AMERICA'S STONE AGE EXPLORERS

PBS Airdate: November 9, 2004

Go to the companion Web site
NARRATOR: Stone Age America, 13,000 years ago: A virgin land, a world great beas
ts have ruled for millions of years, and for early human settlers it is an age i
n which stone weapons can be the difference between life and death.
This is a Clovis spear point. It is the greatest technological breakthrough of t
he Stone Age and long thought to be the oldest human artifact unearthed in the A
mericas. For years, these Stone Age weapons of mass destruction were thought to
represent a culture of prehistoric big game hunters who came over a land bridge
from Asia to become the first Americans. But new clues are forcing scientists to
rewrite an epic story that, until now, had been considered the gospel.
Can these magnificent Clovis spear points, over 13,000 years old, help solve one
of the greatest riddles of North American archaeology? Who were the first Ameri
cans and where did they come from? America's Stone Age explorers, up next on NOV
A.
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NARRATOR: The ancestors of modern humans originated in Africa at least 150,000 y
ears ago. By 40,000 years ago, they had radiated out of Africa and were occupyin
g most of Europe, Asia and Australia. But half the Earth, humans had yet to expl
ore. How people first came to America remains one of the greatest mysteries of o
ur past.
PAUL MARTIN (University of Arizona): Archaeologists have been looking for the ea
rliest for a long time. It's been a Holy Grail for them. Who was first?
MICHAEL COLLINS (University of Texas): The whole question of the peopling of the
Americas is a huge piece of the total human experience. That's just a question
we can't leave unanswered.
NARRATOR: Who were these earliest explorers? Where did they come from? How did t
hey make this epic journey to the New World?
The first clue to the mystery was found in a dried up lake in Clovis, New Mexico
. Here, in 1933, archaeologists uncovered a stone tool made by human hands, an a
ncient spearhead. It became known as the Clovis point.
Alongside the Clovis point was the skeleton of a mammoth, which, evidently, the
spear point had been used to kill. Later, scientists were able to date the bones
, establishing the age of the spearhead as 13,500 years old. It made the Clovis
point the oldest human artifact ever found in America. Archaeologists have now d
iscovered thousands of Clovis spear points across much of the continent.
MICHAEL COLLINS: There's Clovis in every one of the 48 states in the United Stat
es, Mexico, Belize, Costa Rica, in all kinds of environments.

NARRATOR: So many spear points, spreading widely across the continent, suggested
a rapid expansion of a weapon crucial to the lives of the earliest Stone Age Am
erican explorers.
KENNETH TANKERSLEY (Northern Kentucky University): The Clovis point was the fund
amental basis for survival in Ice Age America.
DAVID KILBY (University of New Mexico): Clovis points, arguably, represent the s
tate of the art in hunting weapons on Earth at the time and are probably capable
of taking down just about any animal on the late Pleistocene landscape.
NARRATOR: In an age defined by its most valuable resource, stone, the Clovis spe
ar point represented a great technological breakthrough, transforming rock into
a killing machine.
DENNIS STANFORD (Smithsonian Institution): It's a very distinctive type of artif
act. As you can see here, it has a flake that's been taken out of the base and t
here's also a flake on the other side removed from the base, and these are calle
d flutes. And beyond that the projectile point is flaked on both sides. You see
it's worked here and it's worked on this side, which is what we call "bifacial."
NARRATOR: The bifacial design transforms a rough stone into a projectile with a
serrated sharp edge. The fluting, some archaeologists speculate, allows Clovis h
unters to rapidly load and reload the deadly blades onto spear shafts.
DENNIS STANFORD: And when you throw this at an animal, this goes in and sticks i
n the animal and this comes back out so you can put a new one on it and start hu
nting again.
DAVID KILBY:
There have been some experiments carried out by archaeologists,
using replicas of Clovis points and other stone tools, in which they were used t
o penetrate the hides of modern elephants, elephants which had already deceased.
And it's found, in, in all these cases, that they actually are all very efficie
nt weapons and could potentially kill mammoth where you'd get them into the soft
, vulnerable underbelly and then quickly back away.
NARRATOR: Testimony to the deadliness of the Clovis spear point is that, in a do
zen cases, they were discovered in the remains of butchered mammoths. This led s
cientists to connect the spear point to a catastrophe that befell these Stone Ag
e giants. For around 13,500 years ago, all the mega fauna in the Americas went e
xtinct the mammoths, the giant armadillo, the giant sloth, the short-faced bear all
disappeared within a few hundred years.
But who were these big game hunters with their Stone Age weapons of mass destruc
tion? Where did they come from?
When archaeologists looked for an answer, they found an important clue in the cl
imate of the ancient world. Between 24- and 13,000 years ago was the last great
Ice Age. Huge swaths of the northern hemisphere lay frozen under ice. These gian
t ice sheets locked up vast quantities of water, causing sea levels to drop far
lower than they are today.
DAVID MELTZER (Southern Methodist University): When you've got that much ice on
land, what happens is that it draws, essentially, water out of the oceans. So wi
th that much ice on land, sea levels worldwide are lowered. By lowering sea leve
ls, you expose the continental shelf between Siberia and Alaska, and that made i
t possible for people to walk to the Americas.
NARRATOR: Asia and North America were essentially one great continent, joined by

