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Early Man In The New World

Joseph A. Hester

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EARLY MAN IN THE NEW WORLD

EARLY MAN IN THE NEW WORLD

REVISED EDITION BY Kenneth Macgowan AND Joseph A. Hester, Jr. WITH DRAWINGS BY CAMPBELL GRANT And these are ancient things. CHRONICLES I , 4:22 PUBLISHED IN CO-OPERATION WITH THE AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY THE NATURAL HISTORY LIBRARY ANCHOR BOOKS DOUBLEDAY &amp; COMPANY, INC. GARDEN CITY, NEW YORK The Natural History Library Edition, 1962 Copyright © 1962 by The American Museum of Natural History Copyright © 1950, 1962 by Kenneth Macgowan For permission to quote passages from their r

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FOREWORD

FOREWORD

Since the time of Columbus, when the peoples of the New World were discovered by Europeans, there has been a continuous interest in knowing something about their origin and early history. This has been almost completely shrouded in the primitive past, unmentioned in any written records, and thus largely a matter of speculation of one kind or another. Only very slowly have the means of investigating this history come into being. Greater knowledge of all the world’s peoples has provided the means

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PREFACE

PREFACE

In the twelve years since Early Man in the New World appeared, in 1950, a good deal of archaeological water has passed under the bridge—or over the land-bridge that led the first immigrants into the Americas. Because I had given most of these years to the founding and development of the Department of Theater Arts at U.C.L.A., I was in no position to revise and add to that book without the collaboration of an able and willing anthropologist, a man who had followed far more closely than I the new

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A NOTE ON NOTES

A NOTE ON NOTES

There are no footnotes in this book. A catch-all for the author’s afterthoughts and for the corrections provided by friends who have read manuscript or galley proof—as well as a place for legitimate references—they are often a nuisance and always a typographical eyesore. The reference numbers in this book direct attention only to the sources of quotations, facts, or theories. They do not lead the reader to supplementary text material. Therefore, he may ignore them unless he wants to pursue the s

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A Secret Laboratory of Culture

A Secret Laboratory of Culture

By the end of World War II, Timbuctoo was surprisingly close to Keokuk. Boys from Brooklyn stared up at Roman columns in the African desert, and Marines swapped a package of cigarettes for the spear of a stone-age man in New Guinea. Physically ours was indeed one world. In a different sense it was one world before Columbus sailed, but a very limited world. Europe, North Africa, and portions of Asia made up all that Columbus knew and all that he expected to know. He intended to find a new road to

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Time-Tests by Travel, Tongues, and Physiques

Time-Tests by Travel, Tongues, and Physiques

Somehow or other, by this route or that, the migrants from Asia drifted across to the Americas, down the two continents, and out to their uttermost limits. Of the many possible tests of man’s age in the New World—some good, some not so good—one of the least accurate is a guess at how long it would take men and women, encumbered with children, to walk—and to eat their way—from Bering Strait to Cape Horn. It has been estimated that they might have covered the 4,000 miles from Harbin, Manchuria, to

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From the Old Stone Age to the New

From the Old Stone Age to the New

While the physical man was adapting himself to all manner of climates, the mental man dragged himself up from the hunting life of the Old Stone Age to the invention of writing and the perfecting of an accurate calendar. On the way—and as slow, necessary steps in his progress—he developed agriculture, and invented or perfected the arts and crafts of pottery, weaving, dyeing, metallurgy, sculpture, poetry, painting, architecture, city planning. In his agriculture he utilized irrigation, discovered

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From Tools and Bones, Fossils and Rocks

From Tools and Bones, Fossils and Rocks

The tools and the hearths and the fossils are plentiful, and some years ago this proof of man’s antiquity seemed to be enough. The great and spectacular mammals whose remains were associated with early man in the Americas, as well as in Europe, were thought to have vanished with the glaciers of the Great Ice Age. Therefore, early man in the Americas must also have lived in that period. Now, however, a number of scientists believe that the American mastodon, along with a number of other animals t

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How New Was the New World?

How New Was the New World?

We moderns were not the first to ask the question: Just how new was the New World on October 12, 1492? Or how old? For a time, it was a very ancient world to the Spaniards. It was the Indies of the East, and they thought they had discovered nothing more than a new way of getting at them. Some years passed before they awoke to the fact that they had found a new continent. There may, of course, have been suspicions from the first. Certainly the tropical trees and plants were new; the animals, too,

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A Passage from Asia to North America

A Passage from Asia to North America

In 1590—not quite a hundred years after Columbus’s discovery—a Spanish cleric, José de Acosta, put on paper an ingenious theory for the populating of the Americas. In an English translation of 1604, it reads: It is not likely that there was another Noes Arke, by the which men might be transported into the Indies, and much lesse any Angell to carie the first man to this new world, holding him by the haire of the head, like to the Prophet Abacuc.... I conclude then, that it is likely the first tha

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Men Out of Asia—and All the Continents

Men Out of Asia—and All the Continents

Brerewood moved on from the questions of how and whence to who. With considerable hardihood, this learned Englishman picked a single Asiatic race to supply the Indian with a forebear. Looking askance at the inhabitants of America, he wrote: “In their grosse ignorance of letters, and of arts, in their idolatrie, and the specialties of it, in their incivility, and many barbarous properties, they resemble the old and rude Tartars, above all the nations of the earth.” [3] Brerewood’s reasoning was l

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Bering Strait—Freeway to the New World

Bering Strait—Freeway to the New World

Though early man from northern Asia certainly crossed in one area and in one area only, he may have made the crossing by any one of three methods. That depends on when he came. If he came rather late—say around 10,000 years ago—he had to negotiate Bering Strait, open water in summer, iced over in winter. If the migrants were a boating and fishing people voyaging north along the Asiatic shore, the 56-mile gap of Bering Strait, broken by the Diomede Islands, was a negligible barrier, since the gre

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Three Roads to the South—with One Detour

Three Roads to the South—with One Detour

Once in Alaska, man—early or not so early—had a number of routes to choose from. If he was of maritime habits, and crossed by water, he would have tended to stick to his boats, and sail or paddle southward and southeastward down the coast and on through the inland passages of lower Alaska and Canada which protect boats from ocean storms. When Frank C. Hibben found a certain early kind of spear point in a curio shop in Ketchikan, Alaska, and on the far-away shore of Cook Inlet, he called attentio

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Problematical Roads to the New World

Problematical Roads to the New World

Other routes from other lands may have brought other migrants. These routes are not so fanciful as the paths from Atlantis and Mu, but they have had few advocates. M. R. Harrington has mentioned the possibility that Magdalenian man of Glacial or Postglacial Europe may have crossed from Europe to Canada by way of Iceland and Greenland and various ice- and land-bridges to father the Eskimo. [18] Ellsworth Huntington adds to the land-bridge over Bering Strait “wind-bridges” across the middle Atlant

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Ware Dogma!

