Radical voices see the human habitation of the New World occurring well before the last glacial maximum which covered much of the upper half of North America from 16,000- 20,000 yr. B.P. Conservative scholars such as Vance Haynes and Paul Martin have argued for a very late entry for humans at 12,000 to 13,000 yr. B.P. and a quick migration from the northern part of the continent to the south in a blitzkrieg-like pattern that lead to the extinction of species of large animals and the disruption of ecological patterns.
For the last two decades the Yukon's Old Crow Basin produced the only artifacts in the North that were considered to be older than a time frame that was acceptable to Conservatives, and these finds were later joined by two sites in the Bluefish Basin that were tentatively held up as representing early human presence there.
A flesher found in secondary context from the Old Crow Basin in the Yukon, which was for a while considered to be 27,000 years old on the basis of radiocarbon dates performed on bone apatite, has recently been shown to be 1,300-1,400 years old through AMS dating of the collagen in the bone. This has left a number of northern radical scholars hanging in the wind to say the least, and has made it easy for some scholars, Frederick West is one, to reaffirm the conservative view.
The author of this work is an archaeologist who has worked extensively in Eastern Beringia (read Alaska), one of the crucial areas of research on the topic. Since little evidence suggesting an early entry of humans has been recovered in Alaska proper, he could be expected to be a conservative - voice in the arguments that have been made up to the present time. In fact, he has been an able and logical critic of both the Old Crow and the Blue Fish Caves dates (Dixon 1984), and has generally taken a conservative viewpoint in his scientific publications.
Dixon has not succumbed, however, to a conservative viewpoint in this interesting and readable little volume. Indeed, he gives more than fair hearing to a number of the sites that are claimed to be old in the New World and explores, at least tangentially, ideas that have arisen around some of the most controversial archaeological sites in the New World. He does this in the context of his own research on blood residues on prehistoric tools, an esoteric research topic that Dixon makes interesting for this reader, and that forms the glue which binds the many digressions in this book together.
The three stated themes of the book are 1) the documentation of the early prehistory western North American arctic and subarctic, 2) a presentation of Dixon's picture of the process of scientific inquiry and, 3) a description of the history of archaeology in Alaska. In the eleven chapters of the book, the realization of the themes is somewhat spotty, with the description of the prehistory of the subarctic as it is now known worked out more clearly than the other two stated objectives of the book.
The scientific process that the author talks about is partially related to the technological task that he and Tom Loy took on to identify blood residues on stone tools recovered from early sites in Eastern Beringia, and it is partly the process of identifying and of authenticating early archaeological sites in the Americas.
The identification of blood residues takes Dixon on his quest to the American Museum of Natural History for mummified tissue from extinct animals and then to the National Museums of Civilization in Ottawa and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington for fluted points to complement those available to him in Fairbanks. The quest continues at Loy's hematology laboratories in Vancouver and later at the British Columbia Provincial Museum in Victoria.
The tale of the identification of the blood of sheep, modern bison and then finally mammoth blood residue on the stone tools is fascinating and, like all scientific work, presents evidence that contradicts expectations for the disappearance of mammoth in the arctic before the end of the Pleistocene. Dixon's mammoth blood is on a non-fluted tool that is from a site firmly dated to 9500 years ago, perhaps fifteen hundred to two thousand years after he expects mammoth to have been extinct in the area.
Despite a continuation of the quest to the Australian National University at Canberra, where Loy has taken a position, it is here that the quest ends. Is there a solution to the problem? We are not told in the volume. Instead, Dixon jumps into speculations about the parallels between the migrations of people into Australia some 35,000 to 50,000 years ago, and those of the migrations to North America tens of thousands of years later. Exuberantly, he even hints at possible transoceanic contacts between the Pacific islands and the Americas. The book unfortunately limps to an unsettling end with these speculations.
Dixon also documents the closing of Loy's laboratory
at the geriatric suite of Victoria General Hospital by
the Royal British Columbia Museum in Canada, but the
reader is never informed of the reasons that the two were
unceremoniously thrown out on the street. Although I am
lead to believe that serious questions were raised about
the rigor of Loy's work before the laboratory was closed,
neither reader nor reviewer is informed of the
circumstances, a very unsettling way to begin a chapter
in a book about scientific process and politics. It
should be pointed out, however, that work by Jerold
Lowenstein, a researcher at the University of California
at San Francisco Medical Center, replicated at least one
of Loy's research results, the identification of human
blood on a stone tool from the Near East, in 1987.
Nevertheless, we are left absolutely in the dark about
the questions that colleagues had about Loy's methods, or
whether Dixon believed the results that were obtained,
especially those which were questionable on the basis of
other evidence, such as the continuation of mammoth into
the Holocene in Eastern Beringia.