, a gully on the Escarpment near Hamilton, a hilltop just west of Blue Mountain -- and then imagining the paleo-landscape: tundra, cold lakes, shorelines and islands, migrating caribou herds.

Archaeologists often get cast as rugged, bearded guys in plaid shirts coming back with arrowheads. What a complex intellectually challenging discipline it actually is! Storck's book catches that.

Peopling the Americas

CBC Television tonight reports an archaeological site on the Yukon-Alaska border, where Norm Easton of Yukon College and others are reporting 14,000 year old projectile points and other evidence of human presence -- if proven, perhaps the oldest confirmed site anywhere in the Americas.

Still one of the great unsolved questions of archaeology: how people got into the Americas, and when. Fascinating.

Book of the Week: After the Ice

Out there, the book of the week seems to be The World Without Us, a consideration of how the world would evolve if the plague of human beings was abruptly removed from it. I saw it first waiting for the Harry Potter distribution to start. (See, Harry really does stimulate other reading!) Then a flood of publicity about it started in the media the next morning. (See, other books can survive the Harry onslaught).

But on my reading pile, the book is After the Ice: A Global Human History 20,000-5000 BC by a British anthropologist named Steven Mithen (Harvard UP, 2004). That's our ancestors he is talking about, and what brilliant talk. The whole human journey up to the start of written history, laid out in one lively serious book -- I'm hooked. (Even though he thinks Bluefish Caves, Yukon, is in Alaska.)

Mithen notes that cave painting must be the longest art tradition in human history -- about 800 generations 35,000 BC to 10,000 BC. But it's not ahistorical. There was a unified tradition that covered a broad swath of southern Europe from Spain to the Urals, suggesting communication and information exchange. But then the climate changed, and cave painting stopped dead. Probably the weather got better, game became abundant, groups of people did not need to plan and consult on their hunting, they all went their own ways -- and the shared art tradition just stopped.

He tries to focus on the history, on the past -- but the evidence of the extraordinary work of generations of archaeologists constructing this history is pretty amazing too.

Interesting: the most mysterious aspect of human prehistory is still the Americas. Suddenly it's 11,000 or 12,000 BC and people are all over the Americas. But the initial peopling of the Americas is still almost entirely conjectural.

Alas poor Otzi

I find I'm still ... depressed, almost, over the news that Otzi, the 5000 years dead "Ice Man" whose body was found in a glacier between Italy and Austria in 1991, died in battle.

An arrow in a major artery in his back did him in, apparently. And he had other wounds. And he had the blood of several other people on him. Death in combat looks like the plausible explanation.

Well, sure, that's our species. But I find myself wishing when we have one guy to testify to life in Europe 5000 years ago, that he had not gone for soldiers like so many of his descendants.

Update, July 2007: Current National Geographic has the story in its typically superb fashion, with some revisions to the summary above.

Killing off the mammoths

Archaeologists of North American paleo-history hardly find a Clovis point, it sometimes seems, unless it is embedded in the mammoth bone some early hunter droven it into. Humankind erupted into the Americas, goes the story, and the big prey species were quickly hunted to extinction or, like the bison, changed into something quite new.

The Economist, of all sources, notes an alternative history. Scientists are finding evidence that hints of a catastrophe in North America at about 12,900 years ago. This one was not a meteor like the one that did in the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, they theorize. It would have been a comet that vaporized above the earth, leaving no vast crater but producing an enormous heat explosion sufficient to devastate North America. Maybe that's what killed the mammoths, speculates James Kennett of UCal Santa Barbara. Maybe it killed the Clovis people too, and a second migration or a remnant population had to start all over again.

Hmm. What would this startlingly recent disaster have done to the remaining glaciation? To the oceans? Would there really be so little evidence for it? Why were, say, grizzlies, caribou, and bison spared?

Sounds like a catchy theory that needs work.