Originally Posted: October 5, 2016
Students and faculty nearly filled the Kennedy Auditorium to hear Southern Methodist University anthropology professor and archaeologist David J. Meltzer give a talk titled, “The Pleistocene Peopling of the Americas: What We Know, Don’t Know and Argue About Endlessly.” Morris, the Morris Fellow Visiting Speaker lectured on Oct. 4.
With insight, clarity and even some humor, Meltzer discussed issues surrounding the people of the Americas, drawing on both archaeological and genetic data to guide the audience through competing theories meant to answer persistent ruminations about Pleistocene people. Early in the lecture, he posed a few questions, including but not limited to: “Who were the first Americans?” and “Where did they come from?”
Initially, archaeologists were skeptical that people could have come to the New World before Clovis times. While Meltzer was sincere in conceding that there is much we still do not know because of insufficient data, he asserted, “What we do know is that Clovis is really the first significant presence in the New World, which does not preclude the possibility that people came earlier.”
In order to arrive at this conclusion, Meltzer suggested that archaeological evidence and genetic evidence complemented each other. Inferences from mutation rates, for example, show that people have been present in the New World before Clovis times. But, for Meltzer, “this is a problematic inference to make.” Although “genetics tells a huge part of the story,” he cautioned, to confirm this theory, “we needed an archaeological site,” which was eventually obtained with the discovery of the Monte Verde site in southern Chile.
Throughout his lecture, Meltzer also examined persuasive evidence to support the following additional findings: the archaeological community is “reasonably confident” that the first Americans came from Asia and finds it “very unlikely” that large mammals like mammoths were hunted to extinction by the Pleistocene people who migrated to North America. Rather, while the introduction of people to North America was accompanied by the extinction of over 30 genera, this is largely coincidental.
Thanks to his highly informative talk, audience members walked away with a better understanding of the current status of Pleistocene research as well as our own human ancestors, who came to this continent well over 10,000 years ago.
Meltzer received his Ph.D. from the University of Washington in Seattle, ultimately earning degrees in both anthropology and archaeology. Since then, the results of his research have been published in over 150 publications; some of his published books include The Great Paleolithic War: How Science Forged an Understanding of America’s Ice Age Past, First Peoples in a New World: Colonizing Ice Age America and Folsom: New Archaeological Investigations. READ MORE