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 & 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 respective publications
grateful acknowledgment is made to the following authors, publishers,
and literary executors:
J. B. Lippincott Company: Aleš Hrdlička, “Early Man in America: What
Have the Bones to Say?” in _Early Man_, ed. George Grant MacCurdy
(copyright, 1937, by The Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia); The
Macmillan Company: William B. Scott, _History of Land Mammals in the
Western Hemisphere_, rev. ed. (copyright, 1937, by The American
Philosophical Society); G. P. Putnam’s Sons: Earnest A. Hooton, _Apes,
Men, and Morons_ (copyright, 1937, by G. P. Putnam’s Sons); Rinehart &
Company, Inc.: Robert H. Lowie, _The History of Ethnological Theory_
(copyright, 1937, by Robert H. Lowie); Charles Scribner’s Sons: Roland
B. Dixon, _The Racial History of Man_ (copyright, 1923, by Charles
Scribner’s Sons) and _The Building of Cultures_ (copyright, 1928, by
Charles Scribner’s Sons); Whittlesey House: Harold S. Gladwin, _Men Out
of Asia_ (copyright, 1947, by McGraw-Hill Book Co., Inc.); University of
Toronto Press: Earnest A. Hooton, “Racial Types in America and Their
Relations to Old World Types” in _The American Aborigines_, ed. Diamond
Jenness; Yale University Press: Earnest A. Hooton, _The Indians of Pecos
Pueblo_ (copyright, 1930, by Yale University Press).
_Printed in the United States of America_
TO
GEORGE C. VAILLANT
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 for solidly based comparative studies, and the
developing techniques of archaeology have brought more factual evidence
to hand. Gradually the true picture is taking shape as each new
discovery is analyzed and discussed and takes its place in the total
structure.
This is an exciting adventure in discovery and learning that many would
like to share more completely with the archaeologist and anthropologist.
Usually, however, the reports of the professionals are too technical to
be meaningfully understood by the layman, and the brief accounts of
“finds” and “digs” that appear in the press are far too fragmentary.
Most fortunately, we have the present book, which fills the need very
nicely—far better than anything else in print.
Kenneth Macgowan professes to be an amateur in archaeological matters
and, technically speaking, he is, although his competence in the
extraordinarily involved subject he deals with is certainly of
professional stature. In any event, he clearly discerns what is needed
by the amateur and, without minimizing the complexities and involved
problems of his subject, he provides the background to make them
understandable. To incorporate the various discoveries and new
formulations that have appeared in the twelve years since this book was
first published, the text has been revised and brought up to date,
largely by Professor Joseph A. Hester, Jr. This has been skillfully done
in a way that does not alter the quality or coverage of the original.
I have been recommending this book for many years and now begin a new
series of such recommendations. I am sure that it will be enjoyed and
found most illuminating by all who want to know how the early history of
man in the New World is being revealed.
GORDON F. EKHOLM
_Curator of Mexican Archaeology_
May 1961
_The American Museum of Natural History_
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 findings in American prehistory, and the new theories, or
guesses, about their meanings. I was fortunate indeed to find such a man
in Professor Joseph A. Hester, Jr., of the Department of Sociology and
Anthropology, San Jose State College, California. To him must go the
fullest credit for the updating and the correcting, too, of a
twelve-year-old book. Through him, _Early Man in the New World_ is now
able to present a great deal of information that was not in existence in
1950. Then, for example, the dating of wood and charcoal, bone, horn,
and shell, through radiocarbon was hardly more than a gleam in the eye
of Willard F. Libby. As I was reading page proof when he announced his
first pre-Columbian date, I could mention this invaluable time clock
only at the end of three chapters. A change, rather than an addition to
the text, is the use of the word “Clovis” instead of “Generalized
Folsom,” and “Eden” instead of “Yuma,” thus bringing our terminology in
line with today’s practice.
In its first form, the book came about almost by accident. During 1941
and 1942, my work in the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American
Affairs included the preparation of some educational films upon
archaeological work in Mexico and South America. As a result I came to
know and esteem the Director of the University Museum, George C.
Vaillant. To my surprise and pleasure, when he learned of my interest in
American archaeology, he proposed that we collaborate on a prehistory of
the New World. When the war prevented active work together by taking him
to Peru, I prepared what would have been the first two chapters of our
book—the place of early man in the story of pre-Columbian America. Upon
Vaillant’s untimely death, I decided to study the subject more
intensively, to add material on the Great Ice Age and early man in the
Old World, and to expand the two chapters into a book that I might
dedicate to the man who had done so much for American archaeology in the
twenty years of his work—George C. Vaillant.
Since the book was not the result of personal work in the field, but
rather the product of the kind of research that is nothing more than
reading and talking, I was in the debt of many men and books, and a
welter of papers, pamphlets, and periodicals. I found it hard to believe
that in any other branch of science so many overworked men and women
would be so ready to give their time to talk and correspondence with the
amateur. I was deeply indebted to more than two score who had gone out
of their way to answer questions, lend books, or give reprints of
papers. In listing them I was more than certain that I had inadvertently
omitted some: Edgar Anderson, Ernst Antevs, Ralph L. Beals, Junius Bird,
Robert J. Braidwood, Henry J. Bruman, Kirk Bryan, George F. Carter, R.
A. Daly, Helmut de Terra, Loren C. Eiseley, Richard F. Flint, James
Gilluly, Harold S. Gladwin, M. R. Harrington, Frank C. Hibben, Frederick
W. Hodge, Harry Hoijer, Earnest A. Hooton, W. W. Howells, Frederick R.
Johnson, Arthur R. Kelly, G. H. R. von Koenigswald, Alex D. Krieger,
Alfred L. Kroeber, M. M. Leighton, Theodore D. McCown, George G.
MacCurdy, P. C. Mangelsdorf, Paul S. Martin, Hallam L. Movius, Jr.,
Raymond W. Murray, N. C. Nelson, Charles W. Phillips, Cyrus N. Ray, E.
B. Renaud, Frank H. H. Roberts, Jr., Alfred S. Romer, Irving Rouse, Curt
Sachs, Carl O. Sauer, E. H. Sellards, Herbert J. Spinden, T. D. Stewart,
Wm. Duncan Strong, Griffith Taylor, Bella Weitzner, H. M. Wormington,
and Clark Wissler.
Next to the scientists who provide knowledge stand the librarians who
help to preserve it and make it usable. I was peculiarly indebted to a
number of these: Miss Margaret Currier, Librarian of the Peabody Museum,
Cambridge; her assistant Miss Jessie Bell MacKenzie; Mrs. Ella L.
Robinson, Librarian of the Southwest Museum; Dr. Lawrence C. Powell,
Librarian of the University of California at Los Angeles; his most
cooperative staff; and particularly one of its members, Miss Hilda M.
Gray, whose expeditions into the equal mysteries of stacks and
bibliographies saved me many hours of labor and I can’t guess how many
blunders. Professor Hester and I add a warm word of thanks to Mrs. Alice
De Lisle for assembling data, preparing charts, typing, filing, and
research.
I was particularly indebted to Frank H. H. Roberts, Jr., of the
Smithsonian Institution, the outstanding authority on early man in North
America, for his reading, checking, and challenging of the manuscript,
and to M. R. Harrington, who read and criticized my first draft. I also
owed much to a number of men and women who read various chapters on
which they had special knowledge: Edgar Anderson, Ernst Antevs, Robert
J. Braidwood, Henry J. Bruman, Loren C. Easeley, James Gilluly, Harold
S. Gladwin, M. R. Harrington, Robert F. Heizer, Earnest A. Hooton, Alex
Krieger, Alfred L. Kroeber, Theodore D. McCown, Ernest S. Macgowan,
Hallam L. Movius, Jr., and H. M. Wormington.
Both Professor Hester and I are especially obliged to Campbell Grant,
amateur of anthropology as well as artist, for the many illustrations.
Finally, in the typing of the original manuscript and the checking of
the many references I was fortunate in having the aid of Miss Frankie
Porter and of Joe Pavalko.
Since we are not adding a repetitive bibliography to the almost four
hundred references that we cite, we should like to list a few of the
sources which we have found most useful and which should prove so to any
reader who may wish to pursue further various aspects of the subject:
Frank H. H. Roberts, Jr., “Developments in the Problem of the
North-American Paleo-Indian,” _Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections_,
100:51-116 (1940), and “The New World Paleo-Indian,” _Annual Report of
the Smithsonian Institution for 1944_, 403-433.
H. M. Wormington, _Ancient Man in North America_, 4th edit. (1957).
E. H. Sellards, _Early Man in America_ (1952).
Raymond W. Murray, _Man’s Unknown Ancestors_ (1943).
_Early Man_, a symposium edited by George Grant MacCurdy (1937).
_The American Aborigines_, a symposium edited by Diamond Jenness (1933).
George Grant MacCurdy, _Human Origins_ (1924).
Miles C. Burkitt, _The Old Stone Age_ (1933).
W. J. Sollas, _Ancient Hunters and Their Modern Representatives_ (1924).
W. B. Wright, _Tools and the Man_ (1939).
André Vayson de Pradenne, _Prehistory_ (1940).
Edith Plant, _Man’s Unwritten Past_ (1942).
Hallam L. Movius, Jr., _Early Man and Pleistocene Stratigraphy in
Southern and Eastern Asia_ (1944).
Earnest A. Hooton, _Up from the Ape_ (1946).
W. W. Howells, _Mankind in the Making_ (1959).
Richard F. Flint, _Glacial Geology and the Pleistocene Epoch_ (1947) and
_Glacial and Pleistocene Geology_ (1957).
Roland B. Dixon, _Racial History of Man_ (1923).
R. A. Daly, _The Changing World of the Ice Age_ (1934).
Frederick E. Zeuner, _Dating the Past_, 4th edit. (1958).
Robert H. Lowie, _The History of Ethnological Theory_ (1937).
Marcellin Boule and Henri V. Vallois, _Fossil Men_, trans. by Michael
Bullock (1957).
Robert J. Braidwood, _Prehistoric Men_, 4th edit. (1959).
K. M.
March 1961
_University of California_
_Los Angeles 24, Calif_.
CONTENTS
_Foreword_ ix
_Preface_ xi
_Chapter 1._ 1
THIS SUDDEN NEW WORLD
_A Secret Laboratory of Culture. Time-Tests by Travel, Tongues, and
Physiques. From the Old Stone Age to the New. From Tools and Bones,
Fossils and Rocks._
_Chapter 2._ 11
THE ROAD OF EARLY MAN
_How New Was the New World? A Passage from Asia to North America. Men
Out of Asia—and All the Continents. Bering Strait—Freeway to the New
World. Three Roads to the South—with One Detour. Problematical Roads to
the New World. Ware Dogma!_
_Chapter 3._ 29
THE DEAD HAND OF THE AGES
_Conflicts and Confusions. The Problem of the Ages. The Bronze Age—a
Phantasm. Wood, Bone, and Shell Ages. Dividing the Stone Age—the Old and
the New. Activities of the New Stone Age. Agriculture—Test of the
Neolithic. First a Food Gatherer, Then a Hunter._
_Chapter 4._ 43
THE GREAT ICE AGE
_Our Part of the Geologic Time Scale. The Glacial Hypothesis Appears.
The End of the Great Ice Age. River Terraces and Beach Lines. The Cause
of Glaciation._
_Chapter 5._ 61
EARLY MAN IN THE OLD WORLD
_Archaeology, a New Science. Mortillet’s Cramping Classification. Enter
the Eolith. Flake vs. Core Industries. Dating Early Man in Europe. True
Tools—Deceptive Skulls. Ancestors from Heidelberg and Swanscombe?
Putting the Neanderthal in His Place. Ancient Man in Java and China.
“Giant Ape”—a Mythical Ancestor? “Java” Men in Africa and Europe?
Man-Apes or Ape-Men in Africa. The Progressive Neanderthal. Radiocarbon
Dates for the Mousterian. Homo sapiens—New or Old? Solutrean Flint
Workers Invade Europe. Weapons and Tools—from Hand Ax to Arrowhead. The
Danger in Universal Time Scales._
_Chapter 6._ 119
WHAT THE BONES HAVE TO SAY
_Early Man as Adam’s Progeny. Science and Religion Embattled. Reaction,
Led by Science. The Red Herring of the “Primitive Skull.” The Mystery of
the Missing Bones. South America Provides the First Skulls. North
American Skulls and Bones. Early Man Not Solely Mongoloid or Indian.
Evidence from Middle America. New Finds in the United States._
_Chapter 7._ 143
THE ARTIFACTS OF EARLY MAN IN THE NEW WORLD
_Artifacts from Heaven. The Folsom Point—Unique and Potent. Americans
Hunted Animals Now Extinct. Two Other Folsom Sites—Clovis and
Lindenmeier. Another Fine and Ancient Point. The Plainview Point. A New
Point—and Sloths—in Gypsum Cave. Old Lake and River Sites. Sandia—Older
Than Folsom. The Milling Stone Appears. A Paucity of Art Objects. Hand
Axes in the Americas. Early Man in Mexico. From the Glacial to the
Archaic. Back of 15,000 Years?_
_Chapter 8._ 189
EARLY MAN AND THE GREAT EXTINCTION
_A Twofold Problem. Myths and Mammoths. Archaeological Evidence of
Recent Man and the Mastodon. Sloth and Camel in Dry Caves. The Folsom
Bison Not Extinct? The Mystery of Extinction. More Radiocarbon Dates for
Extinct Mammals._
_Chapter 9._ 207
PYGMIES, AUSTRALOIDS, AND NEGROIDS—BEFORE INDIANS?
_The Mythical Indian Race. Racial Definition—the Field of the Physical
Anthropologist. The Cephalic Index—and Others. What Skull Measurements
Tell Us About Early Man. Europe Recognizes the Australoid in America.
Hooton and Dixon on Early Invaders. A Potpourri of Races. Pygmies Before
Australoids in the New World? Australoids, Negroids, and Men From
Europe. No Mongoloids till 300_ B.C. _Siberian Caucasoids_.
_Chapter 10._ 233
DID THE INDIAN INVENT OR BORROW HIS CULTURE?
_Diffusion vs. Independent Invention. Bastian’s “Psychic Unity.”
Complexity an Argument for Diffusion. Dispersion as Well as Diffusion.
The Trap of Time. Escape from the Trap. Dead Alexander Invades America.
Independent Inventions Neither Parallel Nor Diffused. What Diffusion of
Plants and Art?_
_Chapter 11._ 261
THE INDIAN IN AGRICULTURE
_Inventions—Some New, Some Old. American Plants and Their Cultivation.
When and Where Did Our Agriculture Begin? The Indians Accomplishment in
Agriculture. How Old Is Corn?_
_Chapter 12._ 277
PUZZLES, PROBLEMS AND HALF-ANSWERS
_The Pendulum Swings. The Puzzle of the Skulls. The Puzzle of the
Querns. The Puzzle of the Points. Was Our Early Man a Solutrean? Or Was
the American Aurignacian or Magdalenian? Chopping Tools Instead of Hand
Axes in Asia. Spinden’s Neolithic Blockade. Was the First Migration
Interglacial? Geological Evidence and the Pluvials. In Sum._
_References in the Text_ 295
_References as to Illustrations_ 317
_Index_ 323
ILLUSTRATIONS, MAPS, AND TABLES
The Treks of Early Man 4
Out of Noah’s Ark and Over Bering Strait 13
The Land-Bridge to the New World 18
A Great-Circle Route to North America 19
Migration Routes 22
Glaciers and Ice Fields as Barriers to Early Man 26 and 27
The Life Story of the Earth 44
The Ice Fields of the Last Glaciation 48
The Age of River Terraces 51
The Four Great Glaciations 55
Glaciation Through Warmth 58
The First Hand Ax Found and Recognized 62
Time Scale of Early Man 65
The “Dawn Stones” of Early Man 66
Paleolithic Types and Industries 70
Man’s First Perfected Tool 71
Ancient Implements of Bone and Wood 74
Java Man—_Pithecanthropus erectus_ 82
_Gigantopithecus_—Giant Ancestor of Man? 83
Three Types of Old World Man 89
Man’s First Spear Points 90
Percussion Flaking 91
The Second Step in Flint Knapping 92
The Third Step—Pressure Flaking 93
Sculpture of the Old Stone Age 98
How Blades Were Split off a Core 100
Upper Paleolithic Tools 101
Three Aurignacian Types 102
The Meaning of Scrapers 103
The Tanged Point 105
A Laurel-Leaf Solutrean Point 106
A Tool to Make a Tool 107
Magdalenian Harpoon Head 108
The First Illustration of a Blade 108
Our First Machine, the Spear-Thrower 109
The First Paintings 110
Bowmen from Africa 112
Archers from Spain 113
Magdalenian Engravings 114
A Chart of Old Stone Age Cultures 116 and 117
A Spear Point Found Near Trenton, N.J. 144
The Lake Lahontan Point 145
The Making of a Folsom Point 147
The Minute, Ribbonlike Flaking of a Folsom 148
A Map of the Chief Sites in the Southwest 150
Burials in the Old World and the New 152
The Finest Flint Work of Early Man 155
Two Points of Plainview Type 157
Flint Knapping of the Old and New Stone Ages 158
A Gypsum Cave Point 159
Three Early Points from the Borders of Extinct Lakes 161
An Abilene Point 162
A Sandia Point Compared with Two Solutreans 165
Cochise Milling Stones 168
An Animal Head Carved from a Fossil Bone 171
Earliest Drawings by New World Man? 172
A Hand Ax of the Black’s Fork Culture 174
A Hand Ax and a Chopping Tool from Texas 176
A Broken Pestle from Gold-Bearing Gravels in California 179
The More Important Sites of Early Man in the New World 185
Mammals of the Ice Age in North and South America 190
Eight Thousand Years of the Great Extinction 196
Prehistoric and Modern Bison 199
The Mongoloid Fold 208
The Cephalic Index 211
The Dispersal of Head Types 212
Three Types of Skulls 214
Early Man vs. the Mongoloid 216
From the Old World and the New 228
From Burma to Melanesia to America? 235
Fishhooks from Tahiti and California 236
Diffusion or Independent Invention? 237
Circumpacific Navigation? 241
Bearded White Gods? 250
The Equatorial Counter Current 252
New World Plants and Products 263
The First Illustration of the Corn Plant 268
“Turkie Corne” 270
A Seventeenth Century Picture of Corn 271
Corn of 4,500 Years Ago 273
Eden Chipping in Siberia 282
Hand Axe and Chopping Tool Cultures of the Old World 286
A Chopping Tool of Northwestern India 287
EARLY MAN IN THE NEW WORLD
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 subject further for himself, or to verify the
authority for what may seem to him an implausible statement._
1
THIS SUDDEN NEW WORLD
_Of all animals, we men are the only ones who wonder where we came
from and where we will go._
—W. W. HOWELLS
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 the Indies; that was all. It would be a road across his
own one world.
Then suddenly this world of his was two worlds. A new hemisphere
appeared like a comet from outer space. It was a land and a people
utterly unknown, utterly different. It had lived and grown for thousands
upon thousands of years, sealed off to itself, unique. We search for
some fit comparison, and find nothing adequate to describe the discovery
of this secret laboratory of experiment in human culture.
Perhaps we should not have said that the New World had been “sealed off
to itself.” We might better have said “sealed off from Europe.” The
culture which the Spanish Conquistadores found in the Americas owed
nothing to that world from which they had come. What the Americas owed
to Asia is another matter—in fact, the matter of this book.
One thing is clear. The Americas were indebted to Asia for man himself.
Man—even one type of man—did not originate here. A small primate, the
extinct Notharctus, left his bones—but no descendants—in our Southwest.
The New World has no great apes; there are no indications that it ever
had any. Its monkeys are quite out of the running. They have four too
many teeth, their nose is flat, and they are cursed with a prehensile
tail.
The New World owed something more to Asia, of course; but how much, is
uncertain. Most anthropologists believe that man crossed Bering Strait
with a very meager kit of material culture. He brought, at various
times, the spear-thrower, the bow and arrow, the dog, the boat, the
strike-a-light, some kind of clothing, but not a great deal more. Many
other things—pottery, weaving, agriculture, masonry, metallurgy—he had
to invent for himself in the New World; at least, that is the general
opinion. A few anthropologists say that men out of Asia brought quite an
array of culture traits; but these migrants were late comers, and some
of them crossed the Pacific by boat.
Only a few students now deny that men had been crossing over from Asia
through twenty or more millenniums before the birth of Christ. Some of
them were what we call Indians—most of them, no doubt; but, before the
Indians came, there seem to have been other immigrants. It is the
purpose of this book to tell you what is known or believed or hazarded
about these earliest men of the New World.
There are two chief problems: When did these men come? and What were
they like?
It is a curious fact that, if we look at the rich variety of men and
languages and cultures which was spread from end to end of two whole
continents when the European came, we get some vague idea of how long
man had been in the western hemisphere but no idea at all of what he was
like when he anticipated Columbus by discovering the New World. Through
the haze of time, we can see the general outline of Indian civilization,
and many details. Much of this is clear and concrete, most of it is
natural and understandable in terms of our Americas, and all of it is
striking and extraordinary. But, for our present purposes, the best it
does is to tell us that many millenniums of time must have been required
for its development. It tells us nothing about the men who preceded the
Indian, the primitive savages who discovered the New World. These men
who first journeyed from Bering Strait to Cape Horn were not the men who
made the Maya civilization, and they came long, long before. But by
studying both the Indian and his predecessors we may gain some hint of
how long ago this was.
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 Vancouver Island in from 20 to 1,000 years; the time
involved really depends on how fast and in what direction those wild
animals moved upon which early man depended for food. As the country
widened out, then narrowed in Central America, and widened out once
more, there is no knowing how long the trip to Cape Horn may have taken.
Our migrants would have had to camp and hunt as they went, and at first
they would have moved only as the pursuit of game spurred them on. There
would have had to be time, too, for increase in numbers—among themselves
as well as among later invaders—to create pressure of population, and
force the earlier men to the peripheries of northeastern America,
Florida, and Lower California, and push them across jungled Panama and
Amazonia and toward the bleaker and less desirable parts of South
America. The various invaders multiplied as they moved, and it is
anybody’s guess how many people were crowded into America by 1492; one
authority says 8,400,000, another 50,000,000 to 75,000,000.[1] It took
much time, of course—many millenniums—to breed so many men and cover so
wide a space.
[Illustration: THE TREKS OF EARLY MAN
_This map shows how far man would have had to walk from southern
Africa to a spot just east of the Caspian Sea, where it used to be
supposed that man originated, and it also shows the distance from
that area to England, Australia, and Tierra del Fuego. The journey
of early man from Bering Strait to the tip of Cape Horn was a matter
of 10,000 miles._]
Other things suggest a long sojourn for the Indian in the New World.
Consider the matter of language—“the archives of history.” The Indian,
writes N. C. Nelson, “had been at home in the New World long enough to
have evolved about 160 linguistic stocks or language families, with
1,200 or more dialectic subdivisions.”[2] Alfred L. Kroeber says that
North and South America “contain more native language families than all
the remainder of the world.”[3] Some of this diversity could be due to
migrations from different linguistic areas of the Old World. It might
also be accounted for by the theory of Franz Boas that among early
primitive peoples there was great diversity of language, and that single
tongues began to spread widely only when conquering and proselyting
groups won a certain amount of power and dominion.[4] John Harrington,
an American linguistic authority, believes that the diversity of Indian
speech argues a very long residence in the New World—“at least 20,000
years, perhaps three times that.”[5] Edgar B. Howard states:
“Considering that the languages of the New World lack evidence, outside
of Eskimo, of any identification with Old World languages, the
conclusion appears to be that human contact between the two continents
was very remote.”[6] If there is no such identification, then even the
last migrants came at a very early date indeed, or else all the tribal
relatives who were left behind in the Old World perished without
linguistic trace. It is possible, of course, that resemblances have
merely not been recognized.
In addition to differentiation of language, there is differentiation of
physique. When we in the United States think of the Indian, we think of
a tall man with high cheekbones, a hawk-nose, and a bronze-red skin.
Actually the American Indian is probably more varied in height, face,
and color than the whole White racial stock.[7] More than that, his
somatic constitution—the inner man in a physical sense—varies greatly.
By 1492 the Indian had adapted himself to eight different climates from
arctic to tropic, from arid to humid, from sea level to the 14,000-foot
heights of Peru. This would take time, much time. Albrecht Penck, the
great European glacialist, thinks 25,000 years hardly long enough.[8]
The civilizations which the Indian developed in the Americas—the Maya,
Aztec, and Inca cultures—provide another test of how long man had been
in the New World before Columbus came. This test is no more exact than
those we have already mentioned, but it suggests quite a long sojourn.
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 fertilizers, and developed a great many exclusively American
plants which now supply more than half of the world’s provender. He was
probably the first to write numbers effectively through the use of zero
and numerical position. He practiced trepanning—the removal of a piece
of skull bone to relieve pressure on the brain—and he discovered how to
use certain medicines and narcotics. In his textiles he employed all the
weaves known to us today. He contrived efficient methods of government.
He proliferated into 368 major tribal groups, and developed fifteen
culture centers of distinct individuality.[9] In the United States he
left 100,000 mounds as the product of one of his cultures; in Middle
America, 4,000 ceremonial cities of stone. He practiced most types of
religion except atheism. Certain things that he made resemble things of
the Old World; most are peculiar to him and his life. Of Indian culture
traits Clark Wissler remarks that “the range in variety and
individuality seems even greater in aboriginal America than in the
primitive Old World.”[10]
Progress is slow in the stone age. It seems to have been particularly
slow in the Old Stone Age, or paleolithic period, when man spent half a
million to a million years learning to chip stone and hunt and gather
food efficiently. Things went much faster in the New Stone Age, or
neolithic period, when he was learning to cultivate plants and make
pottery and polish stone tools. To move from the beginnings of
agriculture to the beginnings of metallurgy, which superseded the
neolithic, may have taken as little as 700 years in the Old World and
certainly not much more than 4,000 or 5,000.
Progress was slower in the New World. The Indian reached the neolithic
stage later, and he may have stayed in it longer than man did in the Old
World. This can probably be blamed on the peculiar fauna of the western
hemisphere. In all of the Americas there were no suitable animals to
domesticate except the dog—which the Indian probably brought with
him—and those dubious objects of husbandry, the turkey, the bee, the
Muscovy duck, the llama, the alpaca, the vicuña, and the guinea pig.
Because there were no sheep or cattle, the Indian had no pastoral life
and no milk and butter. He had no beasts of burden except the dog and
the llama; he invented no wheeled cart. It was not entirely his own
fault that he remained essentially a man of the stone age even though,
toward the last, he had perfected a metallurgy of copper, silver, gold,
platinum, and bronze.
The story of the Indian’s spread through the Americas, his variation in
language and physique, and his building of the civilizations of Peru,
Central America, and Mexico argues that he came to the New World many
millenniums before the birth of Christ. You may point out that the
argument is too general, too inexact in outcome, but you must remember
that behind the Indian lies an earlier migrant. We are on somewhat
firmer ground when we turn to the evidence we have of this migrant’s
tools, his hearths, and his bones. For sometimes they are related to the
fossils of extinct mammals and—more important—to certain kinds of earth,
charcoal and rock that can be dated.
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
that are now extinct in the New World, survived the Great Ice Age here.
This would still leave us with an American whose antiquity is quite
respectable.
The best proof of the age of early man was for a long time geological.
Archaeologists dated man by the earth and rocks in which they found his
tools or his bones. Unfortunately, they had not too much geological
evidence in the Americas. In the past ten years, however, radiocarbon
(of which you will learn more later) has made it possible to know much
about when man reached the New World and where he lived.
2
THE ROAD OF EARLY MAN
_I have been a stranger in a strange land._
—EXODUS 2:22
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, all except man. Man was an
Indian—that is, an East Indian. Balboa may have had a “wild surmise,”
but it remained for later Spaniards, as well as the Portuguese, to find
in South America a land that could not be Asia. Columbus discovered the
New World and thought it was India; the Italian Amerigo Vespucci did not
discover the continent named for him, but at least he knew it was not
India and gave it a name of its own—_Mundus Novus_.
Then, indeed, our world became a new world, and a world freighted with a
problem. The problem was how to put its inhabitants into a proper
theological—and ethnological—pigeonhole. As a new and unknown being, the
Indian presented a serious issue to the Catholic Church and its clerical
and imperial pioneers. Here was a people of whom the Bible made no
mention. Shem, Ham, and Japheth had filled three continents very
handily, but they had somehow neglected this one. Established authority
had no explanation for these new men. Were they, indeed, beings without
souls? “While the New World with its gold and other riches was accepted
as reality,” observes N. C. Nelson, “the truly human nature of its
inhabitants was temporarily held in doubt.”[1]
Soon, however, the church found an explanation. The Bible mentioned no
separate creation in an American Garden of Eden; therefore the forebears
of the red man must have come from the Old World. As early as 1512 Pope
Julius II declared officially that the Indians were descended from Adam
and Eve. For many years thereafter they were considered as children of
Babel driven back into the stone age because of their sins.
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 that came to the Indies was by ship-wracke and
tempest of wether.[2]
But Acosta felt the need of a land route to take care of the animals.
Noah had let them out of the Ark in western Asia, and they could hardly
be expected to sail or even to swim to America. And so Acosta ventured
the opinion that somewhere in the north explorers would ultimately find
a portion of America that joined with some corner of the Old World, or
at any rate was “not altogether severed and disjoined” from it. In this
way the animals—and man—had come to the New World.
[Illustration: OUT OF NOAH’S ARK AND OVER BERING STRAIT
_Two pages from Brerewood’s seventeenth-century book_ Enquiries
Touching the Diversity of Languages, and Religions, Through the
Chief Parts of the World, _in which he pictures bears and Tartars
crossing to the New World at a point where Asia and America “are
continent one with the other, or at most, disioyned but by some
narrow channell of the Ocean.” (Courtesy of the University of
California, Los Angeles, Library_.)]
God-fearing Protestants from England joined clerics of the Roman church
in bringing the American aborigine over from Asia. Long before any white
man had stared across Bering Strait from the eastern tip of Asia and
discovered Alaska, sixteenth and seventeenth century men were
envisioning the neighborliness of the two continents and an easy
crossing. It had to be. There was no escaping this solution. Men from
Eden could be trusted to force their way across the widest and wildest
of oceans, but not animals from Ararat. In 1614 Edward Brerewood
worried, like Father de Acosta, over the problem of “the ravenous and
harmefull beasts, wherewith _America_ is stored, as Beares, Lions,
Tigers, Wolves, Foxes, &c. (which men as is likely, would never to their
owne harme transport out of the one continent to the other).” He saw
that “from _Noahs_ Ark, which rested after the deluge, in _Asia_, all
those beasts must of necessity fetch their beginning.” He knew that the
men must have come from Asia because the Indians were not the color of
Africans, and they had “no rellish nor resemblance at all, of the Artes,
or learning, or civility of _Europe_.” Also, “the West side of _America_
respecting _Asia_, is exceeding much better peopled then the opposite or
East side, that respecteth toward Europe.”
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 logic itself and his conclusion inescapable
compared with much of the theorizing of his day and much more that went
on for three hundred years after the discovery of America. In 1607 Fray
Gregorio Garcia published a book, _The Origin of the Indians of the New
World_, in which appeared these words:
The Indians proceed neither from one nation or people, nor have they
come from one part alone of the Old World, or by the same road, or at
the same time, in the same way, or for the same reasons; some have
probably descended from the Carthaginians, others from the Ten Lost
Tribes and other Israelites, others from the lost Atlantis, from the
Greeks, and Phoenicians, and still others from the Chinese, Tartars,
and other groups.[4]
For good measure, Fray García and his fellow theorists threw in men of
Ophir and Tarsus, old Spaniards, Romans, Japanese, Koreans, Egyptians,
Moors, Canary Islanders, Ethiopians, French, English, Irish, Germans,
Trojans, Danes, Frisians, and Norsemen—a veritable League of Nations.
Iconoclastic Voltaire would have none of this—and none of Eden, either:
Can it still be asked from whence came the men who people America? The
same question might be asked with regard to the Terra Australis. They
are much farther distant from the port which Columbus set out from,
than the Antilles. Men and beasts have been found in all parts of the
earth that are inhabitable. Who placed them there? We have already
answered He that caused the grass to grow in the fields; and it is no
more surprising to find men in America, than it is to find flies
there.[5]
The more or less scientific minds of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries were no less prodigal in theory than the clerics and the
philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth. Sometime in the 1820’s
Lord Kingsborough, son of an Irish peer of great wealth, got it into his
head that the Lost Tribes of Israel were the ancestors of the Maya and
the Aztecs—the same idea that animated Joseph Smith and _The Book of
Mormon_; and in 1830—the very year that Smith’s American supplement to
the Bible appeared—Kingsborough began the publication of the nine
monumental and handsomely illustrated volumes, _Antiquities of Mexico_,
which cost him £25,000 and ultimately—like Smith—his life. Quite as
eccentric theories followed. The otherwise sound and observant George
Catlin thought the Mandan Indians the descendants of the Welsh. The
“lost continent” of Mu—the Atlantis of the Pacific—reared its ugly head.
Elliot Smith left the teaching of anatomy, and W. J. Perry cultural
anthropology and comparative religions, to bring from Egypt all the
culture of America—together with most of Eurasia’s and Africa’s—on the
backs of those indefatigable travelers of their invention, the Children
of the Sun.
In the face of such wild theorizing it is comforting to recall that the
great Humboldt recognized as early as 1811 a “striking analogy between
the Americans and the Mongol race.” We must pardon him for clinging to
some vague notion of a primordial American race and declaring that the
Indians were “a mixture of Asiatic tribes and the aborigines of this
vast continent.”[6]
Today science does not have all the answers to the anthropological
problem which arose when Balboa discovered the Pacific and Magellan
crossed it, thus dropping the world’s largest ocean in between the
Americas and the Garden of Eden. So far as early man is concerned, we
know a good deal about how he came, and whence, and a little about when.
Except for the passionate protagonists of Atlantis and of its “opposite
number,” the mythical land of Mu lost in the depths of the Pacific, most
students agree that early man came across what is now Bering Strait—not
by way of the Aleutians, for their inhospitable western tip is separated
from Asia by 225 miles of sea with one small island midway between. For
a long time, the Bering Strait route was supported only by _a priori_
reasoning, but of late years the weapons of early man have been found
either alone or with the fossils of extinct mammals in parts of Alaska
and north-west Canada.
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 greatest stretch of open
water was only 23 miles across. If they found the strait frozen over,
they would have followed the southern edge of the ice. Men of a more
inland type, men less given to water travel, could have crossed to
Alaska—as some do now—on the ice of winter.
If early man first came to the New World in the Great Ice Age or in the
time when the glaciers were beginning to melt, he could have crossed
dry-shod on a land-bridge. Geologists have calculated that the water
withdrawn from the ocean to form the glaciers—which were half a mile to
two miles thick over much of Canada and the northern portion of the
United States—would have lowered the water level in the Bering Strait
region by as much as 200 to 300 feet toward the end of the Great Ice
Age.[7] In addition, the ocean floor of the strait—relieved of so much
weight of water—would doubtless have risen to some extent. Since, at
present, portions of the strait reaching from shore to shore are not
more than 120 feet deep, a land-bridge is a perfectly plausible
hypothesis. Of course the bridge would have disappeared with the end of
the glaciers, which means that, if man had to come over dry-shod in the
summer, he must have invaded America while the glaciers were still
fairly extensive.
[Illustration: THE LAND-BRIDGE TO THE NEW WORLD
_A conservative map of shorelines during the last glaciation, based
on a drop in sea level of 180 feet. Geologists believe that the ice
impounded in the great glaciers and ice fields of the world lowered
the ocean 200 to 300 feet. The southern shore of Alaska during the
last glaciation may have been much nearer its present position.
(After Johnston, 1933.)_]
[Illustration: A GREAT-CIRCLE ROUTE TO NORTH AMERICA
_On the flat, distorted map of Mercator, on page 4, the path of
early man across Asia to the New World seems a roundabout curve. On
a globe, it is very nearly a great circle. This is indicated on a
map such as this, projected from a point above the North Pole. From
above Bering Strait, the route would appear still straighter._]
Aleš Hrdlička has said that not many men would have frequented
northeastern Siberia because of its inhospitable climate, and so only a
few would have “trickled over.”[8] The opposite seems to have been true
in the time of the glaciers. Then northeastern Asia was an excellent
jumping-off place for the Old World migrant. In the first place, there
was not much glaciation in this area, certainly nothing to interfere
with the passage of people along the coast. The last glaciation was “far
less extensive than its predecessor,” say R. F. Flint and H. G. Dorsey,
“and was confined to the higher parts of the higher mountain ranges.”[9]
Secondly, the land-bridge, which made crossing easy, also altered the
climate of Siberia south of the bridge.[10] It cut off the arctic
currents and therefore to some extent the arctic damp which now makes
the Asiatic coast inhospitable. Hrdlička—one of the first and most
violent opponents of early man in America—said that the land-bridge was
not essential. Even if it had existed, “man would not have used it, but
would have followed the much easier route over the water.”[11]
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 attention to a route—whether overland or by sea—which hardly
anyone had stressed except Hrdlička.[12] Hrdlička stressed it because he
brought man over after the glaciers and in boats. But even in the Great
Ice Age this route was not impossible for men without boats. Migrants
who had crossed by a land-bridge might have turned south along the
Pacific shore, climbing and crossing the ice barriers of the glacial
rivers that still slide slowly down from the inland mountains. Philip S.
Smith points out that “ice surfaces allow fully as easy travel by sled
and on foot as do the ordinary land surfaces.”[13] But was there game,
as well as fish, along the coast to lure the migrant on and to sustain
him upon the journey?
Other men seem to have chosen to tramp and hunt eastward and
northeastward from the strait. In this direction there were two main
routes open to men and game. One route led up the narrow lowlands of the
northwest coast to the mouth of the Mackenzie River and then south up
its long valley. The other, and much more likely path for early man, was
up the ice-free Yukon and its tributaries. These would have taken him
eastward to the Mackenzie or southward through the plateau between the
northern Rockies and the Coastal Range. Hrdlička thought the Yukon
valley a most unpromising route because of the turbulent rivers and the
noxious insects; but most students disagree with him and stress the
abundance of fish and game. There can be no question that some parts of
this route were used by early man—and extinct mammals, too. His ancient
spear points have been found in the muck beds of Fairbanks mingled with
the fossilized bones of elephant, bison, camel, horse, and an extinct
jaguar once called the Alaskan lion.[14] Other early points have been
discovered in western Canada in the area of the mountain plateau. In
1944 Frederick Johnson located fifteen camp sites in early soil levels
along the route of the plateau corridor and found many varieties of
artifacts. Among these were a few points, most of them fragmentary, the
butts of which resembled those of an early type.[15] Following Johnson
in 1945, Douglas Leechman found other sites and artifacts along this
route in soils formed perhaps 9,000 years ago.[16]
The Yukon valley rivers could have taken early man to the Mackenzie and
to the northern edge of the plateau; but during a large part of the
Great Ice Age he still faced the gigantic fields of snow and ice that
covered half of North America. Although ice journeys may not be so very
difficult, and early man had learned to live in the chill of northern
Siberia (the Eskimo of today proves that human existence is possible in
a land of little sun and much cold), we cannot believe that he attempted
to cross the icy wastes. A journey on foot across a thousand or two
thousand miles of ice becomes a sheer impossibility if there is no
provender to be found along the way. There was certainly no food for
musk ox or mammoth, and therefore no food for man. Without game to hunt,
he would not have felt the impulse to invade the ice fields.
[Illustration: MIGRATION ROUTES
_The pathways available to early man, as mapped by Carl Sauer—to
which have been added a problematical route by sea along the
southern coast of Alaska and another down the corridor between the
eastern Rockies in Canada and the coastal range. (After Sauer,
1944.)_]
Too many authorities have written as if early man made a free choice of
routes through Alaska and Canada. Actually, the animals he hunted chose
his route for him—doubtless many routes. Unless he had learned to spear
and net fish, the first invader probably pursued a herd of mammoth or
musk ox across the land-bridge or over the frozen ice of later winters.
You in your armchair are likely to suggest that, once man was in Alaska,
he turned south of his own free will and intelligence in order to avoid
the cold. The first trouble with that line of thought is that man had
gone north in Asia. The second is that primitive man had no conception
of where south lay or of the possibility of greater comfort there. At
this point, you will probably say that, though he had no ideas about the
nature of the south, he had brains enough to follow the sun.
Unfortunately this would have spun him round like a slow-motion
teetotum; for he entered North America in the neighborhood of the Arctic
Circle where the summer sun moves in a great low circle, and sinks out
of sight when winter sets in.
If you want to understand early man, and guess with some accuracy at why
he came to the New World and how he happened to drift southward and
eastward until he filled it, you must think of him as a wanderer looking
for food. Game lured him on at random, and vegetation lured both beast
and man. Man might eat his way through caribou country, and come upon
the bison of another area. As he killed and wandered, he might go south
or he might go east. But the animal—and the man who ate berries and
roots and wild grains as well as meat—would move as the climate moved.
The world has known many changes of climate and shifts of rain belts.
Some of these have been extreme—in the Great Ice Age, for example—and
some have been less marked. But they have moved the forests and the
grasslands, and animals and man have moved with the vegetation.
During the past 100,000 years, glacialists believe that there were three
periods when the inland ice melted sufficiently to allow the southward
passage of both animals and man. The first was more than 75,000 years
ago in the Sangamon Interglacial period before the time when the last,
or Wisconsin, glaciation had covered the plains of Canada (see pages 26
and 27). During the Wisconsin, a corridor probably opened about 50,000
years ago along the eastern foothills of the Rockies, and another,
perhaps a little later, down the plateau between the northern Rockies
and the Coast Range. The third opportunity for man to penetrate from the
north came around 11,000 years ago, when the final retreat of the ice
sheets began in those same regions.[17] Perhaps the land-bridge was
still usable up to 10,000 years ago, but certainly later migrants had to
cross Bering Strait by water or winter ice.
