THE PREHISTORIC ARCHÆOLOGY OF NORTH AMERICA.
BY HENRY W. HAYNES,
_Archæological Institute of America._
BY the discovery of America a new continent was brought to light,
inhabited by many distinct tribes, differing in language and in
customs, but strikingly alike in physical appearance. All that can be
learned in regard to their condition, and that of their ancestors,
prior to the coming of Columbus, falls within the domain of the
prehistoric archæology of America. This recent science of Prehistoric
Archæology deals mainly with facts, not surmises. In studying the past
of forgotten races, “hid from the world in the low-delved tomb,” her
chief agent is the spade, not the pen. Her leading principles, the
lamps by which her path is guided, are superposition, association,
and style. Does this new science teach us that the tribes found in
possession of the soil were the descendants of its original occupants,
or does she rather furnish reasons for inferring that these had been
preceded by some extinct race or races? The first question, therefore,
that presents itself to us relates to the antiquity of man upon this
continent; and in respect to this the progress of archæological
investigation has brought about a marked change of opinion. Modern
speculation, based upon recent discoveries, inclines to favor the view
that this continent was inhabited at least as early as in the later
portion of the quaternary or pleistocene period. Whether this primitive
people was autochthonous or not, is a problem that probably will never
be solved; but it is now generally held that this earliest population
was intruded upon by other races, coming either from Asia or from the
Pacific Islands, from whom were descended the various tribes which have
occupied the soil down to the present time.
The writer believes also that the majority of American archæologists
now sees no sufficient reason for supposing that any mysterious,
superior race has ever lived in any portion of our continent. They find
no archæological evidence proving that at the time of its discovery
any tribe had reached a stage of culture that can properly be called
civilization. Even if we accept the exaggerated statements of the
Spanish conquerors, the most intelligent and advanced peoples found
here were only semi-barbarians, in the stage of transition from the
stone to the bronze age, possessing no written language, or what can
properly be styled an alphabet, and not yet having even learned the use
of beasts of burden.
By a large and growing school of archæologists, moreover, it
is maintained that all the various tribes upon this continent,
notwithstanding their different degrees of advancement, were living
under substantially similar institutions; and that even the different
forms of house construction practised by them were only stages in the
development of the same general conceptions. Without attempting to
dogmatize about such difficult problems, the object of this chapter
is to set forth concisely such views as recommend themselves to the
writer’s judgment. He is profoundly conscious of the limitations of his
knowledge, and fully aware that his opinions will be at variance with
those of other competent and learned investigators. _Non nostrum tantas
componere lites._
The controversy in regard to the antiquity of man in the old world
may be regarded as substantially settled. Scarcely any one now denies
that man was in existence there during the close of the quaternary
or pleistocene period; but there is a great difference of opinion as
to the sufficiency of the evidence thus far brought forward to prove
that he had made his appearance in Europe in the previous tertiary
period, or even in the earlier part of the quaternary. What is the
present state of opinion in regard to the correlative question about
the antiquity of man in America? Less than ten years ago the latest
treatise published in this country, in which this subject came under
discussion, met the question with the sweeping reply that “no truly
scientific proof of man’s great antiquity in America exists.”[1477]
But we think if the author of that thorough and “truly scientific”
work were living now his belief would be different. After a careful
consideration of all the former evidence that had been adduced in
proof of man’s early existence upon this continent, none of which
seemed to him conclusive, he goes on to state that “Dr. C. C. Abbott
has unquestionably discovered many palæolithic implements in the
glacial drift in the valley of the Delaware River, near Trenton,
New Jersey.”[1478] Now a single discovery of this character, if it
were unquestionable, or incapable of any other explanation, would
be sufficient to prove that man existed upon this continent in
quaternary times. The establishment, therefore, of the antiquity of
man in America, according to this latest authority, seems to rest
mainly upon the fact of the discovery by Dr. Abbott of palæolithic
implements in the valley of the Delaware. To quote the language of an
eminent European man of science, “This gentleman appears to stand in
a somewhat similar relation to this great question in America as did
Boucher de Perthes in Europe.”[1479] The opinion of the majority of
American geologists upon this point is clearly indicated in a very
recent article by Mr. W. J. McGee, of the U. S. Geological Survey:
“But it is in the aqueo-glacial gravels of the Delaware River, at
Trenton, which were laid down contemporaneously with the terminal
moraine one hundred miles further northward, and which have been so
thoroughly studied by Abbott, that the most conclusive proof of the
existence of glacial man is found.”[1480] It will accordingly be
necessary to give in considerable detail an account of the discovery
of palæolithic implements by Dr. Abbott in the Delaware valley, and of
its confirmation by different investigators, as well as of such other
discoveries in different parts of our country as tend to substantiate
the conclusions that have been drawn from them by archæologists.
[Illustration: PALÆOLITHIC IMPLEMENT FROM THE TRENTON GRAVELS.
Side and edge view, of natural size. From the _Peabody Museum Reports_,
vol. ii. p. 33.]
By the term palæolithic implements we are to understand certain rude
stone objects, of varying size, roughly fashioned into shape by a
process of chipping away fragments from a larger mass so as to produce
cutting edges, with convex sides, massive, and suited to be held at one
end, and usually pointed at the other. These have never afterwards been
subjected to any smoothing or polishing process by rubbing them against
another stone. But it is only when such rude tools have been found
buried in beds of gravel or other deposits, which have been laid down
by great floods towards the close of what is known to geologists as the
quaternary or pleistocene period, that they can be regarded as really
palæolithic.[1481] At that epoch which immediately preceded the present
period, certain rivers flowed with a volume of water much greater than
now, owing to the melting of the thick ice-cap once covering large
portions of the northern hemisphere, which was accompanied by a climate
of great humidity. Vast quantities of gravels were washed down from
the débris of the great terminal moraine of this ice-sheet, and were
accumulated in beds of great thickness, extending in some instances
as high as two hundred feet up the slopes of the river valleys. In
such deposits, side by side with the rude products of human industry
we have thus described, and deposited by the same natural forces, are
found the fossil remains of several species of animals, which have
subsequently either become extinct, like the mammoth and the tichorhine
rhinoceros, or, driven southwards by the encroaching ice, have since
its disappearance migrated to arctic regions, like the musk-sheep and
the reindeer, or to the higher Alpine slopes, like the marmot. Such a
discovery establishes the fact that man must have been living as the
contemporary of these extinct animals, and this is the only proof of
his antiquity that is at present universally accepted.
There has been much discussion among geologists in regard to both the
duration and the conditions of the glacial period, but it is now the
settled opinion that there have been two distinct times of glacial
action, separated by a long interval of warmer climate, as is proved by
the occurrence of intercalated fossiliferous beds; this was followed
by the final retreat of the glacier.[1482] The great terminal moraine
stretching across the United States from Cape Cod to Dakota, and thence
northward to the foot of the Rocky Mountains, marks the limit of the
ice invasion in the second glacial epoch. South of this, extending
in its farthest boundary as low as the 38th degree of latitude, is
a deposit which thins out as we go west and northwest, and which is
called the drift-area. The drift graduates into a peculiar mud deposit,
for which the name of “loess” has been adopted from the geologists of
Europe, by whom it was given to a thick alluvial stratum of fine sand
and loam, of glacial origin. This attenuated drift represents the first
glacial invasion. From Massachusetts as far as northern New Jersey,
and in some other places, the deposits of the two epochs seem to
coalesce.[1483]
The interval of time that separated the two glacial periods can be best
imagined by considering the great erosions that have taken place in the
valleys of the Missouri and of the upper Ohio. “Glacial river deposits
of the earlier epoch form the capping of fragmentary terraces that
stand 250 to 300 feet above the present rivers;” while those of the
second epoch stretch down through a trough excavated to that depth by
the river through these earlier deposits and the rock below.[1484]
As to the probable time that has elapsed since the close of the
glacial period, the tendency of recent speculation is to restrict the
vast extent that was at first suggested for it to a period of from
twenty thousand to thirty thousand years. The most conservative view
maintains that it need not have been more than ten thousand years, or
even less.[1485] This lowest estimate, however, can only be regarded as
fixing a minimum point, and an antiquity vastly greater than this must
be assigned to man, as of necessity he must have been in existence long
before the final events occurred in order to have left his implements
buried in the beds of débris which they occasioned.
In April, 1873, Dr. C. C. Abbott, who was already well known as
an investigator of the antiquities of the Indian races, which he
believed had passed from “a palæolithic to a neolithic condition”
while occupying the Atlantic seaboard, published an article on
the “Occurrence of implements in the river-drift at Trenton, New
Jersey.”[1486] In this he described and figured three rude implements,
which he had found buried at a depth as great in one instance as
sixteen feet in the gravels of a bluff overlooking the Delaware
River. He argued that these must be of greater antiquity than relics
found on the surface, from the fact of their occurring _in place_ in
undisturbed deposits; that they could not have reached such a depth
by any natural means; and that they must be of human origin, and not
accidental formations, because as many as three had been discovered
of a like character. His conclusion is that they are “true drift
implements, fashioned and used by a people far antedating the people
who subsequently occupied this same territory.”
After two years of further research he returned to the subject,
publishing in the same journal, in June, 1876, an account of the
discovery of seven similar objects near the same locality. Of these he
said: “My studies of these palæolithic specimens and of their positions
in the gravel-beds and overlying soil have led me to conclude that not
long after the close of the last glacial epoch man appeared in the
valley of the Delaware.”[1487]
Most of these specimens were deposited by Dr. Abbott in the
Peabody Museum of American Archæology and Ethnology at Cambridge,
Massachusetts; and the curator of that institution, Professor Frederick
W. Putnam, in September, 1876, visited the locality in company with Dr.
Abbott. Together they succeeded in finding two examples _in place_.
Having been commissioned to continue his investigations, Dr. Abbott
presented to the trustees, in November of the same year, a detailed
report _On the Discovery of Supposed Palæolithic Implements from the
Glacial Drift in the Valley of the Delaware River, near Trenton, New
Jersey_.[1488] In this, three of the most characteristic specimens were
figured, which had been submitted to Mr. M. E. Wadsworth of Cambridge,
to determine their lithological character. He pronounced them to be
made of argillite, and declared that the chipping upon them could not
be attributed to any natural cause, and that the weathering of their
surfaces indicated their very great antiquity. The question “how and
when these implements came to be in the gravel” is discussed by Dr.
Abbott at some length. He argued that the same forces which spread the
beds of gravel over the wide area now covered carried them also; and
he predicted that they will be met with wherever such gravels occur in
other parts of the State. He specially dwells upon the circumstances
that the implements were found in _undisturbed_ portions of the freshly
exposed surface of the bluff, and not in the mass of talus accumulated
at its base, into which they might have fallen from the surface; and
that they have been found at great depths, “varying from five to over
twenty feet below the overlying soil.” He also insisted upon the marked
difference between their appearance and the materials of which they
are fashioned and the customary relics of the Indians. The conditions
under which the gravel-beds were accumulated are then studied in
connection with a report upon them by Professor N. S. Shaler, which
concludes, from the absence of stratification and of pebbles marked
with glacial scratches, that they were “formed in the sea near the foot
of the retreating ice-sheet, when the sub-glacial rivers were pouring
out the vast quantities of water and waste that clearly were released
during the breaking up of the great ice-time.” This view regards the
deposits as of glacial origin, and as laid down during that period, but
considers that they were subsequently modified in their arrangement by
the action of water. In such gravel-beds there have also been found
rolled fragments of reindeer-horns, and skulls of the walrus, as well
as the relics of man. Dr. Abbott accordingly drew the conclusion that
“man dwelt at the foot of the glacier, or at least wandered over the
open sea, during the accumulation of this mass of gravel;” that he was
contemporary of these arctic animals; and that this early race was
driven southward by the encroaching ice, leaving its rude implements
behind. Thus it will be seen that Dr. Abbott no longer considers man in
this country as belonging to post-glacial, but to interglacial times.
Continuing his investigations, in the following year Dr. Abbott gave
a much more elaborate account of his work and its results, in which
he announced his discovery of some sixty additional specimens.[1489]
To the objection that had been raised, that these supposed implements
might have been produced by the action of frost, he replied that a
single fractured surface might have originated in that way or from an
accidental blow; but when we find upon the same object from twenty
to forty planes of cleavage, all equally weathered (which shows that
the fragments were all detached at or about the same time), it is
impossible not to recognize in this the result of intentional action.
Four such implements are described and figured, of shapes much more
specialized than those previously published, and resembling very
closely objects which European archæologists style stone axes of “the
Chellean type,” whose artificial origin cannot be doubted.
[Illustration: THE TRENTON GRAVEL BLUFF.
From a photograph kindly furnished by Professor F. W. Putnam, showing
the Delaware and its bluff of gravel, where many of the rude implements
have been found.]
As some geologists were still inclined to insist upon the post-glacial
character of the débris in which the implements were found, Dr. Abbott,
admitting that the great terminal moraine of the northern ice-sheet
does not approach nearer than forty miles to the bluff at Trenton,
nevertheless insists that the character of the deposits there much more
resembles a mass of material accumulated in the sea at the foot of the
glacier than it does beds that have been subjected to the modifying
arrangement of water. He finds an explanation of this condition of
things in a prolongation of the glacier down the valley of the Delaware
as far as Trenton, at a time when the lower portions of the State had
suffered a considerable depression, and before the retreat of the
ice-sheet. But besides the comparatively unmodified material of the
bluff, in which the greater portion of the palæolithic implements has
been found, there also occur limited areas of stratified drift, such
as are to be seen in railway cuttings near Trenton, in which similar
implements are also occasionally found. These, however, present a more
worn appearance than the others. But it will be found that these tracts
of clearly stratified material are so very limited in extent that
they seem to imply some peculiar local condition of the glacier. This
position is illustrated by certain remarkable effects once witnessed
after a very severe rainfall, by which two palæolithic implements were
brought into immediate contact with ordinary Indian relics such as are
common on the surface. This leads to an examination of the question
of the origin of this surface soil, and a discussion of the problem
how true palæolithic implements sometimes occur in it. This soil is
known to be a purely sedimentary deposit, consisting almost exclusively
of sand, or of such finely comminuted gravels as would readily be
transported by rapid currents of water. But imbedded in it and making a
part of it are numerous huge boulders, too heavy to be moved by water.
Dr. Abbott accounted for their presence from their having been dropped
by ice-rafts, while the process of deposition of the soil was going on.
The same sort of agency could not have put in place both the soil and
the boulders contained in it, and the same force which transported the
latter may equally well have brought along such implements as occur in
the beds of clearly stratified origin. The wearing effect upon these of
gravels swept along by post-glacial floods will account for that worn
appearance which sometimes almost disguises their artificial origin.
In conclusion Dr. Abbott attempted to determine what was the early
race which preceded the Indians in the occupation of this continent.
From the peculiar nature and qualities of palæolithic implements he
argues that they are adapted to the needs of a people “living in a
country of vastly different character, and with a different fauna,”
from the densely wooded regions of the Atlantic seaboard, where the
red man found his home. The physical conditions of the glacial times
much more nearly resembled those now prevailing in the extreme north.
Accordingly he finds the descendants of the early race in the Eskimos
of North America, driven northwards after contact with the invading
Indian race. In this he is following the opinion of Professor William
Boyd Dawkins, who considers that people to be of the same blood as the
palæolithic cave-dwellers of southern France, and that of Mr. Dall and
Dr. Rink, who believed that they once occupied this continent as far
south as New Jersey. In confirmation of this view he asserts that the
Eskimos “until recently used stone implements of the rudest patterns.”
But unfortunately for this theory the implements of the Eskimos bear
no greater resemblance to palæolithic implements than do those of any
other people in the later stone age; and subsequent discoveries of
human crania in the Trenton gravels have led Dr. Abbott to question its
soundness.[1490]
These discoveries of Dr. Abbott are not liable to the imputation of
possible errors of observation or record, as would be the case if
they rested upon the testimony of a single person only. As has been
already stated, in September, 1876, Professor Putnam was present at
the finding _in place_ of two palæolithic implements, and in all has
taken five with his own hands from the gravel at various depths.[1491]
Mr. Lucien Carr also visited the locality in company with Professor J.
D. Whitney, in September, 1878, and found several _in place_.[1492]
Since then Professors Shaler, Dawkins, Wright, Lewis, and others,
including the writer, have all succeeded in finding specimens either
in place or in the talus along the face of the bluff, from which they
had washed out from freshly exposed surfaces of the gravel.[1493]
The whole number thus far discovered by Dr. Abbott amounts to
about four hundred specimens.[1494] Meanwhile, the problem of the
conditions under which the Trenton gravels had been accumulated was
made the subject of careful study by other competent geologists,
besides Professor Shaler, to whose opinion reference has already been
made. In October, 1877, the late Thomas Belt, F. G. S., visited the
locality, and shortly afterwards published an account of Dr. Abbott’s
discoveries, illustrated by several geological sections of the gravel.
