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Repatriation and

the Greatest Adventure

For the past 12,000 years, the world has enjoyed a relatively stable climate. Now, the time of predictable global weather has ended. The future will be unsettled, probably fiery and likely terrifying. Forces have been unleashed that threaten the future of our children. The early consequences of global warming have already settled over much of the planet.

Has this kind of climate change ever challenged humans before? It certainly has: Most recently right here in North America, when people first colonized this continent. About 15,000 years ago, the weather began to warm, melting the huge glaciers of the Late Pleistocene that calved off as icebergs and caused the oceans to rise. The Americas were probably uninhabited by people then but teaming with gigantic and fierce animals, many capable of killing and eating human beings. In this brand new landscape, the largest of all unoccupied wilderness regions humans would ever explore on earth, people somehow adapted to unfamiliar habitats and dangerous creatures in the midst of a wildly fluctuating climate. And they made it through. Along the trail of the first migration into the Americas lie challenging illustrations of courage and caution for modern people.

Though the rough outline of this journey is delineated by modern science, what drew me into the wild heart of the first Americans’ story was the adventure, the exploration, the danger: Wondering what it was like to live with huge pack-hunting lions, sabertooth cats, dire wolves and gigantic short-faced bears, to hunt now extinct horses, camels and mammoth, to top a ridge somewhere in what would become Alaska and look out on unending wild country that encompassed two continents uninhabited by humans. It was the first and only time since Adam and Eve emerged from Eden that our species would come into so vast a land, a wilderness five times the area of Australia and never before glimpsed by an upright primate. Here lived beasts both fierce and wonderful. Some species had not previously encountered people, including a number of predators.

I can’t think of a richer, wilder, more perilous time to live. For a person like myself who loves wilderness, this time in America had to be the ultimate journey—heroic, bold adventurers facing down danger at every bend of the river, surviving against impossible odds.

No doubt, these early Americans had no such picture of themselves; just getting through the day alive, finding adequate food and shelter in fluctuating habitats, embraced all shades of courage.

The inexorable force overshadowing all human migrations and accommodations to new environments at the end of the Pleistocene was climate change: The melting world of the Late Pleistocene opened the Americas to human colonization and contributed to the extinction of the big animals we call megafauna. The earliest Americans were ice-age pioneers who took advantage of the time of glaciers (seas were at a lower level) to cross over the Bering Strait. As the weather warmed about 15,000 years ago, they began to wind their way south into the contingent states. They no doubt boated down the Pacific coast, dangerously dodging icebergs in their small skin boats. Later, they found passages down through the glaciers, corridors between the two great American ice sheets. The great hunters, the Clovis people of mammoth fame, probably used the last ice-free corridor to sweep down south and, in a heart-beat of geology (a few hundred years), colonize nearly all of North America. They are often credited with hunting the huge beasts of the Pleistocene, the megafauna, into extinction. Without climate change, the Clovis invasion might not have happened and some of the megafauna might still be around. Of course, great controversy surrounds these assertions.

Today’s shifting weather patterns, the shorthand we call “global warming,” will far exceed anything our ancestors faced during the climate change 13,000 to 15,000 years ago. Yet, at the very end of the Pleistocene we find a major extinction event; 35 genera of mostly large animals suddenly disappear from the earth. The lethal combination of human activity and climate change are the chief suspects. Today, we are experiencing what authorities call the 6th Great Extinction—a much deadlier event than that of the Pleistocene—a crisis most believe to be driven by human-induced climate warming.

The two eras were of course quite different worlds. Thirteen to fifteen thousand years ago, the Americas consisted of two very sparsely inhabited continents; today’s planet is packed with seven billion humans. The strategy for adaptation and survival during the warming climate of the ice age involved bold migrations impossible in the 21st century; direct comparisons of the two periods of climate change are often tenuous.

Still, I was curious and much of that curiosity was bundled around how humans perceive risk. Could there be a bridge between recognizing today’s extreme climatic dangers and the Pleistocene lion crouched in the bush, waiting for two-legged ice-age prey? We evolved to deal with the predator. In comparison, present day “global warming” seems distant, harmlessly incremental or something that happens to remote strangers. For those ancient adventurers, however, the sabertooth was right there, every day—a pragmatic consciousness of great modern value.

We are left to imagine the details of everyday Late Pleistocene life: Archaeology and paleontology provide broad parameters of time and place but there is great mystery and much controversy surrounding the dates and routes by which humans reached the unglaciated core of North America. The hard evidence delineating the peopling of the Americas 15,000 years ago is sketchy. But what a vibrant life it must have been, lived in that wild ice-age topography whose considerable remnants are still with us today.

This book will attempt to dig into the last several millennia of the ice-age, that period of American archaeology for which there is yet the least scientific documentation.

It was, and remains, an incredible adventure—the wildest ride.

•

How did this story take root in my own life? Like countless others, my early days were painted with archaeology’s unforgettable colors. When I was nine, I looked for arrowheads in the muddy furrows of spring-plowed fields of Michigan. The map of my world hugged the banks and terraces of great rivers, guiding me along the low snaking ridges of ancient beaches down into cattail swamps where legions of Canada geese and whistler swans darkened the evening skies—the downy wildebeests of my watery Serengeti. In the blowouts on the sandy ridges, a profusion of fire-broken rock and brown chert flakes blanketed scattered arrowheads of another kind. Summer brought clouds of mosquitoes off the marshes and, at the edge of the swamp, the receding river revealed a pile of huge rough flint blades: A cache of material awaiting refinement into finished arrowheads. Come autumn, at age fourteen, I walked the ridges under the blazing maples and elms. A gust of wind skittered the leaves across a large anthill, a normal feature in this porous soil. What was different about the hill was the color of the sand: It was bright red with faint streaks of green. I would learn what this meant: Underneath, a stillborn child, consecrated with sacred red ocher, lay buried accompanied by Lake Superior copper grave offerings and a hundred triangular arrowheads.

