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Historia de América Latina
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Las sociedades originarias
(The Indigenous societies)

Director
Teresa Rojas Rabiela (Mexico)

Codirector
John V. Murra (United States of America)

Chapter 2: The Original Peopling of Latin America
Alan L. Bryan

Themes

| Introduction
| Asiatic Biological Origins
| Asiatic Technological Origins | The Peopling of Latin America
| Early Adaptations to South American Environments

Asiatic Technological Origins

An old assumption of Americanist archaeologists is the idea that
people did not live in the subarctic until after 20,000 B. P. Siberian
archaeologists working on the Yenesei, Angara, and Lena Rivers are
excavating several sites containing Middle and Lower Palaeolithic
artefact in stratigraphic contexts radiocarbon datable to more than
35,000 years (e.g., Drozdov, et al. l990), and several sites are
geologically datable to as much as 200,000 years ago (Larichev, et al.
l987). One example, the Diring-Yurekh site on the Middle Lena River
near Yakutsk in the coldest part of the northern hemisphere, has
yielded a pebble core and flake industry in a gravel bed capping an
ancient river terrace and underlying a thick sand bed (Ackerman l990;
Larichev, et al. l987). The sand has yielded thermoluminescence and
paleomagnetic dates that the Russian archaeologist Iuri Mochanov has
interpreted as early Pleistocene, although geologists who have visited
the site are of the opinion that it probably dates between 200,000 and
300,000 years. No matter how the controversy over dating is resolved,
this and other sites indicate that people had adapted to Siberian
subarctic and arctic environments long before innovation of
specialized Upper Palaeolithic technologies. A site has recently been
found on the Chukchi Peninsula near the Bering Land Bridge. The site
reportedly has yielded a date of 35,000 B. P., which is within the
range of time that sites containing wedge-shaped cores and microblades
were used in Mongolia and North China. All of these reports are
preliminary and detailed descriptions are awaited; but reports that
people with a Middle or Lower Palaeolithic technology were in central
Siberia by 200,000 years ago, and already on the western edge of the
land bridge as early as 35,000 years ago certainly casts doubt on the
assumption of initial occupation only 20,000 years ago.

In north China, it has long been known that Homo erectus with a Lower
Palaeolithic technology was present between 250,000 and 500,000 years
ago, and recently this time frame has been extended to 1,000,000
years. In Japan, several Middle Palaeolithic sites are being excavated
on Honshu. Japanese archaeologists and geologists believe the time
frame at some of these sites is Middle Pleistocene, perhaps 200,000
years old. Again, there are only preliminary reports; however,
certainly sufficient evidence exists in the general region that
spawned early Americans to call into question the basic assumption
that the initial occupation of Beringia occurred only after 15,000
years ago.

Turner's conclusion from his study of teeth that the earliest
Americans came from North China is well founded, although these people
evidently reached Beringia long before 15,000 years ago. If the new
site near the Bering Straits is confirmed, people were already there
by 35,000 years ago, when the climate was still much as it is now
before the Last Glacial maximum. The presence of people in Japan,
north China, and even in north central Siberia by 200,000 years ago
means that people could have been anywhere in Northeast Asia during
the Last Interglacial, when it was warmer than now. If people were
already adapted to mainland Northeast Asia and to the Japanese islands
early in the Last Interglacial, people could have been in position to
traverse the Bering land bridge either as pedestrians or to skirt the
coast with simple watercraft whenever the sea level dropped as much as
48 m., an event that occurred several times during the Pleistocene,
including about 70,000 years ago (Hopkins 1982). If initial entry onto
the Bering land bridge occurred about 70,000 B. P., the people would
have been at a late transitional Homo sapiens stage, but not yet fully
modern. Also, the level of technology would have been late east Asian
Middle Palaeolithic, with a core and flake tool industry that may have
lacked bifacial flaking. If these early people had expanded
north-westward from forested parts of east Asia, they could have had a
simple repertoire of minimally retouched flakes used to work a well
developed technology of wood, fibre, and other perishables which would
not preserve in most archaeological contexts.