His conclusion is, “that after the land-ice retired, or whilst it was
retiring, and before the coast was submerged to such a depth as to
permit the flotation of icebergs from the north, the upper pebble-beds
containing the stone implements were formed.”[1495] The geologists of
the New Jersey Survey had already recognized the distinction between
the drift gravels of Trenton and the earlier yellow marine gravels
which cover the lower part of the State. But it was the late Professor
Henry Carvill Lewis, of Philadelphia, who first accurately described
the character and limits of the Trenton gravels.[1496] This he had
carefully mapped before he was informed of Dr. Abbott’s discoveries,
and it has been found (with only one possible very recent exception)
that the implements occur solely in these newer gravels of the glacial
period.
Professor Lewis’s matured conclusions in regard to the geological
character and the age of the Trenton gravel cliff are thus expressed:
“The presence of large boulders in the bluff at Trenton, and the extent
and depth of the gravel at this place, have led to the supposition that
there was here the extremity of a glacial moraine. Yet the absence of
‘till’ and of scratched boulders, the absence of glacial striæ upon the
rocks of the valley, and the stratified character of the gravel, all
point to water action alone as the agent of deposition. The depth of
the gravel and the presence of the bluff at this point are explained by
the peculiar position that Trenton occupies relatively to the river,
... in a position where naturally the largest amount of a river gravel
would be deposited, and where its best exposures would be exhibited....
Any drift material which the flooded river swept down its channel
would here, upon meeting tide-water, be in great part deposited.
Boulders which had been rolled down the inclined floor of the upper
valley would here stop in their course, and all be heaped up with the
coarser gravel in the more slowly flowing water, except such as cakes
of floating ice could carry oceanward.... Having heaped up a mass of
detritus in the old river channel as an obstruction at the mouth of the
gorge, the river, so soon as its volume diminished, would immediately
begin wearing away a new channel for itself down to ocean level. This
would be readily accomplished through the loose material, and would
be stopped only when rock was reached.... It has been thought that to
account for the high bank at Trenton an elevation of the land must have
occurred.... An increase in the volume of the river will explain all
the facts. The accompanying diagram will render this more clear.
[Illustration: Section of bluff two miles south of Trenton, New Jersey.
_a b_, TRENTON GRAVEL; Implements—_a_, fine gray sand (boulder); _b_,
coarse sandy gravel; _c_, red gravel; _d_, yellow gravel (pre-glacial);
_e_, plastic clay (Wealden); _f_, fine yellow sand (Hastings?); _g_,
gneiss; _h_, alluvial mud; _i_, Delaware River.
A From a cut in _Primitive Industry_, p. 535.]
“The Trenton gravel, now confined to the sandy flat borders of the
river, corresponds to the ‘intervale’ of New England rivers, ... and
exhibits a topography peculiar to a true river gravel. Frequently
instead of forming a flat plain it forms higher ground close to the
present river channel than it does near its ancient bank. Moreover,
not only does the ground thus slope downward on retreating from the
river, but the boulders become smaller and less abundant. Both of these
facts are in accordance with the facts of river deposits. In time of
flood the rapidly flowing water in the main channel, bearing detritus,
is checked by the more quiet waters at the side of the river, and is
forced to deposit its gravel and boulders as a kind of bank.... Having
shown that the Trenton gravel is a true river gravel of comparatively
recent age, it remains to point out the relation it bears to the
glacial epoch.... Two hypotheses only can be applied to the Trenton
gravel. It is either _post_-glacial, or it belongs to the very last
portion of the glacial period. The view held by the late Thomas Belt
can no longer be maintained.... He fails to recognize any distinction
between the gravels. As we have seen, the Trenton gravel is truly
post-glacial. It only remains to define more strictly the meaning of
that term. There is evidence to support both of these hypotheses.”[1497]
After discussing them both at considerable length, he concludes as
follows: “A second glacial period in Europe, known as the ‘Reindeer
Period,’ has long been recognized. It appears to have followed that
in which the clays were deposited and the terraces formed, and may
therefore correspond with the period of the Trenton gravel. If there
have been two glacial epochs in this country, the Trenton gravel cannot
be earlier than the close of the later one. If there has been but one,
traces of the glacier must have continued into comparatively recent
times, or long after the period of submergence. The Trenton gravel,
whether made by long-continued floods which followed a first or second
glacial epoch,—whether separated from all true glacial action or the
result of the glacier’s final melting,—is truly a post-glacial deposit,
but still a phenomenon of essentially glacial times,—times more nearly
related to the Great Ice Age than to the present.”
He then goes on to consider the bearings of the age of this gravel
upon the question of the antiquity of man. “When we find that the
Trenton gravel contains implements of human workmanship so placed with
reference to it that it is evident that at or soon after the time of
its deposition man had appeared on its borders, and when the question
of the antiquity of man in America is thus before us, we are tempted
to inquire still further into the age of the deposit under discussion.
It has been clearly shown by several competent archæologists that the
implements that have been found are a constituent part of the gravel,
and not intrusive objects. It was of peculiar interest to find that
it has been only within the limits of the Trenton gravel, precisely
traced out by the writer, that Dr. Abbott, Professor F. W. Putnam, Mr.
Lucien Carr, and others, have discovered these implements _in situ_....
At the localities on the Pennsylvania Railroad, where extensive
exposures of these gravels have been made, the deposit is undoubtedly
undisturbed. No implements could have come into this gravel except at
a time when the river flowed upon it, and when they might have sunk
through the loose and shifting material. All the evidence points to the
conclusion that at the time of the Trenton gravel flood man ... lived
upon the banks of the ancient Delaware, and lost his stone implements
in the shifting sands and gravel of the bed of that stream.... The
actual age of the Trenton gravel, and the consequent date to which the
antiquity of man on the Delaware should be assigned, is a question
which geological data alone are insufficient to solve. The only clew,
and that a most unsatisfactory one, is afforded by calculations based
upon the amount of erosion. This, like all geological considerations,
is relative rather than absolute, yet several calculations have been
made, which, based either upon the rate of erosion of river channels or
the rate of accumulation of sediment, have attempted to fix the date
of the close of the glacial epoch. By assuming that the Trenton gravel
was deposited immediately after the close of this epoch, an account
of such calculations may be of interest. If the Trenton gravel is
_post_-glacial in the widest acceptation of the term, a yet later date
must be assigned to it.”
After going carefully through them all, he concludes: “Thus we find
that if any reliance is to be placed upon such calculations, even if we
assume that the Trenton gravel is of glacial age, it is not necessary
to make it more than ten thousand years old. The time necessary for
the Delaware to cut through the gravel down to the rock is by no
means great. When it is noted that the gravel cliff at Trenton was
made by a side wearing away at a bank, and when it is remembered that
the erosive power of the Delaware River was formerly greater than at
present, it will be conceded that the presence of the cliff at Trenton
will not necessarily infer its high antiquity; nor in the character of
the gravel is there any evidence that the time of its deposition need
have been long. It may be that, as investigations are carried further,
it will result not so much in proving man of very great antiquity as
in showing how much more recent than usually supposed was the final
disappearance of the glacier.”
Professor Lewis’s studies of the great terminal moraine of the
northern ice-sheet were still further prosecuted in conjunction
with Professor George Frederick Wright, of Oberlin, Ohio, whose
labors have been of the highest importance in shedding light upon
the question of the antiquity of man in America.[1498] Together they
traced the southern boundary of the glacial region across the State
of Pennsylvania, and subsequently Professor Wright has continued his
researches through the States of Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky, as far
as the Mississippi River and even beyond. He has found that glacial
floods similar to those of the Delaware valley have deposited similar
beds of drift gravel in the valleys of all the southerly flowing
rivers, and he has called attention to the importance of searching in
them for palæolithic implements. As early as March, 1883, he predicted
that traces of early man would be found in the extensive terraces and
gravel deposits of the southern portion of Ohio.[1499] This prediction
was speedily fulfilled, and upon November 4, 1885, Professor Putnam
reported to the Boston Society of Natural History that Dr. C. L. Metz,
of Madisonville, Ohio, had found in the gravels of the valley of the
Little Miami River, at that place, eight feet below the surface, a rude
implement made of black flint, of about the same size and shape as one
of the same material found by Dr. Abbott in the Trenton gravels. This
was followed by the announcement from Dr. Metz that he had discovered
another specimen (a chipped pebble) in the gravels at Loveland, in
the same valley, at a depth of nearly thirty feet from the surface.
Professor Wright has visited both localities, and given a detailed
description of them, illustrated by a map. He finds that the deposit
at Madisonville clearly belongs to the glacial-terrace epoch, and is
underlain by “till,” while in that at Loveland it is known that the
bones of the mastodon have been discovered. He closes his account
with these words: “In the light of the exposition just given, these
implements will at once be recognized as among the most important
archæological discoveries yet made in America, ranking on a par with
those of Dr. Abbott at Trenton, New Jersey. They show that in Ohio, as
well as on the Atlantic coast, man was an inhabitant before the close
of the glacial period.”[1500] Further confirmation of these predictions
was received at the meeting of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science, at Cleveland, Ohio, in August, 1888, when Mr.
Hilborne T. Cresson reported his discovery of a large flint implement
in the glacial gravels of Jackson County, Indiana, as well as of two
chipped implements made of argillite, which he had found _in place_ at
a depth of several feet in the ancient terrace of the Delaware River,
in Claymont, Newcastle County, Delaware.[1501]
This discovery of Mr. Cresson’s has assumed a great geological
importance, and it is thus reported by him: “Toward midday of July 13,
1887, while lying upon the edge of the railroad cut, sketching the
boulder line, my eye chanced to notice a piece of steel-gray substance,
strongly relieved in the sunlight against the red-colored gravel, just
above where it joined the lower grayish-red portion. It seemed to me
like argillite, and being firmly imbedded in the gravel was decidedly
interesting. Descending the steep bank as rapidly as possible, the
specimen was secured.... Upon examining my specimen I found that it was
unquestionably a chipped implement. There is no doubt about its being
firmly imbedded in the gravel, for the delay I made in extricating it
with my pocket-knife nearly caused me the unpleasant position of being
covered by several tons of gravel.... Having duly reported my find
to Professor Putnam, I began, at his request, a thorough examination
of the locality, and on May 25, 1888, the year following, discovered
another implement four feet below the surface, at a place about one
eighth of a mile from the first discovery.... The geological formation
in which the implement was found seems to be a reddish gravel mixed
with schist.”[1502]
Professor Wright thus comments upon these discoveries and their
geological situation: “The discovery of palæolithic implements, as
described by Mr. Cresson, near Claymont, Del., unfolds a new chapter
in the history of man in America. It was my privilege in November last
to visit the spot with him, and to spend a day examining the various
features of the locality.... The cut in the Baltimore and Ohio railroad
in which this implement was found is about one mile and a half west
of the Delaware River, and about one hundred and fifty feet above it.
The river is here quite broad. Indeed, it has ceased to be a river,
and is already merging into Delaware Bay; the New Jersey shore being
about three miles distant from the Delaware side. The ascent from
the bay at Claymont to the locality under consideration is by three
or four well-marked benches. These probably are not terraces in the
strict sense of the word, but shelves marking different periods of
erosion when the land stood at these several levels, but now thinly
covered with old river deposits. Upon reaching the locality of Mr.
Cresson’s recent discovery, we find a well-marked superficial water
deposit containing pebbles and small boulders up to two or three
feet in diameter, and resting unconformably upon other deposits,
different in character, and in some places directly upon the decomposed
schists which characterize the locality. This is without question
the Philadelphia Red Gravel and Brick Clay of Lewis. The implement
submitted to us was found near the bottom of this upper deposit, and
eight feet below the surface.... As Mr. Cresson was on the ground
when the implement was uncovered, and took it out with his own hands,
there would seem to be no reasonable doubt that it was originally a
part of the deposit; for Mr. Cresson is no novice in these matters,
but has had unusual opportunities, both in this country and in the
old world, to study the localities where similar discoveries have
heretofore been made. The absorbing question concerning the age of this
deposit is therefore forced upon our attention as archæologists....
The determination of the age of these particular deposits at Claymont
involves a discussion of the whole question of the Ice Age in North
America, and especially that of the duality of the glacial epoch. At a
meeting of this society on January 19, 1881, I discussed the age of the
Trenton gravel, in which Dr. Abbott has found so many palæoliths, and
was led also incidentally at the same time to discuss the relative age
of what Professor Lewis called the Philadelphia Red Gravel. I had at
that time recently made repeated trips to Trenton, and with Professor
Lewis had been over considerable portions of the Delaware valley for
the express purpose of determining these questions. The conclusions to
which we—that is, Professor Lewis and myself—came were thus expressed
in the paper above referred to (_Proc. Boston Soc. of Nat. Hist._, vol.
xxi. pp. 137-145), namely, that the Philadelphia Brick Clay and Red
Gravel (which are essentially one formation) marked the period when
the ice had its greatest extension, and when there was a considerable
depression of the land in that vicinity; perhaps, however, less than
a hundred feet in the neighborhood of the moraine, though increasing
towards the northwest. During this period of greatest extension and
depression, the Philadelphia Red Gravel and Brick Clay were deposited
by the ice-laden floods which annually poured down the valley in the
summer seasons. As the ice retreated towards the headwaters of the
valley, the period was marked also by a reëlevation of the land to
about its present height, when the later deposits of gravel at Trenton
took place. Dr. Abbott’s discoveries at Trenton prove the presence of
man on the continent at that stage of the glacial epoch. Mr. Cresson’s
discoveries prove the presence of man at a far earlier stage. How much
earlier, will depend upon our interpretation of the general facts
bearing on the question of the duality of the glacial epoch.
“Mr. McGee, of the United States Geological Survey, has recently
published the results of extensive investigations carried on by him
respecting the superficial deposits of the Atlantic coast. (See _Amer.
Jour. of Science_, vol. xxxv., 1888.) He finds that on all the rivers
south of the Delaware there are deposits corresponding in character
to what Professor Lewis had denominated Philadelphia Red Gravel and
Brick Clay.... From the extent to which this deposit is developed
at Washington, in the District of Columbia, Mr. McGee prefers to
designate it the Columbia formation. But the period is regarded by him
as identical with that of the Philadelphia Red Gravel and Brick Clay,
which Professor Lewis had attributed to the period of maximum glacial
development on the Atlantic coast.
“It is observable that the boulders in this Columbia formation belong,
so far as we know, in every case, to the valleys in which they are now
found.... It is observable also that it is not necessary in any case to
suppose that these deposits were the direct result of glacial ice. Mr.
McGee does not suppose that glaciers extended down these valleys to any
great distance. Indeed, so far as we are aware, there is no evidence of
even local glaciers in the Alleghany Mountains south of Harrisburg. But
it is easy to see that an incidental result of the glacial period was a
great increase of ice and snow in the headwaters of all these streams,
so as to add greatly to the extent of the deposits in which floating
ice is concerned. And this Columbia formation is, as we understand
it, supposed by Mr. McGee to be the result of this incidental effect
of the glacial period in increasing the accumulations of snow and ice
along the headwaters of all the streams that rise in the Alleghanies.
In this we are probably agreed. But Mr. McGee differs from the
interpretation of the facts given by Professor Lewis and myself, in
that he postulates, largely, however, on the basis of facts outside of
this region, two distinct glacial epochs, and attributes the Columbia
formation to the first epoch, which he believes to be from three to
ten times as remote as the period in which the Trenton gravels were
deposited. If, therefore, Dr. Abbott’s implements are, as from the
lowest estimate would seem to be the case, from ten thousand to fifteen
thousand years old, the implements discovered by Mr. Cresson in the
Baltimore and Ohio cut at Claymont, which is certainly in Mr. McGee’s
Columbia formation, would be from thirty thousand to one hundred and
fifty thousand years old.
“But as I review the evidence which has come to my knowledge since
writing the paper in 1881, I do not yet see the necessity of making
so complete a separation between the glacial epochs as Mr. McGee and
others feel compelled to do. But, on the other hand, the unity of
the epoch (with, however, a marked period of amelioration in climate
accompanied by extensive recession of the ice, and followed by a
subsequent re-advance over a portion of the territory) seems more
and more evident. All the facts which Mr. McGee adduces from the
eastern side of the Alleghanies comport, apparently, as readily with
the idea of one glacial period as with that of two.... Until further
examination of the district with these suggestions in view, or until a
more specific statement of facts than we find in Mr. McGee’s papers,
it would therefore seem unnecessary to postulate a distinct glacial
period to account for the Columbia formation.... But no matter which
view prevails, whether that of two distinct glacial epochs, or of one
prolonged epoch with a mild period intervening, the Columbia deposits
at Claymont, in which these discoveries of Mr. Cresson have been made,
long antedate (perhaps by many thousand years) the deposits at Trenton,
N. J., at Loveland and Madison, Ohio, at Little Falls, Minn., ... and
at Medora, Ind.... Those all belong to the later portion of the glacial
period, while these at Claymont belong to the earlier portion of that
period, if they are not to be classed, according to Mr. McGee, as
belonging to an entirely distinct epoch.”[1503]
The objects discovered by both Dr. Metz and Mr. Cresson have been
deposited in the Peabody Museum at Cambridge, and their artificial
character cannot be disputed.