The arrowheads shaped a central mystery and a lost way of life. They spoke of another world, an older more compelling world I wanted somehow to become a part of.

I skipped my way through awkward adolescence wandering my wilderness of marshes. Sometimes I carried an ancient Damascus-twist double barrel shotgun into the maze of channels. Pintail ducks exploded from potholes, startling my inattention. I pushed through the line of bulrushes walling off the river. The late summer breeze lifted off filaments of cottony fluff from the seed spike; I was reminded of the white flower pattern on a girl’s pink underpants and I missed a brace of mallards rising off into the cirrus blue sky. The September sun sparkled on the muddy rivulets and, further upstream, glinted off flakes of chert and flint eroding from the riverbank. I splashed up the river’s edge and came to a profusion of rocks, potsherds and flaked artifacts in the shallow water or tumbling out of the riverbank—three or four thousand years of prehistory. Among these lay four of the most perfect arrowheads I had ever seen: big, deeply corner-notched chocolate-brown chert projectile points, the largest over four inches long. No doubt, the big brown arrowheads had come from another cache or even a burial weathering out of the nearby bank. I would return but not to collect artifacts or look for the cache.

That next year I gave up my entire collection of arrowheads. I started reburying arrowheads and repatriating the ones I had kept as a boy.

Except for one. Later, I carried the largest of those chocolate-brown chert arrowheads into war. It protected me from countless enemy bullets and would prefigure the decades to come.

The arrowheads told a story but I didn’t know what it was about. Our family had a trout fishing cabin on the upper Pine River. My grandpa and uncle built it out of wood scraps and tarpaper after the Depression. The cabin was where the stories were told. Grandfather narrated sagas of a gigantic brown trout hooked three times over a decade but never landed. He had a Chippewa Indian friend he sometimes ice-fished with. But the legend of the arrowheads was one story my grandfather never told me.

My father hauled me around to local archaeological meetings—amateur groups who would bring in a professional for a lecture—and helped me find books at the library. My dad made up wonderful stories about an Indian boy like myself, that he would write out over the years and mail to me from his distant Boy Scout postings, or, occasionally sneak into my bedroom (after all, I was a teenager) and ease me towards smiling sleep with his soothing woodsy tales.

I plugged away, tracking the trails of those ancient hunters, especially the earliest ones. Plunging into my backyard wilderness, I prowled those swamps and wastelands. The songs of warblers and larks ushered my forays into dark woodlands. Dusk suggested jeopardy. My child’s universe of adventure edged into a larger world and I slowly began to crave wildness beyond the hills and cornfields. I know now that those fens, sand ridges and feathered herds flying at sunset gave rise to my own idea of home, one that had everything to do with discovery and a sense of the importance of wild exploration that eventually propelled a lifetime aimed at boundless horizons. Much of that value emerged from a child looking for arrowheads and then thinking about the lives of the vanished people who had made them. Where’d they come from and how did they live?

By this time, age fifteen, I had figured out that those sand ridges at 605 feet of elevation represented a post-glacial beach of the Great Lakes, lived on by Late Archaic people about 4,000 years ago. I found another red colored anthill and immediately called the anthropology department at the University of Michigan and talked to James B. Griffin, a giant, I later learned, in the archaeology of the eastern United States.

Griffin sent out two doctorial graduate students, Louis Binford and Mark Papworth. I tagged along on many a field reconnaissance and eavesdropped on conversations too sophisticated for my provincial upbringing. Papworth, especially, took me under his care; we slogged through muddy cornfields and paddled canoes down roily rivers looking for sites. Mark pointed out stands of wild marihuana and passed me a beer—knowledge and rites I had barely imagined. Some time passed, the University of Michigan got a grant for archaeological fieldwork in the Saginaw Basin and I was hired in 1960 as a research assistant on a dig of a site I had discovered when I was sixteen. Later, I attended the University of Michigan and took archaeology courses taught by these great men, learning about the peopling of the Americas and the bold hunters, called “Clovis,” who once stalked mammoth during the time of the gigantic American beasts (now extinct) at the end of the Pleistocene.

But as a student, I was restless, aching for the Rocky Mountains and would quit alternate semesters to go West and pound nails for a living. All the time, the draft board was close behind.

In the spring of 1963, I was working as a core-logging geologist for a copper mine in southern Arizona. My U of M advisor, paleontologist John (Jack) Dorr, called and asked me to accompany him to the Alaskan backcountry on a three-month expedition to look for non-marine vertebrate fossils from the Tertiary era—an effort to correlate the Bering Strait land migration route theory for extinct horses and camels. We went everywhere: All over Alaska, the Yukon drainage, the Mackenzie River basin and the North Slope before big oil got there. The trip was a total academic and scientific failure. We found no such fossils, not a single one. It was one of the best times of my life.

