The Incredible Human Journey (57 page)

My impression of Chile over the days I was there was of almost unremitting dampness. It poured with rain most of the time.
Lichen and moss grew on the wooden boards and shingles of houses in the villages I drove through, and the bare trees were
swathed in moss. It was apt; the archaeological site I was investigating was special because of its very wetness.

My first visit was not to the site of Monte Verde itself, but to Valdivia University, up the coast, where some of the marvellous
artefacts from the excavations were stored. A long, low wooden building there was a repository for a huge range of objects
from ancient archaeological specimens to historical artefacts. There were shelves of beautiful painted pots, clay animals,
teapots, and a Madonna whose detached hands lay on the pedestal at her feet. The curator cleared a space on a table, and brought
out Tupperware boxes full of Monte Verde treasures. As the archaeological site was waterlogged (a damp peat bog), all sorts
of materials have been preserved that would normally rot away quickly in the ground. Instead of ‘postholes’, where darkened
soil shows archaeologists that wooden stakes were once planted in the ground, the stakes themselves were preserved. And there were wooden spikes that looked a lot like tent pegs. I examined a block of wood with a cut-down hole that had been
drilled down – perhaps by twisting a stick to make fire. There was also
string
– unmistakable, twined-together fibres. And there was a piece of thick, darkened animal hide, perhaps from mastodon or mammoth.
All these organic finds were discovered alongside more standard archaeological fare such as stone tools and animal bones.
As I was inspecting these precious objects, Mario Piño arrived. Mario was a geologist who had worked on the excavation at
Monte Verde, and he was to be my guide to the site itself.

I would have been lost without Mario to show me where the archaeology had been uncovered. Driving to Monte Verde itself, we
pulled up beside a wooden gate which led into an insignificant-looking field. The ground was boggy and mossy, sloping down
to a fast-flowing stream, with sheep grazing on its banks. There was no sign of any archaeology at this place – possibly
the most important archaeological site in the Americas.

Mario and I made our way down to the stream. It curved around in a wide meander: there had been quite a significant change
in its course since the last excavations in the 1980s. Mario pointed out the original bank edge, which was much straighter.
The creek had moved about 20m, from the north to the south side of the archaeological site, within thirty years. We stepped
down and walked into the bend of the stream, Chinchihuapi Creek, where a large log had recently been washed up on the low,
sandy bank.

‘The site, like so many others, was discovered by chance,’ said Mario. ‘Local villagers were widening the creek. When they were removing the sediment, cutting the curves, they found these huge
bones, and kept them. Two university students who were travelling round the place took the bones to Valdivia.’

The bones were from Pleistocene animals, and archaeologists at Valdivia University decided to investigate further, joined
by Tom Dillehay of the University of Kentucky. At first, they thought this might just be a fossil site, but when patches of
charcoal – evidence of old hearths – battered cobbles, cores and flakes started to appear, it was clear that it was archaeological. They had found the remains
of an ancient camp.
¹

‘That is about where the large hut was,’ said Mario, indicating the log.

The ‘hut’ was a structure some 20m long. Digging through the sandy terraces of the creek, the archaeologists found a collection
of wooden posts that had collapsed down. Some of them seemed to form divisions inside the hut: perhaps they were different
living spaces. Microscopic pieces of hide were recovered from the sediment among the wooden stakes: it looked as if the hut
had been covered in animal skins.

‘The hut was heated with braziers,’ explained Mario. ‘We found the remains of small holes in the sand, lined with clay, full
of charcoal.’ Outside the hut, they found larger hearths that had probably been used for cooking.

As archaeological excavation proceeded, more and more remains came to light: there were digging sticks, plant remains, animal
bones and skin, and even a child’s footprint in the clay next to a hearth.
²

Some 30m away from the main hut there were the remains of another structure: a strange, ‘wishbone’-shaped outline that Dillehay
had believed to be all that was left of another, small hut. It seemed to me to have been, at just a few feet across, a bit
too small for a hut. Mario described the finds around and within the wishbone shape: mastodon bones, with cut marks from butchering, and, preserved in the wet ground, numerous plant remains. These included
nine varieties of seaweed. Seaweed is an excellent source of iodine and other minerals, but Dillehay thought that some of
these species may also have been used as medicines, as they are today, by the local Mapuche Indians. Rather bizarrely, some of these seaweeds appeared, combined with other potentially medicinal plants, in the form of chewed-up
and spat-out cuds, in the ‘wishbone hut’.
²

The plant remains from the site included nuts and berries, and showed that Monte Verde had been occupied all year round. ‘We
found food from all four seasons,’ said Mario. So it seemed that this place was more permanent than just a seasonal camp.

There were also the earliest remains of potatoes ever discovered – the limp but still recognisable skins of wild potatoes
(
Solanum maglia
) – implying that humans had developed a taste for the humble spud at least 14,000 years ago.
³

The archaeological remains from Monte Verde show that the people living there were exploiting resources from a wide range
of habitats: from inland forests, freshwater marshes – and, as the seaweed, salt and bitumen found at the site show – the
coast. During the Pleistocene, the coast would have been further away – about 90km to the west, compared with 25km today –
so Monte Verde was near the coast but not
on
it. The presence of seaweed at the site suggests that the people living there either made visits to the seashore or were in
contact with palaeoindians living on the coast itself.
²
There is certainly evidence of people living along the coast of South America, eating seabirds, anchovies and molluscs, from
Quebrada Tacahuay and Quebrada Jaguay in Peru.
^4
,
5
Those sites date to between 11,000 and 13,000 years ago, but radiocarbon dating of plant remains and charcoal from the
hearths at Monte Verde place the occupation of the site even earlier: some time between 14,000 and 14,600 years ago.
²
Such dates would be the final nails in the coffin of ‘Clovis first’.