At nearly the same date at which Dr. Abbott published the account of
his discoveries, Col. Charles C. Jones, of Augusta, Georgia, recorded
the finding of “some rudely-chipped, triangular-shaped implements in
Nacoochee valley under circumstances which seemingly assign to them
very remote antiquity. In material, manner of construction, and in
general appearance, so nearly do they resemble some of the rough,
so-called flint hatchets belonging to the drift type, as described by
M. Boucher de Perthes, that they might very readily be mistaken the
one for the other.”[1504] They were met with in the course of mining
operations, in which a cutting had been made through the soil and the
underlying sands, gravels, and boulders down to the bedrock. Resting
upon this, at a depth of some nine feet from the surface, were the
three implements described. But it is plain that this deposit can
scarcely be regarded as a true glacial drift, since the great terminal
moraine lies more than four hundred miles away to the north, and the
region where it occurs does not fall within the drift area. It must
be of local origin, and few geologists would be willing to admit the
existence of local glaciers in the Alleghanies so far to the south
during the glacial period. Consequently these objects do not fall
within our definition of true palæolithic implements.
The same thing may be said in a less degree of the implements
discovered by C. M. Wallace, in 1876, in the gravels and clays of the
valley of the James River.[1505]
A different character attaches to certain objects discovered in 1877
by Professor N. H. Winchell, at Little Falls, Minnesota, in the valley
of the Mississippi River.[1506] These consisted mainly of pieces
of chipped white quartz, perfectly sharp, although occurring in a
water-worn deposit, and they were found to extend over quite a large
area. Their artificial character has been vouched for by Professor
Putnam, and among them were a few rude implements which are well
represented in an accompanying plate. A geological section given in the
report shows that they occur in the terrace some sixty feet above the
bank of the river, and were found to extend about four feet below the
surface. In the words of Professor Winchell: “The interest that centres
in these chips ... involves the question of the age of man and his
work in the Mississippi Valley.... The chipping race ... preceded the
spreading of the material of the plain, and must have been pre-glacial,
since the plain was spread out by that flood stage of the Mississippi
River that existed during the prevalence of the ice-period, or resulted
from the dissolution of the glacial winter.... The wonderful abundance
of these chips indicates an astonishing amount of work done, as if
there had been a great manufactory in the neighborhood, or an enormous
lapse of time for its performance.”
This discovery of Professor Winchell was followed up by researches
prosecuted in 1879 in the vicinity of Little Falls by Miss F. E.
Babbit, of that place.[1507] She discovered a similar stratum of
chipped quartz in the ancient terrace, of a mile or more in width,
about forty rods to the east of the river, and elevated some
twenty-five feet above it. This had been brought to light by the
wearing of a wagon track, leading down a natural drainage channel,
which had cut through the quartz stratum down to a level below it. The
result of her prolonged investigations showed that “the stratum of
quartz chips lay at a level some twelve or fifteen feet lower than the
plane of the terrace top.”[1508] While the quartz chips discovered by
Professor Winchell were contained in the upper surface of the terrace
plain, these were strictly confined to a lower level, and cannot be
synchronous with them. They must be older “by at least the lapse of
time required for the deposition of the twelve or fifteen feet of
modified drift forming the upper part of the terrace plain above the
quartz-bearing stratum.”
This conclusion is abundantly confirmed by Mr. Warren Upham, of
the U. S. Geological Survey, in his study of “The recession of
the ice-sheet in Minnesota in its relation to the gravel deposits
overlying the quartz implements found by Miss Babbit at Little Falls,
Minnesota.”[1509] The great ice-sheet of the latest glacial epoch
at its maximum extension pushed out vast lobes of ice, one of which
crossed western and central Minnesota and extended into Iowa. Different
stages of its retreat are marked by eleven distinct marginal moraines,
and this deposit of modified drift at Little Falls Mr. Upham believes
occurred in the interval between the formation of the eighth and the
ninth. “It is,” he says, “upon the till, or direct deposit of the
ice, and forms a surface over which the ice never re-advanced.” An
examination of the terraces and plains of the Mississippi Valley from
St. Paul to twenty-five miles above Little Falls shows them to be
similar in composition and origin to the terraces of modified drift in
the river valleys of New England. In his judgment, “the rude implements
and fragments of quartz discovered at Little Falls were overspread by
the glacial flood-plain of the Mississippi River, while most of the
northern half of Minnesota was still covered by the ice.... It may
be that the chief cause leading men to occupy this locality so soon
after it was uncovered from the ice was their discovery of the quartz
veins in the slate there, ... affording suitable material for making
sharp-edged stone implements of the best quality. Quartz veins are
absent, or very rare and unsuitable for this, in all the rock outcrops
of the south half of Minnesota, that had become uncovered from the
ice, as well as of the whole Mississippi basin southward, and this was
the first spot accessible whence quartz for implement-making could be
obtained.”
According to this view the upper deposit at Little Falls would appear
to be more recent than those laid down by the immediate wasting of the
great terminal moraine at Trenton and in Ohio; but the occupation of
the spot by man upon the lower terrace may well have been at a much
earlier time.
Many of the objects discovered by Miss Babbitt have been placed in the
Peabody Museum, and as their artificial character has been questioned,
the writer wishes to repeat his opinion, formed upon the study of
numerous specimens that have been submitted to him, but not the same as
those upon which Professor Putnam based his similar conclusions, that
they are undoubtedly of human origin.
Implements of palæolithic form have been discovered in several
other localities, but as none of them have been found _in place_, in
undisturbed gravel-beds, either those which have been derived from
the terminal moraine of the second extension of the great northern
ice-sheet, or those which are included within the drift area, they
cannot be considered as proved to be true palæolithic implements,
although it is highly probable that many of them are such.[1510]
* * * * *
We have now to consider the claim to high antiquity of objects which
have been discovered in several places in certain deposits, equally
regarded as of glacial origin, which occur in the central and western
portions of the United States. These are the so-called “lacustrine
deposits,” which are believed to have had their origin from the
former presence of vast lakes, now either extinct or represented by
comparatively small bodies of water. The largest of such lakes occupied
a great depression which once existed between the Rocky Mountains
and the chain of the Sierra Nevada during the quaternary period. The
existing lakes represent the lowest part of two basins, into which
this depression was divided; of these, the western one, represented by
certain smaller lakes, has received the name of Lake Lahontan. This
never had any communication with the sea, and its deposits consequently
register the greater or less amount of rain and snow during the period
of its existence. To the eastern the name of Lake Bonneville has been
given, and it is at present represented by the Great Salt Lake in
Utah. This formerly had an outlet through the valley of the Columbia
River. These lakes are believed to have been produced by the melting of
local glaciers existing during the quaternary times in the above-named
mountains; and similar consequences seem to have followed from the like
presence of ancient glaciers in the Wahsatch and Uintah mountains,
where no lake now exists.
In the ancient deposits of such an immense fresh-water lake, derived
from the melting of glaciers in the last-mentioned mountains, which
once existed in southern Wyoming, Professor Joseph Leidy first
reported, in 1872, the discovery near Fort Bridger of “mingled
implements of the rudest construction, together with a few of the
highest finish.... Some of the specimens are as sharp and fresh in
appearance as if they had been but recently broken from the parent
block. Others are worn and have their sharpness removed, and are so
deeply altered in color as to look exceedingly ancient.”[1511] The
plates accompanying the report show that some of these objects are of
palæolithic form, but as no further information is given in regard to
the conditions under which they were discovered, we cannot pronounce
them to be really palæolithic.
In 1874, Dr. Samuel Aughey made known the existence in Nebraska of
“hundreds of miles of similar lacustrine deposits, almost level or
gently rolling.”[1512] To these the name of “loess” has also been
given, as well as to the mud deposits derived from the northern drift.
Aughey states that these beds are perfectly homogeneous throughout, and
of almost uniform color, ranging in thickness from five to one hundred
and fifty feet. Generally they lie above a true drift formation derived
from glaciers in the Black Hills, and represent “the final retreat of
the glaciers, and that era of depression of the surface of the State
when the greater part of it constituted a great fresh-water lake, into
which the Missouri, the Platte, and the Republican rivers poured their
waters.” The Missouri and its tributaries, flowing for more than one
thousand miles through these deposits, gradually filled up this great
lake with sediment. The rising of the land by degrees converted the
lake-bottom into marshes, through which the rivers began to cut new
channels, and to form the bluffs which now bound them. “The Missouri,
during the closing centuries of the lacustrine age, must have been from
five to thirty miles in breadth, forming a stream which for size and
majesty rivalled the Amazon.” Many remains of mastodons and elephants
are found in this so-called loess, as well as those of the animals now
living in that region, together with the fresh-water and land shells
peculiar to it. In it Aughey has also discovered an arrow-point and a
spear-head, of which he gives well-executed figures. Both are excellent
examples of those well-chipped implements which are regarded as typical
of the Neolithic age or the age of polished stone, and are absolutely
different from the palæolithic implements of which we have hitherto
spoken. They were both found in railroad cuttings on the Iowa side of
the Missouri River, and within three miles of it. The first lay at a
depth of fifteen feet below the top of the deposit. Of the second he
says it was “twenty feet below the top of the loess, and at least six
inches from the edge of the cut, so that it could not have slid into
that place.... Thirteen inches above the point where it was found, and
within three inches of being on a line with it, in undisturbed loess,
there was a lumbar vertebra of an elephant.”[1513]
This intermingling in these deposits of the bones of extinct and
living animals appears to have been brought about by the shifting of
the beds of the vast rivers he has described, which have been flowing
for ages through the slight and easily moved material. It seems to be
analogous to what has taken place in recent times in the valley of the
Mississippi and in its delta. The finding, therefore, of arrow-heads
of recent Indian type, even _in place_ under twenty feet of loess and
below a fossil elephant-bone, cannot be considered as affording any
stronger proof of the antiquity of man than the oft-cited instances of
the discovery of basket-work and pottery underneath similar fossils
at Petite Anse Island in Louisiana, or of pottery and mastodon-bones
on the banks of the Ashley River in South Carolina. No such discovery
can be considered of consequence as bearing upon the question of
palæolithic man.
The late Thomas Belt wrote to Professor Putnam, in 1878, that he had
discovered “a small human skull in an undisturbed loess in a railway
cutting about two miles from Denver (Colorado). All the plains are
covered with a drift deposit of granitic and quartzose pebbles overlaid
by a sandy and calcareous loam closely resembling the diluvial clay
and the loess of Europe. It was in the upper part of the drift series
that I found the skull. Just the tip of it was visible in the cutting
about three and one half feet below the surface.”[1514] Not long after
this Mr. Belt died, and we are without further information in regard
to the locality. It would seem, however, that the loess in which the
skull occurred belongs to the latest in the lacustrine series, and
consequently does not imply any very great antiquity for it.
[Illustration: OBSIDIAN SPEAR-HEAD.
Found in the Lahontan sediments,—from a cut in Russell’s _Lake
Lahontan_, monograph xi. of Powell’s _U. S. Geological Survey_, p. 247.]
In 1882 Mr. W. J. McGee, of the U. S. Geological Survey, obtained
from the upper lacustral clays of the basin of the ancient Lake
Lahontan, where they are exposed in the walls of Walker River Cañon,
a spear-head, made of obsidian, beautifully chipped, and perfectly
resembling those found on the surface throughout the southwest. “It
was discovered projecting point outwards from a vertical scarp of
lacustral clays twenty-five feet below the top of the section, at a
locality where there were no signs of recent disturbance.”[1515] This
is said to have been “associated in such a manner with the bones of an
elephant or mastodon as to leave no doubt of their having been buried
at approximately the same time.” But we are also told that these lakes
are of very recent date, and that they have “left the very latest
of all the complete geological records to be observed in the Great
Basin.”[1516] The fossil shells obtained from these deposits all belong
to living species; while the mammalian remains, which have been found
in only very limited numbers, and all, with a single exception, in the
upper beds, “are the same as occur elsewhere in tertiary or quaternary
strata.” Mr. McGee says: “If the obsidian implement ... was really _in
situ_ (as all appearances indicated), it must have been dropped in a
shallow and quiet bay of the saline and alkaline Lake Lahontan, and
gradually buried beneath its fine mechanical deposits and chemical
precipitates.”[1517]
In Mr. Russell’s opinion, this single implement, although supported
by no other finds of a similar character, is sufficient to prove
that “man inhabited this continent during the last great rise of the
former lake.” But if this last great rise occurred in recent times,
the presence of the bones of tertiary mammals in the upper beds shows
that great natural forces must have been in operation at that time
to have washed these out of their original place of deposit. The
principal organic remains found, we are told, are those of living
shells, and the intermingling of these with the bones of tertiary
mammals could scarcely have taken place in “shallow and quiet bays.”
To the writer this discovery seems rather to prove that an Indian
spear-head was in some manner washed down and buried in the clays of
the Walker River Cañon than that man was the contemporary there of
the tertiary or quaternary mammalia. This fairly seems to be a case
where, in the language of Dr. Brinton, “Archæology may at times correct
Geology.”[1518]
It is almost paralleled by the discovery made by Mr. P. A. Scott, in
Kansas, of a broken knife or lance-head, measuring in its present
condition two inches and one eighth in length. Sir Daniel Wilson, who
reports it, says: “The spot where the discovery was made is in the
Blue Range of the Rocky Mountains, in an alluvial bottom, and distant
several hundred feet from a small stream called Clear Creek. A shaft
was sunk, passing through four feet of rich, black soil, and below
this through upward of ten feet of gravel, reddish clay, and rounded
quartz. Here the flint was found.... The actual object corresponds more
to the small and slighter productions of the modern Indian tool-maker
than to the rude and massive drift implement.” But this most careful
and conscientious observer goes on to remark, “Under any circumstances
it would be rash to build up comprehensive theories on a solitary case
like this.”[1519]
If the discovery by Mr. McGee of this spear-head be insisted upon
as establishing that man inhabited this continent during the last
great rise of the lake, it would be easier to believe that that event
occurred in recent and not in quaternary times, than to admit that the
distinction between palæolithic and neolithic implements, established
by so many discoveries in this country and in Europe, is thereby
utterly overthrown.
The only alternative left is to believe that neolithic man was the
contemporary of the tertiary mammals. To this conclusion we are asked
to come by Professor Josiah D. Whitney, on account of the discovery
of the remains of man and of his works in the auriferous gravels of
California. The famous “Calaveras skull” is figured upon another
page of this volume, where the circumstances attending its discovery
are briefly referred to.[1520] It is astonishing to see how frail is
the foundation upon which such a surprising superstructure has been
raised, as it is found set forth in detail in the section entitled
_Human remains and works of art of the gravel series_, in the third
chapter of Professor Whitney’s memoir on _The auriferous gravels of
the Sierra Nevada of California_.[1521] All is hearsay testimony, and
entirely uncontrolled by any such careful scrutiny as marks the work
of the British Association in the explorations carried on for fifteen
years at Kent’s Hole, near Torquay. There can be no question that
human bones and human implements have often been discovered in these
gravels, but according to the accounts as given these are mingled in
them in inextricable confusion. What is the character of these objects
of human workmanship? So far are they from being, as Professor Whitney
describes them, “always the same kind of implements, ... namely, the
coarsest and the least finished which one would suppose could be made
and still be implements.” One account speaks of “a spear or lance
head of obsidian, five inches long and one and a half broad, quite
regularly formed.” Others mention “spear and arrow heads made of
obsidian;” or “certain discoidal stones from three to four inches in
diameter, and about an inch and a half thick, concave on both sides,
with perforated centre.” Still another witness speaks of “a large stone
bead, made perhaps of alabaster, about one and a half inches long and
about one and one fourth inches in diameter, with a hole through it
one fourth of an inch in size.” We are also told of a “stone hatchet
of a triangular shape, with a hole through it for a handle, near the
middle. Its size was four inches across the edge, and length about
six inches.” So also oval stones with continuous “grooves cut around
them,” and “grooved oval disks,” are more than once mentioned. We think
these quotations will be sufficient to convince the archæologist that
here is no question of palæolithic implements, but that we have to do
simply with the common Indian objects found on the surface all over
our country. Besides the rude cuts in Bancroft,[1522] I know of only
one example of these California discoveries which has been figured.
This is the “beautiful relic” described by Mr. J. W. Foster, of which
he says: “When we consider its symmetry of form ... and the delicate
drilling of the hole through a material so liable to fracture, we are
free to say it affords an exhibition of the lapidary’s skill superior
to anything yet furnished by the Stone age of either continent.”[1523]
Mr. Foster doubtfully suggests that this object was “used as a plummet
for the purpose of determining the perpendicular to the horizon.” It
has been shown, however, by Mr. W. H. Henshaw, that among the Indians
of Southern California similar objects have long been used by their
medicine-men as “medicine or sorcery stones.”[1524] Whichever may be
held to be the true explanation of its use, either is more likely to be
a characteristic of the Indian race than of primitive man.
