If the Clovis first hypothesis or theory was wrong, why was it so pervasive? How could it have last for so long? Many factors contributed to its acceptance, consolidation, prevalence, and survival for over 40 years (1935-1975), and a protracted battle over the next 50 years, that is still being waged.
Today's post will explore the reasons behind the love affair of academia with the Clovis first ideology.
I am indebted to the excellent outline posted by https://x.com/MoundLore on X (twitter) which can be seen online here, which helped me organize my thoughts on this matter. I don't believe that the Clovis First theory was a deliberate conspiracy. Instead, it was a combination of different factors that had a catalyzing effect.
1. Initial Acceptance and a Grand Theory
When Howard proposed the Clovis culture, defined its age, and its big-game hunting society, North American archaeology suffered from many problems and lacked a sound, unifying theory:
- There were no dependable dating techniques (eg. radiocarbon dating was developed in the late 1940s, luminescence dating in the 1960s), only stratigraphic ones, which were unreliable. Deep, older dates were not trusted. In fact, the origin of the human fossils in the Old World were dated to a few thousands or tens of thousands of years at that time (~25 ky for Cro-Magnons and ~50 ky for Neanderthals, 500 ky for the Heidelberg man, and 1 My for the Pithecanthropus
- Most scholars had been formed under the influence of Aleš Hrdlic̄ka who imposed his belief that the Native Americans had arrived via Bering Strait, from Asia, recently (initially not more than 3,000 years ago, later increased to 10,000 years after the Folsom stone tools were discovered in the late 1920s). The late arrival was supported by Hrdlic̄ka's conviction that Amerindians descended from Asians (who they resembled), and did so after the Mongoloid race had differentiated (sorry for the term, but it was used at that time), he stubbornly refused to accept any pre-modern (i.e. Neanderthal) presence in America. Therefore, most American archaeologists supported a recent arrival of the ancestors of Native Americans to the New World.
- The natives were considered a lower race, weak, and feeble-minded, and scientists collected artifacts, bones, skulls, and ignored native myths and beliefs while trying to interpret the data.
The discovery of the Folsom site in the late 1920s shook the archaeological community, man-made stone tools were found beside extinct Pleistocene bisons. Humans had lived in America for at least 10,000 or more years. This was followed by the even earlier Clovis points that were then found in different locations across North America, of a similar late Pleistocene age (breaking with the previous dogma set by Hrdlic̄ka), and coinciding with the demise of the megafauna like mammoths, large bisons, camels, and giant sloths, was a catalyst that brought all these elements together into a new race of big-game hunters 12,000 years ago, that took the New World by surprise as soon as the ice sheets retreated. Nice and neat, intellectualy comfortable, no loose ends.
Although there had been some isolated claims about early Pleistocene findings, they had been silenced by academic orthodoxy before the Folsom and Clovis discoveries (Jenks, 1932 and Jenks, 1937, and his Minnesota Man), and the Natchez human pelvis found below the level of megafauna remains (Wilson, 1895).
Clovis provided a coherent framework for scientists to work with, based on their preconceptions and assumptions. Soon Clovis sites appeared across America.
2. Clovis becomes Mainstream
The acceptance, and further discoveries fueled publications, fed collections, expanded slots in museums, and became included in textbooks. Clovis was taught in college to a new generation of archaeologists. The general public became aware of the Clovis people.
Each new site contributed to reinforcing the preceeding findings. Academic careers were built on these discoveries. Tenures and publications resulted from research projects linked to Clovis.
The outcome of this process was the entrenchment of the Clovis idea in the archaeological community. Funding and grants were awarded to projects that would support the Clovis notion. Challenging theories were discarded and went unfunded.
Even if a scholar went ahead and produced research that conflicted with the Clovis orthodoxy, it was rejected during the peer review process. Journals refused to publish them.
3. Resistance to Change
Thomas Kuhn outlined the concept of paradigm shift in science, it is a natural process by which theories and basic assumptions change. Science moves forward in bursts, when a revolution ousts an entrenched orthodoxy (an existing "paradigm") replacing it with a new one.
As anomalies appear (sites that are older than the established paradigm), tensions build up, and before the crisis, the orthodoxy fights back. Accepting a new paradigm implies rewriting history, modifying books, upsetting established courses in colleges, modifying museum layouts. Change is costly and people resist it.
Watchdogs appear. The role of Hrdlic̄ka as the gatekeeper, and watchdog, in the case of Clovis First, was played by C. Vance Haynes. His work at Tule Springs, a site located close to Las Vegas, Nevada, US, converted him into an ardent supporter of the Clovis First theory. He has been described as the Godfather within the "Clovis mafia".
Haynes research at Tule Springs led him to believe that there had been no humans at that site prior to 13 ky BP. There were animal remains spanning tens of thousands of years, but the only humans were the Clovis, and they appeared all of a sudden, 13,000 years ago.
In my next post I will mention Haynes and a pre-Clovis tool that he found, and ignored, possibly 30,000 years old, there at Tule Springs.
