Watch Online

The show "Coming Into America" premiered July 20th, 2004. Below is the online video. Please be sure to take a look at related stories from the Frontiers Archive.

				Who Was Arlington Springs Woman? Arlington Springs Woman -- the oldest human remains found in America -- may well turn traditional archaeological thinking on its head.
		Select text to jump ahead in the clip: ALDA: People love to hang ouby the water, and that's probably been true for a very long time. We're making a short hop across the fog-shrouded Santa Barbara Channel to the Channel Islands. We're heading for Santa Rosa Island-- 80 square miles and almost uninhabited. We're also heading back into the past. The archaeologists we're with only half see today's rugged and inhospitable landscape. Instead, they see it thousands of years ago, when Santa Rosa was cooler, wetter, forested and occupied by people who were, of course, hanging out by the water. We're at Arlington Canyon-- home to Arlington Springs Woman more than 13,000 years ago. Hers are the oldest securely dated human remains that have been found anywhere in North or South America. Arlington Springs Woman was discovered by a lucky accident more than 40 years ago. Her bones were just sticking out of the canyon wall, right at this spot. MAN: Phil Orr was excavating a road back in 1959, and right below us, he got in trouble. He got stuck in a spring. ALDA: While figuring out what to do, Phil Orr-- who was a curator of the Santa Barbara Natural History Museum-- looked around and saw the bones. He knew they were old, just from their geological setting. At that time, bones could not be dated directly, so instead, he dated some nearby charcoal. It was old-- 10,000 years old. MAN: There was a lot of questions, you know. Couldn't the bone have eroded into that location and some old charcoal eroded next to it, and therefore maybe the charcoal wasn't really the same age as the human bone? And so people never really quite accepted this association. And so this is what motivated us originally to go back and try to redate the bone is to see if we could really find out how old that bone really was, and lo and behold, it turned out to be even older than the charcoal date that Phil Orr originally found, by 3,000 years. ALDA: Phil Orr brought the bones back to the museum, where they could wait for better dating techniques. ALDA: How long has it been since you had these bones dated? JOHNSON: We began this work about 1989. Well, it's very tricky, especially when you're dating old bone. You have to do a lot of bone chemistry. You really got this locked away, haven't you? Yes. ALDA: In the 1980s, ways were developed to radiocarbon-date the collagen that's part of bone structure. John Johnson realized he had the perfect candidate in his vault, sitting in a block of earth. So that's her bone, huh? That's right. This is the end that's closest to the knee, the thighbone, heading towards the kneecap, going into the block of earth. And then you can see this groove here. This is where the rest of the femur lay originally. And we took a small sample of that, and that's what we got the radiocarbon date on. How long ago did she live? About 13,200 to 13,500 years ago. ALDA: The remains had always been called Arlington Springs Man, but detailed measurements of the scans turned her into a woman. We can tell that she was a petite five-foot high. How do you know this isn't a child? Well, see this line right here that's visible in the CAT scan? That's the fusion line between the shaft of the femur and the end of the femur, and the fact that these have grown together and fused means that this person had quit growing. This is an adult. ALDA: We know nothing about what she was doing on the island, but it makes sense that she was near the canyon for its water and near the sea for its many good things to eat. Native people have exploited the bays and coves of the Channel Islands for thousands of years. In Arlington Canyon, you can see shell dumps eroding from the wall-- ancient remains of meals of abalone, mussels and clams. A cave on a nearby island has recently been excavated. MAN: These are strands of cordage. They're made out of sea grass-- it's a marine grass-- and these are very unusual in the fact that they're about 9,000 years old. They represent the earliest basketry from the Pacific coast of North America. They're just a whole bunch of cutoffs, they're... People were mending nets, making cordage, probably making objects and then snipping off the ends. These are made from bird bone, and they're used for fishing. They would have had a string tied around, just off center of the middle of them, and then bait wrapped around that. And then once the fish swallowed it, then you tugged on it, which toggled it, forced it to lodge in their throat or their stomach, and then you could reel them in. The layers in which they were found contained many, many fish bones. There were thousands of fish bones-- small fish from kelp beds and near shore habitats that could have come either from fishing from the shore or from boats. ALDA: People have probably always lived off the sea here, but the discovery that they were out in the islands more than 13,000 years ago has caused archaeologists to shift nervously in their seats. We've always thought that around that date, the first Americans-- called Clovis people-- were walking down from Alaska into the center of the continent. Clovis people were big-game hunters. So who were these people going fishing off California? And how and when did they get here? ERLANDSON: I suggested a few years ago, almost tongue-in-cheek, rather reluctantly, but in writing, that maybe Clovis came down the coast and then moved to the interior. This completely turns the traditional theory upside down. It's always been Clovis came into the heartland of the Americas and then spread