American History Hit - Early Humans of Ice Age America

Episode Date: September 28, 2026

When did the first humans arrive in America? Archaeologists have long pushed the theory that human habitation in the Americas dates back only to about 10,000 years. But now there's overwhelming evidence that humans have been in the Americas for over 30,000 years. And perhaps much longer.Our guest today is Dr. Paulette Steeves, professor of geography, archeology, and land stewardship at Algoma University. She is also author of the books The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere, and Reclaiming Deep Human Histories of the Western Hemisphere: Archaeologists Who Braved Prejudice to Reveal the Evidence.Produced by Hannah Feodorov. Edited by Tim Arstall. Senior Producer was Freddy Chick.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. We are standing on the Olympic Peninsula, near what is today the sleepy coastal town of Squim, Washington. But 13,800 years ago, the old growth forests and temperate climate for which this region is so famous still lie far in the future.

Instead, we're staring across a cold, raw landscape of low grasses and shrubs. Glaciers cling to the mountains in the distance, but here in the lowlands, the frozen earth has softened, and a group of hunters is tracking the enormous footprints of a mastodon through the mud. These people rarely hunt Mastodon. It's too dangerous. They've learned that lesson too many times. But the cold season has dragged on. Game is scarce, and today they're willing to take the risk. Spears and sharpened bone projectiles at the ready, their voices hushed. They try not to spook this fur-covered giant, which could so easily trample them into the earth, or gore them with its long tusks.

Beneath the gray-white sky, the hunters close in. A weapon flies, and its sharpened point strikes the mastodon, burying itself deep inside the rib cage. What happens next we cannot know, the prehistoric drama that ensued. But just about 14,000 years later, that broken point will be found, still intact and buried in that rib,

unearthed by a landowner digging on his property. And the world of those hunters and the families they fed lives on, preserved as well in the oral histories of indigenous peoples. Hello, all. This is American History. I'm your host, Don Wildman. Happy to be with you. Happy you're listening. Over time on this series, we've done a number of episodes on the prehistoric past of the North American continent. But we've kept things general then. Today we get more specific. We're going to look at a particular region and it finds made in that region that raise important. important questions about early American arrival, who these people were, the environment that existed in the world they created for themselves, and perhaps as important as any fossils discovered, the stories, the oral histories that have been told down countless generations.

For this, we are joined by Dr. Poulet-Steves, Professor of Geography, Archaeology, and Land Stewardship at the Algoma University in Ontario, Canada. She occupies the Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in indigenous history, healing, and reconciliation. She has authored the books, The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere, and reclaiming Deep Human Histories of the Western Hemisphere, archaeologists who braved prejudice to reveal the evidence. Dr. Steve's, Pellett, welcome to American History. It is great to meet you. Thank you. Thank you for inviting me. Let us drop ourselves into the Pleistocene era, a vast stretch of time that begins, if I'm

correct, about 2.6 million years ago and ends around, I don't know, 11,700 years ago, what we loosely called the Ice Age. In terms of human history, this overlaps with the Paleolithic, the Stone Age, when people lived primarily by hunting and gathering. Am I getting my dates right and my terms right? Here we go. Deep in. Yes, the Pleistocene is the time frame of about 2.58 million to 11,700 years ago, often discussed as the ice age, which was marked by repeated cycles of cooling and warming when there were massive ice sheets covering up to 30% of the Earth's land. The prevailing theory for generations until the 90s, really, was that the first people arrived in the Americas around 13,000 years ago. All these years are very rough in the general public understanding. People associated with what archaeologists call the Clovis culture.

It has to do with Clovis Points found in the American Southwest, the actual fossils found there, the artifacts. The characteristics of the Clovis Point, literally an arrowhead. What is going on with development of human society at that time? Well, we have to look in a lot of areas. So one thing that is often missed in these discussions is the diversity of different communities and different indigenous people. at the time. So there's many, many archaeological sites in North America that date to earlier than 11,200 years ago. That is the oldest date known for Clovis. Clovis technology. So another thing to make clear to people is that Clovis is not a culture. Clovis is a stone tool.

