People of the Nightland (North America's Forgotten Past) (51 page)

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Authors: W. Michael Gear,Kathleen O'Neal Gear

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t the time of the cataclysm, PaleoIndians lived near the ice, and made their camps along the borders of the gigantic lakes. In fact, some of the oldest archaeological sites in North America are found close to what was—when the prehistoric peoples lived there—the edge of a melting glacier: the Udora site in Ontario; Debert site in Nova Scotia; Michaud site in Maine; Whipple site in New Hampshire; Meadowcroft Rockshelter, Shawnee-Minisink, and Shoop sites in Pennsylvania; Bull Brook in Massachusetts; the Hiscock and Dutchess Quarry Caves sites in New York; the Hebior–Schaefer in Wisconsin; and in Michigan, the Holcombe, Gainey, Rappuhn, and Barnes sites—all of which reliably date to between 11,000 and 14,000 years ago.
In the area where
People of the Nightland
is set, archaeologists have identified three distinct cultures of PaleoIndian hunters. We call them Gainey, Debert, and Parkhill, after the locations where their distinctive fluted spear points were found. For a general introduction to the archaeology, we recommend Peter L. Storck’s excellent
Journey to the Ice Age
. Other resources are contained in the bibliography.
Why would human beings have been drawn to one of the most inhospitable environments on earth? First of all, the area immediately
adjacent to the ice was certainly tundra and there is evidence of permafrost, but a short distance to the south, the Pleistocene taiga—which formed a belt along the southern margin of the ice—consisted of spruce, jack pine, and oak. The taiga also had many parklike meadows filled with shrubs. At Meadowcroft Rockshelter in Pennsylvania, the archaeologists discovered nutshells, wood, and charcoal from walnut and hickory trees. We call these places
refugia
, that is, sheltered locations that fostered a more temperate ecology. Probably many such refugia existed around the glacial margins.
This is important because the taiga meadows would have provided big game animals with better grazing and browsing opportunities, and
that’s
why prehistoric peoples camped there. Kill a ground squirrel and one person can eat for a night. Kill a mammoth and a village can eat for a month.
Try to imagine a world where extinct animals like mastodons, mammoths, giant ground sloths, tapirs, and camels walked alongside deer, fox squirrels, raccoons, and elk. Each year, huge flocks of ducks, geese, herons, and other migratory birds winged north with the spring. The largest bird in the sky was the California condor; its range extended over all of North America.
The prehistoric peoples were outstanding hunters. Their spear points—fashioned from a variety of stones and propelled by an atlatl, or throwing stick—could penetrate the rib cage of an adult mastodon. In fact, bones from mastodons, and to a lesser extent, mammoths, are among the most common Pleistocene fossils in the Great Lakes region. PaleoIndians were also master traders, exchanging goods across much of eastern North America. As well, we know from the Hiscock site in New York and Meadowcroft Rockshelter in Pennsylvania that they weaved nets and textiles.
So what happened 13,000 years ago?
Global warming peaked. The glaciers collapsed. Ice dams must have partially blocked the Mississippi River drainage and opened a new spillway along the eastern edge of Lake Agassiz, which resulted in catastrophic flooding. Eighty-five percent of the lake’s volume rushed into the Nipigon Basin in western Ontario, and from there into the Superior and then the Huron Basins, and finally flooded out into the North Atlantic through what paleoclimatologists call the Champlain Sea. A small remnant of that sea is what we know today as the St. Lawrence River.
The final triggers for this cataclysmic event may have come from three sources. First, when sea levels rose enough to flood the Bering Strait 13,000 years ago, it established the Trans-Polar Current that sent warmer waters flowing into the Arctic Ocean, melted the sea ice there, and flooded the North Atlantic. Second, as the glaciers melted, the land that had been weighed down by the ice began to spring back. This is called isostatic rebound. (Incidentally, this is happening today in the Alps. Recent surveys have demonstrated that the Alps are losing 1.5 billion tons of ice per year to global warming, and as the massive glaciers melt the reduction in weight on the peaks is causing the entire region to gain altitude. Italian glaciologist Claudio Smiraglia and his colleagues reported this in their excellent article in the July 28, 2006, issue of
