"I believe that from this weekend on, a new chapter will be written in the prehistory of America."
Pleistocene Man in America *
Louis S. B. Leakey
Some of you may wonder why Dr. Leakey, whose main work is in Africa, should be involved in the work at the Calico site. This is not a new interest for me. Back in 1929-1930 when I was teaching students at the University of Cambridge, I began to look into the question of the antiquity of man in the Americas. Although there was no concrete evidence to indicate a remote age, I was so impressed by the circumstantial evidence that I began to tell my students that man must have been in the New World at least 15,000 years. This was sheer heresy!
I shall never forget when Ales Hrdlicka, that great man from the Smithsonian Institution, happened to be at Cambridge, and he was told by my professor (I was then only a student supervisor) that Dr. Leakey was telling students that man must have been in America 15,000 or more years ago. He burst into my rooms - he didn't even wait to shake hands - and said, "Leakey, what's this I hear? Are you preaching heresy?"
I was a young man then, and very taken aback, but I said, "No, Sir!"
He said, "You are! You are telling students that man was in America 15,000 years ago. What evidence have you?"
I said, "No positive evidence. Purely circumstantial evidence. But with man from Alaska to Cape Horn, with many different languages and at least two civilizations, it is not possible that he was present only the few thousands of years that you at present allow. And I shall go on saying that without any evidence it must be so."
I believe that in the next few days we are going to demonstrate that the arrival of man in America is much older still - far far beyond that 15,000 years that I speculated upon in 1929.
Why should we expect an early arrival of man on this continent? Geologists and climatologists have established that in the Pleistocene there was a very wide land bridge where now are the Bering Straits. Across this land bridge fully evolved Pleistocene creatures were crossing: the elephant, now gone, but here in quantity not so long ago; the bison, closely related to the bison of Europe; the mountain sheep, related to the sheep of the Urals and the Himalayas; mountain goat and many others. We know that man was also in Asia at the time of these migrations in the Pleistocene. For me, it is inconceivable that a few families did not cross over in the wake of the animals. Man was scarce, animals were plentiful - so theoretically, they must have come!
When they came, the coastline was not where it is today. The shallow shelf now off the coast and out towards the Channel Islands was a plain, and the islands were hills rising out of that plain, with beach beyond.
I think that when man first came into this new country, he would have gone as far as he could along the then coastal plain. When you follow a shoreline in new territory you can be sure of certain things. You can be sure of food: fishes brought into tidal pools at high tide, crabs, molloscs, edible seaweeds. You don't starve along a shoreline. You can be sure of fresh water somewhere, because the water from the interior comes down to the coast. You can usually find shelter. I believe when much more submarine search is done offshore, some very important, much older sites than the Calico Mountain site will be found. That work will have to be done and proved by the younger generation here.
As these migrants pushed further south, clearer of the colder climates of the north, they were more likely to penetrate into the interior.
So I was interested when Miss Simpson came to me in England to tell me about sites around Manix Lake in Southern California where there seemed to be evidence of man much earlier than Clovis and some of the fluted point types of culture. Later, when I received an appointment at the University of California at Riverside, I was able to visit the Calico area.
I was intrigued immediately by the Yermo fan. On top of that fan there's a pavement where the soft sediments have been blown away by the wind or removed on the slopes by the rain. This pavement consists of bits of chert and jasper, many of them worked over different periods -- material from a few hundred years of age to that much older, worked over many many centuries. But I wasn't interested in the surface material.
To me that location had three things which were fundamental to make it a possible archaeological site. It had a combination at the relevant time (back in the Pleistocene -- somewhere in the Wisconsin or earlier); of water, as shown by the building up of this fan; of suitable stone for tools; and out in front, on what was subsequently Manix Lake Basin, a great plain which must have been verdant green, with animals and plants suitable for food. It was ideal. If there was a place where we could find evidence of Upper Pleistocene or earlier man, this was it!
Dee was disappointed because the place she first showed me was not what I was looking for. There were some tools in situ, but in a secondary deposit -- they were not old. But I said, "Dee, that doesn't mean that the old stuff is not here. Let's hunt."
We were lucky. We found a place where someone exploring for bentonite had cut a section. In the side of that section I saw flakes that I thought were humanly worked. We photographed the flakes, marked the spot, and then climbed up on the fan surface and put in some pegs. I told her, "This is where we are going to excavate. Not right there on the cut, but just behind it. This to me is a site -- an archaeological site within a geological formation."
That was the beginning. Dee gathered a crew and I asked them to excavate by methods that Mary and I had worked out at Olduvai.
I want to pay tribute to the patience and perserverence of that crew. They toiled under exceedingly difficult conditions, but they had faith that the site was going to produce something worthwhile. I had faith from the beginning we were going to find evidence. They had faith in my judgement, and then later as they began to see results, in their own judgement.
Slowly and gradually the original site marked out was opened up. Then an adjacent one was excavated. The artifacts which have come out of these two pits completely satisfy me that we have at Calico a site with clear evidence that tool-making man was here over 50,000 years ago.
We were told that if we put down pits anywhere in that fan we would find exactly the same thing -- pseudoartifacts. So at considerable cost, we put down pits at other places chosen at random, and these pits did not yield the same things.
The problem that we must discuss at this conference is two fold: 1) whether you will accept the specimens we show you as artifacts, and 2) whether the evidence of the age is good. There are those who say they're not artifacts at all -- they were made by nature. There are those who say they're artifacts, but they're not as old as you think.
As far as I am concerned, these questions have been answered. I say without hesitation, knowing what nature can do, that we are digging in an archaeological site -- as much so as the sites in England at Clacton and Jaywick, or the sites on the Somme. They are not living floors, but they are archaeological sites!
Personally, I believe that this weekend is important for the Americas as the days in 1834 when a committee went out in Great Britain to see what Boucher de Perthes had found in his gravel pits on the Somme where he had claimed the discovery of ancient stone tools associated with extinct mammals. He had been ridiculed and laughed at. But the scientists came back and said they were satisfied, and from that day on the prehistory of Europe went forwards. I believe that from this weekend on, a new chapter will be written in the prehistory of America.
* These remarks were part of an opening statement made at the 1st General Session of the conference. This session, a dinner meeting presided over by Dr. Gerald A. Smith, Director of the San Bernardino County Museum, was held at the Holiday Inn in San Bernardino, Thursday evening, October 22. Dr. Leakey, long associated with the Centre for Prehistory and Paleontology at the National Museum, Nairobi, Kenya, and best know for his work at Olduvai, is the Project Director of the Calico Mountains Excavations of the San Bernardino County Museum.
Photo from www.calicodig.org.
No comments:
Post a Comment