from sea to shining sea. But, you know, it's at least possible, it's worth thinking about, that perhaps Clovis originated on the coast and then moved in the other direction. You grew up, right, here, right around here? Yeah, went to school right here, too. And so you used to look out over there to the islands. Did you ever visit the islands? Just, uh... not until I was 17 or 18, I think. I sailed out with some friends. ALDA: In this program, we're going to meet many archaeologists who, like Jon Erlandson, are turning theories upside down. Collectively, they're now in the process of rewriting the history of the first Americans. How would you describe how they made their way to this part of the world? Well, you know, I think one of the things that's really interesting about archaeology and science in general is that you'd think after a century of intensive scientific research, we'd know the answer to some of these questions, but the fact is, we don't. ALDA: We do know Arlington Springs Woman must have had a boat just to get to the island. But even that's quite a new idea. ERLANDSON: In the past, anthropological theory used to say that people's use of boats developed relatively recently. In the last few decades, and just the last few years, we've found evidence that people colonized Australia by boat at least 50,000 years ago, that people moved into island Melanesia in the Pacific, parts of it, as much as 25,000 to 30,000 years ago. These voyages probably required oceangoing travel, sometimes multiple voyages of 100, 150 and even 200 kilometers. So the evidence today suggests that people had more sophisticated boats than we thought, and much earlier than we thought. ALDA: The Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

				Clovis: A Primer Learn more about the Clovis hunting culture.
		Select text to jump ahead in the clip: I've come to meet one of the leading experts on the peopling of America. Dennis Stanford is also one of the principal advocates of new thinking in the field, as we'll find out. But first, I wanted to know about the Clovis people. ALDA: When did the world first start to think about Clovis? Clovis was first brought to the attention of the Smithsonian, and I guess the rest of the world, when a gentleman out in Clovis, New Mexico, by the name of Ridgeley Whiteman, who was an arrowhead collector, had sent a letter to the Smithsonian, where he describes what he had found... WHITEMAN ( dramatized ): "Concerning Indian life, et cetera, "does this organization buy arrowheads and instruments? "I have a very fine collection of Indian relics "from this part of the country. Yours respectfully, Ridgeley Whiteman." ALDA: The collection included arrow or spearheads, known as Folsom points, that had recently been found along with the remains of extinct Ice Age animals. That meant the objects were ancient. The Smithsonian didn't buy a thing, but they did send an expedition out to New Mexico. There, they uncovered the remains of extinct mammoths, along with a new kind of stone point they called Clovis. Clovis was underneath Folsom, with nothing deeper. So the idea began that Clovis people were the first on the land. STANFORD: This is the first Clovis point, and it's bifacial, it's flaked on both sides, and the characteristic identifier is this flake that's taken right out of this area here. You see this nice big flat flake here? ALDA: Why was that taken out? This is a hafting device, and then here's one on the other side. Here we go. That's what I want. Okay, this is what we call a foreshaft. This is a piece of ivory from a mammoth, and you see it's cut at a diagonal here. That's hafted to a wooden spear. Okay, and then at the opposite end, you can see where they've carved it, there's a kind of little area here where it starts tapering down, and then it's rounded and blunt. And then you take this piece, and that is set onto that, and then you can twist it, and when you twist it, the torque sets it so it doesn't come out. And then your Clovis point, with the flute, fits in like that. But the beauty of it is, is that on impact, when you hit your animal, this comes out, and if you're carrying a whole bag full of these, you can put on a new one and take another shot. ALDA: The Clovis people had come up with a lethal weapon system for hunting the large animals, like mammoths, horses and bison, that were around towards the end of the last Ice Age about 13,000 years ago. Many more Clovis sites were found, always, it was said, with nothing deeper or older. We'll come back to that later. ( mammoth trumpets ) The Clovis people made perfect firsts Americans... brave, inventive and successful. their stone work showed not only consummate skill, but an aesthetic sense, too. Many archeologists who study stone age people try to get closer to their subjects by doing what they did. What I'm trying to do is make this specimen as flat as possible, so I want to take this ridge off, and then I'll take off this high point and this high point. ALDA: This unfinished Clovis point, found in Idaho, shows how the blade was thinned by striking a succession of flakes from both faces. The flakes have to be just right, running straight across the blade to the mid point. If the flake turns, or goes across to the opposite edge, the blade's shape is ruined. STANFORD: And that did an outre passé that I didn't want. It turned and went down. Do you find many unfinished points and... and people just abandoned them halfway through? Yeah, and broken them, yeah. Yet all of the mistakes I make, they make... at least in the samples I've seen. There, that's a nice one. ALDA: We're working with obsidian, a volcanic glass prized by toolmakers ever since tool making began. Okay, turn it more this way. Ah, okay. Beautiful. See, it made it all the way across, right to the middle, which is where we want it. Now I want to get