Geophysical Research Letters
.)
Also, 13,000 years ago, when the land began to spring back, there were strong earthquakes that probably helped to further destabilize the glaciers. Lastly, ice cores taken in Greenland verify that one of the most volcanically active periods in the past 100,000 years was the period from about 8,000 to 15,000 years ago. It’s possible that this flurry of volcanic eruptions resulted from the stresses on the earth’s crust that accompanied isostatic rebound. But whatever the reasons, these eruptions spewed enormous amounts of dust and sulfuric acid into the atmosphere and dramatically affected the global climate, resulting in decades of “volcanic winters.”
Also, keep in mind that glaciers grind up rock and gravel, creating a fine dust. As the glaciers melted, this powdery sediment settled into the meltwater lakes. As the lakes in turn drained, wind scoured the thick layers of fine dust and silt, blowing great clouds of it to carpet eastern North America. Geologists call this wind-deposited dust loess, and in places deposits were sixty and seventy feet thick. We can only imagine the terrible impact those huge dust storms had on the local flora and fauna. Suffice to say that when the dust finally stopped blowing, mammoth, mastodon, dire wolf, short-faced bear, condor, giant beaver, and giant sloth were extinct in eastern North America.
Our goal in writing the
People
books is to allow our readers to see through the eyes of prehistoric cultures, in the hope that we can learn from them. In this regard, we are often helped by historical records. For example, eyewitness accounts of similar volcanic events proved extremely valuable in writing
People of the Nightland,
particularly accounts from the second century AD, when there were a series of
explosive eruptions in Alaska. Chinese historians during this time period recorded that “several times the sun rose in the east red as blood and lacking light … only when it had risen to an elevation of more than two zhang (24 degrees) was there any brightness … .” Perhaps one of the most chilling chronicles of these eruptions was written in AD 186 by the Romans: “The heavens were ablaze … stars were seen all the day long … hanging in the air which was a token of a cloud …”
We are also helped a great deal by the oral histories of the native peoples. There are many stories of terrible floods. After the Yavapai emerged into this world, they failed to close the hole to the underworld and it caused a great flood. Tears of mourning often cause floods, as in the Kathlamet story about Beaver crying for his lost wife, or among the Cherokee when Mother Sun’s beloved daughter dies from a rattlesnake bite and her tears cause a flood. The Wiyot story of Above-Old-Man and the Arapaho story of Neshanu tell of how the creator grew unhappy with human beings and flooded the world to cleanse it. The Pawnee creator, Tirawahat, flooded the world to kill the evil giants who lived there. The Cree culture hero, Wesucechak, fought the powerful water lynxes after the great flood to avenge the death of his brother.
These stories may have been inspired by the great flood of 13,000 years ago that brought about a global climatic reversal, rolling the Earth back into an Ice Age we call the Younger Dryas.
Academically oriented readers may question whether people inhabited the ice caves. While the violence of the collapsing glaciers probably erased any such evidence, we know that modern Inuit build houses out of ice and snow for protection from the elements, and the honeycomb of glacial caves would have provided similar shelter from the winter winds, as well as a handy deep-freeze for long-term food storage. Finding evidence for such is a daunting task, but a fertile field for investigation.
Lastly, for those who think the Pleistocene Ice Age ended ten thousand years ago, let us suggest that it may not have. This current warm episode, the Holocene, encompasses only about half a percent of the Quaternary Period. Which means today’s climate could be just another in a long line of brief warming periods.
As you listen to the news tonight remember that Ice Ages are almost always heralded by sudden episodes of global warming.
In fact, with atmospheric carbon dioxide at the highest level it’s been in the past 750,000 years … we’re overdue.
NORTH AMERICA’S FORGOTTEN PAST SERIES
People of the Wolf
People of the Fire
People of the Earth
People of the River
People of the Sea
People of the Lakes
People of the Lightning
People of the Silence
People of the Mist
People of the Masks
People of the Owl
People of the Raven
People of the Moon
People of the Weeping Eye*
People of the Nightland
 
