Blackwater Draw

 One of the great sites in world history is Blackwater Draw in New Mexico. In the 1930s, archeologists found large stone spear points among mammoth bones.

The consensus at the time was that wooly mammoths and other large mammals had become extinct beforehumans arrived in North America. It turned out that humans had arrived earlier than originally believed. The site at Blackwater Draw is 13,000 years old.

The historian Dan Flores’s telling of that story has me wondering whether we humans can learn to live in a place without destroying it.

Blackwater Draw is near Clovis, N.M. The specimens of tools found there became a type. Artifacts from that period — now known as Clovis Culture artifacts — have been found all over North America.

Human beings eventually exterminated the mammoths and other large animals, like giant sloths and horses. That required a new way of living — a way to survive on what was left. Humans on the plains hunted giant bison. That way of life, known as the Folsom Culture, ended when the giant bison were exterminated.

Human beings again adapted, learning to live on what was left. While the giant bison were gone, the bison that we know today were still plentiful. For 8,000 years humans on the Great Plains lived by hunting them. That way of life vanished in the late 1800s.

Since then, human beings have been limping along using techniques that aren’t remotely sustainable. The Dust Bowl was a calamity. We’re now drawing down aquifers and using fossil fuels for fertilizer. We’ve spending the kids’ inheritance.

I think part of the problem is in the way we look at places.

Most times, when the Wise Woman and I hike through the woods, I am just looking, trying to understand the place.

But on a recent trip to the South River, we passed a stand of hazel, and I thought about how it would be to weave the hazel wands into a wattle. Then I could daub a little clay from the riverbank on the wattle. I could lean that frame against a rock outcrop as a shelter, build a fire, catch fish from the shallows.

Some gear had shifted in my mind without me being aware of it. I went from trying to understand a place to trying to use it.

Only after the hike was over did I become aware of the shift in thinking.

I’ve heard neuroscientists talk about the crocodile brain — the part of our brain that functions without our being aware of it. Perhaps this way of thinking is a holdover from humanity’s earlier days. It’s a way of looking at places to figure out how to survive in them — and that’s not a bad impulse.

We’ve got to temper that impulse though. We can’t just think about our own survival.

Our survival depends on the natural world. We need to think about how it will survive too.

• Source: Dan Flores, “Thinking About Big History in One Western Place,” The American West, Episode 25, is here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zJEYm0Yxng

Thanks, Christopher, for sending the link and starting this line of thought.