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Encore: Evidence for the Peopling of the Americas - Ep 111
2 Plays4 minutes ago
The Archaeology Podcast Network is taking a break for the holiday season. In the meantime, please enjoy this encore episode. It’s a favorite of ours! Happy holidays!
There’s a lot of dates thrown around regarding the first people to enter and settle North and South America. However, what’s the evidence? What do we know with a high degree of certainty? Let’s find out on this episode.
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Transcript
Introduction to California Rock Art Foundation
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. Hello out there in archaeology podcast land. This is Dr. Alan Garfinkel. I'm the president and founder of the California Rock Art Foundation. And what we do is we identify, evaluate, manage and conserve rock art both in Alta, California and in Baja, California.
00:00:21
Speaker
We conduct field trips, we have trainings, exercise, we do research, and in every way possible we try to preserve, protect, and coordinate treasures of Alta and Baja, California Rock Guard, of which there are many, and diverse. We also work closely with Native Americans and partner with them to recognize and protect sacred
Supporting the Foundation
00:00:42
Speaker
sites.
00:00:42
Speaker
So for more info about the fabulous California Rock Art Foundation, you can go to carockart.org. Also, i'm I'm open to give me a call, 805-312-2261. We would welcome sponsorship or underwriting helping us to defray the costs of our podcasts and also membership in California Rock Art Foundation. And of course, donations since we are a 501c3 nonprofit scientific and educational corporation. God bless everyone out there in podcast land.
Introduction to The Rock Art Podcast
00:01:16
Speaker
You're listening to The Rock Art Podcast. Join us every week for fascinating tales of rock art, adventure, and archaeology. Find our contact info in the show notes and send us your suggestions.
00:01:34
Speaker
Hey out there in archaeology podcast land. This is your host, Dr. Alan Garfinkel. And we have something a little different today. We're going to talk about the peopling of the Americas. Chris Webster and I will have a discussion about that. And we'll give you some of the the latest thinking on the antiquity and character of the initial peopling of the Americas. And it's not what you might think. We're having a bit of a revolution in our thinking with rewriting the history books.
00:02:05
Speaker
Welcome to the show, everybody.
Peopling of the Americas: Clovis Tradition
00:02:06
Speaker
This is the Rock Art Podcast. And if you're hearing my voice, Chris Webster, that means that I'm talking with Alan today and we don't have a guest on today's episode, but that's because we have a lot to talk about. Oh, Chris Webster, Professor Webster, you're such a wonderful resource and it's been such a blessing. We're on episode 111. I just checked back and it's been, I think it's been three years we've been doing this. Am I correct?
00:02:30
Speaker
man, quite the journey, something like that. Yeah. It's been a while. So that's, it's been a lot. Let me see. I can look back at the first episode. Yeah. It was released on June 17th, 2020.
00:02:42
Speaker
but It's been very exciting. We've had people patch in from Spain, from Australia, from Southeast Asia, and Mexico. so we get We can absolutely say it's an international yeah platform. and I want to veer off from exclusive rock art discussions on this episode.
00:03:02
Speaker
on a subject that is related to what we've been speaking about, has to do with the peopling of the Americas. How's that, Chris? That sounds great, because i i mean there's there's been a lot of stuff lately in the news um about ah and i mean news related to archaeology articles and things like that.
00:03:21
Speaker
you know, about this topic, because it's a hot topic in North American archaeology. It's one of the big unanswered questions, at least to a lot of people, that's an unanswered question. To some people, it's a very well-answered question. To others, it's not a very well-answered question. So, yeah, there's definitely a lot to discuss in this space. Well, the yeah the evolution is, it's I think we're in the midst of seeing a tremendous transformation or what is called a paradigm shift. You know, for the longest time,
00:03:47
Speaker
We believe that the platform or expression called the Clovis tradition was the basement or the beginnings of the in-migration to the Americas. Do you agree?
Challenges to Clovis-First Theory
00:04:01
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And there's I feel like there's still people that kind of adhere to that, to be honest with you. There's you know definitely some proponents of that theory. Oh, I would have to agree.
