14,000-year-old camp studied in Chile
David Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor
San Francisco Chronicle, May 9, 2008
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/05/09/MN8510J8D3.DTL
Southward those First Americans must have come - all the way from Alaska
to South America, generation after generation.
And at the end of their migration route 14,000 years ago, they built
their wood-framed tents of hide, cooked their food, found medicines in
seaweeds, and settled only a few miles from the sea where shellfish of
all kinds abounded.
And on their trek, some generations must have stopped - to settle in the
Pacific Northwest and, perhaps, in "sweet spots" along the Sacramento
River, alive with countless salmon.
Now, fresh evidence has come from an archaeological site in Chile called
Monte Verde that a small group of people lived there at roughly the same
time as some different stay-behind folks settled for at least a while in
southern Oregon's Paisley caves.
A team of archaeologists is re****ting today in the journal Science that
they have found abundant new signs of how those ancient Chilean people
lived: the remains of meat and shellfish they cooked in their hearths, a
dozen long-decayed huts that sheltered them, and varied species of
seaweed they exploited for food or as medicines for their ills.
Tom Dillehay, a noted and sometimes controversial anthropologist from
Vanderbilt University, has led the Monte Verde exploration site with
Chilean colleagues since it was discovered more than 30 years ago in a
peat bog about 500 miles south of Santiago.
He described the finds by telephone Thursday.
At the time when Monte Verde was occupied by a group of 15 or 20 humans,
Dillehay said, the settlement lay 400 feet above sea level beside a
creek more than 50 miles from the coast and about 10 miles inland from a
large coastal bay. But the people must have trekked regularly back and
forth from the sea to gather sustenance, because inside the site the
team found no fewer than nine different species of seaweed obviously
carried inland from the shore, he said.
Some were clearly used as vegetables, while two indigestible species
have medicinal qualities that modern Indians in the region exploit today
to treat infections, among other things, Dillehay said.
Like the people of the Oregon caves whose stone tools and fossil feces
from more than 14,000 years old were described in The Chronicle last
month, the Monte Verde people of the same epoch were thus the earliest
people known to have settled in America.
They arrived at least 1,000 years before the famed Clovis people whose
remains have been found from New Mexico to California and had long been
considered the true "First Americans" before the earlier finds at Monte
Verde and the Paisley caves supplanted them.
At Monte Verde, Dillehay said, the settlers used stone-tipped
projectiles to hunt big game like the extinct elephant-like gomphotheres
and relatives of today's llamas. They gathered roots and nuts and wild
potatoes and apparently digested them well.
Dillehay's team actually found one stone scraper with traces of seaweed
stuck to it, plus several "cuds" - chewed up clumps of seaweed - that
weren't eaten, but could well have been the medicine they masticated but
didn't swallow.
More than 16,000 years ago, a land bridge existed where the Bering
Strait lies today, and to Dillehay and his colleagues, the peoples who
first crossed that bridge from Asia to Alaska must have moved south
slowly.
"How fast, how slow, we just don't know," he said by phone, "but it was
no migration blitzkrieg, and I tend to think they followed an invisible
highway down along the coastline."
Jon Erlandson, an archaeologist at the University of Oregon, specializes
in the peopling of America's West Coast and said he finds the Dillehay
team's new re****t highly significant and convincing. It shows, he said,
that the people of Monte Verde must have had a "fairly deep system of
knowledge" about their region's ecology because it enabled them to
exploit resources both from the sea miles away and from inland regions
where big game and plants were abundant.
It certainly looks as though the migration routes of all those people
took them south along an ice-free coastal corridor, he said, because
glaciers still made inland Alaska totally forbidding.
"It's a nice seaweed garnish to think about, as people moved slowly down
along their kelp highway," Erlandson said of the new food finds at Monte
Verde. "A thousand rivers flowed down from the inland mountain ranges
all the way, and as people crossed the Columbia and the Sacramento
rivers that were so rich in salmon, those were the sweet spots where we
might yet find their traces."
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