Sunday, Dec. 26, 1999

New World habitation tricky issue

By Mike Lee Herald staff writer

Everybody knows by now that Columbus didn't discover America. But some evidence suggests he might not even have been the first person from modern-day Spain to set foot in the New World.

Notwithstanding clues that the first Americans were from Asia, one of the nation's leading scientists proposes that the first intrepid explorers actually hailed from the Solutrean cultures of what is now Spain and France.

"They were from Iberia, not Siberia," said Dennis Stanford, eminent anthropologist at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. "These folks were crossing water. There is no reason why they shouldn't (do that)."

With each turn of the shovel, researchers are rewriting history books - sometimes erroneously, sometimes closer to the truth. It's an extraordinary task given the lack of information and the specialized nature of scientific pursuits into the past.

The big debate - as it has been for years - is whether Clovis people were the first inhabitants of the New World.

"We are forever attempting to find reality," said C. Vance Haynes, recently retired from the University of Arizona in Tucson, a staunch defender of the Clovis-first model.

Named for the town in eastern New Mexico where a distinct cache of stone tools was found in 1932, the Clovis culture flourished about 11,000 years ago. Tools of remarkably similar design are scattered across the continent.

"People are learning that the peopling of the Americas was not a simple process," said Alan Schneider, a Portland lawyer who represents scientists in the Kennewick Man case. "I think that's fascinating people because it becomes a great mystery."

Based on similarities between stone tool technology and art of the new and old worlds, Stanford hypothesizes that early migrants floated from Iberia north during the last Ice Age when ice extended well into northwest Europe.

And when the boat explorers needed a rest, they could pull onto the ice, gather driftwood and build a fire or patch their craft for the next leg of the journey.

Of course, Stanford faces competing theories and realizes his stance on the Solutrean connection will prompt numerous attempts to disprove him.

Evidence shows numerous migrations into the New World, perhaps spanning thousands of years - but supporting artifacts are widely scattered and not developed or proved to the same level of detail. That makes it hard to advance a truly global migration theory.

"We've got a real fundamental problem yet on how to make connections region to region," said Bonnichsen, whose center attempts to synthesize migration information.

For the better part of the century, the dominant theory of the peopling of the New World has been that people from Asia or Siberia crossed the Bering land bridge - an open connection between North America and Asia during the last Ice Age, when a larger amount of water was held in ice and the seas were lower.

As the theory goes, hunters followed big game across the land bridge, then south along an ice-free corridor through what is now Canada. From there, they spread rapidly across the New World.

The explorers are painted as a valorous and hearty people tromping over virgin land, developing stone and bone tools to aid their journey and having numerous children as they pressed toward utopia.

Alan Bryan, professor emeritus of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, said in some cases valid pre-Clovis sites have never been explained. "They have just been ignored," he said, criticizing a scientific myopia. He added, "We will never know when people first arrived in North America if we continue to keep the door closed" to new information.

For years, the scientific establishment's door was closed to reports coming out of Monte Verde, an extensive site in the temperate rain forests of Chile excavated by Tom Dillehay of the University of Kentucky.

Dated at 12,500 years old - with parts much older - it's the site commonly used to show pre-Clovis occupation of the New World.

"We should revisit all of the previous ... assumptions based on Monte Verde," Bryan said. "The question of when people first arrived remains elusive because each model in vogue has tended to restrict research."

Other pre-Clovis sites are scattered around both continents.

Ruth Gruhn, professor emeritus of the University of Alberta, said populations had even expanded into the Amazon rain forest by 11,000 years ago. That leads her to believe the initial entry into the New World was perhaps 20,000 years ago - in South America.

And Deb Huglin, a California archaeologist who works with American Indian tribes to get remains returned, says evidence from the Calico site in California shows extensive human habitation predating Clovis by several millennia. She takes seriously tribal oral tradition that says they have "always been" in the Americas.

And she takes a dim view of what passes for science in American universities. "Archaeology is suppressed," she said. "Part of this is because the information most archaeologists have to go on they learned in the system, which has been funded by the displacement tactics of the government."

Huglin believes the federal government has a vested interest in supporting a multiple migration theory to validate the white invasion of Indian lands and taking tribal rights such as fish and land.

Rebecca Tsosie, executive director of the Indian Legal Program at Arizona State University, has similar qualms. "It would be only too convenient to find that Native Americans are merely another 'immigrant' group with no special claim to lands within the United States," she said in a lengthy review of the Kennewick Man case published last summer.

"If the controversy boils down to a disagreement over who settled America, that shows no hope of ever being resolved - even by scientists who disagree on what 'evidence' counts - then presumably Native American theories on this should be entitled as much weight as scientific theories," Tsosie said.

Scientific theories are developed largely on stone tools because their workmanship and style reveals information about who the users were related to and their activities. A sewing needle, for instance, indicates one lifestyle, while a large two-sided knife indicates another.

Bonnichsen and others say DNA from hair or from dried blood in the cracks of stone tools could open new windows to the past.

"This 'soft technology' probably contributed more to the successful colonization of this hemisphere than any stone tool kit," said James Adovasio, director of Mercyhurst Archaeological Institute in Pennsylvania.

If some theorists are correct, much of the earliest migration evidence is buried in oceans. One idea gaining popularity is that Pacific Rim residents were the first Americans and they floated to the New World by boat down the West Coast. Boats - often overlooked in peopling theories - may also explain how Clovis cultures expanded so rapidly across the Americas.

But all kinds of questions remain: Were other people already on the continent when the Clovis arrived? How did Clovis dominate the hemisphere in 1,000 years? Does Clovis represent a single cultural group?

Also: Why does the record of human remains in North America not extend past about 13,000 years ago? Why are many skeletons that are older than 8,000 years so different from more recent people? What happened to the Clovis people?

And what clues hide just beyond the tip of the last shovel?

Those are the questions pushing archaeologists into the next century - still wondering what happened millennia ago.