00:04:10
Speaker
But they're getting fewer and fewer because in the last year or two, there's been some tremendous discoveries and they consistently have been pushing back the age and character of the earliest expression of people in the Americas, both in terms of geography and in terms of the ah actual typology of what that expression might mean archaeologically. I think um to discuss this, you kind of have to know what the issue was and what the traditional model has said. The traditional model was that that there was a migration about 13,000 years ago across the Bering Straits and peopling of the Americas was ah channeled through a corridor an ice-free corridor between the glacial masses
00:05:10
Speaker
and that the people came through, and then they had an initial almost an explosion of archaeological expression all across the Americas, both North, ah Central, and South America, and uniformly that tradition was associated with a kind of projectile point, a dart point, that was fluted. It had a um a mass of stone taken out of its base. They were lancelate, mainly concave base points. And this particular expression was associated with, at least in some instances, with the hunting of megafauna. Is that what you learned as well?
00:05:54
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I believe so. That's about right. So when you look at the projectile points called Clovis, they have an odd distribution in North America in that they are mainly concentrated in the area of the southeast in Texas and the American Southwest and on the plains. And as you go west, the expression becomes less and less. So in other words, if you're looking for Clovis points in the far west, in the Great Basin,
00:06:28
Speaker
up into the northwestern part, the Pacific Northwest, and in California, along in the desert west in California. You can hardly find any of them. There's very few sites, they're all isolates No, you can't. And you know, you see that in the literature. Yeah, we we actually found an isolated Clovis Point in a two-track in northern Nevada, northwestern Nevada. It was in a two-track and cracked in half because somebody had driven over it. So I don't know if it had just been uncovered through time on that road or if it had been
00:07:00
Speaker
you know drop there by the hoof of a ah cow or something like that or or what happened. But yeah, that's on on big surveys I've done across the state, that's the only one I've ever even heard of getting found. And it was um just not a lot. The thing you find more of, which I think you're alluding to that's pretty Clovis, is Western Stemmed. And we see a lot more of those out here, but still not that many when you start going back that far. So a couple of things. There's a controversy as well.
00:07:29
Speaker
in the far west, involving what they call concave base or basally thinned projectile points that have been called fluted points in the past. yeah And some of the archaeologists, I would say even growing evidence, seems to support that those particular points that are found in ah some abundance, I would say, in certain areas,
00:07:56
Speaker
are derivative of Clovis. They are not contemporaneous with Clovis, yet they are a ah ah derivative expression whereby Clovis itself is supposed to be a a projectile point tradition, but the main was soft hammer percussion or percussion flute.
00:08:14
Speaker
They have these flakes that go across the face of the clovis, they're called utrapase, or that just going across the entire face of the of the point.
Pre-Clovis Evidence and Theories
00:08:25
Speaker
And this particular tradition of doing that, and also the way in which they were manufactured technologically, did not use the fine pressure flaking that you find in these other places that are available. ah you know In the far west, there's a you know concentration of them in the Great Basin. There's some in the southern San Joaquin Valley. they're found where else have they found They're found in the Great Basin as well. so There's all of that. so This was ah you know part and parcel of sort of a related controversy surrounding
00:09:02
Speaker
what's What is Clovis? What's the definition of Clovis and what makes a Clovis projectile point? And how old was Clovis? Is it 13.5 to 12.8? Or is it up until the... end of the Pleistocene, how long did it endure, et cetera. So most of the radiocarbon dates really show a very distinctive and short chronology. Well, I figure, I figured ah feel like it's good in this segment to point out too that, you know, we're obviously talking about Native Americans if somebody didn't get that point already, but
00:09:35
Speaker
I don't know of any Native American tribes that have traditions for their origin going back that says they migrated from Siberia. You know what I mean? All of their traditions say they basically started here. They sprung up in the in the in North America, South America, wherever the tribe is, and then they came here. so And I think that's an important point. that they don't have it in their oral traditions that they migrated. I'm going to bring that up a little bit later with an article I read just ah just a few days ago that's going to come into play there. But that's interesting to me that there's nothing about that. And do you know if there's anybody, any tribes or organiz or or I guess
00:10:12
Speaker
ah traditions, or even rock art for that matter, from like the Inuit and, you know, up in Alaska in that area where they do have traditions of migration across or across the Bering Straits. No, I think you're right. I think that that particular scenario, that set of oral traditions is certainly infrequent, if not absent completely. And that in itself is interesting. Now, one of the things we ought to talk about with that corridor, which is rather important,
00:10:40
Speaker
is it wasn't really open until about, I would say, in the neighborhood of 14,000 years ago. So to move along that land bridge and to get into North America, you had to move through ah an ice-free corridor, and that ice-free corridor wasn't open until 14,000 years ago. right So again, that supported the particular model of of Clovis being the first people that came into the Americas. Made sense, right? It does make sense. And I got to say, to be honest, I hate to see what that corridor would have looked like because after being covered by ice and then now melting ice and just soggy tundra, you know, I mean, there's definitely like forests and things like that in northern Canada. But going down through the ice free corridor, I mean, I've been in that part of Canada, Calgary, Alberta. Yeah, it is flat.