this point? Yeah, but now let's just do... It's just... Oh, right. ALDA: This little stone age trick makes a solid edge to strike. It's called a platform. Uh-oh, we came right down the middle. Yeah, so, uh, I guess they sort of invite me to go join another tribe now. ( laughs ) Sounded good. Perfecto. You're going to be a Clovis elephant hunter yet. ( laughs ) before a 5:00 flight. Oh, I missed it completely. There we go. How long do you think they'd spend making a point like this? It would take me about an hour. And what I suspect... happened was four or five men would get together and they'd sit there working on their stuff and shooting the bull, and talking about the good old days... "Have you heard about the folks "that were down in Patagonia? Maybe we ought to go down there and, you know..." ( both laugh ) "Maybe we ought to go to Texas and check out their women," you know? ( laughing ) Push in, and then... I can't get it to do anything. ALDA: Several mistakes later, our point was shrinking fast but eventually we reached the pressure-flaking stage which creates the final edges. There you go-- good. No, that one crushed. Oh... did I do anything? Yeah, all these little flakes down there, you did. Okay, you see them? Yeah. So this is starting to look like a Clovis point? Yeah, you got this flake and that flake, and this big one and that big one, and now we're just trimming up the edges. Okay, so what we're going to have to do here is trim up these edges, put a tip on it, and then bring the base in, and then flute it. Yeah. ALDA: Now the all-important flute. Ahh... Oh, wait, look at all that that came off. You fluted the hell out of it. Excuse me. ( laughing ) All right now, you hit it right on the platform, like you should have, and it took the... Took the point off. Took the point off. ALDA: Dennis cheated a bit, using a metal tool to quickly fashion a new tip. But that's one heck of a fluted point, gang. Don't show them how thick it is. ALDA: One more mistake and the thing would have practically disappeared. But with the obvious flute thinning its base, this would be recognized by any archeologist as a Clovis point. Sit down. Let me show you what some of this stuff looks like, Alan. This is... This is kind of a potpourri of Clovis-lithic artifacts. ALDA: This is all from a Clovis site near Austin, Texas. Here are the Clovis points with their characteristic thinned, fluted bases. And here are the expected mammoth remains a lower jaw with its massive teeth. But this site, along with many in recent years, has produced a wide variety of other animal remains. The single most common kind of animal to occur in Clovis sites-- in today's sample... Yeah? is turtles. Turtles? Turtles. You don't have to be much of a hunter to... That's right, in fact, that's very likely something the women and children could go out and collect. ALDA: The Clovis site that Mike Collins has exhaustively explored is called Gault. The people who lived here 13,000 years ago were very far from fast-moving big-game hunters. They chose a place with many different resources within easy reach. Here's the rock outcrop where they got flint for tools. The valley floor has wood, nuts, berries and, yes, turtles. These are burr oaks, there's cottonwoods, willows, uh... mulberries, elms-- all these trees that have to have water. This is Buttermilk Creek that we're coming up on here. As you can see it's flowing, even though we're in a drought. Nice stream of water. Right in this area here, it never dries up. We're beginning to mix in cactus, higher and... higher and drier. ALDA: A short walk up from the creek brings new resources. Mike Collins is a rancher, so he knows the land as intimately as the Clovis people must have. Your deer and turkeys are probably going to be easier to hunt in this more open terrain up here. The... these cactus have an edible fruit on them. The big... what we call "pads" are edible. The mesquite beans are edible. Lots of things they can get up here, they're not going to get down in the valley floor. ALDA: The 700,000 bits and pieces that Mike's group is now analyzing give one of the most comprehensive pictures we have of Clovis life. They used their tools for everything cutting and scraping meat, bone and wood... punching holes in hides... slicing many different things. WOMAN: One of the most interesting ones is this tool, and if you take it in your hand and just hold it against the light and go back and forth, can you see that there's a really bright ribbon of polish along the edge of that tool? Yes, now I see that. It almost looks like it's melted on there? ALDA: The polish is a giveaway for the simple activity of grass cutting. COLLINS: As I move it around here, my eye catches that sheen already, in just a few moments of cutting here. And that's identical to what we see on the prehistoric tools. ALDA: Mike was using a replica blade, but here's the real thing. This discovery is a first for a Clovis site. The bright coating is the characteristic sign of silica from inside grass cells. Were the Gault people making baskets or rope? We don't know; nothing has survived. We wouldn't know if they gathered mulberries or mesquite beans, either. They did catch everything from bison to turtles, and overall Mike's conclusion is that these people were hunter-gatherers who exploited everything they possibly could. We can catch a glimpse of their lives beyond subsistence. Was this a weaving pattern? Is this a drawing of grass? Or maybe a map? COLLINS: This is artistic expression that has survived. These people may have painted themselves. They may have tattooed themselves... uh, tattooed themselves. Look at this little thing. Can you see the tip on that? Yes... oh, yes, yeah, a little... A little sharp thing. In cultures around the world today that tattoo themselves, this is exactly the sort of thing they use.

