The Incredible Human Journey (54 page)

The idea of Clovis people as ‘big-game hunters’, descendants of the Eurasian Upper Palaeolithic hunters of the steppe, has
been around a long time. This image is very persuasive: it permeates our culture, fostered by artistic reconstructions and
in film. The iconic image of plucky Ice Age hunters clad in furs, bravely bringing down a mammoth, is familiar to us all.
But is it an accurate representation?

Clovis Culture: Gault, Texas

Driving east, I next made my way to Texas, in search of the mammoth hunters, to the site of Gault, near Austin. Leaving the
freeway, I headed into the countryside and eventually turned off the road on to a track which led to a couple of sheds – these
formed the headquarters of the Gault Archaeological Project. There I met Mike Collins, in blue jeans and Stetson the epitome
of a Texan archaeologist. He was just putting the finishing touches to a wooden picnic table, which he loaded into his truck
and then took me down to the site. It was in the valley below, in a field surrounded by woods.

Gault is one of the largest Clovis occupation sites, around 800m long and 200m wide. When I visited, the archaeologists had
two trenches open and were painstakingly excavating and examining a small fraction of the site. The trenches were covered
with white tents, to protect them – and the archaeologists at work inside them – from the elements. I followed Mike inside
one tent where excavations were ongoing. It was blazing hot outside, but the tent was doing its job – inside it was shady
and cool. Three archaeologists were busy in the bottom of a trench, digging down through dark black soil, and I could see stone tools
sticking out of the walls of the trench.

‘The site is still incredibly prolific,’ said Mike. ‘There have been people digging at this site for at least eighty years.
We estimate that there are hundreds of thousands of artefacts out there, in the antiquities market and in private collections,
that came from here.’

The site had a long history of being plundered. In fact, it was looters who initially brought the site to the attention of
archaeologists, and the first excavations took place in the 1920s. Looting continued, though, and in the 1980s the then landowner
was charging $25 a day for the chance to dig at Gault. Who knows how many precious artefacts were dug up, out of context,
and flogged on the antiquities market? In 1991, one of the paid-up diggers dug a little deeper than most, and found two finely
flaked, fluted Clovis spear points and a selection of engraved limestone pebbles. Incredibly responsibly, he reported these
finds to Mike Collins, who then started scientific excavations at the site again. Even after all that plundering, Gault still
held plenty of archaeological interest: the upper layers, containing ‘Archaic’ archaeology, had been heavily disturbed, but
Mike was relieved to find that the deeper layers containing palaeoindian artefacts were left almost intact.

‘Well, pretty much the entire prehistory of Texas is represented here,’ Mike told me. ‘It’s amazing. From the artefacts which
we’ve found and the dating we’ve been able to get, we can say that people have been here from five hundred years ago, back
to at least 13,500 years ago.’

‘Have you found any of those beautiful Clovis spear points here?’

‘Yes – but Clovis points are actually in a very small minority. In our Clovis levels, we’ve got a million and a half artefacts,
and just forty of them are projectile points. Every one of those is either broken, or resharpened down to the point that it
was discarded. They’re retooling here. They’re making their spear points here, so what we find are the old worn-out ones
that they’re chucking away.’

So the Gault palaeoindian layers included Clovis artefacts, although most of them were waste flakes from making tools, like
the ones I’d seen scattered on the ground. And there were animal bones, too. But there was no indication from these that the
Clovis people at Gault were mammoth or big-game hunters. They seemed to be much more generalised, hunting and eating a great
range of animals.
¹