00:11:35
Speaker
It would have been difficult to navigate being a soggy, probably full of tiny little lakes and ponds you know land. So that would have been tough. It would have been a ah journey. Yeah, no, absolutely. yeah They've done so studies on the biogeography within that corridor.
00:11:51
Speaker
And there was you know megafauna moving up into that corridor, including bison, et cetera, and probably a lot of waterfowl. So that that does make some sense to follow the herds of game and to associate with that. I think with that, we should right sort of close out this first piece of the discussion. And the next discussion, we'll we'll move into some other ah related matters. How's that? Sounds good. See you in the flip-flop, gang.
00:12:22
Speaker
Welcome back to the Rock Art podcast, episode 111. And I'm talking to Alan about the peopling of the Americas and what kind of evidence we really have around that and how far back this evidence goes. So let's talk about some of the more hard evidence to pre Clovis sites that we do have in this country and notably up here in the, uh, in the Western United States.
Multiple Migration Points
00:12:43
Speaker
In the Pacific Northwest is where I think much of this original material has come from. There's at least two sites that have very robust evidence, meaning what they have is sealed deposits that have you know incredibly good stratigraphy with many, many, many dates and an associated assemblage that's different from Clovis. So in other words, what we found now is a stratum, archaeological, you know sort of ah an assemblage of deeply buried or chronologically specific materials
00:13:28
Speaker
that I would say started about 14,000 years ago, but go back to maybe as much as 20 or 21,000 years ago. and that are well dated. Now, when I say well dated, there's you know multiple, multiple dates, all kinds of dates, radiocarbon dates, plus they're sealed deposits that are buried under Mazama ash or other volcanic ash that's been dated. And what they found is instead of finding Clovis points,
00:14:01
Speaker
There's an absence of Clovis points and a presence of what we're calling Western stemmed points. They look like the other points that are called Western stemmed. And people had thought early on that the Western STEM points were in fact the basal occupation in the Americas. But that particular perspective went by the by with the growing evidence for Clovis. But now we go full circle. And we have you know lots of evidence now, mainly for the Pacific Northwest, but also from South America, Monteverde, for
00:14:41
Speaker
seal deposit and these Western STEM projectile points. We don't have much more. We don't have a full picture of what was going on. But first of all, what's what's happening here is that the way in which the the the channel or the method of migration from the old world to the new would no longer have been terrestrial. And that's yeah that's you know quite a quite a transformation in thinking. yeah Because 14,000 years ago, that corridor was blocked. So what we're talking about right is a maritime expression that came pre-clovis and brought people to the Americas, which which is absolutely amazing.