Bering Strait and the great glaciers were not the only obstacles to the
peopling of the Americas. The Isthmus of Panama must have presented
quite a problem to the pioneers who were to fill Amazonia and the Andean
Highlands and to reach Cape Horn. Today nobody sets off blithely by foot
through the jungle that separates Costa Rica from Colombia. The beach is
the best pathway at low tide; but it is an intermittent one. It is
better to hope that the shifts of climate which were involved with the
glaciers made Panama a drier country than it is today.
Of course it was not only early man and his prey that used the routes
from Siberia across Bering Strait and through Alaska and Canada. The
later migrants—ancestors of the Algonquins, the Athapascans, and
others—undoubtedly came in the same way.
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
Atlantic.[19] Like Father de Acosta, he believes that storms may have
blown occasional vessels to the New World. To suggest that unwilling
mariners from the Mediterranean may thus have made oneway trips, he
cites from Stansbury Hagar[20] striking resemblances between the zodiacs
of Europeans and of the Mayas, Aztecs, and even Peruvians. Whether this
matter of the zodiacs is fact or fancy, Huntington’s unwilling voyagers
could not have come much earlier than the birth of Christ. More
fantastic were the claims voiced some years ago that the men who left
skulls of Australoid or Melanesian type in the caves of South America
reached that continent by a southern route across an Antarctic bridge of
land and ice. Of much more serious importance is the possibility that
the long-voyaging Polynesians, having negotiated the 5,000 or 6,000
miles that lay between their home on the edge of Asia and the Marquesas
or Easter Island, would have tried occasionally to continue their
eastward course. If they had done so, they could scarcely have missed
South America. But this was in our own era, not in the time of early
man.
Ware Dogma!
[Illustration: 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 ice in
arctic Canada and in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and Newfoundland
region. (After Antevs; the first three in Gladwin, 1937, the fourth
from data furnished by Antevs.)_]
[Illustration: Wisconsin glaciation 65,000 years ago]
[Illustration: Wisconsin glaciation 50,000 years ago]
[Illustration: Wisconsin glaciation 15,000 years ago]
[Illustration: Wisconsin glaciation 10,000 years ago]
Today we have a few facts about early man and many guesses. Not so long
ago there were a few reputable anthropologists who believed that the New
World was innocent of man before 1000 B.C. Now most of them grant a
foothold at least 10,000 years ago to an enterprising savage—called
Folsom man—whose taste for travel was as great as his talent for making
an exceptionally fine and original type of stone spear point. Some say
he came to the New World 25,000 years ago. A few daring students find
traces of an earlier Australoid human who may have seen the last
glaciers taking shape. Well informed opinion places man’s entrance into
the New World between 10,000 and 25,000 years ago.
Of course we must not expect early dates to be precise. Many of them
must be intelligent guesses as we go deeper and deeper into the past and
reach the time when the glaciers were waxing and waning. To gain a
perspective upon such toying with time—as well as upon early man in the
Americas—we must next consider the story of early man in the Old World.
Incidentally, its contradictions and uncertainties—prefaced by a few in
New World prehistory—may help you to look with a charitable as well as
critical eye upon certain theories about the peopling of the Americas
which may be suspect today yet respectable tomorrow.
3
THE DEAD HAND OF THE AGES
... _systems into ruin hurl’d_.
—ALEXANDER POPE
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 Negroid or Australoid blood. Your horror will be no greater,
however, than that of a few of our archaeologists; such notions give
them what might be called Victorian vapors. Some accept ideas like
these; others keep an open mind, for they remember that many a
scientific fact of today was sheer nonsense to earlier generations, and
vice versa.
As late as 1900, the prehistory of Mexico was accounted for very neatly
by three successive words, Toltec, Chichimec, and Aztec. Now we know
other words, and we know that other peoples and other cultures—Olmec,
Zapotec, Mixtec, Totonac, Tarascan, Teotihuacan—also played an important
part. We divided the Maya just as neatly into the Old Empire and the
New, one south and the other north. Now we know that there were no
empires, and that the Maya culture grew widely and steadily towards
fruition and decay. Once we thought that the Itzá were the Maya that
founded Chichén-Itzá in Yucatan. Now we give the name Itzá to the Toltec
or Toltec-influenced invaders that came hundreds of years later. Once
scientists disputed whether culture and agriculture began in the
highlands of Mexico or in the highlands of Peru. Now certain of them
believe that the American became a farmer in the lowlands east of the
Andes, while others think he began to till the soil in many spots at the
same time. Only a few years ago, we thought that a fairly recent Indian
culture—which is called the Woodland Pattern of the eastern United
States—had its roots in Middle America. Now its pottery is being traced
back through northwestern Canada and northern Asia to the Baltic and
even perhaps to Africa.[1] The Mound Builders were once thought an
ancient people. Now some of them seem barely to antedate the discovery
of America. Bernal Díaz del Castillo—best of the chroniclers of the
conquest of Mexico—may have observed that the Mexicans, along with all
the Indians of the New World, were ignorant of the principle of the
wheel; certainly this has been repeated over and over again for many
years. Yet in 1888 Désiré Charnay reported and pictured a Mexican
pottery toy with wheels, and since then more of these toys have been
found.[2] Throughout his life Roland B. Dixon denied the possibility of
productive transpacific migration from Polynesia to South America; yet
at the end he accepted the transfer of the sweet potato from South
America to Polynesia. From important matters to trivia, the list is
long; we have hardly touched it. Obviously, prehistory is not a field
where truth is easily and quickly come upon. The student, quite as much
as the scientist, must keep an open mind. He must neither cherish dogma
nor refuse speculation. Truth still lies afar off.
Doubts about early man in the Americas seem to have been an occupational
disease with archaeologists. Geologists have found it much easier to
accept him. Men like Ernst Antevs, M. M. Leighton, Kirk Bryan, and
Albrecht Penck, perhaps because they are accustomed to dealing
generously with time, seem to have little trouble in embracing early man
as a Late Glacial interloper anywhere from 15,000 to 100,000 years ago.
Physical anthropologists like Earnest A. Hooton and Sir Arthur Keith,
and cultural anthropologists and ethnologists like Roland Dixon and A.
C. Haddon are not at all afraid to recognize signs of Australoid or
Negroid ancestry in the skulls of New World man. Perhaps it is easier
for the geologists and the physical anthropologists to accept such ideas
because they do not run counter to their own dogmas. Many
archaeologists, at any rate, find it extraordinarily hard to adjust
themselves to evidence which does not fit accepted theories. They may
defend themselves by pointing out that the evidence is not too clear, or
at best is merely suggestive; but the theories they cherish arose from
no firmer evidence in many cases, and frequently continue quite as
unclear or at best merely suggestive. Certainly such reluctance to
accept new evidence held back archaeological research when Aleš
Hrdlička, W. H. Holmes, and Daniel G. Brinton were in their heyday.
This reluctance to face facts permeated even so great and productive a
man as Baron Erland Nordenskiöld. An example of such a Jovian nod may be
salutary. Arguing in _The Copper and Bronze Ages in South America_
against the theory that the craft of metallurgy may have been brought to
the New World by migrants, instead of having been invented here, three
times he cites facts that contradict his thesis, and three times he
offers a kind of self-conscious apology for blinking them. (The italics
are ours.)
If we go through all our material of weapons and tools of bronze and
copper from South America, _we must confess_ that there is not much
that is entirely original, and that to the majority of fundamental
types there is something to correspond in the Old World.
_It must be confessed_ that there is considerable similarity between
the metal technique of the New World and that of the Old during the
Bronze Age.
Bronze is, of course, also a very hard invention, and _I must confess_
to finding it most remarkable that the art of alloying tin and copper
should have been hit upon independently both in the Old World and the
New.[3]
“Admissions,” said Charles John Darling, “are mostly made by those who
do not know their importance.”
Unfortunately there are still a few archaeologists whose attitude
resembles Nordenskiöld’s. Hooton writes of one of these:
One of our most brilliant and once progressive archaeologists naïvely
expressed to me some years ago his sentiments on this question
[evidences of early man in America]. He said it would be a pity to
have new evidence come to light which would overthrow all the
admirable scientific work of the past indicating the recent arrival in
the New World of the American Indian.[4]
Of course early man is not a subject that can hope to be free from error
and contradiction—even early man in the Old World. Perhaps an account of
some of the errors and misconceptions about him that crept into the
study of prehistory may be as good a means as any of preparing your mind
for new facts or new heresies in the Americas.
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,
and we are stuck with it.
An outstanding example of this tendency to set up a classification
system prematurely is the division of the story of man into ages. As far
back as A.D. 52 a Chinese with a scientific bent of mind suggested that
man had passed through three periods: a stone age, a bronze age, and an
iron age. A French magistrate named Goguet wrote a book in 1758 in which
he expounded a similar order of ages, inserting copper ahead of bronze.
In 1813 a Dutch historian named Vedel-Simonsen argued for stone, bronze,
and iron periods in Scandinavian history. A Dane, Christian Jurgensen
Thomsen, gave the system permanent and indeed international status in
1836 when he arranged on this basis the exhibits of the institution he
directed, the National Museum in Copenhagen.
The scheme is neat but far from scientific. To begin with a small
matter, but one that may confuse the layman, the ages overlap. Bronze
did not wholly replace stone; neither did iron. The use of chipped flint
and polished stone continued into the Iron Age.
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 pounding it, he took the first step in the true use of metals; but
when he smelted copper ore—turning a hard rock into a soft metal—he made
himself the master of metallurgy. Bronze—at first an accidental mixing
of copper and tin—was merely an episode along the way. “The superiority
of copper or bronze over flint and stone tools is, I think,” says Gordon
Childe, “generally overestimated. Not only for tilling the land but also
for the execution of monumental carvings and even for shaving, the
Egyptians of the Old Kingdom were apparently content with stone.”[6]
The Bronze Age was very limited in area. Because of the rarity of tin,
the primitive use of the alloy was confined to southern Europe, Asia
Minor, and the Inca empire. Most of the world used iron before bronze.
Furthermore, the Bronze Age is as delimited in time as it is in space.
The earliest bronze in the Danube region is dated about 2300 B.C., and
the earliest iron about 1350 B.C., at Gerar in Judea. “Thus,” said
Rickard, “the so-called Bronze Age shrinks, at most, to a mere
millennium ... the merest fraction of human existence.”[7]
The Iron Age is not so significant as it sounds. It was many centuries
after the first use of iron and bronze that either played a really
important part in the economic life of man. Like the domesticated horse,
the trained elephant, and the wheeled vehicle, bronze and iron were
first used chiefly in the making of war.
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-blades for scrapers.”[8] As early as 1864, a British
student of anthropology, John Crawfurd, stood out against Thomsen’s
Stone Age as the beginning of culture. At a meeting of the Ethnological
Society, he said: “On man’s first appearance, the most obvious materials
would consist of wood and bone.... This would constitute the wood and
bone age, of which, from the perishable nature of the materials, we, of
course, possess but slender records.”[9] Because the discovery of the
stone artifacts of early man in Europe was then creating a scientific
furore, Crawfurd’s sane observations went unnoticed. Today we have part
of a wooden spear made, perhaps, far back in the Great Ice Age (see
illustration, page 74).
Wood, bone, and shell not only antedated stone; they have continued in
use until today. Certain primitive peoples—the Chukchi of Siberia, for
example—retained the use of wood and bone after they were given
iron.[10] Numerous tribes, when first encountered by explorers and
navigators, had not yet begun to use stone; among these were the Aleuts,
the Andaman Islanders, Malayans from the hills, and people of the upper
Amazon.[11]
Rickard, from whom we have drawn liberally in this discussion, proposes
a different scheme of classification for the cultures of man.[12] In the
Primordial Age he would include the primary use of wood, bone, and
shell. He would accept the Stone Age as the next stage. For the Bronze
and Iron ages he would substitute the Metallurgic Age, basing this on
the discovery and use of smelting, whatever the metal involved. The dead
hand of Thomsen, however, will probably continue to rule. The best we
can do will be to take the Stone Age as including all materials except
metal, and pay little attention to that illusion the Bronze Age.
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. By definition, paleolithic man made chipped stone
implements and no other kind. Neolithic man was supposed to be
distinguished by the making of ground, or—as we usually say—polished,
stone axes and of other tools shaped by rubbing instead of chipping;
agriculture, pottery, and textiles came in as secondary traits.
After a time, however, archaeologists found some disturbing
discrepancies. Before neolithic man grew grain and wove textiles,
someone of an earlier age seems to have been making axes from antlers,
turning out new artifacts called microliths—tiny chips of flint which
were set in a row along a wooden or bone handle to make a kind of saw or
a sickle—and also producing a partially polished ax with a ground edge,
and making crude pots. This was all very upsetting to the old scheme of
dividing prehistory into the Paleolithic and the Neolithic. So science
inserted the Mesolithic, or Middle Stone Age, between the two, in order
to account for the appearance of the new tools.
The trouble with the system that Lubbock launched is that man’s behavior
toward stone is a very poor basis for classifying him in culture or
time. For a while it fitted our knowledge of the prehistory of Europe.
Now it is out of line on that continent, and completely askew so far as
the rest of the world is concerned. The kind of stone available often
determines whether a man will chip or grind it. When first discovered,
South Sea Islanders were still polishing stone because they had no
flint.[14] Some Australian natives make chipped stone tools while their
neighbors, who control a supply of diorite, go in for polishing; yet
none of these Blackfellows can be considered as anything but
paleolithic.
Like the Bronze Age, the Neolithic suffers from having shrunk in length.
Rickard figures “that 700 years covers what was meant to be a major
division of human chronology.”[15] To reach this figure he puts the end
of the Paleolithic at 3000 B.C., which seems much too late, and the
beginning of bronze at 2300. Even though we use the date of N. C. Nelson
for the beginning of the Neolithic—5500 B.C.[16]—we have a New Stone Age
of only 3,200 years.
Gordon Childe goes so far as to declare that “there is no such thing as
a neolithic civilization.”[17] Different people, living under different
climates and on different soils, have developed different elements of
the culture of the New Stone Age and combined them with elements of
other cultures.
If we are going to continue using the term Neolithic—as we certainly
are—and if we want to limit it in some sensible way that may prove a bit
more permanent, let us see what else than polished stone can be used to
define it.
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.”[18] But behind this
miracle and this science must have lain many years of almost accidental,
adventitious experiment. L. S. B. Leakey claims specimens of partially
baked pottery sherds in paleolithic Africa.[19] One of these shows marks
of basketry, rather thin support for the theory that the women who
daubed the inside of the baskets to make them hold water must have
discovered, when the baskets stood too near the fire, a little bit about
how to bake clay. It was not until the invention of agriculture tied
neolithic man more or less to the soil that true pottery could and did
flourish widely. We have added many refinements to the craft of the
potter—porcelain, cloisonné, and so forth—but basically it remains
unchanged. Incidentally, all agriculturists did not have pottery—the Big
Bend and Hueco cave dwellers of Texas, and certain people of the Virú
valley in Peru, for example.[20]
The craft of textile weaving almost reached perfection at the hands of
neolithic man—or, rather, woman. But it stemmed from basketry, and
basketry undoubtedly began in the Paleolithic Age.
The first of two interesting facts suggested by the foregoing is that
woman was the only true begetter of the Neolithic Age. She did the
weaving—first of baskets and then of textiles—and she invented and
practiced pottery making. More than that, she must be credited with the
planting and harvesting of grain; for, while her lord and master enjoyed
himself on the hunt, she gathered fruits, nuts, and edible seeds, and
sooner or later this led her to observe that seeds she carelessly
dropped on the midden pile produced new and bigger plants. By so doing
woman invented work; for early man was only an idler who gave himself
intermittently to the pleasures of the chase. Woman also invented
leisure—true, creative leisure—for out of agriculture rose a settled
community and a surplus of provender which allowed the few to think and
plan and build civilization.
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 farmers, yet they made no polished axes because there was almost no
timber to cut.[21]
Speech was certainly the first great inventive triumph of primitive man.
The making of fire ranks second. The third great invention, agriculture,
was also the first industrial revolution; without it what we carelessly
assume to be _the_ industrial revolution would have been impossible.
Science feels sure that agriculture appeared in the Old World before it
did in the New, but is not so certain as to where man first tilled the
soil and when. James H. Breasted, Sr., put agriculture back to 18,000
B.C.; later writers push it up to 5000 B.C. There has been quite as much
disagreement about the area where agriculture began. At first the valley
of the Nile seemed to be the right spot, for every fall the flood waters
of the river brought not only automatic irrigation but also fresh,
fertile soil to enrich the depleted farm lands. Soon, however, the
birthplace of agriculture moved to the “fertile crescent” that stretched
from Egypt to Mesopotamia. Later it shifted from the Tigris-Euphrates
valley to the valley of the Indus. Now it seems to lie somewhere between
these two, perhaps in the dry highlands of Iran and Iraq. In northern
Iraq, 400 miles north of Ur, the wild ancestors of certain of our
cultivated grains still grow, and excavators have come on evidences of
farming communities which may be 8,000 to 11,000 years old.[22] There
has always been hot argument between the supporters of denuded river
valleys and the supporters of dry uplands as the natural site of early
agriculture. Lately students have begun to argue for forested or jungle
areas, and above all for mountain valleys; and they have plumped for
tubers and melons, rather than grains, as the first crops cultivated by
early man. These students see man as a gardener before he was a farmer.
Only the beginnings of agriculture are of any importance in a discussion
of early man. Early man may invent agriculture, but thereupon he
promptly ceases to be early man. With the food, leisure, and fixed abode
that farming provides, he is soon inventing writing. He is then no
longer even prehistoric.
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 then as a food producer. This ignores the very important
fact that man began as a food gatherer and not as a hunter.
The first man probably ate the same food as the great ape—fruits, nuts,
roots, and berries—and perhaps grubs and insects. Occasionally he may
have varied his repast with birds’ eggs and fledglings. With a broken
branch for a weapon, he improved his diet a bit. He knocked over small
animals, and he may occasionally have got hold of the carcass of a large
one, but, for thousands upon thousands of years, he was basically a
vegetarian. His first well developed stone tool—the hand ax shaped
rather like a flattened and pointed egg—was probably more useful for
grubbing roots and tubers out of the ground than for killing animals. As
early man learned to make more efficient weapons—first the curved
throwing stick, then the spear and the spear-thrower, and finally the
bow and arrow—hunting became his chief activity, and meat his chief
diet. But his woman went right on gathering berries and nuts, tubers and
seeds, and getting ready to invent agriculture. Certainly in the New
World—perhaps in the Old World, too—she invented milling stones to grind
seeds while her man was still a paleolithic. Perhaps when she watched
the wearing away and the smoothing down of mortar and pestle, milling
stone and mano, as she ground her seeds into flour between them, the
idea may have occurred to her—or to her man who watched her labor—that
it was possible to grind and polish stone into axes and other
implements.
We feel that the life-story of prehistoric man can best be
divided—certainly for the purposes of this book—into a Paleolithic, or
Old Stone Age, which included the making of artifacts out of wood, bone,
shell, and chipped and sometimes polished stone, and a Neolithic, or New
Stone Age, which was defined by the invention of agriculture and the
perfecting of pottery, of weaving, and of the polishing of stone. This
may reduce a little the confusions that are inevitable in the study of
early man tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of years ago.
Conflicts of evidence and opinion will remain, of course. We need not
let them deter us from judging early man in the Americas. Indeed, they
should free us from paying too much heed to the dogmas of scientific
conservatism.
4
THE GREAT ICE AGE
_Speak to the earth, and it shall teach thee._
—JOB 12:8
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 Tertiary, and the Quaternary.
The first two went by the board when newer scientists found older ages
and stretched the life of the earth a couple of billion years. The
Tertiary is still a respected appellation, but the good name of the
Quaternary—the area of time with which this book is mainly concerned—is
seriously questioned. Defined as the Age of Man, it was supposed to
harbor all evidence of his existence; but hints of his presence in the
Tertiary have rather sullied the scientific standing of the later
period.
[Illustration: THE LIFE STORY OF THE EARTH
_This summary of the story of the earth is a combination of charts
in Arthur Holmes’_ Principles of Physical Geology, _Earnest A.
Hooton’s_ Up from the Ape, _and George Gaylord Simpson’s_ The
Meaning of Evolution, _with modifications by William C. Putnam and
James Gilluly. *The divisions marked with an asterisk used to be
called, respectively, Secondary and Primary._]
PALEONTOLOGICAL DIVISIONS GEOLOGICAL DURATION IN CUMULATIVE
DIVISIONS YEARS TOTALS
(_Round
numbers_)
CENOZOIC (“recent life”)
_Quaternary_ Holocene 25,000
Age of Man (“wholly recent”)
Pleistocene 1,000,000 1,000,000
(“most recent”)
or Great Ice Age
_Tertiary_ Pliocene 11,000,000
Age of Mammals (“more recent”)
Miocene 16,000,000
(“less recent”)
Oligocene 11,000,000 75,000,000
(“little recent”)
Eocene 19,000,000
(“dawn of recent”)
Paleocene 17,000,000
(“ancient recent”)
MESOZOIC (“middle life”) Three periods 130,000,000 205,000,000
*Age of Reptiles
PALEOZOIC (“ancient life”) Six or seven 300,000,000 505,000,000
periods beginning
with the Cambrian
*Age of Fishes, Amphibians, and Primitive
Marine Invertebrates
PROTEROZOIC (“earlier life”) Pre-Cambrian 1,250,000,000 1,750,000,000
Age, presumably, of soft-bodied animals
ARCHAEOZOIC (“primordial life”)
EOZOIC (“dawn of life”)
Problematic signs of life, indicated by
presence of carbon
Unrecorded Interval Since the Origin of the Unknown 2,000,000,000
Earth to
10,000,000,000
In this book we are concerned with two divisions of the Quaternary which
are also growing vaguer in outline, less precise in time. They are the
Pleistocene, or Glacial Period, or Great Ice Age, and the Holocene,
Recent, or Postglacial Period in which we now live. (If your Greek is
rusty, you will be amused to discover that those scientific-sounding
terms are merely translations of “wholly recent” and “most recent.”)
Most geologists believe that these two areas of time covered about
1,000,000 years; but some give them half a million more, and a few limit
them to the 600,000 years, or even 300,000 years, of the last four
glaciations. Some start the Postglacial 25,000 years ago, when the ice
began to shrink toward its present limits; some start it 9,000 years
ago, when a relatively modern climate appeared. Some geologists say we
are still in the Pleistocene, and merely enjoying a warm spell before
another glaciation.
By definition—or lack of it—the Pleistocene is rather vaguely bounded,
and quite as much at its beginning as at its end. To the paleontologist,
the Pleistocene is the time of certain large and picturesque mammals
that are now extinct. To the geologist, it is the time of the waxing and
waning of the great glaciers. The beginnings and the ends of these two
definitions of the Pleistocene do not correspond too closely. We shall
use the term as little as possible, substituting the Great Ice Age.
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 miles away. The common explanation was that they were
water-borne, perhaps by the biblical flood. An American cotton
manufacturer accounted for the wearing away and the scratching of such
boulders by supposing that they had been embedded in the lower surfaces
of icebergs and then swept scraping across the earth by the tumultuous
waters on which the Ark had ridden. In 1802 John Playfair, a professor
of mathematics at Edinburgh, ventured the theory that the blocks had
been transported by glacial ice.[1] This idea had occurred to a
mountaineer named Kuhn in 1787, and Saussure echoed it in 1803; they
knew and interpreted correctly the moraines of loose stones and boulders
which they saw at the foot and the sides of the glaciers. From 1821 to
the middle thirties various French, Swiss, and German scientists—Brard,
Venetz, Charpentier, and Schimper—discussed and amplified this idea.
Though A. Bernhardi, an obscure German professor of forestry, suggested
in 1832 that “the polar ice once reached clear to the southernmost edge
of the district which is now covered by those rock remnants,”[2] it was
not until 1837 that the glacial theory took definite shape. Then Louis
Agassiz, speaking before a Swiss society, launched the glacial
hypothesis that there had been a period of great cold just before the
advent of recent life. By 1840, when Agassiz published his _Studies of
the Glaciers_, the idea was pretty generally accepted; he had “added the
Glacial Epoch to the geological time-table.” The theory has been much
amplified since then.
Adolphe Morlot, in 1854, discovered fossils of temperate plants between
layers of glacial deposits, and advanced the theory that there had been
warm periods as well as cold ones during the Great Ice Age. In his
“Notice sur le Quaternaire en Suisse” he suggested three separate
glaciations with two warm interglacial periods between. In 1874 James
Geikie, the geologist of Edinburgh, brought out his _The Great Ice Age
and Its Relation to the Antiquity of Man_, building upon Morlot’s work;
and his _Prehistoric Europe_, in 1881, expanded the glaciations to six.
Yet for thirty more years some stubborn scientists still believed in a
single glaciation.
It was not until the turn of the century that the work of Albrecht Penck
and Eduard Brückner established the history of the Alpine glaciations on
a solid scientific foundation that has endured pretty well till today.
They found four major glaciations and named them in neat alphabetical
order after four Alpine valleys—Günz, Mindel, Riss, and Würm.[3] They
divided the Würm glaciation at first into two periods of activity, and
later into a number of smaller oscillations toward the end. There has
been some controversy over the subdivisions of the Würm, and one to
three Danubian glaciers have been suggested hundreds of thousands of
years before the Günz; but the general hypothesis brought forward by
Agassiz and the amplifications of his successors are now definitely
established. With all this goes much knowledge of the ice sheets that
covered Scandinavia, northern England, and Germany as far south as
Dresden, and North America from ocean to ocean and down to Long Island
and the Ohio and Missouri rivers.
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 must remember, of course, that the great ice sheets of northern
Europe and North America behaved somewhat differently.
[Illustration: THE ICE FIELDS OF THE LAST GLACIATION
_At the height of the last glaciation 5,000,000 square miles of
North America were covered with ice, as against 2,500,000 in
Eurasia. The volume of ice was three times as great. The shore lines
are those of the present rather than glacial time. (Map after Flint,
1957; Antevs, 1928; and Flint and Dorsey, 1945; estimates from Daly,
1934.)_]
We have some fairly exact knowledge about the retreat of the ice across
Sweden. This has resulted from the theory of Baron Gerhard de Geer that
the varves—layers of alternately coarse and fine clays deposited in
lakes in front of the retreating glaciers—represent the summer and
winter sediments released by the melting ice. (We have a somewhat
similar index in the tree-ring count of wide and narrow rings originated
by A. E. Douglass and improved upon by Harold S. Gladwin. Both tree
rings and varves may reflect changes in solar radiation.) De Geer
counted the varves and determined that the ice sheet began to retreat in
southernmost Sweden some 14,000 years ago, and Ragnar Liden determined
that it had disappeared by 6840 B.C.
De Geer’s Swedish-American pupil Ernst Antevs applied the same system in
North America, and found the ice beginning to retreat from Long Island
36,500 years ago.[4] A calculation of the time required for the wearing
away of the postglacial Niagara Gorge has produced about the same
result, but this has been seriously challenged by Richard F. Flint.[5]
The picture of glaciation is more complicated in North America than in
the Old World. Europe had two main areas of ice—a small one in the Alps,
a much larger one in Scandinavia, the British Isles, northern Germany,
and Poland—but they were self-contained. North America had three ice
centers—the Labradoran east of Hudson Bay, the Keewatin west of the bay,
and the Cordilleran in the Canadian Rockies; these three sheets of ice
did not always grow or shrink at the same time or at the same rate, and
they occasionally overlapped (see maps on pages 26 and 27).
Incidentally, most of the ice of the glacial period was in the New
World. The area of land covered was almost twice as great as in the Old
World, and the bulk of ice three to five times as great.[6]
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
ocean, as well as deep channels prolonging present rivers far out to
sea.
Naturally enough the Great Ice Age was a time of notable changes of
climate. Vegetation advanced and retreated widely. The level of the sea
rose and fell some hundreds of feet. Whether or not there was more rain
and snow—a moot point with science—the many rivers of the world grew in
volume, and often in speed, at certain times and became low and sluggish
at others. These profound alternations created the river terraces which
have aided so much in determining the age of man and his various
cultures. As the ocean sank, while the glaciers grew, the slopes of
river beds became steeper, and the rivers themselves grew swifter. The
turbulent rivers cut deeper channels and carried the displaced materials
far down their valleys and ultimately even into the sea. During the
cold, dry period at the climax of each glaciation, the dying trees and
brush and grasses released their grip on gravels and silts, the
intermittent flood waters of the melting glaciers carried away the
debris and—because the rivers lost in slope and grew sluggish as the sea
level rose—they deposited the gravels and silts in their beds. As the
glaciers grew again and the oceans sank, the rivers once more became
swifter and more turbulent, cut deeper channels, carried away part of
the gravels and silts, and left the rest as terraces. Thus the passing
of each glaciation meant the adding of a new and a lower terrace to the
river valleys. Four such sets of river terraces are found just outside
the areas where the glaciers have been active—in the valleys of the
Rhine, the Thames, the Somme, the Isar, and other rivers.
[Illustration: THE AGE OF RIVER TERRACES
_These simplified sections of a river valley show how successive
channels were cut deeper and deeper, leaving the older deposits of
gravels and silts in the higher terraces at the sides. The discovery
of this process of nature was of the greatest value in determining
the age and the succession of the cultures of early man in Europe.
The oldest flint tools were found in the gravels of the highest
terraces, and the newest in the lowest._]
Farther to the south, periods of great rainfall helped to produce
similar river terraces in valleys like the Nile. The concentration of
masses of ice in central and northern Europe upset the zones of climate
of Africa and other parts of the earth and caused great climatic
disturbance. Rainfall belts moved far south, and the rain increased in
abundance. Such periods of rain are called pluvials. There is still a
good deal of argument about whether pluvial periods occurred principally
in glacial or interglacial periods. This affects the dating of early
man, and it is particularly important to us in the New World.
The raised beaches and the submerged beaches were obviously caused
primarily by the lowering and raising of the sea level and not of the
land. There were land movements, of course—as there are even now—but
they were either too small or too irregular to account entirely for the
systematic arrangement of old beaches in many parts of the world.
There has been much controversy about other glacial matters, but there
can be no question that the submerged beaches and the land-bridges were
a by-product of glaciation. The great masses of ice—estimated to have
averaged half a mile to two miles thick in North America and somewhere
between those figures in northern Europe—depressed somewhat the parts of
the earth on which they lay; the rest of the land tended consequently to
rise a bit, though not enough to account for the now sunken beaches and
for the land-bridges that united Africa and Europe, England and the
Continent, and Alaska and Siberia at various times. It was the immense
amount of sea water drawn up and locked in the glaciers that reduced the
area of the ocean and created new shore lines and the land-bridges.
Estimates of how much the seas were lowered from their present level
range from 70 to 1,800 feet; the best are 200 to 300 feet. There is
still enough glacial ice to raise the ocean more than 100 feet if it all
melted.
The raised beaches belong to a later discussion of the cause of the
Great Ice Age as a whole.
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. Another is a hypothetical decrease in the amount of carbon
dioxide in the atmosphere. Other explanations have to do with changes in
the altitude of land, shifts in air currents and ocean currents,
volcanic eruptions filling the air with dust that screened the rays of
the sun. All these adventitious causes would have had to be repeated
with the curious and complex rhythm which is characteristic of the
waxing and waning of the ice sheets.
One theory seems to have a good deal of cogency. It depends on three
known alterations in the relation of the earth to the sun. The first is
a slow, regular change in the shape of the earth’s orbit through a cycle
of 92,000 years. The second is a shift in the inclination of the earth’s
axis through 40,000 years. The third is what a layman would call the
wobble of this axis through 21,000 years. The first change increases or
decreases the distance of the earth from the sun. The other two alter
the angle of the sun’s rays and thus also increase or decrease the
warmth given a particular area of the earth at certain seasons. No
single unfavorable position would have had a great deal of effect in
lowering summer temperature in the northern hemisphere, but two
occurring at the same time—let alone three—would have appreciably
diminished the sun’s heat.
This astronomical theory of the cause of glaciation goes back a hundred
years. As long ago as 1842 the French mathematician and astronomer J.
Adhémar suggested that changes in the earth’s axis increased rainfall
and provided the floods which he thought had moved the erratic blocks.
Between 1864 and 1875 James Croll combined the wobble of the earth’s
axis and the change in the earth’s orbit. A number of other men worked
unsatisfactorily on the problem. The Serbian astronomer and physicist
Milutin Milankovitch combined all three, and, between his first
publication in 1913 and his latest in 1938, calculated the variations of
solar radiation for the past 650,000 years.[8] In 1924 W. Köppen and A.
Wegener applied Milankovitch’s early figures to the glaciation question,
and Frederick E. Zeuner has lately used the revised figures of
Milankovitch. Zeuner’s results, somewhat simplified, appear on page 55.
They are fairly close to the geological estimates of B. Eberl and W.
Soergel; his last two glaciations extend further back than those of
Penck and Brückner.[9] Zeuner’s dates do not agree, of course, with
those of an extremist like the geologist Kirtley F. Mather, who dates
the first, or Günz, glaciation as ranging from 2,000,000 to 1,500,000
years ago.[10] Zeuner’s findings work out well enough for the American
glaciations, except that there is no New World equivalent for his first
Würm maximum of 115,000 years ago. Many authorities refuse to accept any
such condition in the Old World. Because of this glaciation Zeuner moves
back the appearance of _Homo sapiens_ a good 50,000 or even 75,000
years.
[Illustration: THE FOUR GREAT GLACIATIONS
_Six varying estimates of their duration made by five authorities.
Fisk’s are of the New World glaciers, which are generally equated
with those of Europe._]
There is one serious objection to Zeuner’s theory. Two of the three
movements of the earth on which it is based would have reduced the
warmth of summer in the northern hemisphere, but they would at the same
time have increased the temperature of the southern hemisphere, thus
alternating glaciation in the two hemispheres. Unfortunately, it is
fairly well established that glaciers north and south of the equator
have waxed and waned at the same time over a considerable number of
years.
It is not enough, of course, to find the cause of the individual
glaciations. There must be a cause for the glacial period as a whole.
The Great Ice Age was an almost unique event in the history of the
earth. We have to go back 200,000,000 years, to the time of the reptiles
that preceded the dinosaurs, before we come again on major glaciations.
Zeuner states frankly that the astronomic theory “does not provide the
cause of the Ice Age” as a whole.[11] Some added factor must be found.
One which he considers is a migration of the north pole from the
direction of the Pacific to its present location; Zeuner and others
think the movement occurred before the Great Ice Age.
Two geologists, Maurice Ewing and William L. Donn, have accounted for
the beginning of the Ice Age by accepting the theory that the north and
south poles had moved from the north Pacific and the south Atlantic to
their present positions. They account rather ingeniously for the advance
and the retreat of the four glaciations. With the north pole where it is
now, the ice-free Arctic Ocean would supply moisture by evaporation.
This moisture, owing to cold over the northern areas of Asia and North
America, would fall as snow to nourish glaciers. But how to stop this
process and reverse it? It happens that the sea floor forms a rather
high sill between the Atlantic and the Arctic Oceans. When the sea level
dropped, as its water piled up in the great glaciers, the sill came too
close to the surface to allow much of the warmer water from the Atlantic
to reach the Arctic Ocean and to keep it from freezing over. Once the
ice pack formed, evaporation diminished abruptly. The glaciers lost
their nourishment. The summer melt returned their waters to the ocean.
Sea level rose. The currents from the Atlantic could flow over the sill
again and melt the ice pack. Then conditions would be ripe for a second
advance of snow and ice across the northern world. The shallow waters of
Bering Strait probably had little effect upon the Arctic Ocean.
This theory has been criticized adversely by various authorities,
despite the geologic, oceanographic, and meteorological evidence that
Ewing and Donn have brought to bear upon each step of their reasoning.
Their theory is particularly attractive to the archaeologist; it
requires an ice-free Arctic coast when the land-bridge at Bering Strait
would have been available to early man. Climatic conditions at that time
would have been severe along the land-bridge and coastline, but not
impossible for the survival of early man.[12]
Another explanation is a general decrease in solar energy; Zeuner holds
this in reserve for lack of evidence. But some present-day geologists
seize on the possibility that the heat of the sun may have changed from
time to time, and use the theory in a curious, almost paradoxical way.
The author of this hypothesis, Sir George C. Simpson, believes that the
great masses of ice resulted from an initial _increase_ instead of a
decrease in temperature.[13] As the weather grew slightly warmer,
cloudiness and rain and snow increased, the snow-line fell, and
glaciation resulted. As the weather grew still warmer, the ice melted.
(Simpson demonstrated the basic principle of this through an ingenious
laboratory experiment.) His glacial theory, which is explained in more
detail on the opposite page, postulates two increases in solar energy,
and draws from them a meteorological pattern that provides the four
glacial and three interglacial periods. The first and last interglacials
would be warm and wet, the second cold and dry. Zeuner objects to this
theory on the ground that the last interglacial—which, according to
Simpson, should have been warm and wet—was mainly cool and dry.[14] But,
while it may have been cool and dry in the German area which Zeuner has
most closely studied, other areas probably had other climates. Simpson’s
hypothesis would account for the heavy rains, or pluvial periods, of
Nilotic Africa, which may link up with the glaciations of Europe; but he
provides only two pluvials, and there are evidences of three or more in
Africa.
[Illustration: GLACIATION THROUGH WARMTH
_A somewhat modified graph of Simpson’s theory of the cause of the
Great Ice Age. The following summary by Carl Sauer includes
quotations from Simpson: [First] “Increased solar radiation received
by the earth leads to increase in the general circulation of the
atmosphere, which forms a great cloud blanket and causes increased
precipitation in appropriate areas. In particular, in high latitudes
and altitudes there is increased snowfall or glaciers. [Second] ‘As
the radiation increases still further, the ice melts away and we
have overcast skies and much precipitation but no ice accumulation.’
[Third] ‘When the solar radiation decreases, conditions are reversed
and the whole sequence is gone through in reverse order.’” (After
Simpson, 1938; quotation from Sauer, 1944.)_]
Zeuner has an explanation of why the periodic decrease in the heat from
the sun produced glaciation during the last million years and not for
200,000,000 years before. He introduces the geological factor called
Eustatism,[15] meaning by it simply a progressive drop in sea level.
According to the hypothesis, this began before the Great Ice Age, and
was caused by the sinking of very deep portions of the sea floor. As the
sea level sank, the temperature of the mountains and plains dropped
also, for the higher we rise above the surface of the ocean the cooler
the air grows. The snowline fell, the mountain glaciers grew larger, and
the snow and ice on the northern plains could not be completely melted
by the reduced summer heat, and gradually grew deeper and more
extensive. Thus the lowering of general temperature made it possible for
the periodic decrease in solar radiation to cause the glaciations of the
Great Ice Age. The theory of a general and steady lowering of the sea
level is based on a series of four raised beaches occurring uniformly in
many parts of the world. Other students believe these terraces were
products of a regional rise of land.
Considering that the Great Ice Age ranges back at least 600,000
years—and probably 1,000,000, if we credit evidence of three earlier
Danubian glaciations—it is small wonder that scientists are not entirely
agreed on many factors in its story. “The difficulties are such,” says
the French archaeologist A. Vayson de Pradenne, “that after fifty years
of study to which the greatest geologists have devoted all their
energies, there is no certainty yet as to the exact number of
glaciations and the way in which the faunal changes are related to
them.”[16]
Much more important, of course, than the cause of glaciation is its
effect on early man. Ice covered 27 per cent of the earth’s surface
during the Würm-Wisconsin period, according to Flint. This created the
land-bridge over Bering Strait. It connected Santa Rosa Island with the
coast of California. It broadened the Isthmus of Panama, so that man did
not have to pass through a semi-mountainous jungle, which suggests that
he came south during the Wisconsin glaciation. It seems to have been the
ice that urged man to the south in the Americas and provided freeways.
5
EARLY MAN IN THE OLD WORLD
_Bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh, are these half-brutish
prehistoric brothers._
—WILLIAM JAMES
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 of man’s prehistoric past won no serious status until
the middle of the nineteenth century. “In 1859 prehistoric archaeology,”
says Gordon Childe, referring to the acceptance of finds at Abbeville,
in France, “may be deemed to have become a science.”[1]
There were discoveries before that, but they were neglected and
misinterpreted or despised and disputed. As early as 1690 a man named
Conyers discovered “opposite Black Mary’s, near Gray’s Inn Lane,”
London, a fossilized tooth which, we now know, belonged to an extinct
elephant, and a crude hand ax of stone which, we now recognize, was made
by man fairly early in the Great Ice Age; but it was long before they
won an honored place in the British Museum. A friend of Conyers named
Bagford thought that the elephant belonged to the Roman army of the
Emperor Claudius, and that the flint was a weapon used by a Briton to
slay it (see illustration below).
[Illustration: _The first hand ax found and recognized, probably an
Acheulean implement, discovered in London in 1690 together with the
tooth of an extinct elephant. The tool is about six inches in
length. Like almost all hand axes, it is thinner than it looks from
this angle. (After Sottas, 1911.)_]
In 1797 John Frere reported to the Society of Antiquaries on the finding
near Hoxne in Suffolk of “weapons of war ... in great numbers” together
with “some extraordinary bones, particularly a jawbone of enormous
size.” His discovery has been called as important, in its way, as the
geographical discovery of a New World; by emphasizing “the situation in
which these weapons were found,” he became the first man to apply modern
archaeological methods to a prehistoric find. Frere boldly declared that
the hand axes belonged to a “very remote period indeed; even beyond that
of the present world.”[2] (See illustration, page 71.)
Frere’s reasoning had little effect, however, on a certain type of mind.
