Five hundred generations have tales yet to tell

By Gary Raham
Nature Writer and Illustrator

When I researched my June article in the North Forty News about the famous Lindenmeier Folsom culture site north of Wellington, I reeled at contemplating the 500 generations or more that separated me from the human beings that hunted giant bison 20 miles north of--and 12,000 years from the construction of--my back door.

The Lindenmeier site shines because of its age, size and quantity of human tools and animal remains found there. Additional evidence of a rich prehistory is not lacking in Colorado--or even in Larimer County. Archaeologists have recorded at least 80 sites within 25 miles of Lindenmeier over the years.

What happened to these ancient Americans and what can they tell us about survival in our mile-high slice of a periodically water-challenged paradise?

The Folsom people hunted megabeasts still wandering in the lush, if cool, shadow of melting Wyoming glaciers and left their delicately chipped spear points behind for us to admire. Those that followed--some as yet unclear combination of descendents and new immigrants from Asia--left behind different points and more hand stones (manos) and grinding slabs (metates) that apparently reflected a greater reliance on wild plants in their diet.

By 7,000 years ago, the great Ice Age animals were dead and the so-called Archaic cultures filled their middens with the bones of rabbits, rats, marmots and other relatively small game. Cultures near the eastern seaboard thrived in rich forest habitats, while in the far west the ocean provided a wealth of seafood. In the continental interior, populations apparently shifted locations with the dictates of a climate growing generally warmer and drier, but with relatively wetter interludes. None of the Archaic cultures farmed, but still sustained long-term settlements based on the living wealth of the land.

Archaeologists track population movements and characterize culture through the material remains left behind: Stone circles and pits reveal building skills; notched and shaped spear tips and arrowheads hint at technological innovations; grave goods and animal remains provide clues to culture and environment.

Cores from deep ocean drilling and polar ice sheets still intact from those times allow archaeologists to match cultures to the climates in which they lived and speculate on cause and effect. For example, archaeological sites with ages from 4,500 to 7,000 years ago seem to cluster at higher elevations, implying that the mountains may have been a refuge during two intervals of major drought in the region.

Human remains, as described by E. Steve Cassells in his "Archaeology of Colorado" (1997) paint a picture of one point in time 6,500 years ago. Just south of Middle Park near the Colorado River someone laid to rest a woman in her early 60s at a site called Yarmony. Her body was flexed and her head faced east. She lay on her left side. Two manos lay at her side. Abundant sage pollen led investigators to believe that bundles of the aromatic plant may have been burned in a ceremony not unlike that of later cultures in the area. Remains of two pit houses and other artifacts implied that this mountain site was not a temporary dwelling. The Yarmony woman's people may have lived for a hundred generations - 2,000 years - in mountain valleys mostly insulated from mega droughts that baked Colorado's lowlands.

Perhaps seeing the actual bones of the Archaic peoples would bring their life and times into clearer focus for most of us than chipped stones and grinding stones, but they are rare.

"There are about two dozen human remains older than 8,000 radiocarbon years in North America," said Jason LaBelle, assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at Colorado State University.

The number of remains between 8,000 and 2,000 years old is also minimal. In addition to the Yarmony woman, three other burials have been formally described: a 25-year-old male who died 3,500 years ago in Draper Cave in the foothills south of Pueblo; an individual--perhaps a hunter--found in a pit grave near Dotsero (dated as 4,200 years old) with grave goods that included the remains of birds, small mammals and a domestic dog; and the 2,000-year-old remains of someone who was buried in what would later become a feedlot in Weld County near Greeley.

Ironically, while the Archaic populations of foragers that preceded us in Colorado may have been at the mercy of an oscillating, post-Ice Age climate, some researchers now speculate that the activities of humans--especially in the Old World where early agriculture contributed to the loss of vast tracks of European forest between 7,500 and 8,000 years ago--may have had significant impact on that climate change. William Ruddiman in his book "Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum" goes into some detail on how he believes human activities began to take control of climate far before the Industrial Revolution.

For the most part, early Native Americans (from 7,000 to 500 years ago) thrived in spite of significant climate change. They had room in which to move and large reservoirs of water, both above and below ground, partly as a legacy of melting glaciers. In a further bit of irony, what slashed population numbers in the Americas from perhaps 60 million to 5 million just before the arrival of Columbus was not climate, but the introduction of European diseases that quickly spread from sites of early European contact and decimated unprotected populations--in most cases long before they ever saw a European for themselves. (Ruddiman speculates that that monumental population crash may have contributed to a subsequent cool dip in the climate called the Little Ice Age.)

At any rate, though the precise message is muffled by the passage of time, the Native Americans who preceded us here still have important things to say--about how they lived their lives, about the consequences of human activities, and about how our lives interact with the complex systems that keep the planet healthy.