We camped out on a braided river halfway between the Brooks Range and the Arctic Ocean. The bush plane that had landed on a gravel bar and dropped us off would be a couple weeks late in picking us up because of poor weather. We ran short of food, and worse, Jack was out of tobacco. Every day, we scanned the gray horizon for breaks in the weather: The plane never came. Jack smoked coffee grounds rolled in newspaper while I foraged the flats and hills for berries, fish and meat. We guilelessly wondered if we might end up wintering in this land of tundra and muskeg—we’d have to live like Indians or Eskimos. I fashioned a hook with feathers, made a fly, tied it with a leader to a short branch of dwarf willow, let the wind blow it over the sloughs and jerked countless grayling up onto the bank. Dr. Jack, who had collected sample skulls of nearly all North American mammals, asked me if I might bag an Arctic ground squirrel (whose skull was missing from his collection) for him with my pistol. I stalked the dry ridges, dodging dive-bombing gyrfalcons that nested on the low summits, and watched a coal-black wolf nearly my own weight disappear into the fog. That night I fried up the headless ground squirrel in bacon grease and wondered how the ancients survived in such a place.

I didn’t get back to the North Country for a number of years. In 1966, I wrapped up the big chocolate brown arrowhead in a small roadmap of the northern Rocky Mountains and headed to Southeast Asia. The arrowhead kept me alive during firefights, grenade lobs, mortar attacks and friendly fire from helicopters and stray bombs. The map showed me what I wanted to stay alive for. After serving two tours as a Special Forces medic in the Central Highlands of Vietnam, I was finally repatriated to the Rocky Mountains, the Pacific coast of Alaska and British Columbia, the Arctic tundra, and the great deserts of the Southwest U.S. and Northwestern Mexico—North America, the land I loved the most. The maimed vet crawled back into the brush and lived with grizzly bears until his wound began to staunch, then struck out again walking the high country. The wild habitats of the West that represented my homeland were also the terrain of that great adventure—when the first people reached the western shore of the Pacific and found their way south. How would it have felt to be the first human to explore this uninhabited wilderness when huge lions, sabertooth cats and gigantic bears patrolled the land? I walked the wild ridges with these scenes in the back of my mind.

For four more decades I stalked these places and routes, following grizzly bears, often retracing the paths of prehistoric people, never with artifact collecting on my mind but rather with a sense of wonder and curiosity about how people might have lived in such habitat. Accordingly, I lived off the land, often alone, for weeks at a time in remote deserts, mountains, coastal British Columbia, including the Queen Charlotte and Goose Islands, a coastal route that was not completely glaciated during the last Ice Age. I walked point on a polar bear expedition in eastern Beringia (Beringia during the Late Pleistocene was the vast Arctic region encompassing the Bering land bridge, west from the Russian Far East, Siberia and much of Alaska, east all the way past the Mackenzie River in Canada), tracked Siberian tigers in western Beringia, stalked grizzlies throughout Alaska and all the way down into Mexico, slowly paddled down the Porcupine River where I found a mammoth tusk sticking out of the bank of a side channel and roamed the region of the ice-free corridor, ranging from the waters of the Yukon and Mackenzie Rivers south to the Rocky Mountain Front. For seven months a year, over fifteen years, I lived with wild grizzlies in the high mountains of the American West. I’m still here.

Archaeologists had enriched my life. After the war, I lived in the home of eminent anthropologist Edward H. Spicer, where I came to know Thomas Hinton and Bernard (Bunny) Fontana. For years, Tom and I camped up and down Sonora’s Seri Coast, and Bunny remains a close friend. Henry Wright bailed me out of a jam one time. Mark Papworth read my first book, Grizzly Years, got hold of me through the publisher and we resumed our old friendship.

The past was close behind. My repatriation was already unconsciously tracking this great adventure story—the colonization of ice-age America by humans. A couple developments narrowed my focus on this tale into the brilliant sunlight of a Montana summer and the writing of this book. The first of these concerned an archaeological site.

•

Back in 1968, just north of my house on the Yellowstone River, workers unearthed about 110 stone and bone artifacts that accompanied a child burial. The funeral offerings were consecrated—like those on the ridges of my youth—with sacred red ochre, an ancient burial practice that goes back nearly 100,000 years in the Old World. These grave offerings constitute the largest and most spectacular collection of Clovis tools ever found (the Clovis culture dates from about 13,100 to 12,800 years ago and was once believed to represent the earliest Americans who presumably dashed down the ice-free corridor from Alaska along the Rocky Mountain Front into Montana.) The one-and-a-half-year-old child is the oldest skeleton ever found in the Americas and the only known Clovis burial.

Partly because construction workers had discovered the burial and because rural Montana was far from the scholarly centers of Pre-Columbian archaeology, professionals largely ignored this stunning find and the significance of the site was dismissed or discredited in the scientific and popular literature for decades. At this time, archaeology reentered my life. With two professional friends, I helped organize a re-excavation.

Notebooks, 1999

I first heard about the Clovis Skeleton on a cold November day in 1998. The Livingston, Montana Natural History Exhibit Hall was sponsoring a tour through Paradise Valley where I live, just north of Yellowstone National Park, and a gruff, bearded, 55-year-old archaeologist, outfitter, and guide named Larry Lahren conducted it. Our group explored ancient bison-kill sites along limestone cliff faces and examined red-ocher pictographs that marked the entrance to a canyon just south of town. In passing, Lahren happened to mention a site he had studied north of Livingston, on veterinarian Mel Anzick’s ranch—a place that held special significance for him. Intrigued, I invited Lahren to join me at the Murray Hotel Lounge for a drink.