a land bridge more than a thousand miles wide. But although it was possible to
walk from Siberia to Alaska, giant ice sheets barred entrance to the rest of the
continent. Then, as the climate warmed at the end of the Ice Age, the glaciers
receded, opening up an ice-free corridor through the center of the continent. Fo
r the first time, it seemed, the door was open to the virgin landscape of the Ne
w World.
DAVID MELTZER: As that corridor opens up, that's just about the time when Clovis
appears in the lower 48. So it all seemed to work out very, very beautifully in
terms of the timing of getting these New World peoples from Asia into the Ameri
cas.
NARRATOR: The timing of the land bridge, the ice-free corridor and the Clovis da
tes all seemed to fit together in a simple elegant theory: 13,500 years ago, Clo
vis people, big game hunters from Asia, armed with their lethal Clovis spear poi
nt, walked across the land bridge to the Americas, followed the ice-free corrido
r down into the lower continent and spread across the land, killing all the grea
t beasts. As ice age glaciers melted, the seas rose, submerging the land bridge.
The descendents of the Clovis people, the Native Americans, remained isolated u
ntil their first contact with Columbus.
The theory became known as Clovis First. It was written into the textbooks and t
aught for the better part of a century. The Clovis spear point became the icon o
f the first Americans.
Clovis First was such a powerful story that, for years, few archaeologists looke
d back beyond 13,500 years ago. But then a few did. Jim Adovasio has spent the p
ast 30 years excavating at Meadowcroft, a prehistoric site near Pittsburgh, Penn
sylvania. The deeper he dug, the further back he descended in time.
JAMES ADOVASIO (Mercyhurst College): On these surfaces that you see before us, w
e have signs of repeated visits by Native Americans to this site. These discolor
ations literally represent a moment frozen in time.
NARRATOR: Each tag marks ancient fire pits that can be carbon dated, creating a
cross section of who lived here and when, stretching back 13,500 years.
JAMES ADOVASIO: Just below the surface I'm standing on is where the conventional
Clovis First model says that the earliest material should stop, basically, that
there ought not to be anything beneath it, no matter how much deeper we dug.
NARRATOR: But then, Adovasio did go deeper, below 13,500 years, to a time in the
Americas, when no trace of humans should exist, according to the Clovis First t
heory. He was astounded by what he found.
JAMES ADOVASIO: The artifacts simply continued, and we recovered blades like thi
s all the way down to 16,000 B.C.
NARRATOR: When he published his findings, he was immediately attacked.
JAMES ADOVASIO: The majority of the archaeological community was acutely skeptic
al, and they invented all kinds of reasons why these dates couldn't possibly be
right.
NARRATOR: Some claimed that nearby coal deposits had contaminated Adovasio's sam
ples, but he was known to be a meticulous excavator. Eventually, a few other arc
haeologists began to report evidence questioning the Clovis First theory, and th
ey too were attacked.
MICHAEL COLLINS: The best way in the world to get beaten up, professionally, is

to claim you have a pre-Clovis site.