				Clovis First? The debate rages about who the first Americans were.
		Select text to jump ahead in the clip: ALDA: Mike's view of Clovis is far from the classic, fast-moving big-game hunters. Clovis sites appeared across the entire continent within the space of a few hundred years but maybe it was Clovis ideas spreading, not the people themselves. When I look at the signature of Clovis closely, I see people who were exploiting in diverse resources, in diverse habitats. I think it took them a long time to do that. And so I'm asking, is it an alternative that we are only seeing the spread of a technology that, in part at least, was hop scotching from one existing culture to another? That certainly could have happened. What evidence do you have that that's the way it happened? I don't have any.( laughs ) This is negative. What I'm saying is, how do we explain this stuff being so widespread so quickly? ALDA: That idea, that Clovis were not the first people in the Americas-- has been reinforced by the discovery of a site in Chile. ERLANDSON: Monte Verde, down in Chile, has been widely accepted by many archeologists. It's a thousand years or more older than Clovis, um, and it's way down in South America, and it's actually not far from the coast. If Clovis is first in North America, how did people get to Monte Verde 1,000 years earlier? ALDA: Arguments have raged over Monte Verde for 20 years, but at the same time, archeologists have been busy turning theories upside down on the east coast of North America. It now seems that people were in the forests of the East long before Clovis times, or Monte Verde for that matter. In 1981, a man named David Topper found a source of flint in the woods near the Savannah River. He told Al Goodyear from the University of South Carolina about it. Al's been working here ever since. He's found that he's following in ancient footsteps. GOODYEAR: Prehistoric peoples for thousands of years came to this hillside and gathered up some of this rock and broke it open. And this sharp material, this glass-like material, would form the basis of their stone tools. ALDA: Al recruits volunteers to work at the Topper site every spring. Grain by grain they've revealed the history of the site as it was laid down over... how many thousand years? Ah, that's the question. They pick out anything that's a little bit unnatural looking, that might have been generated by people. The Clovis is sitting within this. Okay. ALDA: Steve Gorman visits Topper regularly. He's an expert in an advanced technique that directly dates soil. In the wet eastern U.S., ancient bone, wood or charcoal rarely survive, so radio-carbon dating is not possible. In his first few years of digging, Al found a satisfying and predictable pattern. GOODYEAR: These represent artifacts that are from the last 13,000 years of occupation at the Topper site, starting with 18th-century colonial bottle glass, Indian arrow points, going back through time. ALDA: This was exactly the sequence Al had been taught in school, with the earliest people being, of course, Clovis. GOODYEAR: All the way back to, in this case, the base of a Clovis fluted point, which would be about 13,000 years. So we have accounted for the basic, um, textbook story of early human life in North America in the upper meter, or so. ALDA: At that point, Al stopped excavating. But then Monte Verde came along, so he decided to take a look below the upper meter, in this layer of Ice Age river sand. He began the new dig in 1998, to get to the lower levels. GOODYEAR: We're going down to our deep-pit excavation, where we first found the evidence of pre-Clovis stone tools, and they're excavating now on the old Ice Age terrace. ( trowels scrape as volunteers converse quietly ) This would be an example of the cluster of smashed chert pieces. You can see the sharp faces and the edges. We typically find these in piles, which is, in a geological sense, an unnatural situation to find them, especially since many of them have fracture faces. We have small flakes. These flakes are generated from this chert being smashed. Here's one with a little scraper type bevel, cut on the end. It could be used for scraping. And then we get something that's very typical of the pre-Clovis lithics here, something... we call a bend-break tool. And you see this sharp, triangular chisel-type working edge on it. ALDA: The prize find was what they call the "Topper Chopper." It has several worked edges, including this carefully trimmed scraper or knife, and a chopper part, worked on two faces. Al says it's hard to argue, as critics do with primitive tools, that there's not a mind at work here. GOODYEAR: In order to move from nature, you have to have design. It's the idea of the watchmaker-- if you find a watch on the beach, you don't think nature formed it. These are not in stream flows of enough force to gather these rocks or break them apart. The hillside gradient is too subdued for them to roll. You could roll a wineglass down this hill and it wouldn't break. So you're beginning to run out of natural explanations for that. ALDA: So how old are the Topper tools? The Ice Age sand they came from could be 20,000 or more years old. Steve Forman ran a series of dates on the layers above the Ice Age sand. The technique, called OSL, precisely measures the light energy stored in sand particles. Careful sampling procedures are critical. The result? 