Stuff You Should Know - Who were the first Americans?

Episode Date: October 8, 2009

Columbus is often touted as the "discoverer" of the Americas, he wasn't the first to set foot on American soil by a long shot. Tune in as Josh and Chuck dig deep into the history -- and mystery -- of the first American inhabitants in this podcast. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. With me as always is Charles W. Chuck Bryant. Which means that you're listening to Stuff You Should Know. As straight ahead as you've been in a long time my friend. It's very nice. You think? Yeah.

I try to mix it up every once in a while. Consider it mixed. Thanks. I will as a matter of fact from this point forward. Chuck. Quick. Who discovered America? Christopher Columbus.

That's wrong Chuck. Is it? Yeah. Even if you qualify it by saying what European discovered America. Right. Columbus was beaten by a good 500 years by the Norse. Right. Who found who were in Newfoundland.

That's not what we were taught in history in elementary school. Definitely not. There's no Norse day. No. No. That'd be awesome actually. No leaf Ericsson day. I don't think there is.

Not in the US. Not here. And there's also evidence that the Norse were beaten by a good 500 years by an Irish monk who used a rowboat to make it from Ireland over to North America. Wow. And he wrote about it and. The tenacious monk. Was that his name?

Tenacious. Yeah. That's what I would have called him. Yeah. Well yeah. At the very least or if not the completely insane monk. Right. The soggy monk.

He came back and wrote about it and drew some maps I believe. He drawed some maps. He drawed some maps. And so there is some sort of evidence that he made contact with these people. Apparently the Norse describe meeting people who were dressed like monks that they had met. So this guy might have come over and been like you guys are dressed all wrong here. We need to church you up.

Right. They didn't pillage as well as the Europeans did though in Columbus in the game. That single Irish monk. Yeah. I'm pretty sure he felt outnumbered. Yeah. Yeah. And so if you qualify what European discovered America there's debate right there.

There's evidence that the Chinese beat Columbus by 70 years. I should say there's some evidence that's highly questionable. And also by the way you can read an article I wrote on the Irish monk and an article I wrote on the Chinese beating Columbus. No wonder you know all this stuff. Yeah. Did you ever hear the Louis CK bit on Indian giving? No.

You want to hear it? Yeah. I'm talking about basically the Indian giving is probably the most offensive thing you can say on earth because it implies that we like they gave us the land and we wanted it back and they wouldn't give it back. And he's talking about the settlers coming over and saying can we have everything and the Indians said well we don't really have. We just use it and enjoy it and share it.

And then we started killing everybody and he does like a knife thing and the Indians says dude if this is what have is can we not do that? That's really good. I love that guy. Oh he's great. And because Chuck just paraphrased everything that's not copyright infringement. No I don't think so. Okay so Chuck we've clearly ruled out Christopher Columbus as the discoverer of North America.

Right? Yes. Who did discover North America though? You have to ask this question. Let's say Columbus comes over he thinks he's in India and he shows up and he's like hey you guys are Indians but you look a little crazy you know and finally comes to realize that he's not in India that he's just discovered this new place. But that immediately begs another question that I'm sure it took a little while for people

to come up with because they were so excited that they just discovered this whole new land mass. An awesome land mass. Yeah the best land mass. But the question had to eventually come up like wait a minute where did these people come from? How did they get there? How did they get there?

Yeah. For millennia there was a theory a widely accepted theory in both the public and scientific lives of spontaneous generation. Right. Like just if you put left meat out too long and it started to rot flies showed up. So rotting meat gave rise to flies. Right. And with moldy grain giving life to mice.

Right. Generally people thought that there was a life force that could spontaneously produce life and that some inanimate objects were associated with giving rise to certain animate objects. Right. And that was the case in North America. I don't know that. Right.

But in 1864 Louis Pasteur definitively proved that there was no life force that gave rise to life. Right. That if you put a, if you sterilized a broth and put it in a flask and kept it sterile life didn't spontaneously originate there. Right. So he definitively disproved it. So if people did think that the Native Americans in North and South America and Central America

did spontaneously generate Pasteur proved that that wouldn't have happened. So there's one theory. Here's the question, where in the name of God did these people come from? Right. How long had they been there? That's an awesome question. I love this article. I thought it was really, really interesting.