Lahren has a reputation that matches his imposing physical presence; he’s built like a football player, thick and hard, with a bit of a middle-age belly that belies the strength and quickness he once used to sweep three drunken cowboys off a Livingston bar. My friend the poet Jim Harrison had warned me, half joking, that it was OK to have two beers with Lahren, but that I should leave before he finished the third. We were on number two when Lahren started getting fired up about the importance of the Anzick site.

“It produced the only Clovis skeleton—period!” Lahren exclaimed. “But nobody in the archaeology establishment wants to hear it. But I know it’s true.”

Given the archaeological importance of Clovis artifacts, it seemed amazing that the only Clovis burial assemblage in the world had been found just a few miles away, and yet remained uncelebrated and almost unknown outside the professional literature. As Lahren continued his remarkable tale, however, I realized that when it comes to the Anzick site, missed opportunities abound.

One morning in June 1968, two local construction workers drove a front-loader and a dump truck out to the base of the elephant-head bluff. Mel Anzick had given the men permission to dig up fill for the local high school, and after Ben Hargis filled a dump truck, Calvin Sarver drove the first load into town.

Hargis continued working. He began punching into the scree at the base of the cliff with the bucket of the front-loader, and as he backed away with a full load, something fell down into the bucket, catching his eye. Bright red powder cascaded down the cliff from the place the object had fallen. Sarver returned to find Hargis excited: He’d found a very old and impressive-looking flaked tool.

That evening after work, Sarver and Hargis returned with their wives to explore the cliffside. They began digging with their hands, and almost immediately a huge chert blade, stained red, fell out. It was flaked on both sides, the sort of tool called a biface. Then another, and another—one made of yellow chalcedony, the next of red jasper. Stacks of big bifaces and spearheads spilled down the slope. Mixed in with the artifacts were fragments of a small human skeleton covered with red ocher; all the stone implements and bone tools were stained with it too. “We were up to our armpits in that red stuff,” Sarver recalled recently. Faye Hargis remembers that they took the tools home and tried to scrub them clean—a task that left the kitchen sink stained red for a week.

Lahren, then a graduate student in archaeology at Montana State University, in Bozeman, heard about the find and asked to see the points, expecting to see weapons from a buffalo kill site, the sort that are common in these parts. He got his first look at the collection in Sarver’s kitchen. There was some small talk, Lahren said, and then Sarver and Hargis went out and returned carrying ten five-gallon buckets full of artifacts into the house.

“I was speechless,” Lahren told me. “I thought I was going to have a heart attack.” He realized the two men might have found important evidence that could help solve the mystery of the identity of the first Americans.

Lahren told Dee Taylor, a professor from the University of Montana, about the discovery, and after identifying the points as Clovis, Taylor presided over a two-week dig in the summer of 1968. But the enterprise was troubled from the start. “It is almost enough to make strong men weep,” he wrote later. The amateur diggers had “succeeded in taking almost everything that was there ‘in situ.’”

Taylor’s dismissal of the Anzick site established the attitude that remained prevalent for the next two decades. Artifacts from the Anzick site appeared on the cover of National Geographic in 1979, but the site was only mentioned briefly in the accompanying story about early Americans.

As Lahren and I sat that evening in the Murray Lounge, as I listened to this strange archaeological saga, I realized how passionate Lahren still was about the Anzick site, and I found myself catching his fever—a new outbreak of the enthusiasm I’ve had for archaeology since I was a boy. I envied the people who lived in that valley 13,000 years ago. I couldn’t help thinking that the supreme American adventure had been the first one. When the humans first reached our shores, America was the greatest unexplored frontier on earth. Lahren seemed to feel the same way I did, and he clearly had unfinished business out in the Shields Valley.

And so I wasn’t really surprised about what happened next. The bar was getting noisier, but we sat silently for a few minutes, and then Lahren said, “I’d love to get back in there with a crew and dig this the right way.”

Those were the magic words. I immediately thought of Papworth. Once when he was running low on cash, Mark sold me his beloved 12-gauge Ithaca LeFever shotgun.

But then we lost touch. Three decades had passed since we last spoke when out of the blue I received a letter from my old professor. He’d read my book, Grizzly Years, in which I described taking vengeance on a particularly nasty rural phone booth. “I bet that was my shotgun you used to shoot that phone booth,” the letter said. Enclosed was a business card: “Mark Papworth, Ph.D., Chief Deputy Coroner, Thurston County, Special Deputy-Homicide, Thurston County Sheriff’s Office. Member of the Faculty, Evergreen State College.”

I wrote back, “Dear Dr. P.: I shot that sucker six times with great satisfaction using your shotgun.” Our friendship resumed. In the last decade of his life, Papworth and I were family, sharing his home in Arizona in winter and mine in grizzly country when the snows melted.

I knew that Papworth would be tempted by Lahren’s scheme, and indeed he was. He agreed to join the team, saying, “It will be a last great adventure for this old man.” For the rest of the winter and into spring, the three of us talked and schemed and brainstormed. In May, we visited Mel and Helen Anzick at their home near Livingston and asked for permission to resume the work that had come to a halt in the 1970s. To our delight, they said yes.

Perhaps the Anzick site was going to get its due. If not, we would at least have a hell of a lot of fun.

July 1999, 8 a.m. a warm, sunny morning, and our 11-person crew—the 1999 Anzick Excavation Team—is crowded around the sandstone outcrop, sipping morning coffee from paper cups. The ground rules include “no poking around” (because this is a consecrated burial site) and no serious beer drinking until 5 p.m. We’ve planned two short digs for this summer, squeezed in between Lahren’s paying job for a mining company as a contract archaeologist and Papworth’s family obligations. Standing at the base of the bluff, we see that a giant bite has been taken out of the slope by previous digging. We will clear this area back to the cliff and down to the bedrock, revealing the original layers. Although Papworth believes the unexcavated areas may contain multiple burials, we will avoid digging in undisturbed dirt.