00:15:36
Speaker
Yeah, and we always talk about America's plural, right? Because we're talking about North America, South America, Central America, all the Americas, right? And that's the thing that always kind of gets me too is, you know, do we talk about, okay, so they, you know, we we have solid evidence of people in the Pacific Northwest 14,000 years ago, right? That's, and and maybe even a little bit older, but solid evidence going back 14,000 years. so But we also have very similar evidence going back a similar timeframe down in South America. And it's like,
00:16:03
Speaker
okay, well, they didn't come down here and then walk 8,000 miles to get to South America in the span of like, you know, a generation. So no either they came here way earlier than we thought and migrated throughout the Americas and eventually made it down all the way through South America, or they came over in different ways at different times using different methods, right? Right. So that's the other thing that's, that's become rather manifest is that there must have been multiple origin points yeah Throughout the continents of how they came in and where they came in and when they came in, there also must have been different traditions in terms of what they were ah focused upon. In some areas it appears, and there's been arguments tendered, that the Pacific Northwest may have been a very logical place to
00:16:55
Speaker
sort of enter North America, following some of the riverine corridors in other ways, because there was a lot of lakes, a lot of lacustrine, and they're looking at a lot of the waterfowl. And the waterfowl would probably have been just innumerable, just masses and masses of birds. Does that make any sense?
00:17:18
Speaker
Yeah, it does. It would have been certainly a resource that would have been plentiful, you know, not only that, but, you know, fish and and other, other things you just find near those Marine and, and like you said, Lucustrine environments. I mean, there's just, it's just an abundance of things to eat. but So yeah been easy yeah. So if you're looking for things to eat, like they taught, like, you know, if what we've found, even at the 10,000 year benchmark,
00:17:43
Speaker
When people live near lakes and rivers, they tend to go for the low-lying fruit. What do they eat, Chris, if they're looking for food near lakes or rivers?
00:17:57
Speaker
Uh, I mean, I would say fish and berries and things like that. What are what are we looking at? Well, what they do is they, you know, those, uh, that have, uh, cattails and tubers and those bulbous things they can pull pull out of the ground. Indeed. They're not very lively in terms of being hugely, you know, nutritious, but you know what?
00:18:22
Speaker
they'll give you a ah full belly. So when you pull them up, you can you can pound them, you can roast them, you can do whatever you want to do with them, and you'll have a full meal. And it didn't take you long to acquire it.
00:18:37
Speaker
So when they're looking at copper lights from 10,000 years ago, they're full of these tubers and these bulbs from those Lacustrian, you know, vegetation, because they're easy to harvest. That makes sense. And they're, and they will, so they will fill you up calorically. And also you you get the, uh, the, the waterfall. Yeah. And it it makes you wonder why they even left it all and kept migrating. Right. Exactly. Yeah. I think when they found those lakes and rivers, they they found a ah windfall and so they could they could live there for quite a while. And um maybe they were there for quite a while. yeah At those places, the Pacific Northwest, they've got 14, 15, 16,000 year old dates. Now,
00:19:27
Speaker
What I've heard off the record, but somewhat you know not sort of ah you know ah sort of as an aside, there appears to be some dates for Daisy Cave on the Channel Islands that may go back 16,000, 17,000 or more years ago. And if that is the case, then that's another example of watercrafts, a maritime economy,
00:19:51
Speaker
They came there and they stayed and they obviously came there in boats and lived and took advantage of the resources such as they were on those islands.
Artifacts and Migration Theories
00:20:05
Speaker
You know, I wonder if if they really date to 16,000, 17,000 years. I don't know how deep that channel is between like, you know, the Long Beach area and the Channel Islands. Right. I mean, the water would have been much lower because, you know, a lot of it was still sucked up into the ice caps. So yeah I wonder, they couldn't necessarily walk to the Channel Islands, I would imagine, but it would have been a heck of a lot shallower and a smaller, a smaller so expanse to traverse by boat. Yeah. And and you can always traverse that area in a boat. They do right now.
00:20:34
Speaker
even at this point, oh sure it's it's not that far away. And if you've got the islands, you've also got the ah the terrestrial, the coast there to add to your repertoire in terms of subsistence. So it's ah interesting nonetheless. One of the things people talk about a lot, which is kind of related to this,
00:20:55
Speaker
thinking is that there's a type of an artifact called a crescent. And it's it's just sort of ah a stone piece that kind of looks like a ah crescent moon. And it's only about as big as my thumb or in in that realm.