Thanks. The Clovis. Well, yes. That was the first theory that, well not the first, but it was widely held for quite a while. Yeah. Actually in the first couple decades, actually in 1906 I believe, 1908, there was a terrible flood in southern New Mexico.

Uh-huh. And it killed a lot of people, a lot of cattle, which in 1908 in southern New Mexico cattle and people were on par. And it also washed up a bunch of weird artifacts, a lot of weird clearly Indian spearheads, arrowheads, that kind of thing. And was this in Clovis? It was near Clovis, Folsom I believe was the first site that they found. So people started kind of collecting these things and word got out that you could find

inexplicable or uncommon spearheads. Yeah. Very distinct spearheads as it turns out. Yeah. The Clovis point. Yes. That's not what it was called yet. People were just like, look at this crazy thing.

Right. That's what I think they called it. Right? Sure. And then over the course of the next couple decades, more and more archeological research was done. Uh, a guy named Ridge Whitman. Ridge Whitman.

Yeah. He was like 1920s name, no, he was just a dude in New Mexico. He found one of these very characteristic spearheads in the bones of a bison. Uh-huh. Right? So things are starting to come together. They're taking trouble. Finally, the tipping point is reached, as Malcolm Gladwell would put it, in 1932 when

the state of New Mexico was digging a highway and they started excavating near Clovis and just found a whole trove of stuff, bones, spearheads, the whole, the whole shebang. Yeah. It really gave us a lot of info. And a guy who was excavating nearby, Dr. Edgar B. Howard, he was excavating for mammoth bones in a cave nearby. See, the guy was all mad because they moved the spear points. That was a different guy.

That had happened about 10 years earlier. Gotcha. You tell them about that because that's significant. Well, people. That kind of lunch, it demonstrates the mentality that's going on at the time. Yeah, they found some spear points and I guess they picked it up or something, which is like a crime scene. You're not supposed to touch anything, evidently.

And he came up on the scene and he started, you know, he pitched a hissy fit because it's out of context now. It doesn't really tell us that much. It was. And pretty much the guy who ruled on whether or not archeological evidence was archeological evidence. I can't remember his name, but he worked for the Smithsonian as a physical anthropologist. He said, sorry, they touched it.

I didn't see it. It could have been placed there. I'm not accepting it. But they found something later and left it intact, right? Right. Yeah. 10 years later or something. Yeah.

And this is when all of it starts to take off in 1932. Right? So all of a sudden they figure out that these spear points had never been seen before anywhere else. They have no idea where these things came from. They just knew they were very, very old because like the bison bones that they were found within, it was an extinct bison and had been extinct for about 10,000 years. All of a sudden it's becoming clear that these people predate any settlement that we'd been

aware of. Right. Or known as Native American. Or Paleo Indians. Wow. Look at you. Yeah. Well, I have a minor in anthropology.

Sure. Of course. And so all of a sudden people are saying, okay, well, these Clovis were the first Americans. And in the 50s when radio carbon dating came about, that proved definitively that these people were old, as old as you would think. 11,200 years ago is what they dated at. Yeah. And how do you do that, Chuck, with radio carbon dating?

I have no idea. All right. Well, what they do is they actually take soil samples. Something to do with the isotopes, right? And the soil stratate. Right. And the age of the carbon isotopes, the C14 carbon isotopes present in the soil. Right.

Around the artifact. Right. And the artifacts have to be laid out in a certain way. Like there can't be evidence that it was buried. Humans, when we make a camp, or when we did 12,000, 10,000 years ago, when we made a camp and just left it, there were very telltale signs, right? So things weren't buried. They're just kind of laid about.