Lahren and Papworth will call the shots; the rest of the all-volunteer team, including a geologist, an anthropologist, myself, some students and friends of Lahren’s, will do the grunt work, cleaning away rocks and debris and getting the site ready for further study.

And so we work, hauling rocks away in wheelbarrows and sifting sand through screens, making sure we don’t miss anything.

On the evening of the first day, as the sun begins to cast a soft golden glow on the cliff face, we welcome an invited guest: The co-discoverer of the site, Calvin Sarver, now in his 60s, has just arrived from town to tell us about that bizarre day 30 years ago when the cliff seemed to rain Clovis artifacts. He walks to the cliff and points at a spot on the wall six feet higher and 15 feet east of the place where both Taylor and Lahren had previously dug.

“It was right here,” Sarver says. “Just about this high.”

Lahren is stunned. “You’re sure about that?” Sarver seems certain, although he grants that it’s been 30 years. This is invaluable information, which my son Colin records on video camera. I ask Calvin why he hadn’t cleared up all the previous archaeological misunderstandings: “Nobody ever asked me,” he answers.

Unlike Taylor, who died in 1991, Lahren now has a chance to set the record straight. “You know, I just assumed Taylor excavated the right place,” he says. “I can’t believe it. We just sifted through his leavings. Well, I guess we better re-do this grid.”

The question of DNA testing on the bones comes up. One of the Anzicks’ five children, their 33-year-old daughter Sarah, is better qualified than most to consider the ramifications of DNA testing: She has worked as a molecular biologist since 1994 at the cancer genetics branch of the National Institutes of Health’s human genome project in Bethesda, Maryland.

“Because the results could shed light onto patterns of human migration,” Sarah wrote to Lahren and me in September of 1999, “the results could have profound significance for the Native American community. The Native Americans have been intensely concerned about all genetic testing, so the [National Human Genome Research Institute] has been working very hard to build a bridge with this community. Given this, we have a moral obligation to communicate with the Native Americans and to be sensitive to their concerns regarding the genetic testing of the Anzick site remains.”

Meanwhile, there is another uncertainty: In recent months, as dealers continue to offer substantial sums for the Clovis artifacts he owns, Mel Anzick has apparently developed a new ambivalence about the potential wealth the artifacts represent. “It’s like finding oil on your place,” he said last fall. I was afraid of this: In our attempt to establish credibility for the Clovis burial, we advertise the site and its artifacts to all kinds of greedy collectors and pushy scientists.

On the evening of our second-to-last day working at the Anzick site, after the others leave, I climb to the top of the sacred elephant head and breathe in the immense space under the vault of the Montana sky, the landscape wild and free since the Pleistocene. May it stay this way, I whisper. But deep down, I know the story of the bones is far from over.

What emerged from our re-excavation of the Clovis child burial site were a number of fundamental questions and some clues as to how to go about answering them.

And these questions were the huge unanswered mysteries surrounding human colonization of the Americas: who were the First Americans? Were there people in North America before Clovis or, much earlier, before the last advance of the great ice sheets? These are two separate questions. Where did they come from and when did they arrive? How did they get down to Montana from Alaska or Siberia? Did they come by land or coast? Could they have come from Europe? How did early arrivals to North America ever survive the terrifying array of Pleistocene predators? What was the origin of the Clovis point (the manufacture of the signature tool, a superbly flaked and fluted spear head, some consider a “revolutionary” lithic technique)? Did it come from, say, Europe, Asia or was it a unique American invention? Finally, how did Clovis technology spread so fast on a sparsely inhabited continent? Both Clovis and the last of American Pleistocene megafauna disappeared at the same time, just over 200 years after the child was buried. Did the Clovis people hunt the mammoth and other huge animals to extinction or did climate change or an asteroid cause their demise?

These are the questions I plan to explore in the next eight chapters.

My two archaeologist friends and I also wondered if there was something special about this site: In addition to the fact that the burial contained the largest cache of Clovis artifacts yet discovered and the only Clovis skeleton, the Montana child burial provided hints that this find could be one of the oldest—there are older, though challenged, dates—and a key to understanding both the migratory routes of the First Americans as well as the origins of Clovis projectile point. Of course, a few people lived south of the ice before Clovis showed up. We’d work it out. Clues came from the geography of the site, the kind of stone used for the Clovis blades and projectile points, and the antler foreshafts (the detachable rods armed with the projectile point).

In the decade to come, the interpretation of the Anzick site would constitute a key argument by prominent archaeologists in the great theoretical wars surrounding the peopling of the Americas. Some of these professional readings do not match up with the factual evidence of the site and these misinterpretations have goaded my provincial defense of this local treasure.

•

The second development was a simple observation. Five autumns ago, behind my Montana house and far up the Absoroka Mountains, the forest turned red. So did the tops of all the other mountain ranges in and around nearby Yellowstone park. You could see it from the highways. The region’s whitebark pine trees succumbed to an invasive pine beetle on a scale of death none of us thought we’d ever see. And it happened so fast—not in decades but just a few years—that it took both concerned citizens and scientists by surprise. The reason the trees died is because the winters warmed up during the last decade and the mountain pine beetle, already active in the lower lodgepole pine forest, moved up a life zone into the whitebark and killed the trees. Nature controls the beetle by freezing the larva—cold temperatures of minus 30 to 35 degrees Fahrenheit for about five days in winter, depending on the thickness of the tree bark. Incidentally, whitebark pine nuts are the most important grizzly food in the Yellowstone region. With whitebark pine nuts eliminated from grizzly bear diets—and this seems to be the case—grizzlies in this island ecosystem will be severely endangered. The bears could be on their way out.

