Lost Worlds Audiobook Chapter: "The World As It Was"

Introduction

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0:12Hi, everybody. From Audible, welcome to another episode of Tides of History. As always, I am Patrick Wyman. Thank you so much for being here with me today. So I've got something special and different for you here. It is Chapter 1 of my new book, Lost Worlds, How Humans Tried, Failed, Succeeded, and Built Our World, which comes out May 5th. I recorded the audiobook in February at one of the coolest recording studios in the world, The Village in Los Angeles, and I think this is some of the best audio work that I have ever done.

0:43I am so excited to share it with you all.

The World As It Was

0:47Chapter 1 is entitled The World As It Was, and it's all about the waning days of the Ice Age across the planet. What the world was like, the various bands of foragers who inhabited it, and where their various paths would lead over the coming millennia. We'll talk a little bit more about the Clovis culture, but we will also go to Europe and the Near East to meet other people who survived in this incredibly harsh time. Pre-orders are absolutely the most important factor driving the success of a book launch, so if you like this sample chapter, I would be eternally grateful if you bought the book before or right at launch.

1:20That is the biggest thing anybody can do to help. I'm really proud of this book that I wrote. I think it's the best thing I've ever done in all of my years of writing and research, and I am so proud to share it with you all. So, I hope you enjoy Chapter 1 of Lost Worlds, The World As It Was. The World As It Was

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2:48Chapter 1. The World As It Was

The Clovis People

2:52Montana, 12,900 years ago. The wind blew down out of the mountains, swaying the stalks of grass that covered the rolling valleys. Stark white against a deep blue sky, the sawtoothed peaks jutted upward in the distance, the snow and ice at the higher elevations looming over the creek bottoms and smaller hillsides. The freezing edge of the gusts served as a reminder that the lethal cold was never far away.

3:23Sheltered by an overhanging ledge on the edge of a low bluff, a small band, no more than two dozen people, assembled around the freshly dug grave. Their clothing, neatly stitched hides still covered in the coarse hair of a mammoth, mastodon, camel, or bison, kept out the worst of the elements. It had to. Otherwise, the group would have frozen long ago. Far more than the lions, saber-toothed cats, and wolves that stalked the vast expanses of North America, winter was their greatest foe.

3:55Winter and the cruel randomness of fate. The child, a little more than a year old, had seemed healthy until shortly before he died. His mother's tears fell freely, staining the soil of the pit as she lowered her motionless bundle into its final resting place. She laid a hand on his forehead. Maybe, just maybe, they had been wrong. For a moment, she had held on to a shred of hope, but her son was cold and lifeless. With the same hand, she wiped her tears away, stood, and stepped back from the grave.

4:27An older woman took her place next to the infant. She squatted down, her knees cracking, and removed a handful of red powder from a leather pouch. She scattered the powder over the child, one handful and then another, until he was covered in a thick layer of reddish pigment. A helping hand pulled her to her feet, and an elderly man took her place. One by one, flexing a right arm stiff and arthritic from decades of spear-throwing, he deposited pieces of stone, sprinkling them with red ochre before placing another layer of stone on top.

4:58When he was done, the other men and women in their band did the same, placing their own stone tools in the grave. The tools varied in size and form. Some were large and only slightly worked, with a few flakes struck off to make a single sharp cutting edge, while others had been carefully shaped by hundreds of small movements into beautiful blades and small projectile points. By the time they were finished, dozens of tools formed a tightly packed stack next to the infant, all of them blanketed in that same reddish pigment.

5:29The child had everything he would need on his next journey, wherever that might take him. His mother and her people had beliefs about these things, ideas that had accompanied them on the long trek that had brought them to this place. It was a beautiful spot, nestled in these valleys among the ridges and mountains, backed by a sandstone cliff and flanked by a burbling creek. The band had come this way a few times before, one occasional stop on their endless peregrination following the game on which they relied for food.

6:01A few miles every several days, dozens every month, and hundreds every year. That was the rhythm of their life. Now they were moving on again, walking down the hillside toward the rushing water, hefting their spear throwers in packs full of half-finished tools and dried meat. A few carried portable shelters, cured hides that could be lashed over a wooden frame. They rarely stayed more than a few days in a single place. Only in the winter, when the cold battered them, would they settle down in a hospitable spot to wait out the snow.