But the objects whose presence in the gravels is most repeatedly spoken
of are stone mortars, which Professor Whitney supposes were “used by
the race inhabiting this region in prehistoric times ... for providing
food.” One of these is stated to have been “found standing upright,
and the pestle was in it, in its proper place, apparently just as it
had been left by the owner.” It was taken out of a shaft, according
to the testimony, twelve feet underneath undisturbed strata. This was
certainly a very marvellous thing to have happened if all the objects
found in the gravels are supposed to have been brought there by the
action of floods of water. But it is a very simple matter, if the
supposition of Mr. Southall be correct, who thinks that “these mortars
have been left in these positions by the ancient inhabitants in their
search for _gold_.”[1525] The Spaniards found gold in abundance in
Mexico, and the locality from which it came is believed by Mr. Southall
to be indicated by a discovery made in 1849 by some gold-diggers at
one of the mountain diggings called Murphy’s, in the region in which
Professor Whitney’s discoveries have taken place. In examining a
high barren district of mountain, they were surprised to come upon
the abandoned site of an ancient mine. At the bottom of a shaft two
hundred and ten feet deep a human skeleton was found, with an altar for
worship and other evidences of ancient labor by the aborigines.[1526]
Mr. Southall believes that these mortars were used “for crushing the
cemented gravel of the auriferous beds.” Some corroboration is afforded
for this suggestion by the fact that stone mortars of a like character
are found in the ancient gold mines, worked by the early Egyptian
monarchs, in the Gebel Allakee Mountains near the Red Sea, which were
used in pulverizing the gold-bearing quartz.
As to the authenticity of the “Calaveras skull,”
“Great contest followed and much learned dust.”
The probabilities seem in favor of its being a genuine human fossil,
and the question recurs as to its character and the presumable age
of the deposits from which it came. The latest geologist who has
studied the locality, so far as the writer is aware, says of these
deposits: “Even before visiting California I had suspected these old
river gravels might be contemporaneous with the glacial epoch, and
I still think this possible. This area was not glaciated, and these
old gravels, hundreds of feet in thickness, may very well represent
that great interval of time occupied in other regions by the glacial
periods.”[1527] In discussing this question from the point of view of
the character of the fossil animal remains contained in the gravels,
we must continually bear in mind what Professor E. D. Cope says of
the _Mesozoic and Cænozoic of North America_: “The faunæ of these
periods have not yet been discriminated.... Many questions of the exact
contemporaneity of these different beds are as yet unsettled.”[1528]
Professor Cope has previously pointed out how marked a difference there
is between the quaternary fauna of North America and that of Europe; we
have no Hippopotamus or Rhinoceros Tichorinus, and they no Megatherium,
Megalonyx, and other species. Under the varying conditions of animal
existence thus implied, to assail established ideas upon the sequence
in man’s development, or to maintain that he has had a long career on
the Pacific slope of our continent before he had made his appearance
in Western Europe, seems to the writer to be an attempt to explain
“_ignotum per ignotius_.”
What is really to be understood by the assumption that man existed
in tertiary times? So profound a palæontologist as Professor William
Boyd Dawkins thinks “it is impossible to believe that man should have
been an exception to the law of change. In the Pliocene age we cannot
expect to find traces of man upon the earth. The living placental
mammals had only then begun to appear, and seeing that the higher
animals have invariably appeared in the rocks according to their place
in the zoölogical scale, fishes, amphibians, reptiles, placental
mammals, it is hardly reasonable to suppose that the highest of all
should then have been upon the earth.”[1529] When, therefore, some of
the geologists of our country support Professor Whitney’s claim that
these discoveries of human fossils have actually proved man’s existence
in the Pliocene period, by arguments mainly based upon the effects of
erosion and the immense periods of time which these imply, or favor
his inference from the animal fossils contained in these deposits that
there has been “a total change in the fauna and flora of the region,”
and that “the fauna of the gravel deposits is almost exclusively made
up of extinct species,” we may well insist, with Dawkins, that the
human remains should not be regarded as standing upon a different basis
from those of the horse, since both occur under similar conditions.
Dr. Leidy reports the finding of remains of four different species of
fossil _Equus_. But among them “we may note the skull of a mustang,
identical with that of Mexico and California, which could not have been
buried in the gravels of Sierra County before the time of the Spanish
Conquest, when the living race of horses was introduced.” Professor
Jeffries Wyman says of the Calaveras skull: “Any conclusions based upon
a single skull are liable to prove erroneous, unless we have sufficient
grounds for the belief that such a skull is a representative one of the
race to which it belongs.... We have no sufficient reason for assuming
in the present instance that the skull is a representative one.... The
skull presents no signs of having belonged to an inferior race. In its
breadth it agrees with the other crania from California, except those
of the Diggers, but surpasses them in the other particulars in which
comparisons have been made.”[1530] As, therefore, what appear to be
the skulls of a California Indian and that of a Mexican mustang have
been found to occur in the same deposits, this circumstance, instead
of proving that man was an inhabitant of pliocene America, would seem
to the writer to imply either that these deposits are comparatively
recent, or that the fossil bones found in them are so commingled that
arguments based upon purely palæontological considerations can be
regarded as entitled to very little weight.
But although some American palæontologists are inclined to argue that
these deposits belong to the Pliocene, on account of the character of
the vertebrate fossils found in them, it must not be forgotten that
geologists generally prefer to refer them to the Pleistocene. They
believe that even the superimposition of lava beds upon the gravels
does not establish a very high antiquity for them, and question whether
the time that has elapsed since the outflow of the lava, as measured
by the amount of erosion that has taken place in the gravels, is to
be regarded as much greater than can properly be assigned to the
Pleistocene period elsewhere. Professor Whitney himself admits the
difficulty of distinguishing whether “deposits have been accumulated in
the place where we find them previous to the cessation of the period
of volcanic activity. The gravels which have not been protected by a
capping of basalt, or only thinly or not at all covered by erupted
materials, may in some places have been overlain by recent deposits
in such a way that the line between volcanic and post-volcanic cannot
be distinctly drawn.... It must not unfrequently have happened that
fossils have been washed out of the less coherent detrital beds
belonging to the volcanic series, carried far from their original
resting-place, and deposited in such a position that they seem to
belong to the present epoch.”[1531] In one of the reports of Hayden’s
survey can be seen a plate representing “Modern Lake Deposits capped
with Basalt.”[1532] There is sufficient ground for believing that the
volcanic activity of the regions of the Sierras has continued down to
very recent times, geologically speaking, and that there is no such
great difference of age between the lava-cappings and the other beds
as Professor Whitney supposes. Hayden thinks “the main portion of the
volcanic material of the West has been thrown out at a comparatively
modern date.”[1533] Undoubtedly the amount of erosion that has taken
place in these river gravels implies a great lapse of time, but so
do the other facts of physical geography which have been employed
as chronometers by which to measure the time since the close of the
quaternary period. To carry this erosion back to the tertiary times,
and to assign man his place in the world then on that ground, in face
of the arguments to the contrary drawn from archæology, palæontology,
and geology, in view of the essential weakness of the testimony upon
which the arguments in its favor are based, would seem to be a most
hazardous assumption. It is only equalled by the statement that “the
discoveries made in Europe, which have already obtained general
credence, carry man close to the verge of the tertiary; if not,
indeed, a little the other side of the line.”[1534] In the writer’s
opinion, this is the belief of only a small number of the most extreme
evolutionists in Europe, while the great body of cautious and critical
observers think that it has not been proved, and a few are willing to
hold their judgment in suspense.
Professor Whitney’s conclusions, however, are supported by Mr. Wallace
in the article quoted at the beginning of this chapter, in his
character as an evolutionist of the most advanced school. He says:
“Believing that the whole bearing of the comparative anatomy of man and
of the anthropoid apes, together with the absence of indications of any
essential change in his structure during the quaternary period, lead to
the conclusion that he _must_ have existed, as man, in pliocene times,
and that the intermediate forms connecting him with the higher apes
probably lived during the early pliocene or the miocene period, it is
urged that all such discoveries ... are in themselves probable and such
as we have a right to expect.”[1535] In such a frame of mind it is very
easy for him to wave aside every objection raised by the archæologist
to the character of the evidence brought forward to sustain the alleged
discoveries. To the objection that the objects accompanying the human
remains, for which such a great antiquity is claimed, are too similar
to those of comparatively recent times, he has a ready answer: “The
same may be said of the most ancient bow and spear-heads and those
made by modern Indians. The use of the articles has in both cases
been continuous, and the objects themselves are so necessary and so
comparatively simple that there is no room for any great modification
of form.” The writer can only state here that no archæologist holds
this opinion, and will refer for a detailed statement of his reasons
for the contrary view to an article by him upon _The Bow and Arrow
unknown to Palæolithic Man_.[1536]
It is not easy to believe that so vast a difference in age can be
attributed to the deposits upon the opposite sides of the chain of the
Sierra Nevada, as would follow if we are to hold that the auriferous
gravels belong to the tertiary, while the Lahontan deposits belong to
the quaternary period. Far more reasonable does it seem to suppose
that they both fall within the two divisions into which we have seen
that the pleistocene has been divided. To the writer it appears, from
what study he has made of the evidences alleged of man’s existence
in North America in early times, that proof is wanting that he made
his appearance here earlier than in interglacial times. Dr. Abbott’s
discoveries seem to be worthy of all the importance which has been
assigned to them, and the more so from the fact that they are in accord
with similar discoveries made in the Old World. The evidence adduced
appears to be altogether too fragmentary and strained to warrant the
conclusion that has been drawn that there is no proper correlation
between the geological calendars of the two hemispheres.
Besides the numerous palæolithic implements which the Trenton gravels
have yielded, there have been found in them three human crania, more
or less complete, and portions of others.[1537] Professor Putnam is
inclined to the opinion that these may be veritable remains of the
makers of the palæolithic implements. But it is difficult to conceive
how such fragile objects as human skulls, in this period and at this
locality, could have survived the destructive forces to which they must
have been subjected. We must recollect that the bones of man are very
seldom met with in the river gravels of the Old World, and such crania
as are accepted as belonging to these deposits are dolichocephalic, and
not, like these, brachycephalic.[1538] The circumstances under which
these three have been found are not reported with sufficient detail
to enable us to account satisfactorily for their presence, nor can we
admit that the fact that they “are not of the Delaware Indian type”
affords any adequate criterion for our judgment. It is well established
that “in America we find extreme brachycephaly, as well among the
prehistoric as among the historic peoples from British America to
Patagonia. At the same time, dolichocephaly is found, besides among the
Eskimos, throughout the American Indian tribes from north to south; but
it cannot be considered an American craniologic characteristic.”[1539]
The various forms of skulls, moreover, are found to be so intermingled
that they have been compared to “what might be looked for in a
collection made from the potter’s field of London or New York.”[1540]
The problem is still further complicated by the widespread custom
among the American tribes of altering the natural shape of the skull,
sometimes by flattening it, sometimes by making it as round as
possible.[1541] Taking all these matters into consideration, we are
compelled to regard craniology by itself as an insufficient guide.
We have now passed in review such evidences of man’s early existence in
North America as seem to be sufficiently substantiated by satisfactory
proof, and have intentionally left out of consideration many former
examples, which were accustomed to be cited before the science of
prehistoric archæology had formulated her laws and established her
general conclusions, as well as some more recent ones in which the
evidence seems to be weak.
It only remains for the writer to express his own conclusions on the
question. But first let him draw attention to the state of public
opinion upon this subject as it is well expressed by an English writer:
“The evidence for the existence of palæolithic man in America has been
more fiercely contested even than in Europe, and the problem there
is certainly more complicated. In Europe we can test the age of the
remains not merely by their actual character, but also by the presence
or absence of associated domestic animals. In America this test is
absent, for there were virtually no domestic animals save the dog
known to the pre-European inhabitants. We are therefore remitted to
less direct evidence, namely, the provenance of the remains from beds
of distinctly Pleistocene age, the fabric of the remains, and their
association with animals, we have reason to believe, become extinct at
the termination of that period.”[1542]
As an example of the spirit in which this “fierce contest” is waged in
America, it will be sufficient to quote a few passages from a work by
one of her most eminent men of science. He is speaking of “what seems
to be a village site in Europe, of far greater antiquity than the Swiss
lake-villages, and which may be a veritable ‘Palæolithic’ antediluvian
town. It occurs at Solutré, near Mâcon, in eastern France, and has
given rise to much discussion and controversy, as described by Messrs.
De Ferry and Arcelin.... It destroys utterly the pretension that the
men of the mammoth age were an inferior race, or ruder than their
successors in the later stone age.... Lastly, many of the flint weapons
of Solutré are of the palæolithic type characteristic of the river
gravels, ... while other implements and weapons are as well worked as
those of the later stone age. Thus this singular deposit connects these
two so-called ages, and fuses them into one.”[1543] The only comment
the writer will make upon this statement is to say that he has twice
visited the station at Solutré in company with M. Arcelin; that he has
examined the collection of the late M. De Ferry at his house; and that
he has before him the work which is supposed to be quoted from,[1544]
and he accordingly feels warranted in asserting with confidence that
not one “flint implement of the palæolithic type characteristic of the
river gravels” was ever found at Solutré. A note appended to Sir J. W.
Dawson’s rash statement adds: “Recent discoveries by M. Prunières, in
caves at Beaumes Chaudes, seem to show that the older cave-men were
in contact with more advanced tribes, as arrow-heads of the so-called
neolithic type are found sticking in their bones, or associated with
them. This would form another evidence of the little value to be
attached to the distinction of the two ages of stone.” The writer
has already indicated his conviction that palæolithic man had not
advanced sufficiently to invent the bow and arrow, and he wishes to
add here that “arrow-heads of the so-called neolithic type” continued
to be ordinary weapons employed during the Age of Bronze. He is only
surprised that Dr. Prunières’ discoveries are not quoted to prove that
there is no distinction between the Age of Stone and the Age of Bronze.
Tested by the canons of prehistoric archæology, superposition,
association, and style, in the judgment of the writer the fact of the
existence of palæolithic man upon this continent, and the distinction
between the rude palæolithic implement and the skilfully chipped
obsidian objects which belong to what is called in Europe the Solutré
type (a development of the later period in the early stone age, which
cannot be overlooked in discussing the question of the antiquity of
man), are truths as firmly established as any taught by modern science.
The small minority who refuse to admit the last stated proposition are
laggards in her march, and the few doubters who still question the
genuineness of the palæolithic implements from the Trenton gravels are
not entitled by their knowledge of the processes of manufacturing stone
implements to have much weight attached to their opinions.
Regarding, then, the existence of palæolithic man as established by
the finding of four hundred of his relics in the Delaware valley near
Trenton, we have next to inquire whether there is evidence that in
that region man made any progress towards the neolithic condition.
For an answer to this question we have only to study the immense
collection of objects gathered by Dr. Abbott, and now deposited in
the Peabody Museum at Cambridge. This seems to warrant a conclusion
exactly the opposite to Professor Whitney’s, who states that “so far
as California is concerned ... the implements, tools, and works of
art obtained are throughout in harmony with each other, all being the
simplest and least artistic of which it is possible to conceive;” and
his further statement that the “rude tools required but little more
skill than is indicated by the chipped obsidian implements which are
now, and have been from all time, in use among the aborigines of this
continent.”[1545]
We have already seen that Professor Whitney’s inferences about the
relics of man occurring in the gravels of California are not at all
justified by the facts relating to their discovery as reported by him;
and as he offers no proof of his other assertion that “chipped obsidian
implements have been _for all time_ in use among the aborigines of
this continent,” we will venture to question its accuracy, even should
he argue that his loose statement was intended to apply only to the
aborigines of California. Consequently we are somewhat at a loss
to understand why Dr. Abbott should feel called upon to refute his
conclusions. He does this, however, successfully in his _Primitive
Industry_, which is so largely based upon this great collection as
to answer satisfactorily as a catalogue for it. In his own words,
“the careful and systematic examination of the surface geology of New
Jersey, of itself, it is believed, shows as abundant and unmistakable
evidence of the transition from a true palæolithic to a neolithic
condition as is exhibited in the traces of human handiwork found in
the valley of any European river.”[1546] The arguments upon which
this conclusion is based are drawn from each of the three canons of
prehistoric archæology. A certain class of objects, superior in form
and finish to the rude palæolithic implement, but decidedly inferior
in every respect to the common types of Indian manufacture, with
which collectors of such objects all over our country are perfectly
familiar, is found occurring _principally_ in deposits which occupy a
position intermediate between the drift gravels, from which come the
palæolithic implements, and the cultivable surface-soil, in which the
former implements of the Indians are constantly brought to light by the
ordinary operations of agriculture. In other instances, where these
peculiar objects are found on or near the surface, not only do they not
always occur there in association with the common Indian relics, but
the material of which they are made, argillite, is the same as that out
of which all the four hundred palæolithic implements are fabricated,
with the exception of “two of quartz, one of quartzite, and one made
from a black chert pebble.”[1547] This peculiar material occurs _in
place_ only a few miles north of Trenton, and as the ice-sheet withdrew
it afforded “the first available mineral for effective implements other
than pebbles, and these were largely covered with water, and not so
readily obtained as at present; while the dry land of that day, the
Columbia gravel, contained almost exclusively in this region small
quartzite pebbles an inch or two in length.”[1548] The objects thus
referred to exhibit only a few simple types. There is a rudely chipped
spear-head, about three or four inches in length and from one to two
in breadth, characterized by the same kind of decomposition of the
surface which is seen upon the palæolithic implements. These occur in
large numbers; “as many as a thousand have been found in an area of
fifty acres.... A peculiarity ... is their frequent occurrence ... at
a depth that suggests that they were lost when the face of the country
was different from what it now is.”[1549] An implement is often found
which was probably used as a knife, also very rudely chipped, and
shaped somewhat like a spear-head, but never having a sharp point.
