Nowadays archaeologists guess that ancient humans first entered the Americas as long as 24,000 years ago, perhaps via a sea ice bridge, or perhaps sailing south along the so-called ‘kelp highway’, the Pacific coastal current rich in seaweed, fish, and birds. South Africans live down the road from some of the oldest human ancestors. Mrs Ples strode around the Gauteng hills almost three million years ago.
A few hundred years before that, Lucy sharpened rocks on the Ethiopian highlands. In the Americas, by contrast, no early hominin remains have ever been discovered. The first intelligent apes to make it here were modern humans.
Exactly when and how, though, has long been contentious. Until recently, if you were an archaeology student, your professors might tell you that about 13,000 years ago so much water was locked up in Ice Age glaciers that aland bridgeopened up between Siberia and Alaska. The first Americans followed mastodons and mammoths over the tundra, navigated gaps between the ice sheets, and then, within a few hundred years, fanned out over two continents.
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Everywhere, they left their distinctive fluted arrowheads, called Clovis points. Supposedly, they also used these to hunt to extinction the Ice Age megafauna. Today we know this to be false.
While Native Americans are certainly descended from Siberians, genetic and linguistic research supports a much longer settlement timeline. Climate change, not humans, was the chief culprit in the extinctions. And most recently, fossilised human footsteps in New Mexico have been carbon dated to about 23,000 years before the present.
In fact, nowadays archaeologists guess that ancient humansfirst enteredthe Americas as long as 24,000 years ago, perhaps via a sea ice bridge, or perhaps sailing south along the so-called “kelp highway”, the Pacific coastal current rich in seaweed, fish, and birds. This new narrative happens to also cleave closer to many indigenous Americans’ oral histories. For example, the Tlingit people maintain that their ancestors were a seafaring people, who came to today’s Alaska by boat.
But in 1973, when a young archaeologist named James Adovasio led a dig at Meadowcroft Rockshelter, just west of today’s Pittsburgh, the “Clovis First” theory still reigned supreme. While it took archaeology a decade or two, and several confirmatory finds, to fully accept the data that Adovasio and his team unearthed, it nevertheless remains true that Meadowcroft single-handedly changed archaeology’s sense of the human story. I grew up in South Africa but now live in Pennsylvania.
So, one recent autumn morning I drove four hours west to meet Andrew Donovan, education and programmes manager for Meadowcroft Rockshelter. Donovan is a tall, slender, tanned man in his forties, with a grey, bushy moustache. Replace his green baseball cap with a fedora, and he could pass for Indiana Jones’ younger brother: hands-on, sharp-witted and passionate about the past.
Donovan grew up in Pittsburgh, then studied history at Arizona State. It was there, next to the 1,500-year-old irrigation canals of the ancient Hohokam, that the past first sunk its teeth into him.
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