DENNIS STANFORD: When you dig deeper than Clovis, a lot of people do not report
it, because they're worried about the reaction of their colleagues.
MICHAEL COLLINS: I've been accused of planting artifacts. People will reject rad
iocarbon dates just simply because there's not supposed to be any people here at
those times, and it just goes on and on and on.
NARRATOR: Even faced with evidence to the contrary, Clovis First supporters refu
sed to accept that people could have arrived in America earlier than 13,500 year
s ago. For, as they pointed out, although it was possible to walk across the lan
d bridge into present day Alaska, ice sheets blocked entry to the rest of the co
ntinent until at least that time. As they put it, "If people were coming to the
New World before then, how could they get past the ice?"
Some archaeologists began to defy the dogma and search for an alternative route
down the coast of Alaska.
JAMES DIXON (University of Colorado at Boulder): Well, when I was a student, we
learned that the entire northwest coast of North America was covered by glacial
ice all the way out to the continental shelf, so really, there was no opportunit
y for plants or animals, much less humans, to exist along that coastline during
the last Ice Age.
NARRATOR: Today, Jim Dixon and Tim Heaton are finding evidence of abundant plant
s and animals at a time when the northwest coast was thought to be a lifeless, f
rozen wasteland.
TIM HEATON (University of South Dakota): We just cleaned up this caribou antler
I want you to take a look at.
NARRATOR: Here, along the coast, the glaciers destroyed most traces of the Ice A
ge world, but Heaton and Dixon have investigated a rare undisturbed site, deep u
nderground in an ancient bear cave.
The cave floor is excavated, inch by inch, from dated layers of soil going back
tens of thousands of years.
ARCHAEOLOGIST: Thanks.
TIM HEATON:

I think it's a bone fragment.

NARRATOR: This excavation has uncovered a record of caribou, fox and bear bones
dating back 50,000 years.
TIM HEATON:
What this suggests is that bears survived the entire last period
of glaciation, and if bears could have survived here, it's certainly clear that
humans could have also.
JAMES DIXON:
We now realize that those early portrayals of this massive conti
nental glacier, all the way out to the ocean really is, is not accurate, and tha
t by, oh, 14- to 16,000 years ago, this ice had retreated sufficiently to create
habitat for plants and animals and ice-free areas that could have been used by
humans.
NARRATOR: Abundant vegetation, temperate coastal climate and bear survival are a
ll evidence of a possible Ice Age route to the Americas along the Alaska coast,
by sea. But still no evidence that humans had actually made the voyage down the
coast.

Then another surprise, from deep in the southern hemisphere, at a place called M
onte Verde, this site of human habitation in Chile, 40 miles from the Pacific co
ast, was claimed to date back earlier than Clovis.
In 1997, a group of highly regarded archaeologists went to examine the evidence
with their own eyes. They saw weapons, tools and other objects, the result of tw
o decades of excavation. After intensely scrutinizing the dating, they confirmed
the artifacts were older than Clovis by over a thousand years.
KENNETH TANKERSLEY: It wasn't until Monte Verde that we saw the first unambiguou
s, unquestionable evidence of people here before Clovis. It allowed us to think
that perhaps the initial peopling of the New World was beyond 12-, 13,000 years
ago and allowed us to look further.
NARRATOR: But even as more archaeologists allowed themselves to consider that Cl
ovis might not have been first, the pillars of the Clovis First theory could not
be completely toppled; Clovis First remained the entrenched answer to the quest
ion of the peopling of Americas.
And so it could have stayed until a remarkable discovery. Doug Wallace takes a d
ifferent approach to the mystery of the first Americans. Instead of archaeology,
he's using DNA to reveal traces of ancient migrations. Stored in his lab are DN
A samples of indigenous people collected from all corners of the globe. DNA is t
he molecule of our genetic endowment expressed in a code of four letters represe
nting four different chemical bases.
Every cell in these samples contains DNA. But Wallace studies a specific kind of
DNA, not from the nucleus, which is a random mix of genes from both parents, bu
t from the mitochondria, the cell's energy factories outside the nucleus.
This kind of DNA is inherited only from the mother and is passed intact from gen
eration to generation as lineages diverge. But at a steady and predictable rate,
tiny mutations creep, like spelling mistakes, into specific stretches of DNA. T
he amount of genetic variation between any two lineages can reveal how far back
in time they shared a common ancestor.
DOUGLAS WALLACE (University of California, Irvine): So what we've been able to d
o, using genetic variation and comparing the genetic variation of aboriginal pop
ulations from all the major continents of the world, we've literally been able t
o reconstruct the history of migration.
NARRATOR: When Wallace and his team analyzed the mitochondrial DNA of Native Ame
ricans, they found four distinctive lineages that he labeled A, B, C and D. All
four turned out to share common ancestors back in Siberia and northeast Asia.
So far, these findings were consistent with the Clovis First theory that the fir
st Americans came from Asia. But when Wallace calculated how long ago the Asian
and Native American DNA diverged, he was shocked. He repeated his work, as did o
ther labs. The results were consistent. Three of the four main ancestral groups
A, C and D, diverged from their Asian forbears at least 20,000 years ago. And ev
en more striking, the first Americans didn't all come at once, but in at least t
hree waves of migration.
DOUGLAS WALLACE: All of the papers that have been published have come to a very
similar conclusion: that the first migration was in the order of 20- to 30,000 y
ears ago.
NARRATOR: The DNA results made the Clovis First theory even more unlikely. Toget
her with the evidence from Monte Verde, Meadowcroft and other sites, it now seem