The argillite, of which these are made, “is very hard and susceptible
of being brought to a very sharp edge,” but they are now all much
decomposed upon the surface, and “are frequently brought to light
through land-slides and the uprooting of trees from depths greater than
it is usual to find jasper implements”[1550] of the Indians.
The most common object of all, however, and one that occurs in
very large numbers, is a slender argillite spear-point, about three
inches in length, of nearly uniform size, and having little or no
finish at the base. These are found at various depths up to five
feet, principally in the alluvial mud that has accumulated upon the
meadows skirting the Delaware River, that are liable to be overflowed
occasionally by the tide. From this circumstance, in addition to
their shape, Dr. Abbott has conjectured that they were used as
fish-spears.[1551] “This deposit of mud is of a deep blue-black color,
stiff in consistency, and almost wholly free from pebbles. It is
composed of decomposed vegetable matter and a large percentage of very
fine sand. It varies in depth from four to twenty feet, and rests on
an old gravel of an origin antedating the river gravels that contain
palæolithic implements. This mud is the geological formation next
succeeding the palæolithic implement-bearing gravels.... A careful
survey of this mud deposit, made at several distant points, leads
to the conclusion that its formation dates from the exposure of the
older gravel upon which it rests, through the gradual lessening of
the bulk of the river, until it occupied only its present channel....
The indications are that the present volume and channel of the river
have been essentially as they now are for a very long period; and the
character of the deposit is such that its accumulation, if principally
from decomposition of vegetable matter, must necessarily be very
gradual. Since its accumulation to a depth sufficient to sustain tree
growth, forests have grown, decayed, and been replaced by a growth
of other timber. While so recent in origin that it seems scarcely
to warrant the attention of the geologist, its years of growth are
nevertheless to be numbered by centuries, and the traces of man found
at all depths through it hint of a distant, shadowy past that is
difficult to realize.
“The same objection, it may be, will be urged in this instance as in
others where the comparative antiquity of man is based upon the depth
at which stone implements are found,—that all these traces have been
left upon the present surface of the ground, and subsequently have
gotten, by unexplained means, to the various depths at which they now
occur. It is, indeed, difficult to realize how some of these argillite
spear-points have finally sunk through a compact peaty mass until they
have reached the very base of the deposit. For those who urge that this
sinking process explains the occurrence of implements at great depths,
it remains to demonstrate that the people who made these argillite
fish-spears either made only these, or were careful to take no other
evidences of their handicraft with them when they wandered about these
meadows; for certainly nothing else appears to have shared the fate
of sinking deeply into the mud. In fact, the objection mentioned is
met in this case, as in that of the palæolithic implements, that if
these fish-spears are of the same age and origin as the ordinary Indian
relics of the surface, then all alike should be found at great depths.
This, we know, is not the case. Furthermore, the character of the
deposit is not that of a loose mud or quicksand, but more like that of
peat. It has a close texture, is tough and unyielding to a degree, and
offers decided resistance to the sinking of comparatively light objects
deeply into it. This is, of course, lessened when the deposit is
subject to tidal overflows, and in the immediate vicinity of springs,
which, bubbling through it, have caused a deposit of quicksand. While
here an object sinks instantly out of sight, it is not here that we
must judge of the character of the formation as a whole; and over the
greater portion of its area we find no evidence of objects disappearing
beneath the surface at a more rapid rate than the accumulation of
decomposing vegetable matter would explain. Efforts have been made to
determine the rate of progress of this growth of mould, but they are
not wholly satisfactory; nevertheless the indications are sufficient to
warrant our belief that the rate is so gradual as to invest with great
archæological interest the characteristic traces of man found in these
alluvial deposits.”
Although these argillite spear-points seem _principally_ to occur, as
has been stated, in the alluvial mud along the banks of the Delaware,
yet they are often found upon the surface, and associated with objects
of Indian origin. This circumstance Dr. Abbott attempts to explain by
the following considerations: “One marked result of the deforesting of
the country and its constant cultivation has been to remove in great
part the many inequalities of the surface and to dry up many of the
smaller brooks. The hillocks have been worn down, the valleys filled
up, and this of course has resulted in bringing to the surface, on the
higher ground, the argillite implements which were at considerable
depths, and in burying in the valleys the more recent jasper and quartz
implements of Indian origin that were left upon the soil when lost or
discarded by the red man. In the remnants of forests still remaining,
where no such disturbance of the soil has occurred, the relative depths
at which argillite and jasper respectively occur indicate the greater
age of the former.”[1552]
He recurs to this subject in another place:[1553] “The telling fact
with reference to these argillite spear-points is that they are not,
in the same sense as jasper arrow-heads, surface-found implements.
They occur also, and even more abundantly, beneath the surface-soil.
The celebrated Swedish naturalist, Peter Kalm, travelled throughout
central and southern New Jersey in 1748-50, and in his description of
the country remarks: ‘We find great woods here, but when the trees in
them have stood a hundred and fifty or a hundred and eighty years, they
are either rotting within or losing their crown, or their wood becomes
quite soft, or their roots are no longer able to draw in sufficient
nourishment, or they die from some other cause. Therefore, when storms
blow, which sometimes happens here, the trees are broken off either
just above the roots, or in the middle, or at the summit. Several trees
are likewise torn out with their roots by the power of the winds....
In this manner the old trees die away continually, and are succeeded
by a younger generation. Those which are thrown down lie on the ground
and putrefy, sooner or later, and by that means increase the _black
soil_, into which the leaves are likewise finally changed, which drop
abundantly in autumn, are blown about by the winds for some time, but
are heaped up and lie on both sides of the trees which are fallen
down. It requires several years before a tree is entirely reduced to
dust.’[1554] This quotation has a direct bearing on that which follows.
It is clear that the surface-soil was forming during the occupancy of
the country by the Indians. The entire area of the State was covered
with a dense forest, which century after century was increasing the
_black soil_ to which Kalm refers. If, now, an opportunity occurs to
examine a section of virgin soil and underlying strata, as occasionally
happens on the bluffs facing the river, the limit in depth of this
black soil may be approximately determined. An average derived from
several such sections leads me to infer that the depth is not much
over one foot, and the proportion of vegetable matter increases as
the surface is approached. Of this depth of superficial soil probably
not over one half has been derived from decomposition of vegetable
growths. While no positive data are determinable in this matter beyond
the naked fact that rotting trees increase the bulk of top-soil, one
archæological fact that we do derive is that _flint implements_ known
as Indian relics belong to this superficial or ‘black soil,’ as Kalm
terms it. Abundantly are they found on the surface; more sparingly are
they found near the surface; more sparingly still the deeper we go;
while at the base of this deposit of soil the _argillite_ implements
occur in greatest abundance. Here, then, we have the whole matter in
a nut-shell. The two forms were dissociated until by the deforesting
of the country and subsequent cultivation of the soil, except in a few
instances, they became commingled.”
A further argument in respect to the relation which argillite
implements bear to those made of jasper and quartz is derived from
the relative proportion in which they occur in localities which are
believed to have been occupied first by the users of argillite, and
subsequently by the Indians. “Of a series of twenty thousand objects
gathered in Mercer County, New Jersey, forty-four hundred were of
argillite, and of such rude forms and in such limited varieties as
would be expected of the productions of a less cultured people than
the Indian of the stone age. Of this series of forty-four hundred, two
hundred and thirty-three are well-designed drills or perforators and
scrapers; the others being spear-points, fishing-spears, arrow-heads,
and knife-like implements.”[1555] This is supplemented by negative
evidence drawn from “the character of the sites of arrow-makers’
open-air workshops, or those spots whereon the professional chipper
of flint pursued his calling. In the locality where I have pursued my
studies several such sites have been discovered and carefully examined.
In no one of these workshop sites has there been found any trace of
argillite mingled with the flint-chips that form the characteristic
feature of such spots. On the other hand, no similar sites have been
discovered, to my knowledge, where argillite was used exclusively.
The absence of this mineral cannot be explained on the ground that it
was difficult to procure, for such is not the case. It constitutes,
in fact, a considerable percentage of the pebbles and boulders of the
drift from which the Indians gathered their jasper and quartz pebbles
for working into implements and weapons. If the absence of argillite
from such heaps of selected stones is explained by the assertion that
the Indians had recognized the superiority of jasper, then the belief
that argillite was used prior to jasper receives tacit assent. If,
however, it was the earlier _Indians_ who used argillite, and gradually
discarded it for the various forms of flint, then we ought to find
workshop sites older than the time of _flint_-chipping, and others
where the two minerals are associated. This, as has been stated, has
not been done.”[1556]
Professor Putnam has found a confirmation of these views of Dr. Abbott
in the contents of a great shell-heap at Keyport, in New Jersey,
investigated over thirty years ago by Rev. Samuel Lockwood, and now
placed in the Peabody Museum at Cambridge. “As the shell-heap at
Keyport, once covering a mile or more in length along a narrow strip
bordered upon one side by the ocean and on the other by Raritan Bay, is
entirely obliterated, it is of importance that the materials obtained
from it are now in the museum for comparison with our very extensive
collections from the shell-heaps of New England. The fact that at
certain places on this narrow strip between the bay and the sea the
prevailing implements were of argillite and of great antiquity has a
peculiar significance in connection with those from Trenton, and again
points to an intermediate period between the palæolithic and the late
Indian occupation of New Jersey.”[1557]
To these various arguments the writer wishes to add the statement
that to his personal knowledge argillite spear-points, and especially
those of the fish-spear type, are occasionally found in other parts
of our country besides New Jersey. In his own researches, which have
been principally carried on upon the seacoast of New England, he has
_never_ found an example of them in the shell-heaps proper, which are
universally recognized by archæologists as relics of the Indians. The
few which he has found himself, or has obtained from others, have come
from meadows by the side of rivers or ponds, where they might very well
have been used as fish-spears.
A further confirmation of Dr. Abbott’s opinions in regard to the
descendants of palæolithic man is derived from certain discoveries
made by Mr. Hilborne T. Cresson in the alluvial deposits at Naaman’s
Creek, in Delaware. These were first made known in November, 1887,
by a letter to the editor of the American Antiquarian. “In 1870, a
fisherman living in the village of Marcus Hook, Pennsylvania, gave me
some spear and arrow heads flaked from a dense argillite, as well as
other rude implements of a prehistoric people, which he had found on
some extensive mud flats near the mouth of Naaman’s Creek, a small
tributary of the Delaware. The finder stated that while fishing ... he
had noticed here and there the ends of logs or stakes protruding from
the mud, and that they seemed to him to have been placed in rows....
A visit made a few days afterward to the place ... disclosed the ends
of much-decayed stakes or piles protruding here and there above the
mud.... On my return from France in 1880 I again visited the spot....
While abroad I studied in spare moments many archæological collections,
especially those from the Swiss Lake Dwellings, and visited the
various lake stations of Switzerland. The rude dressings of the ends
of the piles in some places were evidently made with blunt stone
implements, and recalled those I had seen on the ends of the posts in
the Delaware River marshes. Since 1880 I have quietly examined the
remains, excavating what pile ends remained _in situ_ (preserving a
few that did not crumble to pieces), preserving careful notes of the
dredging and excavations (at low tides), carried on principally by
myself, aided at times by interested friends. The results so far seem
to indicate that the ends of the piles imbedded in the mud, judging
from the implements and other débris scattered around them, once
supported shelters of early man that were erected a few feet above the
water,—the upper portion of the piles having disappeared in the long
lapse of time that must have ensued since they were placed there. (The
flats are covered by four and one half feet of water on the flood tide;
on the ebb the marsh is dry, and covered with slimy ooze several feet
in depth, varying in different places.) Three different dwellings have
been located, all that exist in the flats referred to, after a careful
examination within the last four years of nearly every inch of ground
carefully laid off and examined in sections. The implements found in
two of ‘the supposed river dwelling sites’ are very rude in type, and
generally made of dense argillite, not unlike the palæoliths found by
my friend Dr. C. C. Abbott in the Trenton gravels. The character of
the implements from the other or third supposed river dwelling on the
Delaware marshes is better finished objects made of argillite.”[1558]
The greater portion of the objects obtained by Mr. Cresson has been
placed in the Peabody Museum, to which he is at present attached as a
special assistant; but he has also kindly sent to the writer a small
illustrative collection from each site, for his study.
The writer would hesitate to draw the inference from this single
discovery that the custom of living in pile-dwellings ever prevailed
in North America, although there is evidence that such a practice was
not unknown in South America. This is to be found in the account of the
voyage of Alonso de Ojeda along the north coast of that country, in the
year 1499, in which he was accompanied by Vespucius.[1559] I will quote
the language of Washington Irving: “Proceeding along the coast, he
arrived at a vast, deep gulf resembling a tranquil lake, entering which
he beheld on the eastern side a village whose construction struck him
with surprise. It consisted of twenty large houses, shaped like bells,
and built on piles driven into the bottom of the lake, which in this
part was limpid and of but little depth. Each house was provided with
a drawbridge, and with canoes by which the communication was carried
on. From these resemblances to the Italian city, Ojeda gave to the bay
the name of the Gulf of Venice, and it is called at the present day
Venezuela, or Little Venice.”[1560] There is no inherent improbability
that such a custom may have prevailed upon the shores of Delaware Bay,
and for the same reason that has caused it to be followed elsewhere.
“It has been stated that the natives living near Lake Maracaybo, in
South America, erect pile dwellings over the lake, to which they resort
in order to escape from the mosquitoes which infest the shore. Lord
also mentions that the Indians of the Suman prairie, British Columbia,
on the subsidence of the annual floods in May and June, build pile
dwellings over a lake there, to which they retire to escape from the
mosquitoes which at that period infest the prairie in dense clouds, but
will not cross the water.”[1561]
But it would be safer, probably, to consider these discoveries of Mr.
Cresson’s as marking the site of ancient aboriginal fish-weirs, such as
are described by Captain Ribault and other early explorers as made by
the natives.[1562] The writer agrees with Professor Putnam in thinking
that “the fact that at only one station pottery occurs, and, also, that
at this station the stone implements are largely of jasper and quartz,
with few of argillite, while at the two other stations many rude stone
implements are associated with chipped points of argillite, with few of
jasper and other flint-like material, is of great interest.”[1563]
Still further confirmation of the progress of the palæolithic man in
this region is afforded by discoveries made in a rock-shelter near
the headwaters of Naaman’s Creek, as early as 1866, for an account
of which, and the preservation of the objects then found, we are
also indebted to Mr. Cresson: “The remains of the Naaman’s Creek
rock-shelter luckily fell into hands that have preserved them.... To
give a detailed account of _how_ the rock-shelter was discovered would
consume too much time. Let us rather consider briefly the ... contents
of the shelter’s various layers.... Fortunately careful drawings of
the shelter were made during its excavation between the years 1866 and
1867.... A glance shows the outcrop of the rock as it appeared before
the excavations were begun in 1866. The trees show that the ground
was then covered by a thick wood.... From the point that marks the
innermost edge of the outcrop, overhanging the hollow, a perpendicular
line dropped to the ground would measure five and one eighth feet,
the height of the projection of the rock above the ground before the
excavations were commenced.
“Twenty-two feet eight inches from the outcrop, measured from its
inner face, there is still another outcrop.... This marks the opposite
side of the hollow.... It is evident how admirably the place was
adapted to the wants of the early hunters of the Delaware valley,
whether it be as a shelter, or as a place of defence against their
enemies.... Let us look at the layers of earth that filled it, these
being intermingled with rude implements, broken bones, and charcoal,
indicating that man at times had resorted to the spot.
“Layer C [the lowest]. This was composed of schist, resting on the
bedrock of the shelter. A layer of aqueous gravel, of the same type
as that underlying Philadelphia, rested on the decomposed schist. The
greatest depth of the red gravel layer was four feet two and one fourth
inches, measured from the layer of decomposed schist. Least depth of
gravel observed, one foot three inches....
“Layer A [next above]. This was a layer of grayish-white brick clay
mixed with yellow clay, similar to that underlying Philadelphia, on
top of which was a layer mixed with sand.... Stone implements were
discovered in this layer. They were but few in number and very rude,
exclusively of argillite, and palæolithic in type. Greatest depth of
layer, two feet one and one half inches. No implements of bone were
found....