We now know that people must have had watercraft sufficiently well
developed to cross up to 70 km of ocean in order to populate Australia
and New Guinea at least by 40,000 years ago, and even the Solomons,
New Ireland (Jones l990), and perhaps Okinawa by 30,000 B. P. If
people were on the island of Honshu by 200,000 years ago, it can be
assumed that they were experimenting with watercraft and were capable
of crossing similar expanses of water in the north Pacific to populate
Hokkaido, the Kuriles, and on to Kamchatka by 70,000 years ago. A
maritime north Pacific ecosystem with abundant fish, shellfish, birds,
and sea mammals as well as berries and other edible plants would have
presented a more productive ecosystem for early people to adapt to
than the continental interior of the land bridge, where game was more
mobile and more scattered, and edible plants were rare. Thus, it seems
more likely that the first people who traversed the land bridge hugged
the relatively warm and more productive north Pacific coast, carrying
with them a relatively simple Middle Palaeolithic flake and core tool
technology. Only later did pedestrian big game hunters venture across
the cold and arid continental interior of Beringia after they had
developed a specialized flaked stone technology.

A set of assumptions which is better able to explain available
archaeological data throughout the Americas can now be formulated:

(l) Complete replacement of all populations of evolved Homo erectus by
fully modern Homo Sapiens Sapiens did not occur throughout all of
Eurasia. It is assumed that a late transitional east Asian Homo
Sapiens entered America and evolved into fully modern Homo Sapiens
Sapiens in America;

(2) Analogously, Lower Palaeolithic technologies gradually evolved
through Middle Palaeolithic to an Upper Palaeolithic stage of
specialized and standardized tools, including bifacial points, in
certain relatively open grassland ecosystems where people devised
advanced techniques for hunting herbivores which ran in herds with
predictable habits. In contrast, a technological stage recognizable as
Upper Palaeolithic never evolved in many densely forested areas where
isolated animals could be hunted most effectively with nets, traps,
slingstones, and wooden spears sometimes mounted with simple bone or
stone flake tips. This is why the Upper Palaeolithic is readily
recognized in the open steppe and savannah grassland regions of
northern Eurasia but is difficult to define in heavily forested
Southeast Asia. By analogy, it can be assumed that specialized flaked
stone technologies, including bifacial projectile points, evolved in
and can most readily be recognized in open grassland ecosystems of the
Americas, but will continue to be difficult to define in densely
forested areas because most hunters normally used other devices for
killing forest animals. It can further be assumed that a coastal
adaptation that did not involve the hunting of terrestrial herd
herbivores may not include bifacially flaked stone projectile points;

(3) It is quite possible, even likely, that general hunters and
gatherers well adapted to an ecosystem that did not require a
technology including bifacially flaked stone projectile points would
develop such weapons as they adapted to an inland ecosystem that
included herds of large herbivores that could most effectively be
hunted at certain localities using stone tipped projectiles that more
easily penetrated thick hides than wooden spears;

(4) That coastally adapted people who expanded onto the land bridge
early in the Last Glacial after 70,000 years ago had ample time
gradually to expand their territory along the productive coastal strip
of the Northeast Pacific and reach south of the region before it
became heavily glaciated after 25,000 years ago. Expansion occurred by
small groups who budded off and occupied familiar hunting territory,
but they maintained social and sexual relationships with their
relatives who still lived in the old homeland. Some descendants of
these early maritime-adapted people would have remained in Beringia
until rising sea levels and advancing glaciers restricted them to
unglaciated refugia like the Queen Charlotte Islands or forced them
inland up the Yukon River or smaller rivers that ran into the Cook
Inlet. Thus, the interior of Alaska and Yukon could have been peopled
from the Pacific Coast, although possibly the Athabaskan Indians are
descendants of interior Siberian Upper Palaeolithic hunters who
brought with them the specialized wedge-shaped core and microblade
technology that much later spread eastward across the tundra with the
proto-Eskimos and the boreal forest west of Hudson Bay with the
Athabaskan Indians.

(5) It is assumed that the immediate ancestors of Clovis people had
not traversed the ice-free corridor. Rather, the concentration of
fluted points in the Southeast suggests that Clovis technology most
likely developed in the littoral region of the Gulf of Mexico.

(6) It is assumed that Clovis was not the earliest cultural
manifestation in sub-glacial North America, but rather represents only
one of several early adaptations to inland ecosystems.

