Out of Eden: The Peopling of the World (42 page)

Other reviews of Fiedel’s critique were approving. But the furore it caused left the big question mark hanging over Monte Verde.

For the interested lay person, or even an archaeologist unfamiliar with the sites, trying to assess what was going on here is rather like having to choose a doctor when all the doctors are accusing one another of professional misconduct. One clear conclusion from that hypothetical situation would be to distrust doctors’ opinions of one another. Perhaps the shrillness of the defenders of the Clovis-first orthodoxy is a measure of how much they perceive Monte Verde as a threat. Their response also serves as a baseline for assessing objections to other sites that are claimed to be pre-Clovis. If the objections come from well-known defenders of the Clovis-first orthodoxy, distrust them. If the objections (or confirmations) come from neutral experts or from the whole profession, take them seriously.

Meadowcroft

Another veteran high-profile site under siege is Meadowcroft Rockshelter. For thirty years, Pennsylvania archaeologist James Adovasio has led work on this site (see
Plate 24
). He and his colleagues have dug through eleven floor layers, unearthing 20,000 stone flakes and objects and a huge quantity of animal and plant remains. Fifty-two radiocarbon dates have been published for the Meadowcroft finds, the oldest at the bottom in sterile clay 31,000 years ago and the youngest at the top, just 1,000 years old. Dates unambiguously associated with Palaeoindian occupation go back to 16,225 years ago, while dates in excess of 19,000 years have been claimed for the deepest occupation layer.
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As soon as these old dates were published they drew a storm of protest. No prizes for who has been the fiercest critic: Vance Haynes. Years of criticism focused on details of stratigraphy, documentation, dating anomalies, and possible contamination by a coal seam a kilometre away. Adovasio is reported as regarding such criticism as pathological scepticism. Thousands of pages have been written answering specific questions. The contamination issue was buried by an independent geomorphologist in 1999, but Haynes still wants to get carbon dates on a few remaining items, a nutshell and some seeds. Adovasio has had enough, however. He is reported to have informed Haynes three years ago at the Monte Verde meeting that, ‘I will never run another date you have asked me for, because since 1974, we’ve addressed every criticism anyone has raised. I have spent half my life on this.’
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If professional sceptics such as Haynes and Fiedel are right, then they are to be congratulated for maintaining their integrity in the face of a massive synthesis of false evidence. If they are wrong and/or biased in their approach, on the other hand, then they would have successfully and vaingloriously held up the progress of American archaeology for three decades and artificially prolonged the life of
the obsolete Clovis-first orthodoxy to around seventy years. With the ever-accelerating pace of scientific discovery, that would be an extraordinary achievement. Even Hrdlicka did not achieve that length of filibuster at the beginning of the last century.

Two other, more recently discovered North American pre-Clovis sites now vie for immediate attention – Cactus Hill and Topper. Cactus Hill, on the East Coast near Richmond, Virginia, now has a full site report, written by two competing private archaeological teams, waiting for the sceptics to tear into it.
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Joseph and Lynn McAvoy of the Virginia Department of Historic Resources run one team, while Michael Johnson of the Archaeological Society of Virginia runs the other. Cactus Hill is an ancient sand dune, so-called after the prickly pears that cover it in the summer.

The original find at Cactus Hill was made, as often happens, by a perceptive farmer; he noticed a stone point in a pile of sand dumped some way from the hill and traced it back to its source. Digging through the layers of time, the teams have uncovered stone points of progressively greater antiquity including some of the fluted Clovis type. At the lowest level they found flaked tools, a scraper, a quartzite core, and some small blades. Radiocarbon dates from this bottom layer are in the 15,000–16,000-year age range – earlier than the opening of the ice corridor. In one of the deep layers, unusual stone points suggested an antecedent to the full Clovis style. Together with the other tools, these finds constitute even more evidence for a pre-Clovis culture. Needless to say, Haynes and Fiedel have been here too, to doubt the age of the artefacts. They have not, of course, suggested that they are older, rather that they are younger.
¹⁸

The other new site is Topper, in South Carolina, named after David Topper, the forester who discovered it. The site research is directed by Al Goodyear, a state archaeologist with the University of Carolina. Five years ago Goodyear and his team were forced off another site by floods and re-excavated Topper instead. Only this
time they dug deep, deeper than the Clovis level. Formerly an uncontroversial card-carrying Clovis-first archaeologist, Goodyear was converted by the shock of what he found. Below the Clovis level were small blades of chert, chiselled burins, a scraper, and micro-blades. The technology was more reminiscent of the Upper Palaeolithic in Siberia than anything previously found in the American south-east. Luminescence dating puts the age of the artefacts at 13,000 years.
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Have the sceptics chimed in again? Of course. This time their beef is not with the dates but with the tools. Were they made by humans? Another objection: most Clovis sites do not have pre-Clovis tools beneath them. According to the journal
Science
, Vance Haynes finds it hard to accept that this is just ‘a coincidence’. Such an argument seems rather like rejecting the Roman occupation of England because not every house in England has Roman remains beneath it. ‘I’ve been looking at this for 40 years’, says Haynes. Hmm.
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Two more recent sites with pre-Clovis dates are playing out their cycles of claim and criticism: Schaefer and Hebior, in south-eastern Wisconsin. Both sites have been radiocarbon dated to around 12,500 years ago. At one of them, Hebior, near Kenosha, flakes, a chopper, and two flaked stone bifaces have been found among butchered mammoth bones.
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With archaeologists such as Dillehay, Adovasio, the McAvoys, Johnson, Goodyear, and their colleagues going to extreme lengths to document their evidence, warts and all, and the persistent ‘what if’ responses from the critics, there has been a sea change in discussions on the pre-Clovis issue. The critics are at last being viewed less as the careful counsel of the establishment, and more as those who ‘doth protest too much’.

