in the desert area of southern California. Points like the Pinto
    have been found in Chile. (The Pinto, after Wormington, 1944; the
    other two, after Campbell, 1937.)_]

Confusion, as well as controversy, distinguishes the area which might
prove the most significant of the four if more extended work were done
there by geologists as well as archaeologists. This area is in the
neighborhood of Abilene, Texas, and includes the banks of the Elm Creek
branch of the Brazos River. Cyrus N. Ray, a local physician, has studied
the Abilene sites assiduously for twenty years. In 1931 Gila
Pueblo—Harold S. Gladwin’s research institution—sent E. B. Sayles to
work there. Later Gila arranged to have Antevs, Howard, and M. M.
Leighton, Chief of the Illinois State Geological Survey, study the finds
and the sites. It is unfortunate that the men who worked in this area
have not agreed on a consistent set of names for the various cultures
and geological formations. As H. M. Wormington has observed, “the only
way to approach publications dealing with the archaeology of this region
is with a large bottle of aspirin in either hand.”

     [Illustration: _An Abilene point. (After Wormington, 1944.)_]

The artifacts occurred in two strata. The upper contained points of
types now called Plainview and Milnesand and a long, narrow point that
has been dubbed Abilene, though not accepted as a distinct type by Texas
archaeologists. Leighton placed these tools from what he called the Elm
Creek Silts in the latter portion of our last Glacial period.[37] To
reach Abilene at this time, early man may have passed through the gap
that is thought to have appeared in the ice sheet east of the Rockies
40,000 years ago, or else when the Wisconsin ice of the last glaciers
was in retreat 20,000 years later (see illustrations, pages 26 and 27).

Still greater age is claimed for certain other objects of the Abilene
area. Below the Elm Creek Silts lie the Durst Silts, which were laid
down, Leighton thinks, prior to the last glaciation.[38] In connection
with these silts Sayles found what may be very crude artifacts.[39] They
are the “eoliths” that, wherever found in the Old World, are accepted or
attacked as problematical evidences of man’s first attempts at roughly
chipped artifacts. If these are indeed the work of man, and if Leighton
is right, the men who made them must have come to Texas during the
Sangamon Interglacial period preceding the last, or Wisconsin,
glaciation—a matter of perhaps 70,000 years ago.

Some authorities attack Leighton’s dating and therefore Sayles’s
eoliths. The reported discovery later of Abilene and other points in the
Durst Silts suggested to Kirk Bryan that the silts would have to be
moved up in time.[40] He might have argued that the artifacts should be
moved back, which would have been in line with his championing of very
early man elsewhere. Agreeing with Bryan and C. C. Albritton, Frank C.
Hibben redated the Durst Silts by connecting them with a late glacier in
the Rocky Mountains rather than with the Wisconsin ice field of the
north.[41] Leighton, on the other hand, maintained—and he has had some
good support—that the soil at various depths had been radically changed
by chemical action which would take tens of thousands of years. This
“soil profile” theory as a test of geological age is gaining in
importance.[42]

Sandia—Older Than Folsom

However problematical these evidences of pre-Folsom man near Abilene may
be, there can be no doubt about the meaning of Frank C. Hibben’s
discoveries in Sandia Cave, New Mexico, in 1936. He began by finding the
remains of Pueblo Indians. Under the Pueblo he came upon a layer of
stalagmitic travertine one-half inch to six inches thick, laid down
during a moist period. Sealed off beneath this were classic Folsom
points together with scrapers and evidence of extinct mammals. Next he
found another sterile seal, two inches to two feet thick. This time it
was of yellow ocher—a substance induced by fir and spruce under moist
conditions, Kirk Bryan points out. Fir and spruce require more cold and
more moisture than the neighborhood of Sandia provides at present—which
argues that the ocher was manufactured during the last pulsation of the
fourth and final glaciation more than 11,000 years ago.[43] Beneath this
stratum Hibben found a new type of point.[44] New to the New World, that
is, but not to the Old; for it resembles in a crude way a point of the
Solutrean culture of Europe which has a notch at the bottom to aid in
hafting. Since this discovery, points of the same type have turned up
sporadically throughout the Mississippi Valley, along the eastern
seaboard, and even in California. In every case, Hibben writes, there
were indications of “considerable antiquity.” In fourteen instances out
of thirty-eight, “the points were found with extinct bones, although in
each case by amateurs.”[45]

The Sandia point is, of course, definitely older than the Folsom. The
two periods of moisture indicate that the cave was inhabited by Folsom
man toward the end of the last glaciation, or 9,000 to 11,000 years ago,
and by Sandia man still earlier. Unless, of course, you wish to believe,
as some do, that both pluvial periods were Postglacial.

Quite understandably, Sandia has been of keen interest to
archaeologists. The geology tells us only that the Folsom and the Sandia
occupations of the cave were separated by a cool, moist interval that
could reflect a major glacial advance, a minor glacial advance, or
merely a postglacial period of lowered temperature and more snow or
rain. The last seems the least likely alternative. None of these
possibilities gives us a firm date. Accordingly, the development of the
radiocarbon “clock” by Willard Libby raised some hope that the age of
Sandia points could, at last, be determined. This hope continues, but
has yet to be realized. Radiocarbon tests made by H. R. Crane, at the
University of Michigan, upon fragments of mammoth tusk indicate an age
of at least 20,000 years, with the reasonable possibility that the true
age exceeds 30,000 years.[46] The problems remain. The association of
Sandia points with mammoth tusk was not as clear as Folsom point with
extinct bison. And the problem of the reliability of ivory in
radiocarbon tests—as well as the ever-present question of possible
contamination—urges caution in accepting this date for Sandia.

    [Illustration: _A Sandia point, left, compared with two Solutreans.
    The first of the Solutreans was found with Mousterian artifacts in a
    cave in Tangier, the second in France. (The Sandia point, after
    Hibben, 1941; the Solutreans, after Howe and Movius, 1947, and
    Plant, 1942.)_]

A site discovered at Lime Creek, Nebraska, in 1947 may prove to be old.
In the sharp bank of the stream C. Bertrand Schultz found crude points,
bone awls, scrapers, and tools made out of antlers. Together with
fossils of mammals they lay as deep as forty-seven and one-half feet
below the surface, in a silt containing the remains of decayed
vegetation. Above this soil were seventeen feet of loess, another layer
of soil, another layer of loess, and finally a “mature” or well
developed, and therefore fairly old top soil. Schultz and W. D.
Frankforter write that the seventeen feet of loess covering the earth in
which the artifacts were found appears to have been deposited before or
at the beginning of the last expansion of the Wisconsin, or final,
glaciation.[47] If this is true, it means that the men of Lime Creek
lived 25,000 or 35,000 years ago, and that their forebears may have come
through the corridor in the ice fields of Canada 5,000 to 18,000 years
earlier (see page 27). Antevs and Wormington doubt it.[48] Radiocarbon
dates from burned logs found below the Lime Creek artifacts averaged
9,524 ± 450 years.[49] It is possible that these stone tools are
contemporaneous with Folsom, or even a bit later.

The Milling Stone Appears

In the early thirties, archaeologists began to find a peculiar kind of
artifact that broadened their conception of the activities of early man
in the New World. Anthropologists had always thought of him as merely a
hunter. He needed spear points, scrapers, knives, hammerstones to shape
these things, and fire-drills to make it possible for him to cook his
prey; but that was all. Then milling stones began to appear, and it
became clear that early man—at least in some areas—had been a food
gatherer and food grinder, as well as a hunter. These stones are very
simple slabs with a hollow worn in the surface by round handstones used
in grinding seeds and nuts. Such milling stones, or querns, are not seen
in the Old World until we approach the Neolithic, or New Stone Age, and
the people who developed agriculture and textiles. Milling stones have
been found in a village farming site at Jarmo, Iraq, dating about 7,000
years ago.[50] Agriculture did not enter Europe until about 2500 B.C.,
and milling stones are not found in its caves until after the
Magdalenians of the Old Stone Age. The reason for the precipitate
outcropping of milling stones in the Americas is not that our early man
practiced agriculture. He did not do that, and he did not make polished
stone axes until much later. He was merely a food gatherer. Was he also
a food grinder because he was an Australoid who brought the habit to
America, just as he brought it to Australia? Or, if not, was he another
sort of man, who happened to be smart enough to recognize that North
America provided him with many tempting grains and seeds to grind, foods
that were not so available in the Old World?[51] It seems more than a
coincidence that the earliest American milling stones appear in the arid
Southwest, where desert plants have more seeds and larger seeds than
plants in moister areas.

The first site to provide milling stones was at Whitewater Creek, in
Arizona. Byron Cummings had found artifacts and fossils there in 1926.
When Gladwin heard of this at an anthropological meeting five years
later, he again set Gila Pueblo in motion. Sayles and Emil W. Haury
undertook excavation, and Antevs checked the geology of the various
sites which they studied in the area of what is now called the Cochise
culture.[52] The excavators found milling stones in the same stratum as
the fossils of extinct animals. They found no spear points in this
oldest level—a sign that food gathering was the dominant economy of the
early Cochise.