00:21:10
Speaker
And there's hundreds, thousands of them scattered mainly always in lacustrine environments around lakes and other water sources. And so there's been an extensive argument made that because of their distribution that they may have been associated with the ah hunting of waterfowl. Have you heard that? No, I don't have much ah knowledge from that down in that area, but that's pretty interesting. Yeah.
00:21:35
Speaker
What they have hypothesized is that they were attached to arrows as bunts, transverse projectile points. In other words, kind of so that they would knock the the animals out of the sky, and then they would harvest them and kill them, like the geese and the swans and the wow ducks. and yeah Also, during certain times of the year, the waterfowl would congregate and they would lose the ability to fly.
00:22:06
Speaker
And you could simply net them and you in huge numbers and then harvest them. Yeah. Yeah. The Grebes are what one example of that. Those are those you know kind of funny little birds that sit on the lakes and are brown or black. And um yeah that's what happens. Wow, that's cool. So that's a whole other aspect of this exercise. The locations in the Pacific Northwest of where those sites are, seemed to be a channel along the Columbia River, and that would be a logical sort of inlet for these the-migration to occur. You know, it's interesting. I guess I could share this too. I hadn't thought about it now, but
00:22:54
Speaker
since I'm working in this area, et cetera, using obsidian hydration dating. okay We've talked about that often. it's The volcanic glass can be used to date. You can take a thin section out of it and it picks up water. And the thickness of that band is a an artifact, of a measure, a calendar of its age. In the Pacific Northwest and in California,
00:23:21
Speaker
They've done tremendous amounts of work on calibrating the ages of all the different obsidian sources. And they've done source-specific temperature-adjusted obsidian hydration dating. So they've gotten it more and more refined. okay And when you look at the ages of the the largest rimmed artifacts from the various quarries,
00:23:47
Speaker
they go back 16,000 and 17,000 years old. wow There aren't very many of them that go back that to that age, but there are those rims and they are that size, and we have found them both in the archaeological record of an organ and in California. So if that measure was accurate,
00:24:10
Speaker
Here's a testament to the antiquity of the occupation and the initial use of those areas. Does that make any sense? That does. And I think with that, we'll take our final break because I've definitely got some questions about that on the other side back in a minute.
00:24:26
Speaker
Welcome back to the Rock Art Podcast, episode 111. I'm Chris Webster interviewing, well, not interviewing, discussing the peopling of the Americas with ah Dr. Alan Garfinkel. And we're coming up to the end of the show here. So let's round out this discussion. And one of the things you were saying just, you know, in the last segment there, when you were talking about the dates on the, the obsidian hydration but on some of those things dating back, you know, 16, 70,000, but you said not very many. And I'm like,
00:24:53
Speaker
Okay. But if we have like even one thing that is concrete evidence that is indisputable, that is, yes, this is here. I mean, doesn't that an open and shut case? Like, what is it going to take all the naysayers to say, yes, things now here's the new date. This is it. This is, we we definitely have evidence going back this far. You know, when can we, when can we close the lid on that and say, yep, this this is it.
00:25:17
Speaker
i I think as we get growing evidence and as we get the various orders of evidence from different data sets and different sites, it's becoming a compelling and substantive story.
00:25:30
Speaker
and so it's one that is is It's difficult for us to rewrite history, but it's being rewritten as we speak because you know we've spent how many years telling the story one way,
00:25:44
Speaker
And it this totally turns the ah discussion on its head, both from its from its dating, its placement, the the fashion that it was that people came in. the Everything about it is different, I would say. Don't you agree?
00:26:01
Speaker
I do. I mean, it's it's different. it's it's yeah I do. and Okay, go ahead. But that's that's the thing, though. is's like you know You use these tried and true
Excavation Challenges and Regulatory Bias
00:26:10
Speaker
dating methods. We're not using wacky off-the-wall dating methods to date some of this older stuff, right? We're using tried and true dating methods that have been used across the world and that people believe and trust when it comes to things like Europe. And you say, oh, this dates to 25,000 years ago. And they're like, yep, that seems legit. I buy it because Europe has a pretty solid history going back, you know, hundreds of thousands of years of of Homo sapiens. Yeah. gar Right. Europe, Europe has a long chronology. We've had the short chronology. And so
00:26:39
Speaker
I would say it it makes sense for us to have quite an ample degree of skepticism to try to buy in and understand what we're looking at here. But yes, I i think that with growing evidence consistently,
00:26:54
Speaker
in different geographical areas and different sources and different methods of dating, if they all point to the same thing, that's what's happening. For instance, you've got those ah footprints there in New Mexico right on the sands of you know that preserved ah situation there in that national monument.
