A History of the World in 100 Objects - Dr Neil MacGregor [18]
This small object is the business end of a deadly weapon. It’s made of stone and it was lost by a person like us, a modern human being, in Arizona more than 13,000 years ago. It sits in the North American gallery of the British Museum, among the magnificent feather headdresses, in a case beside the totem poles. The spearhead is made of flint; it’s about the size of a small, slim mobile phone, but in the shape of a long thin leaf. The point is still intact and still very sharp. The surface of both sides has beautiful ripples. When you look closely, you can see that these are the scars from its manufacture, where the flakes of the flint have been carefully chipped off. It’s a lovely thing to touch and stroke, and it’s very well adapted to its lethal purpose.
Perhaps the most surprising fact about this spearhead is that it was found in America. Modern humans originated in Africa, and for most of our history we were confined to Africa, Asia and Europe, all connected by land. How did the people who made spears like this get to America, and who were they?
Spearheads like this are by no means rare; it is just one of thousands that have been found across North America and that are the firmest evidence yet of the first human beings to inhabit the continent. They’re known as Clovis points, after the small town in the US state of New Mexico where they were first discovered in 1936, alongside the bones of the animals they had killed. So the makers of these stone points, the people who hunted with them, are known as Clovis people.
The discovery at Clovis was one of the most dramatic leaps forward in our understanding of the history of the Americas. Almost identical Clovis points have been found in clusters from Alaska to Mexico, and from California to Florida. They show that these people were able to establish small communities right across this immense area as the most recent Ice Age was coming to an end, about 13,000 years ago.
Were the Clovis people the first Americans? A leading expert in this period, Professor Gary Haynes, makes the case:
There’s some scattered evidence that people were in North America maybe before these Clovis points were made, but most of that evidence is arguable. Clovis look like the first people. If you dig an archaeological site almost anywhere in North America, the bottom levels are about 13,000 years old, and if there are any artefacts, they will be Clovis or Clovis-related. So it looks like these were the very first dispersers, who filled up the continent and became the ancestors of modern Native Americans, populating just about all of North America, and they came from somewhere up north, because the studies of genetics seem to prove that the ancestry of Native Americans is north-east Asian.
So archaeology, DNA and the bulk of academic opinion tell us that the original population of America arrived in Alaska from north-east Asia less than 15,000 years ago.
By about 40,000 years ago, humans like ourselves had spread from Africa all over Asia and Europe, even crossing seas to get to Australia. But no humans had yet set foot in the Americas. They got their chance thanks to major changes in climate. First, about 20,000 years ago, an intensification of the Ice Age locked up a great deal of water in ice-sheets and glaciers, leading to a huge fall in sea level. The sea between Russia and Alaska (the Bering Strait) became a wide and easily passable land bridge. Animals – bison and reindeer among them – moved across to the American side, and the humans hunting them followed.
The way further south into the rest of America was through an ice-free corridor between the Rocky Mountains on the Pacific side and the vast continental ice-sheet covering Canada on the other. As the climate warmed up 15,000 years ago, it was possible for large numbers of animals, followed again by their human hunters, to get through this corridor to the rich hunting grounds across what is now the United States. This was the