On Disproving the ‘Clovis First’ Assertion

Charles Hughes v. Ales Hrdlicka

Charles Hughes and Mystery Hill

When I first met the late Charles Hughes, he seemed to be a friendly and funny guy, but someone who seemed obsessed with stories of Atlantis. And most of the literature and books that he had about Atlantis were written by eccentrics, lunatics and wackos – the kind of stuff that Charles would love to poke holes at and laugh about. But I wasn’t all that interested in it at that point. 

Then, during 1987, I was a volunteer for Lyndon LaRouche’s campaign for the Democratic Presidential primary in New Hampshire. That campaign was one of the most memorable and fun times that I can remember. And while we all had things that we wanted to do or see in New Hampshire on our days off, Charles was obsessed with only one thing – a trip to Salem, N.H. And he somehow arranged for all of the campaign volunteers to make a trip to see Mystery Hill, near Salem – an archaeological site with stone chambers and standing stones – called America’s Stonehenge, because the stones reminded one of Britain’s Stonehenge and how the stones were used as a giant astronomical calendar. Everyone wanted to know more, and Charles knew and tried to interest us in the political battle that was being fought over the site – how it wasn’t recognized as a stone-age site by the ‘so-called’ established authorities, but as being a hoax.  

This is also when Charles first lent me a copy of Barry Fells’ book ‘America BC’, of his attempts to prove there was evidence of Bronze age explorers who travelled to America. And he also introduced me to Thor Heyerdahl who built a raft of balsa and bamboo to sail from Peru to the Polynesian islands – to prove that the ancient people of South America could have sailed across the ocean; and who built a reed boat modelled on an ancient Egyptian picture to sail across the Atlantic Ocean – to prove that Mediterranean cultures could have reached America.

Later, Charles would explain to me the ‘Clovis First’ assertion, and how anything that didn’t fit in with that assertion did not exist. He showed me the part in Plato’s Timaeus dialogue, where he recounted the Atlantis story. He showed me an unpublished book that was written by Lyndon LaRouche about how ancient man had to have been a sea-faring people, and that earlier civilizations were far older than it was assumed. All of which I still hadn’t had the foggiest idea about.

But Charles always had time to talk about it. I think that this led him into his experiments with telescopes – ones that he had to build himself, with no special tools, including the lens, as if he was early man, mapping the stars as they may have done to steer their ocean-going ships. Charles always had a reason for everything. Anyway, in the back of my mind, I became a little obsessed too with disproving the ‘Clovis First’ assertion. Just like Charles, I was bitten.

To begin to understand the ‘Clovis First’ assertion, I had to start by reading the book, ‘Treason in America’ by Anton Chaitkin, chapter 16 – ‘Anthropologist against Indians’, where Anton wrote that:

“As settlers poured into Ohio after the Revolution, they passed among thousands of mounds, forts, pyramids, highways, and earth sculptures built by an ancient society … (and) extensive canals for irrigation  … (that) had astronomical knowledge and arts sufficient for calendar systems that charted the movements of heavenly bodies over millions of years … it became evident to the Americans that the ‘savagery’ of the Indians was not only the subject of British tampering and manipulation, but that the Indians themselves had once had a higher civilization in both North and South America, that this culture had to a great extent collapsed, and that this collapse was being worsened by the crimes of the Indians’ British ‘allies’.” 

“How could the European oligarchs cover up the fact that the Indians had had a higher culture in the past, and that they, like all human beings, were susceptible of rapid cultural advancement?” 

So began the work of Albert Gallatin, from the French oligarchic cesspool of Geneva, (Gallatin was not Swiss, as Geneva did not become part of the Swiss Confederacy until it was forced upon them by the evil Congress of Vienna in 1815) and the founding of the American Ethnological Society with his assistant Henry Schoolcraft and his later partner Lewis Henry Morgan, and their corruption of the Smithsonian Institution.

