In the Shadow of the Sabertooth: Global Warming, the Origins of the First Americans, and the Terrible Beasts of the Pleistocene

Chapter 1

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