Well, the archaeologists named this culture, but they applied it to all of North America. You don't see that anywhere in the world. A culture is a small group in a regional area, and it includes people's language, cultural ceremonies, practices, the way they lives. This is a bigger picture what a culture is. So archaeologists really erased the diversity of the indigenous people of the Americas by creating this false story of the Clovis people when there were really many, many people, but a lot of earlier sites than what they call the Clovis sites have been documented and published in academic journals. But in the history of archaeology, it's a history of colonization, which is based on a lot of bias and conjecture. But that's the same as many areas of the world

where indigenous people's history and links to the land were erased. So a lot of early archapeutes. The archaeology regarding when humans arrived in the area we know today is the Americas is based on conjecture, not on scientific data. It's based on the teaching of early archaeologists from the 1900s till today that is often passed on, while it's not supported by any scientific fact. We don't know when the earliest appearance of humans was anywhere in the world. In any given area on every year as new discoveries are made, we learn more about the deep human past, and this is how it should be. There should never be a firm timeline set for the first appearance of humans anywhere in the world because we don't know.

And with new scientific technologies, we're learning more about deep human history every month. Yes, it's a big controversy. It's fascinating. I've done some television shows on this as a total outsider, because obviously I'm not trained in this at all. And discussing these things with people is you get very worked up or they got very worked up with me about these dates and what they imply. And that's so much of what we're talking about here is a rethinking of this period. And just so people understand, you know, I'm one who was raised in the 60s and 70s. You were taught in those days. Human civilization begins 10,000 years ago. For me, it was, I remember. You know, and that's when people start to move across the land bridge into what we call Alaska and Yukon and all that area. And down they came. And that was sort of the simplistic view of how the North American continent was peopled. But in fact, it's full of subtleties and nuance that have to do with the people themselves, right? And that's what we're talking about today, the cultures that began and those oral histories that were passed on.

But I just want to, I'm establishing this for the purposes of argument. The Clovis theory, which was popularized in the early 20th century, was held as the gold standard, as I say, late into the 20th century and placed that arrival between 10 and 13,000 years ago. But that is now being pushed back. The time of their arrival is suggested to be further and further back. And there are many examples of this. And I want you to just comment on these particular examples. The 1970s in the Yukon Bluefish Caves, the French Canadian archaeologist, I'm going to do my best here, Jacques Saint-Marcht, unearthed bones from an extinct species of horse with cuts that appear to have been made by humans dated to 24,000 years ago. Talk about that finding.

So Bluefish Caves is in the Yukon territory, and he collected over 36,000 animal bones, 15 with definite butcher marks. So, of course, he was highly critiqued for his work because it set the date of human arrival back to an earlier time. But Bourjon came in, she was a graduate student, and she began rechecking the bones. And she confirmed there were 15 with human cut marks from skinning, dismembering, and defleshing on a horse. There was also caribou, wapate, and dolly. all sheep and bison. So the oldest cut-marked horse jaw dates to about 24,000 calibrated years before present. There's also a worked mammoth bone flake and a core dated to about 23,500. When you get an understanding of the time frame of glaciation, this makes a lot more sense. During the time of

glaciation. So the last glacial maximum was around 24,000 to around 11,000 years ago. So that's a time when that area was blocked by ice, not just a little bit of ice, ice that was miles deep, right? There was an ice connection between the eastern and the western hemispheres. We know today is Asia and the area of Alaska. But for migrations, there was nothing for people to eat. There was no fresh water, and this was hundreds of miles of ice. This is not a time anybody or any mammal is going to be migrating. But if you go back prior to the beginning of the last ice age, you do often at times have a land connection. You have what they call the subtropical forest in the north. So you have grazing, you have fresh water. Paleontologists have done an amazing job of documenting when our

four-legged relations, mammals went back and forth between the continents. So this was a two-way street. And if mammals are coming and going, so could humans. Interesting. You say the end of the last ice age, within that ice age span that we're talking about, the 2.5 million to 11,000, there are many different periods of glaciation and melting. I mean, we're talking huge amounts of time here in millennia. And so that's what we are referring to when there are more subtle and nuance to this, as I mentioned. There were footprints found in the White Sands National Park in New Mexico in the United States that date back to human habitation 21 to 23,000 years ago.

That was a very famous finding not too long ago. And there have been arguments that humans were in Monteverde in Chile, 33,000 years ago before today. This is why this becomes such a vibrant argument, you know, and debate. I can only imagine the conferences you've been to. where people stake their ground in this stuff, right? Right. Well, you know, and people need to remember what I had to do as an archaeologist is not just understand the human footprint in the Americas.