“The final, now hegemonic anthropological line was advanced by Albert Gallatin himself: the structures show nothing ‘indicative of a much more advanced state of civilization than that of the present’ Indians.  The public should simply pay no attention to the ancient monuments.”

Now I wanted to know where this ‘Clovis First’ assertion came from.

George McJunkin and Early Man in America

[For more information, please read ‘The Life and Legend of George McJunkin: Black Cowboy’ by Franklin Folsom and ‘Black Cowboys of the Old West’ by Tricia Wagner.]

George was born a slave in 1851 in Midway, Texas – his father was a blacksmith who would purchase his freedom. During the Civil War, George gained experience in handling horses because the ranch hands were off fighting in the war. After emancipation, his skill with horses got him a job as a cowboy on a trail drive, as a horse trainer, as a wagon boss and eventually as foreman on a ranch near Folsom, New Mexico.

Needing a surname, he chose the name of the McJunkin brothers, on whose ranch he had worked in Midway. George would teach himself to play the guitar and violin and would learn to read and write. He read books about geology and natural history and began his collection of arrowheads, fossils, bones, rocks and minerals.

In September 1908, while he was checking out the damage caused by a recent flood, he discovered some large bones – too big to be bison bones and too deep to be recent. Thrilled about his discovery, George told any interested person that he knew or met, and he wrote to universities and museums about the discovery of his bone pit.

In 1922, two relic collectors that George had met in Raton, New Mexico years earlier, Carl Schwachheim and Fred Howarth, made the trip to visit George’s bone pit. Unfortunately, George McJunkin had died four months earlier in January 1922.

In the summer of 1925, Schwachheim and Howarth wrote to Jesse Figgins, of the Colorado Museum of Natural History, and also sent along parts of this ‘extinct’ bison. In March 1926, Figgins accompanied them in visiting the site of McJunkin’s bone pit and immediately recognized its importance and ‘the possibility that additional evidence of man’s antiquity in America might be uncovered’. The assertion, that was held at that time and enforced by the Smithsonian’s Ales Hrdlicka, was that early man had entered America from Asia only a few thousand years ago. So, who was this Ales Hrdlicka?

Ales Hrdlicka, born in 1869 in Bohemia, emigrated to New York in 1882. He graduated from the Eclectic Medical College of New York and the N. Y. Homeopathic Medical College, interned at the N.Y. State Homeopathic Hospital for the Insane, where he began his anthropometric interests, with detailed bodily measurements of the inmates, and became Associate in Anthropology at the Pathological Institute of the New York State Hospitals, where he continued his bodily measurements of the inmates. He later worked for the American Museum of Natural History doing anthropometric measurements among the Indians of southwestern United States and of northern Mexico. This would have put him in the orbit of Lewis Henry Morgan. 

[For more information on this circle, please read ‘Lewis Henry Morgan and the Racist Roots of Anthropology’ by Paul Glumaz, and the ongoing series by Cynthia Chung, ‘The Shaping of a World Religion: From Jesuits, Freemasons & Anthropologists to MK Ultra & the Counter-Culture Movement’.]

By 1903, he was appointed Curator of the Physical Anthropology division of the National Museum, by William Henry Holmes, chief of the Bureau of American Ethnology.  He would go on to write such gems as: ‘Eugenics and its Natural Limitations in Man’, 1915; ‘The Origin and Antiquity of the American Indian’, 1917; ‘The Old Americans’, 1925; ‘Effects of Immigration on the American Type’, 1926; ‘Anthropology of the American Negro’, 1927; and ‘A Danger to the American People from Assimilation of the Colored Population’, 1928.

Needing more evidence before attempting to battle Hrdlicka, Figgins directed his son Frank, along with Schwachheim, to continue digging. They discovered two man-made arrowheads, lying adjacent to a rib of an ‘extinct’ bison. The results appeared in an article that Figgins wrote for the Natural History magazine of May-June 1927.

