Colorado: The Highest State, Second Edition

2. The First Coloradans

21 Evidence of the first human beings in Colorado dates back more than 17,000 years. These first people were hunters and food gatherers who had come to North America from Asia around 25,000 years ago. To find out more about these earliest Coloradans, archaeologists continue to excavate their sites and study the relics they find. The ancient past remains a giant puzzle for which we are still finding new pieces. Paleo-IndIans The Paleo-Indian people, who began to settle Colorado around 13,000 years ago, had no written language. We know about them because they left rock art behind. They either painted pictographs on rock walls or used stones to carve out petroglyphs. Archaeologists have also found campsites, burial sites, stone tools, and skeletons of some of the large animals Paleo-Indians killed to eat. They hunted huge bison or buffalo, ground sloths, and mammoth elephants. These early people also hunted animals you would recognize: rabbits, deer, and coyotes. At the time of the Paleo-Indians, mammoths, camels, and horses roamed all across Colorado. Mammoth bones have been found at various sites in the state. These giant animals eventually became extinct in Colorado. The FIrsT Coloradans 2 22 T h e F I r s T C o l o r a d a n s Because there are no written records, scholars call this the prehistoric period. Women and men who study prehistoric peoples are archaeologists. When they find evidence of early people, they carefully explore the area and record their findings: bones, tools, drawings, and other signs of daily life. These archaeological sites are called “digs” because the scientists dig and sift through the dirt. The objects they find are called artifacts. Folsom PeoPle It was not until the twentieth century that experts began to seriously study the first Coloradans. Amateur archaeologists made one of the first and most important finds in 1924 on the Lindenmeier Ranch northeast of Fort Collins. The Lindenmeier site became one of the most famous digs in the state. Archaeologists worked at this site for years. Knives, scrapers, engraved bone pieces, bone needles, and Folsom spear points were found. Archaeologists called these spear points Folsom points because they were first found at a site near Folsom, New Mexico. People who used these points were called Folsom people. Early Coloradans carved these petroglyphs into the walls of Yellow Jacket Canyon in southwestern Colorado. They seem to be waving at us from the past. Courtesy, Denver PubliC library. T h e F I r s T C o l o r a d a n s 23 George McJunkin, an African American cowboy, made the first discovery of Folsom points amid some buffalo bones on a ranch near Folsom. McJunkin reported his find to the Denver Museum of Natural History, which eventually sent archaeologists to the site to study the Folsom people. Folsom people are the first Coloradans we know much about because they left their tools behind. Many of these tools were found at kill sites, where Folsom families killed an animal and feasted. The Folsom culture lived in Colorado around 11,000 to 10,000 years ago. In 1932, a professor from Denver’s Regis College, Harold Bilgery, S.J., and his students found the Dent site along the South Platte River in Weld County. At Dent, a tiny railroad stop, they found a manmade spear point among the skeletons of mammoths. This Clovis point proved that human beings had hunted the giant mammals around 12,000 years ago. The spear points were named for similar stone points found in Clovis, New Mexico. The Clovis people had occupied Colorado even earlier than the Folsom folk. We can learn a great deal about the past from archaeological digs at sites where prehistoric Coloradans lived. This Archaic era ruin is being excavated by Fort Lewis College students in southwestern Colorado. Courtesy, Fort lewis College, southwestern stuDies Center, Durango, Co. 24 T h e F I r s T C o l o r a d a n s Plano CulTure The Folsom people were followed by a group called the Plano (plains) culture . Like the Clovis and Folsom cultures before them, the Plano people made fine projectile points for hunting animals. They also made stone grinding slabs for crushing nuts and seeds, which they gathered along with fruits and berries. Robert Jones Jr., a rancher near Wray in eastern Colorado...