                 [Illustration: COCHISE MILLING STONES

    _The lower comes from the oldest horizon, the Sulphur Spring, the
    upper fragment from a later one, probably the Chiricahua. (The
    Sulphur Spring stone, after Martin, Quimby, and Collier, 1947; the
    other, courtesy of the Southwest Museum.)_]

The artifacts and the fossils were lying in or under clays left by a
lake that has now disappeared. If Lake Cochise was, like Lake
Bonneville, one of the bodies of water created while the last great ice
sheets were growing, then the Cochise culture must date from the last
wet period of the final glaciation—perhaps as much as 35,000 years ago.
Antevs thinks, however, that the water which laid down the clays
belonged to a number of ponds, not to a single large lake, and that the
ponds could have formed and disappeared, formed again and disappeared
again, just before postglacial times brought a much drier climate. Any
single pond may have appeared as late as 10,000 years ago to provide the
Cochise clay. Radiocarbon dates for Cochise all seem too recent to fit
the geology and paleontology of the site. Dates for the earliest stage,
the Sulphur Spring, range from 6,210 to 7,000 years ago; the Chiricahua
from 2,850 to 7,000; the last, the San Pedro, from 1,762 to 2,463.[53]
Antevs, on the other hand, believes that the Sulphur Spring stage at
Double Adobe—twenty-four miles east of the Lehner mammoth site where
Clovis points were found—dates back more than 12,500 years.[54]

Finds of milling stones have also been made at Signal Butte, Nebraska,
by W. D. Strong; at Pinto Basin by the Campbells[55]—the first site
probably about as early as Gypsum, the other 10,000 years old—and under
hardpan at that much disputed site near Frederick, Oklahoma, where some
claim that artifacts and fossils of extinct animals appear together in
an interglacial formation. Milling stones have also been found at sites
of later cultures such as the Edwards Plateau in Texas and Santa Barbara
in California. There are indications of an ancient horizon of milling
stones, as well as Pinto and older points and scrapers, in Sonora and
Lower California. The fact that they were found with the bones of elk
and bison and along the shores of dry lakes in Mexico argues that this
culture is as old as Cochise, perhaps older. Carl Sauer, who found the
materials, believes that only during the last glaciation could the
climate of these two desert areas have been moist enough to produce
lakes and support so much animal life.[56]

At Borax Lake in California, in several years of work following 1938,
Harrington found more milling stones. There were also quite a variety of
points—fluted, Gypsum, Pinto, Mohave, and Silver Lake—scattered through
an alluvial fan of dirt carried down by some early stream that flowed
when the country was well watered and verdant, instead of arid like so
much of California today.[57]

In 1948 Harrington and Willy Stahl found milling stones and a great
wealth of Pinto, Mohave, and Silver Lake points in another part of
California that is now desert. This is near Little Lake, which is fed by
underground waters and small intermittent streams from the Sierra.
Nearby, in glacial times, a small river cut a channel through a great
lava flow, producing a falls that has now moved up half a mile from the
edge of the lava. Here, where the blow sands of the Mohave Desert meet
the lava, and under about ten feet of old, consolidated sand, Harrington
and Stahl found milling stones and points in two feet of soil. This soil
was dark with the remains of vegetation that must have been trees and
bushes when the intermittent stream was still a steady torrent.
Underneath the dark soil there was clay deposited by the stream at some
period of great flow. Across about two-thirds of the camp site a similar
coating of clay indicated that after the user of the milling stones and
Pinto points had departed, the stream had overflowed again during a time
of great rains. This time may have been the “Little Pluvial” of about
3,000 years ago, or the “Great Pluvial” that some say occurred 10,000
years ago when the glaciers had finally retreated, with the former the
more likely date. In this camp site Harrington and Stahl found the post
holes of some sort of hut or shelter, the oldest evidence of
housebuilding in the New World.[58]

    [Illustration: _An animal head carved from part of the spine of a
    variety of llama, or camel, and reputedly found with fossils of
    other extinct mammals in the Valley of Mexico in 1870. About eight
    inches wide. (After Barcena, 1882.)_]

A Paucity of Art Objects

Advanced as early man in America may have been in his stone industry, he
seems to have been singularly backward in making the kind of
spiritualized artifact which we call art. In the caves of France and
Spain men of the Old Stone Age left remarkable paintings and sculptures
of animals. There is nothing like this of corresponding age in the
Americas. Early man in Europe and in Northern Asia turned out many
little figures of women—undoubtedly symbols of fecundity, since the
female characteristics are highly exaggerated; but in the New World
female figurines are to be found only in later levels such as those of
the Eskimo, Southwestern, and Middle American cultures, all of which
date from close to the birth of Christ. Of all the forms of art, we have
few examples that may have been made by early man. In the United States
there are the dubious trio of crude, round heads which Sellards reports
from a gravel pit in Henderson County, Texas.[59] During the digging of
a canal in the Valley of Mexico in 1870, a workman picked out of a
fossil-bearing stratum a bony section of what was described as an
extinct llama, or camel, carved in the shape of a coyote’s head. It was
about forty feet below the surface of the ground in the same layer of
earth with fossils of elephant, horse, giant armadillo, and camel.[60]
The Lindenmeier Folsom site produced decorated discs of bone, possibly
used as game markers. Most interesting of all is the fragment of mammoth
or mastodon bone recovered in the summer of 1959 about ten miles
southeast of Puebla, Mexico, by Juan Armenta Camacho. On a six-inch
wedge of bone, estimated to have been 30,000 years old, are the crudely
carved outlines of bison, tapir, and mammoths or mastodons, carved while
the bone was still fresh.[61]

           [Illustration: EARLIEST DRAWINGS BY NEW WORLD MAN?

    _Four drawings, by Fernando Ramirez Osorio, from a number of
    engravings on a portion of pelvic bone of an extinct form of
    elephant found near Puebla, Mexico. The animal at the upper left may
    be a tapir, the one at the lower right a bison. The other two
    engravings probably represent mammoths or mastodons. The straight
    lines in the drawings of the tapir and the bison may be symbols of
    the hunt such as appear in European caves. A new test for early
    dates gives an age of over 30,000 years. From the same geological
    formation have come remains of nearly thirty extinct animals, some
    thought to be of the third interglacial age, as well as crude tools.
    (Courtesy of Douglas Cornell, science editor of Visión.)_]

Hand Axes in the Americas

Of all the bits of stone that bear on the existence of early man in
America, perhaps the most puzzling—and certainly the most neglected—are
the artifacts which E. B. Renaud has found in countless numbers in
southwestern Wyoming. Here at 105 sites on the arid surface of Black’s
Fork Valley he had picked up by 1940 some 7,000 chipped stones—many of
them like rude hand axes—which suggest a parallel with the industries of
paleolithic man in the Old World.[62] European authorities such as J.
Reid Moir, champion of English eoliths, Reginald A. Smith, of the
British Museum, and D. Peyroni, of the Musée des Eyzies, have stated
that Renaud’s finds agree in type with the hand axes, choppers, and
blades of the Abbevillian, Acheulean, Mousterian, and Clactonian
cultures of Europe and Africa. While emphasizing the resemblances,
Renaud is careful to claim no parallel in time.

Renaud’s artifacts recall a gathering of hand axes under most
unscientific circumstances more than sixty years ago. In the late 1880’s
Thomas Wilson of the National Museum became convinced that the
collections under his care contained numerous hand axes of paleolithic
type and age. He listed 950 in the Museum and appealed through a printed
circular for more examples. He got them. His correspondents in
thirty-five states donated 789 and described enough more to bring the
total up to 8,501.[63]

    [Illustration: _A hand ax of the Black’s Fork culture. (Courtesy of
    the Denver Museum of Natural History.)_]

Wilson’s hand axes and Renaud’s artifacts were attacked in the same
manner. W. H. Holmes of the Bureau of American Ethnology had little
trouble in convincing the scientific public that Wilson’s array of
casually collected material came from quarries and workshops of the
Indian and were cores from which he had struck flakes to make points or
scrapers. The critics of Renaud’s artifacts pointed to certain similar
objects found less plentifully in late camp sites on the Plains, and
suggested that Renaud’s artifacts might be merely the blanks and rejects
of a relatively recent stone industry.[64] Many of the finds are
certainly not finished implements, and the date of the Black’s Fork
culture is still problematical; but among Renaud’s material there are
hand axes and scrapers that bear comparison with the cruder Chellean and
Acheulean work. There are also chopping tools of Asiatic and African
pattern, made from edged pebbles that have been deliberately chipped,
first from one side, then from the other.

Flints of Abbevillian and Acheulean types—whether true artifacts or
rejects—have been recorded by Kirk Bryan at Cerro Pedernal in New
Mexico.[65] At Lake Mohave in the Pinto Basin, Mr. and Mrs. W. H.
Campbell have found points of a Mousterian shape and scrapers suggestive
of the Aurignacian. They are so crude, however, that they seem more like
the “elementary ideas” which, as Bastian claimed, could be the product
of primitive man anywhere. In Texas, there are many tools so well
developed and so close to Acheulean forms that they cannot be turned
aside as either “elementary ideas” or blanks and rejects. These are the
hand axes which Sayles and other archaeologists have found.[66]

Early Man in Mexico

Besides the skull that de Terra found with the fossils of elephants in
Mexico, there are artifacts south of the border which reinforce the
argument for early man. They are more important than the chance
resemblance to a Folsom point which Junius Bird found with sloth bones
in a cave in southern Chile, or the Eden-like point which has turned up
in Venezuela.[67]

During de Terra’s studies of the dry lake beds of the Valley of Mexico
and the glacial moraines on the surrounding mountains—studies which
began late in 1945—he discovered stone tools in two culture levels.
These levels fall in two pluvial periods just before and just after the
end of the Great Ice Age.

        [Illustration: A HAND AX AND A CHOPPING TOOL FROM TEXAS

    _The dating of these tools is uncertain, but the upper resembles
    early paleolithic specimens from Europe despite its more flakelike
    quality. The other is somewhat like chopping tools made from pebbles
    in Asia and Africa. (Courtesy of Gila Pueblo.)_]

The older culture level—called San Juan—contained ten artifacts,
including scrapers, gravers, flakes, and chipped pebbles of obsidian and
chalcedony and a pointed bone tool, together with fossils of mammoth,
sloth, camel, bison, and horse. De Terra found some of this material at
Tequixquiac and some near Teotihuacán, where Manuel Gamio came upon
fossil bones of mammoth and bison when he was excavating that famous
site. Close to where de Terra discovered the skull of early man
discussed in Chapter 6, another anthropologist is said to have picked up
part of a point of Folsom type—the first to be recorded south of the
United States. De Terra places the San Juan culture 12,000 to 20,000
years ago.