Right. And they were on there when they were extinct or whatever happened. So if that's how this site is presented, then you can measure the soil and say, okay, well, the carbon isotopes in the soil are 11,000 years old. Right. That means that this site was above ground and just left 11,000 years ago. Right. So that proved that the Clovis were around 11,200 years ago, right?

Yes. Which is old and definitely pre-Native American. So how did they get here? Well, the Clovis first camp, which was, it sounds to me like they're a very angry bunch of people. They eventually became very angry. Or very protective, at least, of their information. They came to be called the Clovis police.

Yeah, I like that name. Yeah. Or what was the... I wonder if the Clovis New Mexico police like it, if they're like, that's us, dude. Or the Clovis Barrier. They created this Clovis Barrier. Yeah. Basically anybody who had any other competing theory or idea was an idiot and they had

a lockdown on the academic view of the origin of life in North America. So getting back to your question, where did they come from and how did they get there? The general theory was that they basically walked during the middle of the Ice Age, which I can't imagine living during an Ice Age. Could you imagine like crossing the Bering, was it called the Bering Strait Bridge? The Bering Land Bridge. The Bering Land Bridge is how they got here supposedly, which is only about a mile wide and is now beneath the ocean of the Bering Strait.

And that's how they migrated from Siberia to I guess what would be like Canada. And Alaska. And Alaska. And then found their way down to eventually the Southeastern United States. And because of that... So they walked here. There was actually a very brief, as far as the timeline of history goes, there's a very brief moment in history where the Bering Land Bridge was exposed and where the Laurentide

Ice Sheet that covers like Northern Canada and Alaska did at the time was receded enough to allow passage between it and a nearby glacier. Can you imagine how scary that was though? I imagine it was kind of scary but... It was only a mile wide though. It's not like... It wasn't a pleasure walk. It wasn't a stroll.

No. But... And you raised a good question. Like why would you do that? Sure. Why? Food. Food.

Exactly. Mastodon baby, your favorite band. Food, mastodon, metal. And the woolly mammoth, that was the theory is that they were dependent on these animals as they're one of their sole sources of meat, I guess. Right. It was very clear based just on their spear points and their arrowheads. The Clovis were extremely advanced big game hunters.

Yeah. They were hafted. Which I had to look that up. It's actually when they attach something to a handle. So it's either attached to a bow or a spear shaft or an axe handle. And that means you can throw it. Yes. Or shoot it.

Which is how you need to kill a mammoth. You can't just walk up to it and stab it. You also need a lot of coordination, planning, cooperation to take down a mammoth, a mastodon, or one of these extinct bison. And also I read the point was made like they were definitely big game hunters. But they would take small game two or medium sized game like deer or antelope or whatever. That's what I wondered. Because they made a big point about the fact that one of the reasons they may have become

extinct was that the mammoth and mastodon were overhunted. Chuck, you have just brought everything to the fore. The Pleistocene overkill hypothesis? Yes, Chuck. What this is, and this is one of the reasons why the Clovis barrier was so supported and so able to just lock down academia, was because it was a cautionary tale about ecological collapse. But I don't get that not every animal, they couldn't have overhunted every animal.

Just because they overhunted the mastodon and the mammoth, why not skip down to the lower smaller animals? That's an excellent point. That's a question that hasn't been satisfied by or wasn't satisfied by Clovis police. They basically were saying the Clovis came down from, they came across the land bridge from Siberia, down through North America, got to the Great Plains, overhunted the mastodon, the bison. They followed them around where they migrated.

Killed them off and eventually that led to the extinction of their own kind. Because what's really interesting and curious about the Clovis is they appear out of nowhere in North America, and actually like South and Eastern North America and clearly New Mexico, and over the period of 500 years, they pop up out of nowhere and they disappear into the ether. They just show up and they're gone. There's no evidence of any technology leading up to them. You can't see a progression of fluted spearheads that show these people are figuring out how

to make the Clovis point and then you don't see any refining of it or continuation of it after this 500 year period. These people, if you're looking at it just on the timeline of history and archaeologically, they pop up in the middle of North America out of nowhere and then just disappear. Maybe they were aliens. It's entirely possible Chuck. There's another theory though about why they may have vanished. The Clovis Comet theory.