15,000 years old. The Ice Age sand below, where the early tools were found, must be older. So what's their date? GOODYEAR: It's well in excess of 15,000 or 16,000 years. Because the 15,000-year-old OSL date came from above all that. ALDA: Our next stop is a vault in the Denver Museum. Steve Holen believes he can push the peopling of America back even earlier than Topper with the aid of these pieces of mammoth bone. People were using the bones long before the Clovis people hunted the animals, he says. Mammoths were large elephants that roamed the plains of America, Asia and Europe for 100,000 years during the last Ice Age. They died out about 13,000 years ago as the Ice Age ended. Steve is borrowing some wild animals at the Denver Zoo. Cow leg bones are the bait. Here he comes. ALDA: Steve's critics say his mammoth bones might not have been broken by people, so the idea here is to see what kind of damage large carnivores can do to bones. ( crunching ) Oh, I hear a bone cracking. Yes, yes, I do. That one's chewing on some bone there. ( bone crunching ) ALDA: We gave the animals plenty of time. ALDA: The lions all work on the end of the bone. Right-- animals, carnivores, like dogs or any animal, will start chewing on the end of the bone where it's much thinner and then they go in as far as they can until the bone is so thick that they can't break it anymore. These bones were left in for several hours with the lions and as you can see on this bone, there's really very little damage. They gnawed off a small piece of bone right here, and what they basically did was chew off most of the meat and the gristle they could get off of these bones, but really didn't do very much damage. ALDA: Next, hyenas. They're bone specialists-- probably the most powerful bone crunchers around today. HOLEN These bones were eaten by the hyenas, and as we can see, there's severe damage to this bone. Here they have completely chewed away the end of the bone and started getting down into the midshaft. When they get to this, they can't go any further. They cannot destroy this bone. They can't break it any further than this. ALDA: How do you know there wasn't an animal alive then that could chew into the bones? There were a lot of big animals then, right? There were a lot of big animals then. There was the plains lion, the lion that was much larger than the lions that we just looked at. And there was also the giant short-faced bear, which was a bear much larger than a grizzly bear. All of the paleontologists that have studied these animals say the giant short-faced bear cannot pick up a mammoth limb bone-- a full, adult mammoth limb bone-- and break it at mid shaft. The bone is just too heavy and thick. ALDA: These guys were a lot stronger than I am. They lived outdoors and everything. Okay. No, wait a minute, wait a minute. Ow! Okay. Now, let's do it the way that humans actually broke bones in the prehistoric period. Oh... Okay? Watch your hand. Now, try to hit that bone right there. There you go. One more time. There. Okay? Here is what we call a spiral fracture. This is a very typical pattern. It spirals around the bone as opposed to going straight. You really did a job on that when you broke it. I did a job on my hand-- I cut my hand. Oh, no. Here we see the semicircular notch where the impactor hit it. Oh, yeah, yeah. And then we get this negative cone of percussion, we call this. This is indicative. This is the diagnostic factor of percussion by a rock hitting a bone. The force of the rock hitting spreads in a typical way? Spreads in a typical way, making a cone shape. ALDA: This is how the mammoth bones were broken, says Steve. Only humans can create this kind of evidence. HOLEN: We're going to fit four pieces of this femur together to show an impact point. Okay, something very heavy and hard hit this at a high rate of speed, causing these spiral fractures. Then when we look at the impact point, we see the semicircular notch, giving you some idea of the diameter of the impactor. And then when we turn this piece up on edge, we can see this negative cone of percussion right here. Oh, yeah. This is the