Anzick-1, the Clovis People, and Life at the End of the Ice Age

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The Arctic winds blowing in buffeted the hunters in their mammoth- and camel-hide clothing. Spring was coming to the valley, but the dying days of winter still carried the freezing burn of the great ice sheets which lay a few weeks’ walk to the north.

The hunters and their people had come from the north not long ago; the eldest among them were the grandchildren of those original migrants, sages who told generational stories of enormous glaciers stretching as far as the eye could see. They themselves had seen the vast lakes where meltwater collected behind dams of ice, and they told of the apocalyptic floods that scoured the land when those dams collapsed.

This was a hard place, but it was home, a vast territory that promised new possibilities around every spiky, snowy ridge and at each new river juncture. Countless, well-trod pathways through the grass betrayed the recent passage of migrating herds: camels, horses, bison, and even the occasional mastodon or mammoth. The hunters tracked them for miles, leaving behind tiny signs of their presence in an enormous and nearly empty landscape.

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On this particular journey, the hunters left just such a sign behind them under a sandstone ledge. On the surface, it was a tiny mound of dirt, but beneath the mound lay the remains of an infant. The baby boy, born toward the end of the previous spring, had not lived to see the wildflower meadows erupt in their riotous colors. With him the hunters had left a few of their stone tools, the treasured, razor-sharp points that speared their prey, the scrapers they used to clean hides, the blades they used to cut their meat. Maybe he would need them, wherever he went next.

Perhaps the band of hunters would pass this way again. If the herds traveled this direction, they would follow, but if their path took them elsewhere, so be it. They were wanderers, strangers in unfamiliar territory. Within a few centuries, their many descendants had journeyed thousands of miles from this place: south into Mexico, east across the Great Plains, and perhaps even back up north. The secrets of all those future journeys lay in the bones of that tiny infant, who died before he could take his first steps.

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I’m Patrick Wyman. Welcome to Past Lives.

Around 13,000 years ago, a band of wandering hunters stopped at an overhanging rock ledge in what is now Montana. They probably didn’t stay for long, at most a few days, but they left behind something extraordinarily precious and heartbreaking: the remains of a year-old baby, felled by the harsh conditions of life on the northern Great Plains during the last gasp of the Ice Age.

Millennia later, in 1968, two men were digging away at a hillside with a backhoe and a dump truck, collecting fill dirt to take down to the local high school for the construction of a septic tank drain field. As they churned through the soil with the machine, the two caught sight of bone and stone artifacts sticking up out of the ground, and immediately stopped digging. They got more delicate tools, and dug down further. Before long, they ran across fragments of crushed human bone: the infant’s remains, still in place after 13,000 years. Archaeologists quickly got to work on what the diggers had unearthed, naming the location the “Anzick Clovis Site,” after the owners of the land - the Anzicks - and the archaeological group to which the stone tools placed with the baby belonged, the Clovis Culture. The infant they called “Anzick-1.” He will be the subject of today’s episode, the first person we meet in our brand-new season, Bodily Experiences.

The Clovis people, as we call them, were among the first to arrive in the Americas as the glaciers receded and the Ice Age finally came to an end. Anzick-1’s remains are the only human skeleton ever discovered in association with Clovis artifacts. The artifacts found in Anzick-1’s tiny grave are numerous and among the finest examples of Clovis technology ever discovered: mammoth-ivory rods, razor-sharp stone flakes, and most of all, the beautiful double-sided projectiles - Clovis points - that define this archaeological culture. Even then, the most stunning evidence the Anzick site had to offer wasn’t stone or ivory; it was the wealth of thousands of years of genetic information, kept safe inside the infant’s bones beneath the earth.

It would take another half-century after the site’s discovery for its true importance to become clear. Testing Anzick-1’s remains for DNA revealed that the group to which he belonged, the Clovis people, was ancestral to practically all later indigenous Americans. Anzick-1’s life was extraordinarily brief, but in death, his bones unlocked the secrets of how humans populated the Americas.

Today, the Anzick site lies just south of the tiny town of Wilsall, Montana, situated among the rolling grasslands and hills nestled between sub-ranges of the Rocky Mountains. The Shields River, a tributary of the Yellowstone, burbles through the bottomland just below a rocky sandstone outcrop. Thirteen thousand years ago, that sandstone formed the ledge of an overhanging rock shelter, a welcome respite for the nomadic hunters who passed by. The Crazy Mountains lie just to the east, easily visible on a clear summer day; they would have been even more prominent when the infant and his Clovis relatives came to this place, covered at the time by a thick layer of ice extending well down the slopes.