ed as if Clovis people could not be the first Americans. The Pacific coast route
offered a possible alternative to the Bering land bridge and the ice-free corri
dor, and the DNA suggested that humans had been coming to America in waves and f
ar earlier than ever imagined.
Only one last pillar of the epic Clovis First theory was still standing: the art
ifact that inspired the theory, the icon of Stone Age America, the Clovis spear
point itself. Where did it come from?
Archaeologist Dennis Stanford decided to search for its origins along the route
from Asia to America. But as he worked back from Alaska to Siberia, the trail we
nt cold. The weapons and tools he found in Asia were quite different.
DENNIS STANFORD: After looking at the collections, we were disappointed that we
didn't find what we thought we would find, and I was surprised to find that the
technologies were so much different.
NARRATOR: The Clovis spear point is a single stone, bifacial, or shaped on both
sides, with a flute, or groove, at its base. The spear points in Asia are made f
rom lots of small razor-like flints called micro-blades embedded in a bone handl
e.
DENNIS STANFORD: Microblade technology is making a projectile point or a knife b
lade out of bone and then cutting a slot in it and then putting the microblades
in the slot. And that's a totally different philosophy, entirely, than using the
bifacial projectile point, as you can see here. It's just a total different min
dset.
NARRATOR: Now there was a real puzzle. The DNA says the earliest Americans are f
rom Asia, yet the Clovis point, is nowhere to be found in Asia. It was a puzzle,
not only for Stanford, but also his colleague Bruce Bradley. Bradley is an anth
ropologist and a skilled flint knapper, an expert at crafting stone tools.
One day, while making a Clovis point, he had a moment of inspiration. He remembe
red a popular science book he had seen when he was a student. It showed pictures
of ancient spearheads made by the Solutreans, people who lived in Ice Age Franc
e and Spain. Their spear points resembled Clovis points. It seemed unbelievable,
but Stanford and Bradley posed the question, "Could the Clovis point and some o
f the earliest Americans be from Europe?"
DENNIS STANFORD: I was going through the old arguments: "Yeah, well, Solutreans.
.. 5,000 years older than Clovis." And "You've got the Atlantic Ocean out there.
" So I wasn't convinced that we really ought to push forward on it.
BRUCE BRADLEY (University of Exeter): I remember it a little bit differently. Yo
u said, "Are you out of your mind?"
NARRATOR: Despite the unlikelihood of the connection, Stanford and Bradley decid
ed to pursue the idea. Bradley thought an important clue might lie in the specif
ic technique involved in making Clovis points.
BRUCE BRADLEY: You can see how this, starting from this side, went and took off
this whole other side. This is what we call an overshot or outre passe flake, a
very intentional process.
NARRATOR: Overshot flaking was an unusual technique that left behind a distincti
ve byproduct, big flakes, at ancient Clovis stone working sites. Bradley wondere
d if traces of this technique might show up in southwestern France, where the So
lutreans had lived 20,000 years ago.

