[MUSIC] When did humans first travel onto the American continents?

What routes did they take to get here?

And how did they make life in an environment much different than we know today?

These questions drive the search to unearth new evidence and new answers that often raise even bigger questions.

[MUSIC] To delve into the evidence of ancient life on the plains, Don Rowlison traveled to the Shawnee County Historical Society in Topeka to have a discussion with three fellow Kansas archaeologists and old friends, Dr.

Robert Hoard, former state archaeologist at the Kansas Historical Society, Dr.

Steven Holen with the Center for American Paleolithic Research, and Dr.

Jack Hofman, professor emeritus at the University of Kansas.

And all these guys are paleo-archaeologists.

That isn't their specific thing, but they have a heavy interest in it, because archaeologists have to be pretty well-rounded to recognize a military camp, railroad grade, and stuff like that.

But today we'll be talking about the paleo-indian.

And the paleo-indian are what are considered the first people coming to North America.

I'm up for corrections and stuff, but I think how we all started out, they said the paleo-indian came out of Asia, about where Siberia is now during one of the last ice ages.

And the ice had encapsulated the seawater so much in the continental glaciers that it exposed what was called a land bridge connecting Siberia with Alaska.

And also, and please correct me on this, that when they came across, they always told me that the people probably had, as the only domestic animal, the dog.

They knew how to make fire, and they knew how to nap or chip stone objects and make stone tools.

Dennis Stanford, out of the Smithsonian, he had a different idea that people came from Europe and hopscotched across Iceland, Greenland, eastern Canada, and then down.

Right.

That's called the Salutrian hypothesis.

And he and Bruce Bradley developed this hypothesis based on the similarity of artifacts in France and Spain, Salutrian artifacts to Clovis artifacts in North America.

And Salutrian artifacts were, it was a stone age group in Europe.

In Europe, yes.

And so the artifacts looked the same, so they thought maybe there was some connection.

So the question becomes, is this independent invention in North America, or is there really a connection between these two groups of people?

And they think there's a direct connection that some people were able to use boats, these Salutrian people from France and Spain, and were able to follow.

During the last glacial maximum, there was an ice sheet across the North Atlantic, covered Iceland and Greenland and all of that.

But there was an ice front, and he thought they became adapted to coming across and hunting along that front of that ice sheet and got to North America.

And I think it's possible.

I don't know that I completely believe it, but I think it's quite possible.

You wait for more data to make your mind.

It's a good hypothesis, but what do you think, Jack?

Coastal movement, using boats, that has a lot of time depth.

And it's also extremely difficult to document and find, because the sea level fluctuations that you mentioned... And the boats don't preserve, basically.

They're made of wood and rope and things like that, so that doesn't preserve.

I might add that on the island of Crete in the Mediterranean, there's archaeological sites, 130,000 years old, and there's never been a land bridge to Crete.

So people were using boats to get to Crete over a pretty good stretch of water.

And in Southeast Asia, recently they discovered a site on the island of Sulawesi that's between 100 and 200,000 years old, and there's never been a land bridge to that island either.

So we know that people were crossing pretty good stretches of water, and like Australia, at least 60,000 years ago.

What do we have recorded as the earliest people in North America, as far as a pretty good solid date?

You've just asked the most controversial question in North American archaeology.

So congratulations.

And there's almost as many different opinions as there are people studying this.

And the reason I brought that up is because if they came across the Bering land bridge down along the tip of South America, they have 13,000 year old, 16,000 year old sites down there, and you wonder if these people were coming in here, how they got there that fast.

Unless they were following the shoreline or using watercraft.

You can move much more rapidly as a population along the coastline, because it's unidirectional.

If you come in by land and you're hunting big game, you have to spread out over a wide area, and it takes a lot longer for people to get the population level and move through different environments.

But at the coastline, you have fish, shellfish, seals, all that kind of stuff along the coastline, and it's a straight line.

So I think there was probably some pretty rapid movement.

One of the challenges I think we encounter as archaeologists is that we, even though we were trained in departments of anthropology, archaeologists in the 1960s and 70s and 80s, and maybe it started changing, we did not deal with indigenous people.

And we didn't do it well, and we didn't do it consistently, and we tended as a discipline to ignore them, and to essentially relegate oral tradition as nonimportant.

As folklore.