The world was a colder and harsher place then. The Ice Age - technically the “Last Glacial Period” - that had dominated the last 100,000 years of the planet’s history was nearing its end, but the hunters had no way of knowing that; the world had warmed and cooled in regular but unpredictable cycles several times over those thousand centuries. They were living in the midst of the last cold snap of the Ice Age, a period we call the Younger Dryas. While the Earth had steadily warmed over the past 5,000 or so years following the Last Glacial Maximum,when the ice sheets reached their greatest extent, the Younger Dryas reversed that progress; new forests reverted to hardy tundra, and glaciers expanded once more.

The whole planet looked wildly different then. It was substantially colder: With the onset of the Younger Dryas, temperatures dropped about 5 degrees Fahrenheit in At the peak of the Last Glacial Maximum, sea levels had been 440 feet below where they stand today, and they were still hundreds of feet below their present levels despite thousands of years of steady warming between then and the Younger Dryas. The continental shapes we know so well now were unrecognizable: The broad expanses of continental shelf that extend out into the ocean from present-day coastlines were dry land. Much of the North Sea between Britain and the European continent was a landmass called Doggerland; the islands of Southeast Asia, like Java and Borneo, were an extended region known as Sundaland; and in the far north, Beringia, a distinctive region in its own right, linked Alaska and Siberia together. The center of Beringia was about 500 miles from the most distant coastline; the submerged portions of the landmass would have doubled the present-day size of Alaska, so it was hardly a “land bridge.”

The vegetation and animal life that covered the planet were different, too. The vast temperate forests of the northern hemisphere didn’t exist, nor did many of the jungles that now blanket the tropics. In their places were diverse, thriving grasslands: savannah in Amazonia and parts of Southeast Asia, and highly productive Mammoth Steppe across most of Eurasia and North America. Animals suited to these environments, namely large grazers and the predators that ate them, abounded: These were the Pleistocene megafauna, like woolly mammoth and woolly rhinoceros, giant ground sloths, short-faced bears, cave lions, and sabre-tooth tigers. Wild horses and camels roamed the Great Plains, and herds of reindeer ranged far south into France and southern Europe.

It was probably the migrations of these animals that pulled Anzick-1’s ancestors down through Beringia into North America. Evidence for people living in the Americas prior to that time, around 13,000 years ago, is sparse and controversial; it’s likely that there were humans living somewhere on those two continents before then, but our scattered archaeological and genetic indications don’t cohere into any sort of viable narrative about what those earlier occupants were doing or how they were related to later indigenous people in the Americas. There were, however, many groups of people living up north in Beringia. Their ancestors had probably migrated east from Siberia in the past 10,000 years or so, becoming isolated from other groups living in northeast Asia for long enough to develop a distinctive genetic signature. Since Beringia was such a big place, with huge distances separating Yukon and Siberia, those groups had hundreds or thousands of years to diverge from one another. This created what geneticists call “population structure” among the ancient Beringians. While these groups shared recent common ancestors, genetic drift within a limited set of mating partners made them distinctive enough that we can track their signatures in the DNA record through vast periods of time and across staggeringly huge geographic spaces.

Around 14,000 years ago, Anzick-1’s ancestors were probably living somewhere along the eastern edges of Beringia, in what is today central Alaska. For thousands of years, their overland path south had been blocked by the two enormous ice sheets that covered most of present-day Canada. The Cordilleran ice sheet, in the west, stretched from Washington state to Yukon; the much larger Laurentide ice sheet extended from the Canadian Rockies to Greenland to the Arctic. As the planet slowly warmed following the Last Glacial Maximum, these two ice sheets began to melt along their edges. Where the two ice sheets had once met and merged along the continental divide, the melting created an open, ice-free corridor, the viable land route to the south that had so long eluded the Beringians.

