American Buffalo (10 page)

Thought to be George McJunkin’s workshop.

Wild Horse Arroyo, March 2006.

It was early winter, about 10,500
B.C.
There were no cities on earth. When people nowadays think of those times, they conjure images of cavemen, but it seems as though these people did not like caves; rather, they slept in tents made of animal skin. They made their tools from cryptocrystalline rocks such as jasper, agate, chert, and obsidian.
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The weather was generally cooler than today; New Mexico had glaciers. The human population on the western Great Plains was perhaps as low as a few thousand people, and even highly nomadic hunters could have feasibly gone a lifetime without encountering strangers. It’s not unreasonable to suggest that they moved their camps fifty to a hundred times a year. Their preferred quarry,
Bison antiquus
, was less numerous and less predictable than the forms of buffalo encountered at the time of European contact. There was more water in the West, and grasslands were more verdant, so the movements of the animals were not as immediately constrained by the land’s limiting factors.

A group of these hunters was likely migrating from their summer hunting grounds on the open plains of the Texas Panhandle to their winter habitats in the sheltered valleys of the Rockies when they passed near Johnson Mesa. The land in the region was low-quality habitat for game, but nonetheless the hunters encountered a group of
Bison antiquus
. The buffalo may have been completely unaware of humans, having never encountered them. Working together, the hunters herded at least thirty-two cows and calves into a steep-walled arroyo. They moved the buffalo uphill to where the arroyo ended, so that the animals were effectively corralled by dirt walls. The hunters predated the North American invention of the bow by as many as ten thousand years, and they probably killed the animals with spears thrown by an arm-powered contraption known as an atlatl. It was a bloodbath; the thirty-two cows and calves died in a tangled pile.

The hunters spent a couple days butchering their kill. They did not use the carcasses very thoroughly, but instead did something known to hunters today as “gourmet butchering.” They removed only high-utility cuts, such as upper limbs, rib slabs, and vertebrae. They did not butcher all of the carcasses. It appears that they removed the tailbones with the hides and took some of them away from the location, but not all of them. They cut out the tongues from the heads, but did not remove the brains or otherwise disturb the skulls. They did not break the bones for marrow. The anthropologist David Meltzer, of Southern Methodist University’s anthropology department, examined fifteen hundred bones from the site and found definite evidence of knife work, such as cut marks, on only four bones. After the hunters left, the butchered buffalo lay at the surface for perhaps a year or so and were then covered up by silt from the walls of the arroyo. The bones did not see the light of day until the flash flood of 1908.

The discovery of the Folsom site captivated the American public. King Tut’s tomb had recently been discovered in Egypt, and Americans were becoming increasingly intrigued by the deep human history of their own landscape. It was fortuitous timing that America’s burgeoning interest in archaeology happened to coincide roughly with the Dirty Thirties; across much of the West, the Dust Bowl was stripping away the land’s topsoil, and the drought was draining lakes and reservoirs. Denuded lands and dried-up lake beds revealed extinct mammal bones along with human-made projectile points that had been hidden from view for hundreds or thousands of years. Hunting for Indian arrowheads became a popular pursuit. In time, the U.S. map filled up with hundreds of kill sites where Ice Age Americans had camped or slaughtered prey.

Next to Folsom, the most interesting site to emerge was at a place called Blackwater Draw, on the western edge of the Staked Plains near the New Mexico–Texas line. During the Pleistocene, Blackwater Draw was a network of marshes and ponds amid vast and verdant grasslands, but nowadays it’s a dry and dusty pit that holds the remains of a defunct gravel quarry. The wind blows strong there, and stepping down into the draw feels like leaving a noisy room. The site first came into the national spotlight in 1932, when an official from the Smithsonian Institution, E. B. Howard, came out to investigate various local reports of interesting bones coming up out of the ground. One such claim, perhaps more legend than fact, is that a schoolgirl on a field trip found a mammoth skull with a spear point embedded in its eye socket. Another claim had a boy finding a projectile point stuck into a mammoth tooth. Whatever the case, Howard found enough evidence suggesting a direct association between extinct mammals and humans that he began an excavation. Along with the remains of extinct animals such as camels, giant turtles, Pleistocene horses, short-faced bears, giant peccaries, dire wolves, and giant beavers, archaeologists found an abundance of evidence demonstrating human activity: campsites complete with fire rings, various stone implements, scraping tools made from the bones of extinct Ice Age mammals, and drinking ladles made from fire-hardened turtle shells. Most notably, they found an abundance of projectile points buried along with the skeletal remains of mammoths. The points, now known as Clovis points, were up to four inches long, almost twice the length of the points that were found with the buffalo bones at Folsom.
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The Clovis points were less intricately shaped as well; whereas the Folsom points were fluted along the entire length, the Clovis points were fluted for only a third of the length.

Initially, the Blackwater Draw site was viewed as just another piece of evidence supporting the conclusions taken from the Folsom site, that man’s history in the New World dates back to the late Pleistocene. The value of the site was amplified in the summer of 1949, when archaeologists working for the Texas Memorial Museum of the University of Texas began new excavations at Blackwater Draw. Their work focused on the stratigraphic and cultural sequences of the site, or in other words, the order by which the artifacts and bones were deposited in the sediments. The archaeologists discovered Folsom-type points and buffalo bones in the layers immediately above those containing Clovis-type points and mammoth bones. Over the next twenty years, through the 1950s and 1960s, emerging technologies in radiocarbon dating helped assign specific dates to the remains associated with specific projectile points. The Clovis-related artifacts were clustered around 13,300 years ago, and the Folsom-related sites proliferated less than a thousand years later. Subsequent discoveries at many other archaeological sites around the country buttressed these findings. A theory emerged: Ice Age hunters could be grouped into broad cultures with fairly rigid technologies that fit into some sort of time line.