It's also called the Younger Dryas Impact Event and this is just a few years old. Some people theorize that a comet exploded above the Earth's atmosphere around the Great Lakes and basically caught most of North America on fire. Sweet! And not only killed the mastodon and the mammoth but the Clovis. And there's a little bit of evidence of this. They found a charred carbon rich layer of soil at 50 different Clovis age sites and it contained a bunch of unusual stuff in it that they interpreted as like an impact event.

Is that the scientific term for that stuff, unusual stuff? Unusual materials. Yeah. Yeah. Like what? Like what unusual materials? Don't ask me that. Like stuff that you would find in a comet?

Stuff that would indicate that it was an impact event. Crazy. I guess like a meteor impact landing, stuff like that. That's awesome. I've been refuted to, like you know, that's why I love all this stuff. There's all these theories that make sense and then some other person comes along and pokes holes in it and then you're back at square one. Alright, so that's not how it went with the Clovis barrier.

Like it was a fact as far as anybody was concerned. You had radio carbon dating. You had no other evidence of any earlier settlement in the Americas at all and anybody who put forth a hypothesis other than that was poo-pooed and they were very successful at controlling the origin of life in North America or in the Americas for several decades. And then they gave it up and became Scientologists. Right, yeah. Until 1975, that was the beginning of the end of the Clovis first theory.

Yeah, sadly. Maybe maybe not because really the whole reason that you're looking, the whole reason you're spending decades excavating a single site is to find out the truth. Like we have to know who was first. We have to know. See, I'm not in that camp. I know you made a point in your article that's not really that important who was first. Wasn't that just like such a hippie ending that you tossed on there?

I kind of liked it though. It's like I've got up in like the world afterward, yeah. We should respect the Clovis man just because they weren't first. They gave us the hafted fluted spear. Yeah. I was running to Hands Across America the whole time I was writing this. So are we going to down south? Let's go down south Chuck to Monte Verde.

Yes. Okay. Chile? Yeah. Yeah. Well, one of the early theories of the Clovis is that they migrated from south to north. No, north to south. They came down originally, but didn't they later go on to say, but wait, it looks like

they went from south to north. That's what Monte Verde did. Oh, okay. There was a University of Kentucky archaeologist named Tom Dillehey who dedicated 25 years of his life to a single settlement in Chile outside of Monte Verde, Chile. What a loser. But this guy managed to quietly and methodically destroy the Clovis first theory. And even better, he brought the Clovis police down to Chile after he presented his final

findings and said, yeah, I was a sad day for the Clovis police. I think it was. They had to turn in their badges and their uniforms and their little billy clubs. And they all retired and went fishing in Florida. So what happened, Chuck? What did Dillehey find in Monte Verde? Well, he found, he found, he found, that predated them. Irrefutable evidence is another way to put it.

Well, that's the non-cursing way to put it. Sure. Sure. So you want to know what they found? Yes. They found harse of wood with knotted strings attached, which was no accident. It meant that a human being tied some string around it. Well, not only that, they also found leftover mastodon flesh.

Oh, really? Preserved. This is what Monte Verde is, just so, this is how archeology advances by leaps and bounds, by accident. Sure. Monte Verde, the site is a bog. And it's actually preserved this wood, string, mastodon flesh, preserved it beautifully because it's an oxygen-depleted environment.

Right. And it was 12,500 years old. That's what radiocarbon dating showed. So first of all, you have the fact that it's clearly these harths, these, the knotted string, all this stuff. Right. It was clearly presented in a way that this was a settlement. It was a camp.

They estimate it housed like 20 to 30 people. Right. Even like the tent pegs are left in the ground. That's pretty cool. So it wasn't buried, right? It was just left. Right. And the radiocarbon dating proved that, yeah, it was 12,500 years old.

So they had a good millennium on the Clovis. It still doesn't answer how they got there. No, it doesn't. As a matter of fact, it raises even more questions because what the Clovis police said was, well, okay, that's fine. That's fine. We'll give you Monte Verde jerks. But how they get here?

