Early Humans of Ice Age America

American History Hit

This episode explores the controversial debate surrounding the timeline of human arrival in the Americas, challenging the long-held 'Clovis Firs

Key takeaways

• The 'Clovis First' theory is criticized as a construction of archaeological bias rather than an indisputable scientific fact.
• Evidence from the Bluefish Caves in the Yukon suggests human activity involving butchered animals as far back as 24,000 years ago.

Main topics

• Pre-Clovis human migration
• Archaeological bias and racism

Notable quotes

Archaeologists really erased the diversity of the indigenous people of the Americas by creating this false story of the Clovis people.

Conclusion

The episode emphasizes that a truly scientific understanding of human

Transcript preview

Speaker 4 (0:00) Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries, with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past. alive. We are standing on the Olympic Peninsula, near what is today the sleepy coastal town of Squim, Washington. But 13,800 years ago, the old growth forests and temperate climate for which this region is so famous still lie far in the future. Instead, we're staring across a cold, raw landscape of low grasses and shrubs. Glaciers cling to the mountains in the distance, but here in the lowlands, the frozen earth has softened. and a group of hunters is tracking the enormous footprints of a mastodon through the mud. These people rarely hunt mastodon. It's too dangerous. They've learned that lesson too many times. But the cold season has dragged on. Game is scarce, and today they're willing to take the risk. Spears and sharpened bone projectiles at the ready. Their voices hushed. They try not to spook this... fur-covered giant which could so easily trample them into the earth or gore them with its long tusks. Beneath the gray-white sky, the hunters close in. A weapon flies, and its sharpened point strikes the mastodon, burying itself deep inside the ribcage. What happens next, we cannot know. The prehistoric drama that ensued. But just about 14,000 years later, that broken point will be found, still intact and buried in that rib, unearthed by a landowner digging on his property. And the world of those hunters and the families they fed lives on, preserved as well in the oral histories of indigenous peoples. Speaker 4 (2:17) Hello all, this is American History, and I'm your host, Don Wildman. Happy to be with you, happy you're listening. Over time on this series, we've done a number of episodes on the prehistoric past of the North American continent, but we've kept things general then. Today, we get more specific. We're going to look at a particular region and the finds made in that region that raise important questions about early American arrival, who these people were, the environment that existed in the world they created for themselves, and perhaps as important as any fossils discovered, the stories, the oral histories that have been told down countless generations. For this, we are joined by Dr. Paulette Steeves, Professor of Geography, Archaeology, and Land Stewardship at the Algoma University in Ontario, Canada. She occupies the Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Indigenous History, Healing, and Reconciliation. She has authored the books The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere and Reclaiming Deep Human Histories of the Western Hemisphere, Archaeologists Who Braved Prejudice to Reveal the Evidence. Speaker 4 (3:31) Dr. Steeves, Paulette, welcome to American History. It is great to meet you. Speaker 2 (3:35) Thank you. Thank you for inviting me. Speaker 4 (3:37) Let us drop ourselves into the Pleistocene era, a vast stretch of time that begins, if I'm correct, about 2.6 million years ago and ends around, I don't know, 11,700 years ago, what we loosely call the Ice Age. In terms of human history, this overlaps with the Paleolithic, the Stone Age, when people lived primarily by hunting and gathering. Am I getting my dates right and my terms right? Here we go, deep in. Speaker 2 (4:04) Yes, the Pleistocene is the time frame of about 2.58 million to 11,700 years ago, often discussed as the Ice Age, which was marked by repeated cycles of cooling and warming when there were massive ice sheets covering up to 30 % of the Earth's land. The Speaker 4 (4:25) prevailing... Theory for generations, until the 90s really, was that the first people arrived in the Americas around 13,000 years ago. All these years are very rough in the general public understanding. A people associated with what archaeologists call the Clovis culture. It has to do with Clovis points found in the American Southwest, the actual fossils found there, the artifacts. The characteristics of the Clovis point, literally an arrowhead. What is going on with development of human society at that time? Speaker 2 (4:55) Well, we have to look in a lot of areas. So one thing that is often missed in these discussions is the diversity of different communities and different Indigenous peoples at the time. So there's many, many archaeological sites in North America that date to earlier than 11,200 years ago. That is the oldest date known for Clovis. Clovis technology. So another thing to make clear to people is that Clovis is not a culture. Clovis is a stone tool. Well, the archaeologists named this culture, but they applied it to all of North America. You don't see that anywhere in the world. A culture is a small group in a regional area, and it includes peoples. language, cultural ceremonies, practices, the way they live. This is a bigger picture of what a culture is. So archaeologists really erased the diversity of