When in 1823 William Buckland, a teacher of geology who was to become
Dean of Westminster, dug out of a cave near Paviland a female skeleton
which was painted with red ocher—a peculiar habit of early man and of
man not so early—and which lay beside some ivory rods and bracelets and
the skull of a mammoth, Protestant prejudice got the better of science.
Buckland wrote that the skeleton was “_clearly_ not coeval with the
antediluvian bones of the extinct species” with which it had been found.
Like Bagford, he turned to the time of the Roman invasion. His “Red Lady
of Paviland” became a camp follower, and thus he missed his chance to
recognize the first Cro-Magnon skeleton of man from the last
glaciation.[3] Yet religious dogma—which held back Victorian science for
so many years—did not prevent Father John MacEnery from seeing the true
significance of a flint tool and the tooth of a rhinoceros which he
found under a layer of stalagmite in Kent’s Cavern, England, in 1825.
Around 1830 Toumal, a French scientist, and Schmerling, a Belgian, saw
the truth as clearly, and published their discoveries of man-made flints
with the fossils of extinct animals.
The most important find, and the one that ultimately established Glacial
man as a reality, was announced in 1838 at a meeting of the Société
d’Emulation of Abbeville in northern France; but twenty years passed
before it received scientific sanction. The discoverer was an
inconspicuous tax collector, Jacques Boucher de Crèvecœur de Perthes,
who matched his diversified name by writing tragedies, novels, and books
on travel, economics, and philanthropy. He had explored caves as early
as 1805 and had found fossils and man-made tools of flint, but no hand
axes. The hand axes that he found in the river terraces were hardly as
important as his theory that these terraces dated the tools, and that
the terraces were formed far in the past when the rivers were swollen
with water. His only mistake was that he went to the biblical flood to
find the water instead of to the great glaciers. In 1849, after making
other finds, Boucher published _De l’Industrie primitive, ou Les Arts et
leurs origines_, dated 1847; more finds and other books followed. His
hand axes and other discoveries were almost completely ignored until
1858 when the English geologist Hugh Falconer “happened to be passing
through Abbeville and saw the collection.”[4] He brought British
colleagues back to Abbeville, and in 1859 Falconer, Sir Joseph
Prestwich, and Sir John Evans declared officially for the reality of
glacial man. The finds of Boucher, they asserted, proved that human
beings had existed at the same time as Pleistocene mammals now extinct.
Significantly, it was the same year that Darwin published _On the Origin
of Species by Means of Natural Selection_.
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] Modified by later discoveries, the series ran
as follows, beginning with the oldest: Chellean, Acheulean, Mousterian,
Aurignacian, Solutrean, and Magdalenian. (Most prehistorians now use the
word Abbevillian instead of Chellean because later research proved that
the tools found originally at Chelles were Acheulean in type, while
those found at Abbeville were earlier.) In the light of present
knowledge, the list is much too simplified. It is based only on European
finds, yet it is supposed to fit the world picture. For more than fifty
years it has served as a scientific straitjacket, patched with new
material here and there, but still gaping at the seams as the husky
young giant of archaeological science grows in stature.
[Illustration: _Time scale of early man in a limited area of Europe,
as estimated by Robert J. Braidwood._]
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. Often the chipping
looked purposeful; the flakes made an edge or a point that could be used
to scrape or drill.
These rudely shaped flints were first championed by Abbé Louis Bourgeois
in 1863; but his finds were in strata far too old to win scientific
recognition. This was not the case with Benjamin Harrison, who
recognized eoliths in later formations almost one hundred years ago.
Harrison was one of that variegated and comradely group of country
“antiquaries”—noblemen and shopkeepers, vicars and village laborers—who
founded and developed the study of the prehistory of England. Harrison
left his old-fashioned general store and its cakes, fruits, and
draperies, to walk the High Downs of Suffolk, searching with utter
conviction for traces of early man in the glacial gravels. He began as a
youth, when Boucher de Crèvecœur de Perthes had only just won his
battle, and in 1865 he recognized his first eoliths. In 1889 the
distinguished scientist Sir Joseph Prestwich gave them his backing. It
took twenty more years, however, for the eolith to win anything like
respectable recognition, and some still deny that these flints were
worked by men.
[Illustration: THE “DAWN STONES” OF EARLY MAN
_Upper left, a borer. Right, two sides of a scraper. Below, side
view and bottom of a rostrocarinate. (After Peake and Fleure, 1927;
Moir, 1927; and Lankester, 1912.)_]
The fact that some eoliths were found in geological formations much
older than man—so far as we know his history—was an argument against all
of them, because the older and the more recent looked so much alike.
Another cogent objection was that eoliths could have been made by
natural forces, such as a landslide, the pressure of heavy strata, or
one stone knocking against another. A heavy cart can make an eolith when
it rolls over a smooth flint. But in spite of arguments and antagonisms,
which still persist, there were two things that seemed to establish the
eolith as the work of man.
To begin with, some kind of tool, some form of experiment, had to lie
behind even the crudest hand ax. At first man must have picked up a
natural eolith and used its cutting edge. A little later he must have
improved the edge. In any case he threw the stone away when he had
finished the job, and later looked for and improved another one.
Gradually he developed his dawn-stone technique and made tools that he
would use until he lost them.
The second argument for the dawn stone was impressive. In 1910, after
years of search, J. Reid Moir found eoliths near Ipswich, England, under
unusual conditions. They came in two layers, which seemed to indicate
that early man had camped twice in this neighborhood at different times.
They were bedded in soft sand and therefore could not have been chipped
by geologic pressure. The sand dated from the Pliocene Period which
preceded the Great Ice Age. Later, in the same district, he found
eoliths in a layer of delicate shells—again a sign that the eoliths had
not been chipped by natural forces.[6] Moreover, many of Moir’s eoliths
had a new and peculiar shape; they were keeled like an upturned boat or
beaked like an eagle. Sir Ray Lankester called them rostrocarinates. In
1900 Mortillet had to admit man—or pre-man—to an Eolithic Age.
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
peoples only—which proved not so sound. The division lay between cores
and flakes. It lay between tools that had been made out of the heart of
a lump of flint, and tools that had been made from chips flaked off the
lump. The fact that there were core tools and flake tools was plain
enough, but the fondness of scientists for strict classification led the
prehistorians into theories that time disproved.
First of all, they had to set up a time sequence. They decided, not
unnaturally, that man must have begun by hammering things with a handy
rock until his rude tool began to chip away into something approaching
an edge and eventually a point. Thus the hand ax, or _coup de poing_,
came into being (see illustration, page 71). In the course of time man
began to notice the chips, and to use the larger ones to cut and scrape
with. Soon—that is, after a couple of hundred thousand years—he was
deliberately knocking flakes off a stone core, and using them for spear
points as well as scrapers. The prehistorians called hand axes the
products of a “core industry,” and chips the products of a “flake
industry.” They believed that one industry had preceded the other by
hundreds of thousands of years, and that the Abbevillian and Acheulean
had stuck to cores and left flakes to the Mousterian. Thus they believed
that certain cultures had devoted themselves exclusively to the core,
and certain others to the flake.
The theory that the early stone workers had a core industry and the
later ones worked flakes was rudely upset by the discovery of flaked
tools—called Cromerian—in an English stratum as old as the French
sources of the first hand axes, and possibly older. Some say they lie at
the beginning of the Great Ice Age or at the end of the earlier period,
the Pliocene. This demonstration of a very early flake industry was
reenforced by the discovery of a special type of flaked tool—the
Clactonian—which runs from late Abbevillian into Acheulean times.
Another type—the Levalloisian—laps over from the Acheulean into the
Mousterian.
The core industries and the flake industries simply would not stay
nicely separated. The first excavators had found only hand axes because
these tools were so much more interesting than scrapers; later students
found flake tools in the same ancient levels. No hand axes turned up in
Clactonian culture-sites, but they appeared at the end of the Levallois,
and the flake-loving Mousterians made them for a time. “Flake and core
run parallel to one another in time,” says W. B. Wright, “and even
intermix.”[7]
[Illustration: PALEOLITHIC TYPES AND INDUSTRIES
_A chart of the core-, flake-, and blade-making traditions and
industries, devised and dated by Robert J. Braidwood.[8] The dates
indicate the approximate beginning and end of the various types of
artifacts. Usually the same group of men made different kinds of
tools within one industry. The Solutrean was distinguished for
double-faced, leaf-shaped projectile points, rather than blades._]
[Illustration: MAN’S FIRST PERFECTED TOOL
_Three European hand axes that may bridge 300,000 years. They are,
top, Pre-Abbevillian; left, Abbevillian; and right, Acheulean. The
last is one of the tools found by John Frere at Hoxne in 1715. Most
hand axes are not so well formed. Somewhat similar tools have been
found in American Indian cultures hafted at the top of a wooden
handle or in the middle, as a sort of spokeshave. (After Osborn,
1915; Leakey, 1935; and Burkitt, 1933.)_]
If we do not try to apply the core-versus-flake theory too broadly and
too strictly, it suggests a fascinating picture of two kinds of men and
two kinds of life through the first two-thirds of the Great Ice Age. One
kind dominated during the cold of the glaciations; the other, during the
warmth of the interglacials. For the flake tools of the Clactonian and
Levalloisian peoples are found mainly with the fossils of cold-loving
animals in the north and east of Europe, and the core tools of the
Abbevillian and Acheulean peoples with warmer-blooded animals in the
west and south.
Science accepted Mortillet’s system of orderly cultures and the theory
of successive core and flake industries, and for fifty years tried to
apply it to new discoveries both in Europe and elsewhere. Though the
system has had to be modified in parts, and in parts abandoned, its
terms are still used, and used in a way that is confusing because the
terms are no longer exact. In Africa the various types of tools resemble
only approximately those of Europe, and they do not seem to correspond
in time. The hand ax may have spread from Spain into almost all Africa,
or, more probably, from Africa into Spain, as well as southern India,
but there are plenty of flaked tools, too, in these regions. Central and
northern Asia seem to be devoted to the flake, and to eschew the hand ax
in favor of a kind of chopping tool made out of a core. Asia, like
Africa, has tools made out of large, smooth pebbles.
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. Similarly, when he comes upon Abbevillian and
Acheulean in separate terraces of the same river, he always finds the
Abbevillian in a higher terrace than the Acheulean, and, as we have
explained on pages 51 and 52, the higher terrace is always the older.
Dating these cultures in terms of our years is another matter. The first
step is fairly simple. If the tools are found with the fossils of a
warmth-loving animal like the hippopotamus, they belong to an
interglacial period; if they are found with the fossils of an animal
like the hairy mammoth, which could survive a harsh climate, they belong
to a glacial time. The species of animal may determine which glacial or
which interglacial. If the tools are found in the gravel of a certain
river terrace, then they belong to the geological period when the
material of the terrace was being laid down. The terraces often contain
fossils, and this may cross-date the terrace materials with cave
deposits. But scientists are often faced with the problem of picking the
right glacial or interglacial period on scanty evidence, and the still
more difficult problem of setting the period in the terms of our years.
There is room here for much disagreement. Glaciologists do not agree as
to the age or the length of the various glacials and interglacials (see
illustration, page 55). Some prehistorians accept and use the dates of
one glacialist; some choose another’s. They do not all concur as to
which culture came in which glacial period.
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
men who made it liked a fairly warm climate. As neither they nor their
Acheulean successors made fire or controlled it effectively, the early
Europeans probably retreated to Africa during the glaciations.
[Illustration: _Ancient implements of bone and wood. Left, part of
the thigh bone of a mammoth, found at Piltdown, England, in the same
deposit as the now infamous skull; it, too, is a forgery. Right,
part of a wooden spear, its point hardened by fire, found at
Clacton-on-Sea, England, and probably made by Acheulean or
Mousterian man. (Left, after Dawson and Woodward, 1917; right, after
Crawford, 1921.)_]
The Acheulean hand ax was thinner and better, and it is found with
various kinds of scrapers and cleavers. Probably it was this culture
that left us part of a very crude wooden spear at Clacton-on-Sea, in
England, though some date it a little later. The earliest association of
human remains with tools in Europe is that of the Swanscombe skull and
Acheulean tools in Pleistocene gravels of the Thames in Kent.
We are not too sure about the physical appearance of the men of
Abbevillian and Acheulean times. For the Abbevillian there is possibly a
fragment of jaw, a most interesting one, to be sure, but not actually
found with any kind of artifact. For Acheulean times there are no
dependable skeletons to help us, and not even complete skulls. In fact,
there are not as many candidates for the position as we thought we had a
decade or so ago.
Galley Hill man turned out to be a case of mistaken identity. He has a
thick skull and a few other primitive traits—a fossil type of modern
man, perhaps, but not nearly as old as we once thought. His bones lacked
a fluorine mineral content typical of other fossils that belonged in the
interglacial deposits where the Galley Hill skull reposed, eight feet
below the surface.
The same fluorine test—which fortunately applies to such fossilated
things as bone, antler, and ivory—exposed an even more notorious
impostor, expelling him from the select corps of early men. This was
Piltdown man, alias _Homo eoanthropus dawsoni_, alias _Eoanthropus_,
alias Dawson’s Dawn Man. It was demonstrated to be a fake and a forgery
that led its discoverer to try to match a reasonably human skull to the
jaw of an ape. The jaw and its teeth had been modified by the faker—not
Dawson—to make it appear less apelike. Both jaw and skull had been
artfully treated with chemicals to appear as antiquated as the unusual
assortment of fossils with which they were salted into early
interglacial deposits. Many of the fossils, while authentic in their own
right, also were chemically stained and planted. And tools were added to
complete the assemblage. The latter included a bone pick thoughtfully
carved from the femur of an elephant, but it was carved with a modern
steel knife, as careful scrutiny under a powerful lens disclosed, and
not with the stone flakes of prehistoric man. (See illustration, page
74.)
The British scientists Kenneth Oakley, J. S. Wiener, and Sir Wilfrid Le
Gros Clark exposed the forgery in a most conclusive manner.[9] In laying
the ghost of Piltdown, these authorities resolved four decades of
controversy as to his place in human evolution. Although Piltdown’s
contribution to human evolution now is known to have been nil, his
contribution to physical anthropology has been considerable. As the
academic dust settled on this issue, the anthropologists returned to
their laboratories with greater confidence in their science and with
somewhat sharper tools in their research kits. It is unlikely that any
new hoax will ever acquire the same importance as Piltdown.
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
stages of the Ice Age. Heidelberg man clearly lacks a chin, and his
molar teeth are reminiscent in some ways of cattle rather than men or
even monkeys, for that matter. This is an important clue, for the same
thing, “taurodontism,” occurs much later among some of the Neanderthals.
Heidelberg was not found with or near any stone tools. He seems to
belong to that part of the Pleistocene in which the Abbevillian tools
were made. Although he shares a few physical traits with Neanderthal
man, who lived much later and made excellent tools, some specialists
point out that the Heidelberg jaw bears an even closer resemblance to
the early man-apes of South Africa, who had no toolmaking tradition.
For the long, cool, and somewhat arid second interglacial period, we
have two good prospects, both probably females. One of these is from
Swanscombe. In 1936, A. T. Marston found there among the undisturbed
Middle Gravels a fragment of fossil skull. Except for its unusual
thickness, it was not unlike an equivalent portion in the skull of
modern man. Marston’s discovery was all the more exciting since this
fragment fitted very well with another, obviously from the same skull,
which he had found in place the previous year, only a few paces away.
The two pieces, from the left side and back of the skull, provided the
earliest undisputed evidence for a very early form of modern man. Twenty
years later, in 1955, Mr. J. Wymer recovered a third fragment, from the
right side of the same skull. The spots from which the three fragments
of the Swanscombe skull were recovered mark a triangle, the sides of
which measure 24, 49, and 51 feet. Near the Swanscombe bones and at the
same level were found more than two hundred stone flakes as well as four
small hand axes of Acheulean type, a stone knife, and fragments of other
tools. As we have mentioned, the gravels appear to be an undisturbed
deposit. Accordingly, they are now adequately protected and the object
of a most intensive and careful excavation. From them may come yet more
information about this ancient ancestor.[11]
This is early man, indeed. Swanscombe, from all the evidence now
available, is very close physically to modern man, closer than many
fossil men from the third interglacial period. And judging from the
accompanying stone tools, we may say that Swanscombe was culturally as
well as physically human.
Until additional remains of Swanscombe are recovered, we cannot with
certainty assign these remains to a precise place among man’s ancestors.
There are a few who suspect that the facial bones, should these be
recovered, would place Swanscombe closer to Neanderthal than to modern
man. However profitless such a conjecture may seem, it is at least
suggested by our third early European fossil, the Steinheim skull.
Twenty-three feet beneath the surface in a gravel quarry at Steinheim,
Germany, this now famous skull was found. First reported in 1933 by
Curator Fritz K. H. Berckheimer, of the nearby Stuttgart Natural History
Museum, this skull was well within a layer of gravels which now are
believed to be of second interglacial age. Steinheim is now considered
more or less a contemporary of Swanscombe, perhaps just slightly less
ancient. In the Steinheim skull there is a strong resemblance to the
Swanscombe skull and to that of modern man. But most of the right side
of the Steinheim face is intact, along with a few molar teeth, and in
these there is little likeness to _Homo sapiens_.
Given the Swanscombe bones alone, probably no anatomist would dream of
constructing for it a Neanderthal-like face. But in the Steinheim skull
there can be no mistake. Here we find a skull of reasonably modern shape
but equipped with enormous bony ridges over the eye sockets, a markedly
broad nose, and a somewhat projecting mouth—all suggestive of
Neanderthal. In the main, even these features may be somewhat closer to
an early type of modern man. It has been asked: Could Steinheim be an
ancestor to both Neanderthal and modern man?
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
culture are found directly under those of modern types of early
Europeans.
It was, therefore, with something akin to relief that anthropologists
received the findings of Mlle. Henri-Martin at Fontechevade. This was in
1947, some 90 years after Neanderthal had been academically accepted for
what he was, an effectively extinct kind of non-sapiens man. At
Fontechevade, in Charente, west central France, is a cave in which the
litter of millenniums discloses a cultural record ranging from that of
recent Frenchmen back through the Old Stone Age, which includes the
tools and debris of the Neanderthals’ Mousterian culture. The Mousterian
materials were bottommost, resting upon what seemed to be the cave
floor. Mlle. Henri-Martin noted that this “floor” was in fact a thick
layer of stalagmite deposit, and she began excavating. Upon breaking
through this culturally sterile layer, the archaeologist came to more
than 20 feet of additional deposits above the actual floor. In these
lower levels, the cultural debris represented quite a different
tool-manufacturing tradition, the Tayacian. This featured crude flake
tools, rather than worked cores. With the flake tools there were
fragments of fossil mammals, dating the deposit as third interglacial.
There also was a human skullcap and a fragment of a second skull. Not
much to go on, but it was sufficient to show that these were the remains
not of Neanderthal man but of something closer to modern man in most
respects, and perhaps to Swanscombe. Here, for the first time, was clear
and unmistakable proof that a more modern form of man definitely
preceded the brutish Neanderthal. Fontechevade man resembled _Homo
sapiens_ more than Neanderthal—the first evidence that the latter was
not our direct ancestor.
These four early men—Heidelberg, Swanscombe, Steinheim, and
Fontechevade—are of unquestionable antiquity. There are many other
fossil men from Europe, equally interesting but less reliably dated. In
addition there are hosts of Africans and Asians who, perhaps, are really
of greater consequence in human evolution. None of these is dated as
well as the early Europeans, whose bones and stone tools can be assigned
to rather specific periods within the sequence of glacial and
interglacial phases of the Ice Age.
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). For some years the skullcap of this Java man—a handier
name—stood alone as the only fossil of really ancient man. Now it has
been joined by portions of two other adults from the same geological
level and the cranium of a child and portions of a rugged, robust male
skull from a still older level, the discoveries of G. H. R. von
Koenigswald. Reconstructions of Java man give us a fellow with a low
sloping forehead, no chin, not much room for brains, and a very
prominent ridge of bone above his eyes. This human of 300,000 or more
years ago probably looked a good deal like the most primitive of modern
men, the native Australians, who seem to have miraculously and uniquely
survived without much change from the beginnings of _Homo_. Java man
left no tools with his bones, but the massive Patjitanian stone choppers
and crude flakes found in southern Java are thought to be of about the
proper age.
[Illustration: JAVA MAN—Pithecanthropus erectus
_Except for two molars and a thigh bone, the skullcap above was all
that Dubois first found of Java man. The reconstruction, actually
the right side of the skull, has been reversed for comparison. (The
skullcap after Osborn, 1915; the reconstruction after Weinert,
1928.)_]
Java man has a slightly younger relative in Peking man, also
beetle-browed. The first finds were made in 1929, about forty miles
southwest of Peking in the Choukoutien Cave, on Dragon Bone Hill. Since
then parts of about forty men and women have been dug out. We now have
four skulls that are more complete than those of Java man. We also have
148 teeth and thirteen jaws, and some odd pieces of other skulls. We
have fire hearths and a large number of implements, ranging from eoliths
to hammerstones and crude choppers and scrapers. We also have some
fossil bones of monkey, baboon, ostrich, rhinoceros, and mammoth,
besides animals common to China today. The most interesting bones, of
course, are those of man himself, and our concern with them is increased
by the odd and disturbing fact that the thigh bones had been cracked for
their marrow as only a man could crack them, and the skulls had suffered
violence. If Peking man was not a cannibal, he had a neighbor who was.
And that is probably true for the Abbevillian and Acheulean times of
Europe. But at least Peking man, like Java man, stood erect.
“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 cannot guess. He was promptly dubbed “giant ape,”
_Gigantopithecus_. Then, in Java in 1941, von Koenigswald recovered part
of a massive jaw with a few huge teeth intact. Their great size again
prompted a fanciful name, “the giant man of ancient Java,” or
_Meganthropus palaeojavanicus_.
[Illustration: Gigantopithecus—_giant ancestor of man? A normal
human molar contrasted with one of a number of teeth found in a Hong
Kong store. (After Koenigswald, 1947.)_]
Professor Franz Weidenreich speculated that the Hong Kong teeth would
require a beast twice the bulk of a gorilla, while the jaw and teeth of
the Java “giant” indicated an ancient man half again as large as a
gorilla. Gorillas stand, quite uncomfortably, five and a half feet or
so; some weigh more than 600 pounds. Further evidence appeared in 1957,
when Pei Wenchung reported the discovery in Kwangsi Province, China, of
a jaw bone with teeth, which he claimed to be _Gigantopithecus_. Pei
added that it was closer to man than any other ape yet discovered, and
he must have been 12 feet tall.[12]
The logic of including giants among our ancestors stems in part from the
fact that many Pleistocene mammals were larger than their modern
descendants. What these great teeth and jaws mean, we do not yet know.
In the complete absence of such clues to stature as thigh and other
bones, there are few who would now speculate that the huge teeth mean
more than a fossil ape of otherwise moderate proportions. There is not
always an exact correlation between size of teeth and stature, as
comparisons among modern man, Peking and Java man, and South African
man-apes indicate. The smallest teeth occur among some of the tallest
humans; the largest teeth are found among some of the smaller man-apes.
“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 to belong to the second interglacial period. At the bottom of
an ancient spring from which Arambourg recovered his fossils, he also
found a number of stone tools, including fist axes of the Acheulean
type. This perhaps is the earliest association of Acheulean artifacts
with human bones. You will recall that Acheulean fist axes also were
found with Swanscombe. Have we, then, a single type of culture for two
quite different kinds of men? Our accumulating evidence is beginning to
make it clear that some half-brained form of man closely related to our
Java “ape-man” was widely distributed across the inhabitable regions of
the Old World during the long second interglacial period.
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 abundant. A bewildering array of names was assigned to
them, without scientific justification. The first had been called
_Australopithecus africanus_; later, another species, _prometheus_, was
added. Others were labeled as distinct genera, taking note of their
near-human features—_Telanthropus_, _Plesianthropus_, and _Paranthropus_
(with two species, _robustus_ and _crassidens_). In 1959, a new and
important form was added, _Zinjanthropus boisei_. _Zinj_ is the Arab
name for East Africa. Expert opinion now inclines toward lumping these
all together, possibly under our own genus, _Homo_, or at most, within a
single genus, _Australopithecus_. Their status of “ape” is being
reassessed: man-apes, some still maintain; ape-men, say others; a few
believe they included the earliest true men.
The dividing line between ape and man is drawn partly upon physical
grounds, but the greatest difference is a cultural one. Men possess and
transmit culture, a process ordinarily regarded as involving language.
Men make tools; apes do not. The smallest, crudest, and perhaps earliest
of the _Australopithecines_ have long been championed by Dart, who
argues most persuasively that they were at least tool users, if not
toolmakers. With their remains were those of other animals, a source of
bones for picks and clubs, teeth for cutting and scraping, and so on.
Perceiving crude, ready-made tools of bone, tooth, and horn, Dart coined
the term “osteodontokeratic” for this pre-Stone Age assemblage.[15] This
nomenclature was criticized by physical and cultural anthropologists
alike. Whether this “culture” of the _Australopithecines_ is real or—as
many believe—imagined, there is no doubt about the equipment of
_Zinjanthropus_. Associated with his bones are stone tools of the
Oldowan culture, an Abbevillian-level, “Pre-Chelles-Acheul” industry of
worked stone flakes. In the words of his discoverer, Dr. L. S. B.
Leakey, here was the oldest maker of stone tools so far known. By 1960,
the skull of _Zinjanthropus_ had not been fully studied. In certain of
its features, it favors _Paranthropus_, _Australopithecus_, or _Homo_.
On first glance it seems as nearly human as Java man, which Leakey says
it predates.[16]
There are two main difficulties in placing the _Australopithecines_ on
the line of human evolution. Although they might be said to resemble man
more than the apes, they actually resemble neither, for their features
are so specialized that it is difficult to conceive of them as ancestral
to either. It is difficult, too, to place them in geologic time. Except
for _Zinjanthropus_, who clearly belongs to the upper part of the Lower
Pleistocene, most of the _Australopithecines_ have been recovered from
caves, fissures, or other places where there is no stratification. They
are all much too old to be placed in time by some of our more precise
dating techniques, such as the radiocarbon method. Non-primate bones
found with them are typical of animals that in Europe ranged all the way
from the Mid-Pliocene to the Mid-Pleistocene. South Africa is a
cul-de-sac, relatively untouched by the Ice Age. The abundance and
variety of animals surviving today in most of Africa south of the Sahara
are reminiscent of the Pleistocene elsewhere. The index fossils of other
lands are not much use when it comes to dating _Australopithecus_.
Once suspected of being Middle Pleistocene at the earliest, the
_Australopithecines_’ apparent lack of culture, their crude development,
and relatively small brain capacity indicated to some authorities that
they were too little and too late to have been ancestral to man. But
given a greater time span-back, say, to the Late Pliocene—they could be
regarded seriously as mans ancestors. Somewhat cautiously, Sir Wilfrid
E. Le Gros Clark seems to agree with Dart that, as a whole, the
_Australopithecines_ may well include the stock from which our own genus
was derived.[17]
Back of the _Australopithecines_ are yet other fossils of great
interest, forms intermediate between man and apes in various ways. These
all are utterly lacking in culture, in our sense of the word. One of the
more interesting fossils is _Oreopithecus bambolii_, quantities of which
have been recovered from a lignite mine at Baccinello, Italy.[18] These
fossils seem to date from about the Early Pliocene. More than ape or
monkey, their teeth are definitely manlike—hominid rather than merely
hominoid—and the size of their brains is about that of the larger
chimpanzees or the smaller _Australopithecines_. Future studies surely
will indicate if, and perhaps how, _Oreopithecus_ is related to the
South African man-apes, and to man.
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 was the cleverest fellow by far that had ever lived, and the most
sensitive, which may seem rather odd, since some of the earlier skulls
found in England, Africa, Java, and Australia come nearer the modern
type of what we call thinking man, _Homo sapiens_.
On the evidence we have, the Neanderthal seems to have been the inventor
of religion. In his caves we find burials for the first time, and
burials accompanied by tools for the dead man to use in the other world.
We also find shrines made of the skulls of cave bears.
As a chipper of flint, he was much more skillful than those that had
gone before. He soon gave up making tools which, like the hand ax, would
serve a number of purposes, but none very well. He invented the stone
spear point. There is still considerable argument about his flint work,
or at least about the technique which he may or may not have developed.
[Illustration: THREE TYPES OF OLD WORLD MAN
_Note the progressive lessening of brow ridge and receding chin and
the increase in the height of forehead and vault._ Pithecanthropus
robustus _was found in the same general area as_ Pithecanthropus
erectus, _or Java man._ (_Robustus, after Weidenreich, 1946;
Neanderthal, after McGregor, 1926; Cro-Magnon, after Verneau,
1906._)]
[Illustration: MAN’S FIRST SPEAR POINTS
_Two views of a flake of flint that has been chipped on one face and
retouched along the edges by a Neanderthal man. To remove the tiny
lateral chips, he probably held it with the smoother side against a
chunk of wood, and struck small and careful blows with a hammerstone
(as shown at the bottom of page 91). Acheulean man may have used
this technique in making the best of his hand axes. (After
Mortillet, 1881.)_]
When man began to make tools he pounded one rock with another. He hoped
he would knock off just the right chip in the right spot. This is called
the percussion method of flaking (see illustration, page 91). Some say
the Neanderthal was not content with this. They think that he must have
discovered how to place a piece of bone or very hard wood against a
flint at the point where he wanted to knock off a flake, and then strike
it with a hammerstone (see illustration, page 92). This might account
for the small chips, or “retouches,” taken off the edge of some of his
spear points as in the illustration below. Even the Acheuleans are
occasionally credited with this invention because many of their hand
axes are so symmetrical. There are those who say that the Neanderthal
had progressed so far in flint work that he knew the art of pressure
flaking—the third step in flint knapping—which involved the pressing off
of small chips with the bit of wood or bone held in the hand (see
illustration, page 93). It seems more likely that Neanderthals and men
of Acheulean times used the anvil method of percussion flaking (lower
drawing, page 91), not an inaccurate way of knocking off small chips.
[Illustration: PERCUSSION FLAKING
_The first method by which early man shaped his tools. (After
Holmes, 1919.)_]
[Illustration: THE SECOND STEP IN FLINT KNAPPING
_For more accurate work, early man applied a small stick of hardwood
or a piece of bone at the proper spot and hit the interposed tool
with a mallet of heavy wood or a rock. No one knows who invented
this technique—Acheulean, Neanderthal, or later man. (After Holmes,
1919.)_]
[Illustration: THE THIRD STEP—PRESSURE FLAKING
_The discovery that gave early man complete control over the shaping
of flints was that a slow and continued pressure would dislodge just
the flake he desired. Above, we see how he worked on a small point,
and below, to the left, how he chipped thin slivers from a core.
(After Holmes, 1919.)_]
The Neanderthal—with his Mousterian culture—seems to have invaded Europe
from Asia toward the end of the third and last interglacial, anywhere
from 80,000 to 125,000 years ago, and to have left from 15,000 to
100,000 years ago, depending on what authority you choose, and how that
authority dates the last interglacial. Unlike his predecessors, the
Neanderthal lived in caves; but that was probably because he was the
first man in Europe to survive a glacial winter—tens of thousands of
them.
The Neanderthal seems to have disappeared quite suddenly from Europe,
taking his Australoid features with him. There are traces of him in
Africa, and also in Palestine where he is thought to have produced a
hybrid among the Mount Carmel people. Sir Arthur Keith said, in 1915,
that the Neanderthal never left Europe, but was merely absorbed into the
next peoples. We can see the Neanderthal profile on an occasional
passer-by.
Most anthropologists are rather cool to the Neanderthal. They cast him
quite outside the sacred ranks of our ancestors. They say he was not
_Homo sapiens_—merely _Homo neanderthalensis_. This means that he was a
sort of dead end, a blind alley, up which one sort of ape-man ran, while
another was taking a turn that ended in his being master of the atom but
not of the atomic bomb. Other anthropologists do not agree. Like Keith,
they take the Neanderthal into the sacred circle—at least at stud.
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 or
an animal is alive, it contains a constant proportion of this
radioactive material. Radiocarbon is always breaking down and
disappearing, but while a tree or a bird or another animal lives, this
material is being renewed. When this same tree or animal dies, it stops
acquiring new radiocarbon, and therefore its radioactivity decreases.
Heartwood from a 4,000-year-old sequoia tree is appreciably less
radioactive than the living outer layer. Antlers shed by a buck in the
last spring are more radioactive than any reindeer antlers left in a
cave in France by Old Stone Age hunters 17,000 years ago.
After death, radiocarbon disappears at a rate of speed that can be
measured. This rate may seem strange to most laymen. It is based on what
physicists call “half-lives.” The half-life of radiocarbon is 5,568
years, give or take a few. This means that after 5,568 years, half the
radiocarbon is gone. If the material weighed a pound at the death of the
plant or animal, only half a pound would be left. After another
half-life of the same length, only a quarter of a pound would remain.
And so on and so on. With highly refined techniques, what is left of
this radioactive substance can be detected in matter 60,000 to 70,000
years old,[20] and it can be measured and its age determined, with a few
percentage points of error, up to at least 50,000 years ago. The
scientist must be sure, however, that the material—such as wood,
charcoal, peat, antler, shell, bone, or hair—has not been exposed to
contamination that would add radiocarbon.
This method of dating, developed by Willard F. Libby in the late
forties, supplied archaeologists with fairly close estimates of the age
of sites containing wood, charcoal, shell, or bone.
Neanderthal is the first of our early men to have lived within the range
of radiocarbon dating. To be more precise, his Mousterian culture has
left traces that can be measured. We have several radiocarbon
measurements that tell us how recently Neanderthal was around; his
oldest cultural materials are beyond the present range of radiocarbon
measurement. At Godarville, Belgium, Mousterian artifacts were found
underlying an accumulation of peat that dated from more than 36,000
years ago. Since the stone tools were deposited before the peat, they
must be at least as old. Charcoal from an ancient hearth in a Libyan
cave at Haua Fteah, associated with Levalloiso-Mousterian materials and
about three feet or so above a Neanderthaloid jaw, was dated at 34,000
years, or possibly older. The archaeology of this cave suggests that the
Neanderthal survived in North Africa until about 30,000 years ago. In
Israel, south of Haifa in the Mount Carmel range, at a site called
Mugharet-el-Kebara, a very small sample of charcoal, thought to
correlate with a nearby Levalloiso-Mousterian deposit, furnished a date
of more than 30,000 years.
In the Near East, archaeological excavation directed by Dr. Ralph S.
Solecki, of the Smithsonian Institution, turned up yet more material
that helps us date the Neanderthal. In the Zagros Mountains of northern
Iraq, at Shanidar Cave, in Shanidar Valley, there is a remarkable
deposit of both the tools and the bones of early man. The cave contained
a dozen feet or so of Upper Paleolithic remains overlying a deep
Mousterian deposit. The bottom level of the Upper Paleolithic materials
has been dated at over 34,000 years. How much older the Mousterian
layers may be we cannot yet be sure. From depths of 14½ and 23 feet
below the surface and within the Mousterian deposit, adult skeletons
have been recovered. These seem to be Neanderthaloid, as does the
skeleton of a child, recovered at a depth of 26 feet. The estimate is
that the shallower of the skeletons may be about 45,000 years old, the
lower adult perhaps 60,000.[21]
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 the Australian, and even the Neanderthal. The Neanderthals
breed out their crudeness in some sort of union with _Homo sapiens_. Or
all of them are admitted to the ranks of Homo, with Neanderthal a
degenerate offshoot without issue.
The earlier picture was simpler and more dramatic. From _Pithecanthropus
erectus_ to _Homo neanderthalensis_—Java man to the Neanderthal—these
creatures bore no relation to our own happy breed. Then, quite suddenly,
came _Homo sapiens_ in the person of the Cro-Magnon. He was the kind of
tall fellow with a well domed, narrow Nordic head whom Hitler identified
with the better class of human beings. Except for the “Red Lady of
Paviland,” the first specimens were found at Aurignac, France, in 1852,
though nobody recognized the outstanding quality of the skulls until the
find at Cro-Magnon, France, in 1868 (see illustration, page 89).
[Illustration: SCULPTURE OF THE OLD STONE AGE
_Above, one of the carved and perforated reindeer antlers of the
Magdalenians, which are sometimes described as bâtons de
commandement; the Eskimos used a somewhat similar tool for
straightening their arrows. Left, the Venus of Willendorf, an
Aurignacian carving in stone, found near Spitz, Austria. The woman’s
head from the Grotte du Pape, Brassempouy, France, may be either
Aurignacian or Magdalenian. The horse’s head, made of reindeer
antlers, from Mas d’Azil, France, is Magdalenian. (After Osborn,
1915.)_]
For many years the French clung to what Hooton calls the rather
chauvinistic myth that here, in the waning years of the Great Ice Age,
we find a superior kind of man that was predominantly a product of the
French area. Certainly he was a remarkable person in many ways. For one
thing, he discovered art. He painted on the walls of his caves and
carved on pieces of bone and elephant ivory pictures of mammoths, bison,
and boars, and he made sculptures of fat women in stone. Also, he began
to fish in the swift streams that ran off from the glaciers. He hunted
reindeer and made use of their antlers as tools. For quite a time he was
supposed to represent the peak of achievement by early man.
Before long, however, the Cro-Magnon became only a factor in a broader
culture, described as the Aurignacian, and soon the Aurignacian suffered
from scientific fission. Through this whole period and, indeed, until
the end of the Old Stone Age, new tools in the form of blades,
chisellike burins, and implements of reindeer bone make their
appearance; but they vary in shape and in the time of their emergence.
Some of these tools divide what was formerly called the Aurignacian into
three parts: the Châtelperron, the Middle Aurignacian, and the
Gravettian. The Châtelperron people developed a narrow, curved blade out
of a tool vaguely Mousterian. The Middle Aurignacians appeared as
invaders with thin blades and scrapers notched or narrowed halfway along
each side. Finally, a people who had hunted mammoths in southern
Russia—the Gravettians—turned up in France as the inventors of a thin,
narrow, and straight blade made by carefully detaching sliver after
sliver from a well shaped core of flint. Sometimes one edge was blunted
to make it handier to use; occasionally the point of a blade or other
tool was chipped off diagonally to produce a chisellike engraving tool.
Another type of tool, the Font Robert point with a stem, also appeared
(see illustration, page 101).
[Illustration: _How blades were split off a core. The technique was
perfected by the Gravettians, an Aurignacian people, and was
practiced by the Aztecs of Mexico. (After Evans, 1872.)_]
Henry Fairfield Osborn once dated the European advent of the
Aurignacians at about 27,000 years ago, Nelson at 20,000, Mather at
15,000.[22] Zeuner, however, believes they flourished from about 100,000
until 75,000 years ago.[23] Dating the last of the glaciers was the key
to this dispute. Radiocarbon dates now suggest that the Aurignacian
period survived in Europe and the Near East until 18,000 to 34,000 years
ago.[24] Its beginnings may well extend beyond the range of this method.
[Illustration: _Upper Paleolithic tools from long flakes taken off
cores after the manner shown on page 100. The burin, or graver, at
the upper left is probably Upper Aurignacian, though commoner in the
Magdalenian culture. The others are usually called blades. (The
burin, after Burkitt, 1933; the blades, after MacCurdy, 1924.)_]
The Aurignacians are a variegated lot, which argues further for
subdividing them. One specimen, the tall, high-domed Cro-Magnon, is
variously credited with producing the modern European man, the Eskimo,
and even the Indian of America. Another specimen, the Grimaldi from the
Riviera, is distinctly Negroid. Another—from hints in several
places—seems to be Mongoloid. Apparently, the Aurignacians were almost
variegated enough to have peopled the modern world. But almost as much
could be said for the inhabitants of an upper level in the Choukoutien
Cave near Peking. There, in one spot, they divide nicely into Negroid,
Eskimoid, and Melanesoid.
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 was about 12,000 years ago, while Zeuner puts them back
to 67,000 years before our time.[26] Radiocarbon dates indicate only
18,000 years ago.
[Illustration: _Three Aurignacian types that suggest the Negroid,
the Caucasoid, and the Mongoloid. (After Peake and Fleure, 1927.)_]
[Illustration: THE MEANING OF SCRAPERS
_“A primitive thing called a scraper is crude and not at all
eloquent until you realize that it points to much else. It means not
only a scraper, but a thing to be scraped, most likely a hide;
therefore it means a growing ability to kill, to take off the hide
and cure it. That is just the beginning, for a scraper also shows a
knowledge of how to scrape, and a desire for scraping, and enough
leisure (beyond the struggle to get food) to allow time for
scraping. All this means self-restraint and thought for the future,
and it implies a certain confidence in the ways of life, because no
one would be liable to go to all the trouble of scraping if he did
not have reasonable hope of enjoying the results of the
work.”—George R. Stewart, in_ Man: An Autobiography. (_Left and
center, after MacCurdy, 1924; right, after Leakey, 1935._)]
Where the Solutreans came from is another of the unsolved riddles of
archaeology. Until recently, they were generally supposed to have come
out of western Asia, because the most primitive of their remarkable
tools were found plentifully in Hungary and sparsely in western Europe.
For sixty years Solutrean points were found no farther south than
northern and eastern Spain. Now, however, points of Solutrean type have
begun to appear in North Africa, Egypt, and Kenya Colony. Here they are
jumbled together in the same strata with Mousterian points and the
tanged points of the Aterians, a purely African people. Hence certain
archaeologists are inclined to believe that the Solutreans may have
originated in Africa as an offshoot of the Mousterians (see
illustration, page 105).
