Out of Eden: The Peopling of the World (40 page)

Southeast Asia: a gap in occupation, or just the effects of sea level?

In contrast to the clear technological changes that took place around the LGM farther north, Southeast Asia has very little to show from around the climax of the last ice age. In fact, there are few remains of material culture of any description. Whether this dearth of evidence reflects a lack of people or an absence of evidence in the right places, it cannot be used to support the idea of immigration from the north. The masking effect of low sea levels during the LGM is nowhere so great as in Southeast Asia, where the present land above the water is but a meagre remnant of the former continent of Sundaland (see
Figure 6.3
). David Bulbeck has pointed out that the reason why there is so little evidence of occupation at the time of the LGM may be that people generally lived on land less than 100 metres (330 feet) above sea level. They thus simply followed the sea, moving down from the hinterland as the sea fell to occupy land which is now beneath the waves. When the sea rose again after the
LGM they moved back inland, and this is the point where their cultures reappear in the modern archaeological record.
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Whatever the reason, the result is an apparent gap of occupation in inland Indo-China and the Malay Peninsula from around the LGM until about 14,400 years ago, when inland caves were reoccupied by people making pebble and chopper-chopping tools. In some cases the old lithic traditions continued right through the Neolithic period until 2,000 to 3,000 years ago. Since these regions were clearly habitable during the LGM, it is more likely that their occupiers had simply moved back from lower altitudes as the sea level rose.
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The interesting question is who these cave-dwelling, pebble-tool-using people were. It is generally thought that they were the ancestors of the nomadic Negrito forest hunter-gatherers who still occupy the same regions today. Archaeologist Zuraina Majid argues further that the post-glacial technology of the Lenggong Valley in Malaysia was really a continuation of traditions that locally go right back to the valley site of Kota Tampan, now tentatively dated to 74,000 years ago (see also
Chapter 4
). There is some genetic evidence that the ancestors of the Aboriginal Malays could have been living on the Indo-Chinese coastline as well over the same period. Again, the sea would have covered their traces.
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The picture of changes around the LGM is only slightly more revealing in Island Southeast Asia, where a flake-and-blade technology lasted to within the last 2,000 years. There are clues that there was an expansion into Island Southeast Asia during the ice age, as implied by the first evidence of colonization of the Philippines from 17,000 years ago. American archaeologist Wilhelm Solheim, doyen of Southeast Asian prehistory, sees the flake-and-blade tradition as a late Pleistocene intrusion to Island Southeast Asia from South China rather than as being home-grown.
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Perhaps the only star find that could signal an intrusion of really smart new technology, as it were from another planet, is in eastern Sabah on the shores of the extinct Lake Tingkayu. Beautifully,
bifacially worked lanceolate chert knives have been found here with a date inferred to be between 18,000 and 28,000 years ago. (‘Lanceolate’ means shaped like the head of a lance or leaf.) The latter date would suggest an arrival before rather than after the LGM. In Peter Bellwood’s words, these knives are ‘unique in the whole of Southeast Asia, except for one apparent lanceolate found . . . in a tin mine in Kedah in Peninsular Malaysia.’ If the Tingkayu knives from Borneo really were an introduced style, Bellwood’s comment may be a clue to a route taken by the technology from China, since he also mentions the two other preglacial sites on the same peninsula, but on the Thai side: Moh Khiew and Lang Rongrien. At each site there is some evidence for similar bifacial technology, but overlain by the ‘cruder’ Hoabinhian tools.
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Bellwood also finds technical echoes of the Tingkayu lanceolate points in Northeast Asia – specifically in the Diuktai of northeastern Siberia (since 18,000 years ago) and several regions of Japan from the same time.
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Although Bellwood feels that the Tingkayu culture is an independent local event, the cultural echoes he describes would be just the same as those suggested by the genetic model I have put forward. In other words, the dispersal of the hunter-gatherers from the Central Asia steppe around the time of the LGM took high-grade grassland hunting technology east and south-east to regions of China and Sundaland with expanding temperate grasslands. Curiously, the other technical link made with the Diuktai technology is with the New World – the subject of the next chapter, and the last leg of our journey with the first people to arrive at the farthest corners of the globe.

The extraordinary regional specificity of the paternal and maternal gene trees persisting today has made it possible to trace ancient migrations. It shows us that, as they were filling up the Old World, once people got to where they were going they tended to stay put and, at least until the last five hundred years, were mostly able to repel newcomers. What disturbed this conservatism the
most was the LGM. In the northern hemisphere, vast areas of the Old and New Worlds were rendered uninhabitable by ice, glacial lakes, and polar desert. For the formerly highly successful hunter-gatherers of the North Eurasian steppe there were few choices, and these, as usual, were determined by geography and climate. In the peninsula of Europe, locked in by sea, mountain, and desert, the only chance of survival was to be found in refuges in the more southerly temperate zones bordering the Mediterranean and Black Seas. After the LGM, the refugees re-expanded in number and territory, mostly back to where they had come from.

In Central and North Asia, formerly covered in grassland and roamed by huge herds of large herbivores, the increasing cold and desiccation forced the Upper Palaeolithic hunter-gathers off the high steppe in several directions to warmer and more temperate regions. These would have included the Ukraine to the west, China to the south and east, and Japan, Korea, and north-east Siberia. As always, the great rivers of Asia could have played a role as highways, but this time the traffic was downstream. The archaeological evidence for this migration of Upper Palaeolithic steppe hunting cultures towards the Pacific coast at the LGM, is best seen in Japan, but is echoed elsewhere. In South and Southeast Asia huge areas of continental shelf opened up for colonization as the sea level fell. How much of the population expansion in Sundaland (greater Southeast Asia during the LGM) resulted from local people, and how much from refugees from farther north, is not clear, but the genetic and dental evidence suggests mostly the former. The drop in sea level also opened a new continent, ‘Beringia’, to the north-east. This provided a land-bridge to the Americas, where our story reaches its final chapter.