one-- if you would hold that-- that we produced earlier, and here we can see a negative cone of percussion like here, that looks just like this one. ALDA: Steve's found the same pattern at five mammoth bone sites. One site, La Sena in Nebraska, is 18,000 years old. Have people come up with alternative ways that you could get that pattern? There has been one suggestion in actualistic studies in Africa around mass death sites, where a lot of elephants died around a drying-up water hole, where you get a bone that's broken, another bone laying on it, it gets trampled by an elephant and you get a little notch. ALDA: The bone laying on top of it would have that... would concentrate the force the way a rock would? Right. ALDA: But at La Sena, Steve found the lighter bones like the ribs and vertebrae intact. They were cracked during excavations but had not been trampled. When you get trampling situations, the first bones that get broken are the ribs and the vertebrae, okay? So what we have at the La Sena site is just the opposite of what happens in Africa with trampling situations. The lighter bones are more intact and the heavier bones are broken all to pieces. So that's why this cannot be trampling. ALDA: One problem with the idea of people in America 18,000 years ago is that at that time, the way in was blocked by ice. During the last Ice Age, ice took water from the oceans. With sea levels 300 feet lower, a huge land bridge opened up joining Siberia and Alaska. But ice also formed a 1,000-mile barrier clear across Canada. Above the barrier was the ancient landscape archaeologists call Beringia. We're in the Tanana River valley in the center of Alaska at what would have been the eastern edge of Beringia. On the bluff above the river is a site where people lived 14,000 years ago. It's called Broken Mammoth. One part of the idea that Clovis people were the first Americans has always been that they came through Alaska, then traveled south just as the Canadian ice sheets were breaking up. So for a long time, archaeologists have looked for signs of Clovis people in Alaska. This site was discovered in 1989 by chance. The state archaeologists came to investigate. ARCHAEOLOGIST: They put the new road in and it trimmed off the edge of this little knoll that comes down to the river. So we scrambled up and took a look like we're supposed to do and there were artifacts and bones coming out of the strata. ALDA: Right away Chuck dug a small test pit. He found mammoth bone fragments and some charcoal that turned out to be about 13,000 years old. A promising site. ARCHAEOLOGIST: We knew right off it was old. It had well-preserved bone, mammoth tusk fragments, artifacts-- probably hearths because of all this charcoal that we found coming out-- and so we just, we took kind of a gamble. We said, okay, let's do it. Let's get a big project, let's get a bunch of students up here and in 1990, and it was a gamble that paid off. ALDA: The site yielded a variety of artifacts: scrapers of various kinds... a mammoth ivory spear foreshaft... bone tools... and at the lowest level, crude stone tools. These were older-- 14,000 years. It was the oldest site in Alaska, but no Clovis points. Then a little further down the valley another site was discovered. This turned out to be older still by a few hundred years. The site yielded not Clovis points but microblades and scrapers. These are typical of Siberian and Russian sites going back more than 20,000 years. For Chuck Holmes, this reinforces the idea that at that time the people in Alaska weren't really Americans. Alaska was actually more a part of the Old World, in Siberia. So I really don't see much connection at all between what's going on in Alaska and, say, Clovis, and how that comes about and where it comes from. I do not see a connection of origins. I just don't have the data that shows me that. ALDA: This is now a hot debate among archaeologists. Did Clovis people or their predecessors come through here or did they come some other way? ( Yesner explaining to Alda ) David Yesner insists his finds show a connection between Alaska and Clovis. Are they Clovis or what? Okay, I prefer, rather than referring to these people as pre-Clovis, as proto-Clovis. Proto-Clovis. Why... wh-wh-what's the difference? Because pre-Clovis is a term that's been used to suggest people who are somehow different than Clovis, that preceded them. I think these are Clovis, but they're just earlier than the classic Clovis in the lower 48 states, in the areas to the south. They're 500 years earlier, but they are, if not direct ancestral, then certainly an offshoot of those earliest people that became Clovis.

				Were the First Americans European? Some data suggest that the first Americans originally came from Europe.