“Layer T [next above]. This was of reddish gravel, intermingled with
decomposed schist, cinders, and broken bones of animals. Fragments of a
human skull were found ... in this layer. A fragment of a human rib was
also preserved. The fragments of the skull are covered here and there
by dendritic incrustations. Rude spears and implements of argillite
were found in this layer. Depth of layer, thirteen to eighteen inches.
“Layer D [next above]. Composed of reddish-yellow clay. Depth, two feet
three inches. No implements.
“Layer M [next above]. In this layer were numerous implements of
argillite and some of bone, intermingled with rude implements of
quartzite and jasper and fragments of rude pottery, with charcoal.
Greatest depth, one foot one and one half inches. Least depth, three
inches.
“Layer R [next above]. Yellow clay. Greatest depth, two feet one and
one half inches; least depth, eight inches. No implements.
“Layer W [next above]. This contained chipped implements; those made
of jasper and quartzite predominating over those of argillite. In the
lowest part of this layer were fragments of rude pottery. In the upper
portion of the layer were potsherds decidedly superior in decoration
and technique to those from the lower portion. Geological composition
of this layer, yellow clay loam. Greatest depth, three feet four
inches. Least depth, two and one half inches.
“Layer L [top]. This consists of leaf mould seven inches thick,
converted into swamp muck by decomposing action of water from springs.
No implements.... No remains of extinct animals were found.”[1564]
Professor Putnam thus proceeded to comment upon these discoveries: “We
have a series of objects, taken from the several layers of the shelter,
giving us a chronology of the utmost importance, as each period of
occupation of the shelter was followed by a natural deposition,
separating the different periods of occupation. The stone implements
... are taken from the lowest layer, indicating the earliest period of
occupation of the rock-shelter; and ... they correspond in shape and
rudeness of execution with those taken from the gravel-bed at Trenton;
and like most of the latter they are all of argillite. The specimens
from the second period are of argillite, and while many are chipped
into slender points, they are still of very rude forms; and these in
turn correspond with the argillite points found by Dr. Abbott deep
down in the black soil, or resting upon the gravel, at Trenton. In
the upper layers of the cave we observe ... the gradual introduction
of implements chipped from jasper and quartz, and corresponding in
form with those found upon the surface throughout the valley. And as a
further indication of this later development, it was only in the upper
layers that pottery, bone implements, and ornaments were found; the
three distinct periods of occupation of the Delaware valley are thus
distinctly shown; and this cave-shelter is a perfect exemplification of
the results which Dr. Abbott had obtained from a study of the specimens
which he has collected upon the surface, deep in the black soil, and in
the gravel, at Trenton.”
* * * * *
From the accumulative force of these various lines of reasoning, the
writer thinks that there is a strong probability that here, on the
waters of the Delaware, man developed from the palæolithic to the
neolithic stage of culture. But we cannot follow Dr. Abbott in his
further conclusion (if, indeed, he still holds to it) that we are to
seek the descendants of this primitive population in the Eskimos,
driven north after contact with the Indians. We have failed to discover
the slightest evidence to sustain this position. The hereditary enmity
existing between the Eskimos and the Indians may be equally well
explained upon the theory that the former are later comers to this
continent, and are therefore hated by the Indian races as intruders.
The two races are certainly markedly unlike.
In the absence of any evidence tending to show the development of the
argillite-using people into the Indian races, with their perfected
implements and weapons of the age of polished stone, it seems more
reasonable to hold with Professor Dawkins that the earlier and ruder
race perished before or were absorbed by a people furnished with a
better equipment in the struggle for the “survival of the fittest.” The
palæolithic man of the river gravels of Trenton and his argillite-using
posterity the writer believes to be completely extinct.[1565]
It only remains for the writer to express his regret that he has
been prevented from setting forth in detail, at the present time, the
grounds upon which he has come to other conclusions which were briefly
indicated at the beginning of this chapter. He can only repeat here
his belief that the so-called Indians, with their many divisions into
numerous linguistic families, were later comers to our shores than the
primitive population, whose development he has attempted to trace; that
the so-called “moundbuilders” were the ancestors of tribes found in the
occupation of the soil; and that the Pueblos and the Aztecs were only
peoples relatively farther advanced than the others.
The writer further thinks that these are propositions capable, if not
of being demonstrated, at least of being made to appear in a very high
degree probable by means of authorities which will be found amply
referred to in other chapters of this volume.
[Illustration: Signature]
THE PROGRESS OF OPINION RESPECTING THE ORIGIN AND ANTIQUITY OF MAN IN
AMERICA.
BY THE EDITOR.
THE literature respecting the origin and early condition of the
American aborigines is very extensive; and, as a rule, especially
in the earlier period, it is not characterized by much reserve in
connecting races by historical analogies.[1566] Few before Dr.
Robertson, in discussing the problem, could say: “I have ventured to
inquire without presuming to decide.”
The question was one that allured many of the earlier Spanish writers
like Herrera and Torquemada. Among the earlier English discussions is
that of Wm. Bourne in his _Booke called the Treasure for Travellers_
(London, 1578), where a section is given to “The Peopling of America.”
The most famous of the early discussions of the various theories
was that of Gregorio Garciá, a missionary for twenty years in South
America, who reviewed the question in his _Origen de los Indios de
el Nuevo Mundo_ (Valencia, 1607).[1567] He goes over the supposed
navigations of the Phœnicians, the identity of Peru with Solomon’s
Ophir, and the chances of African, Roman, and Jewish migrations,—only
to reject them all, and to favor a coming of Tartars and Chinese.
Clavigero thinks his evidences the merest conjectures. E. Brerewood,
in his _Enquiries touching the diversity of languages and religions_
(London, 1632, 1635), claimed a Tartar origin. In New England, where
many were believers in the Jewish analogies, it is somewhat amusing to
find not long after this the quizzical Thomas Morton, with what seems
like mock gravity, finding the aboriginal source in “the scattered
Trojans, after such time as Brutus departed from Latium.”[1568] The
reader, however, is referred to other sections of the present volume
for the literature bearing upon the distinct ethnical connections of
the early American peoples.
The chief literary controversy over the question began in 1642,
when Hugo Grotius published his _De Origine Gentium Americanarum
Dissertatio_ (Paris and Amsterdam, 1642).[1569] He argued that all
North America except Yucatan (which had an Ethiopian stock) was peopled
from the Scandinavian North; that the Peruvians were from China, and
that the Moluccans peopled the regions below Peru. Grotius aroused an
antagonist in Johannes de Laet, whose challenge appeared the next year:
_Joannis de Laet Antwerpiani notae ad dissertationem Hugonis Grotii
de origine gentium Americanarum: et observationes aliquot ad meliorem
indaginem difficillimæ illius quæstionis_ (Amsterdam, 1643).[1570]
He combated his brother Dutchman at all points, and contended that
the Scythian race furnished the predominant population of America.
The Spaniards went to the Canaries, and thence some of their vessels
drifted to Brazil. He is inclined to accept the story of Madoc’s
Welshmen, and think it not unlikely that the people of the Pacific
islands may have floated to the western coast of South America, and
that minor migrations may have come from other lands. He supports his
views by comparisons of the Irish, Gallic, Icelandic, Huron, Iroquois,
and Mexican tongues.
To all this Grotius replied in a second _Dissertatio_, and De Laet
again renewed the attack: _Ioannis de Laet Antwerpiani responsio
ad dissertationem secundam Hvgonis Grotii, de origine gentium
Americanarum. Cum indice ad utrumque libellum_ (Amsterdam, 1644).[1571]
De Laet, not content with his own onset, incited another to take part
in the controversy, and so George Horn (Hornius) published his _De
Originibus Americanis, libri quatuor_ (Hagæ Comitis, _i. e._ The Hague,
1652; again, Hemipoli, _i. e._ Halberstadt, 1669).[1572] His view was
the Scythian one, but he held to later additions from the Phœnicians
and Carthaginians on the Atlantic side, and from the Chinese on the
Pacific.
For the next fifty years there were a number of writers on the
subject, who are barely names to the present generation;[1573]
but towards the middle of the eighteenth century the question was
considered in _The American Traveller_ (London, 1741), and by
Charlevoix in his _Nouvelle France_ (1744). The author of an _Enquiry
into the Origin of the Cherokees_ (Oxford, 1762) makes them the
descendants of Meshek, son of Japhet. In 1767, however, the question
was again brought into the range of a learned and disputatious
discussion, reviving all the arguments of Grotius, De Laet, and Horn,
when E. Bailli d’Engel published his _Essai sur cette question: Quand
et comment l’America a-t-elle été peuplée d’hommes et d’Animaux?_ (5
vols., Amsterdam, 1767, 2d ed., 1768). He argues for an antediluvian
origin.[1574] The controversy which now followed was aroused by C.
De Pauw’s characterization of all American products, man, animals,
vegetation, as degraded and inferior to nature in the old world, in
an essay which passed through various editions, and was attacked and
defended in turn.[1575] An Italian, Count Carli, some years later,
controverted De Pauw, and using every resource of mythology, tradition,
geology, and astronomy, claimed for the Americans a descent from the
Atlantides.[1576] It was not till after reports had come from the Ohio
Valley of the extensive earthworks in that region that the question
of the earlier peoples of America attracted much general attention
throughout America; and the most conspicuous spokesman was President
Stiles of Yale College, in an address which he delivered before the
General Assembly of Connecticut, in 1783, on the future of the new
republic.[1577] In this, while arguing for the unity of the American
tribes and for their affinity with the Tartars, he held to their being
in the main the descendants of the Canaanites expelled by Joshua,
whether finding their way hither by the Asiatic route and establishing
the northern Sachemdoms, or coming in Phœnician ships across the
Atlantic to settle Mexico and Peru.[1578] Lafitau in 1724 (_Mœurs de
Sauvages_) had contended for a Tartar origin. We have examples of the
reasoning of a missionary in the views of the Moravian Loskiel, and of
a learned controversialist in the treatise of Fritsch, in 1794 and 1796
respectively.[1579]
[Illustration: BENJAMIN SMITH BARTON.]
The earliest American with a scientific training to discuss the
question was a professor in the University of Pennsylvania, Benjamin
Smith Barton, a man who acquired one of the best reputations in his
day among Americans for studies in this and other questions of natural
history. His father was an English clergyman settled in America,
and his mother a sister of David Rittenhouse. It was while he was a
student of medicine in Edinburgh that he first approached the subject
of the origin of the Americans, in a little treatise on American
Antiquities, which he never completed.[1580] His _Papers relating
to certain American Antiquities_ (Philad., 1796) consists of those
read to the Amer. Philos. Soc., and printed in their _Transactions_
(vol. iv.). They were published as the earnest of his later work on
American Antiquities. He argues against De Pauw, and contends that the
Americans are descended—at least some of them—from Asiatic peoples
still recognized. The _Papers_ include a letter from Col. Winthrop
Sargent, Sept. 8, 1794, describing certain articles found in a mound
at Cincinnati, and a letter upon them from Barton to Dr. Priestley.
He in the end gave more careful attention to the subject, mainly on
its linguistic side, and went farther than any one had gone before him
in his _New Views of the Origin of the Tribes and Nations of America_
(Philad., 1797; 2d ed., enlarged, 1798).[1581] The book attracted
much notice, and engaged the attention in some degree of European
philologists, and made Barton at that time the most conspicuous student
on these matters in America. Jefferson was at that time gathering
material in similar studies, but his collections were finally burned in
1801. Barton, in dedicating his treatise to Jefferson, recognized the
latter’s advance in the same direction. He believed his own gathering
of original MS. material to be at that time more extensive than any
other student had collected in America. His views had something of the
comprehensiveness of his material, and he could not feel that he could
point to any one special source of the indigenous population.
During the early years of the present century old theories and new were
abundant. The powerful intellect and vast knowledge of Alexander von
Humboldt were applied to the problem as he found it in Middle America.
He announced some views on the primitive peoples in 1806, in the _Neue
Berlinische Monatsschrift_ (vol. xv.); but his ripened opinions found
record in his _Vues de Cordillères et monumens des peuples indigènes de
l’Amérique_ (Paris, 1816), and the Asiatic theory got a conservative
yet definite advocate.
Hugh Williamson[1582] thought he found traces of the Hindoo in the
higher arts of the Mexicans, and marks of the ruder Asiatics in the
more northern American peoples. A conspicuous littérateur of the day,
Samuel L. Mitchell, veered somewhat wildly about in his notions of
a Malay, Tartar, and Scandinavian origin.[1583] Meanwhile something
like organized efforts were making. The American Antiquarian Society
was formed in 1812.[1584] Silliman began his _Journal of Arts and
Sciences_ in 1819, and both society and periodical proved instruments
of wider inquiry. In the first volume published by the Antiquarian
Society, Caleb Atwater, in his treatise on the Western Antiquities,
gave the earliest sustained study of the subject, and believed in a
general rather than in a particular Asiatic source. The man first to
attract attention for his grouping of ascertained results, unaided
by personal explorations, however, was Dr. James H. McCulloh, who
published his _Researches on America_ at Baltimore in 1816. The book
passed to a second edition the next year, but received its final shape
in the _Researches, philosophical and antiquarian, concerning the
aboriginal history of America_ (1829), a book which Prescott[1585]
praised for its accumulated erudition, and Haven[1586] ranked high for
its manifestations of industry and research, calling it encyclopædic in
character. McCulloh examines the native traditions, but can evolve no
satisfactory conclusion from them as to the origin of the Americans.
The public mind, however, was not ripe for scholarly inquiry, and there
was not that in McCulloh’s style to invite attention; and greater
popularity followed upon the fanciful and dogmatic confidence of
John Haywood,[1587] upon the somewhat vivid if unsteady speculations
of C. S. Rafinesque,[1588] and even upon the itinerant Josiah
Priest, who boasted of the circulation of thousands of copies of his
popular books.[1589] John Delafield’s _Inquiry into the Origin of
the Antiquities of America_ (N. Y., 1839) revived the theory, never
quite dormant, of the descent of the Mexicans from the riper peoples
of Hindostan and Egypt; while the more barbarous red men came of the
Mongol stock. The author ran through the whole range of philology,
mythology, and many of the customs of the races, in reaching this
conclusion. A little book by John McIntosh, _Discovery of America and
Origin of the North American Indians_, published in Toronto, 1836, was
reissued in N. Y. in 1843, and with enlargements in 1846, _Origin of
the North American Indians_, continued down to 1859 to be repeatedly
issued, or to have a seeming success by new dates.[1590]
* * * * *
When Columbus, approaching the main land of South America, imagined
it a large island, he associated it with that belief so long current
in the Old World, which placed the cradle of the race in the Indian
Ocean,—a belief which in our day has been advocated by Haeckel,
Caspari and Winchell,—and imagined he was on the coasts, skirting an
interior, where lay the Garden of Eden.[1591] No one had then ventured
on the belief that the doctrine of Genesis must be reconciled with
any supposed counter-testimony by holding it to be but the record of
the Jewish race. Columbus was not long in his grave when Theophrastus
Paracelsus, in 1520, and before the belief in the continuity of North
America with Asia was dispelled, and consequently before the question
of how man and animals could have reached the New World was raised,
first broached the heterodox view of the plurality of the human
race. All the early disputants on the question of the origin of the
American man looked either across the Atlantic or the Pacific for the
primitive seed; nor was there any necessary connection between the
arguments for an autochthonous American man and a diversity of race,
when Fabricius, in 1721, published his _Dissertatio Critica_[1592] on
the opinions of those who held that different races had been created.
From that day the old orthodox interpretation of the record in Genesis
found no contestant of mark till the question came up in relation
to the American man, it being held quite sufficient to account for
the inferiority or other distinguishing characteristics of race by
assigning them to the influence of climate and physical causes.[1593]
[Illustration: LOUIS AGASSIZ.
After a photograph, hanging in the Somerset Club, Boston; suggested to
the editor by Mr. Alexander Agassiz as a satisfactory likeness.]
The strongest presentation of the case, in considering the American
man a distinct product of the American soil, with no connection with
the Old World[1594] except in the case of the Eskimos, was made when
S. G. Morton, in 1839, printed his _Crania Americana, or a comparative
view of the skulls of various aboriginal nations of North and South
America_, of which there was a second edition in 1844.[1595] Here
was a new test, and applied, very likely, in ignorance of the fact
that Governor Pownal, in 1766, in Knox’s _New Collection of Voyages_,
had suggested it.[1596] Dr. Morton had gathered a collection of near
a thousand skulls from all parts of the world,[1597] and based his
deductions on these,—a process hardly safe, as many of his successors
have determined.[1598] The views of Morton respecting the autochthonous
origin of the Indian found an able upholder when Louis Agassiz,
taking the broader view of the independent creation of higher and
inferior races,[1599] gave in his adhesion to the original American
man (_Christian Examiner_, July, 1850, vol. xlix. p. 110). These
views got more extensive expression in a publication which appeared
in Philadelphia in 1854, in which some unpublished papers of Morton
are accompanied by a contribution from Agassiz, and all are grouped
together and augmented by material of the editors, Dr. Josiah Clark
Nott[1600] of Mobile, and Mr. George R. Gliddon, long a resident in
Cairo. The _Types of Mankind, or Ethnological Researches_ (Philad.,
1854, 1859, 1871), met with a divided reception; the conservative
theologians called it pretentious and false, and there was some color
for their detraction in some rather jejune expositions of the Hebrew
Scriptures contained in the book. The physiologists thought it brought
new vigor to a question which properly belonged to science.[1601] Other
fresh material, with some discussions, made up a new book by the same
editors, published three years later, _Indigenous Races of the Earth,
or New Chapters of Ethnological Inquiry_ (Philad. and London, 1857; 2d
ed., 1857).[1602]
The theological attacks were not always void of a contempt that ill
befitted the work of refutation. The most important of them were John
Bachman’s _Doctrine of the Unity of the Human Race_ (Charleston, S. C.,
1850), with his _Notice of the Types of Mankind_ (Charleston, 1854-55);
and Thomas Smyth’s _Unity of the Human Race proved by Scripture, Reason
and Science_ (N. Y., 1850).[1603]
[Illustration: SAMUEL FOSTER HAVEN.