In spite of their fondness for the chase, the Solutreans of Europe
continued the interest that the Aurignacians had shown in art—or so at
least certain authorities who admire the relief carvings of Le Roc in
France tell us. But their chief distinction is that they knew the craft
of pressure flaking typical of Folsom and Eden cultures in the New
World. The Solutreans are represented mainly by thin, willow- or
laurel-shaped tools. By pressing—not pounding—a piece of bone or wood
against the surface of the flint they flaked off slivers across the tool
in a way that no one equaled in the Old World until the Egyptians had
entered the neolithic and agricultural age many thousands of years
later. The Solutreans also made small points with a tang at one side
(see illustrations, pages 105 and 165). This was for the purpose of
fastening the flint to a shaft; but whether it was used with a bow or a
spear-thrower is not clear. (Incidentally, points of somewhat this shape
appear in the New World.) At about the same time, the Aterians of North
Africa used a very crude tanged arrowhead; and in the late Aurignacian
the Font Robert point with its rude tang appeared. The superior spear
point of the Solutreans seems the natural product of a people who were
particularly active and energetic in the chase. In a single camping
place they left 35,000 tools of flint.
[Illustration: THE TANGED POINT
_It was only in the late years of the Old Stone Age that man learned
to put a tang on a point and so make it easier to fasten to a shaft.
This advance may have been made in connection with the
spear-thrower, but it seems more likely that the arrow brought forth
this technological refinement. Only Solutrean man and the American
Paleo-Indian made truly efficient points. (The Solutrean, after
Burkitt, 1933; the Font Robert at right, after Burkitt, 1933—at
left, after MacCurdy, 1924; the Aterian, after Plant, 1942.)_]
[Illustration: _A laurel-leaf Solutrean point from France, ½ natural
size. (After MacCurdy, 1924.)_]
[Illustration: _A tool to make a tool. Such burins, with a
transverse edge at the top, rather like that of a chisel, were used
by the Magdalenians to shape bone implements and engrave designs
upon them. (After Wilson, 1898.)_]
Following these Asiatics, a people whose culture was very similar to
that of the Aurignacians appeared in Europe. They were the Magdalenians,
and they carried on the general traits of the men of Aurignac and added
to them (see illustration, page 101). They made better blades and
burins. (Long, slim blades of the Aurignacian-Magdalenian type have been
found in Mexico, and there are burins in Alaska and northern Asia.) The
burins helped the Magdalenians to make new implements of bone such as
needles, fishhooks, harpoons, and spear-throwers. Besides all this, they
brought to perfection the arts of painting and sculpture which used to
be too much credited to the Aurignacians (see illustrations, pages 110
and 114). The magnificent polychromes of the Magdalenians in the Lascaux
and Font-de-Gaume Caves in France and the Altamira Cave in Spain testify
to the genius of this people. The customary dispute exists about their
time of activity. One authority puts it from 11,500 to 8,500 years ago,
and another from 70,000 to 25,000.[27] Radiocarbon indicates a probable
range of 17,000 to 10,000 years ago.
[Illustration: _Magdalenian harpoon head, 4¾ inches long, made from
an antler and discovered in the rock shelter of La Madeleine, where
engraved art of early man—a picture of a mammoth—was first found, by
Lartet, in 1864. (After Lartet and Christy, 1875.)_]
[Illustration: _The first illustration of a blade, probably
Magdalenian. (After Mercati, 1717.)_]
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. The newer weapon, the bow, is on the walls of rock
shelters in southern and eastern Spain. At first these paintings were
thought to be neolithic. Later they were credited to the Magdalenians,
in spite of the fact that the use of the human form and the bizarre and
almost humorous caricature contrast with the subjects and the style of
Magdalenian art. Now they are generally credited to the Capsians, a
people from northern Africa. The paintings resemble prehistoric work
from Rhodesia and the Tassili Mountains of southern Algeria, and also
the historic and protohistoric designs of the Bushmen (see
illustrations, pages 111 and 112).
[Illustration: _Our first machine, the spear-thrower, as used by
early man and certain later peoples in the New World as well as the
Old. An invention difficult to conceive and effect, it marked an
important step forward in man’s use of his brain and his body. In
effect, it extended the length of the human arm by at least two feet
and therefore its power by perhaps 50 per cent. (After Harrington,
1933.)_]
[Illustration: THE FIRST PAINTINGS
_Although prehistoric engravings of animal figures on bone had been
discovered in European caves as early as about 1840, and engravings
on cave walls in the sixties, it was not till 1878 that paintings
were found. The discoverer was a child. While Marcelino de Sautuola
was searching among the debris on the floor of the cave of Altamira,
near Santander, in Spain, he heard his little daughter cry_ “Toros!
Toros!” _and saw her point to polychrome paintings of bison and
other animals on the roof of the cave. One of them appears at the
top of this page. The other painting shown is from the French cave
of Font-de-Gaume. These two caverns contain the finest lineal art of
early man, chiefly Magdalenian. (The bison after Cartailhac and
Breuil, 1906; the deer after Capitan, Breuil, and Peyroni, 1910.)_]
The history of even the simplest of man’s tools from the hand ax to the
arrowhead is long, interesting, and puzzling. It is hard to say what
many of the tools were used for, or indeed what they were _not_ used
for. The hand ax would obviously be best for grubbing out roots and
tubers, yet, like most of the implements of early man, it must have
served a variety of other purposes also. Until the Mousterians began to
make spear points, 90,000 to 150,000 years ago, all man’s
implements—even what we call his scrapers—were pretty generalized.
Later, with the Aurignacians and the Magdalenians, came artifacts that
were obviously blades or knives or chisels or harpoons. The tool to make
other tools appeared, and this we must add to the list of man’s
prehistoric achievements: speech, fire making, stone chipping, pressure
flaking, and carving and painting.
The attempt of science to record and interpret the story of early man in
the Old World has been an extraordinary triumph over the obstacles of
half a million years of prehistoric darkness. Hundreds of men and women,
laboring long and ingeniously, have won to an almost miraculous success,
and the end is not yet in sight.
The work has suffered, of course, from many a human limitation. Not the
least of these has been the desire to interpret knowledge too quickly,
to freeze it into forms and classifications, and to stand doggedly by
those forms and classifications when they have become weakened by new
knowledge. The student and the intelligent layman have been confused by
all this. They have been particularly confused—as we think we can
show—when it comes to early man in the New World.
[Illustration: _Aurignacian and Magdalenian men of France drew and
painted animals, almost never the human form. The artists who worked
in the caves and rock shelters of eastern Spain drew figures of
hunters and women, as well as of animals. These artists may have
been Capsians who lived in North Africa in the Aurignacian period
and spread into Europe at some time between then and the Neolithic.
The style resembles that of the African Bushmen. The two archers on
the left are from the cave of Saltadora; the two at the right, from
the Cueva del Mas d’en Josep. (After Obermaier and Weinert, 1919.)_]
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 primitive pottery; in the second, Aurignacian is missing
altogether.
[Illustration: _An archer drawn in the cave of Saltadora, Spain.
(After Obermaier and Weinert, 1919.)_]
[Illustration: _An archer from Alpera, Spain. (After Obermaier and
Weinert, 1919.)_]
Tied in with the mistake of setting up prehistory in Europe as a frame
for prehistory elsewhere, lies the worse mistake of trying to read
general time in terms of things and ideas which are purely local. The
Paleolithic, Neolithic, Bronze, and Stone Ages mean less than nothing as
a dating machine for more than a single locality. “The Stone Age,” says
Childe, “ended before 3500 B.C. in Mesopotamia, about 1600 B.C. in
Denmark, and A.D. 1800 in New Zealand.”[28] Postglacial means one thing
in Germany and another in Sweden, one thing in Buffalo and another in
Winnipeg.
[Illustration: MAGDALENIAN ENGRAVINGS
_These extraordinary drawings of horses and a mammoth are a
transcript of the art of primitive man found upon the walls of the
cave of Font-de-Gaume. (After Capitan, Breuil, and Peyroni, 1910.)_]
The impossibility of measuring time and space together should be clear
enough if you consider merely the matter of how the invention of writing
in the Near East is related to written records in other parts of the
world. Again we quote Childe: “In England they take us back to A.D. 40,
in France to 60 B.C., in Italy a little beyond 500 B.C., in Greece
before 700, but nowhere in our continent before 1000. In China written
records are available as early as 1400 B.C., in Asia Minor to 1800, only
in Egypt and Mesopotamia to 3000 B.C.”[29] Thus the use of writing would
give us no time scale for the Old World. Fortunately, we have never
tried to date the history of nations in terms of an Illiterate Age, a
Writing Age, and a Printing Age.
There is similar difficulty over the fossils of extinct mammals which
help to date man in Europe. They do fairly well as an index to whether a
tool was used in a glacial or an interglacial period. But they sometimes
create scientific disagreements when they are used to place the tool in
one glacial period or another. And when we reach the crucial time of the
end of the last glaciation, and the extinction of the last great beasts,
we are in most serious trouble. Here we are dealing with tens of
thousands of years instead of hundreds of thousands, and the evidence is
simply not that sharp. We do not know when Magdalenian man saw and
painted his last mammoth. The mammoths died by inches—or by miles,
geographically speaking. They were still alive in one area when they had
died out in another. And when we reach the New World, we have still less
basis for setting our watches by the fossils—as will be seen in a later
chapter.
[Illustration: A CHART OF OLD STONE AGE CULTURES
_The first section covers 50,000 years, the next page almost
500,000. Both are based on a logarithmic time scale in which the
years nearest the present are exaggerated in length._]
Our knowledge of early man in the Old World is still shifting and
developing. There has never been too much agreement—as the charts on
pages 116 and 117 demonstrate in the area of time—and there probably
never will be. We have risked this somewhat oversimplified sketch of a
much disputed and complex subject only to provide some sort of
background for the facts, the theories, and the dogmas that are involved
in the story of early man in the New World.
6
WHAT THE BONES HAVE TO SAY
_Prophesy upon these bones._
—EZEKIEL 37:4
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 has suffered from blindness and prejudice and also from ardor
and infatuation. It has run afoul of the dogmatism of science quite as
much as the dogmatism of religion.
Before nineteenth century science began to talk of glacial man as a
possible and provable fact, there was little or no churchly antagonism.
The religious had long shown a fondness for what they called
antiquarianism. To find ancient things did no violence to the Bible.
Adam was still the first man, and any descendant of his who left stone
tools about or who carved mysterious signs on rocks was merely
“antediluvian”: he had simply missed the boat. In 1690 the Reverend
Cotton Mather called the carvings on Dighton Rock in Massachusetts “the
wonderful works of God,” and, before those signs were proved to be of
sixteenth century origin, more than 600 books and articles had been
written about them. To Mather the fossils of extinct mammals proved the
validity of the Bible. “There were giants in the earth in those days.”
In 1712 he described the “17-foot thighbone” and the four-pound tooth of
a mastodon.[1]
In this spirit of sweet reasonableness the pursuit of early man went
forward for one hundred and fifty years. When the Dutch traveler Peter
Kalm wrote in 1772 of certain curious discoveries in New Jersey, he had
no idea that he had come on something which, N. C. Nelson was to
declare, “hinted strongly of ‘Quaternary age.’”[2] Though the Mound
Builders seemed much more ancient to General Rufus Putnam than they now
seem to us, they were still post-Adamites when he mapped the prehistoric
earthworks of Marietta, Ohio, in 1788. We doubt that Thomas Jefferson
worried one way or the other about biblical sanction when he assumed the
role of first archaeologist of America by excavating a Virginia mound in
1784, and reporting on it in his _Notes on Virginia_. Like another
deist, Voltaire, he suggested that the origins of the American Indians
might be determined by comparing their various languages with the
languages of Asiatic peoples.
There was still no conflict between religion and the science of man when
word came from Missouri in 1838 of the first linking of the fossils of
extinct animals with signs of human activity. “Dr.” A. C. Koch, a German
who collected fossils and sold them to museums, dug up the bones of a
mastodon. Further, Koch found evidence of fire among the bones, and also
numerous stones which seemed to have been carried to the spot and thrown
at the unhappy animal as it stood bogged in a swamp. Two years later, in
the same state, Koch came upon another mastodon as well as a spear point
lying beneath it. From a chain of descriptions of the weapon it may be
that Koch found the first of those unique fluted spear points that were
to turn up ninety years later among the fossils of extinct bison and
mammoths.[3]
While Koch was circusing his mastodon up and down the country as the
“Missourium,” the first scientific paper appeared on a New World find of
human skulls and the fossils of extinct animals. This was the 1842
report of the Danish naturalist P. W. Lund on the Lagoa Santa caves of
Brazil.[4] Four years later M. W. Dickeson reported a petrified human
pelvis from Natchez, Mississippi; in 1849 the British scientist Sir
Charles Lyell described his visit to the spot, and in 1863 he pointed
out that the pelvis was quite as fossilized as some mammoth bones that
had been found near it.[5]
Neither of these finds aroused any more enthusiasm or controversy than
Koch’s. It was all very curious and interesting but perfectly
acceptable. There was no question of the men and the elephants being
particularly ancient—just antediluvian. Agassiz’s glacial hypothesis was
hardly known, and Darwin had not yet turned back time past the Garden of
Eden. Adam and the Bible were safe enough.
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 Calaveras skull. Except for the fact that in this case the
churchmen seem to have been right and the scientists wrong, it was
characteristic of most of the disputes over early man. Fittingly enough,
the skull was found in the California county which Mark Twain made
famous about the same time by his own discovery of the celebrated
jumping frog. There is no question that a mine operator with a
reputation for veracity far superior to Mark Twain’s Truthful James
found the thing in a shaft 130 feet below the surface. There is also no
question that the skull, with its heavy brow ridges, was fossilized and
encrusted with the kind of gravel that distinguishes California mines.
Unfortunately, the skull proved too much—or seemed to. It lay under four
strata of lava and three of gold-bearing gravels, and therefore belonged
at the very least to the Pliocene period which ended some million years
ago—unless, of course, a practical joker had salted the mine. Some
scientists accepted the skull. Some preachers and religious editors were
content with evidence from Holy Writ, but most of them preferred the
practical joke argument. Various wits and various victims were involved,
but the most popular explanation held that the mine operator was known
as an agnostic, and that certain miners thought it would be amusing to
plant faked evidence for him to embrace—which presumes a considerable
amount of churchly enthusiasm in the miners of Calaveras County. Science
asked where the miners could have got so ancient and fossilized a skull,
and a few scientists and a good many Protestants replied that the name
of the county had come from the Spanish word for skulls _calaveras_
because whole skeletons and “uneasy crania” were constantly turning up
in its soil and its river beds.
The controversy raged through the 1870’s and gained new vigor in 1880,
when J. D. Whitney, a leading geologist of his day and director of the
California Geological Survey, brought out _Auriferous Gravels of the
Sierra Nevada of California_. In the fourteen years since the discovery
of the skull, Whitney had studied the region thoroughly and gathered
data from everyone who remembered the circumstances of the find. He
concluded that the skull had been discovered _in situ_, and had not been
planted. Some twenty-five years later, when the religious fury of the
attacks had subsided, Aleš Hrdlička produced craniums from the caves of
California that were quite as fossilized as the Calaveras skull and
showed the same heavy brow ridges. He had to admit, however, that the
ridges of the Calaveras skull extended clear across the eyes and nose—“a
much less common form.”[6]
In the days of Queen Victoria scientists were sometimes as extravagant
in their claims for early man in the Americas as the fundamentalists
were absurd in their attacks upon him. Fiorino Ameghino, a museum
director of Buenos Aires, got a hearing for what he called evidences of
Argentine man in an age when the mammals had only just reached
ascendancy. He made his initial discovery at nineteen; that was in 1873.
For forty or fifty years he went on making find after find and raising
controversy after controversy. The fossilized bones of man and mammal
that he discovered at nineteen he placed in the Pliocene Epoch, prior to
the Great Ice Age; geologists claimed that the stratum where he made his
finds is of the Ice Age or later. Much the same criticism applied to
most of Ameghino’s discoveries. He set up four primitive types of early
man, based on the discovery of various bones, and placed the first in
the Miocene Epoch more than fifteen million years ago. The geologists
again put his strata in the Glacial period. Anthropologists and
paleontologists were quite as annoyed as the geologists when Ameghino
made Argentina the center from which all human and mammalian forms
spread over the world.
Yet, in spite of Ameghino’s extravagant claims and others that were
somewhat less extravagant, belief in early man persisted and grew. There
was considerable stir when, between 1872 and 1899, C. C. Abbott and
others discovered some primitive stone implements[7] (see illustration,
page 144), parts of a human thigh-bone, jaw, and skull, in glacial
gravels near Trenton, New Jersey. There were more finds at other sites,
and by 1890 it was generally conceded by scientists that man had invaded
the Americas during or close to the time of the last glaciers. The
Protestant church subsided into a quietude which was not to be broken
until the Scopes “monkey trial” of 1925.
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 the National Museum. Taking advantage of every error, every failure
to weigh evidence with the most scrupulous care, and using new knowledge
in physical anthropology, Holmes and Hrdlička routed their opponents
completely. How completely may be judged from the fact that when it
became proper to issue the Putnam Anniversary Volume at Putnam’s
seventieth birthday, not one of the twenty-five essays in anthropology
dedicated to him dealt with the thesis of which he had been one of the
chief champions—early man in the Americas.
Men discovered new sites, but, if they had the temerity to announce
their finds, their work was ignored or scouted. For twenty-five or
thirty years, as Frank H. H. Roberts, Jr., writes, the subject of early
man in the New World became virtually taboo, and no scientist desirous
of a successful career dared intimate that “he had discovered
indications of a respectable antiquity for the Indian.” Opponents of
early man had definitely retarded progress in this field.[8]
From close to the turn of the century Hrdlička was the leader among
these opponents just as he was the leader among the physical
anthropologists of his day and a man of the greatest ability. For about
forty years he wrote much, and he wrote effectively. His long series of
papers were studded with denials of the antiquity of man on this
continent. Beginning in 1907 with his _Skeletal Remains Suggesting or
Attributed to Early Man in North America_, he demolished one American
skull after another. He tore to shreds the evidence by which Ameghino
pushed man back millions of years in Argentina.[9] His most effective
argument against North American claims was to produce the craniums of
Mound Builders or even Indians of historic times which duplicated finds
of early man. He stigmatized skull after skull as “not in the least
primitive,” “essentially modern,” “not to be distinguished from the
modern Indian.” Unfortunately, as he grew older, his attacks on spurious
evidence developed into violent opposition to practically _all_
evidence. As late as 1942, he saw his opponents as men characterized by
“wishful thinking, imagination, opinionated amateurism, and desire for
self-manifestation.”[10] He recognized no prejudice on his own side.
Yet, against the harm that Hrdlička did science by intimidating its
students, we must set a practical value which Earnest A. Hooton—himself
as great a physical anthropologist as Hrdlička, but a more receptive one
on the subject of early man—has well expressed:
It is to the everlasting credit of professional American anthropology
that it has not succumbed to the itch for ancestors by giving
recognition to the many dubious and spurious finds whose claims have
too often received a facile acceptance abroad. No one can deny that
this salutary state of affairs is due almost entirely to the righteous
scientific iconoclasm of one formidable veteran, Dr. Hrdlička.[11]
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 not the issue. Except for Ameghino, scientists of the twentieth
century were not claiming to have found Abbevillian or even Neanderthal
man in the New World. They were merely saying that certain skulls and
certain tools might go back to the end of glacial times or perhaps a
little earlier. This was no earlier than the Cro-Magnon of Europe, and
the Cro-Magnon was modern enough in physical type. So were the skulls
found with glacial animals and paleolithic tools in the upper
Choukoutien Cave near Peking. As Hooton puts it, the glacial antiquity
of a New World skeleton cannot be disproved by “the modernity of its
anatomical characters alone. _Homo sapiens_ was full-fledged in the Old
World before the end of the Glacial Period. Late Glacial entrants into
the Americas need not prove their age by an array of archaic and simian
physical features. The acid test of their antiquity must be
geological.”[12] Roberts points out that opponents of early man in
America “demand a more primitive physical type as evidence for some
antiquity in the New World than was living in the Old at a comparable
time.”[13]
As pressure of evidence and opinion piled up in favor of early man,
Hrdlička began to weaken a bit. In 1937 he admitted that, compared with
Europe, the situation in America “is not so simple. It is complicated by
the fact ... that individual skulls of recent and even present-day
American aborigines not seldom show features that are more primitive
than the average in the white races. There are American skulls of recent
date that are practically replicas of the Magdalenian and even of some
of the upper Aurignacian skulls of the Old World and there are
occasional skulls that in some of their characteristics remind one even
of the Neanderthals.”[14] In other words, a skull of an early American
man which resembles a skull of a historic Indian may also resemble the
skull of a glacial man of the Old World.
By 1923—after the harm had been done—Hrdlička was willing to concede
that migration to the Americas began “somewhere between possibly 10,000
or at most 15,000 years ago and the dawn of the protohistoric period in
the Old World.”[15] Yet he still clung to his Indian skull, and wrote in
one of his last papers: “There is as yet not a specimen of a skull or
bone that could be accepted as that of any earlier or different being
than the American natives of protohistoric or historic times.”[16] Even
when a skull had the heavy brow ridges and the long narrow shape of the
Australoid—and the Neanderthal—Hrdlička gave no ground. Such notable
examples as the skulls from the Lagoa Santa caves of Brazil—which we
shall describe later—were merely “a peculiarly American variant.”[17] He
got only so far as granting that American man had a relationship with
the Cro-Magnon and the Magdalenian, but he hinted at this relationship
merely in man’s “early Old World ancestry.”[18]
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, vertebrae and ribs, leg bones and toe bones, and even some skin,
hair, and feces. We have uncountable skeletons of small animals that
live on today. But the fossil beds are very short indeed on man, and
even the dry caves help us only a little. In the two continents there
are not more than twenty-five finds of the bones of early man which must
be considered seriously, and some of these are not a little dubious.
It may seem strange that thousands of spear points, scrapers, and
arrowheads can be identified as the products of early man while we find
so few of the skulls that held the brains which conceived them. It may
seem stranger still—unbelievably strange—that, while the five- and
six-foot skeletons of man have disappeared, there remain to us in
excellent shape the delicate bones of fox and gopher, even the pack rat.
We may believe, however, that, though the Americas thronged with animals
that had been there for millions of years, there were relatively few
men. Northeast Asia, from which they had come, was not a place to
nurture great tribes, and to send forth migrants by the hundreds of
thousands. The first men in America had to live by hunting and
gathering, and hunters and gatherers do not multiply like agricultural
peoples. Against hundreds of thousands of large animals—millions upon
millions of small fry—we can place only some tens of thousands of men.
To find a human skeleton among such a welter of animal bones would be
like finding a single needle in the combined haystacks of all the Middle
West. Further, did early man leave his body where we should be likely to
find it? If he did not cremate his dead, then he literally exposed them
to the elements—whether they lay on a scaffold like the dead of the
Plains Indians or were buried in the earth—and the elements did a good
job in scattering or hiding them. A great deal of water has flowed over
land-bridges since the glaciers began to melt, and a great deal of silt
and gravel and loess has spread deep over river bottoms and even high
plateaus, burying the bones of early man beneath it.
What do we find in the way of human bones? Not too much, compared with
the many skulls and skeletons of the Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon in
Europe. They range from the top of a cranium or part of a pelvis to a
few complete skeletons, some properly buried. They are not all of equal
value. The best, however, tell us something about how certain early
Americans may have looked. By that, at least, they contribute more than
the thousands of stone tools which early man left behind him.
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 skulls of men mingled with the bones of extinct mammals in the
Lagoa Santa caves of Brazil.
It would be pleasant to think that Lund left Europe in 1835 imbued with
enthusiasm for the discoveries of Boucher de Perthes, but this is highly
unlikely. The Frenchman and his theories were pretty generally ignored
by science until the late fifties. We don’t know why Lund chose to
explore caves in the state of Minas Gerais, north of Rio de Janeiro, but
in the end it was a fortunate choice. He examined over two hundred
caves, and in six of them he found human remains. For eight or nine
years he was dubious about his finds, but he was convinced in 1844 when
he found human bones mingled with the bones of extinct animals, all
equally fossilized.
Though it was the bones of the mammals that convinced Lund of the
antiquity of the Lagoa Santa craniums, it is certain peculiarities of
the skulls themselves that have given them a very special importance in
the whole argument for early man in the New World. These skulls were
long and narrow, while those of most Indians and other Mongoloid peoples
are relatively short and broad. Again in contrast to the men of northern
Asia, the Lagoa Santa had very heavy brow ridges; their skulls were
straight-sided and had keeled vaults. The total effect was archaic. This
was to prove a basic type to which all the later finds of the bones of
early man could be related.
Dr. Lund’s bones were not received with too much enthusiasm. If they had
belonged to any animal other than man, says Sir Arthur Keith, “their
antiquity would never have been questioned, but being human all sorts of
doubts were raised as to how and when they became mixed with the remains
of extinct animals.”[19] Many years passed before the Lagoa Santa skulls
began to win respectful attention and final acceptance as other long and
narrow skulls with even stronger brow ridges turned up under similar
conditions.
No one worked in the Lagoa Santa regions for almost a century. In 1933
members of the Academy of Science of Minas Gerais excavated a
neighboring cave called Confins. They found the molars of a young
mastodon under a few feet of dirt inside the entrance. Deeper down and
farther back, they discovered fossils of horse, giant sloth, mastodon,
and other extinct mammals. Finally they came on a nearly complete human
skeleton. They had cut through a layer of stalagmitic material and more
than six feet of alluvial soil to reach the bones of Confins man, and so
they knew that he had died during or just before a period of great
moisture. They write of this time as the Post-Pleistocene, or Pluvial.
Post-Pleistocene means, of course, Postglacial, and Pluvial means a time
of much rain. Some scientists push the Pluvial back into the Glacial,
but the finders of Confins man prefer to date him at “a few thousands of
years ago.” The discoverers of the Confins skull write of it as “one of
the most primitive types of _Homo sapiens_ ... yet discovered in South
America.”[20] But this statement seems based more on the conditions
under which it was found than on its shape. The skull is long and
narrow, with heavy brow ridges and a low forehead; but it is not
straight-sided, and its vault is not keeled. It is somewhat less archaic
than the Lagoa Santa craniums.
Certain skulls from Ecuador seem much more archaic than any of those
found in Brazil. These are the Punin specimen found in 1923, and the
group discovered at Paltacalo almost twenty years before.[21] Associated
with the fossils of extinct horse, camel, and mastodon, they have all
the peculiarities of the Lagoa Santa specimens, and in addition they
have retreating foreheads, lower vaults, and unusually large teeth.
Far down in Chile long-headed skulls have been found in association with
fossils of extinct horse and ground sloth. They are not so extreme in
appearance as the Lagoa Santa skulls, though they resemble them. As for
their age, Junius Bird, who made the discovery in caves just north of
the Strait of Magellan, reckons—in what he calls “a few degrees better
than an outright guess”—that they belonged to men who were given
cremation burials not more than 5,400 years ago. We now have radiocarbon
dates for such caves from 6,500 to 9,000 years ago. Bird did not venture
to guess how many years it took these people to travel the 11,000 miles
from the strait of Vitus Jonasson Bering to the strait of Ferdinand
Magellan.[22]
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
clarify them.[23] “Minnesota man”—really a girl—was found in a
geological stratum marked by varves, or thin layers of clay, laid down
in successive years by a glacial lake about 11,000 years ago. Antevs
believes her body was thrust into this stratum at a later time; but
other geological authorities, including Kirk Bryan, Paul MacClintock, G.
F. Kay, and M. M. Leighton, deny it and present rather convincing
evidence.[24] Hooton unhesitatingly expresses the opinion that “this
discovery establishes a very strong probability, though not an absolute
certainty, of the existence of _Homo sapiens_ in the New World in Late
Glacial times.”[25] Artifacts found with the skeleton—including part of
a knife made from an antler—do not give us a radiocarbon date. In the
gravel of Browns Valley, where the second skeleton was found, there were
also spear points (see illustration, page 158). From geological evidence
connected with this find—the most generally accepted of the three in
Minnesota—a date between 8,000 and 12,000 years ago seems plausible. The
third skeleton, Sauk Valley man, has been the center of much dispute.
Some geologists believe that the depth of the occurrence and the
presence of a certain sand within the skull argue a considerable
antiquity. Like the owner of the Punin skull, “Minnesota man” had a
primitive type of teeth, larger even than those of some Old World
paleolithic specimens. Jenks and L. A. Wilford find twenty-six archaic
traits in the Sauk Valley skull.[26]
Thousands of years before the elephants and the men of our three-ring
circuses took up winter quarters in Florida a different kind of elephant
and a different kind of man seem to have come into contact there along
the Indian River. It was a very firm contact indeed; for, if evidence
dug up at Melbourne in 1925 means anything, it means that a mammoth or a
mastodon stepped on the skull of some variety of early man and left it
flat as a pancake. Other elephants and a goodly array of mammals that
are now extinct left some of their bones in the same geologic formation
with the skull. Ten years before, other such fossils and an even more
mutilated skull had been found in the same kind of stratum forty miles
away at Vero Beach.
The history of these finds is typical of the disrepute in which early
man was held from 1900 to 1930. A few men—E. H. Sellards, who made the
Vero find, J. W. Gidley and F. B. Loomis, who published on both sites,
and some others—believed the evidence, but “that doughty doubter”
Hrdlička bore down upon it and left it as flattened as the Melbourne
skull.[27] It was only in 1946 through a study by T. D. Stewart, curator
of physical anthropology in the National Museum, that the finds received
a fair estimate as proof of early man in Florida during glacial or
near-glacial time. Besides upholding the geologic evidence of Sellards,
Gidley, and Loomis, Stewart announced that Hrdlička had left the
reconstruction of the Melbourne skull to a minor technician, and Stewart
showed, by a more careful fitting together of the broken pieces of bone,
that the Melbourne man had the long, narrow, flat-sided head, the low
forehead, and the strong brow ridges typical of most craniums found
under conditions that suggest antiquity.[28] There are no radiocarbon
dates, but fluorine tests—which tell us whether neighboring materials
are of the same age—indicate that men saw elephants at Vero Beach.
Other skulls with the peculiarities of the Melbourne and South American
specimens have been found in the United States and Mexico. Most of them
were fairly close to the surface in soils of recent types. Only a few
were found in geological formations old enough to be worth
discussion—the Lansing, Kansas, skull, for instance, which was buried
under twenty feet of loess, and certain skulls found below hardpan in
California—and none of these won general acceptance as anywhere near
glacial age. Yet in a number of skulls discovered in Texas, Lower
California, the California coastal area, and the Sacramento Valley there
remains a case for early man in North America.
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 conspicuous feature”—they resemble certain skulls from
Lower California called Pericú, which in turn resemble the primitive
type found in the Lagoa Santa caves. They were discovered in 1883 by the
Danish anthropologist, C. F. ten Kate.[29]
Along the coast of California to the north, other narrow skulls with
heavy brow ridges have been found in the neighborhood of Santa Barbara
and the Channel Islands and from just east of San Francisco to
Sacramento. Some consider the Oak Grove specimens from Santa Barbara the
oldest, but until 1946 most anthropologists were not inclined to give
any of them more than 4,000 years. Now, however, nine skeletons have
been found near Concord which will probably move all the California
skulls of this type a few thousand years farther back. These skulls,
from what is called the Monument Site, were under four feet of earth
which the soil experts of the neighboring University of California
believe took anywhere from 4,000 to 8,000 years to accumulate and
weather.[30] Through shell ornaments in the burials, Robert F. Heizer
identifies the Monument skulls with what is called the Middle Central
California culture found near the capital of the state.[31] This culture
lay above Early Central California, and the skulls of the latter were
found in and beneath four feet of cementlike hardpan.[32] Heizer
estimates the age of these early men “in the neighborhood of 4,000 to
5,000 years,” but he states that “a number of soil chemists,
geomorphologists, and geologists who have seen our Early horizon sites
have suggested an antiquity in the neighborhood of 10,000 years.”[33]
The Monument Site seems to argue that the latter figure is not
impossible. Even this date gives us no glacial age for early man in
California, but here again we have skulls that are older and more
archaic in type than those of the Mongoloid Indian. They have some
features of the skulls from Florida and South America that have been
found with the fossils of extinct mammals.
In 1949 Heizer unearthed, not a skull, but the record of a skull that
had been found in 1922 embedded in four to five feet of gravel now
considered “early Recent.” The gravel and sixteen or twenty feet of silt
above it formed the bank of a creek near Stanford University. The skull
is long and narrow,[34] and is fossilized enough to suggest a
respectable antiquity.
The year 1947 presented us, at last, with an early skull that seemed as
if it could be dated pretty accurately without the aid of elephants. Yet
without their aid it might never have been found.
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
stature, and that was the bone from the hip to the knee.” If we try to
visualize Cortés and Díaz inspecting this mammoth bone, the scene adds,
if possible, to the extraordinary picture that the conquest presents. “I
measured myself against it and it was as tall as I am although I am of
fair size.”[35] Since the days of Cortés more and more fossils of
elephants have been found south of the border. Indeed they crop out of
eroded arroyos, drainage ditches, and old lake beds only a few miles
from Mexico City itself.
Until November, 1945, little had been done to place early man in Mexico
or to link him with its many fossils. Then Helmut de Terra—who had
worked long in eastern and southeastern Asia—went to the Valley of
Mexico to study the glacial moraines on neighboring mountains, and to
link them with the soils of the old lake beds in which fossils had long
been found. Expanding the work of A. R. Arellano and Kirk Bryan, he
established the fact that a certain layer of caliche, or soft, earthy
limestone, had been laid down upon the shrunken shores of Lake Texcoco
after the glacial ice had retreated up Popocatepetl and other mountains.
Under the caliche—which he dates as beginning to form between 9,000 and
11,000 years ago—he found a wet, silty clay which contained, here and
there, the bones of elephants and a few rudimentary tools of stone and
bone. Then in February, 1947, he decided to hunt for larger objects in
an area near Tepexpan with an electrical device used for detecting
valuable metals and military mines but never previously used for
archaeological purposes. The resistance of a certain section of the clay
to the passage of an electrical current between two metal stakes driven
into the ground told him that a foreign body lay a little below the
surface. He dug, and unearthed a skull and a considerable part of the
skeleton of a man who was probably hunting an elephant or running from
one when he became mired in the bog of the lake shore.
Because of the lake sediment in which de Terra found the bones, he dates
Tepexpan man between 11,000 and 12,000 years ago.[36] Another
anthropologist, Glenn H. Black—basing his opinion on published
photographs of the excavation—has suggested the “possibility, even
probability” that Tepexpan man got into old lake sediment through
“intrusive burial,” which means that he was interred by his fellows at a
much later date.[37]
The skull of this very meaningful man is not so long and narrow as the
other early craniums but not so round as most Indians’. Weidenreich, an
outstanding authority on Java man and his Peking cousin-once-removed,
has found eight features of the Tepexpan skull and bones “which are more
primitive than those usually found in modern human skulls.” The brow
ridges are very heavy and form a well marked torus, or bulge, above the
nose, “such as occurs in the Australian bushman of today and in other
‘primitive races.’” A ridge on the back of the head “resembles even the
condition found in Neanderthal skulls.”[38] Javier Romero and T. D.
Stewart, however, do not agree with Weidenreich’s analysis. Romero finds
the brow ridge “not very markedly developed.” Stewart calls it
“predominantly Indian in character.”[39]
Radiocarbon dates based upon peat and wood found some distance from the
bones of Tepexpan man, but apparently in the same layer, suggest that
the layer was formed between 11,000 and 16,000 years ago. These bones
and those of extinct animals found nearby are about equally
fossilized—much more so than the remains of more recent burials in the
same area. Still, the methods of excavation used here have been
criticized, leaving considerable doubt as to the manner in which
Tepexpan man came to his resting place.[40]
Other remains of ancient Mexicans include a jaw from Xico, Peñón man—a
heavily mineralized cranium from Peñón de los Baños, near Mexico
City—and human bones in similar condition from Iztlán, in the state of
Michoacán. The layers in which these were found tell us little
geologically. In the case of the Peñón and Iztlán finds, claims for
antiquity have been based on the fact that they are heavily mineralized,
but this may have been due to a century or less of contact with thermal
mineral waters in their neighborhood.[41]
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 radiocarbon and other methods. A higher and younger
layer of red sand contained artifacts known elsewhere to have a maximum
age of about 10,000 years. This sand was laid down in a different, more
humid climate. Snail shells from a layer of white sand, below the gray,
produced a radiocarbon date of less than 15,000 years. Logically,
Midland man should date between these extremes. But pieces of caliche
rock from the gray layer, burned presumably in cooking fires of Midland
man, provided a radiocarbon date of about 20,000 years. This was not
acceptable, since a lower deposit seemed to be younger. There are at
least two potential sources of natural dilution of radiocarbon that
could help the burned caliche to test older than it actually was.
Tenuous support for the 20,000-year date came from a new source. Three
samples from the gray sand were submitted for testing by a new approach
to dating archaeological materials—a refinement of the “uranium-clock”
technique by which very old rocks are dated. This, the so-called Rosholt
method, is a measurement of the amounts of uranium and its products in
radioactive disintegration that accumulate in bone or other material. A
ratio is determined between two isotopes of uranium (U²³⁸ and U²³⁵) and
such radioactive related products as protactinium (Pa²³¹), thorium
(Th²³⁰), and radium (Ra²²⁶). The method is yet unproved and may have
more sources of contamination or error than radiocarbon. The results of
Rosholt measurement on Midland samples averaged 17,000, 18,000, and
20,000 years. The latter date was from a small section of the Midland
skull itself. It must be reemphasized that this process is not
established well enough, and the results here are not acceptable to the
archaeologists who conducted the excavations.[42]
Radiocarbon dates that can be referred to Midland man and that are at
the same time in keeping with local geology and paleontology and with
regional archaeological perspectives indicate a probable age of perhaps
11,000 years.
Other Americans, not so early, are represented by the skeletal remains
of an infant and three adults found in 1955 at Turin, Iowa. Parts of one
adult skeleton and that of the infant were recovered by experts, under
carefully controlled conditions, from a depth of about 15 feet. The
adult had been partially exposed along the bank of a gravel pit. The
associated gravels contained loess, a wind-blown deposit, indicating a
cool climate and probable antiquity. The Turin skeletons have been dated
in a roundabout manner. A projectile point associated with the infant
bones seems identical with others found near Quimby, Iowa, with a
radiocarbon date of just under 9,000 years.[43]
The physical remains of early man in the New World, no matter what
primitive features they may display, must be considered essentially
modern, clearly of the same species as ourselves. Our best clue to
racial difference is the extreme longheadedness of the earlier types.
Their skulls tend to differ from those of most modern Indians. Yet we
can at least consider the possibility that they represented a racial
type in contrast to that of the tribes most recently arrived from Asia.
The old skulls of the New World may not be entirely satisfactory proofs
of the antiquity of early man in this hemisphere; for Tepexpan man and
Minnesota man both have been challenged as intruders in an older soil.
On the other hand, all the skulls except perhaps Tepexpan suggest to the
partisans of glacial man in the Americas that the first immigrants were
not “predominantly Indian in character.” They make an interesting and
significant point. Can it be a mere coincidence that when we find a head
which has been stepped on by an elephant, it is not round like most
Indians’, but longer or narrower, and it has very heavy brow ridges? Can
it be a coincidence that when we find a skull in a cave with the bones
of extinct mammals, it has those same peculiarities? Can it be a
coincidence that when we find a skull under rocklike hardpan or a
distinctly ancient layer of soil, it has those unusual stigmata? It does
no good to hunt up the skull of a Sioux or a Mound Builder or an
Algonquin which looks like one from Punin or Florida or Lower
California. That is not much better than finding the skull of a modern
New Yorker that looks like one of early man’s—which you could do without
too much trouble. If _all_ Sioux skulls or Mound Builder skulls or
Algonquin skulls were as archaic as _all_ the Punin and Florida and
Pericú skulls, or if some early skulls were short and broad, then the
case for the Mongoloid Indian as the earliest man in America would be
incontestable. But until we find a round-headed, thoroughly modern
Mongoloid skull that has been stepped on by an elephant or got itself
interred with a mammoth or buried under earth that ought not to be on
top of it, we shall have to believe that the simon-pure Indian of
Hrdlička’s idolatry was not the first American. We shall have to think
that the archaic fellow from Punin or Florida or Lower California or the
Lagoa Santa caves was our earliest man—and quite early at that. Just how
early, the bones do not yet say.
7
THE ARTIFACTS OF EARLY MAN IN THE NEW WORLD
_Artifact, oh, artifact!_
_Spear point or scraper or hand-axe—_
_First tool of man,_
_Ancestor of steam shovel and power lathe,_
_Dynamo and bomb._
—EMIL NACHAHMER
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 and conglutinated into a mass (like flour with water), and
subsequently indurated by heat, like a brick.”[1] Some found a simpler
explanation: these artifacts were iron tools petrified by time. Toward
the end of the sixteenth century, Michele Mercati, physician to Pope
Clement VIII, saw the truth: “They have been broken off from hard flints
by a violent blow, in the days before iron was employed for the follies
of war; for the earliest men had only splinters of flint for knives.”[2]
The English historian William Dugdale said much the same thing in
_Antiquities of Warwickshire_. The theory was not generally accepted,
however, until the Spaniards found American Indians making arrowheads
and stone axes without the aid of thunder, lightning, or God.
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.
[Illustration: _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 on page 90, but it is a
little longer—5¾ inches. This implement was found on the surface,
but it was said to be identical with some discovered with human
bones in the glacial gravel beds below. (After Abbott, 1872.)_]
This was not the first discovery of a point with the peculiar “fluting”
illustrated on pages 147 and 148. Figgins had found one at Folsom in
1926, but its provenience had been denied. Koch may have found one under
a mastodon in 1839. Certainly the Smithsonian Institution acquired in
1893 a fluted point that was picked up in New Hampshire, and other
specimens have been discovered in old collections. But, in spite of the
fact that these points were very odd in shape and had never been found
in the Old World, scientists had paid little attention to them until
1927.