I had to go back and understand the human footprint from the beginning of the time all over the world. So no story of early human migrations and human evolution is ever so simple as one group, one migration at one time. There were many, many groups of people, many early humans that traveled from the eastern hemisphere to the western hemisphere. And actually, in Northern Asia, some of the early hominine sites, there date to over two million years. So you have a group of early humans or early hominids walking, migrating 14,000 kilometers from Africa to Northern Asia, over two million years ago. Who's to say they couldn't go a little bit farther

and cross when there was a time of a land bridge into what we know today as the Americas? So interestingly, it's always been framed as, oh, it was impossible, people couldn't have got here. Yes, they could. There were many times when there were land connections over the last two million years in that area. But really interesting, just a couple years ago,

scientists in Norway call it a fox. wanted to see where it went to its summer breeding grounds. And that fox from Norway walked to Ellesmere Island, northern Canada. If a fox can do that today across water and land, you can't deny that humans could have done that the same thing. You know, thousands of years ago when there was maybe a lot more ice. And when there was more glaciers and ice, it drew the waters of the ocean down

and areas like the continental banks were drawn. dry and humans lived out there. Yeah, I want to underscore that. That's the idea of the land bridge, that as you have this glacialization, the water gets taken up by the ice, becomes the ice, and then it exposes land. And that's the idea. And then each of these periods that we talk about has these different ice age, you know, these different glacializations, hence the land bridge, and then the melting and the water

rises. And that is an ongoing process throughout. What we're really addressing in a sort of backwards way is the cost. cultural choices that were made throughout spiritually the 20th century to kind of cast this generalized idea on this period so that for whatever reasons, for education reasons, perhaps, but also for cultural reasons, that there was a lot of people benefited from that telling of the story very simplistically. I talked about one particular area in this intro, and that's important. We're talking about the northwest area of the United States. That's where a lot of this

conversation comes from, for your work, right? My work comes from all of North and South America. So most archaeologists specialize in one regional area or the stone tools or the pottery from the northwest, the southeast. But to really gain an understanding of the possibilities of when humans were in the Americas, I had to look at absolutely everything. So my archaeology site is only all of North and South America. But it's hundreds and hundreds of papers and hundreds and hundreds of archaeological sites that are older than 11,000 years. So it's not that there isn't any evidence. What has stopped us from understanding the real human history of the Western Hemisphere of the Americas is bias and racism in American archaeology

that's been embedded for over 100 years. So it's amazing how much is left out of that simple discussion of this, you know, small group of people coming across a land bridge, when there was a glacier in the way, and then all of a sudden spreading throughout all of North and South America and as little as 200 years, no, that didn't happen. And so a lot of archaeologists have critique that and discuss that, that there are no scientific facts supporting the Clovis first theory. It was all conjecture. It was bias. And when someone found an older site, archaeologists that supported the Clovis First Theory made up fantastic stories about floods and impossibilities. Nowhere in the world was it impossible for humans to move around any impediment on the land.

There's evidence of early humans on Crete in the Mediterranean at 100,000 years, and you always needed some form of open ocean transport to cross bodies of water. So there is some evidence going back as far as far. as 100,000 years of people crossing open bodies of water, right? Humans were incredibly intelligent. They knew how to travel across the land. They knew how to avoid dangerous mammals and megafauna. They knew what to eat and what not to eat. And they were very good at adapting to new environment. So North America is a very ecologically diverse area. And at times, there were many more lakes, bodies of water, and ice than we see now. And at different times, lakes and rivers ran

through areas that today are deserts. And the continents of North and South America were very rich and abundant with food, flora, mammals, providing a rich sustenance for humans and mammal populations. So there was a lot here to support those growing populations. Like I say, we don't know exactly how early they got here, but there is evidence that is as early as 200 to 300,000 years. A lot of archaeologists, you're right, they'll get very angry. Oh, no, you need extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence. Well, early humans being in any area of the world outside of the Americas, you know, at 500,000 or a million years is not an extraordinary claim. It's an accepted standard. What's extraordinary is that archaeologists have denied that people weren't here until 11 or 12,000 years ago, and they have no evidence.

And so it's really been based on manipulating the public to erase the indigenous past. Yes, and that is the point. The reason people get worked up about this, the reason why it's important to discuss and try to spread this theory out and expand on it is why, in your opinion. Well, archaeologists have controlled the past of the Americas for over 100 years. And so when an area is colonized, and this happened all around the world, the settlers come in and they rewrite the history of the area to disconnect indigenous people from their lands because they could be seen as owning the lands, everything on the lands, right?