While it’s likely that some people went south along the coast via boat before and after this time, the opening of the ice-free corridor aligns neatly with the dates we have for the Clovis people. The archaeological site of Swan Point, located near what’s now Fairbanks, dates to between 14,000 and 14,500 years ago. It sits close to what would have been the northern opening of the ice-free corridor. Stone artifacts discovered at Swan Point bear a strong resemblance to the later toolkit of the Clovis people. It is as close to a smoking gun as the archaeological record is likely to provide: A group very much like the Clovis people lived near what was likely the northern entrance to the ice-free corridor, at precisely the time they would have needed to start moving south in order to meet the dates we see in North America a thousand years later.

Among those people who camped at Swan Point, cooking red deer over the fire and cracking the leftover bones for their marrow while others flaked their stone tools, were Anzick-1’s ancestors. As years, decades, and then centuries passed, plants and animals colonized the ice-free corridor from both directions. Anzick-1’s ancestors followed the animals as they had always done, tracking them south and eventually emerging into a brand-new world.

Anzick-1 lived his all-too-brief life within a pioneer society. If there were other people living south of the ice sheets or not, there weren’t very many of them, and the small founding groups of Clovis people entered a landscape that was effectively empty of humans. Its animal occupants were wildly different from what we see in North America today. Herds of woolly mammoth rumbled across the open grassl ands. Camels and horses wandered the Great Plains, pursued by dire wolves, lions, and saber-toothed cats. Short-faced bears, far larger than the biggest grizzly, hibernated in protected dens. Giant ground sloths and other megafauna were a common sight. Combined with the bitter cold and omnipresent ice, it sounds like a lethal and unwelcoming environment to us in the present; to Anzick-1’s hardy band, however, it was more like paradise.

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People have been hunting animals since long before our ancestors could be classified as Homo sapiens. We as a species tend to follow predictable patterns in how we choose our prey, the same general patterns that most predators follow: We take the biggest game first, because bigger animals provide more meat and thus more return on the energy investment we make to hunt and kill the animal. An adult Columbian mammoth weighed roughly 22,000 pounds; a white-tailed deer weighs about 150 pounds. Given the choice, a hunter is going to take the mammoth over the deer every time. The land the Clovis people entered around 13,000 years ago was full of enormous ambulatory meat lockers with little-to-no experience of human predation. It wasn’t exactly like shooting fish in a barrel, but they didn’t have a lot of competition; the prey didn’t make it very hard for them, either. In those conditions, the Clovis people thrived. A small initial group, probably no more than a few hundred people, multiplied over and over again, spreading quickly through this new continent. Within just a few hundred years, by about 12,750 years ago, descendants of that group could be found across much of North America, from Montana to northern Mexico and the Pacific Northwest to the Atlantic shores of the southeast. The sheer speed of their expansion is remarkable, and in my opinion, perhaps the clearest example of demographic success we can see anywhere in prehistory.

Anzick-1 was born roughly halfway through this period of extraordinarily rapid expansion. The first Clovis artifacts date to about 150 years before his birth; the latest come from about 150 years after. Those artifacts are well known and understood, particularly the double-sided projectile points the Clovis people used to hunt big game. Clovis points, as these are known, are intricate three-to-four-inch-long blades with a groove - or a “flute” - running down the center. They’re extremely difficult to make, aesthetically beautiful but razor-sharp and dangerous. When affixed to the end of a hunter’s spear—which he would hurl in a move not unlike the plastic contraption we use to throw tennis balls for our dogs—the damage caused would be lethal even to the largest game. Modern experiments have shown that a Clovis point can penetrate between five and nine inches of flesh equivalent, easily enough to reach the organs of an ancient bison or mastodon. And there was always more than one being thrown: The Naco Mammoth, found in Arizona in 1951, had no fewer than eight Clovis points embedded in its flesh when it died. Armed with Clovis points, these hunters were perfectly equipped to stalk and kill the large grazers that were still common in the unexplored lands of North America.

When the people of his band placed little Anzick-1 in his grave, they also put a finished Clovis point in the ground with him, along with dozens of other stone and bone artifacts: double-sided blades used like knives to cut meat, sharp scrapers to clean hides, enigmatic beveled rods made from bone, and larger pieces of stone that would eventually have been knapped into smaller tools. The infant was buried with most of the technological necessities that would have allowed him to survive in the freezing cold of the northern Great Plains as an adult. Scientific investigations of those tools have revealed a great deal about how Anzick-1’s band would have lived, and what he saw around him during his all-too-brief life.