Here is an issue close to my heart. I have always argued, not quite glibly, that the fates of humans and grizzly bears are mingled, confined to a common destiny shared in the same habitats. If brother bear was going, could we be far behind?

Not everyone lives at the foot of a mountain range whose high forests have already been blasted by the effects of climate warming. Elsewhere the consequences are less visible, more elusive. We sense big changes are coming but for now life is good. Yet the threat is real. The precise problem seems to be that modern humans have difficulty perceiving their own true long-term self-interests; we don’t quite see the evolving threat to our survival as a civilization or a species. There’s no Pleistocene lion lurking in the gulch. But beyond the false invulnerability of our clever technology and the insulation of our material comfort, here prowls the beast of our time.

•

As a naturalist of sorts and an advocate for wildness, I try to make a difference through my work. The central issue of my generation is the human perpetrated wound we have inflicted against the life-support systems of the earth, whose collective injuries are increasingly visible today as climate change. Should humans push through another population bottleneck, we will drag down much of the wild earth and almost all the large animals with us. And that’s the rub: not that it’s unfair, which it is, but can people thrive without the habitats in which our human intelligence evolved, that gave rise to that bend of mind we call consciousness? Homo sapiens evolved in wilderness landscapes that are in part still with us; can we hope to endure when that homeland vanishes?

When I decided to write a book about people first coming to America during the Late Pleistocene, I had the importance of wilderness and modern global warming rattling around together in my brain. What do they all have in common? The biggest wild landscape ever glimpsed by Homo sapiens was at the moment people set foot on the Americas—two huge uninhabited continents. All the prehistoric action takes place in lands whose remnants today we call wilderness. And, I believe, the conservation of wild habitats will play a decisive role in our attempts to adapt to the current shifting climate.

The time period in which most of this book unfolds is about 13,000 to 15,000 years ago, a time, like today, of convulsive climate change. The end of the Pleistocene in North America was a time of rising temperatures, increase in the release of Arctic methane gases, melting glaciers, acidifying oceans rising hundreds of feet and massive extinctions. Could the earlier adventure, I wondered, inform the latter in any pragmatic fashion? Are there lessons in the story of early Americans adapting to a changing climate in an uninhabited human landscape prowled by huge cats and gigantic bears? The sudden emergence and disappearance of Clovis culture along with the extinction of North American megafauna are certainly related to changing weather patterns. While this ancient tale is not directly connected to 21st century global warming, the specter of climate change is the mammoth in the room.

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“The Greatest Adventure” is the story of the journey that launches human life on this continent, an epic trip capped by the near-synchronous appearance of the first major human occupation of the Americas and the extinction of the giant megafauna. I might add that this is where my story will end: After the twilight of Clovis and the sudden disappearance of America’s great Pleistocene animals, the amount of anthropological data surges and a rich library of emerging archaeological material illustrates human life between the time of the Clovis demise right up to historical contact of Native Americans and European culture. Many books do a fine job of telling this story. Prior to Clovis and the demise of the big mammals, the archaeology is more controversial and there isn’t much of it. This scant material is lobbied from partisan camps with arguments shouted out to the interested layperson who is encouraged to pick sides.

The Clovis colonization of the Americas climaxes around 13,000 years ago and ends less than two hundred years later with a sudden shift in climate and the final demise of the huge Late Pleistocene animals. These phenomena intersect in time and causation; we still don’t know what induced the cycles of climate change, if human hunters brought down the megafauna or if, conversely, the fierce, huge predators of the Late Pleistocene impeded movement of people throughout the Americas. The precise timing of these events and the etiology of the collapse of American large mammals are yet cloaked in controversy.

Who were these ancient pioneers? They were modern humans, like us, with a different set of skills and priorities. These first Americans were true children of the ice whose ancestors had come up from the temperate lands of Asia, edging north and crossing the Arctic Circle 30,000–40,000 years ago. They were hunters, especially of big game and migratory birds. These men and women possessed the social cohesion of nomadic bands, spoke an unknown language and used a tool kit geared to survive and thrive in the frozen North Country. By at least 24,000 years ago, people were wearing—evidenced by carved ivory figures—fur clothing on the shores of Lake Baikal in southeast Siberia. During the long nights of winter, the elders told tales that reached back millennia, an oral history and collective memory that embraced geography, climate and a detailed knowledge of plants and animals, which provided a template for the rush of discoveries they would encounter in the New World.

Traveling into American is unique in the history of human expansion. The first Americans faced the largest unexplored frontier in the history of colonization, two huge continents with no trace of people. The ice-age landscape was a hunter’s dream, teeming with huge animals, many never seen before by humans, including a dangerous array of giant carnivores.

The final migration, the firmly documented Clovis colonization of the Americas, took place at a rate unprecedented in the global archaeological record: Within a time period of just a few centuries, these Clovis people left their distinctive spear points from Montana to Florida, from New York to Central America.

(There are two later migrations of people into America: The Da Dene around nine thousand years ago and the Inuit-Aleuts a few thousand years ago. These arrivals are not covered in this book, which ends at the time of the great megafauna extinctions around 12,900 years ago.)

