How to Build a Dinosaur by Jack Horner Read Free Book Online Page B

vegetation, however, and the great herds of smaller, short-horned bison did not appear until the long-horned bison were extinct. The modern bison migrated from Alaska, and there is evidence that by twelve thousand years ago they were being driven to their deaths in herds.
    The ancient American natives may have helped create the vast herds of bison that Europeans encountered, Flannery suggests, by their use of fire to create the kind of prairie that favored the growth of these animals in the millions.
    The badlands of the Hell Creek Formation in Garfield County would have been the same, geologically, for the Clovis people as they are for us. They would have faced the same harsh environment we do when we hunt fossils. But the world around them would have been profoundly different. For ten thousand years the bison would have increased and the hunting cultures that depended on them would have visited the High Plains. One remarkable find near the town of Wilsall, about forty miles northeast of Bozeman, produced a spectacular accumulation of Clovis points from eleven thousand years ago that seemed to have been buried with a child of about eighteen months. The Anzick site, named after the owners of the land, also produced the bones of a second child six to eight years old. That child, however, died about two thousand years later, according to radiocarbon dating. Cultures changed during that time, but slowly compared to our own headlong rush. From New York, Los Angeles, or Bozeman for that matter, two thousand years of the Stone Age seem like a dreamlike stasis in which the land must have seemed eternal. From a camp in the badlands that same sense of being lost in time that moves at the pace of geology is almost reachable. But then the laptops come out at the end of the day, and with our dish antenna we connect to the world and to the impatience that speed brings. What would a Clovis hunter have made, not of our machines, but of our intolerance for delays of tens of seconds?
     
     
    For thousands of years the people who hunted and quarried stone in Montana did so on foot, driving buffalo off cliffs to their deaths and setting up camps to butcher them where they fell. There are bluffs in Montana and other parts of the High Plains—buffalo jumps—with accumulations of buffalo bones at the base that indicate use of the same place to drive buffalo to their deaths over hundreds or thousands of years.
    It was the arrival of Europeans, first the Spanish with the horse, and later the press of French and English westward in the United States and Canada, that changed everything. By 1492 the continent was populous and settled by many different Indian groups with distinctive languages and cultures. Many were agriculturalists, although not the Blackfeet or, later, the Sioux and Crow of Montana.
    When the horse came, brought by the Spanish, life on the plains began to change, and the familiar culture of the Plains Indians, warriors on horseback in elaborate costume, began to emerge. Coronado visited the Wichita Indians in 1541. In the 1600s, fur trappers first introduced guns to eastern tribes. As white men pushed west, displaced and newly armed Indian tribes themselves pushed west. The historian Alvin Josephy writes that “by the 1740s, horses were possessed by almost every Plains tribe in both the eastern and western sections of the plains and as far north as Canada’s Saskatchewan River Basin.”
    By the end of the eighteenth century, Josephy writes, just when Lewis and Clark were traveling through the plains, what we know from movies as the culture of the Plains was in full flower, with the war bonnets, lances, extraordinary horsemanship , and transportable tipi villages. These Indians were not farmers, they were hunters and fighters. The westernmost agricultural settlements were villages on the banks of the Missouri in the Dakotas.
    Lewis and Clark entered what is now Montana in the spring of 1805. In the fall of 1804 the Lewis and Clark