6:33The herds were their life. Their meat, skin, and bones were all essential. A single mammoth would feed the whole band for weeks, a few bison for just as long. But their prey did not stay in one place. Seeking grass, water, and safety from predators, the mammoths, mastodons, camels, and bison wandered. So too did the band. They were never sure where their path might take them. One of the group had spotted bison tracks leading southwest,

7:04toward the big river nearby, just a few days old. They would follow. The band could not afford to wait, not even for a mother's grief.

7:14Following that herd, their travels would take them far away from this place. Perhaps this would be the last time the mother was so close to her child. But perhaps they would pass this way again in the future. Maybe, tracking a mammoth or a herd of camels, they might once again follow the creek to the rock shelter. She would stop and offer a few words to her dear little one, who had once been so full of life. He would never learn to hurl one of those distinctive, razor-sharp stone projectile points at a mammoth,

7:44or how to skin a camel, or the intricate technique for napping their gorgeous, double-faced stone blades. He would never see the great snow-capped peaks of the mountains to the south and north of here far higher than these local peaks as the band trudged up and down the passes. His journey had reached its end long before its proper time. The infant's people, however, were taking their first steps on a path that eventually led throughout the Americas. Within just a few centuries, their wanderings would take them south across the Great Plains,

8:17east toward the Atlantic Ocean, and south again through Mesoamerica into the northern reaches of the Amazon. As they did so, the world changed around them. The mammoths and mastodons disappeared. The climate grew warmer and the world more welcoming for larger numbers of people, but only if they adapted. Some of these descendants stopped moving altogether, settling down in a single place to exploit rich sources of game, shellfish, or plants. In this changing world, succeeding generations survived,

8:48flourished, and spread out for many thousands of years.

Anzic One's Story

8:52The Clovis people, as this group is known, were just one of the many societies of foragers populating the planet during the icy days at the end of the Pleistocene. Some pursued the last of the ancient megafauna to the point of extinction. Others specialized in hunting reindeer across the icy, treeless tundra of northern Europe, or gathering wild grasses in the warm and welcoming hills of the Fertile Crescent. All of them would have to adapt to survive or die as the world changed around them.

9:24The baby's remains and the dozens of artifacts accompanying him survived the collapse of the overhanging sandstone ledge. They would stay there for the next 13,000 years under conditions so favorable to preservation that the tiny bones retained traces of the baby's DNA until local Montana residents discovered them entirely by accident in the 1960s. When analyzed with a variety of statistical tests and models, researchers were able to place the infant in the context of both his people's past and their future.

9:56This tiny, unfortunate child, who died before he could experience a full life, nevertheless unlocked the secrets of his group's long journey through his genes. Anzic One, as the infant is known, belonged to a group known as the Clovis People, so named for the small New Mexico town where their distinctive artifacts were first excavated and recognized. His are the only set of human remains ever found that can be associated with these widespread stone artifacts. These tools are especially well-known for two reasons.

10:31First, for their beautiful and characteristic projectile points, known as Clovis points, which are often found in association with the bones of now-extinct animals. And second, because thanks to Anzic One's DNA, we now know precisely how the Clovis People were related to later indigenous Americans. They were directly ancestral to every other later group of indigenous people living everywhere from Canada to Chile. A great many discussions of the Clovis People

11:01focus on whether they were or were not the first humans to inhabit the Americas. The vast majority of scholars now believe others had preceded them, among them those who left their footprints at a dried-up lake bed in New Mexico's White Sands National Park as much as 23,000 years ago. Others reached the site of Monteverde in distant southern Chile several thousand years before the Anzic One burial.