		Select text to jump ahead in the clip: ALDA: David Yesner's "proto-Clovis" people had to come down through what's called the "ice-free corridor" just as the ice sheets retreated and arrive in time to become Clovis people 13,500 years ago. ALDA There was... it was free enough of ice, it was open enough... To permit movement. I don't know how good an environment it was, but for me that suggests, okay, it's possible at that point to have some people. It's just the right time to get people from Broken Mammoth down to the south and perhaps become ancestral to Clovis. ALDA: We're going to come back to that ice-free corridor, but first we'll see what Dennis Stanford at the Smithsonian has to say about an Alaska connection to Clovis people. Here's how Siberian people used their microblades. Using pitch or pine resin, they set them in a row along a bone or wooden holder. It made a good knife or spear point. But for Dennis Stanford, microblade technology bears no relation to the bifacial spear point system that Clovis people used. He spent years in Alaska, but he couldn't see Clovis's origins. I can remember sitting on the banks of the western edge of Alaska looking off to Siberia and saying, "If we could ever get to Siberia we will have the answer." And finally we got to Siberia in the late '80s and early '90s, and we were able to look at all of the archaeological collections in Siberian museums and talk to the Russian archaeologists and go out and look at their sites. There wasn't any Clovis. And this began to bother me considerably. ALDA: Now Dennis has a different idea, which is bothering other people considerably. All right, these are artifacts... ALDA: He's developing a theory which says that Clovis people came from the other direction-- not from Siberia but from Europe, where they're called Solutreans. These people made bifacial projectile points like Clovis, and they're the only Paleolithic people in Europe that did that. ALDA: This is the base of a Solutrean projectile point. Dennis and his group noticed Solutrean points have clear thinning at the base. STANFORD: As we looked at these, we began to see that some of them are actually... have little kind of flutes in them. Can you see that? Yeah. So it's sort of incipient to this fluting, and that these things really work nicely on these harpoons. ALDA: Many Solutrean practices paralleled those of Clovis. They often made large blades like this-- sometimes unfinished-- which they'd store in caches. Whether for ceremonial reasons or as raw material stock, we don't know. Clovis people did the same. This is the Simon cache from Idaho. About a dozen Clovis caches have been found. And then there's the Clovis spear shaft wrench, made of mammoth bone. The first people to make these were the Solutreans. STANFORD: There were so many shared traits, both technological and cultural, that we said that it has to be, but there's two major problems. One, the Solutrean material is 5,000 years older than Clovis, and there's the old Atlantic Ocean out there that the Titanic couldn't get across. Now, what about our cave men? Are they going to cross the Atlantic Ocean? ALDA: Here's problem number one. The Solutrean culture, here in France and Spain, lasted from 19,000 to 16,000 years ago. Clovis culture didn't begin until 13,500 years ago. Dennis says a site called Cactus Hill in Virginia holds the answer. These are casts of the Cactus Hill material, and here, we have these nice little projectile points, and do they remind you of something? They're bifacial, right? They're bifacial, they're basally thinned, and to us, they look just like Solutrean. ALDA: The bases of the two Cactus Hill points are thinned in exactly the same way as the base of the Solutrean point. That's in the center here. Cactus Hill is a recently discovered, very old East Coast site that-- like Topper-- is forcing new thinking. What was even more exciting was the radiocarbon date. It came back about 18,000. So that's pushed Solutrean... or Cactus Hill-- pre-Clovis-- back so it overlaps with Solutrean in time. So you have stuff that looks Solutrean and dates to the same time as the Solutrean technology. Right. So how come we're still talking about Clovis as being the oldest folks here? I don't know. ( both laugh ) ALDA: This fossil walrus jaw illustrates the next step in Dennis's argument. It was found in the Chesapeake, along with a projectile point of a type called Suwannee, first found in Florida. Suwannee points look very Solutrean, but have never been dated. The walrus provides the key, says Dennis. Walrus are animals of the ice. The only time they could have come anywhere near the Chesapeake was during the height of the last Ice Age, and that was around 15,000 to 20,000 years ago. That's when, and how, the Solutreans got here, says Dennis. They came along the edge of the ice. Of course, they'd need boats. We asked a Canadian expert in traditional boat designs

				By Land or By Sea How did the first Americans get here? Learn more about the boats that may have brought them.
		Select text to jump ahead in the clip: to build us one. In Vancouver, British Columbia, Robert Morris builds what are called "skin-on-frame" boats. You want to make sure that the, um... thwart isn't resting on any lashings or abrading any lashings. ALDA: The frame is fastened entirely with various kinds of bindings and lashings. He's using modern materials-- like epoxy glue to fix this break-- but he learned his traditional skills from the Inuit people of the Canadian North. MORRIS: They would have used a blood or blood and fish hide glue. One of the elders was telling me that at a certain time of year, the dried seal blood is so sticky, that if you're eating seal meat and you get a bit of dried blood stuck between your teeth, you actually have to hit the side of your jaw in order to break your teeth loose. It's like super toffee. ALDA: We don't know if these boats existed in Solutrean times. All we can say is, these are very old techniques, used in many traditions all over the world. Imagine instead of nylon twine, twisted fibers from caribou back sinew. Imagine instead of sawn lumber, driftwood shaped with stone axes and scrapers. It's