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In 1932, archaeologist Edgar B. Howard made a major discovery near the town of Clovis, New Mexico. He found a stone spear point embedded in the rib of a woolly mammoth, which inspired what became known as the Clovis First Theory. According to this theory, the creators of those spear points, known as the Clovis people, were the first to settle the Americas about 13,000 years ago. Archaeologists accepted this for decades, but new discoveries have put the theory into question. Learn more about the Clovis first hypothesis and how it's being challenged on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Carvana is so easy. Just a click and we've got ourselves a car.

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The Clovis First Hypothesis is a theory that explains how the first humans came to the Americas. It's been a powerful narrative for decades, and one that most anthropologists and archaeologists have accepted as fact. The Clovis First Hypothesis holds that the earliest human inhabitants of the Americas belonged to the Clovis culture, arriving around 13,000 years ago via the Bering Land bridge and then migrating south through an ice free corridor between continental ice sheets. From this entry point, Clovis peoples were thought to have rapidly spread across North America, bringing a distinctive fluted stone tool technology and representing the first successful peopling of the New World. This is probably a story that most of you have heard for the purpose of this episode. The important point to the theory is that the Clovis people were the first to enter the Americas, which means that nobody came before them. The roots of the Clovis first hypothesis lie in the discoveries made in the early 20th century in the American Southwest. In the 1920s and 1930s, excavations at Blackwater Draw, near the town of Clovis, New Mexico revealed finely made stone spear points in clear association with the bones of extinct Pleistocene animals, particularly mammoths. Radiocarbon dating developed after World War II placed these Clovis sites at roughly 13,200 to 12,800 years ago. the time, no other sites in the Americas were widely accepted as being older. Because Clovis artifacts were found across a vast area of North America, from the Great Plains to the Southeast and Southwest, archaeologists inferred a rapid and successful expansion of a single cultural tradition. This association was crucial. It demonstrated that humans had been present in North America at the end of the last Ice Age and had hunted now extinct animals. From these facts, other facts were assembled to create the full hypothesis. The Bering Land bridge between Asia and the Americas was often open in prehistory, creating an ice free corridor from Alaska to Canada and the continental U.S. it opened briefly about 13,000 years ago. According to the Clovis first theory, these early humans followed large prehistoric animals across the land bridge into North America and began settling along this migration route. The theory stood unopposed for much of the 20th century and became entrenched as archaeological orthodoxy. And to be fair, there was a good reason why the theory became so entrenched. It fit the known facts, and it made a ton of sense. Opposing theories or opposing evidence that countered the Clovis first theory met with strong resistance. Leading archaeologists swiftly challenged new theories, and critics dubbed the defenders the the Clovis first police. New sites sometimes showed evidence of life predating the Clovis culture. Each new claim sparked critics to discredit the findings, reinforcing the entrenched Clovis First's view. For example, human fecal matter predating the Clovis culture by about 1,000 years was discovered in the Paisley Caves in Oregon. The corporalites, aka fossilized poop, was discovered in the cave in 2008 and were met with initial challenges, though not immediate contradiction. These issues stem from the DNA being contaminated, the appearance of the corpolites not suggesting a human origin, or the layer that they were found in at the site not corresponding to a human encampment. Clovis first scientists questioned everything about the site that emerged soil quality, artifact authenticity, dating methodology, and extraction methods. Another good example of Clovis first skepticism emerged when a Pre Clovis site was discovered in 2006 by a team from Texas A and M along Buttermilk Creek in Salado, Texas. The site quickly became a strong Pre Clovis candidate, with thousands of tools and points found mostly in the soil layer below the Clovis period. It was a breakthrough for Pre Clovis advocates. Other sites hinted at Pre Clovis, but few matched Buttermilk Creek's volume of artifacts. Subsequent discoveries strengthened the case against Clovis First. Sites such as the Meadowcroft Rock Shelter in Pennsylvania suggested a human presence earlier than 13,000 years ago. Breakthroughs, however, continue to meet skepticism. Clovis first supporters questioned the find's authenticity, suggesting tool mixing or criticizing data methods. Critics even attacked the soil, suggesting that soft creek bed soil may have let artifacts sink between the layers. For many Clovis first advocates, the no pre Clovis site would ever be able to change their mind. And the scrutiny wasn't new, as Clovis first researchers had challenged every threatening finding since the 1970s. Yet despite the repeated dismissals, the debate over pre Clovis sites intensified with the discovery of the first major Pre Clovis site in South America, Monte Verde II in Chile, excavated by University of Pittsburgh archaeologist James Adivacio. Few defended an alternative theory to Clovis I as strongly as Adivasio did. A major figure in American archaeology, Adivasio passionately defended Monteverdi, believing that the Clovis first theory was on its last legs. The hearths at Monteveri were dated to 19,000 years ago, but critics contended that the samples were contaminated by the high levels of coal derived carbon in the region's soil. And despite the fact that there were no coal seams anywhere in the vicinity, Adovasio eventually presented evidence that even Clovis first advocate struggled to refute pieces of woven baskets. The baskets appeared in multiple layers of soil. They showed distinct construction methods, and the material passed modern dating tests. Adivasio's most notable find was a spear point that differed from Clovis age tools, and likewise, a spear point was found at the Meadowcroft site that lacked the distinctive features of New Mexican Clovis tools, but also showed advanced craftsmanship. Amid all the debates over Clovis, another find