American Genesis: The American Indian and the Origins of Modern Man

16 AMERICAN GENESIS
butchered a woolly mammoth, a giant with twelve-foot tusks,
standing more than fourteen feet high and weighing more than
eight thousand pounds.
The stillness of the scene is pierced by raucous "honking" as a
Bight of Greater Canada geese head south on their fall migration.
The two men carrying the branch acknowledge the geese by
waving their sharp stone-tipped spears. The third, a youth, laughs
and motions for the geese to come closer so that he might shoot
one with his bow and arrow. The geese ignore the men, wheeling
their way south, their cries dying in the distance.
The three hunters soon reach their fall hunting camp. For the
last two months they have lived in tents made of hides stretched
across stout frames made of mammoth ribs. Their permanent
home is five hundred miles to the south in the eastern plains of
Colorado. As soon as the hunters drop their prize, two women
kneel down with tools made of caribou bone which they use to
remove the remaining hide from the meat.
The three hunters join a group of men in listening to one of
their band who recently returned from a treacherous seven-year
round-trip journey on foot to a far distant land (known today as
the French Riviera). The brave traveler holds up a simple map of
the landmarks for the journey which he carved into stone. There
is talk of how all the members of the clan might go there
someday.
The SUJl is setting fast and several women are grinding a wild
grain, perhaps corn. There are some ponies grazing near the
camp, feisty equines the Indians sometimes ride.
At first glance, this scenario doesn't seem at all fantastic, except
for the Riviera trip. It seems a reasonable picture of the early
American Indians, or Paleo-Indians as archaeologists call them.
But in fact, this scenario or something like it has generated some
of the most fascinating speculation and reconsideration in the
world of archaeology in quite some time, because a scene like this
took place at least 50,000 years before generally accepted archaeological
thinking says it should have--at a time when, the