[Illustration: _The Lake Lahontan point, found in the glacial clays
of Nevada associated with the fossils of extinct mammals. (After
Russell, 1885.)_]
Figgins was not the first to discover spear points—of whatever
shape—with the fossils of extinct animals or with other evidence of
considerable age. In at least eight localities during the second half of
the nineteenth century men had made such finds; and there had been five
more finds in the first quarter of the twentieth. Some of the first
group won easy, if uncritical, acceptance; but antagonism to the flint
tools that C. C. Abbott found near Trenton, New Jersey, was so great
that he wrote: “Had the Delaware River been a European stream, the
implements found in its valley would have been accepted at once as
evidence of the so-called _Paleolithic man_.”[3] By 1925 almost everyone
seemed to have forgotten the obsidian blade that a museum director named
W J McGee had pulled out of the unmistakably glacial deposits of extinct
Lake Lahontan, Nevada, in 1882,[4] and the spear point that had been
found in 1895 under the shoulder blade of an extinct type of bison at
Russell Springs, Kansas.[5]
Discoveries after 1900 were, in a sense, more important because better
authenticated; but unfortunately they had to encounter the general
hostility to early man which had been bred by a more scientific approach
to American prehistory and nurtured by Hrdlička at Vero and Melbourne.
In 1924 the finding of a point under a bison at Lone Wolf Creek, Texas,
by men from the Denver Museum of Natural History went relatively
unnoticed.[6] Only harsh controversy welcomed the discovery, at
Frederick, Oklahoma, in 1926, of artifacts and a variegated array of
fossilized fauna in what the geologist E. H. Sellards believed was a
glacial formation.[7]
The Folsom discovery changed the hostile attitude of almost all
anthropologists toward early man. This was partly because the evidence
was so striking and unmistakable, but largely because of the fierce
white light of scientific publicity that was made to beat about a New
Mexico arroyo.
The Denver Museum had found its first Folsom point in 1926.[8] It had
been embedded in the clay surrounding a large bone; but when Figgins
spoke or wrote of this discovery his fellow scientists suggested that
the point was “intrusive,” that it had dropped down through a hole made
by some rodent. So the next year, when Figgins came upon a Folsom point
between two ribs of a bison, he stopped all work and wired to a number
of institutions in the East to send witnesses. Barnum Brown of the
American Museum of Natural History, Frank H. H. Roberts, Jr., of the
Smithsonian Institution, and Alfred V. Kidder of the Peabody Foundation
at Andover arrived to view the point _in situ_. Their testimony and the
collaboration of Brown in work at Folsom established beyond doubt that
man in America had trafficked with animals which were supposed to have
been dead by the end of the Glacial Period. Once this was proved, other
anthropologists and institutions were off on the trail of more such
finds.
[Illustration: _The making of a Folsom point. The flint was first
flaked to the general shape desired. (This sketch is perhaps a
little too schematic.) Next, the maker removed a long flake on each
face. Then he retouched the edges, and usually ground the hose and
the sides of the ears. (After Clarke, 1940.)_]
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]
[Illustration: _The minute, ribbonlike flaking of a Folsom. This
drawing, one and a half actual size, is from a broken point found at
Lindenmeier. (Courtesy of the Denver Museum of Natural History.)_]
Another arresting feature was the shape of the point—unique in all the
history of primitive man—and the fact that it was better made than any
other point of equal antiquity. It was rather broad, with a deep concave
base that terminated at each side in a jutting point, or “ear.” The
edges were most skillfully chipped, and the base and ears were often
ground smooth. It was particularly distinguished by the fact that a long
flake of stone had been chipped away on each face from the base almost
to the tip. The flute, or channel, left by the flake, made the point
look a little like the end of a grooved bayonet. This is the true or
classic Folsom. An earlier type is larger, without ears, and imperfectly
grooved (see illustration, page 155). In current terminology, the former
is called simply Folsom, and the other Clovis Fluted, Ohio Fluted, and
so on, depending on where the point was found.
Between 1926 and 1948, more than sixty points of the classic Folsom type
appeared, and the number has grown since then. Many were discovered on
the surface, some in association with the bones of extinct animals,
particularly _Bison antiquus_. Most appeared in the general area of the
High Plains, but some on the west slope of the Rockies and in southern
Texas. Hundreds of Clovis and other fluted points have been found in the
field or recognized in collections; they have come from every state but
Hawaii, and from Canada. From north of the Arctic Circle in Alaska,
fluted points range southward through Canada, the United States,
Guatemala, and Costa Rica to the highlands of Ecuador.[10]
There has been some argument over whether the Folsom or the Clovis is
the older. John L. Cotter reported the finding of Clovis points and
elephant fossils near Clovis, New Mexico, in a level lower than one
containing Folsom and bison.[11] In 1948 Harrington pointed out that
Clovis has been found four times in association with the mammoth, as
well as once with the bison, but that, when the Folsom type is partnered
with fossils, these are almost invariably the bison’s.[12] (Later finds
bore him out.) The wholly extinct mammoth is usually presumed to be
older than the bison, one species of which still lives. Furthermore, in
Burnet Cave, New Mexico, a Clovis has been found with bones of an animal
of the musk-ox type.[13] Within fifty miles of the Mexican border, the
musk ox, says Roberts, is “generally considered good evidence of an
ice-age fauna.”[14] Folsom may be a localized expression of the basic
pattern, reaching perfection in the High Plains, while Clovis spread
more widely.
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
bison—mammoths, horses, camels, and peccaries. In addition to Folsom and
Clovis points, Howard found an unfluted artifact which he considered to
be a Folsom knife.[15]
[Illustration: _This map shows the chief sites where artifacts of
early man have been found in the Southwest. (After Hurst, 1945, with
some additions.)_]
The third major discovery of classic Folsom artifacts came officially in
1934, when Roberts dug a site called Lindenmeier in Colorado; but as far
back as 1924—two years before the first discovery of a Folsom point in
New Mexico—Judge C. C. Coffin and his son, A. L. Coffin, had begun to
pick up such points in this area without recognizing their importance.
Lindenmeier is particularly significant because it was an occupational
site, a camp of some duration. It was also a factory, for Roberts found
spear points, scrapers, and other tools in various stages of
manufacture. Again there were bison bones.[16] There were also traces of
camel, as well as an elephant tusk not too closely associated with the
artifacts. A skillful geological study of the old and elevated river
terrace on which the site is located linked it with glacial moraines
which indicate a readvance of the glacial ice.[17]
The date of Folsom man is uncertain. Some believe he lived during the
last years of the Great Ice Age. Some place him a little later than the
melting of the glaciers. The earliest radiocarbon date yet determined
for Folsom is from the Lindenmeier site, where bits of charcoal provided
a date of 10,780 ± 375 years.[18] It took about 700 man-hours of tedious
and painstaking work to locate and recover this charcoal. Elsewhere, at
such Texas sites as Blackwater Draw, Lubbock, and Scharbauer, direct or
indirect dates indicate a survival of the Folsom culture until about
9,000 years ago.
One thing is certain: the Folsom point won the battle for early man in
the Americas because it proved that he or his predecessors had hunted
extinct bison, camels, mammoths, peccaries, and horses. Hitherto every
find of human artifacts with fossils had been thrown out of court on the
argument that the artifacts might be intrusive. That charge could not be
leveled at two of these unique Folsom points because they were found in
a unique and decisive position—one between the ribs of an animal and the
other penetrating the channel of the spinal cord.
Some of the opponents of early man were not convinced. They shifted the
argument. Man was early, the Hrdličkas admitted, but not so very early,
because the bison and the elephant were late. More of that in a later
chapter. Meantime, it is worth noting that a humble invertebrate, a
mollusk, found in the Clovis dig, suggests that the Folsom-bearing
deposits were glacial.[19]
[Illustration: BURIALS IN THE OLD WORLD AND THE NEW
_Disposal of the dead by exposure, as practiced among hunting
tribes. (After Sollas, 1911.)_]
You may ask why we have not found Folsom man himself. Howard has pointed
out that early man, as a migrant hunter, would probably have followed
much the same customs as our Plains Indians in the disposal of his dead.
He would have left the bodies exposed on scaffolds or in trees, or he
would have cremated them. “Under such circumstances,” Howard writes, “it
would be the merest chance to come across a skeleton of Folsom man
anywhere in the enormous area of our Great Plains country. It would be
even more remarkable to recognize him as such, unless he had a Folsom
point in his hand or was holding an elephant by the tail.”[20]
The Clovis fluted point is not so fine a piece of craftsmanship as the
Folsom, yet it is more significant as evidence of very early man in
North America. Clovis points tend to be longer, larger, and heavier than
the Folsom. The fluting is rather rudimentary. The earlike tips
characteristic of Folsom usually are lacking in Clovis, and careful
finishing or retouching of the edges is rare. The refinement of
workmanship in Folsom suggests that Clovis antedated it. This, as we
have indicated, is borne out by the fact that Clovis-like points are
usually found with mammoth bones rather than those of the later bison.
These points are widely distributed, but the best associations have been
found at or near Houston, Midland, Miami, and Abilene, in Texas, and at
the Naco and Lehner sites, in Arizona. The first such point definitely
associated with the remains of a mammoth was found near Dent, Colorado,
in 1932.
Another extinct mammal besides the mammoth and _Bison antiquus_ has been
found in early sites—the mastodon. The animal is not typical of any
particular time period, or associated with any special kind of
projectile point. It would seem that people of early cultures in the
eastern United States hunted this beast with a variety of stemmed
projectile points until about 5,500 years ago. Mastodons occur at least
five times in probable association with early man, according to Stephen
Williams. He lists the discoveries at Island 35 in the Mississippi
River; Tipton County, Tennessee; Koch’s much publicized finds in
Gasconade and Benton Counties, Missouri; along with the Richmond
mastodon, near Cromwell, Indiana; and the Orleton Farms mastodon, near
Plumwood, Ohio.[21]
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 first known as Yuma, but now they are called Eden, after a site
in Eden Valley, Wyoming, where they were found _in situ_.[22] They are
easily the finest job of flint knapping in the New World, equaled only
by the later neolithic daggers of Egypt and Scandinavia (see
illustrations, page 158). This might be a good argument for Eden points’
being neolithic, if artifacts with Eden chipping had not been discovered
in association with Folsom tools and also with the fossils of extinct
mammals. Evidence from a site near Cody, Wyoming, indicates that the
Eden industry as a whole is younger than the Folsom. The Eden points
found there are nearer 7,000 than 11,000 years old,[23] for the soil in
which they lay was formed during a moist period late in that interval of
time. Eden and similar points are fairly widespread; some have been
found in Canada and in Alaska.[24]
Anthropologists now recognize two chief varieties of Eden points. One of
these is beautifully patterned by long, parallel pressure flakes that
cross the blade obliquely on a low diagonal. In the other, parallel
flakes meet on a center line. The base and lower edges are usually
ground. There is often a single or a double shoulder for hafting. Many
anthropologists list another type, the Scottsbluff; it is flaked like
the Eden, but shorter and wider, and it has a definite stem with
right-angle notches.
[Illustration: THE FINEST FLINT WORK OF EARLY MAN
_Two varieties of Folsom and Eden points, and the Plainview type,
which has been called unfluted Folsom or Yuma-like. The Plainview
was found in Texas. (Upper left, after a cast from the Laboratory of
Anthropology, Santa Fe, New Mexico; upper right, after Wormington,
1944; the Eden point, after Howard, 1935; the Plainview, after
Krieger, 1947; the second Eden, after Wormington, 1944.)_]
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 eighteen whole or broken points of this sort near Plainview,
Texas, in association with numerous fossils of extinct bison, there is a
tendency to give these “Unfluted Folsoms” the label Plainview.[25] Like
the Folsoms, Plainview points can now be recognized among artifacts
collected before their recognition as a distinct type. F. G. Rainey and
Frank Hibben have found them in the frozen muck of central Alaska,
identifying them by the older names of Yuma-like (Eden) or Generalized
Folsom.[26] This muck is an extraordinary formation four to one hundred
feet deep. Packed into it are masses of dismembered skeletons of the
mammoth, a jaguar, and other extinct mammals, accompanied here and there
by ligaments of flesh and hair. Hibben picked up a point in a curio
store at Ketchikan on the southern coast of Alaska, and another from
Chinitna Bay on the shore of Cook Inlet, both of which he called
Yuma-like, but which may now be regarded as very much like Plainviews.
Alex Krieger lists as Plainviews a considerable number of points which
have been hitherto identified as Clovis or Eden at sixteen different
sites[27] (see illustration, page 155).
Krieger suggests that Plainview lies between Folsom and Eden in its type
of flint work. Later excavations may prove that the three points have a
similar historical relationship, and may throw more light on some nine
or ten other types of points that early man seems to have made.[28]
[Illustration: _Two points that resemble somewhat the Plainview
type, and may indeed be merely deviations from it. The one at the
left was found by a fisherman at Chinitna Bay, Alaska, and called by
Hibben Yuma-like. The other was discovered by Jenks at Browns
Valley, Minnesota, associated with a human skeleton. (Left,
measurements not available, after Hibben, 1943; right, about natural
size, after Roberts, 1940.)_]
[Illustration: FLINT KNAPPING OF THE OLD AND NEW STONE AGES
_From 5,000 to 10,000 years separate the Solutrean artifact of the
Paleolithic period from the Neolithic work of Denmark and Egypt,
depending on which time scale you accept. The Eden point may have
been made 7,000 years ago or even nearer the Neolithic. (The Eden,
after Howard, 1935; the Solutrean, after Sollas, 1911; the Danish,
after Plant, 1942; the Egyptian, after De Morgan, 1925.)_]
Besides Clovis, Eden, and Plainview, Alaska has provided cores that
Nelson finds “identical in several respects with thousands of specimens
found in the Gobi Desert.” He recognizes them as evidence of migration
from Asia 9,000 to 12,000 years ago.[29]
[Illustration: _A Gypsum Cave point. (After Roberts, 1940.)_]
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-thrower. In addition to knives and oval scrapers, there were fire
hearths. Gypsum man burned sloth dung as well as wood, and used torches.
Harrington dated the culture at about 10,500 years ago. Radiocarbon
dates from sloth dung six feet four inches deep averaged 10,455 ± 340
years.[30] Similar material closer to the surface recorded 8,527 ± 250
years.[31] Thus Gypsum seems to follow Folsom.[32]
Such discoveries of the traces of early man in the United States and
Canada spurred anthropologists to new work in the field, with the result
that we now have over one hundred sites where a few of man’s bones or a
host of his artifacts have been found with the fossils of bison,
elephant, camel, horse, or sloth or in geological strata that date him
close to the Great Ice Age and probably in it. Seven North American
sites, and two in Middle America remain to be discussed. Some are
outstanding in evidence of age.
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 mammals as well as artifacts.[33] Malcolm J. Rogers challenges
the dating of Mohave and Pinto as “largely a matter of opinion,” and
believes that “even approximate dates ... cannot be set.” In his own
opinion, Pinto points—mixed with Gypsum in the same area—range only from
1,800 to 2,800 years ago. The Lake Mohave industry cannot begin, he
maintains, earlier than 3,000 to 4,000 years ago.[34] In 1946, Robert F.
Heizer and Edwin M. Lemert and later A. E. Treganza discovered in
Topanga Canyon, north of Los Angeles, points and crude scrapers and
choppers very like those at Lake Mohave and Gypsum Cave and also milling
stones.[35] Lake Mohave artifacts have been found in northwestern
Canada.[36]
A number of sites in the West and Southwest are particularly notable for
their age or for the character of their artifacts, or for both. Some
push the record of man in America back beyond Folsom, possibly far, far
beyond; and some bring into the picture a type of artifact—the milling
stone—which does not seem to have appeared in Europe until later. The
publications upon these sites from 1935 to 1941 aroused much controversy
even while broadening and deepening our knowledge of early man.
[Illustration: _Three early points from the borders of extinct lakes
in the desert area of southern California. Points like the Pinto
have been found in Chile. (The Pinto, after Wormington, 1944; the
other two, after Campbell, 1937.)_]
Confusion, as well as controversy, distinguishes the area which might
prove the most significant of the four if more extended work were done
there by geologists as well as archaeologists. This area is in the
neighborhood of Abilene, Texas, and includes the banks of the Elm Creek
branch of the Brazos River. Cyrus N. Ray, a local physician, has studied
the Abilene sites assiduously for twenty years. In 1931 Gila
Pueblo—Harold S. Gladwin’s research institution—sent E. B. Sayles to
work there. Later Gila arranged to have Antevs, Howard, and M. M.
Leighton, Chief of the Illinois State Geological Survey, study the finds
and the sites. It is unfortunate that the men who worked in this area
have not agreed on a consistent set of names for the various cultures
and geological formations. As H. M. Wormington has observed, “the only
way to approach publications dealing with the archaeology of this region
is with a large bottle of aspirin in either hand.”
[Illustration: _An Abilene point. (After Wormington, 1944.)_]
The artifacts occurred in two strata. The upper contained points of
types now called Plainview and Milnesand and a long, narrow point that
has been dubbed Abilene, though not accepted as a distinct type by Texas
archaeologists. Leighton placed these tools from what he called the Elm
Creek Silts in the latter portion of our last Glacial period.[37] To
reach Abilene at this time, early man may have passed through the gap
that is thought to have appeared in the ice sheet east of the Rockies
40,000 years ago, or else when the Wisconsin ice of the last glaciers
was in retreat 20,000 years later (see illustrations, pages 26 and 27).
Still greater age is claimed for certain other objects of the Abilene
area. Below the Elm Creek Silts lie the Durst Silts, which were laid
down, Leighton thinks, prior to the last glaciation.[38] In connection
with these silts Sayles found what may be very crude artifacts.[39] They
are the “eoliths” that, wherever found in the Old World, are accepted or
attacked as problematical evidences of man’s first attempts at roughly
chipped artifacts. If these are indeed the work of man, and if Leighton
is right, the men who made them must have come to Texas during the
Sangamon Interglacial period preceding the last, or Wisconsin,
glaciation—a matter of perhaps 70,000 years ago.
Some authorities attack Leighton’s dating and therefore Sayles’s
eoliths. The reported discovery later of Abilene and other points in the
Durst Silts suggested to Kirk Bryan that the silts would have to be
moved up in time.[40] He might have argued that the artifacts should be
moved back, which would have been in line with his championing of very
early man elsewhere. Agreeing with Bryan and C. C. Albritton, Frank C.
Hibben redated the Durst Silts by connecting them with a late glacier in
the Rocky Mountains rather than with the Wisconsin ice field of the
north.[41] Leighton, on the other hand, maintained—and he has had some
good support—that the soil at various depths had been radically changed
by chemical action which would take tens of thousands of years. This
“soil profile” theory as a test of geological age is gaining in
importance.[42]
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 sterile seal, two inches to two feet thick. This time it
was of yellow ocher—a substance induced by fir and spruce under moist
conditions, Kirk Bryan points out. Fir and spruce require more cold and
more moisture than the neighborhood of Sandia provides at present—which
argues that the ocher was manufactured during the last pulsation of the
fourth and final glaciation more than 11,000 years ago.[43] Beneath this
stratum Hibben found a new type of point.[44] New to the New World, that
is, but not to the Old; for it resembles in a crude way a point of the
Solutrean culture of Europe which has a notch at the bottom to aid in
hafting. Since this discovery, points of the same type have turned up
sporadically throughout the Mississippi Valley, along the eastern
seaboard, and even in California. In every case, Hibben writes, there
were indications of “considerable antiquity.” In fourteen instances out
of thirty-eight, “the points were found with extinct bones, although in
each case by amateurs.”[45]
The Sandia point is, of course, definitely older than the Folsom. The
two periods of moisture indicate that the cave was inhabited by Folsom
man toward the end of the last glaciation, or 9,000 to 11,000 years ago,
and by Sandia man still earlier. Unless, of course, you wish to believe,
as some do, that both pluvial periods were Postglacial.
Quite understandably, Sandia has been of keen interest to
archaeologists. The geology tells us only that the Folsom and the Sandia
occupations of the cave were separated by a cool, moist interval that
could reflect a major glacial advance, a minor glacial advance, or
merely a postglacial period of lowered temperature and more snow or
rain. The last seems the least likely alternative. None of these
possibilities gives us a firm date. Accordingly, the development of the
radiocarbon “clock” by Willard Libby raised some hope that the age of
Sandia points could, at last, be determined. This hope continues, but
has yet to be realized. Radiocarbon tests made by H. R. Crane, at the
University of Michigan, upon fragments of mammoth tusk indicate an age
of at least 20,000 years, with the reasonable possibility that the true
age exceeds 30,000 years.[46] The problems remain. The association of
Sandia points with mammoth tusk was not as clear as Folsom point with
extinct bison. And the problem of the reliability of ivory in
radiocarbon tests—as well as the ever-present question of possible
contamination—urges caution in accepting this date for Sandia.
[Illustration: _A Sandia point, left, compared with two Solutreans.
The first of the Solutreans was found with Mousterian artifacts in a
cave in Tangier, the second in France. (The Sandia point, after
Hibben, 1941; the Solutreans, after Howe and Movius, 1947, and
Plant, 1942.)_]
A site discovered at Lime Creek, Nebraska, in 1947 may prove to be old.
In the sharp bank of the stream C. Bertrand Schultz found crude points,
bone awls, scrapers, and tools made out of antlers. Together with
fossils of mammals they lay as deep as forty-seven and one-half feet
below the surface, in a silt containing the remains of decayed
vegetation. Above this soil were seventeen feet of loess, another layer
of soil, another layer of loess, and finally a “mature” or well
developed, and therefore fairly old top soil. Schultz and W. D.
Frankforter write that the seventeen feet of loess covering the earth in
which the artifacts were found appears to have been deposited before or
at the beginning of the last expansion of the Wisconsin, or final,
glaciation.[47] If this is true, it means that the men of Lime Creek
lived 25,000 or 35,000 years ago, and that their forebears may have come
through the corridor in the ice fields of Canada 5,000 to 18,000 years
earlier (see page 27). Antevs and Wormington doubt it.[48] Radiocarbon
dates from burned logs found below the Lime Creek artifacts averaged
9,524 ± 450 years.[49] It is possible that these stone tools are
contemporaneous with Folsom, or even a bit later.
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 and food grinder, as well as a hunter. These stones are very
simple slabs with a hollow worn in the surface by round handstones used
in grinding seeds and nuts. Such milling stones, or querns, are not seen
in the Old World until we approach the Neolithic, or New Stone Age, and
the people who developed agriculture and textiles. Milling stones have
been found in a village farming site at Jarmo, Iraq, dating about 7,000
years ago.[50] Agriculture did not enter Europe until about 2500 B.C.,
and milling stones are not found in its caves until after the
Magdalenians of the Old Stone Age. The reason for the precipitate
outcropping of milling stones in the Americas is not that our early man
practiced agriculture. He did not do that, and he did not make polished
stone axes until much later. He was merely a food gatherer. Was he also
a food grinder because he was an Australoid who brought the habit to
America, just as he brought it to Australia? Or, if not, was he another
sort of man, who happened to be smart enough to recognize that North
America provided him with many tempting grains and seeds to grind, foods
that were not so available in the Old World?[51] It seems more than a
coincidence that the earliest American milling stones appear in the arid
Southwest, where desert plants have more seeds and larger seeds than
plants in moister areas.
The first site to provide milling stones was at Whitewater Creek, in
Arizona. Byron Cummings had found artifacts and fossils there in 1926.
When Gladwin heard of this at an anthropological meeting five years
later, he again set Gila Pueblo in motion. Sayles and Emil W. Haury
undertook excavation, and Antevs checked the geology of the various
sites which they studied in the area of what is now called the Cochise
culture.[52] The excavators found milling stones in the same stratum as
the fossils of extinct animals. They found no spear points in this
oldest level—a sign that food gathering was the dominant economy of the
early Cochise.
[Illustration: COCHISE MILLING STONES
_The lower comes from the oldest horizon, the Sulphur Spring, the
upper fragment from a later one, probably the Chiricahua. (The
Sulphur Spring stone, after Martin, Quimby, and Collier, 1947; the
other, courtesy of the Southwest Museum.)_]
The artifacts and the fossils were lying in or under clays left by a
lake that has now disappeared. If Lake Cochise was, like Lake
Bonneville, one of the bodies of water created while the last great ice
sheets were growing, then the Cochise culture must date from the last
wet period of the final glaciation—perhaps as much as 35,000 years ago.
Antevs thinks, however, that the water which laid down the clays
belonged to a number of ponds, not to a single large lake, and that the
ponds could have formed and disappeared, formed again and disappeared
again, just before postglacial times brought a much drier climate. Any
single pond may have appeared as late as 10,000 years ago to provide the
Cochise clay. Radiocarbon dates for Cochise all seem too recent to fit
the geology and paleontology of the site. Dates for the earliest stage,
the Sulphur Spring, range from 6,210 to 7,000 years ago; the Chiricahua
from 2,850 to 7,000; the last, the San Pedro, from 1,762 to 2,463.[53]
Antevs, on the other hand, believes that the Sulphur Spring stage at
Double Adobe—twenty-four miles east of the Lehner mammoth site where
Clovis points were found—dates back more than 12,500 years.[54]
Finds of milling stones have also been made at Signal Butte, Nebraska,
by W. D. Strong; at Pinto Basin by the Campbells[55]—the first site
probably about as early as Gypsum, the other 10,000 years old—and under
hardpan at that much disputed site near Frederick, Oklahoma, where some
claim that artifacts and fossils of extinct animals appear together in
an interglacial formation. Milling stones have also been found at sites
of later cultures such as the Edwards Plateau in Texas and Santa Barbara
in California. There are indications of an ancient horizon of milling
stones, as well as Pinto and older points and scrapers, in Sonora and
Lower California. The fact that they were found with the bones of elk
and bison and along the shores of dry lakes in Mexico argues that this
culture is as old as Cochise, perhaps older. Carl Sauer, who found the
materials, believes that only during the last glaciation could the
climate of these two desert areas have been moist enough to produce
lakes and support so much animal life.[56]
At Borax Lake in California, in several years of work following 1938,
Harrington found more milling stones. There were also quite a variety of
points—fluted, Gypsum, Pinto, Mohave, and Silver Lake—scattered through
an alluvial fan of dirt carried down by some early stream that flowed
when the country was well watered and verdant, instead of arid like so
much of California today.[57]
In 1948 Harrington and Willy Stahl found milling stones and a great
wealth of Pinto, Mohave, and Silver Lake points in another part of
California that is now desert. This is near Little Lake, which is fed by
underground waters and small intermittent streams from the Sierra.
Nearby, in glacial times, a small river cut a channel through a great
lava flow, producing a falls that has now moved up half a mile from the
edge of the lava. Here, where the blow sands of the Mohave Desert meet
the lava, and under about ten feet of old, consolidated sand, Harrington
and Stahl found milling stones and points in two feet of soil. This soil
was dark with the remains of vegetation that must have been trees and
bushes when the intermittent stream was still a steady torrent.
Underneath the dark soil there was clay deposited by the stream at some
period of great flow. Across about two-thirds of the camp site a similar
coating of clay indicated that after the user of the milling stones and
Pinto points had departed, the stream had overflowed again during a time
of great rains. This time may have been the “Little Pluvial” of about
3,000 years ago, or the “Great Pluvial” that some say occurred 10,000
years ago when the glaciers had finally retreated, with the former the
more likely date. In this camp site Harrington and Stahl found the post
holes of some sort of hut or shelter, the oldest evidence of
housebuilding in the New World.[58]
[Illustration: _An animal head carved from part of the spine of a
variety of llama, or camel, and reputedly found with fossils of
other extinct mammals in the Valley of Mexico in 1870. About eight
inches wide. (After Barcena, 1882.)_]
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 are highly exaggerated; but in the New World
female figurines are to be found only in later levels such as those of
the Eskimo, Southwestern, and Middle American cultures, all of which
date from close to the birth of Christ. Of all the forms of art, we have
few examples that may have been made by early man. In the United States
there are the dubious trio of crude, round heads which Sellards reports
from a gravel pit in Henderson County, Texas.[59] During the digging of
a canal in the Valley of Mexico in 1870, a workman picked out of a
fossil-bearing stratum a bony section of what was described as an
extinct llama, or camel, carved in the shape of a coyote’s head. It was
about forty feet below the surface of the ground in the same layer of
earth with fossils of elephant, horse, giant armadillo, and camel.[60]
The Lindenmeier Folsom site produced decorated discs of bone, possibly
used as game markers. Most interesting of all is the fragment of mammoth
or mastodon bone recovered in the summer of 1959 about ten miles
southeast of Puebla, Mexico, by Juan Armenta Camacho. On a six-inch
wedge of bone, estimated to have been 30,000 years old, are the crudely
carved outlines of bison, tapir, and mammoths or mastodons, carved while
the bone was still fresh.[61]
[Illustration: EARLIEST DRAWINGS BY NEW WORLD MAN?
_Four drawings, by Fernando Ramirez Osorio, from a number of
engravings on a portion of pelvic bone of an extinct form of
elephant found near Puebla, Mexico. The animal at the upper left may
be a tapir, the one at the lower right a bison. The other two
engravings probably represent mammoths or mastodons. The straight
lines in the drawings of the tapir and the bison may be symbols of
the hunt such as appear in European caves. A new test for early
dates gives an age of over 30,000 years. From the same geological
formation have come remains of nearly thirty extinct animals, some
thought to be of the third interglacial age, as well as crude tools.
(Courtesy of Douglas Cornell, science editor of Visión.)_]
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 Moir, champion of English eoliths, Reginald A. Smith, of the
British Museum, and D. Peyroni, of the Musée des Eyzies, have stated
that Renaud’s finds agree in type with the hand axes, choppers, and
blades of the Abbevillian, Acheulean, Mousterian, and Clactonian
cultures of Europe and Africa. While emphasizing the resemblances,
Renaud is careful to claim no parallel in time.
Renaud’s artifacts recall a gathering of hand axes under most
unscientific circumstances more than sixty years ago. In the late 1880’s
Thomas Wilson of the National Museum became convinced that the
collections under his care contained numerous hand axes of paleolithic
type and age. He listed 950 in the Museum and appealed through a printed
circular for more examples. He got them. His correspondents in
thirty-five states donated 789 and described enough more to bring the
total up to 8,501.[63]
[Illustration: _A hand ax of the Black’s Fork culture. (Courtesy of
the Denver Museum of Natural History.)_]
Wilson’s hand axes and Renaud’s artifacts were attacked in the same
manner. W. H. Holmes of the Bureau of American Ethnology had little
trouble in convincing the scientific public that Wilson’s array of
casually collected material came from quarries and workshops of the
Indian and were cores from which he had struck flakes to make points or
scrapers. The critics of Renaud’s artifacts pointed to certain similar
objects found less plentifully in late camp sites on the Plains, and
suggested that Renaud’s artifacts might be merely the blanks and rejects
of a relatively recent stone industry.[64] Many of the finds are
certainly not finished implements, and the date of the Black’s Fork
culture is still problematical; but among Renaud’s material there are
hand axes and scrapers that bear comparison with the cruder Chellean and
Acheulean work. There are also chopping tools of Asiatic and African
pattern, made from edged pebbles that have been deliberately chipped,
first from one side, then from the other.
Flints of Abbevillian and Acheulean types—whether true artifacts or
rejects—have been recorded by Kirk Bryan at Cerro Pedernal in New
Mexico.[65] At Lake Mohave in the Pinto Basin, Mr. and Mrs. W. H.
Campbell have found points of a Mousterian shape and scrapers suggestive
of the Aurignacian. They are so crude, however, that they seem more like
the “elementary ideas” which, as Bastian claimed, could be the product
of primitive man anywhere. In Texas, there are many tools so well
developed and so close to Acheulean forms that they cannot be turned
aside as either “elementary ideas” or blanks and rejects. These are the
hand axes which Sayles and other archaeologists have found.[66]
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 which
began late in 1945—he discovered stone tools in two culture levels.
These levels fall in two pluvial periods just before and just after the
end of the Great Ice Age.
[Illustration: A HAND AX AND A CHOPPING TOOL FROM TEXAS
_The dating of these tools is uncertain, but the upper resembles
early paleolithic specimens from Europe despite its more flakelike
quality. The other is somewhat like chopping tools made from pebbles
in Asia and Africa. (Courtesy of Gila Pueblo.)_]
The older culture level—called San Juan—contained ten artifacts,
including scrapers, gravers, flakes, and chipped pebbles of obsidian and
chalcedony and a pointed bone tool, together with fossils of mammoth,
sloth, camel, bison, and horse. De Terra found some of this material at
Tequixquiac and some near Teotihuacán, where Manuel Gamio came upon
fossil bones of mammoth and bison when he was excavating that famous
site. Close to where de Terra discovered the skull of early man
discussed in Chapter 6, another anthropologist is said to have picked up
part of a point of Folsom type—the first to be recorded south of the
United States. De Terra places the San Juan culture 12,000 to 20,000
years ago.
The younger culture—called Chalco—provided sixty-five variegated
artifacts of basalt, including one point. The presence of manos—roundish
stones for grinding seeds on a milling stone—as well as other artifacts,
causes de Terra to compare this culture with the Cochise in Arizona. He
dates the Chalco culture at 4,000 to 10,000 years ago.[68]
The only evidence from Central America—neither skulls nor artifacts—is
extraordinary in nature, but as yet makes no definite contribution in
terms of years. The finds are the footprints of men, women, and children
in a lava bed at El Cauce near Managua, Nicaragua. They were buried
beneath many feet of ash and lava and four separate layers of soil. At a
time of great rainfall—which suggests a pluvial connected with either
the formation or the melting of the glaciers—a river excavated a channel
sixty feet wide and almost ten feet deep. Geologists have not yet
ventured to give us a date. There are tracks, however, of a bison—an
animal long extinct so far south.[69] Other fossil human footprints, in
sandstone and perhaps of a more recent time, have been found near
Usulután, El Salvador.[70]
The story of early man in the Americas, so far as it is interpreted by
the finding of his artifacts, did not begin with Folsom and will not end
with the most recent discoveries in Middle America. As far back as 1869
a geologist named C. J. King found a pestle—considered in the Old World
a product of the Neolithic, or New Stone Age of polished artifacts—so
firmly cemented into the gold-bearing gravels under Table Mountain near
Tuttleton, California, that he “forced it out of its place with
considerable difficulty.”[71] (Other ground and polished implements had
been reported from mine shafts in the 1860’s, but none had been found by
a geologist imbedded in gravels.) As late as 1919, W. H. Holmes, ever
critical of evidence for early man, called King’s pestle “the most
important observation yet made by a geologist bearing upon the problem
of man’s antiquity in America.”[72] If the gravels in which the pestle
was found and the lava which lay just above it were indeed products of
the Pliocene period which preceded the Great Ice Age, then we have to
face a staggering idea. We have to believe that a strain of _Homo
sapiens_ originated in the New World long before Java man. We have to
believe that he acquired the skills of the New Stone Age far ahead of
man in the Old World, and that he then disappeared. It is easier—but not
too easy—to think that the lava flowed in recent times, after glacial
waters had worked a pestle of early man into the gold-bearing gravels,
which would push the seed-grinders of California far, far back in time.
It is still easier to believe that King was out of his head. It should
be noted that California Indians, except along the Colorado River, never
did develop a neolithic, or agricultural, level of technology. Their
ground and polished stone implements were applied to the objects of a
specialized seed-gathering economy. In Old World terms, such activity
tends to characterize late paleolithic economies, where big-game hunting
was not feasible.
[Illustration: _The broken pestle found by C. J. King in
gold-bearing gravels in California. (After Becker, 1891.)_]
The excavations and studies of the next few years may not provide
evidence as startling as King’s, but radiocarbon promises to date any
site of early man where a few ounces of charcoal can be found. Among the
first dates provided by Libby was one between 6,300 and 6,900 years ago
for trees charred by the eruption of pumice from Mt. Mazama, Oregon, and
beneath this pumice lie four or five sites where L. S. Cressman found
artifacts of early man and the fossils of horse and camel.[73] By means
of radiocarbon and, here and there, newer and perhaps equally refined
techniques, anthropologists are beginning to learn a little more about
the relationships in time and culture between the prehistoric makers of
the weapons and tools we have described. Yet out of more than 150 sites,
there are only a few where datings are fully reliable.
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 glacial age or even in the third interglacial; this would take our
earliest man back 50,000 to 100,000 years. There are no firm dates for
this. The best we have is a radiocarbon estimate of 30,000 years ago,
when man may have killed dwarf elephants on an island off the coast of
California.
Let us start with some dates and associations that follow the end of
that mysterious first level 15,000 years ago, and carry us up to the
brink of the Archaic. Let us then go back to the few hazy glimpses we
now have of the very beginnings of man in the Americas.
We must start with the fluted points of Clovis. They may range from
10,000 to 15,000 years back—more likely 11,000 to 13,000. It is still
uncertain whether the shouldered points of Sandia fit into this time
span or precede it. For various technical reasons, we must throw out a
date of more than 37,000 years ago for Clovis points from Lewisville,
Texas, and a date of 8,500 at the Lehner site in Arizona. Points
remarkably like those from the Clovis-type site appear in such places as
Bull Brook, Massachusetts,[74] and Alaska,[75] but dating is either
lacking or insecure, and a 10,000- to 15,000-year age may not agree
comfortably with other geological or cultural associations.
Archaeologists have been tempted to associate this horizon with the
hunting of mammoths.[76]
The Folsom period is next, and fairly well dated. The span of time
during which these classic fluted points were made seems to fall mainly
between 9,000 and 11,000 years ago. The most noted big game of the
Folsom hunters was _Bison antiquus_.[77]
The remaining stage of these “middle” levels may be identified—most
arbitrarily—as the Eden, or parallel-flaked, point horizon. Fluting of
projectile points still occurs, but the distinctive and exceptional
feature is the beautiful pressure-flaking illustrated on page 155. Other
types of projectile points include Gypsum, Plainview, Scottsbluff, Lime
Creek, Angostura, and perhaps Agate Basin. The time span seems to be
from perhaps 7,000 to about 10,000 years ago. The makers of these points
also tended to be bison hunters. _Bison occidentalis_ may have been the
chief game,[78] although there continues occasional association with _B.
antiquus_, and there begins an identification with _B. bison_, the
“buffalo” of Plains Indians in recent times.
In the two thousand years following the Folsom climax—that is, from
about 7,000 to 9,000 years ago—notable transitions occurred in the
technologies and economies of early man. Handsome projectile points
became noticeably diversified in shape, and perhaps in size. Many
continued to be made with a superb craftsmanship that persisted to
historic times. Economically, as we shall see in the next chapter, there
was a major shift of emphasis. This was due in large part to the great
extinction of Pleistocene mammals, which was in progress by 8,000 years
ago and essentially completed 5,000 years ago. During this time, the era
of specialized big-game hunters came to a close. The human populations
that survived seem to have turned their attentions to the generalized
hunting of lesser game. Their economies were first augmented by, and
then focused upon, food collecting. For many groups, such as the Indians
of central California, exploitation of wild seeds and nuts became a
specialized and satisfactory means of subsistence in a climate whose wet
winters and dry summers severely limited agriculture. Elsewhere, seed
collecting was replaced by plant domestication—an important first
step—then by plant cultivation and ultimately by agriculture. Of these
late trends in American prehistory, the scope of this book allows us to
touch on only the Cochise cultures and other seed-collecting traditions
of apparent antiquity.
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 evidence of what
may have been man-made campfires and the broken, scorched, and scattered
bones of camel, mammoth, bison, and perhaps horse and sloth. In 1956,
Ruth D. Simpson located _in situ_ “a small uniface convex scraper,
retouched along approximately two inches of its circumference” in a
pocket of charcoal. From this charcoal, a date of more than 28,000 years
was determined.[79] The few artifacts recovered at Tule Springs are
rather nondescript, but ancient hunters surely occupied the site at
various remote times.
Burned bones of dwarf mammoths on Santa Rosa Island, off the Santa
Barbara coast of southern California, have furnished radiocarbon dates
ranging from 15,000 to about 30,000 years ago. The situation of these
bones strongly suggests death at the hands of man. Sure association of
cultural materials with the six-foot elephants has not been determined
to the full satisfaction of archaeologists.[80] Although the indicated
dates may be accurate—and it is not unlikely that these animals were
hunted by early man—there are other explanations that are even more
plausible.
Near San Diego, California, exposed cliffs with alluvial deposits and
raised sea beaches of presumed Pleistocene age contain burned places, or
fire lenses, often as much as 100 feet across. George F. Carter believes
these to be hearths dating back to third interglacial times or
earlier.[81] As evidence of human occupation, he has assembled
quantities of crudely chipped cobbles, described as “core tools.” His
critics maintain that most are even cruder than the lower paleolithic
hand axes of Europe, and refuse to grant that any of them were made by
man.[82]
Unmistakable artifacts, including types described as choppers, scrapers,
and hand axes, have been found in abundance in the Mohave Desert, at
Pleistocene Lake Manix[83]—now, like Pleistocene Lake Mohave, a dusty
playa—and on ancient beaches in nearby Death Valley.[84] The geology of
these sites suggests that they may be of Pleistocene age, but the
artifact types and materials do not differ significantly from those
associated with the Lake Mohave and Silver Lake cultures, for which
dates of less than 10,000 years are considered probable.
The desert regions of Western America have provided other sites of
apparent Pleistocene age in which the artifacts are both simple and
crudely made. While it is tempting to consider these as being truly
ancient, we will have to know much more about them before we can be
certain that they are more than the output of backward desert dwellers
such as Father Baegert described for Baja California in early mission
days.[85]
From other regions of the Americas, there are other suggestions of early
man and ancient cultures. J. L. Giddings’ Palisades culture, on
mountainside benches of Cape Krusenstern, Alaska, north of Bering
Strait, may be old. It appears considerably older than the Denbigh Flint
Complex, south of the Strait, which may go back from 4,500 to 5,000
years.[86] And in South America early man is represented at such sites
as El Jobo, in Venezuela;[87] an unpublished radiocarbon date from this
region is rumored at about 16,000 years.