When he went there to investigate, one thing soon became clear: the Solutreans w
ere a remarkable people. The Solutreans were responsible for much of the great S
tone Age art of Europe and were the forefathers of the artists who painted the S
istine Chapel of the Ice Age, the Caves of Lascaux.
DAVID MELTZER: They did a lot of carving in bone and in antler and in ivory, the
y fashioned spear throwers, they painted on cave walls; they had a fairly comple
x means of expressing themselves through their art.
NARRATOR: Could these remarkable Stone Age Europeans have brought the Clovis spe
ar point to the Americas?
Bradley's research took him to the local museum in the town of Les Eyzies, Franc
e. What he saw were hundreds of what looked very much like Clovis points.
BRUCE BRADLEY: What we're seeing here is only the finished objects, only the thi
ngs that museum people thought were really good for display. It doesn't always s
how you how things were made.
NARRATOR: To connect the Solutreans and Clovis, he needed to find out if they pr
oduced their spearheads using the same big flake technique.
BRUCE BRADLEY: So what we do is we go back to the collections of the broken mate
rials, which is probably 99 percent of what there is here, and in that we're see
ing the various ways that the Solutreans were making the things, not just the fi
nished objects. And so it's the pieces that are hidden away that are going to te
ll us the most.
NARRATOR: And there in the drawers were big flakes, a clear sign that the Solutr
eans had made their spearheads in an identical technique to that of Clovis.
BRUCE BRADLEY: This is a good example here that shows a kind of flaking that...w
here the flake is struck from one side and went across the surface...removed som
e of the other side. And these pieces show it over and over and over again. I me
an just about any piece you pick up shows this very special technique. I just kn
ew there had to be some kind of a connection.
NARRATOR: Clovis and Solutrean spear points not only look alike, they are made t
he same unusual way. To Stanford and Bradley, this was a powerful clue that preh
istoric explorers had come from Europe and brought with them the technology that
transformed Stone Age America: the Clovis Spear Point.
It was an outrageous idea with a few big problems. The Solutrean's culture ended
in Europe around 18,000 years ago, and the Clovis point would not arrive in Ame
rica for another 5,000 years. If the Solutreans brought the Clovis point to Amer
ica, where had they been?
Stanford and Bradley needed to find some artifact in the Americas to bridge the
time gap. They scoured Clovis sites across the continent, places where other arc
haeologists had been digging for years. Then, from a site called Cactus Hill, in
Virginia, a possibility, a point that resembled the Solutrean style, and it dat
ed far earlier than the Clovis.
DENNIS STANFORD: Here we have a projectile point from a feature that dates right
at 15,900 years or 16,000 years ago, which is clearly right in the middle betwe
en Clovis and Solutrean. And what's really exciting about it is that the technol
ogy here is very similar to Solutrean. In fact it's closer to Solutrean than Clo
vis where you can see that it's in a progression between Solutrean and Clovis, s
o you have Solutrean, Cactus Hill and Clovis.