After a photograph. A heliotype of a portrait by Custer is in the
_Amer. Antiq. Soc. Proc._, Ap., 1879. Haven’s _Annual Reports_, as
librarian of the Amer. Antiq. Soc., furnish a good chronological
conspectus of the progress of anthropological discovery.]
The scientific attack on Morton and Agassiz, and the views they
represented, was an active one, and embraced such writers as Wilson,
Latham, Pickering, and Quatrefages.[1604] The same collection of skulls
which had furnished Morton with his proofs yielded exactly opposite
evidence to Dr. J. A. Meigs in his _Observations upon the Cranial Forms
of the American Aborigines_ (Philad., 1866).[1605] Two of the most
celebrated of the evolutionists reject the autochthonous view, for
Darwin’s _Descent of Man_ and Haeckel’s _Hist. of Creation_ consider
the American man an emigrant from the old world, in whatever way the
race may have developed.[1606]
[Illustration: SIR DANIEL WILSON, LL. D., F.R.S.E.
From a photograph kindly furnished, on request, by Professor Wilson’s
family.]
Of the leading historians of the early American peoples, Prescott,
dealing with the Mexicans, is inclined to agree with Humboldt’s
arguments as to their primitive connection with Asia.[1607] Geo.
Bancroft, in the third volume of his _Hist. of the United States_
(1840), surveying the field, found little in the linguistic affinities,
little in what Humboldt gathered from the Mexican calendars and from
other developments, nothing from the Western mounds, which he was sure
were natural earth-knobs and water-worn passages,[1608] and decides
upon some transmission by the Pacific route from Asia, but so remote
as to make the American tribes practically indigenous, so far as their
character is concerned.
In 1843 another compiler of existing evidence appeared in Alexander W.
Bradford in his _American Antiquities, or Researches into the origin
and history of the Red Race_. His views were new. He connects the
higher organized life of middle America with the corresponding culture
of Southern Asia, the Polynesian islands probably furnishing the avenue
of migrations; while the ruder and more northern peoples of both shores
of the Pacific represent the same stock degraded by northern migrations.
In 1845 the American Ethnological Society began its publications, and
in Albert Gallatin it had a vigorous helper in unravelling some of
these mysteries. A few years later (1853) the United States government
lent its patronage and prestige to the huge conglomerate publication of
Schoolcraft, his _Indian Tribes of the United States_, which leaves the
bewildered reader in a puzzling maze,—the inevitable result of a work
undertaken beyond the ambitious powers of an untrained mind. The work
is not without value if the user of it has more systematic knowledge
than its compiler, to select, discard, and arrange, and if he can weigh
the importance of the separate papers.[1609]
In 1856 Samuel F. Haven, the librarian and guiding spirit of the
American Antiquarian Society, summed up, as it had never been done
before, for comprehensiveness, and with a striking prescience, the
progress and results of studies in this field, in his _Archæology of
the United States_ (_Smithsonian Contributions_, viii., Washington,
1856).
[Illustration: EDWARD B. TYLOR.
After a photograph.]
In 1851 Professor Daniel Wilson, in his _Prehistoric Annals of
Scotland_, first brought into use the designation “prehistoric” as
expressing “the whole period disclosed to us by means of archæological
evidence, as distinguished from what is known through written records;
and in this sense the term was speedily adopted by the archæologists
of Europe.”[1610] Eleven years later he published his _Prehistoric
Man: Researches into the origin of civilization in the old and new
world_.[1611] The book unfortunately is not well fortified with
references, but it is the result of long study, partly in the field,
and written with a commendable reserve of judgment. It is in the main
concerned with the western hemisphere, which he assumes with little
hesitation “began its human period subsequent to that of the old world,
and so started later in the race of civilization.” While thus in effect
a study of early man in America, its scope makes it in good degree a
complement to the _Origin of Civilization_ of Lubbock.
The comparative study of ethnological traces, to enable us to depict
the earliest condition of human society, owes a special indebtedness
to Edward B. Tylor, among writers in English. It is nearly twenty-five
years since he first published his _Researches into the Early History
of Mankind and the Development of Civilization_,[1612] the work
almost, if not quite, of a pioneer in this interesting field, and he
has supplied the reader with all the references necessary to test his
examples. Max Müller (_Chips_, ii. 262) has pointed out how he has
vitalized his vast accumulation of facts by coherent classifications
instead of leaving them an oppressive burden by simple aggregation, as
his precursors in Germany, Gustav Klemm[1613] and Adolf Bastian, had
done; and it is remarked that while thus classifying, he has not been
lured into pronounced theory, which future accession of material might
serve to modify or change. He shortly afterwards touched a phase of the
subject which he had not developed in his book in a paper on “Traces of
the Early Mental Condition of Man,”[1614] and illustrated the methods
he was pursuing in another on “The Condition of Prehistoric Races as
inferred from observations of modern tribes.”[1615]
The postulate of which he has been a distinguished expounder, that man
has progressed from barbarism to civilization, was a main deduction
to be drawn from his next sustained work, _Primitive Culture:
researches into the development of mythology, philosophy, religion,
art, and custom_.[1616] The chief points of this further study of
the thought, belief, art, and custom of the primitive man had been
advanced tentatively in various other papers beside those already
mentioned,[1617] and in this new work he further acknowledges his
obligations to Adolf Bastian’s _Mensch in der Geschichte_ and Theodor
Waitz’s _Anthropologie der Naturvölker_.[1618] He still pursued his
plan of collecting wide and minute evidence from the writers on
ethnography and kindred sciences, and from historians, travellers, and
missionaries, as his foot-notes abundantly testify.
[Illustration: THEODOR WAITZ.
After a likeness in Otto Caspari’s _Urgeschichte der Menschheit_, 2d
ed., vol. i. (Leipzig, 1877).]
These studies of Professor Tylor abundantly qualified him to give
a condensed exposition of the science of anthropology, which he had
done so much to place within the range of scientific studies, by a
primary search for facts and laws; and having contributed the article
on that subject to the ninth edition of the _Encyclopædia Britannica_,
he published in 1881 his _Anthropology: an Introduction to the study
of man and civilization_ (London and N. Y., 1881 and 1888). He maps
out the new science, which has now received of late years so many new
students in the scientific method, without references, but with the
authority of a teacher, tracing what man has been and is under the
differences of sex, race, beliefs, habits, and society.[1619] Again,
at the Montreal meeting (August, 1884) of the British Association for
the Advancement of Science, he set down in an address the bounds of the
“American Aspects of Anthropology.”[1620]
[Illustration: SIR JOHN LUBBOCK.
After a photograph.]
Closely following upon Tylor in this field, and gathering his material
with much the same assiduity, and presenting it with similar beliefs,
though with enough individuality to mark a distinction, was another
Englishman, who probably shares with Tylor the leading position in
this department of study. Sir John Lubbock, in his _Prehistoric Times
as illustrated by ancient remains, and the manners and customs of
modern savages_,[1621] gathered the evidence which exists of the
primitive condition of man, embracing some chapters on modern savages
so far as they are ignorant of the use of metals, as the best study
we can follow, to fill out the picture of races only archæologically
known to us. This study of modern savage life, in arts, marriages,
and relationships, morals, religion, and laws, is, as he holds, a
necessary avenue to the knowledge of a condition of the early man,
from which by various influences the race has advanced to what is
called civilization. His result in this comparative study—not indeed
covering all the phases of savage life—he made known in his _Origin
of Civilization and the Primitive Condition of Man_.[1622] While
referring to Tylor’s _Early Hist. of Mankind_ as more nearly like
his own than any existing treatise, but showing, as compared with
his own book, “that no two minds would view the subject in the same
manner,” he instanced previous treatments of certain phases of the
subject, like Müller’s _Geschichte der Amerikanischen Urreligionen_,
J. F. M’Lennan’s _Primitive Marriage_,[1623] and J. J. Bachofen’s _Das
Mutterrecht_ (Stuttgart, 1861); and even Lord Kames’ _History of Man_,
and Montesquieu’s _Esprit des Lois_, notwithstanding the absence in
them of much of the minute knowledge now necessary to the study of the
subject. These data, of course, are largely obtained from travellers
and missionaries, and Lubbock complains of their unsatisfactory extent
and accuracy. “Travellers,” he adds, “find it easier to describe the
houses, boats, food, dress, weapons, and implements of savages than to
understand their thoughts and feelings.”
[Illustration: SIR JOHN WILLIAM DAWSON.
After a photograph.]
The main controversial point arising out of all this study is the one
already adverted to,—whether man has advanced from savagery to his
present condition, or has preserved, with occasional retrogressions,
his original elevated character; and this causes the other question,
whether the modern savage is the degenerate descendant of the same
civilized first men. “There is no scientific evidence which would
justify us,” says Lubbock (_Prehist. Times_, 417), “in asserting that
this kind of degradation applies to savages in general.”[1624] The
most distinguished advocate of the affirmative of this proposition is
Richard Whately, Archbishop of Dublin, both in his _Political Economy_
and in his lecture on the _Origin of Civilization_ (1855), in which
he undertook to affirm that no nation, unaided by a superior race,
ever succeeded in raising itself out of savagery, and that nations
can become degraded. Lubbock, who, with Tylor, holds the converse of
this proposition, answered Whately in an appendix to his _Origin of
Civilization_, which was originally given as a paper at the Dundee
meeting of the British Association.[1625] The Duke of Argyle, while
not prepared to go to the extent of Whately’s views, attacked, in his
_Primeval Man_, Lubbock’s argument,[1626] and was in turn reviewed
adversely by Lubbock, in a paper read at the Exeter meeting of the
same association (1869), which is also included in the appendix of his
_Origin of Civilization_. Lubbock seems to show, in some instances at
least, that the duke did not possess himself correctly of some of the
views of his opponents.
[Illustration: MIGRATIONS.
A sketch map given in Dawson’s _Fossil Men_, p. 48, showing his view
of the probable lines of migration and distribution of the American
tribes. Morgan (_Ancient Society_) makes what he calls three centres
of subsistence, whence the migration proceeded which overran America.
Cf. Hellwald in _Smithsonian Rept._, 1866, p. 328. The question is
more or less discussed in Latham’s _Man and his migrations_ (London,
1851); Chas. Pickering’s _Men and their geog. distribution_; and Oscar
Peschel’s _Races of Man_ (Eng. transl., London, 1876). On the passage
from the valley of the Columbia to that of the Missouri, see Humboldt’s
_Views of Nature_, 35. Morgan (_No. Am. Rev._, cix.) supposes the
valley of the Columbia River to be the original centre where the
streams diverged, and (_Systems of Consanguinity_, 251) says there
are reasons for believing that the Shoshone migration was the last
which left the Columbia valley, and that it was pending at the epoch
of European colonization. Morgan’s papers in the _No. Am. Rev._, Oct.
1868 and Jan. 1870, are reprinted in Beach’s _Indian Miscellany_, p.
158. On a general belief in a migration from the north, see _Congrès
des Amér_. (1877), ii. 50, 51. L. Simonin, in “L’homme Américain, notes
d’ethnologie et de linguistique sur les indiens des Etats-Unis,” gives
a map of the tribes of North America in the _Bull. de la Soc. de Géog._
Feb. 1870.]
In the researches of Tylor and Lubbock, and of all the others
cited above, the American Indian is the source of many of their
illustrations. Of all writers on this continent, Sir John Wm. Dawson
in his _Fossil Men_, and Southall in his _Recent Origin of Man_, are
probably the most eminent advocates of the views of Whately and Argyle,
however modified, and both have declared it an unfounded assumption
that the primitive man was a savage.[1627] Morgan, in his _Ancient
Society_ (N. Y., 1877), has, on the other hand, sketched the lines of
human progress from savagery through barbarism to civilization.
One of the defenders of the supposed Bible limits best equipped by
reading, if not in the scientific spirit, has been a Virginian, James
C. Southall, who published a large octavo in 1875, _The Recent Origin
of Man as illustrated by geology and the modern science of prehistoric
archæology_ (Philad., 1875). Three years later,—leaving out some
irrelevant matters as touching the antiquity of man, condensing his
collations of detail, sparing the men of science an attack for what in
his earlier volume he called their fickleness, and somewhat veiling
his set purpose of sustaining the Bible record,—he published a more
effective little book, _The Epoch of the Mammoth and the Apparition of
Man upon Earth_ (Philad., 1878). Barring its essentially controversial
character, and waiving judgment on its scientific decisions, it is one
of the best condensed accumulations of data which has been made. His
belief in the literal worth of the Bible narrative is emphatic. He
thinks that man, abruptly and fully civilized, appeared in the East,
and gave rise to the Egyptian and Babylonian civilization, while the
estrays that wandered westward are known to us by their remains, as
the early savage denizens of Europe. To maintain this existence of the
hunter-man of Europe within historic times, he rejects the prevailing
opinions of the geologists and archæologists. He reverses the judgment
that Lyell expresses (_Student’s Elements of Geology_, Am. ed., 162)
of the historical period as not affording any appreciable measure
for calculating the number of centuries necessary to produce so many
extinct animals, to deepen and widen valleys, and to lay so deep
stalagmite floors, and says it does. He contends that the stone age is
not divided into the earlier and later periods with an interval, but
that the mingling of the kinds of flints shows but different phases of
the same period,[1628] and that what others call the palæolithic man
was in reality the quaternary man, with conditions not much different
from now.[1629] The time when the ice retreated from the now temperate
regions he holds to have been about 2000 b.c., and he looks to the
proofs of the action of which traces are left along the North American
great lakes, as observed by Professor Edmund Andrews[1630] of Chicago,
to confirm his judgment of the Glacial age being from 5,300 to 7,500
years ago.[1631] He claims that force has not been sufficiently
recognized as an element in geological action, and that a great lapse
of time was not necessary to effect geological changes (_Ep. of the
M._, 194).[1632] He thinks the present drift of opinion, carrying
back the appearance of man anywhere from 20,000 to 9,000,000 years,
a mere fashion. The gravel of the Somme has been, he holds, a rapid
deposit in valleys already formed and not necessarily old. The peat
beds were a deposit from the flood that followed the glacial period,
and accumulated rapidly (_Ep. of the M._, ch. 10). The extinct animals
found with the tools of man in the caves simply show that such beasts
survived to within historic times, as seems everywhere apparent as
regards the mastodon when found in America. The stalagmites of the
caves are of unequal growth, and it is an assumption to give them
uniformly great age. The finely worked flints found among those called
palæolithic; the skilfully free drawings of the cave-men; the bits of
pottery discovered with the rude flints, and the great similarity of
the implements to those in use to-day among the Eskimos; the finding
of Roman coin in the Danish shell heaps and an English one in those of
America (_Proc. Philad. Acad. Nat. Sci._, 1866, p. 291),—are all parts
of the argument which satisfies him that the archæologists have been
hasty and inconclusive in their deductions. They in turn will dispute
both his facts and conclusions.[1633]
Southall’s arraignment of the opinions generally held may introduce us
to a classification of the data upon which archæologists rely to reach
conclusions upon the antiquity of man, and over some of which there is
certainly no prevailing consensus of opinion. We may find a condensed
summary of beliefs and data respecting the antiquity of man in J. P.
Maclean’s _Manual of the Antiquity of Man_ (Cincinnati, revised ed.,
1877; again, 1880).[1634] The independent view and conservative spirit
are placed respectively in juxtaposition in J. P. Lesley’s _Origin and
Decline of Man_ (ch. 3), and in Dawson’s _Fossil Men_ (ch. 8).[1635]
The opinions of leading English archæologists are found in Lubbock’s
_Prehistoric Times_ (ch. 12), Wallace’s _Tropical Nature_ (ch. 7), and
Huxley’s “Distribution of Races in Relation to the Antiquity of Man,”
in _Internat. Cong. of Prehist. Archæol. Trans._ (1868). Dawkins has
given some recent views in _The Nation_, xxvi. 434, and in _Kansas City
Review_, vii. 344.[1636] Not to refer to special phases, the French
school will be found represented in Nadaillac’s _Les Premiers Hommes_
(ii. ch. 13); in Gabriel de Mortillet’s _La préhistorique antiquité
de l’homme_ (Paris, 1883); Hamy’s _Précis de paléontologie humaine_;
Le Hon’s _L’homme fossile_ (1867); Victor Meunier’s _Les Ancêtres
d’Adam_ (Paris, 1875); Joly’s _L’homme avant métaux_ (Eng. transl.