The Clovis-first mindset has, at last, been weakened. There is now a rash of recycled, new, or alternative explanations of the early colonization of the New World. The debate is moving from asking whether there was a pre-Clovis movement into and throughout the
Americas, to which, and how many, exotic routes were taken. These ‘big arrows into America’,
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which, if all valid, would have to imply multiple entries from elsewhere, including a west coastal land route, a west coastal sea route, a North Atlantic route from Europe, a South Pacific route from Australia, and a South American re-entry after the ice age (see
Figure 7.1
). There is, however, less secure archaeological evidence for any of these scenarios than for Monte Verde and Meadowcroft.

The language story

Before I discuss those possible routes and what the genes can tell us about them, I would like to bring in another discipline that has always offered promises of great insight into the past: language history. Sadly, academic temperament has again helped to inject more confusion than clarity.

Comparative or historical linguistics has as hoary a role in speculations on the first Americans as does archaeology. In each case the nation’s most revered founding father and well-meaning polymath played a part. In 1784, Thomas Jefferson directed the controlled excavation of an ancient mound in Virginia, the first scientific excavation in the history of American archaeology. Four years earlier, he had begun pioneering efforts to collect standardized vocabulary lists for Native Americans. He wanted to trace their origins through comparative linguistics. By 1809 he had several dozen lists, but they were stolen and almost totally destroyed while his possessions were being transported. Jefferson recovered the surviving fragments and sent them to the American Philosophical Society. America thus had a head start on most nations in gazing through this promising yet opaque window onto our past.
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What was it Jefferson wanted to do with language? His idea itself was simple in concept but well nigh impossible to apply in reality. It goes like this: over time, languages split and branch. If this represents expanding peoples splitting into bands, then we should be able
to date the splits and place them on a map. This should then give us a family tree of migrations. For example, European languages such as German, French, Spanish, and English all come from a common Indo-European stock. By comparing them using certain rules, linguists can show that they have branched progressively from that stock via dead ancestors such as Latin and proto-Germanic. If the whole European language tree could be reconstructed – which, though there are certain areas of contention, is possible – the hope is that it might then be possible to trace geographic population splits.

So, if we then lay out the language tree on the map, we find, for example, that French and Spanish come from Latin and, before that, from proto-Italic. English and German came from some proto-west-German root. All the languages from this European family eventually join up with a proto-Indo-European root thousands of years ago. Now one can start drawing big arrows on the map from A to B and C, from C to D, and so on, and write the history of European colonization as told by the languages.

The trouble is that it does not work quite like that. Languages do not change only as a result of population splits and random change. For example, the roughly 15 per cent of English that is not Germanic comes from French. That French vocabulary was imported by a very small number of Norman nobles a thousand years ago, after the Norman conquest – a phenomenon called language borrowing. The French intrusion into English came about via the dominance of a small Norman elite, not through massive Norman migration. French is an Italic language, but no one would suggest on that basis that the French are all direct descendants of Roman invaders. The French language changed from Celtic to a Romance language under the influence of the Roman Empire. That is called language shift. Language borrowing and shift can take place with only a minimal movement of people, which spoils simplistic models of language migrating synchronously with people.

Of course, Europe might not provide the best linguistic comparison with the USA. It has been occupied by modern humans for 45,000 years or more, and there has been a lot of complex internal population movement. But there are a few good examples of people moving and taking only their own language with them in such a way that the language tree can trace the migration history and indicate the source of the migration. These good examples are almost always of migrations into previously unoccupied territory, such as the Polynesians’ spread through the empty islands of the deep Pacific. The small subfamily of Polynesian languages really does look like a tree and does recapitulate their spread as tracked by the archaeological record. What is more, the genetic picture fits the linguistic trail very well within Polynesia.
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The colonization of the Americas could actually be regarded as similar to the conquest of the Pacific, in that people would have been moving into a huge virgin territory – a New World – and spreading out and separating like rays from a star. The trouble is that the Americas were colonized a long time before Polynesia, which was occupied progressively only between 800 and 3,500 years ago.

Great time depth has critical effects on language change and limits the possibility of reconstruction. Not only is it extremely difficult to date the splits in languages, but also most linguists feel that because of the inevitable decay in detectable relationships between words, language families cannot be reconstructed or traced further back than about 6,000–8,000 years.
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This is only slightly over half the time since Clovis, so reconstructing a unified New World language tree back to its base is a major problem. If Native American language families can be traced back only 7,000 years, their tree will be missing all its roots and lower branches: we would be looking at a mess of prunings, with little chance of fitting them together as a tree. And indeed this is the case with North, Central, and South America, which are characterized by many language families, over a hundred in all, consisting of about 1,200 languages.
To most linguists, these cannot be drawn together into any semblance of a single tree, and even a few trees would be ambitious. Attempting to find out how many individual language branches entered America on this basis would thus be an educated guess at best. That has not stopped some people from trying.

The Australian linguist Robert Dixon has estimated that about a dozen separate groups speaking different languages entered the Americas between about 12,000 and 20,000 years ago. American linguist Johanna Nichols, known for her deep-time analysis of world language change, reckons that about 35,000 years of occupation of the New World, based on multiple separate original entries from Asia into America, is necessary to explain the present diversity of American language families. The English linguist Daniel Nettle, in contrast, sees the Americas as having reached their climax of family diversity within the last, say, 12,000 years.
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