So if you want to take all the gold and all the minerals and all the timber and all the land from an area, you make sure that nobody else has a right to claim that area. That's one thing. Academic credit for maintaining that story. What do archaeologists make their living off of? They make their living off the stolen lands and the archaeological sites they control in the Americas. And for years, they would not even talk to indigenous people. I'm not saying all archaeologists are like this, but this has been the majority of archaeology for years. So I worked in archaeology fieldwork for five years straight, and I experienced firsthand how archaeological firms and archaeologists didn't want to talk to the indigenous people. They just wanted to go out and find all the sites and get all the artifacts and write all the papers and what we call CRM Cultural Resource Management. It's a four-periment.

profit archaeology. So if you're going to build a bridge or road a building, first you have to check for cultural artifacts, right? People make millions of dollars doing this, you know, and they don't want indigenous people coming in and say, oh, I'm sorry, could you dig deeper than three feet because we think there's something else? Because then there goes some of their profit, right? And academic archaeologists bought into this story decades ago, and they didn't want to change it. But in the first place, like I said, nowhere in the world do we know the whole history of the whole area. So we should not be blocking knowledge from coming forth. It's like a sort of model has been made throughout the 20th century of how all of this happened. And again,

part of it is the teaching of younger people how this worked on. So it's oversimplified, perhaps. But it's really about controlling the past so that you don't get any kind of resistance. especially from cultures that are caring about this story being told. For the purposes of this discussion, Paulette, we're going to focus on the west coast of America, today's America, particularly the northwest right now. What was the look of that land? When we're talking about people coming over in any of those periods,

what would they be greedy? What kind of landscape? Well, the landscape changed across time. So when you have a glacier, we know the water recedes, the coasts are further out. and we're talking a few miles out. When the glaciers melt, you have floods and giant glacial lakes. So the land could change really rapidly across time.

And unfortunately, that means a lot of archaeological sites may now be buried along the coast, like the northwest coast, along the coastline. But the land was very rich. Like, there were over 100 megafauna species just in North and South America. and then you have all the smaller species. There was abundant food and resources for people. When you're talking about megafauna, you mean like mammoths and mastodons and those sorts? Mammoths, mastodons, giant sloths, so like at the white sand site, the human footprint was found inside of a giant sloth footprint.

So a human was following a giant sloth across the land and stepping in its footprints. These were preserved for 23,000 years, which is just amazing. But that's what's really amazed me is how our ancestors left us, their stories, their histories in the land, and that's still preserved. The prevalence of life. I mean, I lived in L.A. for years, and so the La Brea Tar Pits are a very famous spot, but it's really extraordinary how much they brought out of that one spot in the, middle of Los Angeles. You go to that museum. It's amazing. Yes, I've been there. Really, their collections are amazing and they're very valuable. When you find a, you know, a large bone or something and you can't identify it, you go to LaBrea and you take your bone and you match it to what

they have and you get an identity for that species. Those tarpits were like traps and that was the unique thing about it because they got stuck there going down, thinking it was a place that it could, you know, it was a watering hole of sorts. And little, Did those animals know? There's a famous find called Kennewick Man. It's a burial site in Northwest. Where was this and who was he, if we're talking about a certain person? Well, it was in the Northwest.

And when the burial site was discovered, I was an undergraduate student at the University of Arkansas Fayetteville, and I was doing some research with Dr. Jerome Rose. He was one of 18 specialists. the federal government asked to assess the ancient one. So in his report, which people can find on the National Park Service and read today, he states that the archaeologists that reconstructed Kanoickman put the fossil bones back together, had some of the bones out of place, including bones in the skull. So the archaeologist that found it and some others claimed this person looked cocazoids.

So they didn't put the skull back together right. To me, that's one of the most insulting things, instances in the history of archaeology of North America. But, you know, Dr. Rose came back and he told me, yes, that person looks like a Native American from that area. And that's in his report on the National Park Service site. So archaeologists who wanted to keep control of and do research on Kennewickman, claimed he looked Caucasoid,

and that removed him from them having to follow the Nagprol Law, Native American Graves and Repatriation Act, which requires archaeologists to talk to Native American communities regarding any finds or archaeological sites on their lands or any ancient sites they may be related to. They would have been required to return the ancient one to the communities who were claiming him as an ancestor. But in his silence, Kennewickman speaks volumes about ongoing racism in American archaeology. The ancient one carried a strong message that racism is active in academic circles and is still being taught

and still negatively impacting indigenous people. So we now know after years through genetic testing that Kennewickman was an ancestor of the Native Americans of the area where he was buried. But to me, this is one of the saddest moments in the history of American archaeology because to me it was so incredibly obvious that this was not a Caucasian person.

