Thirteen-thousand years ago the first human culture to colonize all of North America, in this case from Pacific to Atlantic shores, was the Clovis culture of highly-proficient Siberian hunters. While they may not have been the first humans in America, the 1930s discovery of this “Clovisia the Beautiful” launched a century-long debate about their role in a remarkable series of extinctions – the loss of most of America’s African-like megafauna – coinciding with their arrival. Are Clovis and later Folsom cultures the American architects of the early stages of today’s Sixth Extinction? Thank you to our sponsor Velvet Buck. Subscribe now wherever you listen to podcasts. YouTube, Spotify, Apple, iHeart, Pandora, Amazon. MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and Youtube Clips Check out more MeatEater's American History audio originals "The Long Hunters" and "Mountain Men" Subscribe to The MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTube Shop MeatEater MerchSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Chapter 1: What was the Clovis culture and its significance?
Humans belonging to Clovis and Folsom cultures entered an America teeming with a remarkable diversity of Africa-like creatures, but confronted an extinction crisis that was possibly precipitated by their own arrival. I'm Dan Flores, and this is the American West. brought to you by Velvet Buck. Still in barrel, Velvet Buck arrives this summer, just in time for the season that calls us home.
A portion of every bottle supports backcountry hunters and anglers to protect public lands, waters, and wildlife. Enjoy responsibly. Clovisia the Beautiful. We hardly know our actual beginnings in America. Even when the stories are set in places we recognize, the characters of our deep time history can be alien to the point of fantasy.
But while it may sound unlikely, in the 2020s there's no place quite like downtown Los Angeles for acquiring some sense of how the human story began on the continent.
Rancho La Brea Tar Pits, just off Wilshire Boulevard, in the heart of a sprawling Pacific Coast city, is today the most accessible place in the country for picturing in the mind's eye the wild new world migrating humans found when they first saw America.
True enough, there's a sense of time-travel shock having your lift drop you in the middle of swirling, honking LA traffic, only to stand face-to-face minutes later with Colombian mammoths fatally mired in tar, trumpeting their despair. Even if the mammoths are robots and their forlorn cries don't drown out the traffic, they and La Brea and the Page Museum still work a kind of magic.
20,000 years drops away if you let it because La Brea preserves tangible remnants of a world at the far ends of the earth for ancestors of ours whose migrations had begun in Africa. The Page Museum is a working laboratory of paleontology where visitors can watch scientists labor over the site's latest discoveries.
Many of those are the remains of scavenger predators once lured by the cries of snagged mammoths or the scent of decomposing horses, camels, or ground sloths trapped by surface tar near what was once a water source in a dry landscape.
The skulls and tusks of the elephants extracted from La Brea are impressive, but anyone who tours the museum has to admit the most stunning display is the wall, backlit and yellow, of hundreds of dire wolf skulls. The strapping canids, indigenous to America but memorably revived as fictional Westeros fauna in Game of Thrones, left the most remains here of any species, 1,800 individuals.
The fossils of hundreds of coyotes, a brawnier version than our modern animal, make up the third most common species here. But in second place are those ultimate ambush predators of the Pleistocene, the western subspecies of saber-tooths, heavily built cats with a fearsome, snake-like jaw gape and enormous fangs.
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Chapter 2: How did the Rancho La Brea Tar Pits contribute to understanding early America?
One recent theory is that the Clovisians may have been a northern hemisphere wild type, a group of hyper-aggressive Siberian Vikings. According to modern science, a high-fat diet is a strong trigger for enhanced testosterone. But who they were, really, is us.
My 23andMe profile shows 3% of my genes are Native American, a common figure for those of us whose European ancestors arrived in America 300 or more years ago. Clovis heredity is within us.
The Clovis story resonates because we imagine them as ancient versions of ourselves, explorers of hidden continents, the last of the masterful hunters of enormous animals, the culmination of 40,000 generations of hunters. They must have had a sense of that timeless tradition. But to me, the biggest question is this. What did they think?
What did they do when so many of the animals they lived among began to disappear, to dwindle to a last few scattered survivors until there were none? What they faced is mirrored by our own 21st century circumstances. Like us, they had lived as their ancestors did, and no doubt had every expectation that the world would continue as it always had.
And so long as there was a Siberia or a Beringia or an America out there, it did. But Earth proved finite, and so did its animals. Much as we are doing today, the Clovisians ran into a wall of limits.
When I think about certain areas of inquiry, I think that in a lot of spaces there's room for huge discoveries. Meaning we could find life on another planet, right? There could be huge medical, you know, you could picture where we have some medical breakthrough and like increased life expectancy by 25% or 50%. Like I wouldn't be shocked.
But do you feel that our understanding of pre-human and early human North America is like down to the details now? Like it's kind of all there, it's just details?
Well, I tend to think that there are some big discoveries yet to be made. I will say that the advent of genomic research you know, on human remains all over the world is telling us a lot of stuff that we've never known before. And that's kind of the modern version of, you know, radiocarbon dating in the 1950s and stuff. We've now got a way to analyze stuff
human remains that is giving us a sense of how people spread around the world and what connections they had with one another. So my guess is, and it's probably a pretty easy thing to guess, is that there's going to be something big out there.
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