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The American blitzkrieg: a mammoth undertaking
Discover, June, 1987 by Jared Diamond
Martin's blitzkrieg theory has been a lightning rod for criticism, much of it centering on four doubts: Could a band of, say, 100 hunters arriving at Edmonton breed fast enough to populate an entire hemisphere in just 1,000 years? Could they spread fast enough to cover the distance from Edmonton to Patagonia in that time? Were Clovis hunters really the first people in the New World? And if they were, how could these hunters pursue millions of big mammals with such relentless ef- ficiency that not a single individual survived, but nevertheless leave little fossil evidence of their hunts?
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First, the question of breeding rate: populations of modern hunter-gatherers number only about one person per square mile, even when they're on the best hunting ground. Hence, once the whole Western Hemisphere had been settled, its population of hunter-gatherers would have been at most 10 million, the hemisphere's area outside of Canada and other areas covered by glaciers in Clovis times being about 10 million square miles. In modern instances in which colonists have arrived at an uninhabited land (e.g., when the H.M.S. Bounty mutineers reached Pitcairn Island), their population growth has been as rapid as 3.4 per cent per year. At that rate, which corresponds to each couple having four surviving children and a mean generation time of 20 years, 100 hunters would multiply to 10 million in 340 years. Thus, Clovis hunters might easily have been able to multiply to 10 million within a millennium.
But what about the descendants of the Edmonton pioneers reachingTierra del Fuego in 1,000 years? The overland straight-line distance is 8,000 miles, so that they would have had to average eight miles a year. That's a piddling pace: any hunter could have completed the year's march in a day or less. The quarry from which a Clovis tool originated can often be identified, and we know in that way that individual stone tools were moved as far as 200 miles. Some of the nineteenth century Zulu migrations in southern Africa are known to have covered nearly 3,000 miles in fifty years.
Whether Clovis hunters were the first humans to venture south ofthe Canadian ice sheet is a harder question, and any answer to it is highly disputed. All primacy claims for Clovis are based on negative evidence: at excavated Clovis sites, conclusive evidence for artifacts made by other peoples has been found above but not below the level with Clovis tools; and there are no irrefutable human remains with irrefutable pre-Clovis dates anywhere in the New World south of the former Canadian ice sheet. Mind you, there are dozens of claims of sites with pre-Clovis human evidence, but all of them are marred by serious questions about whether the material used for radiocarbon dating was contaminated by older carbon, or whether the dated material was really associated with the human remains, or whether the tools supposedly made by hand were just naturally shaped rocks. In contrast, the evidence for Clovis is undeniable, widely distributed, and accepted by archaeologists. Evidence for the earlier settlement of all the other habitable continents by more primitive hu mans is also unequivocal and universally accepted. Could people possibly have settled the New World and not left behind the usual trail of detritus -- stone tools, hearths, occupied caves, and occasional skeletons -- that, when submitted to dating, provides such persuasive clues for archaeologists? For that reason I now start off suspicious of each new pre-Clovis claim, although new claims are being advanced as fast as old ones are refuted. One good archaeological dig could demolish my suspicions, but until then I'm betting that Clovis people came first.
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