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In one Native American creation story common among the Algonquian people of the Northeast and Great Lakes regions, the Great Spirit created the first people. They lived in peace and harmony for years.
"But they lost their way and quit caring about each other and caring about the relationship with the environment and other living things," said John Low, a professor of comparative studies at The Ohio State University, and a citizen of the Potawatomi nation, originally centered in the western Great Lakes. One of his focuses is preserving Native American stories.
"And similar to the book of Genesis, the Creator decides to cleanse the world. And so there's a great flood," Low continued.
After the flood, a new and more flawed population ended up taking root: the ancestors of today’s Native Americans.
Low said he doesn’t have a problem believing in both tradition and the findings of archaeology.
"I've always taken the position I don't need to choose between stories," he said. "I believe the story that my grandmother taught to me because grandmothers never lie. But I also respect archeologists."
Recreating the past
And, in fact, archeologists have made a lot of progress lately building out their own account of the first people who lived in what’s now Northeast Ohio. Probably the epicenter of that work is the Experimental Archaeology Laboratory at Kent State University.
Archaeology professor Metin Eren runs the lab along with his colleague, Michelle Bebber.
On a recent day, Eren sat on a stool in the lab with a leather mat draped over his knee, using a rock to strike a hunk of glassy black flint. He’s demonstrating how he and his students think the first people to live in what’s now Northeast Ohio made their signature weapon: the Clovis point.
"It's a stone spear tip that you put onto a wooden shaft," Eren explained. "It's got a sharp razor edge all around it."
The people who made those points, Eren said, are generally regarded by archaeologists as the first people to live in what's now Ohio. They arrived about 15,000 years ago — from Northeast Asia, DNA analysis of their remains shows.
Northeast Ohio is a key place to study how these early settlers lived, right after the last ice age ended, Eren added.
"When the glaciers receded 15,000 years ago and we then find archeological sites after that recession, we know 100% that those sites represent colonizing hunter-gatherers," Eren said.
In other words, the glaciers left a demographic blank slate here for those earliest colonizers to leave their mark.
Some researchers have even speculated that the melting of the glaciers, and the overflowing lakes and rivers they left behind, could have provided the basis for that Great Flood story that Low recounted — a possible dovetailing of the oral tradition and scientific findings.
What other kinds of physical marks did the Clovis people leave, aside from their famous arrowheads? To answer that, Eren and Bebber gestured to a tray full of plastic archival bags.
Inside the bags are finds from throughout Northeast Ohio’s earliest human history: stone flakes, broken pottery, animal bones and teeth. They all provide clues to how these earliest settlers lived and what they hunted — mostly deer and black bear, Bebber and Eren said.
On the move
Archaeology also tells us that the region’s earliest people probably didn’t live in permanent structures, Bebber said — in part because there is no evidence of postholes or foundations.
"They obviously had some sort of house, but it would be almost like a tent that they would take with them that would be mobile," Bebber said.
And they appear to have traveled in small groups of 25 or 30 people. Those small group sizes allowed them to live easily in balance with their food sources and avoid serious disease or pandemics, Eren said.
That’s part of why their life expectancy was about 60 years — about twice what it was after the discovery of agriculture.
So why did this successful culture disappear?
It didn’t, Bebber said.
"What happened is their lifeways changed. They became more sedentary. They adapted to the new environment, but they thrived and again led to all the diverse, modern native nations," Bebber said.
DNA evidence has proved that, too — a direct link between the earliest people to arrive here and the nearly 600 federally recognized Native American tribes who call the United States and Northeast Ohio home today.