and there was no basis for calling this a Caucasian person. And this was just done to keep the Kennewick man from his descendants. So they did these facial reconstructions from the skull of Kennewickman, and they made him look Asian, they made him look German, they made him look anything but Native American. So I sent pictures of the skull to a reconstruction expert and didn't tell her what it should look like, just that it was around 10,000 years old. And the drawing she sent me back was definitively looking

Native American. Well, of course. Of course, you know, and so I know they didn't have to do that, but this shows you how far they go to keep control over a person. You can't own a person. What year was this find? When was he found? I don't have the exact year here. I was in undergrad school at the time. And I know that the NAG pro law came in in the 1990. So it was after that. Wow. Okay. So recently. Yeah, it's recent. So there you still see this very blatant to me racism and bias in American archaeology in very recent times.

I have to own up to, I mentioned that I did a special on this. And it was an extensive piece of traveling that I did in order to tell this story. We ended up at Michigan and Lake Huron and all kinds of places talking about this. And the whole time I was like, of course I accept the fact that this is early American people. And of course, They are indigenous and all that sort of thing. And bottom line is like, why are we worried about this so much? Was my, you know, sitting around with coffee thought process? Well, I'm a white guy in America.

That's why I wasn't worried about it. It fits my paradigm, what I was raised with, you know, in a lazy sort of way. And that's what you have to face up to when you realize, oh, this storytelling really matters, especially as an ongoing academic subject, never mind, you know, all the cultural aspect of it. But the the storytelling needs to be deepened. It can't be accepted as just a skin deep. so to speak, you know, what we're talking about here. So let's take a short break, digest a bit of this,

and we'll be back to talk about the connections between contemporary indigenous people and America's prehistoric past. Okay, we're back. We're talking with Dr. Pellett-Steves, who is answering questions, my questions, about early mankind and his arrival on the North American continent.

It is impossible to know exactly what life was really like more than 10,000 years ago. No one had the writing to write down history, but they had oral history. in one form or another, and these have survived. Paulette, what kind of oral storytelling tells us about people living in America during the Pleistocene era? How would that have happened? There are a lot of oral traditions.

There's songs. There's rock art. There's dances dedicated to megafauna. We know that megafauna went extinct around 10,000 years ago. So these oral traditions discussing things like mammoths and mastodons have to be minimally that old. There's many, many stories about different species that are not here today. In the Osage oral tradition, they have an oral tradition, a story about the battle between the great beasts. So the great beasts were very angry and there was huge groups of them and it made it dangerous to travel or to

hunt on the land safely. And so the beasts had a giant battle. And the Osage, watched the battle, and after many of the giant beasts died, it then was safe to go back on the land. So the Osage to honor the animals burnt a lot of them at an area. And then every year they came back to that area and had a ceremony to honor those animals. This area today is now called the Kasimwick site. And it's an area where we know from archaeological excavations, there are huge amounts of mammoth or mastodon bones and stone tools and signs of a lot of fire. So here you have an oral tradition that is supported by later archaeological work. So we know that many of these oral traditions are actually historic facts, which is important.

Eldon Yellowhorn in his dissertation stated that oral traditions could be carried over at least 40,000 years. So when indigenous people tell a story, they're not just going to tell you, oh, look, there's a blue bird on the bush. They're going to tell you, oh, look at that amazing blue bird on that bush. They're going to color the story with so many vivid memories you will never forget it. So understanding oral traditions is not something that archaeologists have traditionally tried to do, but they're beginning to do that. So I encourage them in my publications and writings to look at oral traditions, to look at rock art. We know they're extinct species in rock art.

We know that people were here living during the time that a lot of these megaphone and other species were here that are not here now. They had to be in the northwest, there's one group, and I'm sorry, I don't remember the community's name. They have a mammoth song and a mammoth dance, right? And if you didn't see a mammoth move, you wouldn't be having that. So there's a lot of evidence in oral traditions. So I'm understanding this to be that using oral stories as archaeological evidence would have been controversial, perhaps still is, versus say, fossilized. finding cuts in the fossils and things like that. That's the area that you're challenging, right?