The coming decade should bring further refinements in radiocarbon
dating, as well as the development of newer techniques such as the
Rosholt “uranium-daughter” products and obsidian hydration measurements.
With or without the aid of these dating methods, livelier activity of
archaeologists south of the border should soon give us more information
about early man in Latin America.
THE MORE IMPORTANT SITES OF EARLY MAN
The listing on the three next pages, which goes no further than 1948, is
not exhaustive. There is room for argument over a number of the finds;
but the arrangement of the materials in columns provides a rough
perspective. The sites are listed in order of discovery. The symbols
indicate one or more occurrences:
Occurrence of the saber-toothed cat, tapir, giant beaver, or extinct
armadillo is not indicated. Finds that seem problematical or not
definitely associated with other finds are shaded. Sandia points were
found with the five extinct mammals indicated in the Sandia cave and
below the Folsom.
Human Bones
{SK} skull
{PS} part of skull
{CB} a considerable number of bones
{FB} a few bones
Artifacts, Fires
{SB} a skeleton or the major parts
{C} Clovis and other early fluted points
{F} Folsom
{FP} Plainview, Scottsbluff, and other parallel-fluted points
{OP} other types of point
{CC} charcoal
{MS} milling stone
{P} pottery
{R} rocks thrown by man
{HS} horn and shell objects
{BF} bone and flake tools
{BT} bone tools
Extinct Mammals
{M} mammoth or mastodon
{EB} extinct bison
{S} sloth
{EC} extinct camel
{EH} extinct horse
{ES} extinct South American mammals
*An asterisk within brackets indicates shading in the diagram.
Date Place Human Artifacts, Extinct Mammals
Bones Fires
1835-1844 Lagoa Santa, Brazil {SK}
1838 Gasconade County, Mo. {OP} {R*} {CC} {M}
1839 Benton County, Mo. {C*} {M}
1846 Natchez, Miss. {FB} {M} {EB} {S}
{EH}
1872-1879 Trenton, N.J. {PS} {FB} {OP} {M} {EB}
1872 Omaha, Nebr. {OP} {M}
1882 Lake Lahontan, Nev. {OP} {M} {EB} {EC}
{EH}
1895 Russell Springs, Kans. {OP} {EB}
1902 Lansing, Kans. {SB}
190? Paltacalo, Ecuador {SK}
1915-1916 Vero, Fla. {SK} {FB} {M} {S} {EH}
1920 Sacramento, Calif. {SB} {OP} {MS}
1923-1927 Santa Barbara, Calif. {SB} {OP} {MS}
1923 Melbourne, Fla. {SK} {FB} {OP} {CC}
{M*} {S*}
{EH*}
1923 & Grand Island, Nebr. {FP} {EB}
1931
1923 Punin, Ecuador {SK} {M*} {S*} {EH*}
1924 Lone Wolf Creek, Tex. {FP} {OP} {EB}
1926 Folsom, N.M. {F} {EB}
1926 & Lake Cochise, White {PS} {FB} {OP} {MS} {CC} {M} {EB} {EC}
1935-1940 Water Creek, Ariz. {EH}
1926 Frederick, Okla. {OP} {M} {S} {EC}
{EH}
1928 Alangasi, Ecuador {P} {CC} {M*}
1929 Abilene, Tex. {FP} {OP} {CC} {M} {EH}
1929 Conkling Cavern, N.M. {SK} {FB} {S} {EC} {EH}
1930 Burnet Cave, N.M. {F} {EB} {EC} {EH}
1930 Gypsum Cave, Nev. {OP} {S} {EC} {EH}
1931 Pelican Rapids, Minn. {SB} {HS}
1931 Angus, Nebr. {OP} {M}
1932 Signal Butte, Nebr. {FP} {OP}
{MS} {CC}
1932 Clovis, N.M. {C} {F} {FP} {M} {EB} {EC*}
{CC} {EH*}
1932 Scottsbluff, Nebr. {FP} {OP} {EB}
1932 Dent, Colo. {C} {M}
1933 Browns Valley, Minn. {SB} {FP} {OP}
1934 Lindenmeier, Colo. {C} {F} {FP} {M*} {EB} {EC}
{CC}
1934 Miami, Tex. {C} {M}
1934 Pinto Basin, Calif. {OP} {MS*} {EC*} {EH*}
1935 Confins, Brazil {SB} {M} {S} {EH}
1935 Sauk Valley, Minn. {SB}
1936 Lake Mohave, Calif. {OP}
1936 Sandia Cave, N.M. {F} {FP*} {M} {EB} {S}
{OP} {CC} {EC} {EH}
1936-1937 Cerro Sota Hill, Chile {SB} {OP} {S} {EH}
1936-1937 Fell’s Cave, Chile {OP} {CC} {S} {EH}
1936-1937 Palli Aike Cave, Chile {CB} {OP} {CC} {S} {EH}
1937-1945 Borax Lake, Calif. {F} {OP} {MS}
{CC}
1938 Bee County, Tex. {OP} {CC} {M} {EB} {EH}
1938 Lipscomb County, Tex. {F} {EB}
1939 Ventana Cave, Ariz. {F*} {OP} {EB} {S} {EH}
1939 Mortlach, Sask. {F} {FP} {EB}
1940 Eden, Wyo. {C*} {EB}
1941 San Jon, N.M. {F} {FP*} {OP} {M*} {EB}
1941 San Luis Valley, Colo. {F} {FP*} {EB}
1941 Fairbanks, Alaska {FP} {M}
1941 Circle, Alaska {FP*} {M}
1941 Cook Inlet, Alaska {FP} {CC} {M}
1945 Plainview, Tex. {FP} {EB}
1946 Monument Site, {SB} {OP}
Concord, Calif.
1946-1947 Tequixquiac, Mex. {BF} {M*} {EB*} {S*}
{EC*} {EH*}
1947 Tepexpan, Mex. {SB} {OP*} {M*}
1948 Totolzingo, Mex. {BT} {M*} {EH*}
8
EARLY MAN AND THE GREAT EXTINCTION
_And prate about an Elephant_
_Not one of them has seen!_
—J. G. SAXE
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 mammoth in the New World. The range is from 100,000
years ago to 2500 B.C.
The dating of the life of early man by the death of mammals now extinct
is one of the major tasks that face the American prehistorian. It is
doubly difficult because, in the first place, evidence of when these
animals died off is only now becoming available, and, secondly, because
we must also know how long man hunted them _before_ they became extinct.
We know that a few skulls have been found in strata containing the
fossils of these animals, and we know that all but one of the skulls are
longheaded and beetle-browed like those of the Australians and the
Melanesians, instead of roundheaded like those of most Mongoloids. We
know that Sandia, Clovis, or Folsom points have been found with the
fossils of extinct elephants, horses, camels, and bison. If we knew when
such mammals became extinct, we should know the latest possible date of
most of the archaic skulls and of Sandia and Folsom man. But we should
still not know just how much earlier some of these humans lived, or when
they or their predecessors discovered America.
[Illustration: MAMMALS OF THE ICE AGE IN NORTH AND SOUTH AMERICA
_A chart of the chief animals that became extinct after the arrival
of man. The “extinct armadillo” is more correctly known as
Dasypodidae. (After Colbert, 1942, with some rearrangement.)_]
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 swamps and creeks, prairies and badlands. Laymen and
divines sought explanations, and of course they found dozens, most of
them as absurd as Cotton Mather’s dictum of 1712 that the bones were
those of the giants of Holy Writ. By 1782 Thomas Jefferson knew they
belonged to a kind of elephant, but on “the traditional testimony of the
Indians” he was inclined to believe “that this animal still exists in
the northern and western parts of America.... He may as well exist there
now as he did formerly where we find his bones.”[1]
The bridge from sacred fiction to profane fact, from giants to mammoths
and mastodons, seems to have been the work, oddly enough, of Negro
slaves. Mark Catesby wrote in 1743:
At a place in _Carolina_ called _Stono_ was dug out of the Earth three
or four Teeth of a large animal, which by the concurring Opinion of
all the _Negroes_, native _Africans_, that saw them, were the Grinders
of an Elephant, and in my Opinion that could be no other; I having
seen some of the like that are brought from _Africa_.[2]
On the basis of this statement Loren C. Eiseley—who has written much on
the problem of the extinction of American mammals—believes that the
Negro slaves told the Indian as well as the white man about the animal
that had such gigantic bones, and described its shape and habits.
The eighteenth-century white man—eager for knowledge of zoology and many
other things—pumped the Indian, and doubtless with leading questions.
The Indians, “involved in their own vast animal mythology,” as Eiseley
puts it, were likely to respond “to these myriads of questions with
elaboration and a desire to please.”[3] Thus, when our ancestors asked
where the elephants had gone, the Indians answered, “Across the lakes.”
Soon the belief that the mammoth still lived in the remoter portions of
northeastern Canada grew so strong in white men that early maps
indicated his home in western Labrador. By the time that the
ethnologists of the last half-century began collecting Indian myths
there were numerous traditions of the elephant in the native folklore.
In a summary of the material Duncan Strong lists more than a dozen
instances.[4] An Algonquin tribe told of a great animal “with an arm
coming out of its shoulder,” and of another that left “large round
tracks in the snow” and “struck its enemies with its long nose.”
Penobscot Indians had a myth in which a culture hero saw “moving hills
without vegetation,” which proved to be “great animals with long teeth,
animals so huge that when they lay down they could not get up.” There
were stories of “a great moose with a fifth leg.” Elephant myths turned
up among the Alabama Indians in the South. The Chitimacha said: “A long
time ago a being with a long nose came out of the ocean and began to
kill people. It would root up trees with its nose to get at people who
sought refuge in the branches.” The Eskimos of Alaska joined their
Siberian brothers in tales of a behemoth that burrowed underground and
died if he breathed air—a tale derived, no doubt, from the carcasses of
mammoths found frozen under the snow. “These stories,” writes Eiseley,
“show a suspicious growth in numbers just at the time when White
interest and enthusiasm were keenest.”[5]
Whatever germ of truth may lie in some of the Indian traditions, certain
theorists of the last century and a half were quite as absurd as Cotton
Mather in their conclusions. In 1806 an Englishman named Thomas Ashe
wrote of “incognita, nondescript animals” of the Middle West, and
suggested that “as the immense volume of the creature would unfit him
for coursing after his prey through thickets and woods,” nature had
“furnished him with the power of taking a mighty leap.”[6] Then there
was John Ranking, who published in 1827 _Historical Researches on the
Conquest of Peru, Mexico, Bogota, Natchez, and Talomeco, in the
Thirteenth Century, by the Mongols, Accompanied with Elephants_. Perhaps
he was religious enough to believe, like Jefferson, that “no instance
can be produced, of her [nature] having permitted any one race of her
animals to become extinct.”[7] At any rate, Ranking remembered the
“divine wind” that balked Kubla Khan’s invasion of Japan, and he allowed
it to blow some of Kubla’s vessels to the New World. A son of the Khan
became the first Inca, another Mongol noble founded Montezuma’s line,
and the Khan’s elephants of war spread all up and down the two
continents—a notion reported in 1778 by Johann R. Forster.[8]
In 1880, worried over how the Mound Builders could have transported so
much earth, Frederick Larkin suggested that the Indians must have
domesticated the mammoth: “We can imagine that tremendous teams have
been driven to and fro in the vicinity of their great works.” As
evidence he offered a “copper relic” with an elephant engraved on it “in
harness.”[9]
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 which alone of all the order penetrated to South America and
was unknown in much of the Old World during the Great Ice Age. Its bones
have been found in peat bogs of the Great Lakes area which formed after
the glaciers began to melt, and a skeleton has been unearthed near
Quito, Ecuador, cheek by jowl with broken pottery.
The South American mastodon was found twelve miles from Quito in a
district where the bones of the horse, the extinct sloth, and an extinct
relative of the armadillo have also been discovered. Franz Spillman of
the University of Quito made the find, and Max Uhle cooperated in the
excavation. Uhle states that the scientific facts recorded are beyond
question. The animal lay on his left side, apparently mired in what is
now a yellow clay which lies upon a thick layer of blue clay. A small
landslide had covered the skeleton and the clay. There were a number of
evidences of man. The ribs of the right side had been cut away. There
were remains of fire which had been lighted in the belly and around the
feet and tail, and which had baked some of the clay touching the animal.
Spillman and Uhle found parts of flint artifacts, a shaped bone tool,
and some lengths of wood beside an erect block of stone, which suggested
levers and a fulcrum used in an attempt to lift portions of the
mastodon. They also found—and this is the important point so far as
dating is concerned—more than 150 pieces of broken pottery.[10]
Eiseley maintains that the site’s “archaeological neglect has been
scandalous. If this site had been claimed to be ‘Pleistocene’ many
experts would undoubtedly have journeyed even to this out-of-the-way
location.” Because of the claim that the find was “recent,” it has not
received the thorough study that a Folsom find would unquestionably have
received in North America. If the mastodon actually survived until the
time of pottery in South America, says Eiseley, this does not
demonstrate that the animal lingered as late in North America.[11] But
it plays hob with the antiquity of a South American skull from Punin.
There are two curious factors in this discovery. The first is that coal
was found in the remnants of the fire. Did the Indians of Ecuador use
that fuel before the Spaniards came? Was there a deposit nearer than
that in Peru? The second questionable factor has to do with the pottery.
Although there were no fewer than 152 broken pieces, they could not be
fitted into even one restored pot. Why? Further, 140 of the sherds were
from a primitive type of pottery, imperfectly fired, while 12 pieces
were from an advanced and decorated type which, in other locations, is
supposed to show Maya influence. Why should two varieties of pottery—so
widely separated in technique and, presumably, age—appear at this one
time?
[Illustration: EIGHT THOUSAND YEARS OF THE GREAT EXTINCTION
_More than half of these sixteen mammals seem to have died out
between 10,000 and 8,000 years ago, when the last glaciers were
retreating and early man hunted with Sandia and fluted points. These
latest acceptable dates of survival in North America are drawn from
Jim Hester’s “Late Pleistocene Extinction and Radiocarbon Dating,”
in American Antiquity for July, 1960. The dates vary in precision
from 150 to ± 500. There may come later finds._]
If the Quito mastodon and pots were indeed neighbors in time, then they
provide the only evidence—ex post facto, at that—for the remarkable
statement of the geologist William B. Scott in 1913: “Many Pleistocene
mammals were in existence only a few centuries ago, in what is called
‘historic time’ in the Old World. Several skeletons of the American
Mastodon have been found in bogs, covered by only a few inches of peat,
with more or less of the hair and recognizable contents of the stomach
preserved.”[12] Eiseley has questioned the evidence that the mastodon
had hair, and he has pointed out that a peat bog is an ideal place for
the preservation of vegetable matter such as that animal lived upon.[13]
The bogs and their fossils lie to the south of the Great Lakes, which
formed as the ice fields began to retreat into Canada. Since the retreat
began between 10,000 and 12,000 years ago, it is obvious that bogs could
have formed and mastodons been trapped in them far longer ago than a few
centuries—whether “few” means five, ten, or even fifteen.
A hundred years ago Charles Lyell commented on the profusion of mastodon
bones in North American bogs compared with the paucity of such fossils
in the bogs of Europe; and argued for the late survival of these animals
in the New World.[14] Answering him, Eiseley points out first of all
that for many centuries such skeletons were hunted out and salvaged by
Europeans in search of ivory or the materia medica of the unicorn’s
horn. Further, the mastodon, which was a forest lover and fell a natural
victim to bogs, was almost unknown to Europe, while the mammoth kept
mainly to dry, open steppes. We know that bogs both in our Great Lakes
area and in northern Europe were postglacial, “and that is all. There
exists no evidence, at present, which seems to demand in the New World a
lingering extinction of the American elephants in a way much different
from the course of events in Europe.”[15]
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,
“covered by three to ten feet of dust, there seems to be no reason why
the hair and tissue of the sloth, camel, horse, or bison could not have
been preserved for several thousands of years.”[16]
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 the interesting name of _Bison bison_,[17] or even _Bison bison
bison_—unless, of course, lack of skull material has led scientists
astray. Therefore, if we seek the latest date of Folsom, it would seem
as if we must seek the death day of the extinct bison.
[Illustration: _Prehistoric and modern bison. Above, at the left, is
an outline of typical horn cones of_ Bison antiquus antiquus, _whose
bones have been found with Folsom points. Its horns were longer and
straighter than those of the buffalo of today_, Bison bison, _shown
at the right. Below is a still larger and more ancient type_, Bison
latifrons, _with an eighty-inch span_.]
Protagonists of early man have argued that Folsom must date far, far
back, or there would not be time for the evolution of the modern bison
of the High Plains. Lately, however, Eiseley has developed a theory
which does away with the long period of evolution from _Bison antiquus_
into _Bison bison_, and yet pins down Folsom to the end of the glaciers.
There is some evidence that the kind of bison Folsom man hunted migrated
up into Canada when the glaciers melted, and that the “modern” variety,
which we call “buffalo,” came up from the south and took over the High
Plains. As the temperature moderated over the whole northern hemisphere
the plains of Canada began to resemble the plains of the United States,
where the prey of Folsom man had flourished. The climate and the
vegetation of the High Plains, moving north behind the ice, took _Bison
antiquus_ along. The same northward movement of climate and vegetation
occurred from Mexico to the High Plains, and it carried to their
historic habitat the buffalo that have left their bones in old soils
south of the border. The only place where we meet the two varieties of
bison together is a peat bog in Minnesota.[18]
The evidence that _Bison antiquus_ moved to Canada is not complete, but
it is suggestive. There are accounts of bison horns from Athabasca
“nearly twice the length of the Plains’ ones and much straighter.”[19]
Ernest Thompson Seton provides the same kind of evidence.[20] The
Canadian bison and the Folsom variety seem “suspiciously similar,” says
Eiseley. Unfortunately, in 1925, before the bison of Athabasca—the
second surviving race, _Bison bison athabascæ_—had been properly
measured and observed, _Bison bison_ from the High Plains were brought
north to breed with the Canadian variety. Eiseley feels it is a
possibility that the Athabascan animals “represented, at least in a
mixed form, the last of the Ice Age bison which early man had hunted in
the western plains.”[21] If this is true, it means that Folsom man was
fully developed in the period before the melting of the glaciers drove
his favorite game north to Canada. It means, further, that he or his
immediate forebears may have entered the plains 50,000 years ago when a
corridor opened through the western ice fields. (See illustration, page
26.)
The Folsom bison may also have gone northeast to the edge of New
England. Grasslands extend from the High Plains of the classic Folsom
point northeast to Illinois and Indiana, and ancient steppes once ran
through Ohio to New York State and probably to New Jersey and southern
New England.[22] Antevs suggests that late bands of Folsom men pursued
their bison across this area. Certainly they left their cruder form of
point in this part of the Middle West and the East.[23] But where, in
this area, are the fossils of the extinct bison?
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 wrote in _The Mammoth and the Flood_:
These facts ... prove in the first place that a great catastrophe or
cataclysm occurred at the close of the Mammoth period, by which that
animal, with its companions, were overwhelmed over a very large part
of the earth’s surface. Secondly, this cataclysm involved a very
wide-spread flood of water, which not only killed the animals but also
buried them under continuous beds of loam or gravel. Thirdly, that the
same catastrophe was accompanied by a very great and sudden change of
climate in Siberia, by which the animals which had previously lived in
fairly temperate conditions were frozen in their flesh underground and
have remained frozen ever since.[24]
In the hundred years since Koch found a mammoth and a spear point in
Missouri we have learned little that is definite about the reasons for
the extinction of mammoth, mastodon, camel, horse, sloth, and the rest.
We merely know that they died out as the glaciers began to melt. The
most natural guess for either scientist or amateur is that change of
climate was the lethal factor. Yet we know that many of them had already
survived drastic changes of climate and lived through interglacials as
well as glacials in the Great Ice Age. Further, how do we account for
the survival of deer, antelope, fox, rabbit, moose, beaver, bear, and so
many other animals? How could climate be so selective? If the dire wolf
died, why not the timber wolf? If the short-faced bear, why not the
grizzly? If one form of rabbit and three forms of antelope, why not all
rabbits and all antelopes? If disease instead of climate was the great
eliminator—as some have suggested—we face the same dilemma.
The mysteries of extinction are so many and so baffling that it is small
wonder no book in English has been written on the subject. Since 1906,
when Henry Fairfield Osborn summed the matter up in his paper of
fifty-odd pages, “The Causes of Extinction of Mammalia,” Eiseley credits
only two theories with contributing anything new to the discussion.
One is the hypothesis of Sewall Wright and his co-workers that when an
animal was greatly reduced in numbers it would suffer fatally from
inbreeding.[25] This, however, leaves us still searching for what
reduced its numbers so radically.
The other theory is Sauer’s: Man, the hunter, destroyed the larger,
clumsier, and more gregarious animals largely by means of fire drives,
and these fires made the grasslands.[26] Or, at least, the fire drives
“broke the back” of mammalian resistance.[27] Eiseley objects on a
number of grounds. It was not alone the large, clumsy, and gregarious
animals that disappeared. Certain mollusks, a variety of toad, a
subfamily of rabbits, the dire wolf, the saber-toothed tiger, three
forms of antelope, the short-faced bear, and a small horse also
disappeared. More damaging still to Sauer’s theory is the fact that a
number of birds became extinct. Eiseley asks, “Why, if this method was
so deadly, did the living bison and the living antelope roam the plains
in countless numbers?” He points out that, while there is abundant
evidence of extinct bison caught and killed in fire drives, there is no
proof of mass kills of mammoth, horse, camel, and antelope.[28] He also
mentions the mastodon, the giant beaver, and the sloth, which frequented
eastern forests or northern bogs and died in them. “Though man was on
the scene at the final perishing, his was not ... the appetite nor the
capacity for such gigantic slaughter.”[29] Though Sauer believes that
the numbers of hunting man in the New World were comparatively large
when he killed _Bison antiquus_, most authorities disagree. Alfred S.
Romer believes that if man had been numerous enough and deadly enough to
play a major part in the killing, we should find more evidences of his
association with the extinct mammals.[30]
Romer and Edwin H. Colbert have put forward another explanation for the
extinction of the mammals. They suggest that the advent of man in the
New World may have upset a nicely balanced state of nature.[31] But man
had been living with just such animals in the Old World for hundreds of
thousands of years before they became extinct. What, then, destroyed the
mammoth in Europe?
The most pulling of all the fossils of extinct animals are those in the
deep Alaska muck beds. Their numbers are appalling. They lie frozen in
tangled masses, interspersed with uprooted trees. They seem to have been
torn apart and dismembered and then consolidated under catastrophic
conditions. Eden and Plainview spear points and perhaps one Clovis have
been found in these chill beds. Skin, ligament, hair, flesh, can still
be seen.[32] If scientists can solve this mystery before the
high-pressure water stream of the miner disperses the evidence, perhaps
we shall be nearer solving one of the greatest and most tantalizing
problems involved in the story of early man—the date of the extinction
of the great mammals.
This problem of when the mammoth died should have puzzled the Old World
as well as the New and caused us to question the dating of Neanderthal
and Cro-Magnon quite as much as Folsom man. Oddly enough, it did nothing
of the kind. In Europe the mammoth was accepted as diagnostic of the
glacial period. The fact that a Magdalenian man of southern France
sketched a mammoth on the wall of a cave proved that the man existed in
the Great Ice Age. But in America, if a spear point turned up with the
bones of a mammoth, too many anthropologists accepted it as proof that
the animal died after the ice fields had melted. The mammoth proved the
antiquity of man in Europe; man proved the modernity of the mammoth in
America. The only shred of evidence to support such reasoning was the
questionable pottery and coal that lay beside the mastodon bones in
Ecuador. We should have had more and better proof, and we are beginning
to get it.
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 with a grain of sodium chloride. A single date from a single
sample in only one locality is not too trustworthy. The hazards are
obvious, yet nevertheless we have a fairly large body of facts. From
these, a general impression of the great extinction is beginning to take
shape. As anticipated, man and climate are involved in the disappearance
of the animals.
As for climate, a period of much warmer temperatures followed the end of
the last glaciation. This lasted from about 10,000 to 2,600 years ago.
Antevs isolates the time of highest heat—the Altithermal—as about 7,000
to 4,000 years ago.[33] This matches fairly closely the last dates for
our extinct mammals. Heat and aridity may have driven the larger animals
to the more and more limited watercourses where man himself would
concentrate. Paul S. Martin has noted that the first large mammals to
disappear were those in Alaska and Mexico, and that they were followed
by the animals of the Plains toward what must have been the beginning of
the hot and dry Altithermal period. Martin believes that the grazing and
browsing mammals found refuge in the savannas of Florida.[34]
Working with more than 100 radiocarbon dates concerned with the great
extinction, Jim Hester (no relation of the junior writer) has brought
together results published through 1959.[35] He provides the first
reasonably clear picture of the sequence and magnitude of lethal events.
We see the ancient forms of horse, camel, and bison, as well as the dire
wolf and Columbian mammoth, beginning to disappear 8,000 years ago.
_Bison antiquus_ lingers later, though Clovis mammoth hunters may have
been active in the Southwest at the same time that Folsom bison hunters
were busy on the Plains. Hester’s summary shows how concerned man was in
the final death of the great mammals. He lists the last dates for 27 of
them. Nine—one-third—were found in archaeological sites of early man;
some others were dated by charcoal that may have come from fires where
he cooked the meat of the great beasts.
9
PYGMIES, AUSTRALOIDS, AND NEGROIDS—BEFORE INDIANS?
_Let us have all the skeletons out of the closet._
—EARNEST A. HOOTON
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 pigeonhole becomes laughable. Living Indians of
“pure” breed show an immense variety in all physical features except
their eyes, their hair, their cheekbones, and their upper front teeth.
Some of their skulls and some of the skulls of their dead—particularly
those that belonged to early man—show marked differences from those of
the Mongoloid race of which the Indians are all commonly supposed to be
a part. The differences are so marked that some of our physical
anthropologists believe that other races than the Mongoloid contributed
to the discovery and settlement of the Americas. They see at least one
and possibly three such contributions. If we discount transpacific
migration, we must accept the fact that all the peoples of northern Asia
did not always belong to the now ubiquitous Mongoloid races. Of this,
more at the end of the chapter.
The Mongoloid racial stock has five physical traits that occur with high
frequency, which means that in any mixture with another race, five
traits seem likely to be transmitted to immediate descendants. One trait
is the peculiar shovel shape of the upper incisor, or front, teeth. The
second is brown eyes. The third is straight black hair. The fourth is
prominent cheekbones, or malars. A fifth is the so-called Mongoloid
spot, a purplish discoloration appearing at the base of the spine
shortly after birth. It persists for a few years, gradually becoming
indistinct before adolescence. Of course, there are minor
irregularities. Not all the millions of incisors of our Indians are
shovel-shaped. The wavy hair of the Lacandon Indians of southern Mexico
may have a reddish tinge. But the great majority of New World Indians
share these traits, including prominent cheekbones, and, by so much,
they share also a very considerable amount of Mongoloid ancestry.
[Illustration: _The eye of a Chinese with the Mongoloid fold,
contrasted with the eye of a white man. (After Hooton, 1931.)_]
In addition, there are many traits typical of Asiatic Mongoloids which
appear very irregularly in the Americas. The “Mongoloid fold”—an
overhanging fold of skin on the upper eyelid—is found in some tribes and
not in others, and in certain individuals of a tribe and not in others.
The bony structure of the face varies greatly. Some tribes have strong
chins; some, weak ones. The nose of the typical Plains Indian is
hawklike—a violent departure from the Mongoloid’s rather flat nasal
equipment. The “Semitic” nose of the Maya is Japanese but not at all
Chinese. “The Indian type,” says Nelson, “is distinguishable in one way
or another from its nearest Mongoloid relations, and at the same time is
separable according to some authorities into about ten more or less
distinct varieties.”[1]
Looked at in terms of resemblances to Old World peoples, the American
Indian becomes a very crazy quilt of races. Hooton sees “an almost
pre-Dravidian look” about the Lacandons which vaguely reminds him of the
Veddas of India. He finds that many Indians of the Northwest coast
resemble Alpine Europeans, and that eastern Indians have a “European
look,” and are “by no means as Mongoloid as the Plains and Southwestern
Indians”:
For years I have been troubled by the types depicted in the splendid
series of oil portraits of Indians in the Peabody Museum. The most of
these represent Indians of the eastern and southeastern United States,
and, although the portraits are the work of an excellent painter, his
subjects look very European. The features of most are very
un-Mongoloid, with prominent noses and oval faces ... some Plains
Indians are included in the series, and these seem to be accurate
representations of types familiar today. I am, therefore, disposed to
think that the European-like types are not the result of an artistic
convention, but actually did exist.[2]
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
resembling the Negro in most respects, has in general one of the
roundest heads of all mankind, while the Negro’s is pre-eminently long
and narrow. Many anthropologists pick the Australoid as the second race
to leave an unknown homeland and spread far abroad. The White, or
Caucasoid, racial stock is divided into certain groups by one authority,
and into other groups by another. Hooton puts the beginnings of the
White race far back by calling the Australoid “an archaic form of modern
White man.”[3]
But, in spite of conflicts of opinion, the physical anthropologist has
fairly firm ground to stand on. He can bring to bear on the skull or the
fleshed bone of man certain tests, certain measurements, which enable
him to discriminate with some accuracy between the various racial types.
The most important of the measurements have to do with the shape of the
head and certain of its features.
The Cephalic Index—and Others
A hundred years ago a Swedish scientist, Anders Retzius, set up a
measurement called the cephalic index, which indicates whether a head is
dolichocephalic or brachycephalic—long-headed or round-headed, narrow or
broad. The width of the skull, divided by its length, and multiplied by
100, gives the cephalic index—as 15.0 cm. ÷ 17.6 cm. × 100 = 85.23. The
long-headed, or dolichocephalic, skull, lies below 75; the round-headed,
or brachycephalic, at or above 80. Between lies the intermediate ground
of the mesocephalic. (It is rather easy to keep “dolichocephalic” and
“brachycephalic” straight if you note that the longer word applies to
the long-headed skulls.)
The Pygmy aside, we find long-headedness common to early peoples and
then gradually giving way to round-headedness. Round-headedness is a
progressively modern tendency; there seem to be more round heads than
there used to be. (Round-headedness seems to have increased sharply with
the advent of agriculture. Are the two related? Does a vegetable diet
have a functional effect upon head shape?) Among modern peoples, the
Australian, the Negro, the Nordic, and the Mediterranean are
long-headed. The Pygmy, the Alpine of Central Europe, and the Chinese
are generally round-headed. Most Indians, being heavily Mongoloid, are
likewise round-headed. The cephalic index alone is not too good a means
of determining races today, but it has definite value in dealing with
early man in the Americas. Here, as in the Old World, he seems to have
been, with two exceptions, as long-headed as the modern Australian.
[Illustration: _In this diagrammatic description of one of the most
important measurements of the head, the length is given as 100,
instead of 18 centimeters, or some other actual measurement, in
order to make the matter simpler to comprehend._]
Cephalic Index—width ÷ length × 100
Dolichocephalic, or long-headed, below 75
Mesocephalic, or intermediate, 75-80
Brachycephalic, or round-headed, above 80
[Illustration: _A map showing the centrifugal dispersal, first of
long-headed Negroes and Australoids, then intermediate to
long-headed Mediterraneans, and finally round-headed Mongoloids and
Alpines, from an Asiatic homeland. The maker of this map prefers
“narrow-headed” for “long-headed,” “broad-headed” for
“round-headed.” (After Taylor, 1937, with some modifications.)_]
There are other important measurements, which we shall not describe at
such length. The facial index tells us whether the face is relatively
broad or narrow, the breadth is measured from cheekbone to cheekbone,
and the length from the root, or topmost point, of the nose between the
eyes to the bottom of the chin. This facial index is not so useful as
the cephalic in determining race, because some of the bones involved are
affected by age and sex. The nasal index tells us whether the nose—or,
in a skull, the nasal aperture—is broad or narrow, adapted to a warm,
moist climate or to a dry, cold one. Then there is the matter of
prognathism, with a receding chin. Heavy brow ridges, which usually go
with a retreating forehead, and the shape of the vault may be important
indications of race. No one of these measurements or observations can
definitely denote race, but a number of them taken together are rather
reliable.
There is a certain difficulty, however, in applying the detective
methods of physical anthropology to the skulls of early man in the New
World. It is only a matter of terminology, but sometimes this affects
our understanding of what scientists are talking about when they
describe early American skulls as Australoid, Melanesian, Papuan,
Caucasoid, or Negroid. The difficulty stems back to the southwest
Pacific. The Australians—a race as primitive as the Neanderthal and
perhaps more primitive—are spoken of as Australoid. They are also
described by some writers as Caucasoid on the theory that they are a
blend of an archaic white race with Negroid elements. The dark-skinned
people, who inhabit large parts of New Guinea and nearby islands, are
called Melanesian. Some of the men of this area used to be called
Papuan—which is really only a word for a language. When the
characteristics of their skulls turn up in the Americas, these craniums
may be called Papuan by an older writer or Australoid, Melanesian,
Caucasoid, or Negroid. Recently, physical anthropologists have
determined that no full-sized Negro has existed east of, roughly, Arabia
until recent times. Accordingly, this Negroid element in the western
Pacific must be related to the Pygmy. We will refer to him as Oceanic
Negrito.
What do the tests of the physical anthropologist tell you about skulls
which come from the southwest Pacific or resemble specimens from that
area? If you find a skull that has protruding jaws, a low or depressed
nose root, and straight sides, you may say with some assurance that it
belonged to an Oceanic Negrito, an aboriginal Australian, an
Australoid-Melanesian, or—if the owner has been dead many thousands of
years—an Australoid. If the skull also has a heavy, continuous brow
ridge, a retreating forehead, and a low, keeled vault, you can forget
the Negrito. The man was an Australoid-Melanesian, or an Australoid.
[Illustration: THREE TYPES OF SKULLS
_Generalized impressions of the cranial traits of three races that
may be presumed to have contributed to the peopling of the Americas.
Certain Mongoloid tribes, represented by the Eskimo and peoples of
northern Asia, differ from the race in general in having long,
narrow skulls with keeled vaults and flat sides. (The Australoid,
after Leakey, 1935; the Negroid, after Leakey, 1935, and Martin,
1928; the Mongoloid, after Stibbe, 1938, and Hooton, 1931.)_]
[Illustration: AUSTRALOID]
_Forehead: low, receding_
_Brow ridges: heavy_
_Face and jaws: protruding_
_Rear: protruding_
_Forehead: narrow_
_Vault: keeled_
_Sides: flat_
_Sockets: low, oblong_
_Dolichocephalic (very long and narrow head)_
[Illustration: NEGROID]
_Forehead: low, rounded_
_Brow ridges: slight or absent_
_Face and jaws: rotruding_
_Rear: bulging_
_Forehead: narrow_
_Vault: curved_
_Sides: flat to slightly convex_
_Dolichocephalic (narrow head, medium to long)_
[Illustration: MONGOLOID]
_Forehead: somewhat high_
_Brow ridges: absent_
_Face: flat_
_Rear: flat_
_Forehead: broad_
_Vault: broad, globular_
_Sides: convex to bulging_
_Brachycephalic (round)_
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 most, if not all, of the following
features: a heavy, almost continuous brow ridge; a receding chin; a low
nose root; straight sides; a retreating forehead, and a keeled vault.
On the score of long-headedness, there can be no question about all but
two of the early skulls mentioned in Chapter 6 or illustrated on page
216. The Confins has a cephalic index of 69.1, which is
hyper-dolichocephalic, or extra long; the female skulls of the Pericú in
Lower California average 68.50 and the male 66.15, while sixteen skulls
from the Texas coast show an average of 65.37. Except for the skulls of
Tepexpan man and the Minnesota girl, all the other skulls we have
referred to have the same long-headed character. If those from Texas and
the Pacific Coast are not so ancient as the rest, at least they seem to
represent the descendants of an old strain forced off into marginal
areas by the invasion of newer peoples. To be sure, we have now—and have
had—Indians with long skulls, particularly in the eastern part of the
United States and to some extent on the Great Plains. But their number
is not large, and can never have been large, compared with the great
bulk of round-headed Indians of the two Americas.
[Illustration: EARLY MAN VS. THE MONGOLOID
_In this comparison, the Mongoloid skull—indicated by dotted
lines—and the skulls of early man are not drawn to true scale,
because the former is an abstraction, and the measurements of all
the latter are not available. For comparison, the nose root and the
back of the skull are made to agree in the profiles, and the other
views are drawn from this relationship._ (_The Mongoloid skull,
after Stibbe, 1938, and Hooton, 1931; the Early Sacramento, courtesy
Robert F. Heizer; the Pericú, after ten Kate, 1884, and Woodbury,
1935; the Punin, after Sullivan and Hellman, 1925; the Lagoa Santa,
after Hrdlička, 1912; the Central Texas, after Hooton, 1933.)_]
LAGOA SANTA
Brazil
Av. cephalic index 70.5
PUNIN
Ecuador
Cephalic index 71
MELBOURNE
Florida
Cephalic index 73.1
PERICU
Lower California
Cephalic index 65.62
CENTRAL TEXAS
Jones County
Cephalic Index 60.71
EARLY SACRAMENTO
California
Cephalic Index 72.5
Apart from long-headedness, our early skulls share a number of other
peculiarities of the Australoid-Melanesian: the quite heavy brow ridges,
the keeled vault, the straight sides, the retreating forehead, the low
nose root, and the receding chin. Some have the round vault and the
fuller forehead of White and Mongoloid peoples, but these are also a
feature of the Negrito strain that united with the Australoid in
Melanesia.
In one respect only do the skulls of early American man follow a
Mongoloid pattern: almost all have prominent cheekbones. We must
remember, however, that prominent cheekbones are found in other
races—though not so commonly—and we must recognize that they cannot
weigh too heavily against those un-Mongoloid peculiarities we have dwelt
on.
The peculiarities of our early skulls must make us think twice about the
Indian as the only pre-Columbian inhabitant of the Americas south of the
Eskimo. They bear witness to another invader from the Old World. Such
skulls—even if they were only a thousand years old—would tell us that
the typical Mongoloid Indian was not the only arrival from Asia who left
descendants. Since many of the skulls are definitely the oldest that
have been found in the New World, we must recognize that early man bore
some relationship to other peoples than the forebears of the noble red
man.
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
archaeologists about the meaning of bones. Toward the end, even Hrdlička
was diluting the Mongolism of the Indian with some Aurignacian and
Magdalenian ancestry, though the Australoid and the Melanesian were too
much for him.
In the English-speaking world the case for the Mongoloid Indian as the
only type of early man was definitely and finally thrown out of court in
1930 by statements from two men eminent in their field—Keith and Hooton.
Keith’s statement was simple and short, but his position as a sound and
skillful anatomist gave it considerable weight. He confirmed the
judgment of Louis R. Sullivan and Milo Hellman that the Punin skull from
Ecuador resembled the skulls of native women of Australia. The points of
resemblance, he wrote, “were too numerous to permit us to suppose that
the skull could be a sport produced by an American Indian parentage.”
Here follows Keith’s decisive dictum: “This discovery at Punin does
compel us to look into the possibility of a Pleistocene Glacial invasion
of America by an Australoid people.”[4]
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. In
addition he listed a “Pseudo-Australoid,” a “Pseudo-Negroid,” a
“Long-faced European,” and a “Pseudo-Alpine” type. From this analysis of
skulls little more than a thousand years old, Hooton went on boldly to
picture the kind of men that first discovered and invaded the Americas:
Briefly, then, my present opinion as to the peopling of the American
continent is as follows: At a rather remote period, probably soon
after the last glacial retreat, there straggled into the New World
from Asia by way of the Bering Strait groups of dolichocephals in
which were blended at least three strains: one very closely allied to
the fundamental brunet European and African long-headed stock called
“Mediterranean”; another, a more primitive form with heavy
brow-ridges, low broad face and wide nose, which is probably to be
identified with an archaic type represented today very strongly
(although mixed with other elements) in the native Australians, and
less strongly in the so-called “Pre-Dravidians” such as the Veddahs,
and also in the Ainu; thirdly, an element certainly Negroid (not
Negro). These people, already racially mixed, spread over the New
World carrying with them a primitive fishing and hunting culture.
Their coming must have preceded the occupation of eastern Asia by the
present predominantly Mongoloid peoples, since the purer types of
these dolichocephals do not show the characteristic Mongoloid
features.
At a somewhat later period there began to arrive in the New World
groups of Mongoloids coming by the same route as their predecessors.
Many of these were probably purely Mongoloid in race, but others were
mixed with some other racial element notable because of its
high-bridged and often convex nose. This may have been either Armenoid
or Proto-Nordic (or neither one). These later invaders were capable of
higher cultural development than the early pioneers and were
responsible for the development of agriculture and for the notable
achievements of the New World civilization. In some places they may
have driven out and supplanted the early long-heads, but often they
seem to have interbred with them producing the multiple and varied
types of the present American Indians—types which are Mongoloid to a
varying extent, but never purely Mongoloid. Last of all came the
Eskimo, a culturally primitive Mongoloid group, already mixed with
some non-Mongoloid strain before their arrival in North America.[5]
In 1947 Hooton stated this in simpler terms: “I am fairly sure that the
earliest arrivals here were non-Mongoloids carrying archaic White
strains (‘Australoids,’ if you like) probably mixed with Negritic
elements and with whatever else was kicking around in Asia before they
crossed Bering Strait.”[6]
Dixon’s position, which he took in 1923, is in some ways a more radical
one than Hooton’s. He introduces “Proto-Australoid,” “Proto-Negroid,”
and Mediterranean elements, and also Caspian and Alpine; but, where
Hooton recognizes a general stock in which Australoid, Negroid, and
Mediterranean were blended before their arrival, Dixon brings in his
races separate and pure, and he assigns them definite areas in the New
World.