T
HE PEOPLING OF THE
A
MERICAS

T
HAT THE
A
MERICAN
I
NDIANS
came across the Bering Strait from Asia has been a natural solution to an obvious shared ancestry. As Thomas Jefferson noted in 1784, ‘the resemblance between the Indians of America and the Eastern inhabitants of Asia, would induce us to conjecture, that the former are the descendants of the latter, or the latter of the former . . .’. This even-handed but ambiguous idea had already been given direction 200 years earlier by the Jesuit scientist and traveller José de Acosta, who had suggested that the Asians had come to America 2,000 years before the Spanish. There has not, until recently, been any serious rival to this view.
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With the exception of the colonization of Polynesia, it is likely that the entry into the Americas was the last of the great expansions of humankind into unexplored territory. With the great recent technical advances in the study of prehistory, intense local interest, and the enormous resources of the world’s richest nation, we might well expect the story of the peopling of the Americas to be wrapped up. We might expect to know approximately when the first entry occurred, how many subsequent migrations there were, who they were, and where they came from, and how and when. We might even expect to have a clue about what sort of languages they spoke.

Discord in academia

Nothing could be further from reality. Scientists cannot agree about dates of first entry, having offered estimates ranging from 11,500 to 50,000 years ago. They cannot agree on how many migrations there were, some suggesting one, others many. They cannot even agree on how many Native American language families there have been during historic times, let alone how many entered America. Much of the problem lies in the nature of the evidence and with entrenched, polar academic opinions which have made rational agreement impossible. But, as we shall see, American observers of American prehistorians are becoming increasingly bemused by the very free-enterprise approach to influencing scientific decision-making.
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Formal scientific method should allow for, even insist upon, the uncertainty of theories. Crudely speaking, a theory (or ‘model’) sets out to provide a logical explanation of something not previously understood, in the best way allowed by the observations. We have to accept that some observations may be inaccurate or even misleading, and that more and better observations may allow a new and better theory to be constructed. Observations which call the new theory into question may well turn up, in which case it will give way to another new theory. The hope is that, sooner rather than later, we can get as close as we can to some ideal reality or truth. It is misleading to assume that we can ever get to that absolute truth. Above all, we should always be open to the possibility of being wrong.

The reality of academe is rarely like this. Bright young academics make their names with a new theory or some work that breaks the mould, and then spend the rest of their professional lives consolidating and defending their position from attack. Their students, their financial sponsors, and, of course, the public expect much more certainty than is available. This all encourages inflexibility. The gap between reality and credibility has always been filled with that thick,
all-purpose glue of society – authority. Senior academics in each field have authority invested in their positions and defend both like high priests. When their authority is threatened by outsiders they perceive their positions to be under threat too, and they close ranks, form alliances, and chase off the pretenders. It is irrelevant whether the threat – some new interpretation which runs counter to a cherished, established view – actually gets closer to the Holy Grail of truth, or merely gives another angle on an opaque subject: the big guns still come out.

When two ‘authorities’ turn on each other, then we have civil war. The academic ground shakes as the great grey elephants thunder and charge. Neutral and objective colleagues are coerced to take sides, and juniors are advised to beware. Obviously there is a reverse side to such anti-establishment views of academe. Society abounds with adventurers who like to make capital from the unwary masses by exploiting their fascination with mystery. Some writers make large amounts of money, to the disgust of the archaeological establishment, questioning what they choose to label ‘dogma’, for instance whether humans invented their own ancient cultures, rather than the more exciting possibilities of Martian influence. Who could argue that accredited experts should not be there to defend our weak and ignorant minds from such charlatans? The problem of course is for the observer to know who is defending what in each situation.

The Clovis-first orthodoxy

What has all this to do with the peopling of the Americas? The answer is, much. The most contentious issue in American archaeology is the so-called Clovis orthodoxy or Clovis-first theory. The history of this orthodoxy goes back perhaps to the end of the nineteenth century, before which time it was a heresy. In the 1890s, William Henry Holmes of the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of American Ethnology and Thomas Chamberlin of the United States
Geological Survey chased off many dubious claims for Pleistocene (ice-age) occupation of the New World. The mantle of authority for this gatekeeper role was passed in the 1920s to the physical anthropologist Ales Hrdlicka, also of the Smithsonian. Long after, in 1995, Hrdlicka was singled out by American author Vine Deloria in his book
Red Earth, White Lies
as a heavy-handed zealous defender of the academic status quo who quashed research proposals designed to explore alternative theories.
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In 1926, Jesse Higgins of the Colorado Museum of Natural History found a pointed stone artefact at a site near Folsom, New Mexico, which also yielded the skeleton of an extinct bison. Hrdlicka refused to accept this as evidence of Pleistocene human occupation since no archaeologist had checked the association with the bones before the point was removed. Another stone point was found in 1927. It was left on site, examined, photographed, and verified by outside experts. Higgins found more and larger points, with the same fluting (fluting is where flakes have been struck from the base, presumably to facilitate hafting), first in 1932 in Colorado, in association with mammoth skeletons, then five years later, again with mammoth bones at Clovis, New Mexico. These larger points, now known as Clovis points, lay beneath representatives of the other type, now known as Folsom points, which were associated with bison skeletons.
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