That's the idea you're challenging with. Right. You need a lot of evidence to look and understand human history. And now we're very lucky now that we have so many amazing technologies and people are working what we call interdisciplinary. So we're using soil scientists and literature scientists or a tradition people. We're using archaeology. We have high-powered microscopes.

All of this comes together to give us a really a much clearer picture of those human cultures, of those human communities in the past. Let's talk about the Pacific Northwest oral traditions, very, very colorful communities there and cultures. The Thunderbird plays a huge role in those stories, right, specifically from the Pacific Northwest. Where might that come from? Where does the Thunderbird come from? Well, there were very large birds during the Pleistocy, and there was a bird known as a tetronus that could pick up small animals or humans. And they've been documented in the fossil and paleontological record. What we know of early human communities is that they paid attention to and respected everything around them, especially things like animals and birds.

and they use the sky for navigating, and they watch the animals and the birds to learn about the weather, to learn about the sky, the different patterns. So this comes through in a lot of oral traditions and their discussions of the environment. So the Thunderbird was just one more species or one more relation in their area

that they may have created stories about and interacted with, Everything was respected. Everything had a purpose. And the stories of the Thunderbird definitely portray that. And in a way, this is like the Macedonant mammoth. These are birds that have a wingspan of 12 to 18 feet across. I mean, this makes a condor look like a parakeet.

This is a mammoth, mammoth creature. Right. It would have been extremely imposing. And it was a sacred, powerful spirit in many Native American traditions. that acted as a moral guardian to punish wrongdoings and to keep cosmic balance. Yeah. But this species could not have existed later on. It is specific to a particular time which palatological records can specify, correct?

Yes, so we know that Tetronus was only here at a certain time. Larger bird and mammal species were only here at a certain time. What we don't know is if the Native American people, were actually referring to Tetronus when they said Thunderbird. So the Thunderbird legend is throughout many Native American communities right across North America, and they all have similar but unique stories, and they may have all seen different large birds. That's one of the supporting pieces of the evidence. And so if we're looking at an archaeological site to understand early humans, we need to

to look at all the evidence, not just stone tools, right? Stone tools are the traditional academic go-to place for archaeology and have always been that for good reason, but it's not the only element of the story. That's the point of this episode right now. There's another site I want to talk about in southeast Washington, the Cayuse people in the land along the Yomitea, right? I've never heard of this group of people, and they were particularly good hunters, right? Yes, I haven't studied the Cayuse a lot, but one thing you said really brings a thought to mind is that people don't have an understanding of the diversity, and there are many Native American groups they may never have heard of.

There are a couple volumes out that list from the early 1900s the existing groups that were documented at that time. There's over 6,000 distinct groups. that is after 95% of the population of the Americas was annihilated or died out. And so when you look at languages, so languages is another piece of, you know, how we understand human cultures in the deep past. There's around, some people say 360, 380, language families in the world. Each language family has numerous languages, right? It takes, Joanna Nicholas is a linguist, and she said it takes at least 7,000 years for one new language within the language family to develop.

So to have a large group of language families would have taken thousands of years. Where do you think the largest numbers of language families in the world are? They're right here in the Americas. The Americas have more language families than the whole rest of the world put together. And many of those people and many of those cultures still exist here, thankfully, but are struggling with that whole representation, that identity within the United States for sure and Canada as well, I imagine. Last on this list is Manus's site. The Manus site is a very important name, and I want to understand this better. Tell me about the Manus site in Washington and its significance.

Well, the Manus site was not an intentional discovery. It was an accidental discovery. Manus is very important. We know that early humans used mammoth and mastodon bone to make tools. So a mammoth or mastodon bone are very thick and very dense. And even a big giant short-faced bear couldn't get their jaw around it and break it. And so there's a technique known as spiral fracturing. If a human takes a big boulder and smashes the bone enough time,

the bone will break, but it will fracture spirally, right? If the animal was alive and he broke his own leg, we would see spiral fractures, right? Archaeologists can tell the difference between a bone that the animal broke and between one that humans broke. It's called green fracturing when they break it. The bone held large amounts of really rich marrow. That was a valuable food at the time. But the Bone is so heavy and dense, it was also used to make tools, just like stone tools. So what we see at the manisite is a bone tool in the rib of a mastodon. And I believe they did genetic testing to show that that tool came from, of course, a different mastodon. So it's really important because it's direct evidence of humans using mastodon bone to create stone tools to hunt mastodon.