The younger culture—called Chalco—provided sixty-five variegated
artifacts of basalt, including one point. The presence of manos—roundish
stones for grinding seeds on a milling stone—as well as other artifacts,
causes de Terra to compare this culture with the Cochise in Arizona. He
dates the Chalco culture at 4,000 to 10,000 years ago.[68]

The only evidence from Central America—neither skulls nor artifacts—is
extraordinary in nature, but as yet makes no definite contribution in
terms of years. The finds are the footprints of men, women, and children
in a lava bed at El Cauce near Managua, Nicaragua. They were buried
beneath many feet of ash and lava and four separate layers of soil. At a
time of great rainfall—which suggests a pluvial connected with either
the formation or the melting of the glaciers—a river excavated a channel
sixty feet wide and almost ten feet deep. Geologists have not yet
ventured to give us a date. There are tracks, however, of a bison—an
animal long extinct so far south.[69] Other fossil human footprints, in
sandstone and perhaps of a more recent time, have been found near
Usulután, El Salvador.[70]

The story of early man in the Americas, so far as it is interpreted by
the finding of his artifacts, did not begin with Folsom and will not end
with the most recent discoveries in Middle America. As far back as 1869
a geologist named C. J. King found a pestle—considered in the Old World
a product of the Neolithic, or New Stone Age of polished artifacts—so
firmly cemented into the gold-bearing gravels under Table Mountain near
Tuttleton, California, that he “forced it out of its place with
considerable difficulty.”[71] (Other ground and polished implements had
been reported from mine shafts in the 1860’s, but none had been found by
a geologist imbedded in gravels.) As late as 1919, W. H. Holmes, ever
critical of evidence for early man, called King’s pestle “the most
important observation yet made by a geologist bearing upon the problem
of man’s antiquity in America.”[72] If the gravels in which the pestle
was found and the lava which lay just above it were indeed products of
the Pliocene period which preceded the Great Ice Age, then we have to
face a staggering idea. We have to believe that a strain of _Homo
sapiens_ originated in the New World long before Java man. We have to
believe that he acquired the skills of the New Stone Age far ahead of
man in the Old World, and that he then disappeared. It is easier—but not
too easy—to think that the lava flowed in recent times, after glacial
waters had worked a pestle of early man into the gold-bearing gravels,
which would push the seed-grinders of California far, far back in time.
It is still easier to believe that King was out of his head. It should
be noted that California Indians, except along the Colorado River, never
did develop a neolithic, or agricultural, level of technology. Their
ground and polished stone implements were applied to the objects of a
specialized seed-gathering economy. In Old World terms, such activity
tends to characterize late paleolithic economies, where big-game hunting
was not feasible.

    [Illustration: _The broken pestle found by C. J. King in
    gold-bearing gravels in California. (After Becker, 1891.)_]

The excavations and studies of the next few years may not provide
evidence as startling as King’s, but radiocarbon promises to date any
site of early man where a few ounces of charcoal can be found. Among the
first dates provided by Libby was one between 6,300 and 6,900 years ago
for trees charred by the eruption of pumice from Mt. Mazama, Oregon, and
beneath this pumice lie four or five sites where L. S. Cressman found
artifacts of early man and the fossils of horse and camel.[73] By means
of radiocarbon and, here and there, newer and perhaps equally refined
techniques, anthropologists are beginning to learn a little more about
the relationships in time and culture between the prehistoric makers of
the weapons and tools we have described. Yet out of more than 150 sites,
there are only a few where datings are fully reliable.

From the Glacial to the Archaic

The record of early man in North America may be dealt with on five
levels, each overlapping another. The most recent is sometimes called
the Archaic Period—the stage before native civilizations took shape—and
it lies outside the range of early man as we define him. The earliest of
the other four levels is the most significant and the least known. We
have no suitable name for this period, which stretches back from about
15,000 years ago into the very dim past. It may have begun early in the
last glacial age or even in the third interglacial; this would take our
earliest man back 50,000 to 100,000 years. There are no firm dates for
this. The best we have is a radiocarbon estimate of 30,000 years ago,
when man may have killed dwarf elephants on an island off the coast of
California.

Let us start with some dates and associations that follow the end of
that mysterious first level 15,000 years ago, and carry us up to the
brink of the Archaic. Let us then go back to the few hazy glimpses we
now have of the very beginnings of man in the Americas.

We must start with the fluted points of Clovis. They may range from
10,000 to 15,000 years back—more likely 11,000 to 13,000. It is still
uncertain whether the shouldered points of Sandia fit into this time
span or precede it. For various technical reasons, we must throw out a
date of more than 37,000 years ago for Clovis points from Lewisville,
Texas, and a date of 8,500 at the Lehner site in Arizona. Points
remarkably like those from the Clovis-type site appear in such places as
Bull Brook, Massachusetts,[74] and Alaska,[75] but dating is either
lacking or insecure, and a 10,000- to 15,000-year age may not agree
comfortably with other geological or cultural associations.
Archaeologists have been tempted to associate this horizon with the
hunting of mammoths.[76]

The Folsom period is next, and fairly well dated. The span of time
during which these classic fluted points were made seems to fall mainly
between 9,000 and 11,000 years ago. The most noted big game of the
Folsom hunters was _Bison antiquus_.[77]

The remaining stage of these “middle” levels may be identified—most
arbitrarily—as the Eden, or parallel-flaked, point horizon. Fluting of
projectile points still occurs, but the distinctive and exceptional
feature is the beautiful pressure-flaking illustrated on page 155. Other
types of projectile points include Gypsum, Plainview, Scottsbluff, Lime
Creek, Angostura, and perhaps Agate Basin. The time span seems to be
from perhaps 7,000 to about 10,000 years ago. The makers of these points
also tended to be bison hunters. _Bison occidentalis_ may have been the
chief game,[78] although there continues occasional association with _B.
antiquus_, and there begins an identification with _B. bison_, the
“buffalo” of Plains Indians in recent times.

In the two thousand years following the Folsom climax—that is, from
about 7,000 to 9,000 years ago—notable transitions occurred in the
technologies and economies of early man. Handsome projectile points
became noticeably diversified in shape, and perhaps in size. Many
continued to be made with a superb craftsmanship that persisted to
historic times. Economically, as we shall see in the next chapter, there
was a major shift of emphasis. This was due in large part to the great
extinction of Pleistocene mammals, which was in progress by 8,000 years
ago and essentially completed 5,000 years ago. During this time, the era
of specialized big-game hunters came to a close. The human populations
that survived seem to have turned their attentions to the generalized
hunting of lesser game. Their economies were first augmented by, and
then focused upon, food collecting. For many groups, such as the Indians
of central California, exploitation of wild seeds and nuts became a
specialized and satisfactory means of subsistence in a climate whose wet
winters and dry summers severely limited agriculture. Elsewhere, seed
collecting was replaced by plant domestication—an important first
step—then by plant cultivation and ultimately by agriculture. Of these
late trends in American prehistory, the scope of this book allows us to
touch on only the Cochise cultures and other seed-collecting traditions
of apparent antiquity.

Back of 15,000 Years?

We have hardly mentioned the earliest period of American prehistory. As
in the Old World, the most ancient is the least known. There are many
places in the west and southwest of the United States, and some in
Mexico and South America, where materials of what seems impressive
antiquity have been detected. We say materials, rather than cultures,
for they are often suspect.

At Tule Springs, in southern Nevada, for more than two decades,
Southwest Museum archaeologists have periodically found evidence of what
may have been man-made campfires and the broken, scorched, and scattered
bones of camel, mammoth, bison, and perhaps horse and sloth. In 1956,
Ruth D. Simpson located _in situ_ “a small uniface convex scraper,
retouched along approximately two inches of its circumference” in a
pocket of charcoal. From this charcoal, a date of more than 28,000 years
was determined.[79] The few artifacts recovered at Tule Springs are
rather nondescript, but ancient hunters surely occupied the site at
various remote times.

Burned bones of dwarf mammoths on Santa Rosa Island, off the Santa
Barbara coast of southern California, have furnished radiocarbon dates
ranging from 15,000 to about 30,000 years ago. The situation of these
bones strongly suggests death at the hands of man. Sure association of
cultural materials with the six-foot elephants has not been determined
to the full satisfaction of archaeologists.[80] Although the indicated
dates may be accurate—and it is not unlikely that these animals were
hunted by early man—there are other explanations that are even more
plausible.

Near San Diego, California, exposed cliffs with alluvial deposits and
raised sea beaches of presumed Pleistocene age contain burned places, or
fire lenses, often as much as 100 feet across. George F. Carter believes
these to be hearths dating back to third interglacial times or
earlier.[81] As evidence of human occupation, he has assembled
quantities of crudely chipped cobbles, described as “core tools.” His
critics maintain that most are even cruder than the lower paleolithic
hand axes of Europe, and refuse to grant that any of them were made by
man.[82]

Unmistakable artifacts, including types described as choppers, scrapers,
and hand axes, have been found in abundance in the Mohave Desert, at
Pleistocene Lake Manix[83]—now, like Pleistocene Lake Mohave, a dusty
playa—and on ancient beaches in nearby Death Valley.[84] The geology of
these sites suggests that they may be of Pleistocene age, but the
artifact types and materials do not differ significantly from those
associated with the Lake Mohave and Silver Lake cultures, for which
dates of less than 10,000 years are considered probable.