Ware Dogma!

GLACIERS AND ICE FIELDS AS BARRIERS TO EARLY MAN These maps follow the outlines of the continent today, and so do not show the land-bridge from Alaska to Siberia that existed in varying extent throughout the entire Wisconsin period. The maps indicate tentatively how the great white ice fields may have appeared to different areas at different times, producing an effect of shifting from west to east and then back across the continent. Drawn in 1936, the first three maps probably show too little ic

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Conflicts and Confusions

Conflicts and Confusions

The authors are afraid that it may be a little hard for you, dear reader, to shake yourself out of the late Victorianism of your schoolbooks and accept the idea that someone discovered America at least 14,092 years before Columbus. It may be still harder for you to believe that he was not that noble yet very vague red man whom you and your teachers called the American Indian. Certainly you will be shocked to hear that two or three anthropologists of note believe he had more than a touch of Negro

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The Problem of the Ages

The Problem of the Ages

The first confusion that confronts the student of early man is one of nomenclature. It is a by-product of the human animal’s inveterate and estimable love of system. Give us some new subject, such as prehistoric relics, and we immediately set up a scheme of classification. The scheme works beautifully for a while, but presently new evidence accumulates which doesn’t fit the framework. By that time, unfortunately, it is too late to change the classification. In vulgar parlance, it is our story, a

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The Bronze Age—a Phantasm

The Bronze Age—a Phantasm

“Bronze Age” itself is a misnomer and a phantasm. While “Stone Age” and “Iron Age” do define important culture periods—though not the only periods of man’s early activity—the Bronze Age, says T. A. Rickard, “represents a minor phase in the use of copper.” [5] This alloy is merely an incident in the much longer history of the first metal used by man. At the start copper seemed to him to be merely a soft stone. He beat it into ornaments. When he began to melt and cast the native metal instead of p

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Wood, Bone, and Shell Ages

Wood, Bone, and Shell Ages

There is another serious weakness in the Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age sequence. It takes no account of the probability that man used wood, bone, and shell before he used stone. The ape swings a stick much as the first man must have done. The carcass of some bison or stag, picked clean by vultures, must have seemed to our earliest ancestors “a whole potential tool-shop”—as George R. Stewart writes in Man: An Autobiography —“thigh bones ready-made for clubs, horns or antlers for awls, shoulder-

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Dividing the Stone Age—the Old and the New

Dividing the Stone Age—the Old and the New

Still more conflict and confusion have resulted from attempts to divide the Stone Age into watertight compartments. In 1865 Sir John Lubbock proposed two divisions—the Paleolithic, or Old Stone Age—and the Neolithic, or New Stone Age. [13] The Paleolithic included objects found in caves and glacial gravels; the Neolithic, on the surface and in tombs. The first period ran from some vague beginning hundreds of thousands of years ago up to the advent of the Neolithic after the glaciers had melted.

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Activities of the New Stone Age

Activities of the New Stone Age

Three activities stand out. They are the making of pots, the weaving of textiles, and the planting and harvesting of crops accompanied by the domestication of animals. There can be no question that pottery is an important factor in neolithic life. It was in the New Stone Age that man fully wrought the miracle of “a sort of magic transubstantiation—the conversion of mud or dust into stone,” as Childe puts it. It was, as he says, “the earliest conscious utilization by man of a chemical change.” [1

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Agriculture—Test of the Neolithic

Agriculture—Test of the Neolithic

The second fact is that agriculture seems to be the only sound test of the Neolithic. Pottery and weaving preceded agriculture, yet, without agriculture and its fixed communities and its leisure, pottery and weaving could not have reached perfection. As for the polished ax, it was handy enough in in-fighting; but it was of no practical social use until the farmer needed to cut down the trees which began to thrive all over the place when the glaciers disappeared. The Badarians of Egypt were farme

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First a Food Gatherer, Then a Hunter

First a Food Gatherer, Then a Hunter

It is important to realize and remember that early man ate seed grains, tubers, and fruit before he knew how to cultivate them. Probably he began to eat more and more of these natural products just before he became a farmer. Because archaeologists have found evidences that early man was quite a food gatherer at the end of his career, they have been inclined to set up another classification system which is faulty. They see man first as a hunter, then as a food gatherer who was still a hunter, and

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Our Part of the Geologic Time Scale

Our Part of the Geologic Time Scale

The dead hand of another system of classification lies across a still larger area than the Stone Age itself or the Age of Man. This area is the entire life of our earth since it took sufficient shape to support cellular life. As it is so large an area and much of it is so remote in time, changes in the definition of most of its various divisions do not much affect the present discussion. Once upon a time there were four great divisions, neatly numbered in Latin as the Primary, the Secondary, the

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The Glacial Hypothesis Appears

The Glacial Hypothesis Appears

It is hardly more than a century since science began to realize that large parts of Europe and North America once were covered with glaciers. The discovery came from attempts to explain certain disturbing things called “erratic blocks.” These were large masses of stone—sometimes weighing as much as 10,000 tons—which had no business being where they were, because the native rock in their neighborhood was entirely different. Some of the erratic blocks, for example, should have been hundreds of mil

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The End of the Great Ice Age

The End of the Great Ice Age

Authorities agree that the last melting of the ice sheets and glaciers in the Alpine region began somewhere between 20,000 and 15,500 years ago. After considerable shrinkage and oscillation, the ice increased again for about 5,000 years, and then began to shrink once more. There is some disagreement as to when the Great Ice Age ended; a recent and very minor Daun glaciation has been rather rashly dated as late as only 3,500 years ago. These calculations are only for the Alpine region, and we mus

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River Terraces and Beach Lines

River Terraces and Beach Lines

There are other evidences of glaciation besides varves, erratic blocks, moraines of stones and mixed debris along the sides and fronts of the ice streams, and scratches and polish on the native rock over which the glaciers passed. Four raised terraces are found along the sides of many river valleys. Four raised beach lines, first found in the Mediterranean region, have now been noted in the Americas and Australia. Submerged beach lines and land-bridges have been found at certain places under the

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The Cause of Glaciation

The Cause of Glaciation

Most geologists believe that a comparatively slight drop in temperature would bring back the glaciers and the ice fields. The German geologist Brückner calculated that summers in the last glaciation were only 4° centigrade, or about 7° Fahrenheit, colder than they are today. [7] What could have caused this slight drop in temperature in the Great Ice Age? Most of the explanations are not satisfactory. One is that the earth happened to pass through a dust laden nebula that reduced solar radiation.

