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

56 AMERICAN GENESIS
tween the up-until-then coalescing Cordilleran and Laurentide
ice sheets. If such an ice-free corridor existed at this date, it
would have let the hunters (supposedly confined until then to
central Alaska) enter the western United States, where big game
abounded. Since 12,000 years ago is precisely when Clovis points
were believed to have made their sudden appearance in the western
United States (an observation which has since been shown to
be in error), it was convenient for conservative traditional archaeologists
to tie these two events-the opening of an ice-free
corridor and the first appearance of Clovis points-into a neat
wrap-up of their current scenario. Dr. Vance Haynes, who postulated
the dramatic population explosion, used radiocarbon dating
to fix the subsequent extinction of the elephants at about 11,000
years ago. While Haynes was correct in his dating of this extinction,
he was not On firm ground when he said that "the rapid
increase in the number of mammoth-hunters could easily be one
of the main reasons why these animals became extinct in North
America sometime around 9000 B.C.; leaving the succeeding Folsom
hunters with no larger prey than bison."'·
In the 1950s, unaware of the flaws in their reasoning, most
archaeologists used radiocarbon dating to support and reinforce
their story of a land bridge during the last glacial period, of an
ice-free corridor (10,000 B.C.), the first appearance of man in the
Americas (10,000 B.C.), the extinction of the mammoths (8000
B.C.), and the rapid spread of sites and growth of population
across North America and down to the tip of South America.
The official establishment view about Indian origins seemed to
ring truer than ever. Harvard's Dr. Gordon R. Willey, considered
archaeology's foremost spokesman at the time, put it best in 1966
in his major synthesizing work, An Introduction to American Archaeology:
'The oldest radiocarbon dates for archaeological discoveries
which demonstrate, beyond any doubt, man's presence
in the New World fall in the range of 10,000 to 9,000 B.C.". Dr.
Haynes. in a November 1969 article in Science entitled "The Ear-
• I will support this critique in the next chapter.