Some people – doubtless cruel and heartless people – have told me that “teenagers ought to be drowned at birth”.
Now that seems a little excessive. But I do understand the irritation that lies behind the sentiment. The noise and mess that teenagers make can be deeply irritating, but what can be truly infuriating is their truculence, their refusal to take no for an answer, and their conviction that their way of doing things is (1) startlingly innovative and (2) far better than anything their parents have ever done before.
Still, there’s something comforting about knowing that there’s nothing new about that behaviour. That there have been teenagers for millennia. And that, in all probability, they have always behaved in pretty much the same way.
Just as annoying as the behaviour of teenagers is the behaviour frequently engaged in unthinkingly by adults. For instance, it grates on me whenever people talk about the great European voyages of exploration as ‘discovering’ other lands. Honestly, do they really think that the Chinese didn’t know where China was? Did they need European explorers to show up and tell them? Did they say “so this is China, where I live, is it? Thanks so much for discovering us”?
There’s an even stronger inclination to treat North America as ‘discovered’ land, as the indigenous peoples there sometimes seem to be regarded as having barely existed. No writing, few buildings, not too many artefacts. Compare the District of Columbia today with pre-Colombian civilisation then and it’s perhaps understandable that some people think the land was all but uninhabited in the earlier period.
Understandable but not necessarily forgivable.
All this made it particularly satisfying to find out about the people who really did discover America. They didn’t get there in the Renaissance half a millennium ago, or from Europe. They’re far likely to have reached America from Asia, when there was still a land bridge between the continents, in what is now covered by the bitter waters of the Bering Straits. And it looks like they got there rather more than 23,000 years ago.
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| Fossilised footprints in New Mexico |
The fact that it’s New Mexico is pretty amazing. The dating says the people who made the prints got there in the middle of the latest ice age. Most of the North American continent was covered in ice, though the area that is now White Sands was pleasant and green with a lake in the middle. There would have been plenty of plants to eat, and lots of megafauna to hunt, such as giant sloths and mammoth.
To get there, though, from the north of what is now Canada where the Bering land bridge was, the people who settled the area must have crossed between two ice sheets, facing some frightening hardships on the way, or else they came by boat, travelling down a long, frozen and inhospitable coast.
Tough guys. And gutsy. Fine explorers in the best of human traditions.
Curiously, a large proportion of the footprints are of kids or teenagers. One commentator I read on the subject reckoned it might have been like the school gates in our times. The parents were standing around chatting while they waited for the kids to come out. As for the kids themselves, they were racing around all over the place in the equivalent of the school yard, leaving loads of tracks for palaeontologists to discover thousands of years later.
Another explanation was that they were made by teenagers roped in to help with a hunt. They would have been standing around doing very little, or perhaps making a noise, to drive the game towards the real hunters. Standing around doing very little? Making lots of noise and frightening anyone within earshot? Yep, sounds like teenagers to me.
I can imagine the conversations.
“What are you doing here? I thought you were on hunt duty last week.”
“Damn punishment chore.”
“Oh? Did that girl complain like I said she would?”
“Like heck she did. She said the least I could do was take her down to the downstream village next time I went.”
“You still go there? To another tribe’s territory? Aren’t you scared?”
“Scared? Hey, no. They’re great. You should hear what they do with their drums. You think we have musicians? Ours are so ancient-tradition-y. Their guys, why, they’ve developed a whole new idiom for the drums.”
“So what went wrong?”
“We got caught sneaking back. And like an idiot, I did the honourable thing. Let her slip into the bushes and round the back of the village and took the rap myself. What a moron I am…”
“So an extra week’s hunt duty?”
“An extra week? I wish. It’s the whole summer. A real bummer. And, you know what? I bet we get more sloth again. It’s been sloth every week, when it hasn’t been beans, beans and nothing but beans. For months now. Oh, for a bit of mammoth just for once.”
“Maybe we should move to the downstream village. Sounds like they’re more fun than old folks here.”
“Yeah. I bet the food’s better too.”
Teenagers being teenagers. In all ages.
Still. The teenagers’ prints weren’t the part of the story that I liked most. The best bit was the story of the woman’s tracks. I’m not sure how they worked out they were a woman’s but, hey, I’m not a palaeontologist. What was amusing – touching really – about these prints is that every now and then they were accompanied by those of a young child. Presumably a toddler.
It seems she was walking along and carrying the child until she got tired. Then she’d put the child down, to toddle along next to her, presumably holding her hand, until they got tired too and demanded to be picked up again. At which point, there was just one set of footprints, a little deeper from the extra weight, and with more marks of slipping where the ground was wet.
Isn’t it wonderful that what’s really fundamental changes so little with the millennia?
I mean, what parent hasn’t been there?
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