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Archaeology, a New Science

Archaeology, a New Science

Archaeology—digging up the ancient past—is a fairly young science. It is not so young, of course, as electronics or aerodynamics or radiology. It is not so old as astronomy or mathematics or metallurgy. Excavation began in 1748 with the uncovering of Pompeii; but it was hardly scientific, and it reached only a short distance into the past. The deciphering of the Egyptian hieroglyphics in 1819 and of cuneiform writing in 1837 pushed back history two or three thousand years. But deep explorations

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Mortillet’s Cramping Classification

Mortillet’s Cramping Classification

Progress thereafter was rapid, perhaps too rapid. Notable finds were soon followed by attempts to freeze knowledge into chronologic classifications. R. Rigollot, Gabriel de Mortillet, Edouard Lartet, Milne-Edwards, and Henry Christy found in the river terraces and the caves of France innumerable and varied evidences of man’s activity in the Great Ice Age. Mortillet named various cultures from the places where stone tools were found, and then, in 1869, he set them up in a chronological series. [5

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Enter the Eolith

Enter the Eolith

One of the early difficulties that Mortillet’s list of cultures encountered was the discovery of implements that preceded his first culture, the Chellean—or Abbevillian—in time and type. Cruder axes from older levels had to be called Pre-Chellean (see illustration, page 71 ). In England scrapers and other crude tools cropped up in formations that go back more than 500,000 years. Then eoliths—“dawn stones”—appeared. They were irregular-shaped pieces of flint with chips knocked off here and there.

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Flake vs. Core Industries

Flake vs. Core Industries

More difficulties beset Mortillet and his system of names and cultures as time passed and as fellow scientists dug new caves and terraces, and turned up stone tools of other patterns and other periods. Implements appeared that did not fit into the Frenchman’s classic system. A supplementary scheme had to be devised, and soon it, too, failed to fit the facts. The new system divided all paleolithic tools into two types—which was sound enough—and assigned each type to certain peoples and to those p

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Dating Early Man in Europe

Dating Early Man in Europe

One good thing can be said for Mortillet’s modified sequence of Abbevillian, Acheulean, Mousterian, Aurignacian, Solutrean, and Magdalenian. It may not be complete enough, and it may not apply too well to the world outside Europe; but it is chronologically sound locally. It is a succession of cultures along a time scale. If an archaeologist finds two or more varieties of paleolithic tools in a new site, he finds, for example, Acheulean beneath Mousterian, or Mousterian beneath Aurignacian. Simil

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True Tools—Deceptive Skulls

True Tools—Deceptive Skulls

Men who practiced Abbevillian culture had some flaked tools—which they may have used for scraping—but their best-recognized output was a crude hand ax. It was not too well formed. Undoubtedly they also used wood and bone, but we have no sure evidence of this. Some assign Abbevillian culture to the first interglacial period, about 500,000 years ago. Some move it up 200,000 years, into the second interglacial. Some even place it in the third. Perhaps it lasted through all three. At any rate, the m

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Ancestors from Heidelberg and Swanscombe?

Ancestors from Heidelberg and Swanscombe?

We still have at least four authentically early human fossils from which European men may have descended. Each has its own interesting story. [10] The fragment of jaw found under 80 feet of sand at Mauer, Germany, we call Heidelberg man, although he is the least human of the lot. He seems also to be the most ancient, perhaps belonging to the first interglacial period. At least the bones of horses, elephants, bears, and other animals found at the same level in the sand pit derive from the early s

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Putting the Neanderthal in His Place

Putting the Neanderthal in His Place

Neanderthal man was a latecomer. We will mention him here but wait until farther along to take a closer look at him. He came to Europe late in the third interglacial period. His culture was advanced and his remains are diverse, numerous, and well studied. His bones differ so distinctly from those of modern man that at most he can be considered a distant cousin, only marginally ancestral. But his remains immediately precede those of modern man in Europe, and the stone tools of his Mousterian cult

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Ancient Man in Java and China

Ancient Man in Java and China

In the 1880’s a Dutch Army surgeon named Eugène Dubois decided to go to Java to find a kind of ape-man that the great German scientist Ernst Haeckel had envisioned fifteen years before. In 1891, beneath ancient deposits of the Solo River, Dubois discovered what he was looking for—or perhaps a slight improvement on it. What he found was the skull top, two molar teeth, and a thigh bone of a thing which was much more man than ape, but which received the name Pithecanthropus erectus (erect ape-man).

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“Giant Ape”—a Mythical Ancestor?

“Giant Ape”—a Mythical Ancestor?

Behind Java and Peking man, it was once supposed, a giant ancestor lurked. Ideas of giants occur in the myths and folklore of most peoples, but here the germ was planted by reputable scientists. It began between 1935 and 1939, when von Koenigswald discovered in a Hong Kong apothecary’s shop three molars that had six times the volume of our teeth and were greater than the equivalent teeth in any other man or ape, living or fossil. Their owner obviously was related to man, but how closely we canno

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“Java” Men in Africa and Europe?

“Java” Men in Africa and Europe?

Halfway around the world, at Ternifine, near Oran, in Algeria, Professor Camille Arambourg recovered a portion of a youthful skull and three jaws in 1954-55. He called these Atlanthropus . [13] This was not a valid new genus, however, for there are strong resemblances between these jaws and those of Peking and Java man. Here is an African cousin of Pithecanthropus . (There are others. A fragment of jaw found near Rabat, in Morocco, also is thought to resemble Java man.) The Ternifine jaws seem t

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Man-Apes or Ape-Men in Africa

Man-Apes or Ape-Men in Africa

While Sunday supplements and scientists alike were occupied with Dubois’s “missing link” and his Peking cousin, primate fossils of even greater consequence were being recovered in southern Africa by Professor Raymond Dart and the late Dr. Robert Broom. In 1925, Dart named them Australopithecines or “southern apes.” [14] Arousing little scientific curiosity at first, they were considered by some as a parallel, perhaps profitless, line of evolution. By 1950, such fossils were becoming impressively

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The Progressive Neanderthal

The Progressive Neanderthal

Let us get back to Europe and the next culture in Mortillet’s scale. This is the Mousterian; we know it better by the name of the place in Germany—Neanderthal—where, in 1856, the first skeleton of the Mousterian Age was found. It took thirty years for this skeleton to win scientific recognition, but now we have about a hundred admitted specimens. The Neanderthal was not a pretty spectacle. He had the low forehead and heavy brow ridges of Java and Peking man, and the same lack of chin. And yet he

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Radiocarbon Dates for the Mousterian

Radiocarbon Dates for the Mousterian

However early the Mousterian culture may have begun, the later stages fall within the range of one of the archaeologist’s most interesting and precise techniques for dating. This is the radiocarbon, or Carbon 14, method. [19] Much simplified, it depends upon the following phenomena: Most plants are radioactive, and so are all animals that depend directly or indirectly upon these plants for food. This radioactivity is found in a rare form of carbon called radiocarbon, or Carbon 14. While a plant

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Homo sapiens—New or Old?

Homo sapiens—New or Old?

