We live in singular times, though it can be hard to realize while we are busy living through them. But then again, every era is strange to someone living in a different time.
And the farther back you travel, the weirder things seem. As British author Leslie Poles Hartley once wrote, “The past is a foreign country: They do things differently there.”
Read history and you will marvel at all the strangeness of those other periods. You have to go back only about 20 years to be in a world where people don’t think it odd that someone has never been on the internet, or isn’t really even sure what it is. Go back only a few more decades and you reach a time when racial segregation is legal and common. Travel back just over a century and you find an America where women can’t vote and only the wealthiest people travel by automobile.
But if you want to experience something truly strange, imagine Vermont as the first human inhabitants experienced it. You’ll have to travel back nearly 13,000 years to reach that point.
Actually, to set the stage, we should wind the clock back even farther to, say, 19,000 years ago. What’s a few more thousand years against the entire history of humankind?
Once we get there, we find a world that is starting to change. The Earth’s climate is slowly warming, and as a result the massive Laurentide ice sheet, which has covered Vermont for the past 70,000 years, is beginning to retreat north.
When you think of the ice sheet, don’t imagine a typical glacier. In some parts of Vermont, the sheet is more than a mile thick. (But that’s thin compared with parts of northern Canada, where it is about 2 miles thick.)
2,500 years to leave Vermont
By about 15,000 years ago, the ice sheet has melted as far north as the southern border of Vermont. You can imagine the moment when the ice gives way to rock. To notice any changes, however, this imaginary time-lapse film in your mind would have to have years or decades between frames. We’re talking glacial speed here. It will take the ice sheet about 2,500 years to retreat from one end of Vermont to the other.
The Vermont the ice sheet leaves behind isn’t ready for habitation. Because of the grinding effects of the ice sheet, it has no soil and therefore no plants. The dirt builds up gradually over the years, as winds blow sand, rock flour (fine grains of pulverized rock), and eventually soil over the barren ground. Plants return to Vermont, probably starting with tundra, in the form of sedges and grasses.
Remnants of that tundra can still be seen today on Vermont’s highest peaks, including Mount Mansfield, Mount Abraham and Camels Hump. More plants follow — club moss, ferns, junipers and the like.
The tundra attracts small creatures (think insects and rodents) and large (think woolly mammoths). Trees finally enter the picture. Paper birch and black spruce are the forerunners.
More animal species arrive in Vermont, among them Eastern chipmunk, snowshoe hare, black bear, white-tailed deer, pine marten, elk, timber wolf and mountain lion. Mastodons also lumber into Vermont. Other more exotic species might also be living here, including the giant ground sloth, sabertooth wild cat and giant short-faced bear. Even the giant beaver, the size of a bear, might call Vermont home.
Around the time trees arrive in Vermont, so does another species: humans. People follow the same path to Vermont as the other animals; they come from the south and west. New England, which we often think of as the oldest part of America, is actually among the last places in the continental United States to be populated by humans. Humans are believed to have reached North America by crossing a land bridge from Asia across the Bering Strait, or perhaps arrived by boat. They then followed a path between the Laurentide ice sheet and the Cordilleran ice sheet, which was to the west.
Those who stay adapt
Those who finally reach Vermont are just the latest in an almost unimaginably long line of generations to make their way north and east onto land uncovered by the retreating ice sheet. These first inhabitants in what is today Vermont are now known as the Paleoindians. Living in small clusters, they subsist by hunting the region’s many mammal species, including the seals and whales that inhabit the Champlain Sea (a larger, saltwater predecessor of Lake Champlain).
These people, who could be ancestors of later groups of Native Americans in the region, arrive in Vermont just as its climate is warming and the environment is changing drastically, though slowly, over the course of centuries. Eventually the trees, literally and figuratively, overshadow the grass communities, which are relegated to small pockets in what has become a mostly forested landscape. The tundra retreats north and large game animals follow it. Many edible plants that the Paleoindians had learned to identify also disappear. Meanwhile, the Champlain Sea is shrinking and becoming less salty. Some fish adapt, but the changes happen too quickly for some species, which die out.
The evergreen forests provide little for the native people to eat. There are fewer edible plants, and the animals are smaller and harder to catch. With their food sources changing radically, the Paleoindians must adapt or die. Actually, there is a third option. Some Paleoindians decide to stick with what they know and follow the familiar large game animals and edible tundra plants north.
Those who stay behind adapt. They develop new ways of hunting and, as more deciduous trees expand their range into Vermont, learn to harvest tree nuts. Fortunately for the Native Americans, they have trade contacts with groups to the south, who teach them how to hunt smaller animals. They adopt new technologies from the south, like the atlatl, a device that enables them to throw spears at greater velocities, and learn how to make smaller projectile points. They also develop tools to carve out trees to make dugout canoes, which they use to venture onto Lake Champlain to hunt and fish.
Walk through this forest landscape and for a moment you might be fooled into thinking this is familiar territory. But that thought fades as you never reach a large settlement or road. And if you happen to the shore of Lake Champlain, you might glimpse native people hunting seals from their dugout canoes. This early Vermont is all around us, but it is far from where we live.
