Centennial by James A. Michener

MAN WAS TARDY IN REACHING COLORADO, AND PRECISELY when he arrived, we do not know. The great land bridge leading from Asia to Alaska was open 40,000 years ago, after which it closed when the glaciers melted and their captured water returned to the sea. It was open again about 28,000 years ago, and for the last time, about 13,000 years ago, closing about 10,000 years ago.

When the bridge was open, perhaps a thousand miles wide, well-developed human beings then living in eastern Siberia could have followed mammoths and other large game from Asia into Alaska. And when the tips of the glaciers began to melt, broad avenues opened, leading in a southeasterly direction, with mountains to the west and broad plains to the east, down which the animals could move, pursued by the men who hunted them.

It is sheer speculation to assume that 40,000 years ago Mongoloid men crossed the bridge and came down the avenues. But it is a certainty that when the bridge opened 13,000 years ago men came down-or were already here-to start the earliest recorded occupation of America. In time their descendants would become known as Indians. Finally, we have good records of a late migration around 6,000 B. C. which did not require any land bridge; these incomers used boats to cross the fifty-six-mile gap of ocean that separates Alaska from Siberia. Today their descendants are known as Eskimo, markedly different from the earlier groups that became Indians.

As yet we have no secure evidence that men actually arrived 40,000 years ago; we have found neither their homes, nor their tools, nor their skeletons. All we have are tantalizing intimations of their occupancy-a carved caribou leg bone in the Yukon, a circle of stones in California, a possible dwelling in Puebla-but one of these days, perhaps before the end of this century, definitive proof may be forthcoming.

Nor do we have proof that the bridge 28,000 years ago brought us men, although it almost certainly did. As of today, all we can be sure of is that man was indubitably here 12,000 years ago, because we have the hard-proof records of his occupancy.

We know where he lived, what time of year he hunted, how he made his spear, where he encountered a great mammoth, and how he killed the animal before the feast began. We are as certain of this hunt as we are that Daniel Boone once shot deer in Kentucky; all we lack is the mammoth's skeleton.

In the year 9268 B. C. at the chalk cliffs west of Rattlesnake Buttes a human being twenty-seven years old, and therefore ancient and about to die, studied a chunk of rock which a younger man had quarried from the mountains. He was a flint-knapper, and his practiced eye assured him that this was the kind he needed, a hard, flinty, gray-brown rock with one facet fairly smooth. It was about the size of a man's head, and most of the memorable rocks he had worked with in the past, those he remembered with affection because of the superb points he had struck from them, had looked like this. He breathed deeply and felt there was a good chance this one might prove productive too.

But he was also apprehensive, for the hunters of his clan had gone almost two months without having made a major kill, and food supplies were low. Scouts had spotted a small group of mammoths, those formidable beasts that stood twice as tall as a man and weighed a hundred times more, but to kill such an adversary required the stoutest spears, tipped with the sharpest points, and it was this flint-knapper's task to provide the latter, for upon his skill depended the security of his clan.

Before he risked breaking into the secret of the rock, he purified himself, for he knew that no man could succeed in a venture of great moment without the aid of gods. Leaving his work space-a flat area at the foot of the chalk cliff-he went to an opening between the trees and there turned his face upward and his body to each of the four compass points, ending with the east, from which the sun came. He engaged in no complicated ritual and uttered no incantation; he merely wished to inform the gods that he was about to engage in a project of importance to his clan, and he solicited their attention. He did not grovel for assistance, because in that large area there was no better knapper than he, but he did want the gods to be aware of his undertaking and to refrain from interfering.

He then went to the running stream that came out of the mountains to the west of the cliff and washed his hands, applying some of the water to his face. He was now ready.

As he walked back to his work area he was indistinguishable, except for his dress, from other men who would occupy this land ten thousand years later. He walked erect, with no apelike bending at the waist. His arms did not dangle and his head was not massive in proportion to the rest of his body. There was no conspicuous ledge of bone above his eyes and his hands were, as we shall see, beautifully articulated.

His eyes had a slight slant, an evidence of his Asian ancestry. His face was somewhat heavier than those of later men, his cheekbones more pronounced, his skin several shades lighter than that which was to come later; it inclined, perhaps, more toward red than yellow, and in this respect was quite similar to the men who would follow.

He had a working vocabulary of twelve or thirteen hundred words, few of which would be intelligible even a short time after his death, for in language swift change was in process. He had considerable powers of thought, could plan ahead, could devise tactics for hunting which required cooperative movements carried out at spaced intervals, and he knew a good deal about animals, the nature of differences between women and men, how to rear children, how to lay by enough food in good periods so that he would have something to eat in time of famine. He worked hard and understood that if he got ahead in his production he would have time for his own enjoyment.