The relationship of all these forms of early man is much disputed. For many, many years they were all supposed to be barren offshoots of our ancestral tree. Nobody could find the particular breed of ape-man from which we were descended. Now science is inclined to lump most of them together in one way or another. There are many theories and many genealogies. Swanscombe man plays grandfather to Homo sapiens . Java man and Peking man become the forebears of the Mongoloid. Other men from Java father

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Solutrean Flint Workers Invade Europe

Solutrean Flint Workers Invade Europe

Toward the close of Aurignacian times comes a remarkable people called the Solutreans. They appear quite suddenly as invading hunters, and they disappear as suddenly. Their culture does not evolve out of the Aurignacian, and it does not evolve into the next culture, the Magdalenian. The Solutreans stayed a relatively short time in Europe; Braidwood once gave them 10,000 years, but Mather and Peake and Fleure only 500. [25] Guesses as to when they arrived vary as widely. Peake and Fleure think it

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Weapons and Tools—from Hand Ax to Arrowhead

Weapons and Tools—from Hand Ax to Arrowhead

One of the many mysteries of prehistory is who invented the bow and arrow. The smaller Solutrean points argue that their makers used a bow and invented this primitive but effective machine. But since the bow was made of wood, it has not been preserved in the caves and terraces that spared the bone spear-throwers of the Magdalenians and the flint projectiles; so for evidence we must fall back on the paintings of primitive man. We find the spear-thrower portrayed in South Africa but not in Europe.

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The Danger in Universal Time-Scales

The Danger in Universal Time-Scales

When we apply to the paleolithic cultures of the rest of the world the names of the European culture sequence—Abbevillian, Acheulean, Mousterian, Aurignacian, Solutrean, Magdalenian—we produce acrimonious argument and not much more. These terms are of no use in the rest of the world except as a description of types of tools. In parts of Africa, for example, Mousterian and Aurignacian objects are found together; in other parts, Mousterian and Solutrean. In the first case, the Aurignacian includes

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Early Man as Adam’s Progeny

Early Man as Adam’s Progeny

Early man is only about a century old—in the New World as well as the Old. While a Frenchman theorized about hand axes and the river terraces of the Somme, a German discovered in Missouri the bones of a mastodon which had been stoned and burned by man. That was 1838. Within twenty years early man had won his title to glacial antiquity in Europe. It took ninety, however, for him to get a really sound and solid claim to even 10,000 years in our hemisphere. The study of early man in the Americas ha

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Science and Religion Embattled

Science and Religion Embattled

But by the time the next few finds began to be discussed, the spiritual and intellectual climate had changed. A wind off the glaciers chilled the enthusiasm of the churchly, and banished bland talk of “antediluvian antiquities.” Agassiz and Darwin and early man had to go down together or triumph at the expense of Genesis. The issue was joined. The churchman grew bitter and blind; the scientist, ardent and uncritical. Of the many conflicts and controversies, the most celebrated raged around the C

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Reaction, Led by Science

Reaction, Led by Science

In the nineties—which was roughly the beginning of more intense and thorough scientific study in the whole field of American prehistory—a reaction set in. Early man and his sponsors were violently attacked—not by the church but by certain scientists. Thomas Wilson, Curator of the National Museum in Washington, and F. W. Putnam of the Peabody Museum at Harvard, who had long championed early man, were furiously set upon by W. H. Holmes, then of the Field Museum of Chicago, as well as Hrdlička, of

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The Red Herring of the “Primitive Skull”

The Red Herring of the “Primitive Skull”

It was Hrdlička’s misfortune—and the misfortune of science—that until almost the end of his life he refused to meet his opponents on common ground. He was right enough in challenging early man as an inhabitant of America 200,000 years ago, but he challenged him in terms that applied or seemed to apply to any man earlier than the Indian of three or four thousand years ago. Hrdlička failed to define properly the thing he was attacking. He merely prated of the lack of “primitive skulls.” That was n

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The Mystery of the Missing Bones

The Mystery of the Missing Bones

So far as skeletal relics are concerned, the friends of early man in the New World would have been at something of a disadvantage even if Hrdlička had been less vocal and less violent. Until the edge of the Christian era, physical evidence is scanty in the Americas. The bones of early man are few and far between. The mastodons, elephants, sloths, camels, bison, and horses that once thronged the plains and plateaus south of the glaciers have left us a great sufficiency of skulls and teeth, verteb

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South America Provides the First Skulls

South America Provides the First Skulls

So far as anthropology is concerned, it was a busy and important decade that ended in 1850. Prescott’s histories of the conquest of Mexico and Peru, and John L. Stephens’s two books of travel and study in the Maya area had become best-sellers. Lord Kingsborough was publishing his nine-volume Antiquities of Mexico . Boucher de Perthes was finding additional hand axes, and beginning to write upon them. More important for our purposes is the report of the Danish naturalist Lund that he found the sk

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North American Skulls and Bones

North American Skulls and Bones

Since the discovery of human bones in glacial gravels near Trenton, New Jersey, three skeletons of some importance and a number of skulls that resemble those of Lagoa Santa and Punin have been found in the United States. The three finds of complete skeletons made in Minnesota between 1931 and 1935 have aroused much debate. All three were encountered in road-making or the digging of gravel, and scientists were not present at their discovery. A. E. Jenks’s study of these skeletons has done much to

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Early Man Not Solely Mongoloid or Indian

Early Man Not Solely Mongoloid or Indian

Broadly speaking, these western craniums, like the other skulls I have mentioned, are not typically Mongoloid, and they do not resemble too closely the less Mongoloid skulls of the long-headed Indians of the Plains and the Northeast. Even the freshest and least fossilized specimens—three groups from coastal and central Texas—have “no affinity,” according to the physical anthropologists George and Edna Woodbury, “among the tribes of North America.” Instead—although the brow ridges are “not a cons

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Evidence from Middle America

Evidence from Middle America

Travelers have long reported bones of mammoths and mastodons in Mexico. The first to do this was Cortés’s young lieutenant, Bernal Díaz. To be sure, he thought that the bone the Tlascalans showed him belonged to one of their gigantic ancestors, as they said it did. In his book, The True History of the Conquest of New Spain , he wrote: “So that we could see how huge and tall these people had been they brought a leg bone of one of them which was very thick and the height of a man of ordinary statu

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New Finds in the United States

New Finds in the United States

The first wholly acceptable association of human remains, ancient artifacts, and extinct animals was found in 1953. On the Scharbauer Ranch, near Midland, Texas, parts of a skeleton of a 30-year-old woman were recovered from a deposit of gray sand that included chipped stone tools, remains of extinct horse and bison, and the burned bone of an extinct antelope that Midland man may accidentally have dug up from a lower layer. The gray sand provided a number of materials that have produced dates by