‘Monte Verde means we have to rethink the moment when people came to America,’ said Mario. ‘From the findings in Monte Verde,
and other investigations, it’s proposed that the human entered America between 16,000 and 20,000 years ago. Any relation with
the ice corridor does not make sense. The migration probably happened earlier, and along the Pacific coast.’

But Monte Verde has been a controversial site since its first discovery. By 1997, Tom Dillehay was so fed up with its detractors that he invited a crew of eminent palaeoindian archaeologists to visit
the site, see the artefacts and make up their minds about it. They all agreed that the site was indeed archaeological, and
that there was no reason to doubt the (pre-Clovis) radiocarbon dates.
⁶
It means that Monte Verde is the oldest – generally accepted – site in the whole of the Americas.

So it was agreed that Monte Verde was earlier than Clovis, and indeed earlier even than the opening of the ice-free corridor.
People may have moved down into North America by that route, but they can’t have been the first wave of colonisers. It seems
much more likely, looking at the archaeological, geological and genetic evidence,
⁷
that the ancestors of the people who ended up at Monte Verde had entered the Americas, perhaps along the newly ice-free coastal
route, some time around 15,000 years ago, and then spread down the Pacific coast into South America. (But at this point in time we can’t ignore the possibility that the first Americans might – just might – have come across
the North Atlantic. It will be interesting to ‘watch this space’ and see what evidence emerges from both the east and west coasts of Canada and
the US in the future.) Once in North America, some colonisers may have spread inland, along the southern margin of the ice sheets, perhaps following
dwindling herds of mammoth and mastodon to Wisconsin. The Clovis culture could have been developed by descendants of these people, or alternatively
carried down later from Beringia (by people with the same genetic lineages as the first colonisers) through the ice-free corridor.
⁸

People are still eating seaweed in Chile. I went for a rainy walk along the coast near Monte Verde, and met a man, kitted
out in yellow waterproofs and sou’wester and carrying a sack: he was gathering stalks from the kelp that had washed up at
the last high tide. When I took refuge from the driving rain in a small restaurant at the top of the cliffs, I sampled the
local delicacy: seaweed empanadas.

Journey’s End

At this point, my own journey of discovery was over. And, in a very small way, I was going to relive prehistory. Having been
a nomad for half a year, I was going to settle down. And I was looking forward to going home.

I had ended my journey on the coast, as I had begun it. My travels had taken me all around the world, from our homeland in
Africa all the way to the last continents to be populated: the Americas. I had endured extremes of temperature, from the icy
north of Siberia to the searing heat of Australia. And, wherever I’d gone, I’d met people like me. Very often, we couldn’t
communicate directly in spoken language, but smiles and gestures were universal. And however different we all looked on the
surface, those differences were superficial.

The ‘science’ of palaeoanthropology has been so misused in the past, to justify or emphasise differences between ethnic groups,
to ‘rank’ people by head shape and size, skin colour and culture, but looking at the evidence objectively reveals a quite
different truth, and carries a very positive message.

We’re all members of a young species, going back less than 200,000 years. When we trace our ancestry back, we find that we’re
all related, on a great family tree of humanity. You can’t rank
people
any more than you could rank twigs on a tree. We all have the same, very great-grandmother in African Eve. So wherever we’ve
ended up, all over the world, we are all Africans under the skin.

I had also seen how our ancestors had spread over the world and survived, while huge fluxes in climate and environment transformed
the face of the earth. Climate change is a feature of our world, although the length of our lifespan in comparison to the
grand scale of geological time gives us a false impression of stability. But having said that, the last 11,000 years have been relatively stable, allowing
us to settle down, start farming and achieve a huge population size.
¹
There is no doubt that the world will alter around generations of our off spring, and indeed, anthropogenic climate change
may produce much more dramatic fluctuations than any experienced by recent generations of our ancestors.

It seems that we may have been storing up trouble for ourselves since the time we invented agriculture and populations really
took off. We have cleared vast swathes of woodland for agriculture, flooded huge areas to grow rice, and released ever-increasing
quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. If it weren’t for the man-made emission of these greenhouse gases, and the
removal of carbon sinks, we could reasonably expect the world to start cooling down into a major glaciation within the next
50,000 years. But the scientific evidence for anthropogenic global warming is now irrefutable, and we just don’t know what
effect this disruption, or, as Chris Stringer put it, this ‘tinkering with the Earth’s climate machine’, will have on the
natural climate cycles in the longer term.
¹

Some of the changes we have to face may be catastrophic; some may even threaten to wipe us out in certain places, as they
have done in the past. Some assessments of what will happen to the world and our place in it in the future are incredibly
gloomy, but, taking the long view and looking at how early humans managed to survive and colonise the globe, it appears that
we are a flexible and adaptable species. Chris Stringer points to the example of the Gravettians, who prevailed despite the
deteriorating climate in Europe at the LGM, through new technology and extensive social networks.
¹