Western science beginning to catch up to what Indigenous history has always known

A very, very old mammoth tusk found near a road-widening project, for State Route 54 near National City in the early 1990s, set off considerable controversy among scientists. When a group of archeology, paleontology, and geology specialists authored an article in the journal Nature in 2017 arguing proof of human existence in the Americas as far back as 130,000 years ago, it was a shock to convention — Western convention, anyway.

The previously held belief was that the Clovis people (named for the spearheads found in Clovis, N.M., in the 1930s) migrated to the area around 13,000 years ago. It’s been an uphill battle to persuade their colleagues to reconsider this new information found at the Cerutti Mastodon site in San Diego (named for Richard Cerutti, the field paleontologist on site during the construction who found the tusk). There is an entire history of Indigenous people in the Americas classified as “recent” in comparison with their own oral histories, according to The Indigenous Paleolithic Database of the Americas, created by archaeologist Paulette Steeves, author of The Indigenous Paleolithic of The Western Hemisphere. Steven Holen, director of research at the Center for American Paleolithic Research and one of the co-authors of that 2017 study, have a more open consciousness.

“When my wife, Kathy, and I first came to the San Diego Natural History Museum and looked at this collection, I have never been more shocked in my professional career,” said Holen. “In fact, my wife saw me just staring off into space with my mouth wide open, and I said, ‘This goes against everything I thought I knew, everything I was ever taught, all of my previous research. There were people here much, much earlier than any of the scientific community thinks.’ Now, we were faced with what to do about this.”

Holen took some time to discuss this research and its intersection with Indigenous histories, and the value of the work that amateur scientists bring to their respective fields. (This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)

Q: You present information about the first people in the Americas more than 100,000 years ago. From finding that mammoth husk in 1992, through the years preparing for publication of these findings in 2017, this theory has been met with considerable pushback. Why has this been so controversial?

A: The prevailing paradigm was the Clovis were the first people in North America about 13,000 years ago. That was challenged by several sites over the years and a lot of those sites didn’t really hold up to scrutiny, but some of them were good archaeological sites. So, at the time that I began working on this with my wife, Kathleen, who is a co-author on the article, the prevailing paradigm was that humans came in maybe 16,000 years ago, along the west coast of North America. This was a very big challenge to that paradigm. I mean, more than 100,000 years earlier. My research in all of these mammoth sites that I have excavated out in the Great Plains, have bones that were fractured by humans. We know the Clovis people made the same kinds of fractures on bones when they hunted mammoths, so that led me to already know about this. Plus, we had done two experiments breaking African elephant bone to see what kind of rock it would take to break, and how much pressure it would take to break these bones, so I have a lot of experience, a lot of field experience, a lot of experimental experience. I felt that I was well qualified to comment on this.

We’ve been challenged very strongly in the literature, as we expected and as we were warned by certain people. That’s probably the most controversial article that’s been published in North American archaeology in the last 50 years or more.

Q: In the years since the article received that kind of criticism, has anyone come around? Have you heard from anyone saying they reconsidered and that you all were right, that you were on to something?

A: What we’ve found is that the young archaeologists that were just coming up were much more receptive to this. A lot of the younger people have complimented us on the research and said what we say, which is that, as archaeologists, we really need to be looking at older geological deposits. Most archaeologists still, in North America, don’t look at any geological deposits over 20,000 years old because they already know the answer—that people weren’t here then, so why bother looking at it? I don’t think that’s the way to do science, so we have to go out and work with geologists and paleontologists who do look in these ancient deposits. It was paleontologists who discovered the Cerutti Mastodon site, not archaeologists, which was really interesting because no archaeologists at that time, especially back in the ’90s, would have ever been looking in deposits of that age. They cede all of the older geological deposits to paleontologists, so archaeologists never look there. Unless we do, we’re never going to find out the correct answer.

Q: For Indigenous peoples, evidence of human inhabitants in the Americas that far back is an unsurprising fact, as their oral tradition has routinely indicated their presence since “time immemorial.” San Diego County is home to a large number of tribal governments and reservations, including the tribal nations of the Kumeyaay/Diegueño, the Payoomkawichum (Quechnajuichom/Luiseño and Acjachemen/Juaneño), the Kuupiaxchem/Cupeño, and the Cahuilla. How does your scientific work factor in the relevant and necessary history and contributions of Indigenous communities?

A: We fully agree with the oral traditions of the Native people, that they have been here since time immemorial and, in our opinion, “time immemorial” means we don’t really know how long, but it’s a lot longer than what archaeologists think. We’re fully in agreement with that. In my career in the Great Plains, I’ve worked with Native American people and tribes quite a bit, heavily involved in the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act to get human remains and items of cultural patrimony back to the tribes. I have a lot of experience working with these people and understanding their viewpoint on their history and I think they’ve been correct all along, that they’ve been here for tens of thousands of years.

Q: Why is it important to know about the first people to live in a place? What kind of difference do you think this can make, outside of documenting history?

A: I think it’s important, especially to Native American people, in my opinion, to understand that their legends and oral histories are correct. Western science has, for many years, not been correct about this and kind of sold them short, in my opinion. I think that’s one important part of it.

I think it’s important to the broader scientific world to understand how humans adapt to new climatic conditions. For example, humans would have had to adapt to the Arctic to be able to come across the Bering Land Bridge [a strip of land that once connected Asia to North America], a very, very cold environment, very seasonal environment. In the wintertime, there’s almost no sunlight up there and in the summertime there’s places where there’s almost no dark, so it’s a very different kind of adaptation. We understand how humans in the broader world adapt to new climates and new areas, so it’s kind of twofold.

Q: What do you hope people take from your presentation?

A: Something that I stress very strongly is the role of avocational archaeologists in all of this. Richard Cerutti [who died in 2019] had no college degrees, but was a very smart, very practical, very good technologist who made this amazing discovery and saved it for science. A lot of people wouldn’t have done that, wouldn’t have had the knowledge to do that, so this is an important aspect.

Robert Begole, also, did all of the early archaeological research out here in Anza-Borrego Desert State Park. Many years ago, back in the 1970s, he had found stone tools on some of these high mesas out here in the park. They didn’t have any spear points, no pottery; these were very kind of “primitive” looking tools and they look more like Paleolithic tools from the old world than they do like tools from later Native American groups over here. He published an article that he thought some of these tools were 20,000 to 30,000 years old, so we’re doing research on that.

There was another gentleman called Julian Hayden, who was an amateur archaeologist that worked across the border in Mexico on a lot of sites, and they found the very same kinds of tools there. One of my colleagues, Curtis Runnels at Boston University, who is a Paleolithic archaeologist from the old world, has looked at these tools and described them using Paleolithic terminologies. He’s saying there’s a whole suite of pattern tools that hasn’t been recognized in the past, whereas American archaeologists just said, “Well, this is just quarry debris from people coming along and making stone tools and leaving the stuff they didn’t want.” Curtis Runnels has said, “No, a lot of these are real pattern tools.” They’ve developed a way to date these stone tools now, with microlamination dating on desert varnish. So, I talk about how Robert Begol, an avocational archaeologist that recorded thousands of sites around the park, was probably right. Again, avocational people being kind of ahead of the archaeological profession.

Author: Lisa Deaderick

yogaesoteric
February 8, 2024