As folklore, yeah.

It's worth noting in the 1960s, there was a very strong push towards a more scientific approach to archaeology.

I accepted that as dogma, and I think a lot of other people did as well, only to live with that for a couple decades and realize that the people have something to contribute to that through their oral traditions.

I had never worked with Native Americans until I met the Pawnee.

A big controversy about human remains and the Pawnee, wantedf their human remains back, and the archaeologists were fighting it.

And I got to these meetings with these Pawnee people, and I go, "They're right."

And so I started working with Roger Echo-Hawk, a Pawnee historian, we were working on a canal project in southern Nebraska, and we were salvaging these central plains tradition houses that are about 800 years old, and we came across one, and it just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger, and pretty soon it's 45 feet in diameter.

There was a little hearth in the back corner of the house where there was an opening and a bunch of little indentations around it that you didn't see in regular houses.

It was a ceremonial structure, but Roger Echo-Hawk worked on it from the Pawnee religious point of view, and it was pretty exciting to see him trace back some of their religious beliefs 800 years.

So the first recognized culture that I know of in North America is called the Clovis.

So Clovis technology, the most recognizable artifact from that complex, is a spear point that has distinctive fluting, or an area taken off from the base of the point to thin it.

And these are found associated with woolly mammoth as well as extinct forms of bison.

They're known to be quite early, and what's interesting about that is they're very widespread throughout North America, almost as if they arose in place or there was someone preceding them.

Do these go into Central and South?

Central, Central America, Central.

There are other fluted point types that seem to be related to these in South America all the way to Terra del Fuego.

Is that the fishtail?

Fishtail points that are fluted, but they don't look exactly like this, but they have a similar technology in the fluting.

With these, the Clovis people were hunting what is now extinct forms of animals.

Bison or buffalo aren't what we have today.

Some say also camels, or cameloids as we know, and horses, and ground sloth, I believe.

Yes.

We should also add that these artifacts are casts of ones that came from Kansas, one of the better Clovis sites in Kansas.

I noticed it said, "Jewel County" on it.

At Lovewell Reservoir.

Actually, this was part of my dissertation study.

This lithic material is from Flat Top Butte in northeast Colorado, so it's moved hundreds of miles to get with these people.

Jack helped me with that.

We went out and recorded Clovis points from private collections all over Kansas, Nebraska, and northeast Colorado.

We documented movements of 900 to 1,000 kilometers of some of this lithic material, which is like 600 miles.

That's pretty significant.

And both north and south.

North and south and east and west.

I predicted that some of these groups were moving five to 600 kilometers on a yearly basis even, and then meeting other groups and exchanging lithics, and then they would move even further.

Clovis sites date about 13,000 calendar years ago.

When we were all trained back in the good old days, it was kind of dogma that Clovis were the first people in North America.

And then the hypothesis was that they caused the extinction of all these large animals.

Mammoths, camels, horses, sloths, and a lot of others.

The only ones to survive really were bison.

There's a lot of thought now that it's more complex than that.

There was a very dramatic climate change at the same time, and there was a lot of biotic reorganization.

In other words, the plains, grasslands changed and the forest changed and so forth.

The plains, as we know them and think about them, as a grassland-dominated, bison-dominated ecological region, simply did not exist.

The biotic diversity trees and so forth were quite different than we see today.

These huge Colombian mammoths, some of the largest mammoths that have ever lived in the world, ate several hundred pounds of grass a day.

So your horse doesn't eat very much compared to them.

But they needed a medium to tall grass prairie because they would grab the grass with their trunk and eat it.

And you find mammoths out in the high plains of Colorado today.

You find their remains.

You find their remains, yes, that's right.

So they could not have made a living out there with grass this high.

They couldn't have.

So these mixed tall grass prairies extended probably all the way to the Rocky Mountains at that time.

Where does the term "clovis" come from for these particular projectile points or stir points?

So there was a rancher in New Mexico out, and he found the remains of some very large, uncharacteristically large animals and embedded in those bones was a distinctive clovis point.

So the clovis point is named after the region of Clovis, New Mexico.

I'm going to move a little farther afield here to southern Canada.

There is a bison jump there.

There's a huge rock cliff that the Native Americans used starting about 5,000 years ago, possibly earlier, and used it for a few thousand years.

And they would jump bison off this cliff.