The desert regions of Western America have provided other sites of
apparent Pleistocene age in which the artifacts are both simple and
crudely made. While it is tempting to consider these as being truly
ancient, we will have to know much more about them before we can be
certain that they are more than the output of backward desert dwellers
such as Father Baegert described for Baja California in early mission
days.[85]

From other regions of the Americas, there are other suggestions of early
man and ancient cultures. J. L. Giddings’ Palisades culture, on
mountainside benches of Cape Krusenstern, Alaska, north of Bering
Strait, may be old. It appears considerably older than the Denbigh Flint
Complex, south of the Strait, which may go back from 4,500 to 5,000
years.[86] And in South America early man is represented at such sites
as El Jobo, in Venezuela;[87] an unpublished radiocarbon date from this
region is rumored at about 16,000 years.

The coming decade should bring further refinements in radiocarbon
dating, as well as the development of newer techniques such as the
Rosholt “uranium-daughter” products and obsidian hydration measurements.
With or without the aid of these dating methods, livelier activity of
archaeologists south of the border should soon give us more information
about early man in Latin America.

                 THE MORE IMPORTANT SITES OF EARLY MAN

The listing on the three next pages, which goes no further than 1948, is
not exhaustive. There is room for argument over a number of the finds;
but the arrangement of the materials in columns provides a rough
perspective. The sites are listed in order of discovery. The symbols
indicate one or more occurrences:

Occurrence of the saber-toothed cat, tapir, giant beaver, or extinct
armadillo is not indicated. Finds that seem problematical or not
definitely associated with other finds are shaded. Sandia points were
found with the five extinct mammals indicated in the Sandia cave and
below the Folsom.

  Human Bones
    {SK} skull
    {PS} part of skull
    {CB} a considerable number of bones
    {FB} a few bones
  Artifacts, Fires
    {SB} a skeleton or the major parts
    {C} Clovis and other early fluted points
    {F} Folsom
    {FP} Plainview, Scottsbluff, and other parallel-fluted points
    {OP} other types of point
    {CC} charcoal
    {MS} milling stone
    {P} pottery
    {R} rocks thrown by man
    {HS} horn and shell objects
    {BF} bone and flake tools
    {BT} bone tools
  Extinct Mammals
    {M} mammoth or mastodon
    {EB} extinct bison
    {S} sloth
    {EC} extinct camel
    {EH} extinct horse
    {ES} extinct South American mammals
  *An asterisk within brackets indicates shading in the diagram.

   Date             Place             Human      Artifacts,    Extinct Mammals
                                      Bones        Fires

 1835-1844  Lagoa Santa, Brazil     {SK}
 1838       Gasconade County, Mo.              {OP} {R*} {CC}  {M}
 1839       Benton County, Mo.                 {C*}            {M}
 1846       Natchez, Miss.          {FB}                       {M} {EB} {S}
                                                               {EH}
 1872-1879  Trenton, N.J.           {PS} {FB}  {OP}            {M} {EB}
 1872       Omaha, Nebr.                       {OP}            {M}
 1882       Lake Lahontan, Nev.                {OP}            {M} {EB} {EC}
                                                               {EH}
 1895       Russell Springs, Kans.             {OP}            {EB}
 1902       Lansing, Kans.          {SB}
 190?       Paltacalo, Ecuador      {SK}
 1915-1916  Vero, Fla.              {SK} {FB}                  {M} {S} {EH}
 1920       Sacramento, Calif.      {SB}       {OP} {MS}
 1923-1927  Santa Barbara, Calif.   {SB}       {OP} {MS}
 1923       Melbourne, Fla.         {SK} {FB}  {OP} {CC}
                                               {M*} {S*}
                                               {EH*}
 1923 &     Grand Island, Nebr.                {FP}            {EB}
 1931
 1923       Punin, Ecuador          {SK}                       {M*} {S*} {EH*}
 1924       Lone Wolf Creek, Tex.              {FP} {OP}       {EB}
 1926       Folsom, N.M.                       {F}             {EB}
 1926 &     Lake Cochise, White     {PS} {FB}  {OP} {MS} {CC}  {M} {EB} {EC}
 1935-1940  Water Creek, Ariz.                                 {EH}
 1926       Frederick, Okla.                   {OP}            {M} {S} {EC}
                                                               {EH}
 1928       Alangasi, Ecuador                  {P} {CC}        {M*}
 1929       Abilene, Tex.                      {FP} {OP} {CC}  {M} {EH}
 1929       Conkling Cavern, N.M.   {SK} {FB}                  {S} {EC} {EH}
 1930       Burnet Cave, N.M.                  {F}             {EB} {EC} {EH}
 1930       Gypsum Cave, Nev.                  {OP}            {S} {EC} {EH}
 1931       Pelican Rapids, Minn.   {SB}       {HS}
 1931       Angus, Nebr.                       {OP}            {M}
 1932       Signal Butte, Nebr.                {FP} {OP}
                                               {MS} {CC}
 1932       Clovis, N.M.                       {C} {F} {FP}    {M} {EB} {EC*}
                                               {CC}            {EH*}
 1932       Scottsbluff, Nebr.                 {FP} {OP}       {EB}
 1932       Dent, Colo.                        {C}             {M}
 1933       Browns Valley, Minn.    {SB}       {FP} {OP}
 1934       Lindenmeier, Colo.                 {C} {F} {FP}    {M*} {EB} {EC}
                                               {CC}
 1934       Miami, Tex.                        {C}             {M}
 1934       Pinto Basin, Calif.                {OP} {MS*}      {EC*} {EH*}
 1935       Confins, Brazil         {SB}                       {M} {S} {EH}
 1935       Sauk Valley, Minn.      {SB}
 1936       Lake Mohave, Calif.                {OP}
 1936       Sandia Cave, N.M.                  {F} {FP*}       {M} {EB} {S}
                                               {OP} {CC}       {EC} {EH}
 1936-1937  Cerro Sota Hill, Chile  {SB}       {OP}            {S} {EH}
 1936-1937  Fell’s Cave, Chile                 {OP} {CC}       {S} {EH}
 1936-1937  Palli Aike Cave, Chile  {CB}       {OP} {CC}       {S} {EH}
 1937-1945  Borax Lake, Calif.                 {F} {OP} {MS}
                                               {CC}
 1938       Bee County, Tex.                   {OP} {CC}       {M} {EB} {EH}
 1938       Lipscomb County, Tex.              {F}             {EB}
 1939       Ventana Cave, Ariz.                {F*} {OP}       {EB} {S} {EH}
 1939       Mortlach, Sask.                    {F} {FP}        {EB}
 1940       Eden, Wyo.                         {C*}            {EB}
 1941       San Jon, N.M.                      {F} {FP*} {OP}  {M*} {EB}
 1941       San Luis Valley, Colo.             {F} {FP*}       {EB}
 1941       Fairbanks, Alaska                  {FP}            {M}
 1941       Circle, Alaska                     {FP*}           {M}
 1941       Cook Inlet, Alaska                 {FP} {CC}       {M}
 1945       Plainview, Tex.                    {FP}            {EB}
 1946       Monument Site,          {SB}       {OP}
            Concord, Calif.
 1946-1947  Tequixquiac, Mex.                  {BF}            {M*} {EB*} {S*}
                                                               {EC*} {EH*}
 1947       Tepexpan, Mex.          {SB}       {OP*}           {M*}
 1948       Totolzingo, Mex.                   {BT}            {M*} {EH*}

                                   8
                   EARLY MAN AND THE GREAT EXTINCTION

  _And prate about an Elephant_
  _Not one of them has seen!_
                                                             —J. G. SAXE

A Twofold Problem

A mammoth in Colorado ... a giant sloth near Hoover Dam ... spear points
of early man involved with both. Those two remote and spectacular
animals roaming our own United States set our minds far back on the
trail of time. The weapons, crude as they were and pitifully small,
carry us forward again tens of thousands of years. We are describing the
reaction of the layman who first learns of these things, but the
opinions of science veer almost as widely when it tries to date the
traffic of man and mammoth in the New World. The range is from 100,000
years ago to 2500 B.C.

The dating of the life of early man by the death of mammals now extinct
is one of the major tasks that face the American prehistorian. It is
doubly difficult because, in the first place, evidence of when these
animals died off is only now becoming available, and, secondly, because
we must also know how long man hunted them _before_ they became extinct.
We know that a few skulls have been found in strata containing the
fossils of these animals, and we know that all but one of the skulls are
longheaded and beetle-browed like those of the Australians and the
Melanesians, instead of roundheaded like those of most Mongoloids. We
know that Sandia, Clovis, or Folsom points have been found with the
fossils of extinct elephants, horses, camels, and bison. If we knew when
such mammals became extinct, we should know the latest possible date of
most of the archaic skulls and of Sandia and Folsom man. But we should
still not know just how much earlier some of these humans lived, or when
they or their predecessors discovered America.

    [Illustration: MAMMALS OF THE ICE AGE IN NORTH AND SOUTH AMERICA

    _A chart of the chief animals that became extinct after the arrival
    of man. The “extinct armadillo” is more correctly known as
    Dasypodidae. (After Colbert, 1942, with some rearrangement.)_]

Myths and Mammoths

The subject has been thoroughly confused by too many guesses and too
little evidence. Besides a great variety of geologic theories and some
amazingly stubborn conservatism, we have had some extraordinary Indian
myths as well as the dreams of innocents and eccentrics.