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Artifacts from Heaven

Artifacts from Heaven

“Thunderbolts of God”—from England to Japan and from Norway to Africa, that was how men once explained the stone axes and arrowheads which they found buried in the earth. The philosophers and scientists of the Renaissance dug a little deeper, and one of them came up with the verbose and remarkable suggestion that these stones were made “by an admixture of a certain exhalation of thunder and lightning with metallic matter, chiefly in dark clouds, which is coagulated by the circumfused moisture an

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The Folsom Point—Unique and Potent

The Folsom Point—Unique and Potent

Quite a different thunderbolt—and a potent one—was the spear point that J. D. Figgins, of the Denver Museum of Natural History, found in 1927 between the ribs of an extinct bison near Folsom, New Mexico. It was a thunderbolt that destroyed, startlingly and for all time, thirty years of opposition to the presence of early man in the Americas. A spear point, or possibly a scraper, found near Trenton, New Jersey, in 1872. Except for lack of retouching on the edges, it resembles the Mousterian point

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Americans Hunted Animals Now Extinct

Americans Hunted Animals Now Extinct

The Folsom find was arresting, even dramatic. Not only was one of the nineteen points from the first three field seasons actually lodged between the ribs of an extinct bison. In addition, the skeletons of twenty-three of these animals testified that here was the scene of a prehistoric kill. Man had indeed had something to do with these beasts before they had grown cold; for the tail bones of each bison were missing, and hunters will tell you that, in skinning, “the tail goes with the hide.” [9]

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Two Other Folsom Sites—Clovis and Lindenmeier

Two Other Folsom Sites—Clovis and Lindenmeier

The second site of classic Folsom was that near Clovis, investigated first by Edgar B. Howard in 1932, and dated by the glacialist Ernst Antevs and the geologist Kirk Bryan. It was notable on two counts. The finds were in the dried beds of lakes that had apparently been formed in the pluvial, or very wet, period which occurred at least as early as the end of the last glaciation—11,000 to 12,000 years ago—and probably still earlier. This time there were fossils of other extinct mammals besides bi

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Another Fine and Ancient Point

Another Fine and Ancient Point

Folsom man and his spear point had only just begun to worry conservative anthropologists when A. E. Jenks—who was to champion skeletons of early man in Minnesota—noted, in 1928, a still finer type of flint in the collection of Perry and Harold Anderson, of Yuma County, Colorado. It was long and narrow, with parallel sides and a triangular point, and looked rather like a half-bayonet without its Folsom flute. It was consummately chipped by pressure over its whole surface. These artifacts were at

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The Plainview Point

The Plainview Point

Another type of early point has given students a good deal of trouble. It is shaped somewhat like a Folsom but it has no long chip, or flute, removed from its two faces. The lower edges are often ground. Its surface is sometimes chipped like an Eden with collateral flaking, and sometimes patterned with larger, and less regular flakes. When such points were found with Folsoms, they were often called Folsom-like. As the result of the discovery in 1945 by Glen L. Evans and Grayson E. Meade of eight

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A New Point—and Sloths—in Gypsum Cave

A New Point—and Sloths—in Gypsum Cave

After the discovery of the Eden point, the next important development came in 1930 with M. R. Harrington’s excavation of Gypsum Cave, Nevada. Here he found the dung, hair, skin, and bones of the ground sloth in clear association with a wide variety of artifacts. Besides the sloth, there were fossils of camel and perhaps horse. Among the artifacts was a new type of diamond-shaped point, and—quite as remarkable—there were parts of painted dart shafts with the butts pitted for use with a spear-thro

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Old Lake and River Sites

Old Lake and River Sites

In 1934 and 1935 Mr. and Mrs. W. H. Campbell found traces of man along the beaches of vanished lakes in the southern California desert. At first Antevs believed that the lakes formed when the glaciers were melting away 20,000 to 25,000 years ago, but now he dates the artifacts and camp sites as less than 9,000 years old. At Lake Mohave, in the Campbells’ first year of work, they found only stone tools—Mohave and Silver Lake points—but in the Pinto Basin they came upon the bones of extinct mammal

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Sandia—Older Than Folsom

Sandia—Older Than Folsom

However problematical these evidences of pre-Folsom man near Abilene may be, there can be no doubt about the meaning of Frank C. Hibben’s discoveries in Sandia Cave, New Mexico, in 1936. He began by finding the remains of Pueblo Indians. Under the Pueblo he came upon a layer of stalagmitic travertine one-half inch to six inches thick, laid down during a moist period. Sealed off beneath this were classic Folsom points together with scrapers and evidence of extinct mammals. Next he found another s

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The Milling Stone Appears

The Milling Stone Appears

In the early thirties, archaeologists began to find a peculiar kind of artifact that broadened their conception of the activities of early man in the New World. Anthropologists had always thought of him as merely a hunter. He needed spear points, scrapers, knives, hammerstones to shape these things, and fire-drills to make it possible for him to cook his prey; but that was all. Then milling stones began to appear, and it became clear that early man—at least in some areas—had been a food gatherer

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A Paucity of Art Objects

A Paucity of Art Objects

Advanced as early man in America may have been in his stone industry, he seems to have been singularly backward in making the kind of spiritualized artifact which we call art. In the caves of France and Spain men of the Old Stone Age left remarkable paintings and sculptures of animals. There is nothing like this of corresponding age in the Americas. Early man in Europe and in Northern Asia turned out many little figures of women—undoubtedly symbols of fecundity, since the female characteristics

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Hand Axes in the Americas

Hand Axes in the Americas

Of all the bits of stone that bear on the existence of early man in America, perhaps the most puzzling—and certainly the most neglected—are the artifacts which E. B. Renaud has found in countless numbers in southwestern Wyoming. Here at 105 sites on the arid surface of Black’s Fork Valley he had picked up by 1940 some 7,000 chipped stones—many of them like rude hand axes—which suggest a parallel with the industries of paleolithic man in the Old World. [62] European authorities such as J. Reid Mo

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Early Man in Mexico

Early Man in Mexico

Besides the skull that de Terra found with the fossils of elephants in Mexico, there are artifacts south of the border which reinforce the argument for early man. They are more important than the chance resemblance to a Folsom point which Junius Bird found with sloth bones in a cave in southern Chile, or the Eden-like point which has turned up in Venezuela. [67] During de Terra’s studies of the dry lake beds of the Valley of Mexico and the glacial moraines on the surrounding mountains—studies wh

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From the Glacial to the Archaic

From the Glacial to the Archaic

The record of early man in North America may be dealt with on five levels, each overlapping another. The most recent is sometimes called the Archaic Period—the stage before native civilizations took shape—and it lies outside the range of early man as we define him. The earliest of the other four levels is the most significant and the least known. We have no suitable name for this period, which stretches back from about 15,000 years ago into the very dim past. It may have begun early in the last

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Back of 15,000 Years?

Back of 15,000 Years?