And at the base of this cliff, the archaeologists have excavated bison bone deposits 20 to 30 foot thick.

People just used this over and over.

And if you go up on top of the bluff, there's an open prairie, and they built drive lines that narrowed in, and people would stand on these drive lines and wave things or scare the bison, and the lead bison would go over the cliff, and everybody else would too.

So they were very sophisticated hunters, and they found success, and it's a great museum.

I highly recommend if people want to see this, they will look at this museum.

And the nice thing about the museum is that it's run by the Native people from the local area.

Head Smashed In Head Smashed In is the name of it, in southern Alberta.

With the mammoth, do you see any sort of correlation with the mammoth jump anywhere?

No, no mammoth jumps.

But there's, in Colorado, at the Dent site, there's mammoths in a gully fill, and it looks like they were maybe using that gully as some kind of a trap, possibly.

That was the first discovery of a spear point with mammoths in situ made by the Denver Museum in 1933.

And they set out a paleontological crew.

They didn't have an archaeologist on staff, and they started, and they excavated and found a spear point and left it in place and photographed it in place with the mammoth bones.

And the 12 Mile Creek site was like that, too.

They found some, and they did it, but I mean, it was the paleontologists that found it out of the University of Kansas that were out there hunting for fossils in that area.

Well, it was paleontologists that found all these early discoveries.

They worked on the Folsom site, too, in 1926 and 27.

The way things are now, I personally think that paleontologists make the earliest and best discoveries because archaeologists even today think they know the answer that archaeological sites really can't be more than maybe 17 or 20,000 years old.

And so they don't work in the older deposits, but paleontologists do, and they find things.

And that's what's really interesting.

What I have worked on here in the plains on mammoth sites at Lovewell Reservoir and at Medicine Creek Reservoir in Nebraska, and I have mammoth sites with impact fractured and flaked mammoth bone, these huge mammoths.

So what is an impact fracture?

Well, you see this a lot on bison bone.

You'll see impact notches where they break the bone open to get marrow out.

Well, mammoth bone not only is good to get the marrow out, but it's big enough you can actually flake it into rough chopping tools that you, if you can get one bone out of the mammoth, you can flake enough bone tools to help butcher the mammoth.

You don't have to use up all your stone tools.

So people have been breaking up elephant and mammoth bones starting in Africa 1.5 million years ago or more, and everywhere where people are associated with these, what we call proboscidians, which are mammoths, mastodons, and elephants, they use bone for tools and flake them.

The site at Lovewell Reservoir is about 22,000 calendar years old, and the site at Medicine Creek Reservoir is about 21 to 22,000 years old, much older than Clovis.

But I don't find any spear points with these things because the bone is flaked, and we've done experiments flaking elephant bone, and we can recreate these patterns we find in these archaeological sites.

So a lot of people don't like this research because I haven't found stone tools with these mammoths, but I say, well, you don't have to have stone tools.

You have to have evidence of human technology.

And we have that, and we've reproduced it experimentally, and all of these are in fine-grained geological deposits, so it's not some weird geological thing breaking the bone, and it's not other mammoths trampling on the bone because you don't get impact notches.

You don't get the sharp edges hitting it.

We've become fairly sophisticated in recognizing signatures on bones that come from different causes.

There are a whole variety of things that can cause bones to break, and we can distinguish between bones that are old and already dried out that break and bones that are fresh and green when they break.

And the kinds of things that Steve has been documenting, there's no simple explanation other than these are broken by people.

Interestingly, at the Lang Ferguson site in South Dakota, we see the same bone technology in association with Clovis projectile points It's the same.

It's the same bone technology, same bone flaking.

The paleontologists many years ago at Lake McConaughey excavated... Lake McConaughey, Nebraska.

Western Nebraska.

Yeah, and they excavated a site eroding out the edge of the reservoir, and they found some impact fractured bone, and they said this was probably on some extinct animals.

And they said this is probably human association.

They published a little like one page article on it, but that's all that ever came out.

I went back there many years later, and by that time a private collector had found a big piece of mammoth bone with a big impact notch on it.

Something about two inches in diameter had hit that bone when it was fresh and broke it open.

Just like all these sites I'd excavated, it's the same thing.

So we thought, well, let's see how old that bone is.

So we radiocarbon dated it at 33,000 years old.