This book is the story of those human migrations into the Americas, beginning with the ephemeral ice-age people at the peak of the glaciation, to the bold mariners who no doubt traveled the northwest coast during the time of icebergs and finally with Clovis and the extinction of the megafauna.

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Here arguably is the world’s greatest adventure story: Ice-age hunters exploring a brand-new wilderness, braving raging rivers, crossing glaciers, encountering never-before-seen giant creatures—surviving in these shifting, uninhabited landscapes amid a rapidly changing climate. This journey is our unclaimed American Odyssey.

The notion of adventure includes risky undertakings, hazardous journeys with uncertain outcomes. The accounts of European exploration of the Polar Regions, Lewis and Clark moving up the Missouri River, John Wesley Powell going down the Colorado or surviving with Cabeza de Vaca are saturated with adventure. Today, with fewer blank spots left on the map, true adventure is a more elusive attainment; we are often forced to design our modern adventures, complete with magazine, book and movie deals, vaguely hoping for unexpected turns and slight misfortune. Yet, even vicariously, we still need this adrenaline-fueled hope called adventure, crave it, love it when we emerge at the take-out, a changed person but alive and looking at the world anew.

Though this journey was traveled millennia before written history and is only faintly delineated by our modern science, the tale looms as an untapped reservoir of human inspiration, as useful to people today as the most epic stories ever told around the campfire or in our books and folklore. It’s hard to imagine a more vital time to live than the Late Pleistocene in North America. Everything was new, the living dangerous, the daily routine utterly engaging.

This story stands in opposition to the history lesson I was taught in school—the pap of pilgrims conquering a dark and foreboding wilderness, of subduing godless savages with disease and blunderbusses, of Mayflower and Manifest Destiny. The Greatest Adventure begins at the opposite side of the continent, enters a land bountiful without parallel, the bright habitats beckoning with adventure, sizzling with life and devoid of any trace of human occupation. But it also bristles with dangerous beasts, formidable water crossings and massive ice fields. The Greatest Adventure was a much tougher trip through paradise.

The great American naturalist John Muir (presaging E. O. Wilson’s “biophilia”) believed his passion for nature came from a “natural inherited wildness in our blood.” Muir believed that natural selection created that passion and that it was permanently buried in our brains and genes.

Our own organic consciousness evolved within wild habitats from the African savannah all the way to the frozen tundra of the North. Evolutional awareness was shaped by the mammoths we hunted, by the great cats and bears who sometimes stalked us. And, as the lynx still sculpts snowshoe hare evolution, what forces today yet hone the human mind that was born of foraging? Modern people sometimes insist they exist apart from nature, the conditions that gave rise to human awareness—the habitats whose remnants we now call “wilderness.” But today nature has reasserted herself. The signs are dire. Will we heed the warnings? The Pleistocene predators are gone. A child in danger, a dark alley or a personal brush with tragedy generates an appropriate emotional response far more easily than the distant but predictable ocean rise that could displace a billion starving human strangers. Once again we live in dangerous times and navigating these treacherous waters will require sharpening that ancient perception of risk. It might not be a bad idea to try to hang on to some of that original landscape, like the wild Pacific coast or the cordilleras of the American West, habitat for survival, where utilitarian adventure still smolders.

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Why not have the professional archaeologists tell this story? Good question. Those archaeologists who have written such books jealously guard their territorial prerogatives. Even when writing books for the general reader, archaeologists tout the unique value of having been inside the authenticity-bestowing room when credibility proclamations are awarded. Some insiders question whether salvage archaeologists are qualified to criticize academic papers and if non-scientific but mainstream magazines should be writing about archaeological issues. Maybe they are correct.

I had a few reservations about the field; my archaeologist friends instilled in me a healthy skepticism, particularly about the specialized study of First Americans; they acknowledged that setting up two hypotheses as if the truth of one negates the truth of another is a persistent problem of archaeological intellectual life and noted that sample sizes tend to be small and correlation does not explain causation. Nonetheless, tough thinkers surround the profession and I wondered if this dialogue could benefit from an outside interpretive voice.

Underneath, I may have also sensed a bit of resentment (primed by my Montana experience of mainstream archaeology’s dismissal of the Anzick Clovis burial and scientists’ subsequent shifty scramble for the child’s skeletal remains) at the injustice that the larger story, the story of all our people—our American Creation Myth—was patrolled and constrained by an academia whose own literature was frequently composed with a territorial imperative. Yet the field encompassed the landscape of legends, quartered in our childhood dreams of fossil giants and arrowheads. Technical scholarship sometimes swallows the best of this adventure: Could a naturalist’s take on the archaeological material liberate this tale?

I read up on the subject, consuming volumes of material trying to sate my curiosity with the lives of these ice-age pioneers; the depth and range of the controversies surrounding this field of early American archaeology, along with the vehemence and niggling with which these academic wars are waged, astounded me, fascinated me. The richness of the material leapt off the driest scholarly page. Although many strive for the juice of modern discovery, the dozen or so most recent books on the topic, seemed insular (written by archaeologists with other archaeologists in mind) and devoid of the older vitality that lies at the heart of this incredibly journey.

Paradoxically, this is a tough tale to be told by an insider. Given the paltry stack of hard evidence, there’s too much academic territory at stake.