And, in fact, this seems to be the picture that is now emerging as more Clovis sites are found or re-examined. The Clovis
culture spread right across northern and central America, from coast to coast, and from southern Canada to Costa Rica. Recent
radiocarbon dates have tightened its duration to a few hundred years, between 13,200 to 12,800 years ago.
²
Certainly, many of these sites have produced Clovis points in association with mammoth skeletons (for example, at Dent in
Colorado and Naco in Arizona), which have led to the suggestion that the Clovis people were specialised big-game hunters –
who may even have brought about the extinction of the mammoths with their deadly effective weaponry. Although some archaeologists have suggested that the sites with mammoth remains and Clovis tools may represent scavenging
of carcasses, there are several sites where Clovis points have been found in among the bones of mammoth skeletons, and these
seem to prove beyond doubt that hunting of these great beasts did occur. And why not? The existence of massive animals that
offered a huge return in terms of energy (imagine how many people you could feed with a mammoth), as well as the convenience
of long-term storage during the Ice Age.
³

But maybe these mammoth kill sites have produced a skewed view of Clovis people as big-game hunters. Mike Collins argued that
Gault is one of a growing number of sites that indicate a more generalised approach to hunting. He also believed that, on
a wider scale, the spread of Clovis sites across America spoke of a generalised approach to subsistence – one that was flexible
enough to facilitate survival across a large range of environments – rather than a highly specialised form of hunting. Perhaps there are a lot of Clovis sites with mammoth remains because the large bones are exactly what caught the eye of the
archaeologists in the first place.
⁴

The less ‘spectacular’ sites paint a different picture, and Mike argues that these show the hunters in their true colours,
as generalists, going after mammals ranging in size from raccoons and badgers to bison and mammoths. The diet at Gault also
included small mammals, frogs and birds. And it’s not just the animal bones that made Mike doubt the myth of the mammoth
hunter. The density of the occupation site at Gault suggests that these people were much less mobile than would be expected
if they were (in the main) big-game hunters, tied in to following herd animals around a landscape. In contrast, the later
Folsom culture of North America relates to highly mobile and highly specialised bison hunting.
¹
The stone tools themselves also imply a less mobile lifestyle: unlike some of the Clovis hunting camps and kill sites, where
stone tools have often been transported hundreds of miles from the source of the stone, Gault is sited close to a convenient
source of chert. More than 99 per cent of stone tools and waste flakes are made from that local stone.
^2
,
4

More generally speaking, ‘foraging theory’, looking at the range and numbers of animals available at the end of the Ice Age,
suggests that the early palaeoindians would have been much better off hunting whatever was available, rather than specialising
in the large animals.
⁵

But Mike doesn’t claim that Clovis hunters never went after big game. Animals such as mammoth, horse and bison formed part
of their diet, but plant materials and smaller animals were generally more important.
¹
At the time of writing, there were at least twelve known Clovis mammoth or mastodon kill sites – compared with only six across
the whole of Upper Palaeolithic Europe. Some archaeologists still argue that these proboscideans were important prey animals
to Clovis people – albeit within a wider subsistence strategy – and that humans could have been instrumental in their extinction.
^2
,
6
So, at the end of the day, it seems that labelling the Clovis people as mammoth hunters is not categorically
wrong
, but it’s a narrow stereotype, like saying the French exist exclusively on frogs’ legs (whereas, of course, they eat a much
wider diet, including pâté de foie gras and snails as well …).

I felt I was getting closer to the truth about these early American hunters. At lunchtime we all sat in the shade of a tree,
at the newly constructed picnic tables, to eat our sandwiches. After lunch, I went for a walk in the shady woods, beside a
stream. The ground was littered with leaves and stone flakes. Next to the stream, lazing in the dappled sunlight, I saw a
snake, a water moccasin, and walked very cautiously past it. Its eyes were open, but it didn’t move as I passed by. It would
probably have constituted a tasty snack for those Clovis people.

That afternoon, Mike wanted to show me another trench from previous years’ excavations. Over the other side of the stream,
just in the woods, was a deep pit.

‘What we’re really excited about, and the reason we’re digging right here, is that previous tests in this part of the site
tell us we also have a layer below Clovis. Older than Clovis …’

Mike pointed out layers near the bottom of the pit.

‘Right there is where we find Clovis artefacts, but we continue to get artefacts down 25 to 30cm below that.’

He took a few bags of artefacts out of his pocket to show me.

