Great Basin Indians: An Encyclopedic History

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224 P Paleo-Indians (13,000–9000 BP). Consistent with the exciting fact that archaeologists continue to push back the date of the earliest human beings in the New World—the oldest known occupation in the Americas being from the Monte Verde site in Chile, radiocarbon dated at 11,800–12,800 CE, or 14,500 year ago (Dillehy 1989)—the Great Basin continues to yield nearly comparably old dates. Richard Holmer (1986, 94), for example, writes about three fragmentary obsidian fluted points associated with mammoth at Owl Cave in southern Idaho whose bone collage renders dates between 12,900 and 10,900 years ago. And at the Sunshine Locality in Long Valley, northwest of Ely, Nevada, an archaeological site placed in 1978 on the National Register of Historic Places, Beck and Jones (2008) report the presence of a fluted projectile point within proximity of Pleistocene camel, whose bones they claim can be firmly dated by the uranium-thorium method between 9,000 and 9,500 years ago. Radiocarbon dates for charcoal located at a lower level also yield a comparably old date of 12,300 BP (Hockett, Goebel, and Graf 2007, 36). Indeed, Beck and Jones report “17 fluted points from the Sunshine Locality in eastern Nevada” (2007, 30). Dennis Jenkins (2007), on the basis of accelerator mass spectrometry, similarly reports an astonishingly early absolute date for human coprolites (dried feces) from the Paisley Five-Mile Point Cave 5 in south-central Oregon. This finding proves that Great Basin Indians not only hunted and inferentially ate Pleistocene megafauna (bison), but also used the place as a latrine 14,300 years ago, that is, 1,000 years seemingly before Clovis times (see Hockett, Goebel, and Graf 2008, 38)! Yet another remarkable early Paleo-Indian date comes from the Buhl Burial. Also known as the Buhl Woman, this discovery from Idaho shows a young Native American woman buried with a stemmed point under her head. According to stable isotope analysis performed during a bone biopsy, she consumed meat and salmon. Dated 10,675 BP, the Buhl Woman consequently is around 12,500 years old (Simms 2008a, 130; see Archaic). These findings, then, contradict Jesse Jennings (1957, 115), who wrote, “Nowhere has a buried kill site or other firm association of human activity with bones of extinct prey been encountered in the physiographic Great Basin.” Indeed, they are even inconsistent with new 12,300 BP radiocarbon dating of hearths found at the lowest level of this arguably most famous of all Great Basin excavations (see Danger Cave). Hence, along with the recovery of 239 Great Basin fluted points thus far in the Great Basin (Beck and Jones 2007, 34), and the firm dating of the two oldest skeletons found in the New World also in the Great Basin (see Spirit Cave Mummy; Wizards Beach Man), these combine to leave no doubt about the existence of “Early Man” in the Americas. Beck and Jones (2007) summarize the current state of affairs regarding fluted points in the Great Basin as follows: “(1) Fluted points appear later in the p a l e o - i n d i a n s 225 Great Basin than Clovis on the Plains; and (2) after its arrival [in the Great Basin], the Clovis fluted point was succeeded by at least one-non-Clovis fluted form” (ibid., 34; see also Beck and Jones 2010). Claims regarding Paleo-Indians in the Great Basin earlier than Clovis, however, remain unproven (see Grayson 1993, 56–61). Thus, at the Calico site in the central Mojave Desert of southeastern California, for example, stone tools putatively dated between 50,000 and 80,000 years ago by the renowned African paleontologist Louis Leakey turn out in fact, however, to have been “geofacts,” natural objects, not human made. Another unproved claim includes the date of “over 28,000 years” purported for stone tools allegedly found in association with extinct Pleistocene horse, mammoth, and camel bones at Tule Springs, Nevada. Yet another example of a now disproved early date for Great Basin Indians in the Americas is Mark Harrington’s contention that dung from a giant sloth, one of eleven of thirty-five genera of Pleistocene “megafauna ” arguably hunted to extinction by early humans in the Great Basin and elsewhere following the recession of the last ice age (circa 10,000 years ago), turns out not to have been coeval with so-called Gypsum points also found in Gypsum Cave in Nevada. Finally, the cache of twenty...