THE ANASAZI MYSTERY SERIES
 
The Visitant
The Summoning God
Bone Walker
 
BY KATHLEEN O’NEAL GEAR
 
Thin Moon and Cold Mist
Sand in the Wind
This Widowed Land
It Sleeps in Me
It Wakes in Me
It Dreams in Me*
 
BY W. MICHAEL GEAR
 
Long Ride Home
Big Horn Legacy
Coyote Summer
Athena Factor
The Morning River
 
OTHER TITLES BY KATHLEEN O’NEAL GEAR AND W. MICHAEL GEAR
 
Dark Inheritance
Raising Abel
To Cast a Pearl*
 
*Forthcoming
 
Agenbroad, Larry D., et al.
Megafauna and Man: Discovery of America’s Heartland.
Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, and the Mammoth Site of Hot Springs, South Dakota, 1990.
Bonnichsen, Robson, and Karen L. Turnmire.
Clovis: Origins and Adaptations.
Corvallis, Oregon: Center for the Study of First Americans, 1991.
Bradley, Raymond S.
Paleoclimatology: Reconstructing Climates of the Quaternary.
Amsterdam: Elsevier Academic Press, 1999.
Bryant, Vaughn M., and Richard G. Holloway.
Pollen Records of Late Quaternary North American Sediments.
Dallas: The American Association of Stratigraphic Palynologists Foundation, 1985.
Deller, Brian D., and Christopher J. Ellis.
Thedford II: A Paleo-Indian Site in the Ausable River Watershed of Southwestern Ontario.
Memoirs of the Museum of Anthropology. No. 24. University of Michigan, 1992.
Dixon, E. James.
Bones, Boats, and Bison: Archeology and the First Colonization of Western North America.
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999.
Ellis, Christopher, and Jonathan C. Lothrop.
Eastern Paleoindian Lithic Resource Use.
San Francisco: Westview Press, 1989.
Fagan, Brian M.
Ancient North America: The Archaeology of a Continent.
London: Thames and Hudson, 2000.
Guthrie, R. Dale.
Frozen Fauna of the Mammoth Steppe: The Story of Blue Babe.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.
Hansel, A. K., D. M. Mickelson, A. F. Schneider, and C. E. Larson. “Late Wisconsinian and Holocene History of the Lake Michigan Basin.”
Quaternary Evolution of the Great Lakes.
Eds. P. F. Karrow and P. E. Calken. Geological Association of Canada Special Paper No. 30, 1985: 39–53.
Haynes, Gary.
Mammoths, Mastodons, and Elephants: Biology, Behavior and the Fossil Record.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Helm, June, ed.
Handbook of North American Indians.
Vol. 6. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1981.
Jablonski, Nina, ed.
The First Americans: Pleistocene Colonization of the New World.
Memoirs of the California Academy of the Sciences. No. 27.
Jackson, Lawrence J.
The Sandy Ridge and Halstead Paleo-Indian Sites: Unifacial Tool Use and Gainey Phase Definition in South-Central Ontario.
Memoirs of the Museum of Anthropology. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1998.
Martin, Paul S., and Richard G. Klein.
Quaternary Extinctions: A Prehistoric Revolution.
Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1989.
Mead, Jim, and David J. Meltzer.
Environments and Extinctions: Man in Late Glacial North America.
Orono, Maine: Center for the Study of Early Man, 1985.
Pearson, James L.
Shamanism and the Ancient Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Archaeology.
New York: Altamira Press, 2002.
Peilou, E. C.
After the Ice Age: The Return of Life to Glaciated North America.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.
Roosa, W. B. “Great Lakes Paleo-Indians: The Parkhill Site, Ontario.”
Amerinds and Their Paleoenvironments in Northeastern North America.
Eds. Walter S. Newman and Bert Salwin. New York: Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1977. No. 288: 349–354.
Saunders, Jeffery J. “A Model for Man-Mastodon Relationships in Late Pleistocene North America.”
Canadian Journal of Anthropology
1.1, 1981: 87–98.
Storck, Peter L.
The Fisher Site: Archaeological, Geological and Paleo-botanical Studies at an Early Paleo-Indian Site in Southern Ontario, Canada.
Memoirs of the Museum of Anthropology. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1997.
Storck, Peter L.
Journey to the Ice Age: Discovering an Ancient World.
Vancouver: UBC Press, 2004.
Straus, Lawrence Guy, et al.
Humans at the End of the Ice Age: The Archaeology of the Pleistocene-Holocene Transition.
New York: Plenum Press, 1996.

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