The First Humans in the Americas -- In Pittsburgh?

Bering Sea Land-Bridge from 21,000 years ago

In Western culture, much of the "credit" for "discovering" the "New World" has gone to "Christopher Columbus" in 1492. I put his name in quotes because I got carried away with using quote marks. Also, his actual name was Cristóbal Colón, or perhaps Cristoforo Colombo. But, let's not get into that now. His arrival in the Western Hemisphere, also known now as the Americas (North, Central, and South), was the first by Europeans that led to the establishment of long-lasting settlements and "interaction" with local native populations.  By "interaction," I mean genocide, but that also is off-topic for now. 

Columbus was not the first European to reach the Americas. It is generally accepted that the Norseman Leif Ericson reached Newfoundland (get it? "New-found land") around the year 1000. He apparently built a temporary settlement there. There are also tales of others who might have reached the Americas, including an Irish monk, an African expedition, and Polynesian or Chinese sailors.

Although there is a lot of controversy about who first came to the shores of the Americas during the past thousand years or so, every supporter of each theory agrees on one point: There already were people there. Where did they come from, and when did they get there?
 
The traditional theory holds that Homo sapiens emerged about 200,000 years ago in Africa, and groups of these beings spread throughout the world, beginning about 70,000 years ago. Asian populations then travelled across a land-bridge that had existed where the Bering Strait now separates the Americas from Asia. The geological records allow speculation that humans could have traversed the Bering Strait as long as 40,000 years ago, but there were many factors that would have limited further travel south. Scientists had come to the general conclusion that human habitation took root in the Americas about 14,000 years ago, after some ice-free passages allowed migration south from the land-bridge, which disappeared soon after.

For many years, the Clovis (or "Llano") culture was considered the common ancestors of all American indigenous peoples. This theory was based on the discovery of similar, distinct arrowheads and other tools that had been discovered in Clovis, New Mexico and other locations. These Clovis implements, dated at about 13,500 years old, were the oldest known human-related findings in America. Well, until older ones began to be found.

In 1975, an archaeological site in southern Chile, Monte Verde, provided evidence of a pre-Clovis site dating back about 14,800 years. This was over 1,000 years before the oldest Clovis artifacts, and even seems to predate the land-bridge possibility. So where did the Monte Verde people come from? It is speculated that they didn't use the land-bridge at all, but might have traveled along the western shores. However, there is no supporting evidence of this -- any coastal settlements would now be under deep ocean water.

Over the years, additional sites have been discovered that predate Clovis: One site in central Texas has artifacts up to 15,500 years old, while another near Richmond, Virginia has artifacts ranging in age between 15,000-17,000 years old. One of the most interesting of these pre-Clovis sites is located at Meadowcroft Rockshelter, just 27 miles from downtown Pittsburgh. Artifacts found here provide evidence that human habitation existed there at least 19,000 years ago! This area near Pittsburgh is now the oldest known human habitation site in the Western Hemisphere. This fact creates all sorts of complex questions.

For instance: If humans populated America from Asia, when did the ancestors of the Meadowcroft site first enter the hemisphere and how (there was no usable passage from Asia 19,000 years ago)? Why are there no intermediary sites found between Alaska and Pittsburgh? Why would anyone want to come to Pittsburgh in the first place? Perhaps the first humans on America were not from Asia after all? If not, where did they come from? Even Leif Ericson was not going to appear for another 18,000 years.

Solutrean?

Between 17,000-21,000 years ago, the Solutrean culture existed in today's France and Spain. Their use of tools and artwork were far advanced beyond other contemporary human settlements. Based on similarities between Solutrean arrowheads and tools with those of the old Clovis culture, there is speculation that Solutrean peoples traveled along the ice sheets of northwestern Europe and eventually crossed over to America, perhaps even ending up in Pittsburgh. If this is so, then the Spanish conquest of the New World was actually just a civil war amongst different generations of Spaniards. Well, you know what I mean. Unfortunately for the Solutrean theory, there is not much evidence besides speculation to support it.

DNA Evidence: Ten Lost Tribes?

No, the earliest American natives are not the Ten Lost Tribes from Israel -- for one thing, those tribes went missing less than 3,000 years ago. However.... DNA tests of present-day native Americans who have not interbred with Europeans have come up with a peculiar mystery: In addition to expected links to north Asian populations, some tribes have significant amounts of genetic material from a specific group in the Middle East. The DNA marker Haplogroup X is found most frequently in the Druze, who inhabit areas in Israel, Lebanon, and Syria. The subgroup Haplogroup X2, in fact, is found in about 27% of Israeli Druze. Where is there another high percentage of Haplogroup X? The Algonquian tribes of northeastern North America (including the Pittsburgh area) have the marker at a 25% frequency, which is unlike most of the other ancient peoples of the American continents.

Conclusion

So, when did humans first enter the Western Hemisphere, and where did they come from? Well, no one really knows. The problem is that the best evidence is likely under hundreds of feet of water, because when the last Ice Age ended and the glaciers receded, the world's oceans rose and covered any traces of habitation. In addition, finding any human remains more than 10,000 years old has been exceedingly rare, and controversial. So most of the migration theories are mere speculation based on circumstantial or second-hand evidence -- such as dating mammoth bones that appear to have been in contact with humans.

What is most likely is that there were a number of migrations at various times in the last 20,000 years -- land-bridge across the Bering Strait, small boats along the Pacific coasts of Asia and America, and possibly even small boats along the Atlantic coasts of Europe and America. America had been "discovered" innumerable times before Columbus/Colon even boarded the Santa Maria.
 
And the oldest place in the New World? Druze in Pittsburgh. I didn't see that coming.