The First Americans

J. M. Adovasio

Imagine you have a subspecialty of academic study, and that you study under a tyrannical field specialist, but your dissertation is done in museums with existing perishable artifacts. On graduation, you bounce around a bit, lighting at a Pennsylvania university. As part of the interview, you suggest that you would like to have a field site for students in the area. A site is found about 35 miles from Pittsburgh, a rockshelter or rock overhang. During the initial excavation, you find that the sheltered outcropping has been recently used – on the surface aluminum beer cans, syringes and other debris are mute testimony. The team digs a bit. The beer cans are steel. The excavation continues, the beer containers switch to old bottles. Then, arrowheads are found. A second summer advances the site. More arrowheads are found, along with the remains of a campfire. Specimens at each level are collected and sent off for carbon dating. The lowest level is dated to an age of around 15,000 years. But the scientific theory, dogma really, said “Clovis” was first. For over forty years, the science is that the oldest remnants of North American habitation are Clovis sites, which date to about 11,000 years. Let the fireworks begin. There must be a problem with the site. Contamination, sloppy work, animal or other disruption. But Adovasio has assembled both students and a multi-specialist team that meticulously documents the dig, which is well funded and continues not for years, but decades. Except for the most intransigent among them, all the naysayers are eventually won over. Not bad for someone that whose dissertation was on early basked weaving. There is much more to this book that I don't have space for, including the differences in exploration in Europe and the US, glaciation and how early humans actually lived quite close to receding glaciers (this site was around 100 miles from the receding Laurentide glacier), linguistics, DNA studies... But, best to see for yourself how this professor that taught at my alma mater for a while turned the scientific world on its ear.