Our understanding of the lives of the Clovis people relies on inference and educated guesswork. Archaeologists have never found an unambiguous settlement, only the possible remains of seasonal or nightly campsites. Most of what we know about the Clovis people comes from widespread but limited finds of stone artifacts, particularly those distinctive points, and the kill sites where they dispatched mammoth, mastodon, and giant bison. We know they were hunter-gatherers, but that doesn’t narrow it down much. Foragers can live in many different ways: Some stay put in limited areas, extensively exploiting the animals, plants, fish, and other resources available nearby; others travel widely. Some rely almost exclusively on wild game, while others are dedicated to collecting berries and nuts, and still others collect shellfish and kelp as their preferred foods. Even among dedicated hunters, variation rules: Stalking deer or boar through a dense forest is a much different lifestyle than going out onto the ice-choked waters of the Arctic to hunt seal or whale or trapping small game in the Kalahari. The stone tools buried with Anzick-1 weren’t suitable for any of those purposes: They were the implements of dedicated big-game hunters, nomads who traversed extraordinarily long distances in search of their preferred prey.

When the archaeologist Samuel Stockton White V ran tests on the Anzick artifacts, he found in the surviving flint traces of their original uses from 13,000 years ago. The traces could be found in the form of microscopic proteins caught between the tiny, jagged crenellations on the edges of the tools that made them so useful to their makers. One blade had been used to cut through the flesh of a Pleistocene camel, a species that has only rarely been documented as prey for the Clovis people. Scraper tools were used to shape the elk bones that became long rods, perhaps the foreshafts of darts tipped with Clovis points. Other traces were lost to time, or the items had been made but not put to use before the burial. Between those protein traces, the tools’ shape, and parallels with other Clovis artifact assemblages, the basic conclusion is that Anzick-1 spent his short life on the move.

We have all the information we need to reconstruct a day in that life.

As babies generally do, Anzick-1 probably woke up with a cry for his mother. Infants in forager societies, particularly those that included hypermobile hunters like the Clovis people, tend to spend their time in close contact with their mothers, often carried in some sort of sling. It was surely a frigid morning, and would have seemed so even for those who live in that part of Montana today. The looming ice sheets had receded over the past millennia, but they were still close, and the freezing winds that blew down through the unprotected plains were viciously cold. The landscape was open, even more so than it is now; fewer trees crowded the hillsides and riverbanks. Snow never left the peaks of the mountains, not even at the height of what passed for summer, with seasons less defined than they are today. Anzick-1’s year of life was spent amid variations of cold that simply don’t exist anywhere on the planet anymore.

Assuming it was a day to move camp, which would have happened dozens of times every year, the baby first saw light as portable shelters of wood and hide were broken down and lashed into bundles that could be dragged across the grasslands with a travois or sled. We have no idea how large Clovis bands were, but several dozen members is likely based on parallels to other groups of big-game hunters: enough to form a durable community whose members could reproduce without inbreeding, but not so many that food intake became unsustainable.

We have no indications of food storage among the Clovis people, and most archaeologists assume they exploited plants only opportunistically, drawing most of their caloric intake from meat. Anzick-1 was obviously too small to consume mammoth or elk, but as his eyes adjusted to the brightness of a Montana morning, he smelled meat roasting over a small cookfire. He saw the adults of his band munching on greasy, fatty flesh or struggling to masticate preserved, rawhide-tough meat that was weeks or even months old. Even in a ta rget-rich environment like North America at this time, with perfectly tailored weaponry, taking big game was a chancy business: A single failed hunt could plunge the band into days or weeks of hunger. Better to live off stale scraps and ensure their longer-term chances of survival.

Once the camp was packed, it was time to move. To the limited extent that we can reconstruct their patterns of movement, the Clovis people followed the rivers that cut through North America’s interior. In this particular area, that was the Yellowstone River and its tributaries, which drain thousands of square miles of land in the northern Plains. The higher reaches of the region were even less hospitable than they are today, but elk grazed on the hillsides while herds of bison, mammoth, horses, and other animals followed the same migration routes the newly arrived people did. We know, thanks to that single protein analysis, that camel was on the menu at some point not too long before Anzick-1’s death.

