1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

by Charles C. Mann

Pena worked on the Botocudo project slowly and intermittently—it was a longshot idea, and he had much else to do. His six-person team contacted 173 people from a small village in what had been Botocudo country, explained what they were doing, obtained blood samples and extracted and examined the mitochondrial DNA. Twenty people had Indian haplogroups.

So various were the peoples of the Americas that continent-wide generalizations are risky to the point of folly. Nonetheless, one can say that for the most part the initial Indian-European encounter was less of an intellectual shock to Indians than to Europeans.

Indians were surprised when strange-looking people appeared on their shores, but unlike Europeans they were not surprised that such strange people existed.

Many natives, seeking to categorize the newcomers, were open to the possibility that they might belong to the realm of the supernatural. They often approached visitors as if they might be deities, possibly calculating, in the spirit of Pascal’s wager, that the...

On Columbus’s later voyages, his crew happily accepted godhood—until the Taino began empirically testing their divinity by forcing their heads underwater for long periods to see if the Spanish were, as gods should be, immortal.

But the historian Matthew Restall has noted that none of the conquistadors’ writings mention this supposed apotheosis, not even Cortés’s lengthy memos to the Spanish king, which go into detail about every other wonderful thing he did. Instead the Quetzalcoatl story first appears decades later.

Similarly, groups like the Wampanoag, Narragansett, and Haudenosaunee in eastern North America also thought at first that Europeans might have supernatural qualities. But this was because Indians north and south regarded Europeans as human beings exactly like themselves.

If the Wampanoag and Mexica had shamans who could magically inflict sickness, why couldn’t the British? (The Europeans, who themselves believed that people could become witches and magically spread disease, were hardly going to argue.)

In Choctaw lore, for example, the Creator breathed life into not one but many primeval pairs of human beings scattered all over the earth. It could not have been terribly surprising to Choctaw thinkers that the descendants of one pair should show up in the territory of another.

Contact with Indians caused Europeans considerably more consternation. Columbus went to his grave convinced that he had landed on the shores of Asia, near India. The inhabitants of this previously unseen land were therefore Asians—hence the unfortunate name “Indians.”

According to Genesis, all human beings and animals perished in the Flood except those on Noah’s ark, which landed “upon the mountains of Ararat,” thought to be in eastern Turkey. How, then, was it possible for humans and animals to have crossed the immense Pacific? Did the existence of Indians negate the Bible, and Christianity with it?

Enthusiasts proposed a dozen groups as the ancestral stock: Phoenicians, Basques, Chinese, Scythians, Romans, Africans, “Hindoos,” ancient Greeks, ancient Assyrians, ancient Egyptians, the inhabitants of Atlantis, even straying bands of Welsh. But the most widely accepted candidates were the Lost Tribes of Israel.

Acosta weighed the Indians-as-Jews theory but eventually dismissed it because Indians were not circumcised. Besides, he blithely explained, Jews were cowardly and greedy, and Indians were not.

Woooooof

The Lost Tribes theory held sway until the nineteenth century, when it was challenged by events. As Lund had in Brazil, British scientists discovered some strange-looking human skeletons jumbled up with the skeletons of extinct Pleistocene mammals.

Unsurprisingly, Christian leaders rejected Abbott’s claims, which (to repeat) contradicted both Ussher’s chronology and the theologically convenient Lost Tribes theory. More puzzling, at least to present-day eyes, were the equally vehement objections voiced by professional archaeologists and anthropologists, especially those at the Smithsonian Institution, which had established a Bureau of American Ethnology in 1879.

Holmes was a rigorous, orderly man with, Meltzer told me, “no sense of humor whatsoever.” Although Holmes in no way believed that Indians were descended from the Lost Tribes, he was also unwilling to believe that Indians or anyone else had inhabited the Americas as far back as the Ice Ages.

Abbott’s medical practice collapsed because patients disliked his touchy disposition and crackpot sermons about ancient spear points. Forced to work as a clerk in Trenton, New Jersey, a town he loathed, he hunted for evidence of Pleistocene Indians during weekends on his farmstead. (In truth, the Abbott farm had a lot of artifacts; it is now an official National Historic Landmark.)

Unsurprisingly, Abbott detested William Henry Holmes, W. J. McGee, and the “scientific men of Washington” who were conspiring against the truth. “The stones are inspected,” he wrote in one of the few doggerel poems ever published in Science

In the next quarter century amateur bone hunters discovered dozens of what they believed to be ancient skeletons in what they believed to be ancient sediments. One by one Hrdlička, who had moved to the Smithsonian and become the most eminent physical anthropologist of his time, shot them down.

By temperament, he was suspicious of anything that smacked of novelty and modishness. Alas, the list of things that he dismissed as intellectual fads included female scientists, genetic analysis, and the entire discipline of statistics—even such simple statistical measures as standard deviations were notably absent from the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.

When he received a favorable report from Folsom, he dispatched a work crew to dig out the bones. Its members quickly stumbled across two artifacts—not crude, Abbott-style arrowheads, but elegantly crafted spear points. They also found that a piece from one of the spear points was pressed into the dirt surrounding a bison bone.

The spear points both intrigued and dismayed Figgins. His museum had discovered evidence that the Americas had been inhabited during the Pleistocene, a major scientific coup. But this also put Figgins, who knew little about archaeology, in the crosshairs of Aleš Hrdlička.