If the Spanish churchmen were a bit upset at finding in the Indies both
a new world and a race unaccounted for in the Bible, later explorers and
settlers of the mainland were quite as astonished over the discovery of
huge bones in swamps and creeks, prairies and badlands. Laymen and
divines sought explanations, and of course they found dozens, most of
them as absurd as Cotton Mather’s dictum of 1712 that the bones were
those of the giants of Holy Writ. By 1782 Thomas Jefferson knew they
belonged to a kind of elephant, but on “the traditional testimony of the
Indians” he was inclined to believe “that this animal still exists in
the northern and western parts of America.... He may as well exist there
now as he did formerly where we find his bones.”[1]

The bridge from sacred fiction to profane fact, from giants to mammoths
and mastodons, seems to have been the work, oddly enough, of Negro
slaves. Mark Catesby wrote in 1743:

  At a place in _Carolina_ called _Stono_ was dug out of the Earth three
  or four Teeth of a large animal, which by the concurring Opinion of
  all the _Negroes_, native _Africans_, that saw them, were the Grinders
  of an Elephant, and in my Opinion that could be no other; I having
  seen some of the like that are brought from _Africa_.[2]

On the basis of this statement Loren C. Eiseley—who has written much on
the problem of the extinction of American mammals—believes that the
Negro slaves told the Indian as well as the white man about the animal
that had such gigantic bones, and described its shape and habits.

The eighteenth-century white man—eager for knowledge of zoology and many
other things—pumped the Indian, and doubtless with leading questions.
The Indians, “involved in their own vast animal mythology,” as Eiseley
puts it, were likely to respond “to these myriads of questions with
elaboration and a desire to please.”[3] Thus, when our ancestors asked
where the elephants had gone, the Indians answered, “Across the lakes.”
Soon the belief that the mammoth still lived in the remoter portions of
northeastern Canada grew so strong in white men that early maps
indicated his home in western Labrador. By the time that the
ethnologists of the last half-century began collecting Indian myths
there were numerous traditions of the elephant in the native folklore.
In a summary of the material Duncan Strong lists more than a dozen
instances.[4] An Algonquin tribe told of a great animal “with an arm
coming out of its shoulder,” and of another that left “large round
tracks in the snow” and “struck its enemies with its long nose.”
Penobscot Indians had a myth in which a culture hero saw “moving hills
without vegetation,” which proved to be “great animals with long teeth,
animals so huge that when they lay down they could not get up.” There
were stories of “a great moose with a fifth leg.” Elephant myths turned
up among the Alabama Indians in the South. The Chitimacha said: “A long
time ago a being with a long nose came out of the ocean and began to
kill people. It would root up trees with its nose to get at people who
sought refuge in the branches.” The Eskimos of Alaska joined their
Siberian brothers in tales of a behemoth that burrowed underground and
died if he breathed air—a tale derived, no doubt, from the carcasses of
mammoths found frozen under the snow. “These stories,” writes Eiseley,
“show a suspicious growth in numbers just at the time when White
interest and enthusiasm were keenest.”[5]

Whatever germ of truth may lie in some of the Indian traditions, certain
theorists of the last century and a half were quite as absurd as Cotton
Mather in their conclusions. In 1806 an Englishman named Thomas Ashe
wrote of “incognita, nondescript animals” of the Middle West, and
suggested that “as the immense volume of the creature would unfit him
for coursing after his prey through thickets and woods,” nature had
“furnished him with the power of taking a mighty leap.”[6] Then there
was John Ranking, who published in 1827 _Historical Researches on the
Conquest of Peru, Mexico, Bogota, Natchez, and Talomeco, in the
Thirteenth Century, by the Mongols, Accompanied with Elephants_. Perhaps
he was religious enough to believe, like Jefferson, that “no instance
can be produced, of her [nature] having permitted any one race of her
animals to become extinct.”[7] At any rate, Ranking remembered the
“divine wind” that balked Kubla Khan’s invasion of Japan, and he allowed
it to blow some of Kubla’s vessels to the New World. A son of the Khan
became the first Inca, another Mongol noble founded Montezuma’s line,
and the Khan’s elephants of war spread all up and down the two
continents—a notion reported in 1778 by Johann R. Forster.[8]

In 1880, worried over how the Mound Builders could have transported so
much earth, Frederick Larkin suggested that the Indians must have
domesticated the mammoth: “We can imagine that tremendous teams have
been driven to and fro in the vicinity of their great works.” As
evidence he offered a “copper relic” with an elephant engraved on it “in
harness.”[9]

Archaeological Evidence of Recent Man and the Mastodon

The American archaeologist has found no evidence of the mammoth as a
living factor in the life of the American Indian since the time of
Christ. He looks askance at two elephant pipes of doubtful provenience
which turned up near Davenport, Iowa, around the eighties. He is not
impressed by a carved head, which might be either elephant or macaw, on
a stone stela in Copan, Honduras. But he must give more respectful
attention to certain evidence concerning the mastodon—that early form of
elephant which alone of all the order penetrated to South America and
was unknown in much of the Old World during the Great Ice Age. Its bones
have been found in peat bogs of the Great Lakes area which formed after
the glaciers began to melt, and a skeleton has been unearthed near
Quito, Ecuador, cheek by jowl with broken pottery.

The South American mastodon was found twelve miles from Quito in a
district where the bones of the horse, the extinct sloth, and an extinct
relative of the armadillo have also been discovered. Franz Spillman of
the University of Quito made the find, and Max Uhle cooperated in the
excavation. Uhle states that the scientific facts recorded are beyond
question. The animal lay on his left side, apparently mired in what is
now a yellow clay which lies upon a thick layer of blue clay. A small
landslide had covered the skeleton and the clay. There were a number of
evidences of man. The ribs of the right side had been cut away. There
were remains of fire which had been lighted in the belly and around the
feet and tail, and which had baked some of the clay touching the animal.
Spillman and Uhle found parts of flint artifacts, a shaped bone tool,
and some lengths of wood beside an erect block of stone, which suggested
levers and a fulcrum used in an attempt to lift portions of the
mastodon. They also found—and this is the important point so far as
dating is concerned—more than 150 pieces of broken pottery.[10]

Eiseley maintains that the site’s “archaeological neglect has been
scandalous. If this site had been claimed to be ‘Pleistocene’ many
experts would undoubtedly have journeyed even to this out-of-the-way
location.” Because of the claim that the find was “recent,” it has not
received the thorough study that a Folsom find would unquestionably have
received in North America. If the mastodon actually survived until the
time of pottery in South America, says Eiseley, this does not
demonstrate that the animal lingered as late in North America.[11] But
it plays hob with the antiquity of a South American skull from Punin.

There are two curious factors in this discovery. The first is that coal
was found in the remnants of the fire. Did the Indians of Ecuador use
that fuel before the Spaniards came? Was there a deposit nearer than
that in Peru? The second questionable factor has to do with the pottery.
Although there were no fewer than 152 broken pieces, they could not be
fitted into even one restored pot. Why? Further, 140 of the sherds were
from a primitive type of pottery, imperfectly fired, while 12 pieces
were from an advanced and decorated type which, in other locations, is
supposed to show Maya influence. Why should two varieties of pottery—so
widely separated in technique and, presumably, age—appear at this one
time?

      [Illustration: EIGHT THOUSAND YEARS OF THE GREAT EXTINCTION

    _More than half of these sixteen mammals seem to have died out
    between 10,000 and 8,000 years ago, when the last glaciers were
    retreating and early man hunted with Sandia and fluted points. These
    latest acceptable dates of survival in North America are drawn from
    Jim Hester’s “Late Pleistocene Extinction and Radiocarbon Dating,”
    in American Antiquity for July, 1960. The dates vary in precision
    from 150 to ± 500. There may come later finds._]

If the Quito mastodon and pots were indeed neighbors in time, then they
provide the only evidence—ex post facto, at that—for the remarkable
statement of the geologist William B. Scott in 1913: “Many Pleistocene
mammals were in existence only a few centuries ago, in what is called
‘historic time’ in the Old World. Several skeletons of the American
Mastodon have been found in bogs, covered by only a few inches of peat,
with more or less of the hair and recognizable contents of the stomach
preserved.”[12] Eiseley has questioned the evidence that the mastodon
had hair, and he has pointed out that a peat bog is an ideal place for
the preservation of vegetable matter such as that animal lived upon.[13]
The bogs and their fossils lie to the south of the Great Lakes, which
formed as the ice fields began to retreat into Canada. Since the retreat
began between 10,000 and 12,000 years ago, it is obvious that bogs could
have formed and mastodons been trapped in them far longer ago than a few
centuries—whether “few” means five, ten, or even fifteen.

A hundred years ago Charles Lyell commented on the profusion of mastodon
bones in North American bogs compared with the paucity of such fossils
in the bogs of Europe; and argued for the late survival of these animals
in the New World.[14] Answering him, Eiseley points out first of all
that for many centuries such skeletons were hunted out and salvaged by
Europeans in search of ivory or the materia medica of the unicorn’s
horn. Further, the mastodon, which was a forest lover and fell a natural
victim to bogs, was almost unknown to Europe, while the mammoth kept
mainly to dry, open steppes. We know that bogs both in our Great Lakes
area and in northern Europe were postglacial, “and that is all. There
exists no evidence, at present, which seems to demand in the New World a
lingering extinction of the American elephants in a way much different
from the course of events in Europe.”[15]

Sloth and Camel in Dry Caves

When we turn from the mastodon preserved in wet peat bogs, we come upon
the camel and the sloth in dry caves. There, buried in dust, are skin,
hair, and ligaments, as well as bone. Not a great deal of such remains
exist, however, and only in a few caves—and this time “few” means less
than five. It happens that dry and dust-filled caves are almost as good
embalmers as the bogs of the Great Lakes or the ice of Siberia and the
Alaska muck beds. “In a perfectly dry limestone cave,” says Howard,
“covered by three to ten feet of dust, there seems to be no reason why
the hair and tissue of the sloth, camel, horse, or bison could not have
been preserved for several thousands of years.”[16]

The Folsom Bison Not Extinct?