Here's the, this is one thing that was never addressed with the Clovis by the Clovis police is why weren't there any evidence of Clovis settlements along the way from, uh, Siberia to Canada, Alaska to the Southeast, the Great Plains there on any, because if you come across, if you come down Alaska and Canada into North America, you hit the Great Plains and brother, there was really good hunting around there 10,000 years ago. You're going to have campsites. You're going to have some evidence. There was nothing.

Maybe they haven't found it though. Is that plausible? It is totally plausible. I think that's how the Clovis first theory was able to stand for so long is because maybe we just haven't found it yet, whatever. But this Monte Verde theory turns it on its ear because instead of from North to South, it suggests they went from South to North. And it was 1300 years older.

Yes. But I like your theory of how they got here. It's not a theory. It's not my theory. It's a hypothesis that other people have suggested as well. Because the same thing happened in Australia, right? Yeah, well, possibly. Think about it.

Australia has been a continent, an unattached continent for 50 million years. They believe archaeologists and anthropologists believe that the Aborigines in Australia got there about 60,000 years ago, which means they would have had to have parachuted in or come by boat or swam. Yeah. I think boats are most plausible. It definitely is. And you have little islands along the way that you could stage.

You can island hop over there. Yeah. I mean, there's some pretty horrible journeys along the way, but it's entirely possible. Right. And the theory is that the same thing could have happened to the folks in Monte Verde. It's true. Or the other way to look at it is there's a lot of people who still believe that they came from a North to South migration pattern, but that they just came a lot earlier.

So they went North to South and then back up. OK. That makes sense. It does. The fly in that ointment is this. There's another site found at Monte Verde that is being excavated now. I'm pretty sure Dilla Hay was like, I'm out. I'm out.

I did my thing. You guys take this over. That's been 25 years. Yeah. But they found another camp nearby or evidence of more human activity nearby that's dated to about 33,000 years ago. Which turns this on its ear. Yes.

So does that hold to the theory of the waves of migration that you were talking about in the article? I don't know. I don't know. I've also heard there's a lot of archaeological sites that are underwater right now, they're sure. Oh, yeah. Because once the ice ages ended, the water levels rose and who knows what's underwater

along our coasts. There could be definitive evidence that they came by boat. We have no idea, ultimately. We just know that the Clovis weren't the first people here, and why they vanished still don't know. It's very interesting. There was, it looks like, people in Chile 33,000 years ago. Which goes to prove Columbus did not discover America.

Right. Full circle. What does this all have to do with me and you living here in Atlanta today? Nothing. On Clovis ground, potentially. Yeah, they were here. It has nothing to do with us. Were they in Georgia?

They said Southeast. And Carolina. So we're just a couple of schlubs here in 2009, eh? Yeah, and you ask really, other than the pursuit of knowledge, other than the pursuit of definitive truth, it really doesn't apply to us. But it is fascinating. Yeah, there's no reason. I'd defy you to say that it's not.

I think you could argue that all of archaeology is, I'm not saying pointless, but because I think it's fascinating. But what are you doing besides trying to find the truth? And there's value in that. Sure. There's definite value in it. But it's not like they're going to find some ancient cure for cancer. Or will they?

I don't know. We'll find out. They'll keep digging in the meantime, because I got to tell you Chuck, most archaeologists could care less what you and I think about their field. Yeah, I know. I'm sure we'll get some emails about this. Well, since I just said most archaeologists could care less, that means it's time, Chuck, for...

Oh yeah, if you want to read this article, you can type Clovis into the handysearchbar at HowStuffWorks.com, which now means it's time for listener mail. So Josh, before we have listener mail, okay, we want to talk about something we're excited about. I'm excited about a lot of stuff. You're going to have to specify. Don't switch off your podcast here, people. This is really good.

