March 15, 2017

These weapons, mementos of some titanic struggle in the mists of prehistory, may provide us with a clue to solving one of archaeology’s greatest mysteries. 

June 09, 2016

It’s a prehistoric ballistic missile system  – a wooden shaft, over six feet long, tipped with an eight-inch wooden foreshaft, which in turn is tipped with a three-inch-long chert blade, lashed to the end of the foreshaft by deer sinew and fixed in place with pine pitch mixed with charcoal. It fits neatly into the socket of a wooden spear thrower, or atlatl, which is the length of a man’s forearm and which acts as a low-mass, fast-moving lever, accelerating the spear to a lethal velocity, enough to slay a bison or a mammoth -- or a seal, or a whale.

June 09, 2016

She stares at me from across a chasm of more than seventy thousand years, long dark hair swirling about her head, eyes wide open, alert, piercing, searching. Her skin is dark brown, deeply lined from years of exposure to the tropical sun. Her face short and broad, with a small forehead, heavy brow ridge, and prominent jaw. So much like us in some ways, and yet so different in others.

May 20, 2016

The spear hangs in a glass display case at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Hewn from a single piece of wood, it is a formidable-looking weapon: more than six feet long, as big at its widest circumference as a child’s baseball bat, tapered to a sharp point. This artifact is a replica of one of the eight Schöningen spears, relics of fantastic antiquity, dating from some three hundred thousand years ago – more than the entire span of our existence as modern humans.

May 20, 2016

In his laboratory at the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., Dr. Dennis Stanford hands me a slab of brown plaster. It’s a replica of a bone fragment – from a mastodon or a giant ground sloth – recovered from Vero Beach, Florida. On the slab is an etching of a mastodon, placed there by some unknown artist. The bone has become mineralized, making radiocarbon dating impossible, but we do know that the last mastodons disappeared from eastern North America some 12-13,000 years ago, making the etching at least that old. It could be much older than that, which would make this artifact part of a growing body of evidence that could overturn everything scientists once thought they knew about the peopling of the Americas.