Neither elephant nor sloth, neither horse nor camel, is such a common
companion of the points of Folsom man as is an extinct form of bison. It
was larger than the historic animal, and had longer and straighter
horns. Though it is known variously as _Bison taylori_, _Bison antiquus
antiquus_, and _Bison antiquus figgensi_, it was probably of a single
type, the last named. Now one of the significant things about Folsom is
that the point never turns up with the modern variety of buffalo which
goes by the interesting name of _Bison bison_,[17] or even _Bison bison
bison_—unless, of course, lack of skull material has led scientists
astray. Therefore, if we seek the latest date of Folsom, it would seem
as if we must seek the death day of the extinct bison.

    [Illustration: _Prehistoric and modern bison. Above, at the left, is
    an outline of typical horn cones of_ Bison antiquus antiquus, _whose
    bones have been found with Folsom points. Its horns were longer and
    straighter than those of the buffalo of today_, Bison bison, _shown
    at the right. Below is a still larger and more ancient type_, Bison
    latifrons, _with an eighty-inch span_.]

Protagonists of early man have argued that Folsom must date far, far
back, or there would not be time for the evolution of the modern bison
of the High Plains. Lately, however, Eiseley has developed a theory
which does away with the long period of evolution from _Bison antiquus_
into _Bison bison_, and yet pins down Folsom to the end of the glaciers.
There is some evidence that the kind of bison Folsom man hunted migrated
up into Canada when the glaciers melted, and that the “modern” variety,
which we call “buffalo,” came up from the south and took over the High
Plains. As the temperature moderated over the whole northern hemisphere
the plains of Canada began to resemble the plains of the United States,
where the prey of Folsom man had flourished. The climate and the
vegetation of the High Plains, moving north behind the ice, took _Bison
antiquus_ along. The same northward movement of climate and vegetation
occurred from Mexico to the High Plains, and it carried to their
historic habitat the buffalo that have left their bones in old soils
south of the border. The only place where we meet the two varieties of
bison together is a peat bog in Minnesota.[18]

The evidence that _Bison antiquus_ moved to Canada is not complete, but
it is suggestive. There are accounts of bison horns from Athabasca
“nearly twice the length of the Plains’ ones and much straighter.”[19]
Ernest Thompson Seton provides the same kind of evidence.[20] The
Canadian bison and the Folsom variety seem “suspiciously similar,” says
Eiseley. Unfortunately, in 1925, before the bison of Athabasca—the
second surviving race, _Bison bison athabascæ_—had been properly
measured and observed, _Bison bison_ from the High Plains were brought
north to breed with the Canadian variety. Eiseley feels it is a
possibility that the Athabascan animals “represented, at least in a
mixed form, the last of the Ice Age bison which early man had hunted in
the western plains.”[21] If this is true, it means that Folsom man was
fully developed in the period before the melting of the glaciers drove
his favorite game north to Canada. It means, further, that he or his
immediate forebears may have entered the plains 50,000 years ago when a
corridor opened through the western ice fields. (See illustration, page
26.)

The Folsom bison may also have gone northeast to the edge of New
England. Grasslands extend from the High Plains of the classic Folsom
point northeast to Illinois and Indiana, and ancient steppes once ran
through Ohio to New York State and probably to New Jersey and southern
New England.[22] Antevs suggests that late bands of Folsom men pursued
their bison across this area. Certainly they left their cruder form of
point in this part of the Middle West and the East.[23] But where, in
this area, are the fossils of the extinct bison?

The Mystery of Extinction

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

  These facts ... prove in the first place that a great catastrophe or
  cataclysm occurred at the close of the Mammoth period, by which that
  animal, with its companions, were overwhelmed over a very large part
  of the earth’s surface. Secondly, this cataclysm involved a very
  wide-spread flood of water, which not only killed the animals but also
  buried them under continuous beds of loam or gravel. Thirdly, that the
  same catastrophe was accompanied by a very great and sudden change of
  climate in Siberia, by which the animals which had previously lived in
  fairly temperate conditions were frozen in their flesh underground and
  have remained frozen ever since.[24]

In the hundred years since Koch found a mammoth and a spear point in
Missouri we have learned little that is definite about the reasons for
the extinction of mammoth, mastodon, camel, horse, sloth, and the rest.
We merely know that they died out as the glaciers began to melt. The
most natural guess for either scientist or amateur is that change of
climate was the lethal factor. Yet we know that many of them had already
survived drastic changes of climate and lived through interglacials as
well as glacials in the Great Ice Age. Further, how do we account for
the survival of deer, antelope, fox, rabbit, moose, beaver, bear, and so
many other animals? How could climate be so selective? If the dire wolf
died, why not the timber wolf? If the short-faced bear, why not the
grizzly? If one form of rabbit and three forms of antelope, why not all
rabbits and all antelopes? If disease instead of climate was the great
eliminator—as some have suggested—we face the same dilemma.

The mysteries of extinction are so many and so baffling that it is small
wonder no book in English has been written on the subject. Since 1906,
when Henry Fairfield Osborn summed the matter up in his paper of
fifty-odd pages, “The Causes of Extinction of Mammalia,” Eiseley credits
only two theories with contributing anything new to the discussion.

One is the hypothesis of Sewall Wright and his co-workers that when an
animal was greatly reduced in numbers it would suffer fatally from
inbreeding.[25] This, however, leaves us still searching for what
reduced its numbers so radically.

The other theory is Sauer’s: Man, the hunter, destroyed the larger,
clumsier, and more gregarious animals largely by means of fire drives,
and these fires made the grasslands.[26] Or, at least, the fire drives
“broke the back” of mammalian resistance.[27] Eiseley objects on a
number of grounds. It was not alone the large, clumsy, and gregarious
animals that disappeared. Certain mollusks, a variety of toad, a
subfamily of rabbits, the dire wolf, the saber-toothed tiger, three
forms of antelope, the short-faced bear, and a small horse also
disappeared. More damaging still to Sauer’s theory is the fact that a
number of birds became extinct. Eiseley asks, “Why, if this method was
so deadly, did the living bison and the living antelope roam the plains
in countless numbers?” He points out that, while there is abundant
evidence of extinct bison caught and killed in fire drives, there is no
proof of mass kills of mammoth, horse, camel, and antelope.[28] He also
mentions the mastodon, the giant beaver, and the sloth, which frequented
eastern forests or northern bogs and died in them. “Though man was on
the scene at the final perishing, his was not ... the appetite nor the
capacity for such gigantic slaughter.”[29] Though Sauer believes that
the numbers of hunting man in the New World were comparatively large
when he killed _Bison antiquus_, most authorities disagree. Alfred S.
Romer believes that if man had been numerous enough and deadly enough to
play a major part in the killing, we should find more evidences of his
association with the extinct mammals.[30]

Romer and Edwin H. Colbert have put forward another explanation for the
extinction of the mammals. They suggest that the advent of man in the
New World may have upset a nicely balanced state of nature.[31] But man
had been living with just such animals in the Old World for hundreds of
thousands of years before they became extinct. What, then, destroyed the
mammoth in Europe?

The most pulling of all the fossils of extinct animals are those in the
deep Alaska muck beds. Their numbers are appalling. They lie frozen in
tangled masses, interspersed with uprooted trees. They seem to have been
torn apart and dismembered and then consolidated under catastrophic
conditions. Eden and Plainview spear points and perhaps one Clovis have
been found in these chill beds. Skin, ligament, hair, flesh, can still
be seen.[32] If scientists can solve this mystery before the
high-pressure water stream of the miner disperses the evidence, perhaps
we shall be nearer solving one of the greatest and most tantalizing
problems involved in the story of early man—the date of the extinction
of the great mammals.

This problem of when the mammoth died should have puzzled the Old World
as well as the New and caused us to question the dating of Neanderthal
and Cro-Magnon quite as much as Folsom man. Oddly enough, it did nothing
of the kind. In Europe the mammoth was accepted as diagnostic of the
glacial period. The fact that a Magdalenian man of southern France
sketched a mammoth on the wall of a cave proved that the man existed in
the Great Ice Age. But in America, if a spear point turned up with the
bones of a mammoth, too many anthropologists accepted it as proof that
the animal died after the ice fields had melted. The mammoth proved the
antiquity of man in Europe; man proved the modernity of the mammoth in
America. The only shred of evidence to support such reasoning was the
questionable pottery and coal that lay beside the mastodon bones in
Ecuador. We should have had more and better proof, and we are beginning
to get it.

More Radiocarbon Dates for Extinct Mammals

Working together, archaeologists, paleontologists, and physicists are
providing more and more facts about the great extinction. Archaeologists
are supplying artifacts for cultural associations, and animal bones that
the paleontologists identify. In radiocarbon laboratories, the
physicists are dating the bones and sometimes charcoal from man-made
fires. Through the evergrowing list of dates, many early theories are
being replaced with factual knowledge. Some of the dates, however, must
be taken with a grain of sodium chloride. A single date from a single
sample in only one locality is not too trustworthy. The hazards are
obvious, yet nevertheless we have a fairly large body of facts. From
these, a general impression of the great extinction is beginning to take
shape. As anticipated, man and climate are involved in the disappearance
of the animals.

