Roots — Deep Ones
The perils of looking into American prehistory.
By John J. Miller, NR's national political reporter June 9‑10, 2001
One of the secrets of
archaeology is that many truly
great finds aren't made by
archaeologists. It was a farmer,
Harold Conover, who
stumbled on a clue in the late 1980s that led to a magnificent
site in Virginia called Cactus Hill. Conover and his wife were
walking on logging roads near their home when he spotted a
few Indian artifacts mixed in the sand. He soon traced the
sand back to a quarry about ten miles away. Thanks to this
detective work, a group of archaeologists led by Joseph
McAvoy started digging near that quarry in the early 1990s.
They unearthed signs of human habitation stretching back
about 18,000 years — making Cactus Hill one of the two or
three oldest sites in North America. They also found evidence
to support one of the most provocative developments of our
time: the growing suspicion among physical anthropologists,
archaeologists, and even geneticists that some of the first
people who settled in the New World were Europeans.
Ten years ago, hardly anybody outside crackpot circles
would have contemplated this notion. There's a whole
speculative literature of oddball theories on groups coming to
America in antiquity. Ivan Van Sertima's They Came Before
Columbus points to statues produced by Mexico's Olmec
civilization as representations of Negroid faces, and the book
remains a perennial grocery‑store seller. Nancy Yaw Davis
argued last year in The Zuni Enigma that New Mexico's
Zuni tribe has too much in common with ancient Japanese
culture for it to be a coincidence. Many of these ideas persist
simply because they're hard to disprove, and it's important to
remember that the whole field is afflicted with celebrated
frauds like the Kensington Runestone — a large stone slab
that came to light a century ago and claims to describe the
travels of 14th‑century Vikings in Minnesota.
Despite the uncertainty, it has become increasingly clear over
the last decade that the history‑textbook version of ancient
American settlement no longer holds up. The first Americans,
according to the standard view, arrived about 12,000 years
ago by way of a land bridge that once connected Siberia and
Alaska. Thanks to a handful of sites like Cactus Hill, it is now
beyond dispute that some people got here much earlier. Asia
remains a likely source for migrations, because of its
proximity and the fact that today's Indians indisputably have
ancestors who lived there. But Asia may not be the only
source, and there's good reason to think it wasn't.
This ought to be thrilling news for the multiculturalists. What
better project for them than the serious study of America's
prehistory; a glorious mosaic whose rich diversity is only
now seeing daylight? But it must be remembered that
multiculturalism is motivated not by sincere curiosity about the
past, but by the sensitivities of modern victimology. An
important part of American Indian identity relies on the belief
that, in some fundamental way, they were here first. They are
indigenous, they are Native, and they make an important
moral claim on the national conscience for this very reason.
Yet if some population came before them — perhaps a group
their own ancestors wiped out through war and disease, in an
eerily reversed foreshadowing of the contact Columbus
introduced, then a vital piece of their mythologizing suffers
a serious blow. This revised history drastically undercuts the
posturing occasioned by the 500th anniversary of Columbus's
1492 voyage.
The prime mover behind the European‑migration theory is
Dennis Stanford, a jovial anthropologist who has spent nearly
three decades at the Smithsonian Institution studying Stone
Age technology. A big table dominates his office in the
National Museum of Natural History, and it's often cluttered
with primitive tools borrowed from the Smithsonian's huge
collection. He is an authority on Clovis Culture, named for the
town in New Mexico where the first remnants of it were
found in 1932. The Clovis people were said to be big‑game
hunters who stalked mammoths, and they left behind
distinctive relics. Researchers were so sure that they were the
continent's original settlers — about 12,000 years ago — that
suggesting otherwise was professional heresy.
But by the late 1980s, Stanford and a few of his colleagues,
including his former student Bruce Bradley, began to harbor
serious doubts about the Clovis theory. For starters, there
were a handful of sites, such as Pennsylvania's Meadowcroft
Rockshelter, that seemed older than Clovis. But more
important, in Stanford's view, was the complete lack of
evidence that Clovis culture ever existed outside the
Americas. He spent years scouring museum collections
around the world, but always came away empty. "It was
getting pretty discouraging," he says.
