Expanding Geographical Horizons: New Worlds

1. Expanding Geographical Horizons: New Worlds The Past in Perspective 8

2. Expanding Geographical Horizons: New Worlds • The Settlement of Greater Australia • The Earliest Occupation of Greater Australia • The Spread through Australia • Tasmania • Greater Australia: A Broad Range of Adaptations • Coming to America • The Source of Los Indios

3. Expanding Geographical Horizons: New Worlds • The First Human Settlement of America • Alaska • Clovis • First Skeletons • Issues and Debates • Case Study Close-Up • Summary

4. The Settlement of Greater Australia • The original Australians, called Aborigines, were an enigma to the European colonizers. • Paleogeography in the Western Pacific • During glacial maxima, the islands of Java, Sumatra, Bali, and Boneo were connected to each other in a single landmass called Sunda (or Sundaland). • Australia, New Guinea, and Tasmania were similarly connected as a single landmass, called Sahul, or “Greater Australia.”

5. The Settlement of Greater Australia • Paleogeography in the Western Pacific • Greater Australia has been separated from Asia since the two were separated through continental drift more than 100 million years ago. • The Wallace Trench, located between New Guinea-Australia and Java-Borneo, is an enormous undersea chasm. • The islands never coalesced, kept apart by the deep waters of Wallacea, the sea over the Wallace Trench (Glover 1993).

6. The Settlement of Greater Australia • The Road to Sahul • Anthropologist Joseph Birdsell (1977) has suggested a series of possible routes from Sunda to Sahul during periods of lowered sea level. • The Discovery of Greater Australia • Stone tools dating to as much as 900,000 years ago have been found on the island of Flores, located at the eastern end of the Indonesian archipelago. • One of the older sites in southeast Asia is located at Niah Cave on the island of Borneo. • Radiocarbon dates place the earliest occupation of Niah Cave at around 40,000 years ago.

7. The Settlement of Greater Australia The current coastlines of Australia, New Guinea, and southeast Asia, as well as the coastline during glacial maxima. Arrows show proposed migration routes from Sunda (the combined landmass of the islands of Southeast Asia) to Sahul (Greater Australia). Insert Figure 8.1 (old figure 9.1)

8. The Settlement of Greater Australia Sites representing the earliest occupation of Greater Australia. Insert Figure 8.2 (old figure 9.2)

9. The Earliest Occupation of Greater Australia • The Archaeology of Sahul • The earliest-known settlement of New Guinea, then a part of Greater Australia, has been dated by thermoluminescence to 40,000 B.P. (Groube et al. 1986). • The Kuk site in the New Guinea highlands, consisting of some carbon and fire-cracked rocks, may be as old as 30,000 years. • The Lake Mungo 3 skeleton was recently redated to about 62,000 years ago (Thorne et al. 1999). • The older Australian dates were determined by the application of techniques like ESR and optically stimulated luminescence that can be problematic in their application and interpretation.

10. The Earliest Occupation of Greater Australia • Willandra Lakes • The Lake Mungo 1 skeleton is that of a cremated female that has been dated to 26,000 years ago (Bowler, Thorne, and Polack 1972). • Dating to between 20,000 and 30,000 years ago, Willandra Lakes 50 (as the skeletal remains are designated) is far different in appearance from either Lake Mungo 1 or 3.

11. The Spread through Australia • The Spread through Australia • The oldest human sites in Australia are located along the modern coastal rim or in formerly wetter interiors. • The Australian Interior • Not until 20,000-25,000 years ago did human groups begin to penetrate the dry core of central Australia.

12. Tasmania • Tasmania • A human population first entered the island of Tasmania when it was still connected to the Australian continent. • The environment was entirely different from any faced previously by Australian Aborigines—a frozen tundra not unlike that of Upper Paleolithic Europe. • Tasmania shows archaeological evidence of occupation as early as 35,000 years ago at Wareen Cave (Cosgrove, Allen, and Marshall 1990).

13. Greater Australia: A Broad Range of Adaptations • The ancestors of the native people of Australia arrived by watercraft by about 40,000 years ago. • Some developed cultural strategies for coping with environs as diverse as the Great Sandy Desert and the sub-Antarctic tundra of Tasmania. • The lesson is of the nearly infinite capacity of human groups for adaptive flexibility.

14. East Into the Pacific • A Pacific Islander “Age of Exploration” • Settlers from southeast Asia and New Guinea discovered, explored, and colonized many Pacific islands. • Melanesia—the so-called black islands of New Guinea and smaller islands to the east, including the Solomon Islands, the Bismark Archipelago, Santa Cruz, New Caledonia, Vanatu, and Fiji. • Micronesia—the “small islands” north of Melanesia. • Polynesia—“many islands” including a broad triangle of islands demarcated at its points by Hawaii to the north, Easter Island to the southeast, and New Zealand to the southwest.

15. East Into the Pacific • Pacific Archaeology • Some larger islands of Melanesia were settled by seafaring explorers from Australia by at least 35,000 years ago. • The islands farther to the east were settled much later beginning probably little more than 3,500 years ago (Irwin 1993). • The spread of people through east Melanesia and Polynesia was accomplished by a common culture. • They brought non-native agricultural staples with them. • They brought a common pottery style, called Lapita.