Haynes and the notion of a late ice-free corridor (published in the mid 1960s), made the theory invulnerable to attacks. Haynes refuted, identified trivial weaknesses, attacked, and disqualified other findings.
An online article in the Smithsonian magazine describes the negation and suppression of pre-Clovis dates: "It was a brutal experience, something that Cinq-Mars once likened to the Spanish Inquisition. At conferences, audiences paid little heed to his presentations, giving short shrift to the evidence. Other researchers listened politely, then questioned his competence. The result was always the same. “When Jacques proposed [that Bluefish Caves was] 24,000, it was not accepted,” says William Josie, director of natural resources at the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation in Old Crow. In his office at the Canadian Museum of History, Cinq-Mars fumed at the wall of closed minds. Funding for his Bluefish work grew scarce: his fieldwork eventually sputtered and died."
4. Religion
The Christian Bible upholds certain dogma, like the Noachian flood, the dispersal of races after the failed Babylon tower project, and an early (a few millennia) origin of mankind (God's creation of Adam and Eve). These pose time constraints that cause friction with scientific theories.
There are several weird ideas related to religion involving the peopling of America, these are some examples that I found online: The Clovis people died in Noah's flood, Clovis people descended from Noah arrived by boat after the Flood, they reached America after the Babel dispersion.
It may not seem important, but don't forget that a 2025 Religious poll found that 57% of adult Americans believe that Hell exists, 49% believe that the Bible is 100% accurate in its teachings, 68% believe in an unchanging God and 71% assume him as a Trinity (God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit).
5. Cultural Dominance
But what about the Native Americans. These people have their own creation myths, oral traditions dating back in time that state that they have always been here, in America, since Time inmemorial.
Now, in a more woke period, Richard W. Stoffle, Kathleen A. Van Vlack, Heather H. Lim, Alannah Bell, Landon Yarrington, 2024 note that the Native Americans ancient beliefs are gaining relevance among scholars. These authors acknowledge that it wasn't always the case:
"... the Clovis first theory... was the dominant interpretation of the past throughout most of the 20th century and into the 21st century. It precluded the acceptance of Native American Pleistocene observations as they were presented in Native rock paintings, rock peckings, and oral history that depicted and interpreted large Pleistocene animals and glacial wetland ecology. During this time, it was the standard practice of western scholars and land managers to reject Native interpretations of ancient times. Pleistocene-specific observations were even removed from ethnographic reports by land managers and debunked in science papers and journals because Native American observations did not align with what western scientists deemed to be true"
Native Americans were silenced and ignored. They didn't support the Clovis First theory, or in fact any theory that puts their position as "First People", or, as we call them in South America, Pueblos Originarios (Original People).
One of the few natives to reject the Clovis First theory was a Native American named Vine Deloria Jr. (1933-2005), he was a lawyer, theologist, university professor and scholar. As a Standing Rock Lakota, he held a strong point of view about Western civilization and academia, and its influence on how history is written. He was an advocate for the rights and claims of Native Americans.
In his controversial and provocative book Red Earth White Lies, published in 1995 he criticizes Western science and puts forward many pseudoscientific notions, for instance, that geology is mistaken, humans and dinosaurs were contemporaries, high levels of carbon dioxide and a fluctuating gravity coefficient lead to gigantism, and the theory of Evolution is wrong, just to mention a few. However he does hit the nail on the head when he suggests that scientists revere orthodoxy, and science is essentially a religion, with its scientific myths.
It should be noted that Deloria believed that the oral traditions of Native Americans accurately describe what happened in the past. Their versions should be considered the truth until science can provide strong, data-backed evidence to refute them. This concept also had a political point of view, to ratify the Native American people's oral tradition as being the correct interpretation of historic events, such as the treaties they were forced to sign with the U.S. or Canada.
Stoffle et al., 2025, acknowledge Deloria's work and adopt a critical view science's attitude: "that there is no Native truth unless it is supported by western truth —an argument that only further validates Deloria's claims that Native American knowledge and history are being suppressed by the limitations of western science."
Philip J. Deloria, Vine's son, wrote that his father's book is hard to defend. However, he understands where his father was going with it. Vine Deloria believed that the Beringia crossing into America made Native Americans migrants, they were one of many who migrated to America, with the Western Europeans being the last. The Natives did so early, but were migrants just the same we are all migrants in the New World. He also disagreed with the notion that these first people entered a vacant, virgin continent, untouched by humans, it wasn't owned, it was there to be taken. The idea that these new-arrivals then overkilled the megafauna to extinction, a gross violation of the idea that Native Americans understood their environment and were stewards, led him to propose catastrophic events leading to the extinction.
Conclusion
Only when irrefutable evidence had accumulated, and genetic information backed by these earlier archaeological dates put forward early dates for genetic splits in Asian lineages, did the Clovis First yield. Slowly, but inevitably the pre-Clovis field gained momentum and is now the prevailing dogma, though, some holdouts of the former orthodoxy remain, like Surovell.
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