Reasons for stating the last two assumptions can be summarized.
Although a wedge-shaped core, microblades, and a burin have been
excavated from Bluefish Caves, Yukon, with butchered mammoth and
caribou bones that dated between 15,000 and 24,000 B. P., the
exceedingly widespread microblade technology was not part of the
Clovis technology, even though Clovis people hunted caribou along the
Southeast margins of the Laurentide glacier about 11,000 B. P. If
Clovis people had migrated through the corridor from Yukon, surely
they would have continued to use microblades to hunt caribou.
Furthermore, the earliest known sites in the ice-free corridor,
although contemporary with fluted points at 10,500 to 11,000 B. P,
contain an abundant flake industry but no bifacial projectile points.
Farther north in the corridor, a squat fluted point found with modern
bison dated 10,500 B. P. suggests that the makers of fluted points
were moving north through the corridor. The presence of
willow-leaf-shaped and stemmed projectile points in contexts dated
between 10,000 and 13,000 B. P. in the Great Basin, and a unifacial
flake industry at Meadowcroft Rockshelter in Pennsylvania at least as
early as 14,000 B. P. indicates that Clovis represents only one of
several final Pleistocene socio-economic adaptation to diverse North
American ecosystems, and that not all of these assemblages contain
bifacially flaked stone projectile points.

If the first Americans were not big game hunters with a specialized
bifacial technology, but rather general hunters and gatherers with a
simple but effective core and unifacial flake technology that was
readily adaptable to working bone, hide, wood, and fibrous plants into
various kinds of tools for procuring roots, berries, fish, birds,
shellfish, small- and medium-sized mammals, and the occasional large
mammal that might be found weakened, mired, or otherwise easy to
procure, archaeologists may expect to find on early occupation sites
only a few minimally retouched flakes used for cutting and scraping,
perhaps a simple core, or a hammerstone, and perhaps cut or charred
bones, and charcoal and ash, if not later removed by running water.
Diagnostic standardized artefacts may not be found because most would
have been made of perishable materials. If most of these people were
oriented to the coast, their sites would now be submerged on the
continental shelf, deeply buried in alluvium, or destroyed by water
action. Only a few stratigraphic contexts partly protected from
running water, such as caves, rockshelters, bogs, or ponds, would
preserve original cultural contexts. Otherwise, only flakes and cores,
probably water-worn, would be found in beach or stream gravels; and
such artefacts could easily be mistaken for naturefacts. Although
there is little chance of finding the earliest sites in most regions
because they are inaccessible or have been destroyed, we should expect
to find a few early uneroded contexts preserved by aridity or rapid
deposition.

As people explored new regions and adapted to new ecosystems by
experimenting with the local flora and fauna for food and medicinal
products, they created new kinds of artefacts, some of which are
important for archaeologists because they are standardized and
therefore diagnostic. In grassland areas where ingenious hunters
realized that certain mammals that ran in herds could successfully be
encountered and hunted at specific places where animals passed at
predictable times on their migrations or congregated for water. Often,
these migratory herd mammals were large; and it was soon realized that
traditional weapons like sling or bolas stones, traps, and nets were
not very effective means for killing these huge beasts, even if they
were mired in soft sediments. Therefore, people experimented with
mounting bone or unifacially flaked tips on their spears so that the
tips could easily be replaced when broken, and eventually with
bifacially flaked points which would better penetrate thick hides.

In North America, there were many natural grassland areas suitable for
grazing herbivores, so when the idea of bifacial projectile points was
first innovated in the Late Pleistocene in a few places, other people
saw how effective these weapons were for hunting even medium-sized
mammals, so they adopted the new technology, which soon spread widely
across the continent. Even as the forests encroached during the early
Holocene, people kept prairies open by periodic burning, so bifacial
points continued to be used throughout prehistoric times for hunting
deer, elk, and bison. On the Great Plains, a huge grassland area that
remained open and allowed unrestricted movement of herds of bison
until it was fenced in historic times, hunters continued to dispatch
bison driven over cliffs and into pounds with projectile points that
changed in style through time, as they did in neighbouring areas off
the Plains.

Most archaeologists trained in North America therefore expect to find
diagnostic projectile points to help them define archaeological
cultures and cultural assemblages. Only in a few densely forested
regions, notably the Northwest Coastal rain forest and some parts of
the boreal forest, are sites found with few diagnostic projectile
points because the prehistoric people relied more on traps, nets, and
spears tipped with bone points, which only rarely preserve. The
situation is quite different in Central and South America because
bifacial projectile points are common only in the major grassland
areas of the Andes, the pampas, and Patagonia. Mexico north of the
Isthmus of Tehuantepec is part of North America, and dense forests
covered only parts of the coastal strips before they were cleared for
planting crops. However, beyond the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in Central
and South America, tropical and alpine rain forests encroached onto
most of the natural grassland areas that had been more common during
the Pleistocene. Periodic burning, which commenced as soon as the
forests started encroaching, kept small areas open for grazing
animals, but after people started burning the tropical forests for
crops along the Atlantic Coast and throughout Panama, many people
abandoned bifacial points.

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