We have hardly mentioned the earliest period of American prehistory. As in the Old World, the most ancient is the least known. There are many places in the west and southwest of the United States, and some in Mexico and South America, where materials of what seems impressive antiquity have been detected. We say materials, rather than cultures, for they are often suspect. At Tule Springs, in southern Nevada, for more than two decades, Southwest Museum archaeologists have periodically found eviden

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A Twofold Problem

A Twofold Problem

A mammoth in Colorado ... a giant sloth near Hoover Dam ... spear points of early man involved with both. Those two remote and spectacular animals roaming our own United States set our minds far back on the trail of time. The weapons, crude as they were and pitifully small, carry us forward again tens of thousands of years. We are describing the reaction of the layman who first learns of these things, but the opinions of science veer almost as widely when it tries to date the traffic of man and

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Myths and Mammoths

Myths and Mammoths

The subject has been thoroughly confused by too many guesses and too little evidence. Besides a great variety of geologic theories and some amazingly stubborn conservatism, we have had some extraordinary Indian myths as well as the dreams of innocents and eccentrics. If the Spanish churchmen were a bit upset at finding in the Indies both a new world and a race unaccounted for in the Bible, later explorers and settlers of the mainland were quite as astonished over the discovery of huge bones in s

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Archaeological Evidence of Recent Man and the Mastodon

Archaeological Evidence of Recent Man and the Mastodon

The American archaeologist has found no evidence of the mammoth as a living factor in the life of the American Indian since the time of Christ. He looks askance at two elephant pipes of doubtful provenience which turned up near Davenport, Iowa, around the eighties. He is not impressed by a carved head, which might be either elephant or macaw, on a stone stela in Copan, Honduras. But he must give more respectful attention to certain evidence concerning the mastodon—that early form of elephant whi

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Sloth and Camel in Dry Caves

Sloth and Camel in Dry Caves

When we turn from the mastodon preserved in wet peat bogs, we come upon the camel and the sloth in dry caves. There, buried in dust, are skin, hair, and ligaments, as well as bone. Not a great deal of such remains exist, however, and only in a few caves—and this time “few” means less than five. It happens that dry and dust-filled caves are almost as good embalmers as the bogs of the Great Lakes or the ice of Siberia and the Alaska muck beds. “In a perfectly dry limestone cave,” says Howard, “cov

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The Folsom Bison Not Extinct?

The Folsom Bison Not Extinct?

Neither elephant nor sloth, neither horse nor camel, is such a common companion of the points of Folsom man as is an extinct form of bison. It was larger than the historic animal, and had longer and straighter horns. Though it is known variously as Bison taylori , Bison antiquus antiquus , and Bison antiquus figgensi , it was probably of a single type, the last named. Now one of the significant things about Folsom is that the point never turns up with the modern variety of buffalo which goes by

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The Mystery of Extinction

The Mystery of Extinction

A hundred years ago the French scientist Cuvier, who gave much time to the study of the fossils of extinct mammals, presented the “cataclysmal” explanation of their end. They were destroyed by sudden great geologic changes. To us, perhaps, these changes seem to have ignored certain other animals in a most disquieting way. Cuvier was at a disadvantage, of course, for he was working in a Bible-ridden world which had to accept the Book of Genesis as fact. Even as late as 1887, Henry H. Howorth wrot

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More Radiocarbon Dates for Extinct Mammals

More Radiocarbon Dates for Extinct Mammals

Working together, archaeologists, paleontologists, and physicists are providing more and more facts about the great extinction. Archaeologists are supplying artifacts for cultural associations, and animal bones that the paleontologists identify. In radiocarbon laboratories, the physicists are dating the bones and sometimes charcoal from man-made fires. Through the evergrowing list of dates, many early theories are being replaced with factual knowledge. Some of the dates, however, must be taken w

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The Mythical Indian Race

The Mythical Indian Race

Science has found a great many artifacts and a few skulls that seem to have belonged to early man. Was he an Indian? Was he a Paleo-Indian—whatever that may imply? Was he a Mongoloid with an admixture of Australoid, Negroid, and White? Was he Mongoloid at all? Among the most blatant misnomers of popular science is “Indian race.” Even in North America it is an absurdity. Throw in Middle America and South America, and the attempt to fit the people of the New World into this or any one racial pigeo

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Racial Definition—the Field of the Physical Anthropologist

Racial Definition—the Field of the Physical Anthropologist

Physical anthropology has its difficulties and uncertainties when it tries to reach back deep into time. But the tests by which it distinguishes races seem as sound and dependable as those of any of the disciplines that deal with early man. Some of the results are certainly striking. There are problems, of course, as to the order in which the various races developed and spread throughout the Old World. In the opinion of some authorities, the Pygmy, or Negrito, came first. The Pygmy, although res

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What Skull Measurements Tell Us About Early Man

What Skull Measurements Tell Us About Early Man

These peculiarities of southwest Pacific skulls are important if you are looking for early man in the Americas. As we have said, a skull found along with the bones of extinct mammals or in a geological formation that suggests great age is almost always long-headed, or dolichocephalic. The typical, round-headed Mongoloid Indian is conspicuous by his antique absence. (The only early skulls that are not long-headed fall in the intermediate division, the mesocephalic.) Further, the early skull has m

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Europe Recognizes the Australoid in America

Europe Recognizes the Australoid in America

The earliest recognition of non-Indian traits in the Americas came from scientists of the Old World—Mochi, Biasutti, Hansen, Quatrefages, ten Kate (who found the Pericú skulls in Lower California), Rivet, Gusinde, Lebzelter, Mendes Correâ, Hultkrantz. The first American and British students to accept the idea were Roland B. Dixon in 1923, A. C. Haddon in 1925, and Sir Arthur Keith and Earnest A. Hooton in 1930; the last two were physical anthropologists, and naturally knew more than archaeologis

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Hooton and Dixon on Early Invaders

Hooton and Dixon on Early Invaders

Hooton’s pronouncement in 1930 against the pretensions of the Mongoloid Indian resulted from a study of a number of old skulls found at Pecos Pueblo in New Mexico. In terms of early man they were not so very aged; in fact, they were slightly younger than the Basket Makers of the first Christian centuries. But in these skulls Hooton found traces of seven types of men. They included, as one might expect, the Basket Makers, the Plains Indian, and a “large hybrid” type which was thoroughly Indian. I

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A Potpourri of Races

A Potpourri of Races

The theories of Dixon and Hooton and others conflict in many places; but they present, on the whole, an arresting and convincing case for early man as a predecessor of the Mongoloids and as quite a different sort of creature. There are many side issues to the general theory, and they increase as we begin to deal with living peoples. Hooton finds close resemblances to Egyptian skulls among the Arizona Basket Makers and in the Coahuila Caves of northern Mexico, [10] and Dixon identifies ancient Eg

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Pygmies Before Australoids in the New World?

Pygmies Before Australoids in the New World?