In truth, there is a Stone Age technology that looks an awful
lot like Clovis, and its existence troubled Stanford and
Bradley: The culture that produced it wasn't found in Siberia,
where just about everybody would have expected it, but at
the other end of the same landmass — in modern‑day France
and Spain. It's called Solutrean, and it vanished some 20,000
years ago. Stanford and Bradley were especially intrigued by
the fact that the greatest concentration of Clovis sites occurs
in the southeastern United States: If the technology is native
to the Americas, it was probably invented in this area. If it
wasn't native, then this was probably the site to which it was
imported — on the side of the North American continent
facing Europe. But a pair of insurmountable obstacles
appeared to separate the Clovis and Solutrean cultures:
several thousand years, and a large ocean.
Then came the findings at Cactus Hill. "As soon as we started
to see some of that stuff come out, we thought about the
connection to Solutrean," says Stanford. Joseph McAvoy
and his team found Clovis artifacts on the site, as well as
irrefutably older material that Stanford and Bradley think is a
developmental form of Clovis technology.
That's a groundbreaking observation. Experts in ancient
technology like to build family trees. Just as a sculptor can
hack a limitless number of objects out of a stone block, there
are an infinite number of ways to chip a hand ax or spearpoint
from a rock. Over time, cultures develop particular
techniques; archaeologists can identify them and create tool
genealogies. If they find tools that look similar and were
manufactured in the same way, there's a good chance the
people making them shared cultural traits. They may have
been blood relatives or trading partners, but whatever their
precise relationship, they almost certainly drew from the same
storehouse of knowledge.
Stanford is one of the world's few remaining accomplished
flintknappers: Give him the right type of rock and he can flake
it into a long, bifacial, and fluted spearpoint just like a Clovis
hunter would. While other scholars have noted the similarities
between Clovis and Solutrean technology as a mildly
interesting example of cultural convergence — in other
words, a coincidence — Stanford's expertise in flintwork
made him suspect a deeper connection: "There are so many
matching steps in how they made their tools: bifacial flaking,
heat treatment, similar ceremonial items, the presence of red
ocher. There must be fifty or sixty points of comparison. It
can't be chance." And yet nobody could figure out a way to
bridge the thousands of years and miles dividing the two
groups.
Then, in 1994, a team of Emory University scientists studying
genetic diversity made an unexpected discovery. They
examined a specific kind of DNA lineage known as
mitochondrial DNA in ethnic groups around the world. Their
survey of American Indians found four major varieties, which
they labeled haplogroups A, B, C, and D. Each of these has
antecedents in Asia, confirming that today's Indians descend
almost entirely from Asian stock. But there's a fifth lineage,
too, called haplogroup X. It occurs in about a quarter of all
Ojibway Indians, and in lesser amounts among members of
the Sioux, Navajo, and other tribes. A version of the X
haplogroup shows up in only one other place on the planet:
Europe.
"That's what pushed me over the edge," says Stanford. If the
X haplogroup had found its way to America through Siberia,
it almost certainly would have left behind a mark somewhere
in Asia; but exhaustive searching has turned up no indications
of any passage. The simplest explanation is an Atlantic
crossing.
Out of Europe?
Actual human remains might help clinch the case.
Unfortunately, not many 9,000‑year‑old skeletons survive
today. The small sample that are known raise fascinating
possibilities. The much‑disputed Kennewick Man, for
instance, is said to have Caucasoid features, as opposed to
the Mongoloid ones of present‑day Indians. (This isn't to say
he was "white" — nobody knows the color of his skin.)
Some researchers have suggested his morphology most
closely resembles the Ainu, an indigenous Japanese
population. But the prospect of early migrations from places
other than Asia can't be dismissed. One skull found in Brazil
shares more similarities with Australian Aborigines than with
any other group. "The evidence is mounting that the earliest
North Americans were a distinct people, or perhaps several
distinct peoples, who cannot easily be linked to modern
American Indians," writes James C. Chatters — the forensic
anthropologist who recovered Kennewick Man — in his
just‑published book, Ancient Encounters.
How might Europeans have made it to the Americas so long
ago? The challenge appears immense, but there is a tendency
to underestimate the cleverness of ancient peoples — a
tendency that grows over time, perhaps, as we depend more
on sophisticated technology and begin to believe that only a
half‑wit would sail beyond sight of the coast without hooking
up to a GPS satellite. But boats and navigation aren't recent
inventions; human beings reached Australia at least 40,000
years ago, and getting there would have required — at least
— a trip of about 80 miles on the high seas, from New
Guinea. That's much shorter than traversing the Atlantic, to be
sure, but the important point is that it represents a willingness
and ability among ancient people to leave the relative safety
of coastal waterways.
