Thousands of years ago Native people in the West chose, among all the possibilities, the coyote as the deity animal in their various stories of North America’s creation. Then they proceeded to fashion thousands of stories around “Old Man America,” the oldest literary figure in America. Long described as a Trickster, the deity Coyote actually was a human avatar whose stories richly conveyed human nature in both its admirable and not-so-admirable forms. As part coyote and part human, deity Coyote stands in a progression of human gods, one whose insights into human nature have allowed him to survive into the modern age.

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For 10,000 years, from the end of the Pleistocene to the coming of Old Worlders to America, a diverse population of Native people lived in North America while somehow managing to preserve almost all its biological riches. In contrast to the period when the prior Paleolithic hunters dominated America and the West, this 10,000 year phase of American history featured only one human-caused extinction that science has so far discovered. Was this some strange accident of continental history? Or were their concrete reasons for why, and how, Native America achieved this kind of environmental success?

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Thirteen-thousand years ago the first human culture to colonize all of North America, in this case from Pacific to Atlantic shores, was the Clovis culture of highly-proficient Siberian hunters. While they may not have been the first humans in America, the 1930s discovery of this “Clovisia the Beautiful” launched a century-long debate about their role in a remarkable series of extinctions – the loss of most of America’s African-like megafauna – coinciding with their arrival. Are Clovis and later Folsom cultures the American architects of the early stages of today’s Sixth Extinction?

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