‘These,’ he said, carefully passing the small stone flakes to me, ‘are from that deep layer. They are pre-Clovis.’

‘But for years and years archaeologists have been saying that Clovis is the oldest culture in the Americas,’ I said.

‘That’s poppycock,’ he replied. ‘That’s a paradigm that we spent seventy years honing and most of it is wrong. The paradigm
is shifting. What happens when you break down a paradigm, a long-held theory, is that intellectual chaos follows because you don’t know
what the replacement theory is going to be.

‘We have a luminescence date on this layer of 14,400 years ago. That’s a thousand years before Clovis. It means we’ve got to rethink our ideas of the peopling of the Americas.’

For a long time, Clovis appeared to be the earliest archaeology in the Americas, so it seemed reasonable to assume that its
makers were the first Americans. It also fitted rather beautifully with the timing of the melting back of the Laurentide and
Cordilleran ice sheets, to form an ice-free corridor. This parting of the ice is thought to have happened around 14,000 to
13,500 years ago – and Clovis starts to appear around 13,200 years ago.
²
But a selection of sites across North and South America are now challenging the ‘Clovis first’ model. Gault was one of them.
There were people in that valley long before the makers of the fine stone points arrived.

Meadowcroft Rockshelter in Pennsylvania has been proposed as another pre-Clovis site, where there is a suggestion of people
having been present as early as 22,000 years ago, but the dates are controversial. It’s possible that natural coal in the
area may have contaminated the samples from the site, meaning that radiocarbon dating overestimates the date.
⁷

However, there are a growing number of sites with more reliable, pre-Clovis dates. At Schaefer and Hebior in Wisconsin, which
would have been close to the southern edge of the Laurentide ice sheet, there’s evidence of hunting or scavenging of mammoths
long before the distinctive Clovis culture emerged, between 14,200 and 14,800 years ago. There are also stone tools and the
remains of extinct animals at Page-Ladson in Florida, dating to around 14,400 years ago, and at the Paisley Caves in Oregon,
three human coprolites were found, dating to 14,100 years ago.
²
It’s a patchy archaeological record, though. It would be nice if the archaeologists could find a well-dated occupation site,
and maybe even some actual human remains from between 14,000 and 15,000 years ago. At the moment, there are just a few tantalising
clues that humans were in North America that early: a handful of stone tools and flakes with animal bones, and some fossilised
faeces.

Now, there are some sites that have been claimed to show a human presence earlier than 15,000 years ago, but the traces are
very shadowy and the dates controversial. Four sites have recently come to the fore in the search for the earliest Americans:
Cactus Hill in Virginia, La Sena in Nebraska, Lovewell in Kansas, and Topper in South Carolina. Topper, like Gault, has Clovis
stone artefacts and older pre-Clovis stone tools in underlying sediments, dating to around 15,000 years ago. But in 2004,
tools were found in even deeper layers at Topper, and the archaeologists have claimed that they may be in excess of – wait
for it –
50,000
years old.
But before we get too excited, these tools are not beautifully worked points or even things that are immediately recognisable
as having been worked by human hand. They might just be natural. And with the archaeological and genetic data from Asia suggesting
that the founding population there was not even in place before 40,000 years ago, this means we should view such a date for
the Americas with profound scepticism.
²

But it still seems likely that humans got into the Americas a long time before Clovis, maybe 15,000 years ago, perhaps even
a bit earlier. In addition to the emerging archaeological clues, there’s the genetic suggestion of an earlier colonisation along that coastal
route into the Americas, and the circumstantial evidence relating to the environment along that north-west coast.

For Mike Collins, Clovis getting knocked off its pedestal as the first culture in the Americas didn’t reduce its interest.
It’s still fascinating as a phenomenon that stretched across a whole continent, and there are still unanswered questions.
Where did it come from? How did it develop? There is no clearly antecedent culture in north-east Asia or Beringia, although
there are some common components (such as those ivory foreshafts).