Clovis in context: New light on the peopling of the Americas |
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Authors: | A C Roosevelt |
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Institution: | (1) Field Museum of Natural History Department of Anthropology, University of Illinois at Chicago, 1400 South Lake Shere Drive, 60605 Chicago, IL |
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Abstract: | Until recently, the first Americans were thought to be fluted-point spear-hunters from the Siberian steppes. Near the end
of the Ice Age, they followed big-game herds over the Bering land bridge into the open, upland habitats of the interior of
North America about 12,000 years ago. Rapidly extinguishing the big game herds with their deadly hunting methods, they pressed
southward in search of new herds and reached the tip of South America about a thousand years later. Today, nearly 70 years
after the first excavations at Clovis, New Mexico, the type site for this culture, new sites and new dates from both North
and South America are forcing a revision of the earlier picture of the migrations and adaptations of the first Americans.
But despite recurring claims that human colonization of the Western Hemisphere began as early as 20,000 or more years ago
with the arrival of generalized foragers lacking a projectile-point tradition, no definitive data gives empirical support
for a human presence before c. 12,000 before the present (B.P.). All supposed pre-Clovis cultures except one in Alaska have
failed to withstand careful scrutiny of their data. In addition, despite recent claims for cultural and biological links of
the migrants to Europe or the Pacific Islands, the skeletons and cultural assemblages of Paleoindians throughout the hemisphere
point consistently to a northeast Asian origin. According to new data, Paleoindian ancestors in Beringia c. 12,000 years ago
were not specialized, fluted-point hunters of large game, but broad-spectrum hunter-gatherers using triangular or bipointed,
lanceolates. Diverse cultures descended from these ancestors, not only the big-game hunting Clovis culture of the North American
high plains. And just as Clovis did not set the cultural pattern for the hemisphere, it was not the earliest culture. Fully
contemporary with the earliest possible Clovis dates of c. 11,200, in South America there already were maritime foragers on
the Pacific coast, small-game hunters in the southern pampas, and tropical forest riverine foragers in the eastern tropical
lowlands. The Clovis culture thus was just one of several regional cultures developed in the millennium after the initial
migration. It could not have been the ancestor of the other early Paleoindian cultures.
This new picture of Paleoindian cultures changes understanding of initial human adaptive radiation in the Americas and has
implications for general theories of human evolution and behavioral ecology. |
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Keywords: | prehistoric hunters-gatherers human ecology human evolution environmental archaeology peopling of Americas |
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