So, the other day, I wanted to hang a picture, but like so many occasional carpenters, I had misplaced not just one, but two hammers. Hmm. What to use? Fortunately, to pound the single nail I needed to pound, I found a substitute: A piece of granite I had picked up in a quarry. Guess what. It worked. How far have we really come?
Progress. That’s what we’re all about, right? And look! It has taken us in the Americas less than 20,000 years to effect enormous changes. But I am getting ahead of myself.
We certainly do seem to have come a long way since those first centuries and millennia in Monte Verde, Chile. We’ve gone from tools made of rocks, through hammers, to nail guns. And we have gone from constructing simple fire pits to building skyscrapers. As a species, we have long had the ability to use a technology to build stuff.
We know that dating the time of ancient people is difficult and that archaeologists have running arguments about where people first settled in the Americas. The rock shelter called Meadowcroft in western Pennsylvania is arguably the oldest site of habitation in North America. It predates the so-called Clovis people, and bears evidence of dwellers some 16,000 years ago. The logic of human migration to the Americas would suggest that upon crossing the Bering Land Bridge, people occupied North America before they moved across the isthmus to South America. But the discovery of artifacts from Monte Verde, Chile might overturn that logic because those artifacts now suggest a South American habitation 18,000 years ago. Did the people of Monte Verde jump over North America? Why didn’t they leave a record of their passage southward? Maybe they did, but we just haven’t found it yet. Maybe something happened to what they constructed.
As archaeologists know, stone tools last a long time. That fact enables them to peer into the distant past. The Monte Verde people, as archaeologist Thomas Dillehay appears to have shown, cooked and left stone tools. It seems that these ancient people had an ice-free corridor between the high mountains and the coast, where they could hunt, make fires, and chip away at some hard minerals and rocks to make stone tools.
Anyway, here we are 18,000 years later, also occupying the Americas like the Meadowcroft and Monte Verde people. Let’s look at ourselves: Sophisticated residents of two American continents now dominated by descendants of people from all over the planet but mostly by people who first crossed from lands on the shores of the eastern Atlantic rather than from the shores of the western Pacific. Two waves of influence have shaped the continents: Those who settled the land ten to twenty thousand years ago whose culmination of influence might be recognized in the ruins of Mayan, Incan, and Aztec cities, and those who settled the land in the past 500 years whose influence is manifested in modern structures. That’s a big gap in migrations, and it was a big gap in tool making and building stuff. In those intervening millennia, we improved our technology and built lots of stuff.
Well, yes, technologically, we seem very different from our ancient ancestors. But our needs and behaviors haven’t changed much. Yes, they used rock hammers to pound something, if not to build, then to break. In our contemporary world we also do a bunch of building and breaking. Much of the latter we do through war. So, over the centuries, we have broken what we have built in a cycle that probably will never end. Look at the ruins of cities both ancient and modern if you want examples. As a species, we seem to be enamored equally by making and breaking. And our ability to do either has been enhanced by our technological advances.
We don’t know whether the people of Monte Verde crossed through North America to get to South America. If they did, they might have built stuff on the way south, stuff they or some other group also destroyed. Make and Break. Is that our destiny?
Progress. That’s what we’re all about, right? And look! It has taken us in the Americas less than 20,000 years to effect enormous changes. But I am getting ahead of myself.
We certainly do seem to have come a long way since those first centuries and millennia in Monte Verde, Chile. We’ve gone from tools made of rocks, through hammers, to nail guns. And we have gone from constructing simple fire pits to building skyscrapers. As a species, we have long had the ability to use a technology to build stuff.
We know that dating the time of ancient people is difficult and that archaeologists have running arguments about where people first settled in the Americas. The rock shelter called Meadowcroft in western Pennsylvania is arguably the oldest site of habitation in North America. It predates the so-called Clovis people, and bears evidence of dwellers some 16,000 years ago. The logic of human migration to the Americas would suggest that upon crossing the Bering Land Bridge, people occupied North America before they moved across the isthmus to South America. But the discovery of artifacts from Monte Verde, Chile might overturn that logic because those artifacts now suggest a South American habitation 18,000 years ago. Did the people of Monte Verde jump over North America? Why didn’t they leave a record of their passage southward? Maybe they did, but we just haven’t found it yet. Maybe something happened to what they constructed.
As archaeologists know, stone tools last a long time. That fact enables them to peer into the distant past. The Monte Verde people, as archaeologist Thomas Dillehay appears to have shown, cooked and left stone tools. It seems that these ancient people had an ice-free corridor between the high mountains and the coast, where they could hunt, make fires, and chip away at some hard minerals and rocks to make stone tools.
Anyway, here we are 18,000 years later, also occupying the Americas like the Meadowcroft and Monte Verde people. Let’s look at ourselves: Sophisticated residents of two American continents now dominated by descendants of people from all over the planet but mostly by people who first crossed from lands on the shores of the eastern Atlantic rather than from the shores of the western Pacific. Two waves of influence have shaped the continents: Those who settled the land ten to twenty thousand years ago whose culmination of influence might be recognized in the ruins of Mayan, Incan, and Aztec cities, and those who settled the land in the past 500 years whose influence is manifested in modern structures. That’s a big gap in migrations, and it was a big gap in tool making and building stuff. In those intervening millennia, we improved our technology and built lots of stuff.
Well, yes, technologically, we seem very different from our ancient ancestors. But our needs and behaviors haven’t changed much. Yes, they used rock hammers to pound something, if not to build, then to break. In our contemporary world we also do a bunch of building and breaking. Much of the latter we do through war. So, over the centuries, we have broken what we have built in a cycle that probably will never end. Look at the ruins of cities both ancient and modern if you want examples. As a species, we seem to be enamored equally by making and breaking. And our ability to do either has been enhanced by our technological advances.
We don’t know whether the people of Monte Verde crossed through North America to get to South America. If they did, they might have built stuff on the way south, stuff they or some other group also destroyed. Make and Break. Is that our destiny?
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