not so farfetched that people could have been doing this for 20,000 or 30,000 years or longer. Now imagine bearded seal or split walrus hides, sewn together by the women of the group, then stretched over the frame. Well, all you've done is imagine what the Inupiat people of Alaska have done for many thousands of years. We're building a boat very similar to the skin-on-frame umiaks of Alaska's Arctic coast. They're tough, light and flexible. They carry heavy loads and are ideal for use along the edge of the ice. Launch day for our umiak. We've asked along a crew of scientists and archaeologists for the maiden voyage. Okay, let go. ALDA: Robert's big concern is stability. Dumping a load of scientists into Vancouver Harbor would not be the best way to show how Solutreans reached America. So where would you suggest I sit? Why don't you sit in the middle? I've got the gunwale. Don't worry about going over. Get your hip right against the gunwale. I want you to be... You guys can be in the bow. ALDA: The boat would capsize if Robert wasn't hanging on. We're going to get some rocks over at this beach to try and get the weight... center of gravity of the boat lower. ALDA: Robert adds ballast-- about 200 pounds altogether. So where do you think we should go? How about Asia? We'll do the return trip. MORRIS: Maybe a little backwater on the starboard side there. Okay, forward all sides. It actually didn't have the stability that I thought it would have at first, but once it was ballasted, it was amazing. Maybe we can go out a bit further. I love the way this boat is flexing. MORRIS: We were hitting swells out there and reflected waves and chop that 20 minutes earlier would have rolled the boat right over, and we were all just going, "Whoo-hoo!" Particularly when we hit the large waves, I was worried at first, but it was amazing how stable it was. ALDA: Our umiak proved to be a very capable boat-- great for long-distance travel, taking plenty of cargo. HETHERINGTON: I was thinking, "Well, where are the kids going to go? Where's-- the household goods-- where are they going to go?" The boat, as you can see, has a lot of space in it, and it actually needed that extra weight to make it work properly. ALDA: The edge of the ice is a surprisingly easy place to live and thrive. There's good hunting-- for seals, walrus, even whales. Northern people have been doing this for a long time. Anybody who was capable of living in northern latitudes would certainly have had the technology available, both to hunt along the seacoast and also to build the kind of boats that we're talking about here. It's very likely that the, for example, the shelters for hunter-gathers in northern environments are going to be built out of skin, and so right there, you've got the skin technology. You'd have skin technology for clothing as well, and this would be essential not only for surviving in cold climates, but also for building the kind of boats that we're looking at here. ALDA: In fact, long-distance oceantravel near the ice makes sense for people coming into America both from Europe and Asia. They could have come during the Ice Age, reaching both coasts in time to settle all the early sites we know about. In contrast to ocean routes, it may be that the obvious land route into America that archaeologists had always accepted wasn't so easy. Our crew included a geologist who's an expert on the Canadian ice sheets during the Ice Age. There were actually two ice sheets that covered North America. There was the Laurentide ice sheet, and it extended up into the Arctic and down into the mid-continent area of the United States, off into Montana. And then there was another ice sheet that covered what we call the Cordillera-- the mountains extending from the Rocky Mountains on the east right over to the coast. The Cordilleran ice sheet got to its maximum extent after the Laurentide ice sheet had formed. So there were periods of time, maybe down to about 22,000 years, something like that, that some of the lowland major valleys-- the north-south valleys in the Cordillera-- were still open. ALDA: So people could walkinto America from Beringia before about 22,000 years ago. There's no evidence that they did, but that would fit with Steve Holen's 18,000- year-old mammoth bone sites in Nebraska. Then the corridor was closed for about the next 10,000 years. JACKSON: Maybe down to about 12,000 years ago, the way south-- east of the Cordillera, east of the Rocky Mountains, the Mackenzie Mountains and so on-- was pretty well blocked by ice. ALDA: This is another way the traditional view of Clovis could be wrong if Clovis people were here a thousand years before the ice-free land corridor was available. They still could have come down the Pacific coast-- stopping at Santa Rosa Island-- or they might have come the way Dennis Stanford suggests. STANFORD: The ice-free corridodidn't open up early enough for Clovis to get down, but by the time the Solutrean-related people worked around the glacial front, it was opening up, and they just worked right up through... ALDA: And it would have opened up from the south first, because it was warmer there. Yes. And then so that would be a path that people might take. Absolutely. But then once they had gone up there... They ran into Asians that were already there, and these are the microblade-using people. ALDA: So now instead of the firstAmericans being one people, coming one way, at one date, we might have a Pacific coastal route, a Beringian land route and an Atlantic ice route. And we haven't even mentioned some of the direct ocean routes that people are starting to think about. It's a whole new world for the peopling of the New World. Okay, we've finally got rid of the ice-free corridor, the Clovis-first model. And let's think broadly. Let's think about oceans being highways rather than barriers, and how does that affect the way humans migrated around the world, and it's going to change our views entirely. What will it tell us about the rest of humanity, if you get it a little more clear what happened on this continent? Well, I think the key thing is that, if we're right, it just shows how closely we're all related. And I like that.