Original Texans

Austin-area find adds to debate over early man By ERIC BERGER
Copyright 2001 Houston Chronicle Science Writer

The verdant Central Texas cove was Shangri-La for people living 13,000 years ago.

Fed by permanent springs, the area between the Edwards Plateau and lower coastal plains offered ample game from both ecosystems, and its limestone held an abundant supply of flint-like rock, or chert, ideal for making Stone Age tools.

"This is an absolutely special place," University of Texas archaeologist Michael Collins said as he recently surveyed the rolling ground occasionally pockmarked by meticulously terraced digs. It's special in bounty for ancient people and modern researchers alike.

About 50 miles north of Austin, the site has become one of the most important finds for archaeologists studying the ancient Clovis people.

Named for the area where their artifacts were first found near Clovis, N.M., they may have been the first inhabitants of the Americas. Evidence of their presence has been found across the United States, the sites tied together by distinctive spear points.

Across 25 acres, the Texas site has produced 300,000 artifacts, making it perhaps the largest Clovis habitat ever found.

The tools Collins and his team have found, including arrowhead-like points, blades and even rock art, are painting a more complete picture of the Clovis people. Instead of being nomadic big-game hunters, the artifacts suggest a more sophisticated people well adapted to their environment, Collins said.

Center of debate,p> Such conclusions have thrust Collins and the Texas site into a great debate that has increasingly riven archaeologists: When did people first come to this hemisphere, and where did they come from?

Collins' work has convinced him that the Americas must have been occupied much earlier than traditionally thought.

For decades, archaeologists believed the Clovis people's ancestors walked into North America from Asia across the Bering Sea landmass as the last Ice Age waned about 13,500 years ago.

They feasted on large game unaccustomed to human predators and possibly contributed to the extinction of animals such as the mammoth. They followed this game and quickly spread throughout the continent. About 500 years later, Clovis gave way to varied, ancient Indian peoples.

In recent years, however, this "Clovis first" theory has come under mounting attack by some archaeologists, linguists and geneticists who suggest people may have been in this hemisphere for far longer, predating the Clovis by thousands of years.

A few of these pre-Clovis advocates even believe the first Americans may have come from Europe, not Asia.

"At the moment the field of archaeology is wide open on this question," said David Meltzer, an anthropology professor at Southern Methodist University. "We're scrambling to find out what the evidence all means."

Collins, 60, falls solidly into the camp of pre-Clovis supporters, he says, because of what lies buried beneath the clay soil at the so-called Gault site, named for an early owner of the property.

Collectors have raided the area, where arrowheads seem more common than rocks, for decades.

Until the current property owners bought the site in 1998 anyone could pay $25 a day to dig. Some arrowheads will regularly sell on the Internet auction site eBay for $200 or more.

Luckily for archaeologists, collectors and dealers rarely dug deep enough to tap into the sediment where Clovis-era artifacts were found.

When a family in Florence bought the property they found some mammoth bones, including a mandible and four teeth. The family contacted UT and, after negotiations, Collins secured a lease to dig at the site through the summer of 2002.

The property is closed to outsiders, and the Chronicle is not divulging its exact location at Collins' request.

Collins, colleagues from UT and Texas A&M University, and volunteers from the Texas Archaeological Society dig at the site twice a week.

Each dig is about one square yard. Archaeologists draw a map of the square showing a position of each artifact. If an artifact is more than two-thirds exposed, they remove it. Then they dig the square two inches deeper, repeating the mapping and removal.

This allows the dig to be reconstructed in three dimensions, which helps put artifacts in sequential order.

Such mapping, as well as studying the geology, is especially important at the Gault site because researchers have found no bones or teeth with preserved collagen, which would allow the site to be radiocarbon-dated. The collagen has been washed away by the water table.

"That's really the heartbreaker of the Gault site," said Michael Waters, a Texas A&M anthropology professor working with Collins. "We simply don't know if we're dealing with the entire 500-year range of Clovis, or early or late."

But the artifacts are clearly Clovis technology. Their sheer number stuns archaeologists.