As for climate, a period of much warmer temperatures followed the end of
the last glaciation. This lasted from about 10,000 to 2,600 years ago.
Antevs isolates the time of highest heat—the Altithermal—as about 7,000
to 4,000 years ago.[33] This matches fairly closely the last dates for
our extinct mammals. Heat and aridity may have driven the larger animals
to the more and more limited watercourses where man himself would
concentrate. Paul S. Martin has noted that the first large mammals to
disappear were those in Alaska and Mexico, and that they were followed
by the animals of the Plains toward what must have been the beginning of
the hot and dry Altithermal period. Martin believes that the grazing and
browsing mammals found refuge in the savannas of Florida.[34]

Working with more than 100 radiocarbon dates concerned with the great
extinction, Jim Hester (no relation of the junior writer) has brought
together results published through 1959.[35] He provides the first
reasonably clear picture of the sequence and magnitude of lethal events.
We see the ancient forms of horse, camel, and bison, as well as the dire
wolf and Columbian mammoth, beginning to disappear 8,000 years ago.
_Bison antiquus_ lingers later, though Clovis mammoth hunters may have
been active in the Southwest at the same time that Folsom bison hunters
were busy on the Plains. Hester’s summary shows how concerned man was in
the final death of the great mammals. He lists the last dates for 27 of
them. Nine—one-third—were found in archaeological sites of early man;
some others were dated by charcoal that may have come from fires where
he cooked the meat of the great beasts.

                                   9
           PYGMIES, AUSTRALOIDS, AND NEGROIDS—BEFORE INDIANS?

  _Let us have all the skeletons out of the closet._
                                                      —EARNEST A. HOOTON

The Mythical Indian Race

Science has found a great many artifacts and a few skulls that seem to
have belonged to early man. Was he an Indian? Was he a
Paleo-Indian—whatever that may imply? Was he a Mongoloid with an
admixture of Australoid, Negroid, and White? Was he Mongoloid at all?

Among the most blatant misnomers of popular science is “Indian race.”
Even in North America it is an absurdity. Throw in Middle America and
South America, and the attempt to fit the people of the New World into
this or any one racial pigeonhole becomes laughable. Living Indians of
“pure” breed show an immense variety in all physical features except
their eyes, their hair, their cheekbones, and their upper front teeth.
Some of their skulls and some of the skulls of their dead—particularly
those that belonged to early man—show marked differences from those of
the Mongoloid race of which the Indians are all commonly supposed to be
a part. The differences are so marked that some of our physical
anthropologists believe that other races than the Mongoloid contributed
to the discovery and settlement of the Americas. They see at least one
and possibly three such contributions. If we discount transpacific
migration, we must accept the fact that all the peoples of northern Asia
did not always belong to the now ubiquitous Mongoloid races. Of this,
more at the end of the chapter.

The Mongoloid racial stock has five physical traits that occur with high
frequency, which means that in any mixture with another race, five
traits seem likely to be transmitted to immediate descendants. One trait
is the peculiar shovel shape of the upper incisor, or front, teeth. The
second is brown eyes. The third is straight black hair. The fourth is
prominent cheekbones, or malars. A fifth is the so-called Mongoloid
spot, a purplish discoloration appearing at the base of the spine
shortly after birth. It persists for a few years, gradually becoming
indistinct before adolescence. Of course, there are minor
irregularities. Not all the millions of incisors of our Indians are
shovel-shaped. The wavy hair of the Lacandon Indians of southern Mexico
may have a reddish tinge. But the great majority of New World Indians
share these traits, including prominent cheekbones, and, by so much,
they share also a very considerable amount of Mongoloid ancestry.

    [Illustration: _The eye of a Chinese with the Mongoloid fold,
    contrasted with the eye of a white man. (After Hooton, 1931.)_]

In addition, there are many traits typical of Asiatic Mongoloids which
appear very irregularly in the Americas. The “Mongoloid fold”—an
overhanging fold of skin on the upper eyelid—is found in some tribes and
not in others, and in certain individuals of a tribe and not in others.
The bony structure of the face varies greatly. Some tribes have strong
chins; some, weak ones. The nose of the typical Plains Indian is
hawklike—a violent departure from the Mongoloid’s rather flat nasal
equipment. The “Semitic” nose of the Maya is Japanese but not at all
Chinese. “The Indian type,” says Nelson, “is distinguishable in one way
or another from its nearest Mongoloid relations, and at the same time is
separable according to some authorities into about ten more or less
distinct varieties.”[1]

Looked at in terms of resemblances to Old World peoples, the American
Indian becomes a very crazy quilt of races. Hooton sees “an almost
pre-Dravidian look” about the Lacandons which vaguely reminds him of the
Veddas of India. He finds that many Indians of the Northwest coast
resemble Alpine Europeans, and that eastern Indians have a “European
look,” and are “by no means as Mongoloid as the Plains and Southwestern
Indians”:

  For years I have been troubled by the types depicted in the splendid
  series of oil portraits of Indians in the Peabody Museum. The most of
  these represent Indians of the eastern and southeastern United States,
  and, although the portraits are the work of an excellent painter, his
  subjects look very European. The features of most are very
  un-Mongoloid, with prominent noses and oval faces ... some Plains
  Indians are included in the series, and these seem to be accurate
  representations of types familiar today. I am, therefore, disposed to
  think that the European-like types are not the result of an artistic
  convention, but actually did exist.[2]

Racial Definition—the Field of the Physical Anthropologist

Physical anthropology has its difficulties and uncertainties when it
tries to reach back deep into time. But the tests by which it
distinguishes races seem as sound and dependable as those of any of the
disciplines that deal with early man. Some of the results are certainly
striking.

There are problems, of course, as to the order in which the various
races developed and spread throughout the Old World. In the opinion of
some authorities, the Pygmy, or Negrito, came first. The Pygmy, although
resembling the Negro in most respects, has in general one of the
roundest heads of all mankind, while the Negro’s is pre-eminently long
and narrow. Many anthropologists pick the Australoid as the second race
to leave an unknown homeland and spread far abroad. The White, or
Caucasoid, racial stock is divided into certain groups by one authority,
and into other groups by another. Hooton puts the beginnings of the
White race far back by calling the Australoid “an archaic form of modern
White man.”[3]

But, in spite of conflicts of opinion, the physical anthropologist has
fairly firm ground to stand on. He can bring to bear on the skull or the
fleshed bone of man certain tests, certain measurements, which enable
him to discriminate with some accuracy between the various racial types.
The most important of the measurements have to do with the shape of the
head and certain of its features.

The Cephalic Index—and Others

A hundred years ago a Swedish scientist, Anders Retzius, set up a
measurement called the cephalic index, which indicates whether a head is
dolichocephalic or brachycephalic—long-headed or round-headed, narrow or
broad. The width of the skull, divided by its length, and multiplied by
100, gives the cephalic index—as 15.0 cm. ÷ 17.6 cm. × 100 = 85.23. The
long-headed, or dolichocephalic, skull, lies below 75; the round-headed,
or brachycephalic, at or above 80. Between lies the intermediate ground
of the mesocephalic. (It is rather easy to keep “dolichocephalic” and
“brachycephalic” straight if you note that the longer word applies to
the long-headed skulls.)

The Pygmy aside, we find long-headedness common to early peoples and
then gradually giving way to round-headedness. Round-headedness is a
progressively modern tendency; there seem to be more round heads than
there used to be. (Round-headedness seems to have increased sharply with
the advent of agriculture. Are the two related? Does a vegetable diet
have a functional effect upon head shape?) Among modern peoples, the
Australian, the Negro, the Nordic, and the Mediterranean are
long-headed. The Pygmy, the Alpine of Central Europe, and the Chinese
are generally round-headed. Most Indians, being heavily Mongoloid, are
likewise round-headed. The cephalic index alone is not too good a means
of determining races today, but it has definite value in dealing with
early man in the Americas. Here, as in the Old World, he seems to have
been, with two exceptions, as long-headed as the modern Australian.

    [Illustration: _In this diagrammatic description of one of the most
    important measurements of the head, the length is given as 100,
    instead of 18 centimeters, or some other actual measurement, in
    order to make the matter simpler to comprehend._]

  Cephalic Index—width ÷ length × 100
    Dolichocephalic, or long-headed, below 75
    Mesocephalic, or intermediate, 75-80
    Brachycephalic, or round-headed, above 80

    [Illustration: _A map showing the centrifugal dispersal, first of
    long-headed Negroes and Australoids, then intermediate to
    long-headed Mediterraneans, and finally round-headed Mongoloids and
    Alpines, from an Asiatic homeland. The maker of this map prefers
    “narrow-headed” for “long-headed,” “broad-headed” for
    “round-headed.” (After Taylor, 1937, with some modifications.)_]

There are other important measurements, which we shall not describe at
such length. The facial index tells us whether the face is relatively
broad or narrow, the breadth is measured from cheekbone to cheekbone,
and the length from the root, or topmost point, of the nose between the
eyes to the bottom of the chin. This facial index is not so useful as
the cephalic in determining race, because some of the bones involved are
affected by age and sex. The nasal index tells us whether the nose—or,
in a skull, the nasal aperture—is broad or narrow, adapted to a warm,
moist climate or to a dry, cold one. Then there is the matter of
prognathism, with a receding chin. Heavy brow ridges, which usually go
with a retreating forehead, and the shape of the vault may be important
indications of race. No one of these measurements or observations can
definitely denote race, but a number of them taken together are rather
reliable.

There is a certain difficulty, however, in applying the detective
methods of physical anthropology to the skulls of early man in the New
World. It is only a matter of terminology, but sometimes this affects
our understanding of what scientists are talking about when they
describe early American skulls as Australoid, Melanesian, Papuan,
Caucasoid, or Negroid. The difficulty stems back to the southwest
Pacific. The Australians—a race as primitive as the Neanderthal and
perhaps more primitive—are spoken of as Australoid. They are also
described by some writers as Caucasoid on the theory that they are a
blend of an archaic white race with Negroid elements. The dark-skinned
people, who inhabit large parts of New Guinea and nearby islands, are
called Melanesian. Some of the men of this area used to be called
Papuan—which is really only a word for a language. When the
characteristics of their skulls turn up in the Americas, these craniums
may be called Papuan by an older writer or Australoid, Melanesian,
Caucasoid, or Negroid. Recently, physical anthropologists have
determined that no full-sized Negro has existed east of, roughly, Arabia
until recent times. Accordingly, this Negroid element in the western
Pacific must be related to the Pygmy. We will refer to him as Oceanic
Negrito.