In September 1927, in order to prove this discovery, Jesse Figgins invited Alfred Kidder of the Peabody Museum, Frank Roberts of the Smithsonian Institution, and Barnum Brown of the American Museum of Natural History to visit the Folsom site [something akin to inviting the foxes in to inspect the hen-house!!!] and while there, they observed additional spear-points, and the findings were reported at the next meeting of the American Anthropological Association.

In 1929, 19 year-old Ridgely Whiteman, who had been following the news of the Folsom discovery, also discovered some spear-points near Blackwater Draw – near Clovis, New Mexico. His interest had come from his mother, who had a large collection of arrowheads while growing up near the Big Serpent Mound in Ohio, and from his grandmother who was of Cherokee descent. He wrote to the Smithsonian Museum about his discovery, but nothing was done.

In 1932, a friend of his, Pete Anderson, met Dr. Howard who was digging at Carlsbad, New Mexico and invited him to come and see Whiteman’s findings. After a meeting in August, Howard borrowed some of Whiteman’s artifacts and returned to Philadelphia.

Note: In 1929, Edgar Howard, an archaeology research associate at the University of Pennsylvania, had been on a southwest expedition sponsored by the university’s Museum, and was told by Bill Burnet, of a cave near Carlsbad, New Mexico. For the following three summers, he would return to do excavations at Burnet’s Cave. In August 1931, at the cave, Howard found a spear-point on the edge of a hearth of burnt bison and musk-ox bones, which he showed at the 3^rd Pecos Conference in September.

In September 1932, gravel mining began for work on a new road near Clovis, New Mexico, when the crew discovered a large find of ‘ancient’ bones. When he heard of the find, Howard dropped everything he had been doing at Burnet’s Cave and hurried back to this site near Blackwater Draw, at Clovis N.M., and persuaded the owners to let him begin excavating, beginning the next summer (while also hiring Whiteman and ‘Old Bill’ Burnet to assist him) – during the hot Dust Bowl years. The excavation was sponsored by the University of Pennsylvania Museum and the Academy of Natural Sciences at Philadelphia, led by Howard in 1933–34, and continued under John Cotter in 1936-37.  (Cotter had studied under Jesse Figgins at Denver.)

Howard first made a detailed surface contour map along with stratigraphic profiles. In 1936, at the ‘mammoth pit’, they discovered a mammoth skeleton and the scattered bones of another, along with 5 utilized flakes, 4 fluted points and 2 polished bone implements. All the remains were carefully exposed, mapped, photographed, while noting their stratigraphic position, before being prepared and sent to the university in Philadelphia. 

In March of 1937, Howard organized an International Symposium on Early Man, sponsored by the Academy of Natural Sciences at Philadelphia, that included 435 delegates from 91 academic institutions of 14 countries, where an exhibit recreated the ‘Mammoth pit’. The next year, partial remains of another mammoth were uncovered. Also discovered were the remains of 5 bison, along with 1 utilized flake and 2 fluted points – that were similar to the points found at Folsom.

It was later estimated, using carbon dating, that the Clovis points were from approximately 10,000 to 9,000 BC, and that the Folsom points were from approximately 9,000 to 8,000 BC. Unfortunately, further investigations did not resume until 1949, and during the intervening years, while the site was visited by amateur archaeologists and artifact collectors, it remained unprotected to runoff and wind erosion.

The ice-free corridor from Canada

Earlier in 1932, Diamond Jenness, the Chief Anthropologist at the National Museum of Canada wrote ‘Indians of Canada’, where he also followed Hrdlicka and the anthropologists’ theory, writing that:

“The Indians are not indigenous to America, but have migrated hither from the Old World, probably by way of Bering Strait … The latest immigrants were perhaps the Eskimo, who may have entered America not many centuries before the Christian era. At the end of the first millennium A.D. a few parties of Malayo-Polynesians may possibly have landed somewhere on the Pacific coast somewhere between California and Peru, but it seems highly improbable that they could have influenced in any way the aboriginal tribes of the Dominion.”