Whereas most Clovis sites around the Americas yield a handful of specimens, Collins finds an average of 30 in a single level of a single square. This alone draws dozens of dedicated volunteers to the site.

The site's most impressive finds include hundreds of distinct Clovis points, carefully chipped blades, several dozen stones with geometric art and a woodworking tool known as an adze.

Significantly, Collins said, they found tools that were used for cutting grass, indicating a use for thatched roofs, mats or possibly dart shafts.

"That's new information for Clovis," he said. "We're looking at a people who were more sophisticated than popular theory suggests."

In addition to bones of large game, including bison, mammoth and deer, researchers have found evidence that small animals such as foxes, raccoons, coyotes, birds and turtles were all part of the local Clovis diet.

This adds to the portrait of a people well adapted to varied environments, he said.

Clovis sites have been found in all 48 continental states, and as far south as Belize. Archaeologists have uncovered their artifacts high in the Rocky Mountains and along the Pacific, Atlantic and Gulf coasts.

To fit the Clovis-first theory timeline, the people would have had to spread from the Bering Sea land bridge across the United States in less than 500 years, adapt to myriad habitats and thrive, Collins said.

"Clovis represents the end product of centuries, if not millennia, of learning how to live in North American environments," he said. "It's entirely possible there were people who were here who had learned to live off the land, and the later arrivals mapped onto their knowledge."

If such predecessors did live here, why have none of their artifacts been found?

Collins believes these artifacts are difficult to find and recognize without a distinctive trait such as the Clovis point.

He has found a few artifacts at the Gault site below the dirt where the Clovis points were found, but not enough to significantly determine whether they were pre-Clovis. Searching for pre-Clovis remains will be a major focus of his work at the Gault site in coming years.

It's indicative of how divided archaeologists are over peopling of the Americas that another principal investigator at Gault, A&M anthropologist Harry Shafer, looks at the site and sees support for the Clovis-first theory.

"If it was 15,000 years or longer ago, there should be a lot of archaeology," he said. "It would be more visible if people were here a long time ago. It should be clearly visible, and there should be a lot of it. Stone is pretty durable stuff."

Collins and Shafer are an aberration in the field of archaeology. Typically researchers, when finding a trove like Gault, would seek to monopolize the find. Collins, on the other hand, invited researchers with differing views to the site.

Shafer is convinced that egos of Clovis-first and pre-Clovis researchers are hurting efforts to find the true answer to the questions of who came first and from where.

"People are so defensive about their research that they're losing their objectivity," he said. "The early man issue should be bigger than egos."

Researchers agree the discovery of a particular site in Monte Verde, Chile, is largely responsible for blowing the origination debate wide open.

The site, dated by several scientists, was active 14,500 years ago. It is thousands of miles south of Clovis areas. The occupation shows a culture with wooden huts, hearths, tools and subsistence on game animals and plant foods, none of which resemble Clovis technologies.

There have been other finds in North America dated even earlier than Monte Verde, such as Meadowcroft near Pittsburgh, but their claims are far less accepted by the majority of archaeologists.

Another challenge to the Clovis-first theory comes from a lack of artifacts in northeast Asia, presumably where Stone Age hunter-gatherers who crossed the Bering Sea land bridge would have come from, linking those people to Clovis descendants. These remnants, too, would probably be difficult to find and recognize.

The lack of such finds, the Monte Verde discovery and other questions have pushed archaeologists to consider alternative theories.

One has people in primitive boats following the Asian and American coastlines as a means of reaching the Western Hemisphere. This route would have allowed passage during the coldest centuries of the Ice Age, perhaps 20,000 years ago.

Others have speculated that populations crossed the Pacific in boats from southeastern Asia or Pacific islands, which could explain the Monte Verde site.

Finally, there is the theory that people from Spain's Iberian peninsula followed the ice sheet stretching across the north Atlantic 15,000 or 20,000 years ago to reach the eastern United States.

At a recent conference hosted by the Houston Museum of Natural Science, a principal supporter of this theory, archaeologist Bruce Bradley, outlined a theory in which the European Solutrean culture fished in the sea ice environment, which he characterized as rich in wildlife.

They would not need much navigational knowledge to follow birds from shoreline to shoreline.