00:27:17
Speaker
yeah And they've dated them so several ways. I've read a couple of scientific articles so far on that. And and another one, they feel very strongly that the evidence is there for in excess of 20,000 years ago that there were people occupying New Mexico, and and that's where those are from.
00:27:38
Speaker
And they've used radiocarbon dates, they've got stratigraphy, they've got everything else. But again, what is it? Extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence. And so that's what we're looking at. And yes, I'm so i'm still, you know, I still am waiting to see what other people really yeah take from that piece of evidence. It seems rather compelling. Yeah.
00:28:06
Speaker
if what they say is true and how they've dated it and how they c claim to have you know irrefutable evidence and dates that would support that particular age.
00:28:20
Speaker
butt I mean, that that jumps from what we thought was literally maybe 13,000 to 21,000 years ago, like in an instant. And so so someone says, well, where's the stuff and in between, right? where's the where's the where's the archae Where's the archaeology that we should see between 13 and 21,000?
00:28:41
Speaker
Where's the people? Yeah. Well, I'll tell you what, there might be an argument for that too, because I've definitely interviewed some people on past shows that have discussed the fact that a lot of times we don't dig deep enough. You know what I mean? Because a lot of our evidence doesn't come from, I mean, some of it comes from academic digs, you know, like the, some of the stuff up in Oregon, they're digging into these caves and you know, caves are very well preserved environments and you can come back year after year after year and just keep digging down in the cave. Right. And just, uh, just gets a, it's a resource that just keeps on giving.
00:29:10
Speaker
But you talk about cultural resource management projects and shovel testing. And I'll tell you what, most of ours don't go down any deeper than you can reach with a shovel. and And if it has to go down farther than that, sometimes we'll auger. But the standard rule, unless you know something different about the stratigraphy, the soils, the geochronology of the area, which a lot of times you don't. But if you know something different, then fine. But if you don't, you usually go down to two sterile levels or the depth of the shovel or the water table. But that doesn't always mean that i that water table always really got me working in the Southeast. We'd always stop before you hit water. And I'm like, all right, well, the water table was different 10,000 years ago. It wasn't here. but So, you know, by stopping there, we're ignoring a huge body of evidence. You know what I mean? So for instance, in the area that I'm working in in Oregon,
00:30:00
Speaker
yeah in ah southwestern Oregon near the town of Roseburg, there's a site that was excavated. And they yeah they excavated, I don't know, maybe 50 or 100 centimeters. And then they stopped, but then they they had an inkling that they may have been on top of an Amazama you know, expression. They had to go two meters deeper than that to hit the cultural component below the Mazama ash. Can you imagine two meters? that That's six feet, right? Yeah.
00:30:43
Speaker
Yeah. that's a lot So the only reason the only reason they were able to get this is they had a column that was on the end end of a ridge and they could see it. And so they were able to sort of get get below that. And yes, there was a prima zama expression that was there. Same thing happened in the Central Valley. They had a circumstance where they went down, I don't know, 10 feet.
00:31:08
Speaker
Then they hit the ah cultural expression, and it was ah you know sort of a Western, Pluvial tradition material right there, and they ah dated it to 7,000, 8,000 years ago. So if you had to go 10 feet to get to 7,000, 8,000 years ago. Can you imagine?
00:31:29
Speaker
how deep you'd have to go. Well, and and this is what I'm talking about too, right? Like you get some of these areas now out here in the great basin, you might go down two feet and hit bedrock, right? There's not a whole lot below the bedrock. the bedrock, you're done, right? but But in some of these areas, like I'll never forget working out in the Carolinas. And again, out on the coastal plain, you know we're digging down to you know a meter at best, maybe a meter and a half, if you can lay on your stomach and really reach your shovel down there. But then my wife worked on a project where they were ah they had
00:32:01
Speaker
they and I don't know how they knew this, right and but by the time she got on it, they were auguring down um in these in these ah in this one area because there was there was something going in there. I think it was a reservoir project or something like that, but something was going in there. They were auguring down and finding paleo deposits like like eight to 10,000 year deposits at three to four meters below the surface.
