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