Ocmulgee National Monument 2

Ocmulgee National Monument 2

Another peculiar condition in this region at this time was the presence

of considerable areas untouched by glacial ice. These included the

foothills and coastal plain along Alaska's northern coast as well as the

great central Yukon Valley. This surprising situation was probably due

to the small amount of moisture left in the winds which had passed over

the high and cold mountain chains bordering the southern coast and the

second great mass of the Brooks Range to the north. Furthermore, the

broad Mackenzie Valley, leading south along the eastern slopes of the

Rockies, was the area latest to be covered by glacial ice and first to

open up with the return of warmer conditions. It may even be that the

ice failed to cover this region during the last one or more of the minor

advances which together make up the latest, or Wisconsin, glacial

period.

 

Taken all together, therefore, the conditions described provided man

with a chilly but relatively dry and passable route from the Asiatic

mainland to Alaska and thence to the warmer interior sections of North

America. For a considerable period this route must have been flanked

with glacial ice lying only a few miles away on one side or both through

a total distance of some 2,000 miles. It is one of man's distinctive

qualities, however, that he is able to adapt himself to extremes; and it

is probable that the game he lived on was itself acclimated to living

close to the edges of the ice sheets. We are less certain about the

conditions under which this journey was begun at its Asiatic end; but it

seems likely that there, too, ice would have formed in the high mountain

masses, but that the valleys and lowland would have remained open as

they did farther east.

 

We are confident in our knowledge of where man came from to the New

World and how he was able to make the trip. We are on less certain

ground, however, when we try to determine when he arrived. Estimates

have varied widely, changing with every increase in our knowledge. From

the first enthusiastic attempts to fit the Indian into the Old Stone Age

chronology which was just then unfolding for the Old World, the cold

reasoning of skeptical scientists brought down the maximum age of human

occupation of this hemisphere to something like 3,000 years. Beginning

in 1925, however, a series of finds has provided unquestionable evidence

that men using very distinctive weapons were living on this continent,

largely by hunting the mammoth and a great bison, both now extinct,

during the period when the ice was receding for the last time. The

typical channeled or fluted spear point of this people has even been

found lately along the northern Alaska coast. So, while we still cannot

say that this characteristic artifact was brought from Asia rather than

being developed here in America, it is at least an interesting

coincidence that man hunted large and now extinct game in Alaska in

areas where conditions were at times particularly well suited to his

immigration.

 

Other evidence shows that the users of this telltale point were not the

first to live in the region of the western plains; at least some of

their numbers had been preceded by men whose stone work was almost as

unusual and equally easy to identify. Recently developed methods of

dating by the use of radioactive carbon-14 show that the span of time

when the channeled point users, Folsom man, roamed the Plains included

one date of about 8000 B. C. For his predecessors, we feel justified in

pushing this date a good 2,000 or 3,000 years further back; and there

are even hints taken quite seriously by leading archeologists that man

was here many thousands of years before that. We know that the great

climatic swings marking the principal stages of the Pleistocene Epoch

were actually composed of repeated lesser pulsations. Like a mighty

pump, the changing climate worked upon all life within thousands of

miles of the shifting ice fronts, driving it southward with icy winds

and then sucking it back toward the north as cold and damp were replaced

by heat and drought. Man followed the game; and this, rather than any

planned migration, probably accounts for the wide spread of his earliest

remains.

 

American Indians, then, are most closely related to the present

inhabitants of eastern Asia, where they, too, had their origin. They

came to this country as its first human inhabitants some 12,000 to

15,000 years ago at the very least. They did not come all at once, or

even in one limited period of time, but probably in a fairly continuous

succession of small hunting bands following the game. Their earliest

migrations hither were doubtless the indirect result of great

fluctuations in climate which marked the coming and going of the ice

during the glacial age; and it was the peculiar conditions existing

about the present region of Bering Strait that encouraged them to

explore the now accessible region to the east. Once they had reached the

New World, their hunting travels probably carried them back and forth in

both directions so that a knowledge of the seemingly limitless territory

beyond became fairly general.

 

[Illustration: Broken Clovis point and sharp-cornered scrapers from

Ocmulgee excavations. Point length 3^1^1/_1_{6} inches. Artist's

reconstruction of point at left.]