00:32:21
Speaker
three to four meters. Yeah. And I'm like, okay, so you've got this evidence here of definite things, three to four meters down. Yeah. And yet we're stopping at a meter out here on the coast. And you know, part of the reason out in that area is because the hurricanes and weather really shapes the landscape and you can have a hurricane drop of, you know, two feet of sand on one area in a season. You know what I mean?
00:32:43
Speaker
So the landscape really adjusts quickly. So that's why you get buried deposits that could be incredibly deep in some areas, depending on, depending on the year, you know? So it's crazy. And yet we speak with authority when we say that's it. Yeah.
00:32:57
Speaker
Right, so you're talking about the environment. We talk about cataclysms like Mount Mazama and the ashen ash that fell 7,700 years ago. if you If you look in the Central Valley of California, you're looking at tremendous amounts of alluvium over the many years, accumulating, and to get to anywhere near, let's say, Paleo-Indian, you'd have to go down 12, 15 feet to get to that deposit. So you're exactly right. So for for a lot of us, we have never we have never really gotten to that level.
Genetic and Linguistic Evidence
00:33:33
Speaker
Or we don't know where to find the exposure
00:33:38
Speaker
of the pale, you know you're looking you you want to see relic landforms where that was preserved so that you can find that kind of material. you know That's exactly right. In the past, I've called this regulatory bias. right I don't know if that's a real term anybody uses, but you know when you're doing shovel testing or something like that, you only have to really look down as far as the disturbance is going to happen. you know that's That's really the regulation. They're not asking you to find everything down to the the lowest level, which is scientifically what we would want to do.
00:34:07
Speaker
But you're only being paid to go down as far as the ground will be disturbed, right? So if they're putting in a parking lot, you only have to go down four or five feet before you're you're going to hit soils. They're just simply not going to disturb. So it's not that we're saying not saying there's something down there. We're just not being paid to find it. We're not given the opportunity.
00:34:26
Speaker
Right. And it is regulatory bias. I like that. Yeah, yeah it's a good way of looking at it. So sell crazy I guess the newest models have ah have avoided regulatory bias. And now we're beginning to see a whole new set of expressions both of a different archaeological tradition, chronologically and typologically, that is pre-Clovis and may go between, let's say, 14 and maybe even 21,000 years ago. Now, that 14 to 21 matches
00:35:03
Speaker
the genetic evidence, the genetic evidence that they've been able to look at, the genetic sort of timeline that they've developed, looking at the at the peoples that they've examined, the indigenous peoples, and then examining their relationship and the time depth. So that's where they are.
Conclusion and Reflection
00:35:23
Speaker
And I think that's a good place to stop. ah to stop where You could add your closing note, Doctor.
00:35:29
Speaker
I will add to that because there's one other thing besides the genetic evidence that starts giving that time depth, and that's the linguistic evidence. right When they start looking at the sheer number of languages that Native Americans have just in North America alone, in order to gain that sort of variation, linguists can can take that back thousands and thousands of years in what we knew of language evolution to say, well, it would have to have gone back X number of years. And that time is getting pushed further and further back the more we study those languages and start realizing where the similarities and differences are. So like you said, lots of evidence coming together pointing to a deeper history than we ever assumed. I like it. All right. Well, that's it for today then. Yeah. Yeah, that's it. See you in the flip-flop, gang. Hope you enjoyed this episode.
00:36:23
Speaker
Thanks for listening to the Rock Art Podcast with Dr. Alan Garfinkel and Chris Webster. Find show notes and contact information at www.arcpodnet.com forward slash rock art. Thanks for listening and thanks for sharing this podcast with your family and friends.
00:36:55
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his ah RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Culturo Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Chris Webster. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archapodnet.com. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com.