PEOPLING

The subject of the peopling of the Americas was always messy and it’s getting more interesting all the time. Some will insist people have always been on these lands while others conjecture about a traversal from Asia, across land, ice, or sea, or all of the above. When any of that took place is an even more complicated business. I bring it up here because so many disruptive findings have emerged in recent years, much of which I don’t think has permeated the culture.

Unfortunately, more and better anthropology and archaeology has not made the picture much clearer; and, at least to my eye, things actually appear muddier than ever. This is largely because as the dates of various finds of human modified tools and landscapes are pushed deeper into history, fewer and fewer examples exist and those are less and less well preserved. And, obviously, the farther back arrival goes the less any of us knows about the human history of this place.

Also obscuring much of the picture is surely the fact that so much water for so long, and until just recently, was locked away within the continent’s incomprehensibly massive glaciers. The relatively swift melt of all that resulted in the present seashore being nowhere near where it recently was. Of course, the coastline, just as today, was where transportation was easy, food was diverse and abundant, and settlement locations would have made sense. To be clear, going 10,000 or 15,000 years back, even just along the BC coast, recent studies suggest sea levels not plus or minus a few meters but around 80m above and 150m below where they’re now found, depending on the location and time period. (For scale, the tallest building on Vancouver Island at the time of writing is the 85m Hudson Place One at 777 Herald Street.) I’m no paleoarcheologist but it seems like it would be pretty hard to find shell middens or stone tools kilometres out to sea, far below the surface, and then buried below a dozen or more millennia of deposits of every sort.

That said, preserved footprints and implements found in recent years have given even the very skeptical reason to admit people must have been here long before any dates found in the textbooks they were trained on. The hypothesis for most of my lifetime has been that the Cordilleran Ice Sheet covered everything we think of as British Columbia and the west coast, including southern Yukon and Alaska. And that mass, far beyond a million square kilometres and a couple of kilometres deep, was smashed up against the Laurentide Ice Sheet, at about where the Rockies stand, and which covered the rest of present-day Canada along with a good swathe of the northern US. And that darn mass was undoubtedly impassable. Think about any photos or film you’ve seen of the calving face of even a small glacier. That thing isn't formidable or near-impossible to surmount. No. No one is getting up there without a helicopter. And once you’re up there don’t you have an unending set of new problems — the least of all being a continent-sized maze composed of bottomless crevasses? Yes. [Insert a video clip of a lady in furs asking ChatGPT "How to survive on a glacier" just before the phone slips from her hand and down an indigo abyss.] Well, this problem of maximally vast slabs of two kilometre-thick ice, paired with the fact of human presence on the continent, led some to speculate about the necessity of an ice-free corridor opening up, probably between these two glaciers, and to seek out evidence for that.

By my reading, however, it’s looking like that idea has fallen flat. The evidence gathered for a plausible window of time for a navigable passage between ice sheets, and thus a route for first human arrival, is just too late. All the evidence suggested a parting of these seas of ice was at most about 13,800 years ago. That timeline worked fine until just recently when a team of researchers revealed their discovery of more than a dozen unique projectile points. What made these bits of knapped stone so special, and what was immediately obvious, was that they were unlike the ubiquitous “clovis points” that dominate the dig sites throughout this continent, far more closely resembling “western stemmed points” like those found from the Upper Paleolithic around Japan. In addition to that, when these projectile points were dated they turned out to be at least 2,000 years older than all prior evidence for the earliest human presence on the continent. That’s what you call a big find. These projectile points immediately destroyed the idea of an ice-free inland corridor as a first arrival route while also simultaneously shattering the long-standing “Clovis First” hypothesis (Clovis being the name of the town in New Mexico where artefacts were discovered from what to that point seemed to be the oldest artefacts around and thus products of the original culture populating the Americas) which had given us a window of 12,000 to 14,000 years ago for first arrival. Now it looked like folks were deep into the continent, around modern-day Idaho, by 15,700 years ago.

That actually seemed perfect because samples of both human and dog DNA support an arrival date around that same time. Obviously, humans have taken dogs just about everywhere they’ve ever gone. (And with any luck they’ll be pooping all over the Moon and Mars in no time…) They aren’t just helpful in every way and our best friends (says the parent of guinea pigs, budgies, fish, shrimp, crabs, a praying mantis, and a cat but never a dog) but they can tell us a great deal, too. The genetics from dogs found in the Americas insists their divergence from their Asian relatives occurred around 16,400 years ago and that they saw a huge population explosion at that time. On the human side, the DNA samples gifted to science thus far strongly suggest all those we consider indigenous to the Americas descend from five founding maternal lineages, with one common ancestor living between 18,000 and 15,000 years ago. All of that genetics is pretty strong evidence. And don’t we love when things nicely match up just so? For sure. But even these dates for a time of first arrival have now been blown up. KA-BLAMO!

Researchers recently proposed nearly doubling what all the textbooks offered as an accepted age of first arrival derived from Clovis-related finds. As you can imagine, that made the headlines. Though almost laughed off when originally published, diverging so far from anything previously uncovered or even hypothesized, this extraordinary claim was soon paired with extraordinary evidence. The site, at Lake Otero in White Sands National Park, New Mexico, contains a vast collection of footprints laid down in what was a muddy lake bottom. The tracks belong to ancient mammoths, ground sloths, and camels — all now extinct — and, yes, humans. The first date that came back for an age estimate landed in the 20,000 year range. Their dating method had some inherent weaknesses. Of course the researchers were well aware of these and just about everyone interested in such things was also quick to point these out, too. What followed was a whole battery of other independent and highly reliable dating techniques. What returned was a consilience of evidence strongly supporting the earlier claim that these tracks were impressed into the sand and sediment sometime between 23,000 and 20,000 years ago.

Take that — all previous estimates. *Karate chops*

So, needless to say, there was more going on in the Americas and far earlier than most folks ever appreciated, even diligent researchers and reporters trying to provide a best guess and some authoritative accounting. Personally, I love that the accepted wisdom is continually being overturned. Love it!