NARRATOR: For Stanford and Bradley, the Cactus Hill point bridged the 5,000-year
gap, connecting Solutreans in France and Clovis in America. But their fledgling
theory now confronted another massive problem almost 3,000 miles wide: the Atla
ntic Ocean.
At the time of the Solutreans, ice sheets stretched down as far as southern Fran
ce, where winter temperatures were 50 degrees colder than today. Unlike the more
temperate Pacific coast, the Atlantic would, at times, have been thick with ice
bergs and blizzards.
LAWRENCE GUY STRAUS (University of New Mexico): There are 5,000 kilometers of op
en North Atlantic Ice Age conditions to be crossed. There are icebergs floating
around in the Bay of Biscay, and it's a polar desert.
NARRATOR: Could the Solutreans, a Stone Age people, have made such a voyage?
Stanford flew to a place where he thought he might find the answer: Barrow, Alas
ka, on the edge of the continent at the northern most tip of the United States.
Here he hopes the native people of Alaska, the Inupiat, might reveal how, thousa
nds of years ago, the Solutreans could have made an epic transatlantic journey.
Today the Inupiat survive temperatures of minus 35 degrees. For warm waterproof
clothing, traditionalists prefer caribou skin and sinew, the same materials avai
lable to their Stone Age ancestors. And for food on their seasonal hunting trips
, the Inupiat turn to an age old resource, the sea.
RONALD BROWER (Inupiat Heritage Center): The sea has been our garden. We don't h
ave any growth...growing things. There's nothing growing, up here, so we depend
on the sea for our livelihood, and most of our hunting is based on sea mammal hu
nting. We have the great whales, polar bears, walrus, seals and fish.
NARRATOR: Even with warm clothing and food, could the Solutreans have made boats
capable of crossing thousands of miles of treacherous, icy water? Today, tradit
ional Inupiat build umiaks, whaling boats, using sealskin and caribou sinew stre
tched on wood frames and waterproofed with oil applied directly from seal blubbe
r. These same techniques and materials would have been available to prehistoric
people.
DENNIS STANFORD: Boats like these can...could have made the journey that we're h
ypothesizing for Solutrean people quite well. In fact, I was noticing on the dis
tance signs here in the middle of town, they say it's about 1,500 miles to Green
land. And we know that, prehistorically, Eskimo peoples moved that distance from
here to there several times.
NARRATOR: In Arctic seas filled with pack ice conditions similar to the Ice Age
Atlantic, the boats pass the test as the Inupiat paddle from ice floe to ice flo
e.
DENNIS STANFORD: Well, it certainly is exactly the way I think the Solutrean guy
s were dealing with the ice edge, because you can get in and off of the ice real
rapidly and, and if the weather gets a little, little nasty then you just pull
up off...out of the water and onto the ice.
NARRATOR: For Stanford and Bradley, this ability to travel great distances in Ar
ctic conditions suggested how the Solutreans could have made their epic journey
during the Ice Age.
They had now gathered a broad range of evidence: physical similarities between t
he Solutrean and Clovis spear points, a similar technique used to make them, and
the Cactus Hill point connecting Solutrean and Clovis in time. All added up to

a radical and provocative theory, that the Solutreans invented the Clovis point
technology, and Ice Age Europeans were amongst America's earliest explorers.
Immediately, the theory was attacked. The close resemblance of the spear points
was not enough.
DAVID MELTZER: You can always find...if you're careful in your selection, you ca
n always find one or two things that look alike. I'm not looking for one or two
things. I'm looking for lots of things: the artwork, the antler spear throwers,
where are they? Did they get left behind? There's no reason why they shouldn't b
e there, but we don't see it.
NARRATOR: Can one spear point bridge a 5,000 year gap?
KENNETH TANKERSLEY: Although Cactus Hill, its radiocarbon date and artifact have
been used to bridge the gap between the Solutrean and Clovis, in reality, it wi
ll take a lot of sites, a lot of radiocarbon dates and a large assemblage of art
ifacts to make that connection.
NARRATOR: And although the Solutreans may have been capable of making a cross-At
lantic journey, there's little archeological evidence that they did.
LAWRENCE GUY STRAUS: There is absolutely no evidence of deep sea fishing. There'
s absolutely no evidence, for that matter, of boats.
NARRATOR: But Stanford argues that crucial evidence is missing, submerged under
300 feet of water as rising sea levels inundated the Solutrean coastline at the
end of the Ice Age.
The debate raged on, with arguments for and against the Solutrean theory. Then c
ame evidence that, again, seemed like it might end the battle: DNA.
It was the latest report from colleagues of Doug Wallace who were investigating
early human migrations. They were puzzling over mitochondrial DNA samples from a
Native American tribe called the Ojibwa.
DOUGLAS WALLACE: When we studied the mitochondrial DNA of the Ojibwa we found, a
s we had anticipated, the four primary lineages A, B, C and D but there was about a
quarter of the mitochondrial DNAs that was not A, B, C and D.
NARRATOR: There was a fifth source of DNA of mysterious origin. They called it X
, and unlike A, B, C and D, they couldn't find it anywhere in Siberia or eastern
Asia. But it was similar to an uncommon lineage in European populations today.
At first, they thought it must be the result of interracial breeding within the
last 500 years, sometime after Columbus.
DOUGLAS WALLACE: We naturally assumed that perhaps there had been European recen
t mixture with the Ojibwa tribe and that some European women had married into th
e Ojibwa tribe and contributed their mitochondrial DNAs.
NARRATOR: But that assumption proved wrong. When they looked at the amount of va
riation in the X lineage, it pointed to an origin long before Columbus, in fact,
to at least 15,000 years ago. It appeared to be evidence of Ice Age Europeans i
n America.
DOUGLAS WALLACE: Well, what it says is that a mitochondrial lineage that is pred
ominantly found in Europe somehow got to the Great Lakes region of the Americas
14,000 to 15,000 years ago.
NARRATOR: Could X be genetic evidence of the Solutreans in America? Further inve