16. Coming to America • Coming to America • The New Word discovered by Columbus consisted of two entire continents with a native population estimated to have been in the tens of millions and speaking more than 1,500 different languages and dialects. • When Was Eastern Siberia First Inhabited? • Archaeologist David Meltzer (1989) points out that we simply do not know when it was first inhabited.

17. The Source of Los Indios • The Source of Los Indios • During long periods in the Pleistocene, people in northeast Asia could have walked into the New World across the body of land today called Beringia, or the Bering Land Bridge. • When Was Beringia Exposed and Open for Travel? • Beringia was above water more or less continuously from the period beginning about 35,000 years ago.

18. The Source of Los Indios The modern coastlines of northeast Asia and northwest North America as well as the projected coastline of Beringia during glacial maxima. Insert Figure 8.7 (old figure 9.4)

19. The Source of Los Indios Sites representing the earliest occupation of North America and South America. Insert Figure 8.10 (old figure 9.6)

20. The First Human Settlement of America • One If by Land • A few ancient sites in northwestern North America have provided evidence of an interior adaptation between 15,000 and 12,000 years ago (Cinq-Mars 1978). • The Laurentide ice sheet in northeastern North America covered much of the northern latitudes of this continent. • The Cordilleran ice sheet, whose center was in the Rocky Mountains. • During the late Pleistocene, a pathway opened up episodically, called the ice-free corridor, or McKenzie corridor.

21. The First Human Settlement of America • Two if by Sea • The Monte Verde site in Chile can be firmly dated to 12,500 years ago. • It might best be explained as the remains of a community whose distant ancestors had entered the New World along the Beringian coast, obviously long before 12,500 B.P. • These people traveled south along the Pacific coast of the New World.

22. Alaska • Alaska • Close to the Beringian point of entry, are a number of sites dating to before 11,000 B.P. • Denali and Nenana • Sites exhibiting tools of the locally designated Denali Complex of wedge-shaped cores, microblades, bifacial knives, and burins have been excavated in the Nenana Valley southwest of Fairbanks. • These sites have produced a radiocarbon date of about 10,700 B.P. • Stone-tool assemblages at the Nenana Complex show bifacial flaked spear points which date to about 14,000 years ago. • Descendants of the people of Nenana made a small technological step in spearpoint form—the so-called fluted point.

23. Clovis • Clovis • These Paleoindian sites number in the hundreds and are found throughout the continental United States. • Almost all Clovis sites fit between 11,200 B.P. and 10,500 B.P (Haynes 1982, 1987, 1992). • Clovis Technology • Clovis spearpoints are distinctive in having a channel, or flute, on both faces. • The rapid, almost simultaneous appearance of fluted points throughout much of the New World is striking.

24. Clovis • The Clovis Advantage • A new hunting technology such as the fluted spear may have been a key factor in the success of the culture. • Clovis Subsistence • The Paleoindian probably relied on root grubbing, seed gathering, and small-mammal trapping, at least some of the time (Meltzer 1993a; Johnson 1991). • Some Paleoindians, like the Inuit people (Eskimos), must have relied on hunting, since little else was available in their territories.

25. Clovis • When the North American elephants became extinct around 11,000 years ago, the Paleoindians in the western United States shifted their hunting focus to bison. • The technology changed, producing shorter spearpoints, but with channels extending almost to the tip. • These so-called Folsom points are of the culture that bears the same name.

26. First Skeletons • The remains of fewer than forty individual people have been found in the New World dating to more than 8,000 years ago. • The oldest human remains found in the New World do not match the morphology of modern Native Americans.

27. Issues and Debates • What Other Kinds of Data Can Contribute to the Solving the Riddle of the First Americans? • Linguistic Diversity • Genetic Diversity • The Altations in central Siberia exhibit all five of the mitochondrial variants. • A European team of geneticists has suggested that the amount of genetic variation in Native Americans, when compared to native northeast Asians, suggests a separation of 20,000 to 25,000 years (Gibbons, 1996b).

28. Issues and Debates • Could Native Americans Really Have Come From Europe Instead of Asia? • The argument presented by archaeologists Dennis Stanford and Bruce Bradley (2000) is based on perceived detailed and deep technological and morphological similarities between Clovis technology and that of the Solutrean tradition of the European Upper Paleolithic. • Archaeologist Lawrence Guy Strauss (2000), an expert on the Solutrean, rejects the suggestion of a Solutrean/Clovis connection.

29. Issues and Debates • What-or Who-Killed the American Megafauna? • There is an apparent correlation between the first arrival of human groups in Australia and in the New World and the massive extinction of large game animals.

30. Case Study Close-Up • At the Lehner site in Arizona 13 elephants were killed by Clovis hunter brandishing pears tipped with fluted points (Haury, Sales, and Sasley 1959). • When the bison were traveling in larger groups and were relatively easy to herd, several bands coalesced in a larger encampment. • A bit more than 10,000 years ago, the Paleoindians caught and killed nearly 80 bison in one hunt.

31. Summary • In the late Pleistocene, expanding human populations intruded into new territories and migrated into Australia, North America, and South America. • During the Pleistocene, the New World was intermittently connected to the Old World by a vast land bridge.

32. Summary • Sites as distant from the land bridge as Monte Verde in Chile, Topper in Virginia, and Meadowcraft Rockshelter in Western Pennsylvania imply a much earlier time of entry onto the land bridge—20,000 years ago or possible more. • Several early sites in Alaska and the Canadian Yukon date to the period immediately after 12,000 years ago and bear lithic industries analogous to those in Siberia.