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Ever since unusually ancient and deadly spear points were found near
Clovis, New Mexico in the 1930s, many archeologists have believed
that this type of weapon originated with the first settlers of the
New World, who supposedly migrated from Asia at the end of the last
ice age. In "America's Stone Age Explorers," NOVA reports new
evidence that challenges this widely held view.
The hunt for clues takes NOVA to sites of stunning discoveries in
western Pennsylvania and southern Chile; to southern France, where
Stone Age artifacts have been found that resemble the famous Clovis
points; to the high arctic to learn the techniques that may have
been used to cross the ice-encrusted Atlantic 17,000 years before
Columbus; and to a remarkable find in central Texas that may hold
the key to who invented the Clovis technology.
The distinctive design of a Clovis point (see
The Fenn Cache) is
perfect for killing big game, making it a Stone Age weapon of mass
destruction. The Clovis point may even have been behind the
extinction of large ice age mammals such as the mammoth (see
End of the Big Beasts). Clovis points have been found at archeological sites throughout
North America, and for decades these sites represented the oldest
accepted evidence of human presence in the New World.
Many archeologists therefore concluded that hunters equipped with
Clovis technology were the first settlers of the Americas and that
they probably arrived from Asia at the end of the Ice Age about
13,500 years ago, when lower sea level allowed hunters to cross a
land bridge connecting Siberia and Alaska. But there is growing
evidence that humans were in the Americas long before the Clovis
hunters (see
Before Clovis).
One of the best known of the possibly pre-Clovis sites is called
Meadowcroft, near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. There, Jim Adovasio of
Mercyhurst Archeological Institute has been excavating artifacts
well below the geological layer that corresponds to the Clovis
period, although many archeologists dispute his evidence. "A lot of
people ... think that this is not only a repudiation of a
well-accepted dogma, it's a repudiation of themselves," Adovasio
says.
Another promising pre-Clovis dig is Monte Verde in southern Chile,
where archeologist Tom Dillehay, formerly of the University of
Kentucky, has made an unusually rich find half a world away from the
Asian land bridge route. Also joining the debate are scientists
using DNA analysis of current populations of Native Americans to
look for clues of their ancestry—again with intriguing but
controversial results.
One team even proposes that the first Americans came from Europe,
not Asia, based on the similarity of Clovis points to the weapons of
the Solutreans, who lived about 17,000 years ago in what is now
southern France and northern Spain. If the Solutreans ever crossed
the Atlantic, they may have traveled like today's Eskimos, who make
long journeys skirting ice floes in watertight skin boats, hunting
arctic game as they go.
Archeologist Michael Collins of the University of Texas at Austin
has an even more startling theory. The theory is based on his
excavations at Gault, Texas, which show evidence of a more complex
Clovis culture than ever imagined, including a diet that spans the
food chain, evidence of a sophisticated trade network, hundreds of
types of tools, and possibly the earliest example of art in the
Americas.
"Where did Clovis come from?" asks Collins. "The longstanding notion
of the rapid spread of Clovis across the continent has been taken to
mean the spread of a people across the continent. An alternative
might be that the spread of Clovis is actually the expansion of a
technology across existing populations—analogous to the fact
you can go anywhere in the world and find people driving John Deere
tractors."
In other words, the Clovis point could be the first technological
breakthrough in the Americas, invented by people who had long been
resident here—and then adopted by their neighbors, who knew a
good thing when they saw it.
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