This was the rhythm of Anzick-1’s short life. His mother strapped him into a sling or baby-board of some kind and went about the innumerable tasks that required her attention: drawing water from the nearby creek or river into a leather container; feeding the baby; packing up their sleeping furs and other belongings before beginning the journey; dressing in garments of elk-, mammoth-, and camel-hide; and seeing to any other children she might have had, who were probably at least five years old, based on usual patterns of birth spacing in mobile foraging societies. That’s because it was almost impossible for a woman to care for more than one child who couldn’t walk at a time. Their band was only viable if it kept moving.

Their most fundamental collective experience was walking: at least a few miles every day while encamped, perhaps ten miles per day when burdened with their possessions and moving between campsites, thirty miles or even more for hunters moving fast while tracking prey. Anzick-1 spent the majority of his brief life in that carrier with his mother, gently swaying as she took long strides through the omnipresent grass or stepped carefully onto slick river rocks, napping as she trudged along the banks of the Yellowstone and its tributaries, squawling when a nap was disturbed by the ruckus of the hunters returning to camp with hundreds of pounds of camel meat. By afternoon, they were stopping at a promising campsite, breaking out the shelters and sleeping furs, and preparing food. Work would get underway, hammerstones ringing on flint as broken stone tools were sharpened and retouched. As night descended and the baby fell asleep again, the band bedded down. Perhaps they would stay a few days, or not, depending. There was always a next day, a next journey, until, for Anzick-1, there wasn’t.

We don’t know whether Anzick-1’s illness was brief or long. The bones are poorly preserved and fragmentary, as the remains of infants so often are, but there’s no obvious indication of physical trauma. As with every society before the very recent past, infant and child mortality would have been astronomically high among the Clovis people: Roughly half of all babies born would not have reached adulthood, whether because of malnutrition, injury, or illness. That last option is the most likely in this case, as it has been throughout human history, so vulnerable are the very young to infection. In some cases, archaeologists have excavated sizable skeletal samples from a single time and place: With that much data, we can reconstruct actual demographic patterns that tell us about population health and the kinds of stresses they experienced. In the case of the Clovis people, however, we have almost no human remains to work with - except those of little Anzick-1. His are the only remains ever discovered in association with any of the hundreds of Clovis artifact finds, the sole human face of the first people we know well from the ancient Americas.

Because he is the only Clovis person ever discovered, the information hidden inside those tiny, fragmentary bones is beyond priceless. When analyzed, Anzick-1’s DNA revealed that his group was ancestral to practically all later indigenous people living in the Americas. It may not have been his band specifically, but their close relatives - cousins, uncles, people removed by only a few degrees - lay at the root of the family trees of people who would soon live everywhere from the Great Lakes to Tierra del Fuego. In genetic terms, the effective population size of this founding population of Clovis people numbered only in the low hundreds. The initial group that migrated south from Beringia was tiny, and everyone living in the Americas for the following 13,000 years was descended in whole or in part from them. Anzick-1 is our only indisputable proof of that connection, the link in the chain connecting millions upon millions of later people to some of their earliest identifiable ancestors.

But he was also a baby whose life ended far too soon. There is no reason to believe that people mourned the loss of the youngest among them any less than we do now simply because it happened so often; they weren’t inured to the pain, they just lived with more of it. That was a burden that every premodern person carried to a degree that is difficult, even impossible to imagine today. Yet we still know the pain of loss, and that is what a mother and a tight-knit community felt when they laid a baby to rest underneath a sandstone ledge 13,000 years ago. We can hope that they never again experienced that tragedy, though they surely did; more often, however, they felt the joy of children entering the world. Perhaps more than any other group in the archaeological record, the Clovis people succeeded in bringing more of those babies into the world and raising them to adulthood, soon to have children of their own. New bands split off and traveled far away from that spot near the Shields River, forgetting about the infant buried so long ago above the burbling waters. We remember him now, and thanks to him, the story of untold millions of later people deepens and expands in ways we never could have imagined.

Next time on Past Lives, we’ll head west a ways, to the banks of the Columbia River in Washington state. Around 8,500 years ago, a man was buried there, after he had already traveled hundreds of miles in his forty or fifty years of life. He’s known today as Kennewick Man, or the Ancient One, and he’s one of the best understood people we have from the distant past.

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Past Lives is written and narrated by me, Patrick Wyman. The producer is Morgan Jaffe. The music and sound design is by Gabriel Gould. The story editor is Rachel Kambury.

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