In August 1927 Figgins’s team at Folsom came across a spear point stuck between two bison ribs. He sent out telegrams. Three renowned scientists promptly traveled to New Mexico and watched Figgins’s team brush away the dirt from the point and extract it from the gully. All three agreed, as they quickly informed Hrdlička, that the discovery admitted only one possible explanation: thousands of years ago, a Pleistocene hunter had speared a bison.

Whiteman’s bones were in Blackwater Draw, which during the Pleistocene served as a wide, shallow regional drainage channel, a kind of long, slow-moving lake. As the Ice Ages ended, Blackwater Draw slowly dried up. The continuous flow of water turned into isolated ponds. Game animals congregated around the water, and hunters followed them there. By the time of Gilmore’s visit, Blackwater Draw was an arid, almost vegetation-free jumble of sandy drifts and faces of fractured caliche. In one of archaeology’s great missed opportunities, Gilmore walked around the area for an hour, decided that it was of no interest, and took the train back to Washington.

Slowly peeling away the geological layers, Howard’s workers revealed that Blackwater Draw had hosted not one, but two ancient societies. One had left relics just like those at Folsom. Below the dirt strata with these objects, though, was a layer of quite different artifacts: bigger, thicker, and not as beautifully made.

Because Clovis was so dry, its stratigraphy—the sequence of geological layers—had not been jumbled up by later waterflow, a common archaeological hazard. Because of this unusual clarity and because Howard meticulously documented his work there, even the most skeptical archaeologists quickly accepted the existence and antiquity of the Clovis culture.

By focusing on skeletons, he was able to avoid discussing Clovis, the focus of the conference, because Howard had found no skeletons there.*

Its hallmark was the “Clovis point,” a four-inch spearhead with a slightly cut-in, concave tail; in silhouette, the points somewhat resemble those goldfish-shaped cocktail crackers. Folsom points, by contrast, are smaller and finer—perhaps two inches long and an eighth of an inch thick—and usually have a less prominent tail. Both types have wide, shallow grooves or channels called “flutes” cut into the two faces of the head.

With Blackwater Draw as a pattern, scientists knew exactly what to look for. During the next few decades, they discovered more than eighty large paleo-Indian sites throughout the United States, Mexico, and southern Canada.

Libby’s research began in the global scientific race during the 1930s and 1940s to understand cosmic rays, the mysterious, ultrahigh velocity subatomic particles that continually rain onto the earth from outer space. Like so many bullets, the particles slam into air molecules in the upper atmosphere, knocking off fragments that in turn strike other air molecules. Along the way, Libby realized, the cascade of interactions creates a trickle of carbon-14 (C14), a mildly radioactive form of carbon that over time disintegrates—decays, as scientists say—into a form of nitrogen. Libby determined that the rate at which cosmic rays create C14 is roughly equal to the rate at which it decays. As a result, a small but steady percentage of the carbon in air, sea, and land consists of C14

By comparing the C14 level in bones and wooden implements to the normal level in living tissues, Libby reasoned, scientists should be able to determine the age of these objects with unheard-of precision. It was as if every living creature had an invisible radioactive clock in its cells.

Libby won a well-deserved Nobel Prize in 1960. By that time, carbon dating was already revolutionizing archaeology. “You read books and find statements that such and such a society or archaeological site is 20,000 years old,” he remarked. “We learned rather abruptly that these numbers, these ancient ages, are not known.”

In a crisply argued paper in Science in 1964, Haynes drew attention to the correlation between the birth of “an ice-free, trans-Canadian corridor” and the “abrupt appearance of Clovis artifacts some 700 years later.” Thirteen thousand to fourteen thousand years ago, he suggested, a window in time opened.

So complete was the disaster that many of today’s big American mammals, such as caribou, moose, and brown bear, are immigrants from Asia. The die-off happened amazingly fast—the statistics, according to the study, suggest that it was instantaneous. And when it was complete, naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace wrote, the Americas had become “a zoologically impoverished world, from which all of the hugest, and fiercest, and strangest forms [had] recently disappeared.”

Not only would domesticated animals have changed Indian societies, they might have created new zoonotic diseases. Absent the extinctions, the encounter between Europe and the Americas might have been equally deadly for both sides—a world in which both hemispheres experienced catastrophic depopulation.

Paul Martin, a paleontologist who was one of Haynes’s Arizona colleagues, thought otherwise. Extinction, he claimed, was the nigh-inevitable outcome when beasts with no exposure to Homo sapiens suddenly encountered “a new and thoroughly superior predator, a hunter who preferred killing and persisted in killing animals as long as they were available.”

Historical records show that frontier populations can increase at astonishing rates; in the early nineteenth century, the annual U.S. birthrate climbed as high as 5 percent. If the first paleo-Indians doubled in number every 20 years (a birthrate of 3.4 percent), the population would hit 10 million in only 340 years, a blink of an eye in geological terms.

Even with conservative assumptions about the rate of paleo-Indian expansion, the destructive front would reach the Gulf of Mexico in three to five centuries. Within a thousand years it would strike Tierra del Fuego. In the archaeological record, Martin pointed out, this hurricane of slaughter would be visible only as the near-simultaneous appearance of Clovis artifacts throughout North America—and “the swift extermination of the more conspicuous native American large mammals.” Which, in fact, is exactly what one sees.

More often, though, hunters stalked individual beasts until they were close enough to throw a spear in the gut. “Then you just follow them around for a day or two until they keel over from blood loss or infection,” Charles Kay, an ecological archaeologist at Utah State University, told me. “It’s not what we think of as sporting, but it’s very effective and a hell of a lot safer than hand-to-hand combat with a mammoth.”