Both Imbelloni and Gladwin begin with a suggestion that Pygmies deserve consideration. These primordial migrants trod their tiny paces from some unknown fatherland to the forests of the Congo and the jungles of New Guinea, to islands like the Andamans and possibly to Tasmania. The presence of five-foot Yahgan in Tierra del Fuego suggests to both Imbelloni and Gladwin that Pygmies may have preceded the Australoids to the New World. The advent of Pygmies in Tierra del Fuego as well as in Tasmania

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Australoids, Negroids, and Men from Europe

Australoids, Negroids, and Men from Europe

Gladwin is definite about the Australoids. They came over Bering Strait somewhere around 25,000 years ago, and drifted down the west coast. They spread out in the southwestern part of the United States below a line from San Francisco to the Texas coast, and flowed on down into Mexico and South America. For evidence he has more than the Australoid-Melanesian skulls of Lower California, Texas, Punin, Paltacalo, and Lagoa Santa. He cites a number of things used and made by the Australians of recent

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No Mongoloids till 300 B.C.

No Mongoloids till 300 B.C.

The first Mongoloids, as Gladwin sees it, were the Eskimos. They came to the northern edge of North America about 500 B.C. But, because they clung to that edge, we must look elsewhere and later for a Mongoloid invasion of the cultural areas of the New World. Gladwin believes that these second Mongoloids were thrust out of northern China and on into the New World by the ferment of the Huns. They reached Alaska about 300 B.C. Ultimately, supplemented by the Uto-Aztecans, they supplied the man powe

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Siberian Caucasoids

Siberian Caucasoids

Since 1950, Joseph Birdsell and Carleton Coon have done something to clear a little of the mist that has obscured the physical origins of man in the New World. They agree, more or less, that the first migrants were of Caucasoid stock from the basin of the Amur River, in northeast Siberia. [32] Birdsell, a close student of the Australian aborigines, finds three strains in these peoples, one of which is traceable to the “white” Ainus, of northern Japan, and finally to what he calls the Amurians of

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Diffusion vs. Independent Invention

Diffusion vs. Independent Invention

We hope you have not been skipping the choice thoughts that we have placed at the beginning of chapters. Some of them are merely amusing, but certain ones make an important point. Such is the above remark from Hooton. It calls our attention to an unscientific emotionalism which often lies behind one of the dogmas of American archaeology. This dogma is called the autochthonous origin of Indian cultures. It asserts that practically all the traits, discoveries, and inventions which Columbus, Cortes

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Bastian’s “Psychic Unity”

Bastian’s “Psychic Unity”

Those who argue for independent invention rest their case largely on a distortion of the theory of “psychic unity” put forward by Adolf Bastian in mid-Victorian days. From studies of African and Asiatic cultures, Bastian developed the thesis that “psychic unity” everywhere produced similar “elementary ideas.” Thus early man in France and early man in Asia might harden the point of a wooden spear in a fire, or knock chips off a lump of flint to make a sharper tool, or make a rope out of twisted v

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Complexity an Argument for Diffusion

Complexity an Argument for Diffusion

The chief modern American proponent of diffusion is Harold S. Gladwin. What is his case? How does he come to his conclusions? He begins, of course, by noting a large number of random resemblances. Some are in simple objects. Some are in complex ones. As he seeks a scientific basis for his argument, he concentrates on the complex things. Complexity seems to rule out coincidence. If a tool has only one or two parts—like a curved throwing stick or a hafted knife—it is not difficult to conceive of t

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Dispersion as Well as Diffusion

Dispersion as Well as Diffusion

The difficulty of this second step in the diffusionist’s argument lies in the fact that it is hard indeed to find a complex of traits in one American locality that resembles exactly a complex of traits in a single Old World one. If the traits are all together in Peru, some may come from one place in the Old World and some from another. Or, if we take a group of traits from a single Old World locale, we find them spread out widely and separately in the Americas. An excellent example of this may b

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The Trap of Time

The Trap of Time

Gladwin has a better answer, which is also an attack on a basic weakness of his opponents. Through many years he has been pointing out that friends of the inventive Indian have been getting squeezed tighter and tighter in a trap of their own independent invention. It is the trap of time. When the Spaniards found the New World, they found it full of inventions and discoveries. There were cities of stone, painted temples, great pyramids. Metal workers smelted ores, made alloys, and cast elaborate

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Escape from the Trap

Escape from the Trap

The similarity between the traits of the north and the south which Nordenskiöld points out, and the fact that a different lot of traits were dropped in between the others are grist to Gladwin’s diffusion mill. In 1937, when he wrote Excavations at Snaketown , he was only beginning to see an answer. By 1947, when Men Out of Asia appeared, he had a fairly complete and certainly an ingenious explanation. His first proposition is that the Mongoloids came late—very late—and that they brought not much

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Dead Alexander Invades America

Dead Alexander Invades America

BEARDED WHITE GODS? Middle American portraits of men who, unlike the generality of Mongoloids, wore beards. Upper left, the back of a Totonac slate mirror probably from the state of Veracruz. Upper right, a carving from Tepataxco, Veracruz. Center, a figure on a pottery vase from Chama, Guatemala. Lower left, a pottery head found at Tres Zapotes, Veracruz. Lower right, a carving on a stela at La Venta, which appears to have an artificial beard such as was worn by the Egyptians. (The first three,

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Independent Inventions Neither Parallel Nor Diffused

Independent Inventions Neither Parallel Nor Diffused

It will be some years before the debate of diffusion versus independent invention comes anywhere near settlement. Much of Gladwin’s evidence for diffusion is striking and not to be laughed aside—particularly the group of Australian traits in our Southwest, and the Polynesian and Melanesian traits in the area around the Gulf of Darien. His injection of Old World voyagers between the northern and southern areas of the New World explains certain puzzling matters; but the theory presents puzzles of

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What Diffusion of Plants and Art?

What Diffusion of Plants and Art?

Meantime it is interesting to observe that the log-jam of the independent inventionists is weakening a bit. When the International Congress of Americanists met in New York in 1949, the hitherto conservative and autochthonous American Museum of Natural History presented for the instruction and delectation of the Congress a rather elaborate exhibition of parallelisms between the cultural traits of the Old World and the New. A follow-up to this noteworthy gathering was a symposium of many of the sa

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Inventions—Some New, Some Old

Inventions—Some New, Some Old

Let us forget, for the moment, white conquerors like Alexander and white gods like Quetzalcoatl. Let us suppose that the Indian actually invented his own culture. This does not mean that we throw diffusion out of the window; for the Indian may have invented things in the Old World and brought them to the New—which is one kind of diffusion. On the other hand, he may have invented in the Americas the same things that other peoples were inventing—before or after him—in Eurasia. That, of course, is

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American Plants and Their Cultivation

American Plants and Their Cultivation

The list of important plants that made up the Indian’s agriculture is impressive. It is also unique, for it contains few Old World species. In the northeastern United States there were a few wild fruits and berries—grapes and blackberries, for example—that are common to the north temperate zones of both hemispheres. In Middle America were two plants which are found in Asia and the South Sea Islands—the bottle gourd and the coconut palm—and cotton of a different species from that of Eurasia and A

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When and Where Did Our Agriculture Begin?