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In 2007, I applied for and received a Guggenheim Fellowship. I spent the next two years reading related scholarly papers; it’s interdisciplinary—archaeology, paleontology, genetics, linguistics, glaciology—but finite and accessible to an informed researcher, such as myself with a dusty degree in geology, graduate study in anthropology, a background in archaeology and the natural sciences. I also talked with a few primary researchers in the field. I can see why this tale is hard to bring to life but, after another year of following stories in the press, and a 2011 Fellowship from the Lannan Foundation, I thought I’d give it a shot.

Why write a book about a journey that took place many thousands of years before any written record, especially during a time when the world seems on fire? After all, these days are the most dangerous times we have seen in the history of the earth. Beyond the agony of modern wars, disease, economics, genocide, torture and starvation, the planet itself and its support systems are in peril. We are experiencing the largest rates of plant and animal extinction on record, rivaling the massive extinctions of the Cretaceous that knocked off the dinosaurs. All around the globe, the air is poisoned and the oceans over-fished. Climate change threatens all species, including humans. Global warming is not a passing phenomenon. It will be there at the end of the day and at the end of our lives. Revisiting an ancient puzzle that unfolded 13,000 to 15,000 years ago might be a waste of time and energy. So, again, why go back and track the odyssey of these bold first Americans?

Human adaptation to climate change is the common underlying theme. However thin the threads of evidence illuminating adaptation to ice-age global warming, I wanted to follow them to some speculative conclusion, even if it merely adds up to a wild guess. Direct comparisons between the two periods of climate change are impossible, rendered unproductive by an unmistakable lack of hard evidence. But the older journey is a great adventure, closer to mythology than science. Life in the Pleistocene is our original emergence story. Our own American Odysseus was out there fighting off ice-age sabertooths and bears with his spear while pursuing mammoth and other giant beasts.

In this spirit, I thought a good adventure story, occasionally with constructive parallelism, might spur us to open our hearts to the undeniable truth that we are again devouring more of the earth’s resources than she has to spare. The book is also a celebration of the North American continent: An exhilarating tale—less prophesy than parable—spun along the lines of exploration in a brand new world beset by the storms of change. The hub of this story reveals adaptation by people coping with extreme climate change, the driving force of our evolution. Tracing the movement of the first people of the Americas’ is ultimately an optimistic trip full of fun and excitement—a message of hope and courage we all could embrace.

A note on dating and carbon-14Whenever possible, I avoid using radiocarbon dates in this book. Of course, carbon-14 dating is the bread and butter of archaeology, which is ultimately rooted not in the amazing technology of accelerator mass spectrometry but the care and accuracy with which the carbon sample and its provenance are reported. For an outsider to question a particular radiocarbon date might be tantamount to calling the scientist a liar. Archaeology has a colorful history of great big liars (from Piltdown to Sandia) but I leave it to other archaeologists to state reservations about radiocarbon (and other methods) dates from key locations.Briefly, the isotope carbon-14 (C14) is absorbed by plants from the air and moves on into animals until the organism dies. C14 then slowly reverts to N14. Half of it is gone in 5,730 years; another half of that, 25%, decays after 11,460 years and so on. The usefulness of radiocarbon dating fades rapidly for objects older than 45,000 years old. Dates are stated in years before present (BP) with “present” defined as 1950. A range of potential error, plus or minus in years, is provided with each analyzed sample. Calibration of radiocarbon dates to calendar years is neither linear nor especially logical; variation of cosmic particle bombardment from the sun and relative amounts of CO2 stored in the ocean or air all play hell with recalibration. Tree ring chronology provides about twelve thousand years of comparison.I have arbitrarily tacked on a couple thousand years to radiocarbon dates for the period of 15,000 to 12,000 years ago in order to discuss the time of the Great Adventure: Thus the radiocarbon date, 11,000 C-14 yr BP+/- 75 becomes a rough 13,000 years ago, in this case less than a hundred years off the true recalibrated date. For the purposes of telling my story, that’s generally close enough. On occasion, radiocarbon dates are necessary to pin down the precise timing of the opening of the ice-free corridor or the brief panoramic window of Clovis. When you see an exception to rounded-off dates in this book, such as 13,300 or 12,900 years ago, that means the data is translated from the radiocarbon calendar and has been cited several times in peer-reviewed literature. I’d like to attempt to keep it simple.

Here is a sample of some rounded off dates that appear several times in the text:30,000 years ago: Marks about the earliest date humans could have appeared in North America. The evidence? Not much: A single site in the Siberian Arctic and inferences from genetic and linguistic studies on extant populations.15,000 to 27,000 years ago: A very cold time of advancing glaciers. By about 20,000 years ago the ice sheets were at their maximum, closing off all routes from Alaska to lower North America. The great megafauna still roamed the ice-free far north but there is no record of humans in the Arctic during this period.13,000 to 15,000 years ago: Very rough dates that denote the time of the so-called pre-Clovis people. It was a time of global warming and rising seas. The archaeological data indicates a couple sites around 14,000 years ago in northeastern Siberia and, about 700 years later, several more along the tributaries of the upper Yukon River in Alaska. South of the ice, a number of credible pre-Clovis dates come from the United States and South America.12,800 to 13,100 years ago: This is the time of Clovis, which probably begins several hundred years earlier than 13,000 years ago, by which date the culture, marked by its iconic projectile point, was full blown and spread across the southern half of the continent. There’s lots of archaeology to pin these dates down. About 12,800 years ago, the warming period is interrupted by a cold snap. The American megafauna, which might have been in decline for a few hundred years, suddenly goes extinct, and Clovis disappears from the archaeological record.