was uncovered in Kenosha, Wisconsin. In the 1970s. A field owned by farmer John Highbor was excavated after he found a fossil. The excavations lasted nearly 25 years, and in 1994, scientists from the University of Wisconsin, Madison and Marquette University found a complete mammoth skeleton with human butchering marks. The bones with the marks have been radiocarbon dated to reveal the animal's death at 14,500 years before present. This places it more than 1,000 years before the Clovis sites of New Mexico. The Hybror site became a focal point in the Clovis first debate. Nearby sites supported similar finds. A mammoth kill site in Mudlake, Wisconsin, had been dated to 19,000 years ago, providing further evidence. The greatest controversy rose at the Ceruti mastodon site near San Diego, California. Unlike earlier finds, it pushed the boundaries not by a few thousand years, but by almost 100,000 years before a Clovis first migration event. As a result, the site was subjected to enormous skepticism and scrutiny. Scholars had a difficult time accepting the site stone tools as man made, and many argued that the damage to the bones had actually been caused not by humans, but by later highway construction in the area. The claims regarding the site's date were so surprising that they have yet to gain widespread acceptance, including among pre Clovis researchers. The Bluefish Caves in the Yukon, excavated by Canadian archaeologist Jacques Saint Mars, has sparked ongoing debates over pre Clovis habitation, a process that Saint Camars likened to the Spanish Inquisition. Saint Camars rejected Clovis I as his site showed habitation 10,000 years before the land bridge. Despite strong evidence, Clovis first advocates attacked his findings, leading him to lose funding for his project. The discoveries at the Bluefish Caves were centered on stone tools found at the site, along with a wide variety of ice age animal life, including mammoths, Yukon horses and giant bison. Many of the animal remains and the bone markings were dismissed as unreliable until the discovery of a horse mandible bearing the unmistakable marks of intentional incisions. Finally, perhaps the site that contributed the strongest evidence for a pre Clovis culture was Cooper's Ferry, Idaho. Like the sites in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, Cooper's Ferry represented a departure from the typical sites found in the west or in Canada, providing further geographic diversity to the pre Clovis claims. Cooper's Ferry is located downriver along the Columbia River Valley, intersecting with the Snake river and onto the Salmon River. The 300 mile migration from the Pacific coast to this site appears to have been intentional. The Coopers Ferry site contains stone tools of a completely different technology from those at Clovis age sites. The tools and charcoal hearths located at Cooper's ferry dated back 16,000 years. To many, the 2019 discoveries in Idaho represented the final nail in the Clovis first coffin. San Diego State archaeologist Todd Brahe, who reviewed the work done at the site, proclaimed, the Clovis first model is no longer viable. The conclusions of the Cooper's Ferry site were clear to many. While Clovis peoples were an important migratory pattern in history, they were not the first people to have arrived in the Americas. To many, the debate was closed. There had simply been too many sites that contradicted the Clovis first conclusions. The ability of Clovis first defenders to credit the growing number of sites was becoming untenable. There's still a shrinking number of archaeologists who have stuck to the Clovis first playbook and continue to try to contradict pre Clovis findings. Their opinions are unlikely to change. However, this all brings up another question. If the Clovis first hypothesis isn't true, then was the Bering Land bridge the primary path of migration to humans in the Americas? And if it wasn't, then how did humans get here? The theories on this are evolving, and there isn't yet a consensus on the subject. But the most popular theory, and the one supported by the realities of the ice bridge and companion artifacts from Japan and Cooper's Ferry, is the kelp highway hypothesis. The theory is based on the extensive kelp forest ecosystem along the Pacific Rim, from Japan to northern Asia, across the Bering Strait and down the Pacific coast. Early mariners may have sailed along the coastline in small craft, feeding on kelp, but more likely enjoying the bounty of marine life in this ecosystem. Humans had made similar length journeys in the Pacific for thousands of years before the dates attributed to the traffic along the kelp highway. Historians have always known that the journey was possible. They were simply blocked from entertaining the notion because it ran counter to the Clovis first orthodoxy. The kelp highway theory is difficult to prove, and detractors of the theory would point to the lack of boat evidence as a direct link. A great example of the challenges facing the kelp highway hypothesis rests in the recent excavations near the Channel Islands, just off the coast of Santa Rosa, California. The evidence that has emerged has been tantalizing for archaeologists. The spear points found in this region are closer to Japanese points than to Clovis points. A big problem, however, is that sea levels are so different today than they were 15,000 years ago. that time, sea levels were estimated to be approximately 150ft, or 50 meters, lower than they are today. Any coastal settlements from that period would have been swallowed by the sea thousands of years ago. The tight, coherent narrative of the Clovis first hypothesis made it an attractive theory, which is why it was so hard for some people to let go of it. But after decades of evidence, the tide might finally be turning as more and more researchers come to accept that humans were in the Americas even earlier than we thought. This change, however, hasn't come from changing most people's minds so much as it's come from new researchers entering the field proving the principle set forth by the physicist Max Planck, who A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light. But rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Austin Otkin and Cameron Kiefer. Research and writing for this episode was provided by Joel Hermanson. My big thanks go to everyone who supports the show over on Patreon. Your support helps make this podcast possible. I also want to remind everyone about the community groups on Facebook and Discord, as this is where everything happens outside of the podcast. As always, if you leave a review on any of the major podcast apps, you too can have it right on the show.