A migration out of Europe seems distinctly possible if we
consider a number of factors that probably would have given
ancient travelers a boost. During the last ice age, the sea
levels were lower; today's coasts were inland, and the
distance from Western Europe to the Grand Banks (which
then formed the easternmost part of North America) would
have been about 1,400 miles — far, but much closer than it is
today. In addition, an ice shelf extending south from the
Arctic would have presented a clear route. Seals, penguins,
and fish would have offered nourishment along the way. The
prevailing ocean current, too, would have swept these early
people in the right direction. So the journey wouldn't have
required the prehistoric equivalent of the Apollo space
program. may have been a few guys on an ice floe," says
Stanford.
Discovering an 18,000‑year‑old Irish coracle off the New
Jersey shore would settle a lot of questions, but ancient boats
were made of perishable materials. Tools and bones last
longer, and that's what makes the Cactus Hill artifacts and the
Kennewick remains so important. Prehistory isn't called
prehistory for nothing: It's a challenge to study, because the
people who made it left only scant traces of themselves. Even
if a European migration really did happen, the evidence
proving it conclusively may not exist today. What evidence
does exist seems to turn up by happenstance, such as when a
farmer takes a stroll down a logging road. In the case of
Kennewick Man, a pair of boozed‑up college students
waded into the Columbia River to avoid buying $11 tickets
for a boating exhibition, and then spotted a skull sticking out
of the mud. These important discoveries were essentially
accidents.
The truth may be out there, but some people would prefer to
keep it hidden. Kennewick Man, for instance, is currently
locked up in Seattle's Burke Museum, where nobody is
allowed to study him. Last September, interior secretary
Bruce Babbitt announced his intention to give the priceless
remains to modern‑day Indian tribes that intended to bury the
bones without allowing scientists a look. Several researchers
(including Stanford) sued, and a judge stopped the handover.
Lawyers will argue the case on June 19, and the fate of
Kennewick Man — perhaps the most important human
skeleton ever found in the Western Hemisphere — remains
uncertain.
This case is hardly an exception. Thanks to the Native
American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990,
federally recognized tribes have the right to petition for human
remains. The idea was to help them protect their ancestors
from grave robbers — but in practice the law has become a
tool for tribal activists to prevent the study of ancient people.
The Friends of America's Past, an organization based in
Portland, Ore., counts five other sets of bones — rough
contemporaries of Kennewick Man — that have been lost to
science under this or similar laws, and another six "in
jeopardy" of the same fate. Most of these remains are said to
share the vaguely "Caucasoid" traits seen on Kennewick Man
— but again, research opportunities have been restricted.
Stanford and Bradley are completing a manuscript on the
Clovis‑Solutrean connection, which the University of
California Press expects to publish next year. It's impossible
to say whether the next generation of scholars will come to
look at their work as a turning point in our understanding of
prehistory, or a less‑than‑completely‑convincing argument
that makes creative use of meager material. What seems
increasingly clear, however, is that the old story of a simple
land migration from Siberia 12,000 years ago won't survive.
The question of what will replace it should be a matter of
concern to all of us, because the first Americans represent the
heritage of all Americans. No single person or group owns
the past; we all do, collectively. And it is only through a spirit
of scientific inquiry that we may learn the answer to that
fascinating question: How did the New World come to have
such people in it?
Roots — Deep Ones
WASHINGTON, DC
— The perils of
looking into American
prehistory¼by John J.
Miller
Jeers to You, Mrs.
Robinson
NEW YORK— Who’s
the weakest link
now?¼by John
Podhoretz
Ms. Discovers
Motherhood
NEW YORK — Ann
Crittenden on mothers
and choices¼by
Kathryn Jean Lopez
Lowering the Boom
NEW YORK —
Reviewing Joe
Queenan’s Balsamic
Dreams¼by James
Morrow
Dr. Laura Speaks
WASHINGTON, DC
— An interview with
Dr. Laura
Schlessinger¼by
Melissa Seckora
Grading Bobby Flay
NEW YORK — Iron
Chef lessons
learned¼by Chris
McEvoy
Indie Noir
BOSTON —
Reviewing
Memento¼by Thomas
Hibbs
California Dreamin’
DORSET, VT — The
Sixers, Lakers, energy,
price caps, etc¼by
Geoffrey Norman
On Gallows Hill
NEW YORK — The
Salem Witch Trials
begin¼by Jack Walsh
Look, Mama, Only 38
Days
NEW YORK — Castro
and the celebrity
swoon¼by William F.
Buckley Jr.
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