These findings helped reveal something quite interesting: not only had human hunters been in the New World for much longer than previously suspected, but they were undergoing fairly rapid transitions at the termination of the Ice Age. The hunters’ prey base was changing, and they responded to those changes by evolving their technological and cultural traditions. The term “Paleo-Indian” was adopted as an umbrella term to contain the various human cultures that existed during this period, including the makers of the Folsom and Clovis points.
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Several questions about Paleo-Indian hunters began to nag anthropologists: Where did they come from? How did they get here? When did they get here? The root of those questions is found in a predicament: if humans entered the New World at the oldest known site of human occupation, that means they spontaneously generated in the American West about fourteen thousand years ago. Because that is highly improbable, people have put forth ample theories ranging from the outrageous (the first Americans came from outer space) to the semi-outrageous (the first Americans were Pacific Islanders blown astray).

Even the leading theory, that the first Americans were Siberian nomads who followed in the path of the buffalo, crossing from Asia to Alaska via the Bering Land Bridge, was plagued by a lack of proof. In a way, the mystery was fueled by one of the primary things that anthropologists understood about Paleo-Indians. Since they had evolving, codified systems for producing projectile points, there should be evidence of their technological evolution at their point of origination. There was nothing quite like that in Siberia, nothing like that in the Pacific Islands, and, as far as anyone knew, nothing like that in outer space. The closest Old World approximations to Clovis points were the spear points produced by the Solutrean Paleolithic cultures of western Europe that are best known for their cave paintings of Ice Age mammals. The similarities led to a theory called the Solutrean connection, which was plagued by logistical problems. If the North American Paleo-Indian culture was born in western Europe, how did those peoples, or their technologies, get to the New World? A water route was highly improbable. And if the western Europeans migrated through Asia, why didn’t they leave evidence of themselves?

A partial solution to these problems was discovered in the late 1970s when an archaeologist named Mike Kunz was wandering through the western Brooks Range of Arctic Alaska. Kunz worked at the Blackwater Draw site as a graduate student in the mid-1960s, and upon graduation he moved to Alaska to conduct archaeological surveys ahead of construction on the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. When the pipeline was completed, Kunz went to work for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management’s Arctic Field Office, doing archaeological surveys on the National Petroleum Reserve–Alaska. At twenty-three million acres (think Indiana), the NPR-A is the largest undeveloped block of federally owned real estate in the United States, and it occupies land that was once the eastern foot of the Bering Land Bridge. In 1978, while working in the vicinity of the Ivotuk River, Kunz climbed atop a prominent mesa and was surprised by what he saw. “When I walked up there,” he explained to me, “the first thing I saw, I said, ‘This looks a lot like a Paleo-Indian point.’ Then I found another one. And another one.” Over the next twenty years Kunz and his crew excavated 450 stone tools, including 150 projectile points, from the top of the mesa. Many of the points were mixed in with campfire charcoal from forty hearths. The charcoal yielded calendar dates from 13,600 to 11,000 years ago. While the area was not the oldest known site in North America, Kunz was the first to find tangible proof of a connection between the Bering Land Bridge and the Paleo-Indians of the mid-continental United States. In 1993, he published his findings in
Science,
and his discovery was covered by everyone from Sam Donaldson to the BBC.

I wanted to see the mesa for myself, and in the summer of 2006 I spent ten days getting there and back. First I flew from Anchorage to Fairbanks International Airport, and then I spent a night in town before catching an early morning cab to Fort Wainwright Army Base. I boarded a single-engine Cessna Caravan loaded with supplies and bound for “the Slope,” as locals call that vast expanse of largely unpeopled tundra lying between the Brooks Range and the Arctic Ocean. After a three-hour flight, the airplane dropped through a purple-rimmed hole in the clouds to land at a gravel airstrip on the tundra marked by a collection of tents, a Bell JetRanger helicopter dubbed 4-Papa-Alpha, and a hand-painted sign reading “When you are here, you’re still nowhere.” I was 150 miles north of the Arctic Circle, 160 miles west of the nearest road (which was gravel), and 200 miles from Barrow, Alaska, the northernmost settlement on the North American mainland. I spent the next twenty-four hours holed up in a tent while waiting out a windstorm. The sun circled slowly overhead without ever setting. When the wind finally calmed, I flew out with Kunz and his helicopter pilot, Mad Mel Campbell, to have a look around.

Kunz and Mad Mel had matching white scraggly beards and severely weather-beaten faces. Mad Mel was an avid gum chewer, carried a .44 Magnum for bear protection, and was missing the end of his nose, which was hacked off during skin cancer surgery; Kunz carried a 12-gauge pump for grizzly protection and kept a toothpick locked between his teeth so tightly that I thought it must be holding something in place. About six miles out of camp, Mad Mel began to circle a prominent mesa that sat on the tundra like a beached ship. It was about a hundred yards wide and maybe a little bit longer, rising 180 feet above the surrounding landscape. Kunz spoke to me through a helmet-mounted headset, loud enough to be heard over the whump-whump-whump of the chopper. “Except for some different plants down there, it looks basically the way it did fourteen thousand years ago,” he said. He leaned forward from the helicopter’s backseat and pointed to the crest of the mesa. “There’s a 360-degree uninterrupted view of forty square miles from there. I’ve seen thousands of caribou pass below that mesa. I don’t think these people actually camped on top; they probably camped along the creek, where there was cooking fuel and water. But they made fires and they sat up there and watched for game. They worked on their tools and points while they waited.”