11:25Perhaps they came down the western coastline of the Americas, following a highway of underwater kelp forests from British Columbia to Chile and occasionally exploring inland via the abundant rivers. Human feces found at Paisley Caves in Oregon have been dated to several centuries before the earliest Clovis occupation. Yet the focus on who came first is a red herring. The pre-Clovis evidence scattered across the Americas is currently impossible to assemble into a coherent narrative

11:56of life in the distant past. We have no idea what the relationships of the groups that left traces at White Sands or Paisley Caves to the later indigenous peoples of the Americas might have been. Perhaps they died out completely. There were many failed attempts at human colonization across the planet in the Upper Paleolithic that we can now see thanks to ancient DNA, such as the sequential, basically unrelated groups that populated Europe during this period. Alternatively,

12:27these earliest inhabitants of the Americas might have been absorbed into later arriving groups that then disappeared. We simply do not know, and perhaps we never will. By contrast, we do know a great deal about the Clovis people. They spread out through the interior of North America, went south into Mesoamerica, and entered the northern reaches of South America with incredible speed, covering thousands of miles in just a few centuries. Their toolkits were distinctive

12:57and ingenious, perfectly suited to the target-rich environment in which they found themselves. We know, thanks to ANZIC-1's preserved genetic material, that the vast majority of the ancestry of later indigenous Americans derived from the small initial group of which ANZIC-1 was a part. In the centuries before they hunted mammoth, camel, and bison in the vast expanses of late Pleistocene North America, ANZIC-1's ancestors had lived a long distance to the north, on the other side

13:28of the vast ice sheets that still covered most of what is today Canada. Many thousands of years before, they migrated across the now inundated floor of the Bering Sea. This is commonly called the Bering Land Bridge, the corridor connecting what are now Siberia and Alaska, but this is a misnomer. At its greatest extent, the geographic center of this lost world was 500 miles away from the nearest coast. A better name for this region is Beringia, which was less

13:58a temporary causeway connecting two continents than a distinct, long-lasting, biogeographical region stretching from Siberia to the Yukon. Even during the frigid days of the last glacial maximum, Beringia had been a reasonably pleasant place to live. Cold and dry, yes, but home to herds of grazing animals like mammoth, saiga, and muskox that fed on the lush grass. Along the coast, where the northern Pacific was surprisingly warm, fish and shellfish abounded.

14:29Beringia provided a variety of welcoming environments for its inhabitants, including ANZIC-1's direct ancestors. Rather than serving as a temporary road between continents, Beringia was instead a viable home for the groups ancestral to indigenous Americans, ANZIC-1's forebears included, for a period of time before they moved further south. Precisely how long this period lasted is unclear. Genetic evidence points toward a long period of separation between the ancestors

15:00of later indigenous Americans and other groups in East Asia, but that does not imply that the whole period of separation was spent in Beringia. In fact, given Beringia's size, it's likely that there were multiple groups residing there who were quite different from one another, even if they were all ultimately descended from the same source population that had traveled through northeast Asia toward the Arctic. This is what geneticists call population structure, and the ancient Beringians' long period of isolation

15:30directly shaped the future genetic portrait of indigenous Americans. It's difficult to tell precisely how all of this happened. Whether the period of residence in Beringia was short or long, how much population structure and diversity there was, or even where in Beringia these people resided. What happened after this standstill, however, is clearer. Following the last glacial maximum around 20,000 years ago, some of these groups, almost certainly more than one,

16:01began to move southward. The timing of these movements is hard to pinpoint, so was the question of whether there were already people living in the Americas when they began their journey. Two paths could have brought people south from Beringia, past the still-present ice sheets, and into the open landscapes of the Americas. The first was the coastal route, which would have involved short jumps from one viable spot to the next along the coasts of Alaska and British Colombia. Given the watercraft

16:31technology available in other places around the northern rim of the Pacific at the time, this would have been perfectly feasible. People living in Japan were exploiting coastal resources extensively, presumably using hide-covered boats or dugout canoes. From the west coast, the profusion of major rivers leading inland, the Fraser, Colombia, and Sacramento foremost among them, could have quickly granted entry to the continent's interior. If there were indeed people who moved south prior to Anzac-1's

17:01Clovis culture, they likely took the coastal route. The other potential route, via the interior of the continent, did not become viable until shortly before Anzac-1 was buried in Montana. It was simply impossible to traverse the mile-thick ice sheets covering most of what is now Canada. Around 15,000 years ago, however, the glaciers began to melt more quickly. A gap appeared at the seam between the Cordilleran ice sheet to the west and the Laurentide ice sheet to the east, a thousand-mile-long

17:32corridor stretching from Alaska to Alberta. Within a few centuries, first plants and then animals colonized the formerly desolate stretch. People, including the direct ancestors of the Clovis folk, could simply have walked south into their new land. Whether you're exploring your current fascinations or discovering new ones, Audible has all the stories that'll introduce you to your most fascinating self.