the indigenous people of the Americas by creating this false story of the Clovis people, when there were really many, many people. But a lot of earlier sites... than what they call the Clovis sites have been documented and published in academic journals. But in the history of archaeology, it's a history of colonization, which is based on a lot of bias and conjecture. But that's the same as many areas of the world where Indigenous peoples' history and links to the land were erased. So a lot of early archaeology regarding when humans arrived in the area we know today as the Americas is based on conjecture, not on scientific data. It's based on the teaching of early archaeologists from the 1900s till today that is often passed on while it's not supported by any scientific fact. We don't know when the earliest appearance of humans was anywhere in the world. In any given area on every year as new discoveries are made, we learn more about the deep human past, and this is how it should be. There should never be a firm timeline set for the first appearance of humans anywhere in the world because we don't know. And with new scientific technologies, we're learning more about deep human history. Every month. Speaker 4 (7:28) Yes. It's a big controversy. It's fascinating. I've done some television shows on this as a total outsider because obviously I'm not trained in this at all. And discussing these things with people is you get very worked up or they got very worked up with me about these dates and what they imply. And that's so much of what we're talking about here is a rethinking of this period. And just so people understand, you know, I'm one who was raised in the 60s and 70s. You were taught in those days, human civilization begins 10,000 years ago. For me, it was, I remember. And that's when people start to move across the land bridge into what we call Alaska and Yukon and all that area. And down they came. And that was sort of the simplistic view of how the North American continent was peopled. But in fact, it's full of subtleties and nuance. that have to do with the people themselves, right? And that's what we're talking about today, the cultures that began and those oral histories that were passed on. But I just want to, I'm establishing this for the purposes of argument. The Clovis theory, which was popularized in the early 20th century, was held as the gold standard, as I say, late into the 20th century and placed that arrival between 10 and 13,000 years ago. But that is now being pushed back. The time of their arrival is suggested to be further and further back. And there are many examples of this, and I want you to just comment on these particular examples. The 1970s, in the Yukon Bluefish Caves, the French-Canadian archaeologist, I'm going to do my best here, Jacques Saint-Marc, unearthed bones from an extinct species of horse with cuts that appear to have been made by humans dated to 24,000 years ago. Talk about that finding. Speaker 2 (9:15) So Bluefish Caves is in the Yukon Territory, and he collected over 36,000 animal bones, 15 with definite butcher marks. So, of course, he was highly critiqued for his work because it set the date of human arrival back to an earlier time. But Bourgeon came in. She was a graduate student, and she began rechecking the bones. And she confirmed there were 15 with human cut marks from skinning, dismembering, and defleshing on a horse. There was also caribou, wapate, and doll sheep and bison. So the oldest cut marked horse jaw dates to about 24,000 calibrated years before present. There's also a worked mammoth bone flake. and a core dated to about 23,500. When you get an understanding of the time frame of glaciations, this makes a lot more sense. During the time of glaciation, so the last glacial maximum was around 24,000 to around 11,000 years ago. So that's a time when that area was blocked by ice, not just a little bit of ice, ice that was miles deep, right? There was an ice connection between the eastern and the western hemispheres. We know today as Asia and the area of Alaska. But for migrations, there was nothing for people to eat. There was no fresh water. And this was hundreds of miles of ice. This is not a time anybody or any mammal is going to be migrating. But if you go back prior to the beginning of the last ice age, You do often at times have a land connection. You have what they call the subtropical forest in the north. So you have grazing, you have fresh water. Paleontologists have done an amazing job of documenting when our four-legged relations, mammals, went back and forth between the continents. So this was a two-way street. And if mammals are coming and going, so could humans. Speaker 4 (11:33) Interesting. You say the end of the last ice age. Within that ice age span that we're talking about, the 2.5 million to 11,000, there are many different periods of glaciation and melting. And I mean, we're talking huge amounts of time here, millennia. And so that's what we are referring to when there are more subtleties and nuance to this, as I mentioned. There were footprints found in the White Sands National Park in New Mexico in the United States. that date back to human habitation 21 to 23,000 years ago. That was a very famous finding not too long ago. And there have been arguments that humans were in Monteverde in Chile 33,000 years ago before today. This is why this becomes such a vibrant argument, you know, and debate. I can only imagine the conferences you've been to where people stake their ground in this stuff, right? Speaker 2 (12:25) Right. Well, you know, and people need to remember what I had to do as an archaeologist is not just understand the human footprint in the