You recall during the microlending episode, we talked about an awesome website, kiva.org, K-I-V-A, and that is where you can donate money, $25 minimum, to satisfy these microloans for needy people all over the world. Needy entrepreneurs. Needy entrepreneurs. Yes. It's not a charity, like you're going to have to fund their enterprises. So if you haven't listened to that episode, give it a listen.

And we found out through Kiva, you could start a team, and then we started searching around and found out... Denmark has a team. Denmark has a team. A lot of corporations have teams. Gay, lesbian, and bisexuals have a team. Sure. Who else?

Well, the Colbert Nation. Stephen Colbert has a team. Oh, that's right. And we saw that, and we thought, hey, they're lame. They're not raising much money. No, there's like 100 members last time I checked, and they've raised like six grand, which I guess is pretty good for 100 members, but I think we can top that. We could definitely top that.

And we have people that write in and talk about the fact this is a free podcast, and they wish there was something they could do. Well now you can go to kiva.org, join the stuff you should know team under community, sign up and join the team, and start donating, and we can start satisfying some of these loans. I love satisfying things. And we'll keep up with this through the blog and kind of let people know how many loans we've satisfied, and we're going to keep our eye out for Colbert.

Yeah, this is not going to be some throwaway poo poo idea that we came up with and forgot about Colbert. We're in this for the long run. Boom! We're going to put it on the blog, and we want the stuff you should know team to satisfy these loans. And you can get paid back. That's a cool thing.

You can get 50 bucks. If you want, you can once a loan is repaid, you can get that money back. Yeah, you can take it and run, or buy some donuts with it. Or you can reinvest it, or you can just donate it to the Kiva Foundation as a whole. Either way, you're helping people in the developing world, again, fund their own enterprises in an effort to become self-sufficient. For a lousy 25 bucks. Plus, you're like a hair's breadth away from Muhammad Yunus.

Right. I mean, he's right there next to you. So go to Kiva.org, check out the stuff you should know team, and join up. And we're going to keep up with it on the blog and through the podcast. We will shame you if you haven't joined. Chuck, this is a great idea. Thank you, Chuck. It was a really good idea, man.

All right. So now, Listener Mail. I'm going to just do this one, since we're short on time. You asked people to write in after the Bhutan Gross National Happiness. Yeah, we've gotten a lot of good responses from that. This is the best one. Everyone who's written in has this nice, mellow, even-keeled tone. Nobody's been like, help me.

Right. Especially this guy. I like Chris. Chris says, an answer to your request for someone who has left the rat race of the American Money Chase, I think I qualify. I live on a commune, this is in a commune, I almost thought it was on. He lives in a commune and files taxes under the IRS code 501D, which I don't even know what that is.

I've only heard of 501C3. It sounds like some sort of a hippie thing. Yeah. I've lived in this commune with my wife for close to 15 years. Before moving in, I grew up in another commune whose income was solely based on donations. So all in all, you could say I've always lived with a yearly salary under $10,000. Man. Am I happy?

I'd say yes. I find lots of ways to have fun and live hand to mouth. You never really know what you can live without until you rid your life of stuff. When I host visitors at our place, it pretty much blows people's minds. My wife and I take up three rooms in our building. We try to make the most of our space and not hang on to extra books, clothes, et cetera, for too long. Your show in happiness and money, your show on happiness and money, ask some good questions.

I'm a regular listener and then he signed off. Peace, Chris. Peace, Chris. So. You left out his Michelle Shock quote. He has a quote from singer-songwriter Michelle Shock, who apparently once said, if you ever want to, if you ever want an adventure, live without cash, so true. That is an adventure.

Yeah. Thank you for writing in, Chris. You dirty hippie. Thank you to everybody who took time to write in about dropping out of the rat race or just never joining in some cases. And let's see, Chuck, do you want to hear about anything specific from people? For this week? No.

I want people to go to kiva.org and join our team. Yeah. How about that? Why don't you write in and let us know if you've joined, if you see anybody that you think we should focus our attention on. Let's do all things kiva this week. Yeah. Send it in an email to me and Chuck and Jerry at StuffPodcast at HowStuffWorks.com.

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