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19:59The site of Swan Point in present-day Alaska's Tonana Valley is the oldest absolutely unequivocal archaeological evidence of human occupation in the Americas. It's presumably not a coincidence that this site, with evidence of hearths, mammoth tusk, and stone tools that speak to connections to Siberian groups, sit quite near what would have been the opening of this ice-free corridor. The earliest layer of occupation at Swan Point around 14,500 years ago took place at

20:29roughly the time the corridor began to open. As mammoths, bison, and other prey began to explore the ice-free corridor, people followed the animals, eventually arriving in what is now southern Alberta and Montana. The ice-free corridor and coastal routes are not mutually exclusive. It's even possible that a group of migrants who had arrived via the coast explored the ice-free corridor in a northward direction, eventually linking up with people living in eastern Beringia as they came south. The genetic data

21:00suggests at least three different southward migrations at various points in time. One group, which we know of through DNA extracted from the remains of two infants found at the Upward Sun river site in Alaska, stayed behind in Beringia. Geneticists call them the ancient Beringians, and these people continued to interact with other groups living farther to the east in present-day Siberia. Another group split off from the ancient Beringians around this time, but they didn't head south for several thousand years afterward.

21:33Two others did leave immediately, and it's plausible that their distinct genetic signatures, closely related to one another in the recent past but separate sense, represent different migratory routes. They came into contact again only much later. One of those groups included the ancestors of Anzic 1 and his close relatives. Every piece of evidence we have about Anzic 1's forebears, from the distribution of their stone tools over the landscape to their genes,

22:03suggests that these early southward migrants moved with extreme speed. The initial group may have been quite small, just a few dozen people, but they found a world that suited them perfectly. The open grasslands of the Great Plains, far more extensive than they are now, extending south from Canada to northern Mexico and east toward the Atlantic. Prey animals were plentiful, and not just any prey, but large grazers, the last of the Pleistocene megafauna. Even as the giant-sized animals

22:35that had once been common across the planet disappeared elsewhere, the mammoths, mastodons, bison, horses, camels, and the predators that stalked them still abounded in the Americas.

22:47Megafauna occupy a special place at the pinnacle of human food sources. Hunting them is dangerous and difficult. Nobody wants to be gored by a bison, trampled by an elephant, or drowned by a hippopotamus, but the potential payoff is worth the risk. The larger the animal, the more meat it carries. The more meat, the more energy it provides to those who are able to kill and eat it. On top of that, the animal's bones are an essential component for toolmaking, while hides can be turned into clothing,

23:18shelter, and containers. A Colombian mammoth weighed 22,000 pounds. The average male white-tailed deer today weighs around 150 pounds. Observations of hunter-gatherers in more recent periods suggest that if they are available nearby, people usually choose to hunt larger animals whenever possible. The rate of return on energy expended is simply much higher. As they entered the interior of North America and encountered the megafauna,

23:49who presumably had little or no experience dealing with human predation, ANZIC-1's ancestors found themselves in a series of ecological zones that offered great promise. Lots of prey, little reason to fear intergroup conflict or competition for resources, and a warming climate. If they were to fully take advantage of the possibilities, however, they would need the right sets of tools, skills, and practices. We can understand that combination of characteristics and capabilities

24:19as a cultural package, a repository of knowledge about effective ways of using what we see around us. A group might encounter a river teeming with fish, but if that group has no tradition of making fishing spears or nets and no generational tradition of fishing, then they will not automatically benefit from that rich resource base. Grasses have a great deal of potential as a food source, but not without sickles for cutting the stalks and grindstones for processing the seeds. A single whale

24:50might feed dozens of people for weeks, but without specialized watercraft and weaponry, live whales are off the menu. Megafauna might be the highest-ranked prey given the return on energy expenditure. People might pursue them preferentially if they're available. Actually subsisting by hunting them, however, was not a given. Imagine trying to hunt an elephant with a fishing spear or a stone-bladed sickle. The success of the Clovis people in building a way

25:21of life based around megafauna predation was not foreordained. Instead, they developed a specific technological and cultural package that proved to be wildly successful in the conditions they encountered around 13,000 years ago. Far from being throwbacks to a timeless Paleolithic, the last representatives of an ancient predilection for hunting the biggest possible game, the Clovis people seem to have built an entirely new and exceptionally viable way of life.