And we don't know that humans hunted a lot of mammoths are mastodons. They may have actually just gotten the bone or the meat after the animal was found already deceased. So if you think about it and you're out on the land and, you know, it's late afternoon and you want dinner, are you going to go after a mastodon or a rabbit or a turtle or a fish or a deer, you know, or a bird? There was a lot of food available that took a lot less energy to harvest. And I've had some elders tell me that if a Native American community killed a mammoth or mastodon, it was a ceremony that was rarely done, not something. that they did all the time. Anasite especially talks about basically the hunting technology that

they were capable of, but also the ceremonial aspect of this, the rituals that were being practiced already. That takes a sit down. That takes a culture to be sitting down and deciding how to be, and generations training each other and oral history is passing on stories. All of that is the deepening of a society. Paulette, you have spent your life in this quest to reorient archaeology. Is that a fair way of characterizing you? Well, we can ask people to consider the facts. And number one, the facts are there was never any direct evidence to support the Clovis First hypothesis. Number two, this is not common anywhere in the world where we say that people only got here at a certain time and we don't accept any changes.

So for 100 years, in the 1920s, the time frame for people in the Americas went from 3,000 years to 10,000 years. It's been stuck at 10,000 years, 12,000 years ever since. It should not be an argument about when people were here. It should be a body of community work where archaeologists work together. Our job as archaeologist is to understand the human past, not to deny it and not to block it. And do you find that? that to be as big a struggle as it was earlier in your career? I mean, is it changing? Oh, I think it's definitely changing. I did a survey a couple years ago of about 165 archaeologists, mainly in the Americas, but some globally. And I think some big things have really changed. So 70% of

the respondents believe that there is historic evidence and prehistoric evidence in oral traditions. I think it was over 40% believed that people were here before 24,000 years ago. So before the last glacial maximum, I do believe that it is gradually changing. But here's the thing. It's been very difficult for archaeologists to publish on pre-Clovis age sites. This was called an area of academic suicide. If you wanted to end your career in American archaeology, published that a site, was older than Clovis. Tom Dillahey at Monte Verde said 17 professors people wrote to the

university trying to get them fired when he published that Monteverdi was older. Why would you do that? Why would you care if people were here earlier? Let me tell you why. Bias and racism and ownership of the land and the indigenous past. And that's what is the big piece that's changing. This is a part of healing and reconciliation. So a few things I would really like people to think about and remember is that people need to consider the human history in North and South America. It's not so different from anywhere else in the world. And we shouldn't be placing deadstop timeframes on the earliest possible human habitation

in any area of the world. So like I said before, we know. that early hominins were in Northern Asia two million years ago. That wasn't so far away from the land bridge that was opening and closing many times. So there's every possibility that humans came here much earlier. We know there was nothing stopping them from following mammals that paleontologists have documented. So the horse, the camel, and other species arose first in the Americas. They were here. They can't fly, they had to walk across a viable migration landscape to get to the eastern hemisphere. So we know that mammals went from America to Asia, and we know that it was vice versa.

And if mammals were doing it, then humans could do it. But I want the public to understand that many archaeologists who published on sites suffered a great deal, which means it was very difficult to get funding. So archaeological excavations are very, very expensive. You need funding, right? Some have gotten private funding, which is fabulous. So it makes a difference how we understand the human past. And how we understand the human past of any area reflects on how we treat contemporary populations who are ancestral today. So I have taught students, ask them what they know at the beginning of a class about Native American history and what they know after they take my class. And after they take my class, they tell me, I am so much more informed. This definitely impacts how I think of

and interact with contemporary indigenous populations today. It pushes back on racism, bias, and discrimination when we are more informed. Absolutely. I will let you have the last word, and thank you very much for that. I have my thoughts. I agree with you. My feeling is that the Americas we live in now are so much more interesting as a result and fascinating as a result of understanding these indigenous societies even long before the ones that were traditionally talked about in the last few hundred years. It has an effect on one's feeling about your own country, honestly, and it's a good one. Dr. Paulette-Steves is a professor of geography, archaeology, and land stewardship at Algoma University in Ontario, Canada.

She occupies the Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Indigenous History, Healing and Reconciliation, and has authored a few books that you should look up, The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere and reclaiming deep human histories of the Western Hemisphere, archaeologists who braved prejudice to reveal the evidence. Thank you very much, Paulette, for joining us. It was a real honor to meet you. Oh, thank you for inviting me. Thanks for listening to American History.

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