When and Where Did Our Agriculture Begin?

There are two questions to be asked about agriculture in the New World: Where did it originate and with what plants? Did it have a multiple origin—which would entail a sort of independent invention? These questions have a bearing on how much time man spent in the inventing and perfecting of agriculture, and therefore on how long he had been thoroughly settled in the Americas when the Spaniards came. Not so many years ago, Indian corn, or maize, was carelessly considered the first plant cultivate

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The Indian’s Accomplishment in Agriculture

The Indian’s Accomplishment in Agriculture

There can be no argument over the remarkable nature of certain things that the Indian farmer accomplished. Through long cultivation he produced the seedless pineapple. When he found that one form of manioc was poisonous, he took thought and devised a press for squeezing out the deadly cyanide while retaining the starch. Bruman calls this “one of the outstanding accomplishments of the American Indian.” [13] He says further: The original process of plant selection seems to have been carried on mor

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How Old Is Corn?

How Old Is Corn?

Obviously it must have taken many long years for the Indian to develop corn from its unknown ancestor into its many and widespread varieties. One botanical authority, G. N. Collins, thinks 20,000 years would not be enough—if a gross mutation, or sudden genetic change, were ruled out. [19] Other botanists do not accept such a figure. The development of corn may have taken a good many centuries or, more likely, a few millenniums. Behind corn must lie more centuries or more millenniums during which

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The Pendulum Swings

The Pendulum Swings

This chapter might have been headed “Summary.” We could not have called it “Conclusions,” for, as we read the record of early man, we saw the damage that had been done by too rash appraisals. The final pages will review the more important evidence of early man in the New World, including his relation to Old World peoples and to certain geologic phenomena. The study of early man in America has suffered from alternate spasms of unscientific enthusiasm and far too “scientific” caution. It has range

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The Puzzle of the Skulls

The Puzzle of the Skulls

We have quite a few skulls that may have belonged to early man. On the whole, they do not look as Mongoloid as good Indian skulls should. Except for two—Minnesota man and Tepexpan man—they are long-headed instead of round-headed, and those exceptions lie between the two extremes. The skulls have heavy brow ridges. Most of them have keeled vaults like the Australoid-Melanesians of today. Many have retreating foreheads. It is true that skulls like these can be found in the variegated ranks of what

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The Puzzle of the Querns

The Puzzle of the Querns

The next puzzle lies in the milling stones. Man in America not only starts off with an exceptionally fine type of spear point to thrust into elephant or bison, and uses pressure flaking far more extensively than man in the Old World; in addition, he develops the type of milling stone, or quern, that does not appear in Europe until man is coming out of the Old Stone Age and entering the neolithic period of agriculture. Milling stones might be used as an argument against the early appearance of ma

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The Puzzle of the Points

The Puzzle of the Points

With the first hunters in the New World—the men who made the Sandia, the Folsom, the Plainview, and probably the early Eden points—we come to another puzzle. The Sandia is shaped like a much superior point made by the Solutreans of Europe and an equally crude one made in Africa, but the best Folsom is better than the best Solutrean. The fluted channels of the Folsom are remarkable enough; in addition, the edges are sharpened by the removal of almost microscopic flakes, and the base is often care

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Was Our Early Man a Solutrean?

Was Our Early Man a Solutrean?

Let us stress again that the Folsom and Eden chipping reached a perfection unknown in Europe until neolithic man brought in agriculture. Indeed, if the paleolithic Solutrean points had never been found, all American archaeologists—instead of just one or two—might unhesitatingly have called Folsom and Eden neolithic, even though they were found with extinct animals. In the history of Europe’s Old Stone Age—and in Africa’s, too, for that matter—we have no more than one hint of such work. It was on

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Or Was the American Aurignacian or Magdalenian?

Or Was the American Aurignacian or Magdalenian?

Even before the discovery of Folsom made early man in America look like a fugitive from that village in France called Solutré, anthropologists were struck by other resemblances. In 1924 the Englishman Sollas compared the Eskimo culture with the Magdalenian. [9] In 1932 Hrdlička was writing of an Aurignacian and Magdalenian ancestry for the American Indian. [10] In 1933 N. C. Nelson was playing with such comparisons, and writing of our “wooden spear and spear-thrower, perhaps of Magdalenian affin

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Chopping Tools Instead of Hand Axes in Asia

Chopping Tools Instead of Hand Axes in Asia

Showing the areas where the hand ax dominated and those where the chopping tool took precedence. The white portions are the ice fields of the last glaciation. (After Movius, 1944.) Throughout most of Asia the men of the Old Stone Age developed a very different core industry from that of Europe. Instead of the hand ax ( coup-de-poing ), they made an implement now called a chopping tool. This was a large and somewhat flat pebble with a sharpened edge made by striking off flakes alternately from ei

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Spinden’s Neolithic Blockade

Spinden’s Neolithic Blockade

All this is patently absurd to the dean of American archaeologists, Herbert J. Spinden. If tools in the New World resemble the Aurignacian or the Solutrean, it is an accident—perhaps an accident of psychic unity. He is against all talk of paleolithic man in the Americas on the late edge of the Great Ice Age. In the face of facts presented by Russian and American glacialists, he maintains that “eastern Siberia was rather heavily glaciated.” [15] He believes that certain Asiatic peoples with a sud

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Was the First Migration Interglacial?

Was the First Migration Interglacial?

As we think we have shown in Chapter 8 , we can never hope to date early man at all exactly by means of elephants or bison or any other extinct mammal. Even if science were able to settle the time of the great extinction, we should be only a little better off. We could say that man was in the New World at that time; but this would give us only an upper date, not a lower one. Man may have been here for tens of thousands of years before those mammals died off. A few scientists think he was. The gr

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Geological Evidence and the Pluvials

Geological Evidence and the Pluvials

All this is speculation, of course—reasoned speculation, but no more than that. Are we on firmer ground when we deal with geological evidence? Perhaps, yet there is plenty of room for controversy. The New World has very few sites in which artifacts or human bones have been found in glacial gravels. A noted one, near Trenton, New Jersey, has been under dispute for eighty years. The Lake Lahontan site and its blade have been too much neglected. There are, however, a number of places where skulls o

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In Sum

In Sum

Ten years ago, we knew that men in America had once killed, skinned, and eaten animals now extinct, for we had found their weapons and a few of their bones mingled with the fossils of mammals long extinct. We could not question the association, because it often involved the remains of campfires; spear points and bones might be moved about in the course of time, but not fragile heaps of charcoal. We knew, too, that the bones and tools of man had been found sealed away by the chemistry of the ages

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