stigation raised another possibility. The ancient X lineage may have existed in
Siberia, but died out, though not before coming over to America with Ancient mig
rations.
DOUGLAS WALLACE: And so the DNA data itself cannot distinguish between those two
alternatives. It could be either from Europe or from Siberia, of a population t
hat is now lost.
NARRATOR: So X could have reached the Americas through Asia, or across the Atlan
tic directly from Europe. The DNA could not provide a storybook ending.
MICHAEL COLLINS: The hypothesis that Clovis may derive from Solutrean, it's goin
g to be...it's going to take years to sort that out. That's, that's not the most
important thing right now. The very fact that that hypothesis is being articula
ted forces us to think in, in much broader terms about the problem of the peopli
ng of the Americas.
NARRATOR: With Clovis First in ruins and the Solutrean theory still hotly contes
ted, now archaeologists must pull together their discoveries into an all-encompa
ssing new theory of the peopling of the Americas. And central to that quest is t
he origin of the Clovis point.
KENNETH TANKERSLEY: Although the technology needed to produce a Clovis point was
found among other cultures during the Ice Age, the actual Clovis point itself i
s unique to the Americas, suggesting that it was invented here in the New World.
NARRATOR: Perhaps the Clovis spear point was not brought by big game hunters fro
m Asia or seafaring Solutreans from Europe. Could the Clovis point be the first
great American invention?
A prime place for investigating Clovis culture in America is the Gault Site, in
central Texas. Unlike its hot, arid surroundings, Gault is a shady park-like oas
is. Michael Collins, from the University of Texas, started excavating at Gault i
n 1998.
MICHAEL COLLINS: As you can see, the Gault site is really a special place. It's
well watered, got lush vegetation, an abundance of resources, both plant and ani
mal. It's an ideal place for people who are hunters and gatherers.
NARRATOR: Gault is the best of both worlds: nearby is a parched plateau for hunt
ing game, while down in a cool stream-fed valley, are pecans, walnuts and berrie
s. And not far from the streambed is a natural resource so crucial to the surviv
al of prehistoric people that it defines the whole age, stone.
MICHAEL COLLINS: We're at an outcropping here, a rich outcropping of cretaceous
chert. This was the choice material for making stone tools for at least 13,000 y
ears. It's pretty good stuff when you break it open. It...see how it breaks. You
get nice flakes of it out of there.
NARRATOR: To a Stone Age craftsman, this particular rock was perfect for fashion
ing stone tools and may have drawn people for hundreds of miles. To date, nearly
half a million Clovis artifacts have been found at Gault, but curiously, very f
ew are spear points.
MICHAEL COLLINS: The Clovis spear point is the, sort of the icon of Clovis cultu
re. But what we see at the Gault site is we only have about 30 projectile points m
ostly broken and worn out and discarded Clovis points in comparison to the several
thousand other tools.
NARRATOR: What can explain the lack of spear points at one of Stone Age America'

