America's Wetland: An Environmental and Cultural History of Tidewater Virginia and North Carolina

1. Ice-Age Enclave

7 1 Ice-Age Enclave The Albemarle region holds a unique place in prehistory of the Americas. Just as this region today is the northernmost warm strip along the Atlantic coast, it was also a thermal strip during the last ice age (late Pleistocene ). Glaciers and winter ice came close to, but did not encompass, this unglaciated coastal enclave whose relative warmth and abundance of food was amenable to early human habitation. Its nearest ice-age counterpart across the Atlantic, near the other end of the Gulf Stream, was southern France, where a cultural enclave renown for Clovis-type tools is well documented at about the same time or a bit earlier (see, for example, the Solutrean culture in Lascaux, France). The contentious Solutrean Hypothesis that ice-age man migrated from Europe to North America lies outside the scope of this book. However, Pleistocene Albemarle may become relevant to this debate in that this ancient warm ecosystem represents the northernmost Solutrean counterpart in the New World during the last glacial maximum. On both sides of the Atlantic the sea level was much lower than today, resulting in coastlines extending farther into the Atlantic. Furthermore, during the last ice age the Albemarle Sound, the Pamlico Sound, and even the Chesapeake Bay did not exist. Instead, they were represented by the paleo-Roanoke River, the paleo-Pamlico River, and the paleo-James/paleo-Susquehanna River, respectively, each discharging independently into the ocean at the continental slope. Thus, ten thousand years ago, when the sea level was about four hundred feet below its present level, the main channel of the Roanoke River was located at what is now the bottom of the Albemarle Table 1. Cold-tolerant animals and plants at southern limits of distribution in the Albemarle region At the time of the ice ages, cold-tolerant animals and plants of the Albemarle region lived along a steep thermal gradient in proximity to a warm coastal strip warmed by the Gulf Stream. Most of the following species are vaguely reminiscent of such relicts in that their southern limits of distribution along the East Coast occur at or near the Albemarle ecosystem. A fossil ancestor of the great auk was found in a phosphate mine in Beaufort County, North Carolina, indicating that conditions in the Albemarle region were boreal during the Pliocene epoch, two to five million years ago (S. Olson 1977). The recently extinct great auk, a flightless, penguinlike seabird, was reportedly a winter visitor to this general region in the early eighteenth century (Gaskell 2000). Its near relatives the razorbill and the dovekie are both species of auk typically found in the Arctic, but they return irregularly this far south as winter visitors. Geese and swans return annually from subarctic regions to overwinter here. Common name Scientific name Great auk (Pliocene ancestor) Pinguinus alfrednewtoni Great auk (historical) Pinguinus impennis Razorbill auk Alca torda Dovekie (little auk) Alle alle Atlantic brant goose Branta bernicla hrota Trumpeter swan (historical) Cygnus buccinator Tundra swan (whistling swan) Cygnus columbianu River herring (alewife) Alosa pseudoharengus Redback salamander Plethodon cinereus Redbelly turtle Pseudemys rubriventris Southern bog lemming Synaptomys cooperi Intermediate woodfern Dryopteris intermedia Eelgrass Zostera marina Ice-Age Enclave W 9 Sound, and it emptied into the ocean between fifteen and sixty miles east of Nags Head.∞ In the Albemarle enclave of the last ice age the nearby tundralike climate supported mastodons and mammoths and other megafauna, which could have served as food for skilled hunters. The southern bog lemming Synaptomys cooperi is a Pleistocene relict that is still living in the Dismal Swamp and other parts of northeastern North Carolina (see table 1).≤ Perhaps the most remarkable mammal once living along the coastal strip was the giant (seventeen-foot-long) ground sloth (Eremotherium eomigrans), an intact skeleton of which was found recently near Wilmington . No direct evidence exists that early humans in the Albemarle killed these or other megafauna now extinct in this area, but based on evidence elsewhere, such a supposition is reasonable. (In this context, the PageLadson pre-Clovis site of northern Florida is particularly significant.) Recent archaeological research in the Albemarle basin has presented tantalizing evidence that a site on the Chowan-Nottoway River (Cactus Hill, Virginia) is one of the oldest inhabited parts of North America, dating to at least 15,000 bp (i.e., before the last ice age receded). In other words, humans were living in this...