_Man before Metals_, N. Y., 1883); _Revue des Questions historiques_
(vol. xvi.). The German school is represented in Haeckel’s _Natürliche
Schöpfungsgeschichte_; Waitz’s _Anthropologie_; Carl Vogt’s _Lectures
on Man_ (Eng. transl., Lond., 1864); and L. Büchner’s _Der Mensch und
seine Stellung in der Natur_ (2d ed., Leipzig, 1872; or W. S. Dallas’s
Eng. translation, Lond., 1872). The history of the growth of geological
antagonism to the biblical record as once understood, and the several
methods proposed for reconciling their respective teaching, is traced
concisely in the article on geology in M’Clintock and Strong’s
_Cyclopædia_, with references for further examination. The views there
given are those propounded by Chalmers in 1804, that the geological
record, ignored in the account of Genesis, finds its place in that book
between the first and second verses,[1637] which have no dependence on
one another, and that the biblical account of creation followed in six
literal days. What may be considered the present theological attitude
of churchmen may be noted in _The Speaker’s Commentary_ (N. Y. ed.,
1871, p. 61).
* * * * *
The question of the territorial connection of America with Asia under
earlier geological conditions is necessarily considered in some of the
discussions on the transplanting of the American man from the side of
Asia.
Otto Caspari in his _Urgeschichte der Menschheit_ (Leipzig, 1873), vol.
i., gives a map of Asia and America in the post-tertiary period, as he
understands it, which stretches the Asiatic and African continents over
a large part of the Indian Ocean; and in this region, now beneath the
sea, he places the home of the primeval man, and marks the lines of
migration east, north, and west. This view is accepted by Winchell in
his _Preadamites_ (see his map). Haeckel (_Nat. Schöpfungsgeschichte_,
1868, 1873; Eng. transl. 1876) calls this region “Lemuria” in his map.
Caspari places large continental islands between this region and South
America, which rendered migration to South America easy. The eastern
shore of the present Asia is extended beyond the Japanese islands,
and similar convenient islands render the passage by other lines of
immigration easy to the regions of British Columbia and of Mexico. (Cf.
Short, 507; Baldwin, App.) Howorth, _Mammoth and the Flood_, supposes a
connection at Behring’s Straits. The supposed similarity of the flora
of the two shores of the Pacific has been used to support this theory,
but botanists say that the language of Hooker and Gray has been given a
meaning they did not intend. It is opposed by many eminent geologists.
A. R. Wallace (_Journal Amer. Geog. Soc._, xix.) finds no ground to
believe that any of the oceans contain sunken continents. (Cf. his
_Geographical Distribution of Animals_ and his _Malay Archipelago_.)
James Croll in his _Climate and Cosmology_ (p. 6) says: “There is no
geological evidence to show that at least since Silurian times the
Atlantic and Pacific were ever in their broad features otherwise than
they now are.”[1638] Hyde Clarke has examined the legend of Atlantis in
reference to protohistoric communication with America, in _Royal Hist.
Soc. Trans._, n. s., iii. p. 1.[1639]
* * * * *
The arguments for the great antiquity of man[1640] are deduced in the
main from the testimony of the river gravels, the bone caves, the peat
deposits, the shell heaps, and the Lacustrine villages, for the mounds
and other relics of defence, habitation, and worship are very likely
not the records of a great antiquity. The whole field is surveyed with
more fullness than anywhere else, and with a faith in the geological
antiquity of the race, in Sir Charles Lyell’s _Geological Evidences of
the Antiquity of Man_.[1641] With as firm a belief in the integrity of
the biblical record, and in its not being impugned by the discoveries
or inductions of science, we find a survey in Southall’s _Recent Origin
of Man_. These two books constitute the extremes of the methods,
both for and against the conservative interpretation of the Bible.
The independent spirit of the scientist is nowhere more confidently
expressed than by J. P. Lesley (_Man’s Origin and Destiny_, Philad.,
1868, p. 45), who says: “There is no alliance possible between Jewish
theology and modern science.... Geologists have won the right to be
Christians without first becoming Jews.” Southall[1642] interprets
this spirit in this wise: “I do not recollect that the _Antiquity of
Man_ ever recognizes that the book of Genesis is in existence; and yet
every one is perfectly conscious that the author has it in mind, and
is writing at it all the time.”[1643] The entire literature of the
scientific interpretation shows that the canons of criticism are not
yet secure enough to prevent the widest interpretations and inferences.
The intimations which are supposed to exist in the Bible of a race
earlier than Adam have given rise to what is called the theory of
the Preadamites, and there is little noteworthy upon it in European
literature back of Isaac de La Peyrère’s _Praeadamitae_ (Paris and
Amsterdam, 1655), whose views were put into English in _Man before
Adam_ (London, 1656).[1644] The advocates of the theory from that day
to this are enumerated in Alexander Winchell’s _Preadamites_ (Chicago,
1880), and this book is the best known contribution to the subject by
an American author. It is his opinion that the aboriginal American,
with the Mongoloids in general, comes from some descendant of Adam
earlier than Noah, and that the black races come from a stock earlier
than Adam, whom Cain found when he went out of his native country.[1645]
* * * * *
The investigations of the great antiquity of man in America fall far
short in extent of those which have been given to his geological
remoteness in Europe; and yet, should we believe with Winchell that the
American man represents the pre-Adamite, while the European man does
not, we might reasonably hope to find in America earlier traces of the
geological man, if, as Agassiz shows, the greater age of the American
continent weighs in the question.[1646]
The explicit proofs, as advanced by different geologists, to give a
great antiquity to the American man, and perhaps in some ways greater
than to the European man,[1647] may now be briefly considered in detail.
Oldest of all may perhaps be placed the gold-drift of California, with
its human remains, and chief among them the Calaveras skull, which is
claimed to be of the Pliocene (tertiary) age; but it must be remembered
that Powell and the government geologists call it quaternary. It
was in February, 1866, that in a mining shaft in Calaveras County,
California, a hundred and thirty feet below the surface, a skull
was found imbedded in gravel, which under the name of the Calaveras
skull has excited much interest. It was not the first time that human
remains had been found in these California gravels, but it was the
first discovery that attracted notice. It was not seen _in situ_ by a
professional geologist, and a few weeks elapsed before Professor Josiah
Dwight Whitney, then state geologist of California, visited the spot,
and satisfied himself that the geological conditions were such as to
make it certain that the skull and the deposition of the gravel were
of the same age. The relic subsequently passed into the possession of
Professor Whitney, and the annexed cut is reproduced from the careful
drawing made of it for the _Memoirs of the Museum of Comp. Zoölogy_
(Harvard University), vol. vi. He had published earlier an account in
the _Revue d’Anthropologie_ (1872), p. 760.[1648] This interesting
relic is now in Cambridge, coated with thin wax for preservation, but
this coating interferes with any satisfactory photograph. The volume of
_Memoirs_ above named is made up of Whitney’s _Auriferous Gravels of
the Sierra Nevada of California_ (1880), and at p. ix he says: “There
will undoubtedly be much hesitancy on the part of anthropologists and
others in accepting the results regarding the Tertiary Age of man, to
which our investigations seem so clearly to point.” He says that those
who reject the evidence of the Calaveras skull because it was not seen
_in situ_ by a scientific observer forget the evidence of the fossil
itself; and he adds that since 1866 the other evidence for tertiary
man has so accumulated that “it would not be materially weakened by
dropping that furnished by the Calaveras skull itself.”
[Illustration: CALAVERAS SKULL. (_Front and side view._)]
What Whitney says of the history and authenticity of the skull will
be found in his paper on “Human remains and works of art of the
gravel series,” in _Ibid._ pp. 258-288. His conclusions are that it
shows the existence of man with an extinct fauna and flora, and under
geographical and physical conditions differing from the present,—in
the Pliocene age certainly. This opinion has obtained the support of
Marsh and Le Conte and other eminent geologists. Schmidt (_Archiv
für Anthropologie_) thinks it signifies a pre-glacial man. Winchell
(_Preadamites_, 428) says it is the best authenticated evidence of
Pliocene man yet adduced. On the contrary, there are some confident
doubters. Dawkins (_No. Am. Rev._, Oct., 1883) thinks that all but a
few American geologists have given up the Pliocene man, and that the
chances of later interments, of accidents, of ancient mines, and the
presence of skulls of mustang ponies (introduced by the Spaniards)
found in the same gravels, throw insuperable doubts. “Neither in the
new world nor the old world,” he says, “is there any trace of Pliocene
man revealed by modern discovery.” Southall and all the Bible advocates
of course deny the bearing of all such evidence. Dawson (_Fossil
Men_, 345) thinks the arguments of Whitney inconclusive. Nadaillac
(_L’Amérique préhistorique_, 40, with a cut, and his _Les Premiers
Hommes_, ii. 435) hesitates to accept the evidence, and enumerates the
doubters.[1649]
* * * * *
Footprints have been found in a tufa bed, resting on yellow sand, in
the neighborhood of an extinct volcano, Tizcapa, in Nicaragua. One of
the prints is shown in the annexed cut, after a representation given
by Dr. Brinton in the _Amer. Philosoph. Soc. Proc._ (xxiv. 1887, p.
437). Above this tufa bed were fourteen distinct strata of deposits
before the surface soil was reached. Geologists have placed this yellow
sand, bearing shells, from the post-Pliocene to the Eocene. The seventh
stratum, going downwards, had remains of the mastodon.[1650]
Some ancient basket work discovered at Petit Anse Island, in Louisiana,
has been figured in the _Chicago Acad. of Sciences, Transactions_ (i.
part 2). Cf. E. W. Hilgard, in _Smithsonian Contributions_, no. 248.
* * * * *
Foster rather strikingly likens what we know of the history of the
human race to the apex of a pyramid, of which we know neither the
height nor extent of base. Our efforts to trace man back to his
beginning would be like following down the sides of that pyramid till
it reaches a firm base, we know not where. Many geologists believe
in a great ice-sheet which at one time had settled upon the northern
parts of America, and covered it down to a line that extends across
Pennsylvania, Ohio, and westerly in a direction of some variableness.
There are some, like Sir William Dawson,[1651] who reject the evidence
that persuades others. Prof. Whitney (_Climatic Changes_, 387) holds
that it was a local phenomenon confined in America to the northeastern
parts. The advocates look to Dr. James Geikie[1652] as having
correlated the proofs of the proposition as well as any, while writers
like Howorth[1653] trace the resulting phenomena largely to a flood.
[Illustration: ANCIENT FOOTPRINT FROM NICARAGUA.]
How long ago this was, the cautious geologist does not like to
say;[1654] nor is he quite ready to aver what it all means.[1655]
Perhaps, as some theorize, this prevailing ice showed the long winter
brought about by the precession of the equinoxes, as has long been a
favorite belief, with the swing of ten thousand years, more or less,
from one extreme to the other.[1656]
Others believe that we must look back 200,000 years, as James
Croll[1657] and Lubbock do, or 800,000 and more, as Lyell did at first,
and find the cause in the variable eccentricity of the earth’s orbit,
which shall account for all the climatic changes since the dawn of
what is called the glacial epoch, accompanying the deflection of ocean
currents, as Croll supposes, or the variations in the disposition of
sea and land, as Lyell imagines.[1658] This great ice-sheet, however
extensive, began for some reason to retreat, at a period as remote,
according as we accept this or the other estimate, as from ten thousand
to a hundred thousand years.
* * * * *
That the objects of stone, shaped and polished, which had been observed
all over the civilized world, were celestial in origin seems to have
been the prevalent opinion,[1659] when Mahudel in 1723 and even when
Buffon in 1778 ventured to assign to them a human origin.[1660]
In the gravels which were deposited by the melting of this more or
less extended ice-sheet, parts of the human frame and the work of
human hands have been found, and mark the anterior limit of man’s
residence on the globe, so far as we can confidently trace it.[1661]
Few geologists have any doubt about the existence of human relics in
these American glacial drifts, however widely they may differ about the
age of them.[1662]
[Illustration: FROM DAWSON’S FOSSIL MEN.
The outer outline is that of the skull found in the cave of Cro-magnon,
in France, belonging, as Dawson says, p. 189, to one of the oldest
human inhabitants of western Europe, as shown in Lartet and Christy’s
_Reliquiae Aquitanicae_. The second outline is that of the Enghis
skull; the dotted outline that of the Neanderthal skull. The shaded
skull is on a smaller scale, but preserving the true outline, and is
one of the Hochelaga Indians (site of Montreal). Cuts of the Enghis
and Neanderthal skulls are given in Lubbock’s _Prehistoric Times_,
pp. 328, 329. Dawkins (_Cave Hunters_, 235) thinks the Enghis skull
of doubtful age. On the Neanderthal skull see Quatrefages and Hamy,
_Crania Ethnica_ (Paris, 1873-75), and Dawkins (p. 240). Huxley gives
it a great antiquity, and says it is the most ape-like one he ever
saw. Quatrefages, _Hommes fossiles_, etc. (1884), says it is not below
some later men. Southall (_Epoch of the Mammoth_, 80) says it has the
average capacity of the negro, and double that of the gorilla, and
doubts its antiquity.]
It was in the _American Naturalist_ (Mar. and Ap., 1872) that Dr.
C. C. Abbott made an early communication respecting the discovery of
rude human implements in the glacial gravels[1663] of the Delaware
valley, and since then the Trenton gravels have been the subject of
much interest. The rudeness of the flints has repeatedly raised doubts
as to their artificial character; but Wilson (_Prehistoric Man_, i.
29) says that it is impossible to find in flints broken for the road,
or in any other accumulation of rocky débris, a single specimen that
looks like the rudest implement of the drift. Experts attest the exact
correspondence of these Trenton tools with those of the European river
drift. Abbott has explained the artificial cleavages of stone in the
_American Antiquarian_ (viii. 43). There are geologists like Shaler
who question the artificial character of the Trenton implements. From
time to time since this early announcement, Dr. Abbott has made public
additional evidence as he has accumulated it, going to show, as he
thinks, that we have in these deposits of the glacial action the signs
of men contemporary with the glacial flow, and earlier than the red
Indian stock of historic times.[1664] He summarizes the matter in his
“Palæolithic implements of a people on the Atlantic coast anterior to
the Indians,” in his _Primitive Industry_ (1882).[1665]
* * * * *
Some discoveries of human bones in the loess or loam of the Mississippi
Valley have not been generally accepted. Lyell (_Second Visit_, ii.
197; _Antiq. of Man_, 203) suspends judgment, as does Joseph Leidy in
his _Extinct Mammalia of North America_ (p. 365).
* * * * *
The existence of man in western Europe with extinct animals is a
belief that, from the incredulity which accompanied the discovery by
Kemp in London, in 1714, of a stone hatchet lying in contiguity to some
elephant’s teeth,[1666] has long passed into indisputable fact, settled
by the exploration of cave and shell heaps.[1667] In North America,
this conjunction of man’s remains with those of the mastodon is very
widely spread.[1668] The geological evidence is quite sufficient
without resorting to what has been called an Elephant’s head in the
architecture of Palenqué, the so-called Elephant Mound in Wisconsin,
and the dubious if not fraudulent Elephant Pipe of Iowa.[1669] The
positions of the skeletons have led many to believe that the interval
since the mastodon ceased to roam in the Mississippi Valley is not
geologically great. Shaler (_Amer. Naturalist_, iv. 162) places it at
a few thousand years, and there is enough ground for it perhaps to
justify Southall (_Recent Origin, etc._, 551; _Ep. of the Mammoth_, ch.
8) in claiming that these animals have lived into historic times.
* * * * *
A human skeleton was found sixteen feet below the surface, near New
Orleans—(which is only nine feet above the Gulf of Mexico), and under
four successive growths of cypress forests. Its antiquity, however,
is questioned.[1670] The belief in human traces in the calcareous
conglomerate of Florida seems to have been based (Haven, p. 87) on a
misconception of Count Pourtalès’ statement (_Amer. Naturalist_, ii.
434), though it has got credence in many of the leading books on this
subject. Col. Whittlesey has reported some not very ancient hearths in
the Ohio Valley (_Am. Ass. Arts and Sciences, Proc., Chicago, 1868,
Meeting_, vol. xvii. 268).
* * * * *
The testimony of the caves to the early existence of man has never had
the importance in America that it has had in Europe.
It was in 1822 that Dr. Buckland, in his _Reliquiae diluvianae_ (2d
ed., 1824), first made something like a systematic gathering of the
evidence of animal remains, as shown by cave explorations; but he was
not prepared to believe that man’s remains were as old as the beasts.
He later came to believe in the prehistoric man. In 1833-34, Dr.
Schmerling found in the cave of Enghis, near Liége, a highly developed
skull, and published his _Recherches sur les ossemens fossiles
découverts dans les cavernes de la province de Liége_.[1671]