So then I went back and the paleontologists had excavated a bison bone butchery unit.

It was still in the plaster jacket.

And so we dated that one at 33,000 years old also.

And I sent it to a colleague of mine who is an expert on bison bone butchery, and I sent pictures of it to him and said, oh, he said, yeah, that's obviously a bison, a butchered bison unit.

And I told him how old it was and he kind of went, oh, you know, because it's much older than they're supposed to be.

And did we go further back than that?

I'm just curious.

Well, sure.

Well-- Yeah, Steve, do you go back further than that?

Yes, we do.

And again, we can blame the paleontologists, okay?

So in the 1990s, Rob Bonixson of the Center for the Study of the First Americans, he was at Oregon State University then, and he told me about a site in California that he visited, that paleontologists had excavated in San Diego that he thought was really old.

Well, I didn't have any research money or time to do it at the time, and I forgot about it.

And an amateur archaeologist sent me a book, and in the end of the book, there was a mention of this National City Mastodon site.

This was many years later.

And at that time, I was curator of archaeology at the Denver Museum and had a little bit of time and a little bit of travel money, so my wife and I flew out.

We walked in there and looked, and what was very fine-grained overbanked deposits, fine sand and silts, here were these huge rocks with broken mastodon bone all around them.

There were calcium carbonate concretions about a half inch to an inch thick on some of the rocks and some of the bones.

If you get calcium carbonate concretions adhering to things, it's usually 100,000 years old.

And I'm just staring off into space, and my wife says, "What's wrong with you?"

And I said, "This goes against everything I was ever taught, everything I ever thought I knew."

So over a 10-year period, we worked with a paleontologist there.

We got a team together, finally got 11 co-authors, all different kinds of people, geochronologists, people who dated the site, paleontologists, archaeologists, geologists, and they did what's called uranium series dating, which I knew nothing about, but the uranium series dated the bone.

At 130,000 years ago.

Wow.

And so we published it and got it in a very important journal.

So we received a lot of flak, and we're still looking for more evidence.

There was a lot of flak about Clovis when it first appeared, and people didn't believe that there were archaeological sites that were that old, and it was a major point of discussion for a good decade.

And Lansing Man, too, with human remains up in Northeastern Kansas, when they found that, they couldn't be that deep.

There was no one here.

This is such an outlier that we don't really understand the big time gap in between there, and we're working to try to fill that in.

Well, and that's what I always thought about archaeology.

You might go to a site and you might answer one question, but you leave with 20 unanswered or more.

Well, that you never, you never get.

Yeah, this site has brought up so many questions that we can't answer.

That's why people have a hard time accepting it.

What's your site name ?

Oh, it's called the Cerutti Mastodon site.

It was named after an amateur archaeologist who actually worked as a monitor on this highway project for the paleontologists, and he saw the backhoe hit these rocks with fractured bones, and he goes, "Stop, stop, stop."

And he saved the site.

We named the site after him because he saved it, because he got them to excavate it like an archaeological site.

So how can a person, a regular citizen in Kansas, help with the archaeology of the state or even new ideas?

So when I was the state archaeologist, it was not unusual for me to get a call from a landowner saying that they found an arrow point or they found some pottery, and that was a good thing.

They would call in and report that, and given time and resources, you can send an archaeologist to go out and they can record the site.

They can show the location of the site.

They can describe what's there, maybe do a little bit of test excavation and see if it's deeply buried or just on the surface.

But people also can record sites on their own.

The site form is available online.

To have the information, to have a description of what was found, maybe some photographs of what was found, where it was found, proximity to water, the form literally asks you, you know, what needs, what information is necessary.

It ties back to these early sites we were talking about, whether it's 12 Mile Creek, Folsom, Clovis, just over and over, we know about these places because of local landowners or local interested parties.

That enables the documentation of sites and the archaeological record that we otherwise would have no idea about.

So citizens can and do participate in the archaeological research, but by doing that we can start looking at different patterns.

How widely spread or not is a certain ceramic type or a certain kind of stone tool or a certain type of stone.

Yeah, you know, it's amazing how many people will say, I always wanted to be an archaeologist, you know, or how did you get to be able to do that?

And I think it reflects this human interest that is shared by many, not everyone, but by many people.

Just curiosity about our origins, about human nature, about how people lived in the past.