Dixon’s Proto-Australoid originated in tropical southeast Asia. It
spread westward “through India and the Arabian coasts to Africa, and by
way of the Mediterranean passed into western Europe, where it appeared
in early Paleolithic times.... Another branch spread southeast into
Australia, where its early presence is proved by the Talgai skull,”
perhaps 150,000 years old. “A third branch drifted slowly northward up
the eastern Asiatic littoral, and, crossing into America, spread thinly
through the continents, and perhaps mainly along the western shores....
On the Pacific Coast in California and Lower California it appears to
constitute the oldest stratum, characterizing as it does the crania from
the lower layers of the shell-heaps, from the islands of Santa Catalina
and San Clemente off the Coast, and from the extinct Pericue [now
Pericú] isolated on the southern tip of the peninsula of Lower
California.” Dixon places some of his Proto-Australoids among the
ancestors of the Iroquois and the southern Algonquin tribes of the East.
He puts most of his Proto-Negroids in that same eastern area and with
the same tribes. He finds them generally east of the Rockies, but also
among the Basket Makers in the Southwest and the peoples of the Coahuila
Caves of northern Mexico, in the Lagoa Santa area in Brazil, and in
Patagonia.[7]
Two of the White types—the Caspian and the Mediterranean—seem rather
scattered and rather early. Dixon thinks that a Caspian strain may have
appeared as soon as the Proto-Australoid, perhaps sooner. It crops up
among the Eskimo and at spots in British Columbia, and widely in South
America. The Mediterranean influence, Dixon says, is found also among
the Eskimo and among Shoshonean and Siouan tribes.
Dixon does not think much of the Mongoloids. Believing they were a very
old people that drifted into Europe in early paleolithic times, he says
they “contributed little of value either to the sum of human
achievements or the blood of existing races.” He gives them only scant
space in North America. Instead he introduces two other round-headed
peoples. They are first the Paleo-Alpines, and later the Alpines. These,
who seem to take on the role played by the Mongoloids of Hooton and
others, spread through to South America and “displayed striking
ability.... To them seems to be attributable most of the higher
achievements of the aboriginal American peoples.”[8]
Some theories are doubtless much too simple; also, they depend too much
on other theories, such as the idea that all the races originated in
southwestern Asia. R. Ruggles Gates, who writes of “American
Neanderthaloids” and “pseudo-Australoids,” believes that the craniums of
the men of Lagoa Santa and Punin—“the earliest wave of interglacial
Americans”—“represent a parallel stage in skull development of a widely
different race” from the one that began as the Neanderthal or the one
that ended as the Australian.[9]
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
Egyptian skulls with skulls from California and skulls of the Iroquois.
W. W. Howells sees similarities between “many forest tribes of South
America and certain Indonesian groups in Borneo and the Philippines,”
and believes the non-Mongoloid features of the Indians point, “not to
the Australoids or the Negroes, but towards the White group.”[11] Hooton
finds Indians of the Northwest coast who “resemble Alpine Europeans.” He
says that certain Plains Indians seem to be basically White with
Mongoloid added, and he points out that although the Eskimo are the most
Mongoloid of all the inhabitants of the Americas, they are long-headed,
which is a most un-Monogoloid trait.[12] On the basis of skulls from
Chancelade, France, and certain late-paleolithic traits, Sollas saw the
ancestors of the Eskimo living in Europe in Magdalenian times.[13] M. R.
Harrington also picks a Magdalenian forebear for the Eskimo.[14]
Authorities differ as to whether the Botocudo tribe of Brazil is
descended from the people that left their skulls in the Lagoa Santa
caves, but on the basis of R. N. Wegners description of a Bolivian
tribe, the Qurunga, Griffith Taylor believes these people may be living
representatives of an early Australoid migration.[15] Hooton puts
forward the picturesque and amusing theory that the Maya, with their
large, curved noses and their mania for flattening their heads between
boards, picked up both the nose and the mania from the Armenoids of the
Iranian plateau. The Mongoloids provided the characteristic skin, hair,
and eyelids.[16]
The backwardness of certain living American tribes suggests to Sauer
that they came to the New World a very long time ago. Their lack of a
number of useful skills argues that they branched off from the men of
the Old Stone Age when the Australoid ancestors of the abysmal
Blackfellows of Australia looked like an up-and-coming people. These
early men had the enterprise to reach the New World, but they stuck to
old and limited habits of life. They would not learn from new invading
peoples, and so they were forced into refuge areas as remote as
Newfoundland, Lower California, Amazonia, and Tierra del Fuego. As an
example of cultural backwardness and of an inability to learn which
recalls the Australians, Sauer cites a people in the Brazilian interior
who get along without boiling any of their food. He believes that this
tribe acquired its cultural habits in the days before man began to put
heated stones into water in pitch-sealed baskets. The primitive
resistance of these “Indians” to borrowing new cooking skills like
boiling comes out in other directions. “Long in contact with
pottery-making peoples, they make casual or no use of pots, but restrict
their cooking to roasting and baking, with gourds, a late acquisition,
used for carrying water.”[17]
Griffith Taylor once wrote to Earl W. Count that, because certain of the
now extinct mammals inhabited both sides of Bering Strait in the days of
the glaciers, “it is almost impossible that the Australoids (who preyed
on them) did not cross into America in Pre-Würm times.” Count supports
Taylor with the suggestion that the most primitive of the many stocks
that invaded the Americas came “at a time, say, when Talgai man and
Wadjak man were en route to their _cul de sac_ in Australia.”[18]
Radical as these last two suggestions are in point of time, they are
conservative compared with theories held by A. A. Mendes Correâ and Paul
Rivet. Like many another student, Mendes Correâ saw Australian,
Caucasoid, Polynesian, Melanesian, and Asiatic affinities among the
American Indians; but he struck into a new field of theory in 1926 by
transporting the Australians to South America over a now-vanished
land-bridge to the south. Using Wegener’s hypothesis of the drift of
continents, he found his bridge in a severed and displaced Antarctica.
He conceded that this was only a conjecture, but thought it “very
probable.”[19] That same year Rivet—approving migrations of Australian,
Malayan-Polynesian, Asiatic, and Ural elements—suggested that glaciation
in the southern hemisphere might have aided the Australians in passing
from island to island until they reached the mainland of South
America.[20] He dated their journey at only 6,000 years ago,[21] so that
glacial assistance beyond the present extent of Antarctica seems just a
little unlikely. Rivet, following many a student from Leibnitz to Thomas
Jefferson, proposed to trace the origin of the American peoples through
comparing their languages with those of the Old World. In 1925 he came
up with something more than the usual random identities between
words.[22] Indeed, the parallels which he drew between the present
speech of the Tshon of Patagonia and the Australians seemed to Dixon to
be impossibly close after centuries upon centuries of separation from
one another and of contact with other peoples.[23] Only sheer
coincidence could account for such identity.
There remain two champions of multiform and multitudinous
migrations—José Imbelloni of Argentina and Harold S. Gladwin. They go
further than any of their predecessors in peopling the New World with
varied races, and further in advancing transpacific migrations as an
important factor in the history of the Americas.
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 may be open to question; for in both places the natives, though
short, exceeded the average of Pygmy height by a few inches, and their
heads, instead of being round like those of the Pygmies, are recorded as
of medium cephalic index.
After the Tasmanian strain, Imbelloni carries over by land a Melanesian
type to lay their skulls in Lagoa Santa, Punin, Texas, and Lower
California. Next came tall people, “comparable partly to the Australian
type,” who seem to be the Indians of plains and pampas. These were the
last of the land-borne migrants until the present era. Hereafter they
came by sea. The fourth element was a Proto-Indonesian people that
settled exclusively in South America and mainly in Amazonia. With the
fifth group Imbelloni presents the first frank Mongoloids, round-headed
and inclined to agriculture; they settled in the Southwest, in Middle
America, and along the Andean coast. An almost identical people—whom
Imbelloni calls the Isthmid—spread through the center of the same area
shortly after the birth of Christ and brought to fruition the
civilizations which Cortez and Pizarro found in the New World. To top
off his list, Imbelloni brings over the Eskimo and men for the American
Northwest—but by no longer a sea voyage than Bering Strait.[24]
Gladwin’s theories appeared first in the second volume of _Excavations
at Snaketown_, and were presented in altered and amplified form through
his rather antic book _Men Out of Asia_. They are completely heretical,
completely fascinating, and in some respects uncommonly plausible. They
are certainly a tonic.
Gladwin begins with what might be called a Pygmoid visitation. He does
not dignify it with the word “migration.” He is careful to say that
there are only “rather vague indications.” There is “just enough to make
one wonder if there may not have been a few Pygmy groups who strayed
over here long, long ago and were pushed off to the edges and the ends
when the Australoid tide flowed in.”[25]
If a scientific study is ever made in the Guayana highlands of
Venezuela, some support may be given to the theory of an early Pygmy
migration. Carl Sauer on a visit to Venezuela in 1946 saw photographs of
a Pygmy-like people taken by a Venezuelan army officer who had paddled
and packed the Guayana River for some years. This tribe, which does not
interbreed with other tribes, appears to be Pygmoid in stature and type.
Further, it lacks “clothing, weaving, netting, baskets, boats, and
fishing skills, and also houses.”[26]
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 times and also found in the area between
southern California and eastern Texas. They include an Aurignacian flint
industry, bunt points for darts, bull-roarers, string made by spinning
human hair, twisted rabbit fur, curved throwing sticks with parallel
grooves, sand paintings, amputation of finger joints as shown in
pictographs, and similarities in spear-throwers and darts with
foreshafts (see illustration, page 228).[27] We should like to find them
nearer Lagoa Santa.
Gladwin’s next migration, the Proto-Negroid of Dixon, leans upon the
Pseudo-Negroid traits of Hooton. It comes in about 17,000 years ago,
also over Bering Strait, but down through the corridor between the
retreating ice fields of western Canada. Having seen Aurignacian
qualities in the Australoids, Gladwin sees Solutrean ones in the Negroid
invaders. They bring—or, rather, make—the Folsom point. Unlike the
Australoids, who were mostly food gatherers, the Negroids—or Folsom
men—are primarily hunters. Although they come trickling in for many,
many years, they are few; for, in spite of their hunting prowess and
their fine flint knives and spear points, they never invade the
Australoid territory that is staked out south from the Mexican
border.[28]
[Illustration: FROM THE OLD WORLD AND THE NEW
_Implements from Australoid areas of the eastern hemisphere
resembling implements from western Texas. (After Gladwin, 1937.)_]
Bunt-Points
A, Melanesia; B, western Texas. (length of B—6 inches)
Bull-Roarers
A, Australia; B, western Texas. (length of B—16 inches)
Curved Throwing Sticks
A, Australia; B, western Texas. (length of A—26 inches)
Spear-Throwers
A, Australia; B, western Texas, (length of B—24 inches)
The next migration is the Algonquin. It reaches North America somewhere
between 1000 and 500 B.C. These people bring in the cord-marked pottery
of the Woodland culture of the eastern United States—unpolished and
unpainted, its only ornament impressed in the clay. Such pottery has now
been traced to western Canada, up into Alaska, across to Siberia, west
through Russia to the beakerwares of Europe, and finally down into
Africa about 3000 B.C. The Algonquins are such a mixture as the long
trip of their pottery might indicate. They are generally long-headed,
and they are not today wholly Mongoloid.[29]
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 power on which the Mexican and Maya
civilizations were built; and some reached the west coast of South
America.[30] Without a good many of them it seems to us difficult to
account for such Andean peoples as the speakers of the Quechua and
Aymara languages, who were the working population of the Chimu, Nasca,
Tiahuanaco, and Inca cultures. By Gladwin’s dating, the Mongoloids had
only a little more than a thousand years to stamp their hair and eyes
and teeth upon five million to fifty million men and women in both
Americas.
By the time of the Algonquin—let alone the Eskimo and the Aztec—we are
far out of the era of early man. But we are not yet through with the
theories of Gladwin as to the peopling of the Americas; for, not content
with the stimulating activities of the Huns in northern China, he
rediscovers the sailors and the Asiatic fleet of the late, great
conqueror Alexander of Macedon, and leads them on expeditions through
the East Indies and Oceania even to the Gulf of Darien.[31]
However heretical Gladwin’s suggestions may be, they deserve serious
attention if only because they bear heavily upon an old quarrel of the
archaeologists, and because this old quarrel bears upon the antiquity of
man in the Americas. To be sure, it has to do with the Indians who made
the civilizations of Middle America and Peru two thousand years ago, and
not with the earlier men who did no more than hunt or gather, and who
made nothing more remarkable than Folsom and Eden points or milling
stones. But by studying certain aspects of those civilizations we may
recognize that the Indians had been in the Americas 3,000 to 5,000 years
before Columbus. By so much we may reenforce the theory that their
forerunners or their forebears came to the New World at least 15,000
years ago and probably 25,000 or more years ago.
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
the aforementioned river basin. In Australia their descendants are
rather short and stocky, with a “rough-hewn Caucasoid cast of features.”
Their craniums are long and low, with large brow ridges—general traits
of Pleistocene man as well as some of our possibly early, and certainly
problematical, Americans. Coon supposes that natural selection among the
Amurians—trapped by the advance of the fourth glaciation or one of its
substages—produced certain Mongoloid features that they later carried
into the New World. Birdsell sees among the early migrants no Negritos,
no full-sized Negroids, no so-called Melanesians, no Mediterranean type
of Caucasoids. He suggests that a much-mixed strain of Caucasoid
Amurians and the newly evolved Mongoloid race accounts for earliest man
in the Americas. These “present the only discernible elements available
at the proper time and place to have contributed importantly to the New
World populations.... One may speculate that if human populations
reached the New World in the third interglacial they could be expected
to be purely Caucasoid, that is Amurian, and to show no Mongoloid
characteristics.” Birdsell suggests that migrants coming after the last
glaciation would carry some Mongoloid features through hybridization.
Guardedly, Birdsell insists that, though this is a satisfying and
stimulating hypothesis, we have as yet no means of judging accurately
racial affiliations from a single cranium or entire populations. He
concludes—somewhat sadly, we surmise—that methods utilized as recently
as 1949 (the date of his proposal) offer no promise of unraveling in
detail the enigma of the origins of our earliest Americans.
10
DID THE INDIAN INVENT OR BORROW HIS CULTURE?
_American anthropologists usually deny that Old World cultures have
influenced to any great extent the pre-Columbian development of the
American Indian. We have set up for Aboriginal America a sort of_ ex
post facto _Monroe Doctrine and are inclined to regard suggestions of
alien influences as acts of aggression. This is probably a
scientifically tenable position, although I am afraid it has often
been maintained in part by an emotional bias—an “America for
Americans” feeling._
—EARNEST A. HOOTON
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, and Pizarro found in the New World were
homegrown products—importations barred. The question at issue between
the friends and the opponents of this dogma is commonly expressed as
Independent Invention versus Diffusion. But the phrasing is not quite
accurate: it needs a little amplification. Anything invented by man is
in a sense an independent invention. In the present case we are talking
of an invention made in one center, the New World, independent of a
similar invention in another center, the Old. We are concerned, not with
independent invention, but with _parallel_ independent invention.
“Diffusion” is still more inaccurate. Normally it means the gradual
transfer of some trait or technique from one people to another, often
through the intervention of a third or of a third and a fourth people.
In the present discussion it is more a matter of a people’s carrying the
trait or the technique to a new home. The question is not merely, “Did
the Indian invent pottery?” or “Did the American Australoid invent the
bull-roarer?” It is rather, “Did he invent it in the New World or the
Old?” or “Did he invent it in the Old World and carry it to the New?” or
“Did he invent it in the New World while another fellow invented it in
the Old?”
This problem of parallel independent invention versus diffusion is
important to any discussion of early man, because it can also be
phrased: “Did he or did he not bring traits from the Old World that may
indicate his racial ancestry?”
[Illustration: FROM BURMA TO MELANESIA TO AMERICA?
_Among the most curious resemblances between traits in the New World
and in the Old are those of Panpipes. Certain pipes from the Solomon
Islands have been found to have the same scale and the same absolute
pitch as specimens from western Brazil. Double rows of pipes come
from the hinterland of Burma, from the Solomon Islands, and from
Panama and the Andean highlands, and in all these areas the two rows
are tuned in the same relation to each other. The two sets may be
lashed together, like these from the Solomon Islands, left, and from
Bolivia, right, or they may be merely connected by a cord and blown
by two men or, alternately, by one. (Left, after von Hornbostel,
1912; right, after Nordenskiöld, 1924.)_]
[Illustration: _The material used in these fishhooks—pearl shell in
Tahiti; abalone shell on San Nicolas Island, off southern
California—dictated the slight difference in shape. Objects like
these are found only in these general areas. (Courtesy of the
American Museum of Natural History and the Santa Barbara Museum of
Natural History.)_]
Both the theory of diffusion and the theory of parallel, independent
invention arise from the same scientific fact. This fact is that
different primitive peoples often make similar tools, build similar
buildings, enjoy similar institutions, live by similar customs, or
believe similar myths. And they do this although the tribes may be
widely separated from one another. To pin the matter down to our own
present concern, certain objects found in the New World and dated before
Columbus are almost exactly like objects in the Old World. For instance,
a spear-thrower from western Texas not only employs the same principle
as one from Australia, but has practically the same physical shape.
Curved throwing-sticks and bull-roarers come from both these localities
(see illustration, page 226). Star-shaped mace heads of Melanesian type
turn up in Peru. Looms that have the same eleven working parts are found
in areas of the New World as well as the Old. Easter Island has
polygonal stonework with locked joints which matches a form of masonry
in Andean Peru, and a certain people of Easter Island stretched their
ear lobes in the same fashion as the Incas. Panpipes of the Old World
type appear in South America, Panama, and California; some from western
Brazil are identical in tonal scale and absolute pitch with some from
the Solomon Islands (see illustration, page 235). In Hawaii and in Peru,
as in Egypt and ancient Japan, brothers married to sisters were of
superior status. The digging stick of certain Polynesians has a step
like that of the Indians of Peru. The quipu, or knotted-string record,
spread from Polynesia to Peru, and the decimal system was found in both
areas, though farther north, in Middle America, men employed the
vigesimal system based on progression by twenties. The Hindu game of
pachisi resembles the Mexican game of patolli. Lists have been published
of as many as fifty such similarities between Oceania and the
Americas.[1]
[Illustration: DIFFUSION OR INDEPENDENT INVENTION?
_Striking resemblances exist between Old World and New World
artifacts. The stone clubs are about 14 inches long. (Upper left,
after Gladwin, 1937; the Chinese bell, after Gladwin, 1937, the
Arizona bell, after Elmore, 1945; upper right, the New Zealand club,
after Wickersham, 1895, the California and Peruvian clubs, after
Imbelloni, 1930. The mace heads, after Gladwin, 1937.)_]
Effigy Flints
Russia
Illinois
Bronze and Copper Bells
China
Arizona
Two-Edged Stone Clubs
New Zealand
California
Peru
Star-Shaped Mace Head
Melanesia
Peru
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 vines. But beyond “elementary ideas,” said Bastian, man would
develop different things in different places, depending on different
physical conditions; and finally, as he reached a higher plane of mental
and social development, his ideas and his behavior would be influenced
by other men and other cultures with which he came in contact. This was
a sound thesis. Unfortunately, however, Bastian’s followers ignored the
words “elementary ideas,” as well as the last half of his theory, and
made “psychic unity” the provider of all good things from pots to
pyramids.
There have been opponents of independent invention, of course. There
were some in Bastian’s day. They pointed out—as Robert H. Lowie has done
recently—that the champion of the theory must prove that different
peoples making similar things were subjected to similar stimulants in
both areas. Otherwise “all the societies of the world should share the
features in question.”[2] Lowie might have said that all cultures of man
should be alike today.
By and large, the diffusionists were in the minority. The distorters of
Bastian triumphed. They triumphed even in the Old World, where distances
were not always very great, and where traffic between Africa and Eurasia
seemed not so very difficult. You can imagine, therefore, what a happy
hunting ground the independent inventionists have made of the Americas.
The New World is remote indeed from the Old. You must go back to the
time of the glaciers to find a land-bridge and up to the Arctic to bring
the two worlds within hailing distance of each other. Otherwise you must
be willing to accept thousands of miles of ocean voyaging. The physical
fact of the remoteness of the Americas has stopped many a mental
adventurer among the anthropologists. He rereads with respect—perhaps
too much respect—these words of Spinden’s: “The fact that no food plant
is common to the two hemispheres is enough to offset any number of petty
puzzles in arts and myths.”[3]
If the physical fact of the Pacific Ocean had not been enough to stifle
talk of diffusion, the extravagant theories of Sir Grafton Elliot Smith
would have done the job. Here was a diffusionist indeed! Echoed by W. J.
Perry, Smith found the beginnings of all culture of any importance in
Egypt, and from there he sent its traveling salesmen abroad to sell it
to Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Pearls and pyramids, gold and
dolmens, initiations and totemism, sun worship and the marriage of
brother and sister, mummies—even if they were no more than desiccated
bodies wrapped in a bag—these traits and many more all “proved” that the
Children of the Sun had sold their cultural goods to lesser peoples.
There were other theorists as wild and whirling. Augustus Le Plongeon
brought the Maya from Atlantis to found Egypt. Ignatius Donnelly
reversed the procession and dragged Greeks to Atlantis and then Mexico.
Lewis Spence transported Atlas across the Atlantic as the Mexican god
Quetzalcoatl. Leo Wiener, as Spinden has put it, “derives everything of
importance in the New World from the highly civilized coasts of Gambia
and Sierra Leone ... brightest Africa.”[4] And then there was Churchward
with his continent of Mu.
Smiths and Perry’s uncritical use of evidence and their distortion of
fact—plus these fantasies of Africa and Atlantis and Mu—put the friends
of independent invention even more firmly in the saddle than the single
and simple fact of the Pacific Ocean. The diffusion of Smith _et al._
was a diffusion to end all diffusion.
Americanists—students of man in the New World—have not yet escaped from
the curse of the Children of the Sun, and the terror of Atlantis and Mu.
One of the best, Baron Erland Nordenskiöld, a distinguished Swedish
scientist, gave a great deal of energy to the cataloguing of the many
evidences of analogies; and yet he came to the conclusion that, by and
large, Indian culture was a product of independent invention in the New
World.[5] He granted that the Indians may have received from Oceania
through random voyages “one or two cultivable plants and possibly a few
more culture elements”—knowledge of how to make crude clay vessels, for
example.[6] Hrdlička, too, conceded a small number of sea-borne visitors
before Columbus: “It is ... probable that the western coast of America,
within the last 2,000 years, was on more than one occasion reached by
small parties of Polynesians, and that the eastern coast was similarly
reached by small groups of whites, and that such parties may have
locally influenced the culture of the Americans.”[7] But Hrdlička
considered such voyaging of very little importance.
[Illustration: CIRCUMPACIFIC NAVIGATION?
_There are marked resemblances between the traits of the Maori of
New Zealand and of the Indians of the northwest coast of North
America. Among these are sailing ships and houses. (After figures on
a map by Covarrubias, 1940.)_]
NEW ZEALAND
NORTHWESTERN AMERICA
Only two anthropologists of any standing have favored diffusion. The
first of these, Earnest A. Hooton, rejected “the supposition that these
various Asiatic invaders brought with them to the New World nothing but
a repressed desire to indulge in independent invention, that they came
with culturally empty hands, but brains stuffed full of patents to be
filed only after arrival.... I have no use at all for the
anthropological isolationists who are determined to maintain the
incredible dogma that there was no diffusion of inventions and ideas
from the Old World to the New, but only of naked human animals.”[8]
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 two different men inventing it on opposite sides of the
world. A bow and arrow with three essential parts presents a little more
of a problem, but not too much, for the three parts are dependent on one
another. If the bow has a back reinforced by sinew, if the arrow has
feathers and a foreshaft, and the foreshaft has a flint arrowhead—making
seven elements in all—then one begins to wonder at the mathematical
chances of two men exactly duplicating the whole arrangement. Then,
consider the vertical loom with nine separate elements, and eleven if it
sports a shuttle and a reed fork.
From citing such coincidences, Gladwin turns to the second step of the
diffusionist’s argument. This has to do not alone with one complex
object, but with unrelated things grouped around it—let us say a
vertical loom and bark cloth, painted tripod pottery, and metal casting
by the lost wax method. Now if all these disconnected objects can be
found in another locality and in use by another people, the suggestion
of diffusion becomes far stronger than even in the case of a single
complex machine. As Gladwin puts it:
If ... a man should report to the Chinese police that some copper
bells, a vertical loom, some tripod trays, and a roll of bark cloth
had been stolen from his house, and if, after broadcasting the
details, the American police should find all these articles in the
possession of a man in America, where such things had hitherto been
unknown, would the authorities be satisfied with the explanation that
the possessor had independently invented each item? I am inclined to
think that, if I should happen to be the attorney for the defense,
knowing that my client had recently come over from Asia, a plea of
insanity might carry more weight with the jury than my client’s
explanation.
He argues his point still more vividly:
If a Scotsman uses a split-bamboo trout rod, a waterproof silkline,
and a barbed hook, it is not necessarily a case of diffusion if a man
in Saskatchewan is found to be fishing with a willow twig, a piece of
string, and a bent-pin, since each item is dependent upon the others.
But if in addition to their fishing tackle, the Scotsman and the man
in Saskatchewan are found to possess a shot-gun, a flask, a brier-pipe
and bagpipes, then it would look like a case of diffusion since no one
item of the assemblage is dependent upon any other.[9]
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 be drawn from Oceania and South America. Dixon writes of the
diffusionists:
When in South America, they say, you find not only coca-chewing, plank
canoes, and tie-dyeing, but also terraced irrigation, Panpipes, and
the blow gun—all traits widespread in the western Pacific and
southeastern Asia—how can you deny that their occurrence is due to
diffusion, or believe for a moment that so many similar and parallel
inventions could take place? The challenge is a formidable one. Is
there anything that can be said in reply?
Dixon points out that these Oceanic traits are not found _together_ in
the New World. The plank canoe is confined to the Santa Barbara Islands
and southern Chile; tie-dyeing, to the arid coasts of northern Peru;
coca-chewing, originally to the Andean highlands and the tropical
forests along its eastern border; terraced irrigation, to the Andes of
Peru and Bolivia; the blow gun, to the upper Amazon and Orinoco forests,
the Antilles, and the eastern United States; the Panpipe, to the
Amazon-Orinoco drainage and southward through Bolivia to northern Chile
and the Peruvian coast, and to one or two isolated spots in Ecuador and
Colombia. “With one exception the only area where the distribution of
any two of these traits is found to overlap lies in the Andean highlands
and the tropical forest area to the eastward. Only tie-dyeing and the
Panpipe are found together on the coast.” Further, the two traits we
find on the coast are separated in the Old World. Tie-dyeing is found
specifically in Indonesia “and known in Melanesia only in degenerate
form in one small area, whereas the Panpipe is primarily Melanesian and
almost unknown in Indonesia.”[10] He seems to be ignorant of double
Panpipes connected by a cord which are found in the hinterland of Burma
and also in Panama and South America.[11]
No opponent of diffusionism is so blind as to deny the importation of
some culture traits by the migrants from northern Asia. Kroeber concedes
the fire drill, the spear-thrower, stone chipping, twisting of string,
the bow, the throwing harpoon, simple basketry and nets, hunting
complexes, cooking stones in vessels of wood, of bark, or of skin, body
painting and perhaps tattooing, the domestication of dogs.[12] But,
except for these and a few other examples, most anthropologists deny
that the American Indians, early or late, brought any objects of their
culture from the Old World. Alfred V. Kidder has phrased very neatly
their antagonism to “non-stop journeys by bag-and-baggage culture
carriers.”[13] This phrase is aimed at a weak chink in the
diffusionist’s armor—the fact that Old World traits found, say, in the
Southwest, Middle America, or farther south leave no trail across Alaska
and down through Canada and over the Great Plains.
In addition, the opponents of diffusion like to point out that certain
things in the Indian culture of the northern part of the New World are
like certain things in the Indian culture of the southern part, while in
between lies a very large area—Middle America and Peru—of entirely
different culture traits. Here we find none of the northern and southern
things. Nordenskiöld observes that, while some of the identical northern
and southern traits may be due to the stimulus of similar cold climates,
there are numerous traits that have nothing to do with temperature and
humidity. He doubtless feels he is delivering the coup de grâce when he
writes:
It is a very characteristic fact that incomparably greater similarity
exists between civilizations as far apart as those of the Calchaquis
of Argentina, and the Pueblos of North America, than between the
culture of any Indian tribe and that of any people in the whole of
Oceania.[14]
If such traits were diffused from one American area to the other, they
left no trace between. When we add this to the fact that from Alaska to
Middle America there are no traces of even the simplest beginnings of
the cultures of the central area, the advocate of independent invention
has a pretty good case. In answer, the diffusionist has been tempted to
argue that when men are moving rather steadily across an area, they do
not leave evidence that is easy to find some millenniums later. Only a
hundred years have passed since Brigham Young led his people from
Independence, Missouri, to Salt Lake City, and yet there is a singular
paucity of spinning wheels and first editions of _The Book of Mormon_
along their trail.
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
ornaments of gold by a most intricate process. There was a complex
despotism in Mexico and as complex and despotic a communism in Peru. The
Maya had a calendar more accurate than the one Columbus used. They had
devised a hieroglyphic writing and knew how to make cement. The Indians
of both continents had developed an extensive agriculture, with potatoes
and fertilizers in Peru and corn and beans and tomatoes all over the
place.
As soon as the archaeologists decided that all this had been invented in
the New World with no help to speak of from the Old, they had to
recognize that it would take quite a little time. At first this posed a
difficulty, for there was no very early evidence of man in Mexico. In
1917, however, came the discovery of skeletons and pottery under a lava
flow at Copilco near Mexico City and of a primitive pyramid half buried
under the same flow at near-by Cuicuilco; and the archaeologists
promptly dated the eruption of the lava at 4000 B.C.
Then, unfortunately, new evidence narrowed the trap of time once more.
George C. Vaillant and his wife dated other sites with the same kind of
pottery as Copilco considerably later than the birth of Christ. A
radiocarbon date based upon charcoal within the pottery level below the
Cuicuilco lava falls between these guesses; it is 2422 ± 250 years.[15]
The Basket Makers advanced from an estimated 2000 B.C. to a tree-ring
date about A.D. 217. And all this time nobody could find any really
primitive beginnings of pottery in Middle America, and nothing that
seemed earlier than the birth of Christ. The trap of time was growing
tighter and tighter. A very elaborate civilization would have to develop
in 1,500 years, without any roots. Gladwin pointed out this difficulty
and urged the theory that man came into the Americas not only as a
paleolithic primitive 15,000 or 25,000 years ago, but as a fairly
civilized and perfected neolithic close to the beginning of the
Christian era.
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 more than the brawn and brains which someone
else would later direct. His fifteenth chapter begins with the following
parody of a baseball score:
_Score at the End of the Fourth Inning_
NORTH AMERICA 4
Australoid, Folsom, Algonquin, Eskimo
SOUTH AMERICA 1
Australoid
_No Discoveries No Inventions No Mongoloids_
By 300 B.C.—two hundred years after the Eskimo—Gladwin is willing to add
1 run to the North American score and make that run Mongoloid. But he
does not believe that the Mongoloids reached South America in any
numbers, or contributed anything but labor to the culture which Columbus
found. They did not make black-on-white pottery in the Pueblo country or
red-on-buff pottery and irrigation canals in southern Arizona, create
incised pottery, pyramids, carved jade, or a calendar system and
hieroglyphs in Middle America, pound bark cloth in Central America, or
produce stone fortresses and superb weaving and portrait jugs in Peru.
Left to their own devices, the Mongoloids would have accomplished no
more in the New World than they had in the Old before the Huns made
things unpleasant for them in northern China. Gladwin believes that the
people who created the culture of Middle America and Peru came overseas,
spreading north and south from the isthmus of Panama. The suggested
invasion by water explains the odd fact that many of the traits of
northern North America are like some of those of southern South America,
and not at all like most of the traits of the area between. Some of
these northern and southern traits, says Gladwin, are the property of
the Australoids who came far back; others in North America find
analogies in China and northern Asia. His overseas peoples thrust
themselves and their culture into the central part of the New World,
changing or obliterating the Australoid traits that they found there,
and isolating those that lay to the north and south. He believes that
these people brought with them certain objects and customs from the
islands in the Pacific, from southeastern Asia, and from China and
points west. Among them is the habit of squeezing a baby’s head between
boards to give it an elegant elongation; this head deformation is not
practiced in northern Asia, from which the Indians are presumed to have
come.
It is hardly necessary to point out that Gladwin’s hypothesis disposes
of the question: “Why are there no traces of Middle American and
Peruvian traits on the trail down from Alaska?” But we might ask: “Why
are there not more of them in the Pacific islands?”
Gladwin has not worked out his maritime invasions too thoroughly; but he
sees the Melanesians—who, he believed, reached Easter Island—continuing
on to Central America and becoming the Caribs and spreading into South
America and the West Indies. He sees the Polynesians taking much the
same route and turning into the Arawaks.
What started these South Sea islanders off on their career of civilizing
the central part of the Americas? Where did they get some of the traits
and some of the physical features that Melanesians and Polynesians do
not now possess, as well as their inventive brains? Here Gladwin has a
startling and fabulous theory to put forward. Here is where Alexander
the Great and his sailors and ships come in.
Dead Alexander Invades America
[Illustration: 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, after Vaillant, 1931; the fourth, after
Stirling, 1940; the last, after Covarrubias, 1946.)_]
Before Alexander died in 323 B.C. he brought 5,000 Levantine and Greek
shipwrights and sailors to the Persian Gulf and built a navy of 800
vessels. We hear a good deal about what his army did after his death, of
the quarrels of generals and the dissipation of their forces—but not a
word about the 5,000 nautical men or their fleet. As Gladwin points out,
it is hard to imagine that sailors with sound vessels under them would
take shore leave and walk home to Greece. If they sailed away from the
Persian Gulf, which way would they have gone? They would hardly have
sailed southwestward along the Arabian coast; for Alexander died at a
season when the winds would have been against them, and the coast is
lacking in fresh water and harbors at any time. A southeastward voyage
would have been another matter. The wind would have been behind them,
and they had already found the coast attractive in that direction.
With this much to go upon, Gladwin sends the fleet of the dead Alexander
down the coast of India, past the Spice Islands, and out through
Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia. On the way the fleet picks up men
and women of various races, and stimulates the whole South Seas into a
navigating era. The end result is another discovery of America. It is a
discovery by a varied and talented people. Along with the
Melanesian-Carib and Polynesian-Arawak, the fleet of Gladwin and
Alexander finally brings to our western shores those bearded white men
with civilizing propensities who are found in the legends of the Toltec
and Maya and the peoples of Colombia and Peru. They it is who teach the
Mongoloids how to build stone edifices, work metals, weave textiles, and
make fine pots. Gladwin documents all this assiduously and even goes to
his opponents for evidence.
He bolsters his argument with the “Q Complex”—that list of traits in the
cultures of Middle America and the southeastern portion of the United
States which Vaillant and Lothrop compiled as being very old indeed and
unaccounted for in present theory. _Men Out of Asia_ suggests that the
Levantine voyagers brought these things or shaped them after they
landed.
He uses with the greatest relish the mass of material on Oceanic traits
in the Americas that Nordenskiöld drew together in “Origin of the Indian
Civilizations in South America.” Of the forty-nine elements of culture
which the Swede found common to both regions, Gladwin points out that
more occur in Colombia and Panama than in any other New World
area—thirty-eight in all—and that Colombia and Panama surround the spot
where ships would have landed if they had followed the Equatorial
Counter Current to the Gulf of Darien. From this region as a center the
Melanesian and Polynesian traits gradually thin out to the north, the
south, and the east.
[Illustration: _The Equatorial Counter Current, which flows just
north of the equator, varies in width from 150 to 500 miles. The
winds in this area are light and blow from south of east over its
southern area and north of east over its northern area._]
Against Gladwin’s argument must be set, however, the evidence that
Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán has recently developed showing that, among the
slaves sent to Mexico from Manila during the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, there were many from New Guinea and other Pacific
islands.[16] Was there a similar trade with Colombia, where Oceanic
traits are slightly more plentiful than in Mexico and Central America,
and with Amazonia, where they are almost as plentiful? It is vitally
important, however, to remember that Melanesian slaves cannot possibly
be credited with the importation of objects that have been found in
pre-Columbian burials—certain Panpipes and mace heads, for example.
There are plenty of other objections, of course, to Gladwin’s theory,
even though it seems to explain much that has been a mystery; but there
are also defenses that he has not made. If the islands of the Pacific
are not too well provided with pottery, pyramids, cement, metallurgy,
and textiles, he might have pointed out that they were imperfectly
supplied with the proper raw materials. If the white voyagers left their
triremes behind in favor of double canoes, and if they did not build
Greek temples in the New World, he might have suggested that some
generations of sojourn in the South Seas led them to forget a few
things. Indeed, it is surprising that these sailors remembered so much
of weaving, metal working, and pottery (minus the potter’s wheel). It is
equally surprising and just a little disquieting that the white gods,
almost as soon as they landed, invented a complex and unique calendar
and a hieroglyphic system like nothing they were familiar with. (Perhaps
they could not agree on which of the many Old World varieties to use and
had to devise something new.)
Before pouncing too heavily on Gladwin and his Alexandrians, it may be
well to reread some sentences in his Introduction:
We are going to offer an explanation that will be a radical departure
from those in current circulation, and I shall be the first to admit
that this tale will need a great deal of patching and strengthening
before it will carry much weight. This may seem a strange way to
launch a new theory, but I am more concerned in opening up new
channels of inquiry than in trying to provide pat answers to all the
questions that are plaguing us.... I do not know of anyone who has yet
been rash enough to try to connect the origins of American
civilizations with definite causes, at definite dates, in the progress
of Old World history, and it is for this reason that I have said this
tale will need support and will undoubtedly need to be changed. This,
however, is the way that every theory should be treated, and no harm
will be done if when a new idea is launched it is regarded with due
reserve, but also without prejudice.[17]
Our next chapter will return to rather formidable arguments for
inventiveness in the American Indian; but first we should perhaps point
out that Gladwin is not an Elliot Smith riding the hobby of diffusion to
the end. He admits independent invention in many important fields.
Pottery was invented, he believes, at least twice in the Old World. He
concedes a number of origins for agriculture in the New. But he believes
that the really inventive men of the New World—the men who developed
corn, and devised the Maya calendar—were the men who brought brains as
well as cultural equipment in the ships of Alexander, and put those
brains to work devising more cultural equipment. (He ignores the fact
that corn was developed more than a thousand years before Alexander was
born.) Gladwin simply does not consider that early man and his
successors before the birth of Christ were smart enough to produce much
more than exceptionally good spear points and rather inferior milling
stones. He does not believe that the Australoids or the Folsom men or
the Algonquins or the Mongoloids who came over just before our era—let
alone the Uto-Aztecans or the Athabascans a little later—were capable of
inventing much in the way of neolithic civilization. He points out that
the Indian—bereft, presumably, of the brains and blood of the men of
Alexander’s fleet—has not done much inventing in the past four
centuries. An opponent might remark that many an inventive, creative
people has lapsed from grace—the Egyptians and the Greeks, for instance.
The Polynesians and the Melanesians have not done much more inventing
than the Indians since the days when the Alexandrians turned them into
pre-Columbian pioneers of America culture.
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
its own. Many culture traits of Middle America and Peru are not found in
Oceania: the use of cement in masonry and the vigesimal system of
numeration in Middle America; the amazingly intricate Maya calendar and
hieroglyphics with the first invention of zero; baked brick in two
Mexican sites; bronze in Peru; the hammock; the whistling jar; the
manioc press. Some of these New World traits must have been invented
here, but we are asked to believe that the others were forgotten in
Oceania and remembered in the Americas. One argument for trans-Pacific
diffusion is clear and cogent, however. It is hard to believe that the
men who voyaged as far as the Marquesas and Easter Island stopped there,
and so missed our long coast line. Certainly the sweet potato made the
ocean crossing in the reverse direction, but was it before Columbus?[18]
Other things went with the sweet potato, according to the great chemist
Gilbert N. Lewis. Without believing that man originated in South
America, he thinks that man first reached the neolithic level in the
area east of the Peruvian Andes while his fellow man in the rest of the
world was wandering in paleolithic darkness. In the Andean highlands,
man developed architecture, numeration, metallurgy, weaving, sculpture,
and so forth. He spread these things to Middle America 6,000 or 8,000
years ago, and then carried them across the Pacific to the Old
World.[19] As a whole, Lewis’s theory may be unacceptable; but his
arguments for diffusion and against independent invention are
persuasive.
In 1947 six Scandinavians demonstrated the possibility of an east-west
crossing by sailing and drifting 4,300 miles in 101 days on a primitive
raft of balsa logs from Peru to an atoll not many days from Tahiti.[20]
The position of the American partisans of independent invention is a
curious one. It is both weak and strong. Man is inventive—even primitive
man. But his inventions often have a unique quality: they are not always
duplicated, or they are not duplicated at the same level of cultural
development. Consider the cave paintings and the sculpture of the
Aurignacians, Solutreans, and Magdalenians in the late Paleolithic. It
is an art of remarkable perfection that utterly disappeared, and was not
equaled again for thousands upon thousands of years. At Bonampak, in
southern Mexico, a Maya painter used consummate perspective and
foreshortening long before they appeared in Asia. Then there are the
unique Folsom point, the perfection of the Solutrean and Eden points,
the Maya calendar and hieroglyphs, the mosaic walls of Mitla in Mexico,
Egyptian architecture and sculpture as well as writing, the beautifully
expressive masks of the African Negro, the Melanesian, and the Eskimo.