"This is an awkward proposal because it challenges the current paradigm," said Bradley, an adjunct professor at Augustana College in Sioux Falls, S.D.

Bradley and Dennis Stanford, the Smithsonian Institution's anthropology department chairman, note similarities in Solutrean projectile points and those used by the Clovis people.

Most archaeologists view this out-of-Europe theory skeptically. The Solutrean culture disappeared about 5,000 years before the first Clovis site was found. Scholars doubt it would have taken that long to cross the Atlantic.

An authority on Solutrean culture, University of New Mexico anthropology professor Lawrence G. Straus, dismissed the theory, saying Solutrean artifacts "bore only superficial resemblances to Clovis technology."

He also noted that the Solutrean had art capabilities not found in Clovis culture and that there is no evidence the culture had significant marine skills.

Still, evidence from other scientific fields is emerging that makes an earlier peopling of the Americas seem more likely.

Nearly half the world's language families are in the Americas, linguists say. It would take at least 20,000 years for that many different languages to build up, some believe.

"The linguistic answer to the question of how long have they been here is very long, certainly before the peak of glaciation," said Johanna Nichols, linguist at the University of California at Berkeley.

With land routes into North America impassable because of the Ice Age before roughly 17,000 years ago, the people must have come much earlier, prior to the Ice Age's peak about 20,000 years ago, or have found other ways.

Some genetic evidence of human remains, which has indicated similarities to Asian and European populations in Native American peoples, indicates the western hemisphere could have been inhabited as early as 35,000 years ago.

Whether the question is ever fully answered will rely upon the work of scientists in a variety of fields, from climatology to geology, Collins said. A consensus may never emerge.

"The state of it right now is we have some animate defenders of Clovis-first," Collins said. "They are locked into that theory and cannot be dissuaded.

"Yet we have all these questions and we don't even begin to have the answers to them. The nice thing for us, with this site and others, is that Texas is not left out of the debate."

Meadowcroft Rock Shelter

Meadowcroft Rock Shelter is an archaeological site located in southwestern Pennsylvania that has been used by humans since Paleo-Indian times. It was occupied from at least 12,000 years ago until nearly 700 years ago. The site was abandoned by Native Americans during the American War for Independence. Meadowcroft was re-discovered by Albert Miller in 1955. He found the site by looking at some diggings made by a ground hog.

Dr. James Adovasio is the man who meticulously excavated this large shelter between 1973 and 1977. The archeological remains were found as deep as 11.5 feet below the ground. Adovasio revealed no less than 11 strata, the lowest of which contained traces of human occupation. Adovasio and his colleagues divide this level into three subunits. The uppermost sublevel dates to between about 10,950 and 7,950 years ago, and is separated from the middle sublevel by a layer of rock that was the roof and walls of the shelter. This middle layer accumulated between about 12,950 and 10,950 years ago, while the lowest sublevel (which also is sealed by the pieces of rock from the walls and roof of the shelter) contains radiocarbon dates from 19,600 to 13,230 years ago. This level tells us what life was like for the earliest humans in this area. It dates back to the end of the last glaciation period, when the glaciers came within thirty miles of Meadowcroft Rockshelter and the climate was like that of today.

The site has yeilded the largest collection of plant and animal remains in a single site in North America. The deposits here include the earliest corn in the area (375-340 BC) and the earliest squash and ceramics (1115-865 BC). The late Archaic (4000-1500 BC) shows an increase in the use of the rockshelter. The middle and early Archaic (8500-4000 BC) include the industrious processing of deer, elk, bird eggs, mussels, hackberries, nuts, and other fruits and seeds. Deeper down, the Paleo-Indian tools are surprisingly sophisticated.

Not everyone agrees that the rockshelter has been used by humans as long as Adovasio believes. The plant remains from the site's lowest level are black gum, oak, and hickory; while the animal bones include white-tailed deer, southern flying squirrel, and the passenger pigeon. The problem occurs when you understand that these are not ice age species. Vance Haynes suggests that maybe the area was contaminated by older carbonates in the groundwater. Adovasio counters this by saying that the low-lying, south facing Meadowcroft Rockshelter was in a microclimate, a sheltered region that could have had a more temperate climate. Whatever the exact date of the first occupation of this shelter by humans, Meadowcroft is one of the earliest documented archaeological sites in North America

Its a constant source of amazement about how "What everybody knows" in the scientific world is often found out to be WRONG!