Note: During World War II, Jenness served as the Deputy-Director of Intelligence for the Royal Canadian Air Force. Hmmm.

Then, at the 5^th Pacific Science Conference, held in June 1933 at Victoria and Vancouver, in British Columbia, Jenness chaired the Anthropology section and edited the proceedings – ‘The American Aborigines: their Origin and Antiquity’, and where Jenness presented his paper ‘The Problem of the Eskimo’.

Also it was here that William Johnson, of the Geological Survey of Canada, presented his paper, ‘Quaternary Geology of North America in Relation to the Migration of Man’, that showed evidence that during the ice age melt, a corridor developed between the two ice sheets, the Laurentide and the Cordilleran – suggesting an ice-free path from the Arctic to the Americas. This would soon become the new anthropologist dogma for how America was settled. 

Since definite proof had been shown that early man had lived in America, at least, as early as the ice age mammals, it was then decreed by the Smithsonian lickspittle Hrdlicka that early man had travelled, by land, from Siberia in Asia, across to Alaska and down through North America, and had arrived in America 10,000 years ago, as if spontaneously, first at Clovis, and not one second before and nowhere else sooner. This became the so-called ‘Clovis First’ assertion.

Somehow, so-called ‘Aryan’ hunters from Siberia had walked from Asia, across a land connection to Alaska, down through a land of tundra or muskeg or swamps and flooded plains, with no food nor anything to hunt, alongside the eastern side of the Rocky Mountains, and suddenly stop at Clovis to hunt now-extinct ice-age mammals. And we’re supposed to believe this? because only so-called ‘Aryans’ could have colonized America. Remember that as part of this assertion, northern Europeans had made their way to Siberia, so Siberians aren’t Asian, but they’re really Europeans!?!?

And even if these brave Asian ‘Aryans’ had made this great trek across the Bering land-bridge and down through Canada to their pre-determined destiny at Clovis, then why could they not have made this trek earlier, when the conditions were so much easier – i.e. before the Ice Age began, perhaps over 100,000 years ago? or more!!!

But if people had come to America from Asia that early, then they couldn’t be ‘Aryan’ Asians, but they must have been ‘real’ Asians - people moving north from Zhongyuan, from northern China! Aaahhh … one can imagine Hrdlicka screaming from his grave at this assumption.

This ‘Clovis First’ assertion also implies that ‘other people’ couldn’t possibly have come to America by sea - that they may have come from Asia by boat to Alaska, but no further, that they would have had to ditch their boats there and then to begin that great marathon land trek through the unknown to America!

But, surely, can’t we at least assume that if they made their way to Alaska by sea, they would have continued down the west coast of America by sea - as is hinted at in Henriette Mertz’s ‘Pale Ink’, in her discussion of the ancient Chinese ‘Classic of Mountains and Seas’. Oooops … I think I hear Hrdlicka screaming again!

OR, if we did accept the ‘Clovis First’ assertion of the great trek, then mustn’t we also accept the hypothesis that Americans may have travelled along this great trek to discover Asia!!! Because exploration is a two-way street! Perhaps, ancient Americans travelled to, and settled in Asia, and may have even travelled westward across Asia to Europe??? Were the Mongols and Huns and Scythians actually descendants of ancient Americans??? Aaaahhh … calm down, Herr Hrdlicka, I’m only speculating here.

But the point that does need to be made, is that unless we disprove the ‘Clovis First’ assertion, then all of our future wanderings and all of our future wonderings will be bounded and limited by this absurd and unimaginative ‘Clovis First’ assumption. Surely, our imaginations deserve a glimpse of our past from a better outlook.

And now, with all that in mind, I would recommend that you and I should read the Spring 2013 issue of 21^st Century Science and Technology, ‘Evidence of Advanced Civilization in the Ice Age’ written by my friend, Charles Hughes.

[For more information on Charles Hughes, please read his obituary, from Executive Intelligence Review, in 2015.]

Have fun. imaginatively.