These were independent inventions, but they were unique ones. They were
not independent, _parallel_ inventions. And they were not diffused.
As for early man in the New World, we may believe if we wish that the
shape of the Sandia point was diffused from the Solutreans of Europe. We
may deny the independent invention in our Southwest of spear-throwers,
bull-roarers, bunt points, and curved throwing sticks that look more as
if they had been brought from Australia. The Eden point may have come
from Siberia, or Siberia may have got it from North America. The Folsom
point, however, looks definitely like an independent invention, for it
is found nowhere else in the world. This argues that the people who
ultimately succeeded in making it must have been in the New World for
many, many generations before one of them lashed a Folsom point to a
spear and thrust it into a bison. Where are the flints they shaped
before the Sandia, Clovis, and Folsom? Can they have evolved the craft
of flint knapping here in the New World? When we know this, we shall
probably know whether they came before or after the last glaciers.
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 same anthropologists at a meeting, two years
later, of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The
theme was “Prehistoric and Historic Asia: Transpacific Contacts with the
New World.”[21] The question of contacts was not squelched, but there
was no substantial progress in finding answers. The symposium focused
the problem on two tests of possible diffusion. These concerned
domesticated plants and formal art.
The strongest cases that can be made for the diffusion of any plant
concern the _Lagenaria_ gourd, cotton, the sweet potato, and the
coconut. None of these ranks as a staple of subsistence, and two of them
are not even food plants. Thus Old World and New World crops are
mutually exclusive. The four plants that we have mentioned may have had
world-wide distribution before man reached the New World; they may have
followed the first contacts of white men with the Americas; there is
only a remote possibility that they crossed the ocean through natural
agencies.
In formal art—or perhaps we should say religious art—there are some
tantalizing prospects for rather recent Asia-America diffusion. Gordon
Ekholm, of the American Museum of Natural History, has listed a number
of these. He suggests that the time of contact would have been about 700
A.D. This, you will note, is much too late to do much in shaping
American civilization. At the most, it would have furnished no more than
a bit of Asiatic frosting upon the cake of American civilization.
Drawing upon elements of art from India, southeast Asia, and Indonesia,
Ekholm points to similarities in Maya, Mexican, or other native American
art, where parallels seem to exist in such things as a trefoil arch, a
sacred tree or cross, tiger thrones, conch-shell-and-plant, Atlantean
figures, monster doorways, serpent columns and balustrades, and
others.[22] The comparisons are provocative, to say the least. In the
Maya area, where most of the suspected influence of Asia occurs, many
forms of art steadily deteriorated during the period when,
theoretically, Asiatic stimulation would have been most pronounced.
Can we logically assume that the Maya would borrow a lotus motif or a
serpent column from southeast Asia, but not the dome or true arch? Is it
likely that sailors from Asia or Oceania succeeded in introducing useful
plants but not sails or boats that could tack against the wind? If
transoceanic diffusion is to be considered seriously, should there be no
evidence for even a few practical seagoing inventions shared between the
Old World and the New? Surely this would be more acceptable to the
Americanists than forcing the assumption of transoceanic diffusion upon
the presence of cultivated plants of secondary importance, or
theological concepts expressed so vaguely as to be subject to
alternative interpretations.
11
THE INDIAN IN AGRICULTURE
_Corn, which is the staff of life._
—EDWARD WINSLOW, _Good Newes from New England_, (1624)
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
independent invention.
There is a third possibility: that the Indian invented things in the New
World which none of the peoples of the Old World ever invented. If he
could do this, then it is obvious that he could invent some things which
other people had also invented. The Indians ability to invent uniquely
is a far stronger argument for independent invention than the theory of
“psychic unity.” It is also an argument for early man, if the things
invented can be dated far back in time.
Nordenskiöld and others list a number of inventions that are unique to
the New World.[1] Among them are the hammock; the tube of diagonally
woven fibers which enabled the lowland Indians of South America to
squeeze the poison from the manioc and produce wholesome tapioca; the
ventilating and cooling system of the kivas (the subterranean religious
chambers of the pueblos); the Peruvian whistling jar; the cigar,
cigarette, tobacco pipe, cigar holder; the quipu (a set of knotted
strings for counting); the enema syringe; the hollow rubber ball;
elastic rings; the toboggan; the Maya calendar and hieroglyphs; and
possibly the snowshoe. If the list is not very impressive, consider how
few unique inventions the Old World could muster in the same kind of
stone age.
The significance of the list is reinforced by our knowledge of certain
parallel inventions which the Indian is presumed to have made without
aid from the Old World. One is metallurgy. In South America, he
discovered rather late how to smelt metals and make bronze. This
lateness, according to Nordenskiöld, proves independent invention. If
migrants brought over the knowledge of metallurgy, they left no trace of
it along their journey, either in North America or in the South Seas;
and there is no Indian folklore telling of how their forefathers or
their gods brought bronze to the New World. Nordenskiöld makes the
further point that, having invented the casting of metal, the Indians
must also have invented the forms in which they cast it—the socketed ax,
for example, the bell, and the pincers. On the basis of these inventions
in metallurgy, and other inventions, Nordenskiöld writes, “It is surely
a matter of logical reasoning to suppose that independent inventions may
have been made by them in the realms of architecture, weaving, ceramics,
etc.”[2] This would be a very much better argument, of course, if bronze
had never been invented in the Old World. Then no boatload of
Alexandrians could ever refute it.
Nordenskiöld might have added agriculture to his list of unique Indian
inventions—or rather the products of agriculture. The Indian discovered
and cultivated plants unknown to the Old World. He developed special
varieties suited to special conditions of soil and climate. In a sense
he even invented one very important plant, for botanists have been
unable to find any wild ancestor of Indian corn.
NEW WORLD PLANTS AND PRODUCTS
CULTIVATED FOOD CROPS
maize (Indian corn)*
white potato
sweet potato
tomato
pumpkin
squash
peanut
lima bean
kidney bean
tepary bean
chili pepper
cacao (for chocolate)
agave (for pulque)
sunflower seed
custard apple
pineapple
chayote (vegetable)
quinoa (cereal)
strawberry
arracacha (root)
avocado
manioc (for tapioca)
Jerusalem artichoke
WILD FOODSTUFFS
persimmon
papaw
papaya
wild rice
guava
arrowroot
cashew nut
jacote (plum)
Paraguay tea (maté)
soursop
vanilla bean
tonka bean
capulin (a cherry)
FIBERS
New World cottons*
henequen
DYES
cochineal (red)*
annatto (red and yellow)
anil (indigo blue)
GUMS
rubber
copal
balsam of Peru
chicle
DRUGS
tobacco*
coca* (for cocaine)
cinchona (for quinine)
cascara sagrada
ipecac
*Cultivated
A more exhaustive list could include many natural products which the
Indian used locally, such as flour made from acorn and mesquite.
_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 Africa. Otherwise, “of cultivable plants,” says
Nordenskiöld, “the ancient American higher civilizations possessed none
in common with the Old World.”[3]
There are two very curious facts about primitive husbandry in the New
World. The Americas provided the Indian with few animals that could be
domesticated, and no draft animals at all. Because he had no ox and no
horse, he could not use a plow, and did not invent one. Fortunately, on
the other hand, the Americas had no plants that required plow
cultivation and field sowing. Wild rice grew in lakes. The rest of the
plants responded to hoe culture. Or, rather, since the Indian used the
hoe only in limited areas—and probably quite late, at that—the seeds
could be placed in the ground with a planting stick, and after a little
hand cultivation the shade of the abundant leaves would take care of the
weeds. Beans, corn, manioc, and potatoes—the four major crops—were
ideally suited to the only means the Indian possessed for planting and
cultivating.
This difference between agriculture in the Mediterranean area and the
New World is quite as great as the difference between the pastoral
activities of the Fertile Crescent and the scanty domestication of
animals in the Americas. Here there is no solace for the diffusionist.
As Lowie has said, “There is more resemblance between the Ionic capital
and a Papuan headrest than between the sowing of cereals and the
planting of a banana shoot.” (If he had been thinking specifically of
our present problem, he would have substituted corn kernel or potato eye
for banana shoot.) “Bee-keeping is not the same as training elephants or
herding horses; and sowing seeds is not equivalent to planting a
side-shoot or a tuber, let alone ridding a tuber [manioc] of its prussic
acid.”[4]
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 cultivated in the Americas—probably because it was the
most spectacular—and was supposed to have originated in the highlands of
Mexico or Guatemala. Now we know that pumpkins preceded corn, and so, in
all probability, did most of the commoner food plants. Beans and melons,
with their free-running vines and prominent flowers and seed pods, would
seem most likely to have first attracted man—or, perhaps, woman—and led
him to assist the processes of nature.
When corn was king, semiarid farm lands were supposed to be the place of
its origin. Spinden saw “irrigation as an invention which accounts for
the very origin of agriculture itself.”[5] Semiarid land, however, is
notoriously hard to clear; though its plants are few, they have deep,
tenacious roots. River flood plains of the Sonoran desert in
Mexico—ideal by Spinden’s standard—yield no evidence of long or
extensive occupation, according to Carl Sauer. Where irrigation was used
in our Southwest, dates are not early. The evidence of the plants
themselves, he writes, “overwhelmingly points not to desert or steppe
but to several humid climates for their origin.”[6]
There has never been much enthusiasm for the humid tropic lowlands as
the seedbed of agriculture. Of late years the students of botany have
turned to the temperate forest area and particularly to the mountain
valley as the seat of agriculture. This has been championed by N. I.
Vavilov and a group of Russian scientists, sent to the Americas in the
1920’s, who made a most elaborate study of our native cultivated plants.
Much of their evidence is too technical for presentation here, but their
conclusions have seemed convincing to many students.[7] A mountain
valley provides a wider range of temperature and rainfall and a greater
variety of native plants. Its forest trees, before they are cleared by
girdling and burning, store up a rich humus under their shade. Costa
Rica and El Salvador—full of isolated mountain valleys—contain,
according to Henry J. Bruman, as many species of plants as the United
States, in spite of the fact that the United States is a hundred times
the size of the two countries together.[8] The Russians believe that
agriculture took early shape in certain mountain valley areas, including
southern Mexico, Central America, Colombia, highland Peru, western
Bolivia, and southern Chile. Though they do not commit themselves as to
whether agriculture originated in one place and spread later to others,
“their evidence,” Sauer thinks, “may be interpreted in favor of multiple
independent beginnings.”[9] But Bruman, writing of their work, points
out that the “enormous spread of maize and beans, of cotton and tobacco,
for example, shows that there is ‘something of the undivided whole’ in
the great cultures of the New World, as Vavilov well expresses it.”[10]
Richard S. MacNeish, an archaeologist who spent at least a dozen years
on the matter, declared in 1960, “There were multiple origins of New
World domesticated plants, at different times.”[11]
It is amusing to note that the diffusionists and the partisans of
independent invention change places on the subject of corn. Spinden
diffuses all corn from Middle America. Gladwin plumps for various areas
of independent invention, including the Mississippi Valley.[12]
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
more intensively in the Americas than elsewhere. The major crop plants
were farther removed from their wild ancestors than those of any other
part of the earth at the time of the discovery. Mention need only be
made of corn, which is so distinct as to require classification in a
unique genus, and of the potato, which resulted probably from the
crossing of many and various Solanaceae.
[The Solanaceae include nightshade, jimson weed, tobacco, and others.]
It is ironic that, as O. F. Cook has observed, the white potatoes grown
each year are worth more than all the gold that the Spaniards took from
the Incas.[14] This is probably still truer of Indian corn.
[Illustration: THE FIRST ILLUSTRATION OF THE CORN PLANT
_From Fuch’s_ De Historia Stirpium, _published in 1542, only fifty
years after Columbus’s men first saw maize. Seven years earlier,
Oviedo printed a drawing of an ear of corn. (Courtesy of Harvard
University Library.)_]
On November 5, 1492, two Spaniards whom Columbus had sent into the
interior of Cuba told him of “a sort of grain they call maiz which was
well tasted, bak’d, dry’d, and made into flour.” Thus came the first
news of what P. C. Mangelsdorf and R. G. Reeves, authorities on corn,
call “a cereal treasure of immensely greater value than the spices which
Columbus traveled so far to seek.”[15]
The fact that corn is today the second most important food crop of the
world is due to its unique adaptability. In 1492 at least seven hundred
different varieties of this grain were growing in widely varied areas of
half the western hemisphere. Today corn is grown on all the continents,
and its habitats range from 58° north latitude in Canada and Russia to
40° south of the equator in Argentina.
Fields of maize are growing below sea level in the Caspian plain and
at altitudes of more than 12,000 feet in the Peruvian Andes. Corn is
cultivated in regions of less than ten inches of annual rainfall in
the semi-arid plains of Russia, and in regions with more than 200
inches of rain in the tropics of Hindustan. It thrives almost equally
well in the short summers of Canada and the perpetual summer of
tropical Colombia.[16]
For the Gaspé Peninsula in the province of Quebec and for the Pyrenees
Mountains there is a variety that matures in two months; for Colombia
there is one that requires ten or eleven months. The height ranges from
two feet to twenty; the leaves vary from eight to forty-eight; the
number of stalks by a single seed, from one to twelve; the ears from
three inches to three feet. Authorities used to list from five to eight
basically different types of corn; the five are sweet, flour, dent,
flint, and pop. “The Russians,” write P. C. Mangelsdorf and R. G.
Reeves, “have already collected more than 8,000 varieties.”[17]
[Illustration: “TURKIE CORNE”
_By 1578, maize had spread so widely in the Old World that in
Dodoen’s_ A Newe Herball _the habitat of this “marvelous strange
plant” was attributed to Turkey. (Courtesy of Harvard University
Library.)_]
[Illustration: A SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY PICTURE OF CORN
_Part of a page from Parkinson’s_ Theatrum Botanicum, _published in
1640. (Courtesy of Harvard University Library.)_]
All the chief types of corn known today were developed by the Indians to
suit the wide variety of lands and climates in which they lived. The
feat seems all the more remarkable because botanists tell us that all
these varieties had to be developed by keen observation and hard work
from a single parent species—_Zea mays L._—and modern man has never
found corn in a wild form. This amazingly varied plant, which cannot
properly seed itself and will die without man’s intervention, was
evolved from a plant that is now apparently extinct.
In spite of the old saw about the staff of life, a starchy grain is not
the ideal food; but corn, says Sauer, is the most useful of all American
starches because in addition to its ease of storage “it contains also
fat and protein and is a more nearly complete food than the others.”[18]
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 the first agriculturists of the New World discovered how to
grow other plants, because whether corn originated in Middle America,
Colombia, or Paraguay—independent inventionists argue for each
locality—or in all three with the Mississippi Valley thrown in, there
can be no question that it came later than most of the other cultivated
plants. This adds still more years to the story of the civilizing of man
in the Americas. Bruman writes:
Whether this high specialization of cultivated plant life can be used
as an indication of greater age on the part of American agriculture in
comparison to that of the Old World is a difficult point. In the
writer’s opinion it may indicate merely a greater agricultural
awareness on the part of the Indian, a cultural trait no doubt
strongly furthered by the relative unimportance of domesticated
animals.[20]
[Illustration: _Corn of 4,500 years ago, as reconstructed from a cob
found in Bat Cave, New Mexico. (After Mangelsdorf and Smith,
1949.)_]
Sylvanus G. Morley believed that the Maya cultivated corn at a time
close to 1000 B.C.[21] which was, of course, no more than a guess.
MacNeish states that the most ancient corn of the Maya area, found in
the gulf state of Tamaulipas, dates from about 5,000 years ago.[22] We
may presume that the Maya were cultivating it some centuries earlier.
Antevs gives a date of “not later than 2500 B.C.” for a layer of refuse
in Bat Cave, New Mexico, in which Herbert W. Dick found the cobs and
kernels of a primitive form of maize that is both a pod corn and a pop
corn. These cobs—now dated by radiocarbon at about 5,600 years
ago[23]—range from 2⅜ inches to 3¾ inches in length. Though probably not
specimens of the long-sought wild corn, they are not far removed in
characteristics.[24] In coastal Peru—where corn could not have
started—Julio C. Tello found kernels in the ruins of Paracas, along with
manioc roots, sweet potatoes, and beans. There is a radiocarbon date of
about 2,250 years ago for cotton cloth from a mummy found at
Paracas.[25] In a preceramic culture about 5,000 years old,[26] Duncan
Strong and Junius Bird found no corn, but evidence that these early
agriculturists had raised cotton, squash, and other plants.[27]
It seems unlikely that any form of agriculture could have been developed
from native plants in coastal Peru, for it is as arid a spot as can be
found anywhere in our hemisphere. Only an elaborate system of irrigation
canals enabled this area to grow extensively corn, beans, and other
plants. In the highly developed civilization of the coast—so close to
the guano islands—the Indians started the use of fertilizers, which was
to be a feature of Peruvian agriculture. The development of irrigation
and fertilizer, plus city architecture and the finest pottery in the
Americas, spells many years of slowly growing civilization in coastal
Peru, and behind these beginnings must have lain centuries upon
centuries of earlier agricultural discoveries and improvements in the
hinterlands. The only alternative is to accept the diffusion of a
full-blown culture across the Pacific.
There are those who believe that corn did in fact come from Asia to the
Americas. Sauer points out that Asia has more kinds of the wild grasses,
Gramineae, akin to corn, _Zea mays L._, than the New World.[28] Another
argument is that though the Chinese kept a careful record of the
importation of various plants such as tobacco and the opium poppy, there
is no mention of corn, implying that they had long been familiar with
some variety of it.[29] The botanist Edgar Anderson believes it could
have originated in Burma, and could have come across the Pacific “along
with cotton, pottery, weaving, etc.”[30] Anderson’s evidence, as he
himself maintains, is not conclusive; but it is certainly suggestive.
Popcorn is found today among primitive or backward peoples in the
remoter parts of Formosa, Sumatra, Java, Borneo, and Burma. From the
Naga Hills, where Burma meets Assam, Anderson has had brought to the
United States cobs and kernels of popcorn which are identical with the
corn found in the earliest graves in Peru. Was this Burmese popcorn
carried eastward over the Pacific thousands of years ago and then
crossed with some American plant, such as _Tripsacum_, to produce the
great variety of larger and more useful types that the Spaniards found?
Or was popcorn, imported from the New World, the only maize that the
primitive Naga of Burma would cultivate?
The argument for a Burmese origin for popcorn is strengthened by some
habits of the Naga tribesmen which carry us back to the dispute over
diffusion versus independent invention. These people, living in the
Stone Age today, follow the agricultural pattern of the pre-Columbian
Indian. They burn trees and underbrush to clear their fields. They use a
digging stick to plant their corn in the charred rubbish. In amongst the
corn they grow cereals and cotton.[31] On the other hand, they could
have taken their corn to the New World long before the men of Bat Cave
ate maize 6500 years ago.
Yet, if it should prove true that popcorn came to the Americas as the
first form of maize, we should still have to credit the Indian with the
tedious centuries—even millenniums—that went into the production of the
many varieties which covered thousands of square miles of the New World
when Columbus heard of “a sort of grain they call maiz.” And, before the
coming of corn from Asia, we should still have to recognize the tens of
centuries that went into the discovery and development of the
agriculture of beans, squash, melons, potatoes, and manioc.
The story of corn and of agriculture does not tell us just when early
man reached our hemisphere; but it suggests that he must have settled in
South America thousands of years before the birth of Christ. He needed
many millenniums to evolve from a hunting and gathering savage into a
farmer and to reach the cultural level at which he would develop and
perfect the many varieties of corn. These millenniums may stretch back
to the last interglacial—if an astounding discovery in the Valley of
Mexico can be accepted. According to Mangelsdorf, a drill core from more
than 200 feet below ground contained fossilized grains of pollen. Elso
Barghoom has identified them as corn. The geological level where the
core was taken is “probably at least 80,000 years old.”[32]
12
PUZZLES, PROBLEMS, AND HALF-ANSWERS
_One swallow does not make a summer, but two lead one to suspect an
abiding change in the weather._
—R. A. DALY
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 ranged
from the parading of rumor and guesswork to the blind cranioclasm of
Hrdlička. In the nineteenth century the talk was of man in the Americas
before the Great Ice Age and far back into the Tertiary era that ended
1,000,000 years ago. At the beginning of the twentieth century
anthropologists gave him no more than 4,000 years in the New World. Now
they generally concede him 10,000 or 15,000 years, and many grant him
25,000 or more.
Clark Wissler, in _The Origin of the American Indian_, wrote, “The first
great migration of Old World peoples to the New can be set down as not
only beginning but culminating within the limits of late Pleistocene
Time.”[1] Frank H. H. Roberts, Jr., long a protagonist of Folsom man,
wrote the next year, “The belief that the Folsom complex developed
towards the end of the Pleistocene, or Late Glacial, period and carried
over into the beginning of the Recent is now more or less generally
accepted.”[2]
On the whole, the archaeologists—developing a new and sound technique in
stratigraphic excavation and pottery study—have held back more than the
physical anthropologists from the acceptance of a variegated array of
early men at quite early dates. Geologists and paleontologists, in whose
hands must lie the final dating of the Indian’s predecessors, have
inclined to a more radical attitude. A few scientists are talking of the
possibility that man crossed Bering Strait before the last
glaciation—Würm in Europe, Wisconsin in America—and possibly even while
the Riss-Illinois was laying a land-bridge across from Siberia to
Alaska.
At last, through chemist Willard Libby and his radiocarbon, we are
getting some dependable dates for early man and earlier mammals. Yet
disagreements continue. When you look at the evidence behind the
conflicting opinions of scientists—at skulls, tools, fossils, and earth
strata, all too innocent of Carbon¹⁴—you see why there had to be
disagreements. We have facts about early man, plenty of them. Some are
conflicting facts. Most of them raise serious problems. A few leave us
with grievous puzzles. Let us reexamine the facts and puzzles.
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 is supposed to be the homogeneous “Indian
race”; but they are far from plentiful. For instance, Hrdlička’s
catalogue of Indian craniums shows only a small percentage that are
long-headed. If early man was indeed more Australoid-Melanesian in type
than pure Mongoloid, it would be only natural to find some reflection in
the descendants of the Mongoloid immigrants with whom early man may be
presumed to have bred.
There is no agreement as to the racial affinities of the earliest
migrants. Most anthropologists still believe they were Mongoloids and
therefore what they call Indians. Some go to the other extreme and
declare they were Australoid, Negroid, and/or Caucasoid. Some, like
Hooton, say the stock was drawn from a mingling of the three races in
Asia. He thinks they “may have received some Mongoloid admixture before
reaching the New World, but this is doubtful.”[3]
Many of the skulls of early man resemble in certain respects those of
that late arrival, the Eskimo, just as the Eskimo resembles some
specimens of Magdalenian man. The skulls of the Eskimo are long-headed,
and have keeled vaults and prominent cheekbones. But most early craniums
have three features that are lacking in the Eskimo—receding chins,
slanting foreheads and heavy brow ridges—all stigmata of the
Australoid-Melanesian.
It is rather puzzling to note that these early skulls are found with the
bones of extinct animals in South America, but seldom with such fossils
in North America, while they are not found with Folsom or Sandia or any
form of ancient point. (There seem few points of definite-early type in
South America.) It is possible, as Howard suggested, that the North
American hunters practiced exposure of the dead instead of burial, while
early man to the south left more burials for us than the few that have
been found.
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 man in America if it could be proved that they were made to grind
agricultural products; but no kernels of corn or other cultivated seeds
have been found with these querns.
Except for milling stones that seem to have been used to grind paint in
Chile,[4] the preagricultural querns occur mainly in the area of
California, the Southwest, and upper Mexico. Through California, from
Borax Lake and the Mohave Desert, to the Cochise area of southeastern
Arizona and the Edwards Plateau of central Texas, and on into
northwestern Mexico, these grinding tools turn up with artifacts and in
geological strata that may be from 6,000 to 25,000 years old. If those
dates are correct, then we have milling stones in the New World many
years before there was any agriculture. The explanation must be that
some of the earliest of the Americans were food gatherers and grinders
of nuts and seeds as well as hunters. In addition to their querns, they
have left us hearths on beds of collected stones, rude knives, rough
percussion tools such as scrapers and choppers, but very few spear
points. There is no early culture of this sort now known in Asia or
Africa. It is not Folsom. Is it Australoid? Does it go back to a type of
people who, in some hybrid and degenerate form, settled Australia? At
least we know that the culture of the Australians is a curious mixture
of very primitive traits with some elements of the polished stone work
of the New Stone Age and milling stones. They are nearer being food
gatherers than hunters.
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 carefully ground. We know that such points were being made at
least 10,000 and perhaps 15,000 years ago. The Eden point is doubtless
newer, yet it must antedate the only chipped weapons that can equal it,
the daggers of neolithic Egyptians 7,500 years ago or of the still later
Danes.
A point with Eden-like chipping has been found in a neolithic site in
Siberia.[5] What does this mean? Obviously Sandia man or his forebears
came from Asia across Bering Strait, but too early to leave the Siberian
Eden behind him. Someone has been bold enough to suggest that the
descendants of the man who developed the Folsom point may have returned
to Siberia; after all, as George Gaylord Simpson has pointed out, a
bridge works both ways.[6] If Eden man was too late for the land-bridge
of the last glaciation, he still had the ice-bridge of winter. But “ice”
suggests a doubt. Would a hunter of the temperate High Plains be likely
to trek north through the chill of winter to deposit a spear point in
Siberia? Yet we know that traces of Eden, Plainview, and Folsom have
been found in Alaska. Were they left by summer transients fishing Cook
Inlet or hunting Alaskan jaguar around Fairbanks? It is safer, on the
whole, to ask where this type of early American came from than to ask
where he went.
[Illustration: _Left, a point with oblique chipping in the Eden
style, found near Lake Baikal, Siberia, in a neolithic culture,
compared with an Eden point from Colorado. Is the resemblance
accidental, or could Eden man have migrated to the Old World after
developing his characteristic style of flint knapping in the New?
The size of the Siberian point is not recorded. (The Eden point,
after Howard, 1935; the Siberian, after Okladnikov, 1938, and
Collins, 1943.)_]
The points of early man present a double puzzle. How did it happen that
the art of working flint was brought to higher perfection in the New
World during the Old Stone Age than it was in the Old World? And where
did these consummate flint knappers come from? The first question may
never be answered. The second presents interesting possibilities. They
revolve around the brief appearance of the Solutreans in Europe. Only a
great deal of very thorough excavation in Siberia will give us more than
provocative or provoking theories about the origins of the men who made
Sandia and Folsom points.
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 only the men of the Solutrean culture—thrust between the
late Aurignacian and the early Magdalenian—who took much true advantage
of pressure flaking, and who made spear points with Sandia-like
shoulders. (While the flint chipping of the Solutreans is fine, it is
not so minute or so perfect as the work of the men who made Folsom and
Eden points.) With the disappearance of the Solutreans, the art of fine
flint knapping and point making faded away in the Old World, not to
appear again with any vigor until neolithic times.
The Solutreans are not a part of the flow and development of prehistoric
European culture. They seem to come as invaders, and then fade out after
500 years, or, at the most, 10,000. Where they came from is uncertain.
Because crude points called Proto-Solutrean are much more plentiful
along the Danube than they are in France—where the finest Solutrean work
is found—it has long been argued that the people who made them came from
western Asia. Lately, flint work of the Solutrean type has been
discovered in Morocco and also in Egypt;[7] and, since it is intermixed
with the products of a much older culture, the Mousterian, it may be
argued that the Solutreans came from Africa. The theory of an eastern
origin remains strong, however; for among the African flints are
shouldered points, and shouldered points were not developed until the
end of the Solutrean period in Europe. We do not know the date of the
Mousterian in Africa; it may have been late.
If the Solutreans did, in fact, originate in Asia, can we believe that
an Asiatic people with an unusual flair for flint knapping fathered both
the Solutreans and the men who made the Sandia and the far finer Folsom
and Eden points? Did this parent stock send a group of migrants across
Bering Strait and down into the High Plains to give us Folsom, Sandia,
and Eden points? Did it throw off toward the west a group that practiced
the Solutrean arts in Europe? Even after archaeologists have dug Siberia
thoroughly we may never know how much earlier or later the American
offshoot appeared on the High Plains than the Solutreans in Europe.
It is a curious fact that the Solutreans were as negligent as the Folsom
and Eden men in providing us with skulls. C. S. Coon writes, “There are
no skulls which all authorities accept as definitely belonging to that
short and far from widespread cultural phase.”[8] Hunters in Europe,
like hunters in America, seem to have taken little interest in formal
obsequies and proper burials. Nature consumed their remains.
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
affinity; our three out of four forms of Solutrean chipped blades; our
ordinary Aurignacian-like endscraper; our simple Mousterian type flake;
and, finally, our Abbevillian and Chellean varieties of the
_coup-de-poing_.”[11] In the same year Harrington was going further.
Recalling that in 1921 he had reported flint work in Cuba that was
Aurignacian in style, Harrington pointed out that the Solutrean never
reached the West Indies. “Man in a Magdalenian stage of development ...
reached America, probably via Asia, but perhaps from Europe via Iceland
and Greenland. These bands kept to the north, following up the
retreating glaciers, and became the ancestors of the Eskimo.”[12] Thomas
Jefferson had somewhat the same idea when he wrote that the Eskimos
“must be derived from the Groenlanders, and these probably from some of
the northern parts of the old continent.”[13]
Must we add the Aurignacians and Magdalenians of the end of the New
Stone Age to the Solutreans and the Australoids as early invaders of
America? The answer is dubious, for as yet northern Asia has yielded
only a little evidence of the Aurignacian and the Magdalenian.
Chopping Tools Instead of Hand Axes in Asia
[Illustration: _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 either side. They had also large,
crude scrapers, flaked on a single side, which are now called choppers.
Only in India and the Near East did the hand ax seem to flourish as in
western Europe and much of Africa. In the border area of the Upper
Punjab, Helmut de Terra found both hand axes and chopping tools in the
early Soan culture, which seems to lie in the Second Interglacial. In
upper Burma the hand ax disappears, leaving the field to the chopping
tool and the chopper. The same seems true of Java and northern
China.[14] Here there are flake artifacts, but they were not chipped by
European methods. On the whole, the tools of the Asiatic complex look
much more like the choppers and scrapers found at very early sites such
as Lake Mohave, southeastern Arizona (Cochise), Sonora, Lower
California, and the Valley of Mexico.
[Illustration: _A chopping tool of the early Soan culture, in
northwestern India. (After Paterson, 1942.)_]
Yet—another puzzle—hand axes have been found in central and southern
Texas, and in Renaud’s Black’s Fork culture of Wyoming, without traces
of Folsom or Eden. Can these hand axes, like the Aurignacian and
Magdalenian traits of which Nelson and Harrington write, represent an
earlier migration than Sandia and Folsom? This is most problematical.
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 sudden urge for travel first appeared at the Siberian-Alaskan
portal about 2500 B.C.[16] They could not have been men of the Old Stone
Age because, he asserts, we have found nothing in Siberia that
approaches the paleolithic; indeed, we have found no paleolithic tools
north of 54° in England, of 53° in Siberia, or of 43° on the Sea of
Japan, while “the portal to America for man and beast lies at 67° north
latitude.” We have, then, “a no-proof barrier zone a thousand miles deep
extending clear across the Old World.”[17] This “rules out invasion of
America until relatively modern times because it shows that a wide zone
of the Old World, blocking the road to America, was itself unused by man
until long after the last continental ice sheet ... had
disappeared.”[18] Obviously, Spinden’s argument is not based on evidence
in the Americas, but rather on lack of evidence in little studied
Siberia. He ignores the presence of paleolithic tools in northern
Manchuria together with the fossils of extinct mammals.[19] He concedes
that even in the regions of “the most ancient civilization” in the Old
World there is no trace of such high technical skill in flint chipping
as the Folsom “before the fourth millennium before Christ.”
But—appearing to ignore the geological evidence connected with Sandia,
Folsom, Clovis, Abilene, and Lake Mohave—he interprets this as meaning
that man cannot have reached the Southwest before the golden age of Ur.
He speaks of “the lost cause of paleolithic man in America.” He accepts
Solutrean flint work as paleolithic, but not Folsom or Eden. “Now, even
if we admit that Folsom man hunted the mammoth, we must place that
sporting event not earlier than 2000 B.C.”[20]
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 great glaciations presented early man with an opportunity and a
difficulty; they threw a land-bridge across Bering Strait, but, for long
periods of time, they also laid a barrier of ice and snow across his
path to the south. Look at the map at the top of page 26 and you will
see that about 65,000 years ago the barrier covered the whole depth of
Canada. This would have meant a trip of some 2,000 miles across ice. For
a time, as we have explained earlier, a corridor opened up for his
passage. By 18,000 years ago, however, it had closed again. To be sure,
there was a tongue of ice-free land that ran southward across part of
Canada and shortened the journey over snow and ice to a thousand miles;
but the invader would have had to be extremely lucky to hit the upper
end of the open country. Far more important, none of the animals that he
hunted, and that therefore led him on his southward journey, would have
taken that thousand-mile trek across a frozen, foodless waste. If early
man came in the time of the corridor, his trip would not have been too
difficult and he would have found game along the way. At any period he
could have come by boat or possibly afoot along the Pacific coast. But,
no matter how he came, he would have faced almost insuperable
difficulties during the first quarter and the third quarter of the last
glaciation.
This fact affects different students differently. Antevs, feeling that
man must have come after the ice began to melt, gives our migrant not
much over 15,000 years in the New World. If man arrived earlier, he
feels, it must have been when the corridor opened through the ice some
40,000 years ago, and he sees no evidence for so early a migration.[21]
Kirk Bryan disagrees. Accepting the theory that the last glaciation
waxed and waned three times, he places the first invasion by man in the
second of these wanings, or inter-stadials, just before the final
burgeoning of the ice 12,000 years ago.[22] Sauer goes further. He
suggests that the shores of western Siberia may have been inhabited
during the second interglacial, and that during the third glaciation,
preceding the Wisconsin, “a first colonization of the New World is not
improbable.”[23] Erwin H. Barbour and C. Bertrand Schultz say that
“evidence is constantly accumulating to show that man actually had
reached North America before the last glacial advance.”[24] George F.
Carter believes that artifacts in the glacial gravels of Trenton and
Lake Lahontan, spear points with musk oxen in New Mexico, the Vero skull
partnered in Florida with flora and fauna more appropriate to
Pennsylvania, stone implements deeply buried under aged soil profiles,
all argue that man was in North America during the last glaciation. He
does not believe that primitive hunters—let alone the Cochise food
gatherers—would have survived Arctic travel at the height of the
glaciations. He thinks that Folsom man came through the ice-free
corridor of 40,000 years ago, and that another body of immigrants came
during the last of the three great interglacials, which means about
100,000 years ago.[25]
Interglacial migration finds support from Albrecht Penck, the German
glacialist who with Eduard Brückner established the four great
glaciations of central Europe. Penck gives two reasons for believing
that man came to the Americas in the last interglacial. Both theories
lie outside his field of special knowledge.
First, Penck doubts that man had time enough after the glaciers melted
to adapt himself to the seven or eight climates in which he lived and
labored in 1492. In the 10,000 years since the Wisconsin glaciation,
people of an arctic habitat could not possibly have adjusted their
physical nature so perfectly “first to forests, then to steppes and
deserts in temperate zones, then to steaming tropical forests and to the
plateaus of the tropics, the steppes and deserts of the southern
hemisphere, and finally to the damp, cool south.”
Penck’s second reason for supporting interglacial migration has to do
with the marked changes of climate that took pace during the Great Ice
Age. As the glaciers grew and moved farther and farther south, the
temperature belts of Canada and the United States moved south with them.
As these belts moved, vegetation altered. Tundra crept to the south,
pursuing grasslands and forest. Deserts and jungle moved before them.
When the glaciers began to melt, this movement went into reverse. Penck
feels that primitive man migrates easily only within a single climatic
zone. Tundra folk avoid forests; forest folk avoid tundra. Man moves
with the climate, not against it; a New Yorker goes to Florida in the
winter, not the summer. Early man would not have traveled southward
through Canada and the United States while the climate was moving
northward with the melting of the ice. On the contrary, man would have
moved southward only as the glaciers grew and the temperature belts
moved southward. When the glaciers melted he would have tended to move
northward again. Thus man must have entered the New World toward the end
of an interglacial, and gone southward with the weather. After that,
shifts in the climate would have distributed man all over the Americas.
“Under the influence of a number of alternating glacial and interglacial
periods, we can understand the gradual settlement, but not solely on the
assumption of one glacial migration.” With the end of the last glaciers
men spread north and south once more, and even drifted back to Asia.[26]
Penck’s argument becomes all the stronger if we grant that early man
followed the animals he killed for food and animals followed the
movements of the vegetation on which they fed.
Further, the presence of early man close to the time and even the edge
of the retreating glaciers—if the evidence is read aright—argues that he
must have arrived in North America during one of those retreats of the
Wisconsin glaciation which preceded its final growth and decline.
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 or artifacts have been found linked to other strata
than gravels that suggest a relationship with glacial activity.
In these sites we find human skulls or artifacts together with signs of
much rainfall or of large lakes and rivers which now have no more
existence than the mammoth. The evidence of man lay undisturbed beneath
sterile layers of material deposited by water. A typical case is Sandia
Cave. Here Folsom points were found beneath a floor of a stalagmitic
limestone created by so heavy a seepage of calcium-charged water that
the stratum holding the Folsom material had been partially consolidated.
Below lies another sterile layer—of yellow ocher earth, indicating a
very moist period and the presence of trees which would provide certain
chemical agents and which are no more common now in this arid area than
are heavy, continuous rains. Another example of mans association with a
much moister time than the present comes from the cave in Brazil where
the Confins skull was found. The skull lay under six feet of alluvial
soil carried in by water. Later a layer of stalagmitic limestone sealed
the sepulcher. It may be presumed that artifacts found on the shore or
in the clay of Lake Cochise, Lake Mohave, and Pinto Basin—now dry and
gone—must have been made during a time of great waters.
What do such evidences of unusual moisture mean? They mean that the men
of these sites lived before or during a period of heavy rainfall not
known there for at least the last 9000 years. Beyond that bare fact,
debate begins. Walter, Cathoud, and Mattos, who described the Brazilian
find, took a most conservative attitude and wrote that Confins man lived
“a few thousands of years ago.”[27] Bryan, who studied Sandia Cave,
placed the later wet period after the end of Pleistocene, or Great Ice
Age, and the first wet period—along with the Sandia points—in the Late
glacial.[28]
Glacial experts call a period of unusual and widespread rains a pluvial.
They believe that the growth of the glaciers was accompanied by
pluvials, and some maintain that pluvials also marked the melting of the
ice. Antevs lists a great pluvial—the Bonneville—which formed Lake
Bonneville and Lake Lahontan during the first maximum of the last, or
Wisconsin, glaciation, 65,000 years ago. He places another period of
great moisture, the Provo Pluvial, at the last glacial maximum, about
12,000 years ago, and believes it was all but spent 7,000 to 9,000 years
ago.[29] Thus he dates Lake Mohave and its early artifacts about 9,000
years ago. His point is that annual precipitation is about the same
throughout the globe, but that the pluvials shift at various times. “It
is essentially the location of the rainfall that changes.”[30]
All authorities do not agree that annual rainfall is constant, and some
deny Antev’s late date for the last pluvial. Sauer writes, “I know of no
climatologic basis for postulating a postglacial pluvial period,” either
in New Mexico or the Lake Mohave and Pinto Basin area of southern
California.[31] Some European authorities believe that pluvials are
entirely glacial. M. C. Burkitt, for example, cites the fact that the
same type of tools is found in Africa during pluvials as in Europe
during glacials.[32] According to Simpson’s theory of the formation of
the glaciers, rainfall increased enormously during two periods of the
Great Ice Age; the last pluvial was at its height during the building up
of the Würm-Wisconsin ice sheets. (See page 58.) The pluvials make a
rather good case for early man in the New World during the last
glaciation.
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. But when we tried to date man securely by animals that were dead
and gone, or by the earths that lay above him, we began to guess. The
guesses of conservative glacialists gave him at least 15,000 years in
the New World. Other speculations—supported by rather plausible evidence
as well as not implausible theory—placed him still earlier. Now, at
last, through the miraculous time clock of radiocarbon, we know that man
was here before the chill of the last Ice Age settled upon the land.
REFERENCES IN THE TEXT
Chapter 1
[1]Alfred L. Kroeber, “Native American Population,” _American
Anthropologist_, 36:24 (1934). Herbert J. Spinden, “The Population
of Ancient America,” _Smithsonian Institution Annual Report for
1929_ (1930), 470.
[2]Nels C. Nelson, “The Antiquity of Man in America in the Light of
Archaeology,” in _The American Aborigines_, ed. Diamond Jenness
(1933), 97.
[3]Alfred L. Kroeber, _Anthropology_ (1923), 98.
[4]Franz Boas, “Relationships Between Northwest America and Northeast
Asia,” in _The American Aborigines_, 367-368.
[5]John P. Harrington, personal communication, 1947, and “Southern
Peripheral Athapaskawan Origins, Divisions, and Migrations,”
_Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections_, 100:504 (1940).
[6]Edgar B. Howard, “An Outline of the Problem of Man’s Antiquity in
North America,” _American Anthropologist_, 38:398 (1936).
[7]W. W. Howells, “The Origins of the American Indian Race Types,” _The
Maya and Their Neighbors_ (1940), 5.
[8]Albrecht Penck, “Wann kamen die Indianer nach Nordamerika?”
_Proceedings, 23rd International Congress of Americanists_ (1930),
23-30.
[9]Kroeber, _Anthropology_, 336-339.
[10]Clark Wissler, “Ethnological Diversity in America and Its
Significance,” in _The American Aborigines_, 188.