In the Shadow of the Sabertooth. Doug Peacock
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.
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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.
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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