 

The disappearance of the land bridge must have been very gradual by

human standards. Successive generations would have found the journey

increasingly difficult, but this would only have led to the adoption of

other measures such as waiting for winter ice or the use of rafts or

boats to cross the widening stretches of open water. Once arrived, they

began to spread out over the country, moving on as the game became

scarce to where it was more abundant, looking for new and unpeopled

areas whenever they began to catch sight too often of members of other

bands hunting the same territory. Not many years would be needed to

cover the vast expanse of the two continents. With movements of only 20

or 30 miles each year, it might have happened in as little as a dozen

generations; but we can say for sure that man had reached southern

Patagonia by about 6000 B. C., possibly far earlier. By then, we may

assume, the new homeland had been explored with some thoroughness; and

portions of it had already been inhabited for thousands of years. It was

by no means filled up; but many of its potentialities were known, and

American Indians were well started on their own peculiar course of

development.

 

 

 

 

Man Comes to Georgia

 

 

The roving existence led by these _Wandering Hunters_ brought them into

the region which is now Georgia at a relatively early date. We do not

know by what route they came here, for it is easier to seek out the

geographic limitations which restricted the first migrants to the New

World to a single point of entry than it is to trace the wanderings of

their descendants over some 8,000,000 square miles of North America.

Nevertheless, we are beginning to get a few hints.

 

[Illustration: Mammoth Hunters, from Museum exhibit panel.]

 

Fluted point sites have been found in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and

Virginia; and single fluted points have been found in a number of places

in Georgia, though possibly more often north than south of Macon. One

fluted specimen, however, was actually excavated from the Macon Plateau,

a designation adopted for the hilltop terrain of the Ocmulgee

excavations. The recovery here of other tools of the same greatly

decomposed flint strengthens the likelihood of a true "paleo-Indian"

occupation at Ocmulgee. The inclusion among them of many thumbnail

scrapers of a type recently shown to be distinctive of eastern fluted

point sites is especially significant.

 

The fluted point, missing the forward one-third of its length, was a

fine specimen of the so-called Clovis type of these artifacts, and so

typical of thousands of such implements which have been picked up at

random in the eastern United States as well as in the West. The Clovis

point is like its Folsom cousin in several ways, particularly in having

a long channel flake removed from one or both of its faces, possibly as

a means of reducing its total thickness, and in the grinding of the edge

along the lower sides and across the base to avoid cutting the lashings

which bound it to the shaft. Like the smaller Folsom point, too, it is

named for a site in the western High Plains, where its position

underlying Folsom on some sites and its association with mammoth bones

give us definite clues to its age west of the Mississippi.

 

Unlike Folsom, however, the Clovis fluted point is not limited to the

region on the east flank of the Rockies. Instead, it has been found from

Alaska to Costa Rica and from Vermont to Florida. Its use, too, seems to

have been less specialized. Folsom man was a bison hunter; and the

abundant grasses of the Plains probably account for the rather definite

limits of his range. The big Clovis points, on the other hand, were

certainly used on mammoth; but we do not know that this over-sized

quarry was their only target. Possibly the mammoth was more adaptable

than the bison and could seek out other areas as the changing climate

made its accustomed haunts unlivable; or it may have been the Clovis

hunters who were the more flexible and could shift more readily to other

kinds of game when the mammoth disappeared from the scene.

 

[Illustration: Hunting was hard work. Museum exhibit case.]

 

The wide geographic range of the point is matched by the variety of

shapes which are included in the type, though all have a family

resemblance built around the distinctive channel formed on one or both

faces. Until it is found in a context permitting direct dating, however,

the real problem in the East hinges on the significance of this family

resemblance. The question is whether this resemblance is a result of

chance, or whether it indicates contact with the makers of the fluted

points in the West whose age is now reasonably well established.

 

[Illustration: Hunter with atlatl (throwing stick).]

 

Perhaps the only thing we can say definitely about these early nomadic

hunters would be that their unusual fluted type of projectile point

occurs in the eastern United States and has been found in clearly

defined contexts which suggest a greater age than that known for any

other recognized types in these areas. This distinctive weapon is

thought to be a variety of the western Clovis fluted point, which has

been found in the West beneath Folsom, and therefore antedating 8000 B.C.