25:51They found mammoths, bison, camels, horses, elk, mastodons, and other megafauna in abundance. But they had to make the right weapons to hunt them and the right tools to butcher them, then build their migration patterns around finding that prey at the right times of the year. Perhaps the earlier inhabitants of the Americas, the people who left enigmatic footprints at white sands, simply did not hit upon that same fortuitous combination of technology and circumstance.

26:21We don't know exactly when or where this package emerged. Theories abound in Beringia, in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, on the Great Plains, or the American Southwest, perhaps in the Southeast. But hard, conclusive evidence is sorely lacking. Earlier radiocarbon dates seem to appear in the southern Great Plains more than elsewhere, but there simply aren't many dates from which to work, and the archaeological record is far from complete. Wherever it first appeared,

26:52the precise location is less important than the fact that a group of people living somewhere south of the ice sheets eventually created the characteristic piece of Clovis technology. The fluted biface, a large, beautifully shaped stone projectile point with a distinctive groove, or fluting, running down the middle. This is the Clovis point, the razor-sharp stone signature of Anzik I and his people. Once you've seen one, the Clovis point

27:22is instantly recognizable. A lanceolate, like a sharpened teardrop, shape, flaked on both sides with impeccable skill, wider in the middle than at the base, and tapering to a fine point over its considerable length. A flute or groove runs down the middle, an extremely difficult feat for any stone napper to accomplish without breaking the nearly finished point. A brand-new Clovis point, made of extremely high-quality flint or obsidian, would be somewhere around four inches

27:53in length, and even larger examples are occasionally found. As it acquired chips and brakes over the course of its use, the point would be repeatedly resharpened and reduced in size until it broke completely or became too small to be useful. When affixed to a shaft and hurled with the aid of an atlatl or spear-thrower, like the plastic contraption one might use to throw a tennis ball for a particularly energetic dog, the Clovis point was a fearsome weapon. A group of experienced hunters could hurl them

28:23with tremendous force one after the other in the direction of their prey. A lone mastodon caught against a rock wall, for example, or a herd of bison trapped in a gully. The unfortunate animals would be peppered with razor-sharp projectiles thrown with enough velocity to punch through even the tough hide of a mammoth or the layers of fat protecting the internal organs of a giant short-faced bear. Recent experimental tests of Clovis points penetrated between five and nine inches of flesh equivalent on average,

28:53more than sufficient to reach the vitals of large megafauna. The Naco mammoth, a slain animal found in the sleepy locale of Naco, Arizona, had no fewer than eight Clovis points embedded in its flesh at the time of death. The distinctive and technically demanding fluting, the grooves running along both faces of the projectile point, served as short-faced shock absorbers to prevent breakage and allow for reuse of the valuable tool. The Clovis point was a brilliant technological adaptation that helped to produce a wildly successful

29:24way of life. Armed with projectiles of this design, the Clovis people were well-equipped to hunt the megafauna that wandered the grasslands of North America. The points themselves, with their shock-absorbing design and reusability, were perfectly suited to highly mobile groups that might travel hundreds of miles in pursuit of their prey. Clovis points were not the only item in the Clovis toolkit. Projectile points were not especially useful for anything other than hunting and killing large prey. For butchering carcasses,

29:54Clovis people needed sharp flakes to serve as cutting edges. To prepare hides, they needed scrapers. Cylindrical, beveled bone rods may have served as foreshafts for projectile points or, alternatively, as specialized tools for flaking the points. All of these are less recognizable, diagnostic in archaeological terms, than the distinctive Clovis points. This toolkit, so far as we can tell, was intended to service a highly mobile lifestyle predicated on hunting

30:24large game. Large, durable, reusable projectile points were an exceptional asset for that kind of lifestyle. That wasn't necessarily the only activity in which the Clovis people engaged.