s premiere stone quarries? And why would big game hunters need any other tools b
eside the spear point?
At the Texas Archeological Research Lab, Marilyn Shoberg examines the Clovis too
ls under a microscope. By studying the scratches on the tool she hopes to discov
er its function. The last hand to use this tool did so some 13,000 years ago.
MARILYN SHOBERG (Texas Archeological Research Laboratory): Very fine striations
that are running parallel to the edge of the blade and these striations all para
llel to the edge, indicate that it was used primarily in a longitudinal motion,
sort of slicing, as in slicing grass.
NARRATOR: To test her idea, Collins and his colleagues created replica tools, ma
de from the same Gault stone and used them at the site.
MICHAEL COLLINS: In cutting just this little bit of grass here I've already deve
loped a bright sheen right along the edge and under the microscope that'll be a
very bright polish built up on that edge, and it'll have striations in it going
this way, because of my cutting motion.
NARRATOR: Under the microscope, the replica tool has the same sheen and pattern
as the Clovis tool. Perhaps Clovis people were cutting grass or reeds for basket
s, bedding or thatched roofs for shelter.
Shoberg examines other types of tools found at the site.
MARILYN SHOBERG: Deep troughed grooves, characteristic of contact with bone...
NARRATOR: A spear point used for hunting.
MARILYN SHOBERG: All along the edge of this artifact there is polish that's char
acteristic of contact with a soft material, like meat.
NARRATOR: A knife used for slicing food.
MARILYN SHOBERG: This is the hide punch.
NARRATOR: A punch or awl for sewing tailored clothing.
MARILYN SHOBERG: This little blade fragment was used to engrave or incise bone.
NARRATOR: Small pieces of limestone have been discovered at Gault, etched with m
ysterious geometric patterns among the only examples of Ice Age art in America.
Art, tailored clothes, baskets and thatched roofs for shelter: all contradict th
e old Clovis First image of nomadic, mammoth murderers. And although the remains
of a mammoth were found at Gault, Collins and colleagues have found far more bo
nes of turtles, birds and small mammals. This menu suggests more variety than a
big game hunter's diet of wooly mammoth and bison.
MICHAEL COLLINS: What emerges from the totality of all that information is these
people were generalized hunters and gatherers. They were living on a variety of
animals, staying in one place for quite a while and not simply pursuing large g
ame as their primary way of life.
NARRATOR: There's even evidence of trade networks between Clovis people at diffe
rent sites across the continent. It's not uncommon to find Clovis points hundred
s of miles from the source of the original rock. And different bands of Clovis p
eople probably traded more than just tools; they may have been exchanging potent
ial spouses.

DAVID KILBY:
Although we tend to think, sometimes, of hunter gatherers as bei
ng fairly simple in adaptation, it's actually a pretty complicated world in whic
h they live. There have to be social mechanisms in place that allow you to sort
of share information and relate to surrounding groups in some systematic way and
to be on good enough terms with them that you're able to, sort of, exchange mat
es, and therefore genetic viability, across an otherwise, sort of, sparsely popu
lated landscape.
NARRATOR: A clue that Clovis people had intimate knowledge of the landscape lies
, once again, with the Clovis point. Many have been found in caches, bundles of
spear points, hidden away for later use by Clovis hunters.
David Kilby has traveled the United States and studied all of the nearly two doz
en known caches.
DAVID KILBY:
This strategy of caching suggests intimate familiarity with the
landscape and sort of a complex understanding of the distribution of different r
esources around the landscape. The fact that they're putting tools and raw mater
ial in specific places on the landscape and leaving them behind, suggests that t
hey knew with some confidence where they were going to be in the future.
NARRATOR: Caching, trade and travel must have involved patterns of seasonal migr
ation developed over dozens of generations. This emerging picture of the Clovis
lifestyle contradicts the old image of Clovis as a single people, nomadic big ga
me hunters, sweeping rapidly across the continent with their lethal spear, wipin
g out all the great beasts.
MICHAEL COLLINS: The longstanding notion of the rapid spread, the archaeological
ly rapid spread, of Clovis across the continent, has been taken to mean the spre
ad of a people across the continent. An alternative to that might be that the sp
read of Clovis is actually the expansion of a technology across existing populat
ions, a little bit analogous to the fact you can go anywhere in the world and fi
nd people driving John Deere tractors. Technology can spread across different la
nguages, different cultures, quite readily.
NARRATOR: Perhaps this is the birth of an intriguing new theory for the peopling
of America: the first Stone Age explorers arrive on this continent more than 20
,000 years ago, much earlier than scientists ever imagined. They come from Asia,
and maybe even Europe, by land and by sea. Tenuously, at first, these different
groups spread across the virgin land, and over thousands of years they develop
an intimate knowledge of the New World. Around 13,500 years ago, a stone weapon
is invented, so powerful, so crucial to survival that it spreads swiftly across
all the people of the Americas. With this new technology they take root, prolife
rate and prosper. Clovis is the first great invention of the New World and the i
con of the peoples who may rightfully be called the first Americans.