Right now 'everybody knows' that the America's were populated from northeast Asia. What I have always supposed is that the America's were populated from ALL OVER - that is - from northeast Asia, and Polynesia, and Europe, and even Africa. Anyone with a mediocre armada of boats could discover a continent that is 10,000 miles from north to south!

Coulda' happened by accident or design, but it was bound to happen.

It seems that if detailed genetic or linguistic studies are done, the puzzle could be solved. It also seems as if this has never been systematically tried.

CACTUS HILL UPDATE

Evidence for a pre-Clovis level at Cactus Hill was presented in a series of papers given on April 7 at the annual Society for American Archaeology conference in Philadelphia by the director of the excavations at Cactus Hill, Joseph McAvoy, and a number of specialists studying various aspects of the site. Cactus Hill, on the Nottoway River in southeastern Virginia, has Archaic material which is underlain by a Clovis-era level. Several inches of sand separate the Clovis-era deposit from a lower level in which points, blades, and cores, as well as charcoal and calcined fragments of animal bone have been recovered. Initial radiocarbon dates from the lower level were too early given its position beneath Clovis-era remains, leading to questions about the integrity of the site's stratigraphy. Some of the papers given in Philadelphia examined different lines of evidence to address this question, while others described the stone tool and faunal assemblages from the lower level.

Soil chemistry analysis has revealed elevated amounts of phosphate, an indicator of human occupation, in the lower level. The abundance of phytoliths, silica structures found in plants, and the amount of cultural material (as measured by weight) followed a similar pattern: a drop-off after the Clovis-era deposit that corresponds to the sterile sand level, followed by a small peak corresponding to the lower cultural level. Review of the radiocarbon samples by palaeobotanist Lucinda McSweeney suggests that the initial dates were from rootlets and partially carbonized hickory wood that had intrude into the lower level from above. Samples cleaned of the hickory wood yield dates consistent with pre-Clovis. Significantly, while younger material has in local instances intruded from above, older material has not been found, or at least recognized or dated, in the upper levels. The three pre-Clovis dates that the excavators have obtained are 15,070 ± 70, 16,670 ± 730, and 16,940 ± 50. Additional dates obtained through luminescence were presented but, while consistent in being pre-Clovis, need more evaluation before their relation to the radiocarbon dates is understood.

The stone tool assemblage at the site was described by Larry Kimball. About the two points found in the lower level, Kimball said that their roughly pentangular form appears to be the intended shape, that is, they were not re-worked over time to that shape. He bases this conclusion on the thinness of the pieces and the presence of striking platforms on the sides of them suggesting they were not resharpened. Microwear indicates they were hafted and fractures on the tips suggest they broke on impact--that is they were projectiles. Kimball sees them as a logical precursor to fluted Clovis points. Over 90 percent of the stone tools from the lower level are blades. Microwear shows that they were hafted and used for butchering and hide processing. Microwear also indicates that over half of the cores from which the blades were struck were subsequently used for hide scraping. There are no endscrapers, drills, or bipolar pieces in the assemblage. Two of the blades, however, were fashioned into burins.

Faunal remains from the lower level are scant: some 20 specimens, the largest of which is 1.5 cm long. Ten could be identified: 2 mud turtle shell fragments, 2 whitetail deer toe bone fragments, and 5 fossil shark¹s teeth possibly brought to the site from Miocene fossil deposits 20 kilometers downstream from the site.

McAvoy said that, as far as he is concerned, the quotation of whether or not the pre-Clovis level at Cactus Hill is real is "not even close." In discussing the papers, Dennis Stanford of the Smithsonian Institution suggested the assemblage adds to evidence that Clovis may have originated in the Southeast.--MARK ROSE

(I've recently read that they've gotten some 19,000 year old dates at this site)

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Teams digging into history of the earliest people