What do the tests of the physical anthropologist tell you about skulls
which come from the southwest Pacific or resemble specimens from that
area? If you find a skull that has protruding jaws, a low or depressed
nose root, and straight sides, you may say with some assurance that it
belonged to an Oceanic Negrito, an aboriginal Australian, an
Australoid-Melanesian, or—if the owner has been dead many thousands of
years—an Australoid. If the skull also has a heavy, continuous brow
ridge, a retreating forehead, and a low, keeled vault, you can forget
the Negrito. The man was an Australoid-Melanesian, or an Australoid.

                  [Illustration: THREE TYPES OF SKULLS

    _Generalized impressions of the cranial traits of three races that
    may be presumed to have contributed to the peopling of the Americas.
    Certain Mongoloid tribes, represented by the Eskimo and peoples of
    northern Asia, differ from the race in general in having long,
    narrow skulls with keeled vaults and flat sides. (The Australoid,
    after Leakey, 1935; the Negroid, after Leakey, 1935, and Martin,
    1928; the Mongoloid, after Stibbe, 1938, and Hooton, 1931.)_]

                       [Illustration: AUSTRALOID]

  _Forehead: low, receding_
  _Brow ridges: heavy_
  _Face and jaws: protruding_
  _Rear: protruding_
  _Forehead: narrow_
  _Vault: keeled_
  _Sides: flat_
  _Sockets: low, oblong_
  _Dolichocephalic (very long and narrow head)_

                        [Illustration: NEGROID]

  _Forehead: low, rounded_
  _Brow ridges: slight or absent_
  _Face and jaws: rotruding_
  _Rear: bulging_
  _Forehead: narrow_
  _Vault: curved_
  _Sides: flat to slightly convex_
  _Dolichocephalic (narrow head, medium to long)_

                       [Illustration: MONGOLOID]

  _Forehead: somewhat high_
  _Brow ridges: absent_
  _Face: flat_
  _Rear: flat_
  _Forehead: broad_
  _Vault: broad, globular_
  _Sides: convex to bulging_
  _Brachycephalic (round)_

What Skull Measurements Tell Us About Early Man

These peculiarities of southwest Pacific skulls are important if you are
looking for early man in the Americas. As we have said, a skull found
along with the bones of extinct mammals or in a geological formation
that suggests great age is almost always long-headed, or
dolichocephalic. The typical, round-headed Mongoloid Indian is
conspicuous by his antique absence. (The only early skulls that are not
long-headed fall in the intermediate division, the mesocephalic.)
Further, the early skull has most, if not all, of the following
features: a heavy, almost continuous brow ridge; a receding chin; a low
nose root; straight sides; a retreating forehead, and a keeled vault.

On the score of long-headedness, there can be no question about all but
two of the early skulls mentioned in Chapter 6 or illustrated on page
216. The Confins has a cephalic index of 69.1, which is
hyper-dolichocephalic, or extra long; the female skulls of the Pericú in
Lower California average 68.50 and the male 66.15, while sixteen skulls
from the Texas coast show an average of 65.37. Except for the skulls of
Tepexpan man and the Minnesota girl, all the other skulls we have
referred to have the same long-headed character. If those from Texas and
the Pacific Coast are not so ancient as the rest, at least they seem to
represent the descendants of an old strain forced off into marginal
areas by the invasion of newer peoples. To be sure, we have now—and have
had—Indians with long skulls, particularly in the eastern part of the
United States and to some extent on the Great Plains. But their number
is not large, and can never have been large, compared with the great
bulk of round-headed Indians of the two Americas.

               [Illustration: EARLY MAN VS. THE MONGOLOID

    _In this comparison, the Mongoloid skull—indicated by dotted
    lines—and the skulls of early man are not drawn to true scale,
    because the former is an abstraction, and the measurements of all
    the latter are not available. For comparison, the nose root and the
    back of the skull are made to agree in the profiles, and the other
    views are drawn from this relationship._ (_The Mongoloid skull,
    after Stibbe, 1938, and Hooton, 1931; the Early Sacramento, courtesy
    Robert F. Heizer; the Pericú, after ten Kate, 1884, and Woodbury,
    1935; the Punin, after Sullivan and Hellman, 1925; the Lagoa Santa,
    after Hrdlička, 1912; the Central Texas, after Hooton, 1933.)_]

  LAGOA SANTA
    Brazil
    Av. cephalic index 70.5
  PUNIN
    Ecuador
    Cephalic index 71
  MELBOURNE
    Florida
    Cephalic index 73.1
  PERICU
    Lower California
    Cephalic index 65.62
  CENTRAL TEXAS
    Jones County
    Cephalic Index 60.71
  EARLY SACRAMENTO
    California
    Cephalic Index 72.5

Apart from long-headedness, our early skulls share a number of other
peculiarities of the Australoid-Melanesian: the quite heavy brow ridges,
the keeled vault, the straight sides, the retreating forehead, the low
nose root, and the receding chin. Some have the round vault and the
fuller forehead of White and Mongoloid peoples, but these are also a
feature of the Negrito strain that united with the Australoid in
Melanesia.

In one respect only do the skulls of early American man follow a
Mongoloid pattern: almost all have prominent cheekbones. We must
remember, however, that prominent cheekbones are found in other
races—though not so commonly—and we must recognize that they cannot
weigh too heavily against those un-Mongoloid peculiarities we have dwelt
on.

The peculiarities of our early skulls must make us think twice about the
Indian as the only pre-Columbian inhabitant of the Americas south of the
Eskimo. They bear witness to another invader from the Old World. Such
skulls—even if they were only a thousand years old—would tell us that
the typical Mongoloid Indian was not the only arrival from Asia who left
descendants. Since many of the skulls are definitely the oldest that
have been found in the New World, we must recognize that early man bore
some relationship to other peoples than the forebears of the noble red
man.

Europe Recognizes the Australoid in America

The earliest recognition of non-Indian traits in the Americas came from
scientists of the Old World—Mochi, Biasutti, Hansen, Quatrefages, ten
Kate (who found the Pericú skulls in Lower California), Rivet, Gusinde,
Lebzelter, Mendes Correâ, Hultkrantz. The first American and British
students to accept the idea were Roland B. Dixon in 1923, A. C. Haddon
in 1925, and Sir Arthur Keith and Earnest A. Hooton in 1930; the last
two were physical anthropologists, and naturally knew more than
archaeologists about the meaning of bones. Toward the end, even Hrdlička
was diluting the Mongolism of the Indian with some Aurignacian and
Magdalenian ancestry, though the Australoid and the Melanesian were too
much for him.

In the English-speaking world the case for the Mongoloid Indian as the
only type of early man was definitely and finally thrown out of court in
1930 by statements from two men eminent in their field—Keith and Hooton.

Keith’s statement was simple and short, but his position as a sound and
skillful anatomist gave it considerable weight. He confirmed the
judgment of Louis R. Sullivan and Milo Hellman that the Punin skull from
Ecuador resembled the skulls of native women of Australia. The points of
resemblance, he wrote, “were too numerous to permit us to suppose that
the skull could be a sport produced by an American Indian parentage.”
Here follows Keith’s decisive dictum: “This discovery at Punin does
compel us to look into the possibility of a Pleistocene Glacial invasion
of America by an Australoid people.”[4]

Hooton and Dixon on Early Invaders

Hooton’s pronouncement in 1930 against the pretensions of the Mongoloid
Indian resulted from a study of a number of old skulls found at Pecos
Pueblo in New Mexico. In terms of early man they were not so very aged;
in fact, they were slightly younger than the Basket Makers of the first
Christian centuries. But in these skulls Hooton found traces of seven
types of men. They included, as one might expect, the Basket Makers, the
Plains Indian, and a “large hybrid” type which was thoroughly Indian. In
addition he listed a “Pseudo-Australoid,” a “Pseudo-Negroid,” a
“Long-faced European,” and a “Pseudo-Alpine” type. From this analysis of
skulls little more than a thousand years old, Hooton went on boldly to
picture the kind of men that first discovered and invaded the Americas:

  Briefly, then, my present opinion as to the peopling of the American
  continent is as follows: At a rather remote period, probably soon
  after the last glacial retreat, there straggled into the New World
  from Asia by way of the Bering Strait groups of dolichocephals in
  which were blended at least three strains: one very closely allied to
  the fundamental brunet European and African long-headed stock called
  “Mediterranean”; another, a more primitive form with heavy
  brow-ridges, low broad face and wide nose, which is probably to be
  identified with an archaic type represented today very strongly
  (although mixed with other elements) in the native Australians, and
  less strongly in the so-called “Pre-Dravidians” such as the Veddahs,
  and also in the Ainu; thirdly, an element certainly Negroid (not
  Negro). These people, already racially mixed, spread over the New
  World carrying with them a primitive fishing and hunting culture.
  Their coming must have preceded the occupation of eastern Asia by the
  present predominantly Mongoloid peoples, since the purer types of
  these dolichocephals do not show the characteristic Mongoloid
  features.

  At a somewhat later period there began to arrive in the New World
  groups of Mongoloids coming by the same route as their predecessors.
  Many of these were probably purely Mongoloid in race, but others were
  mixed with some other racial element notable because of its
  high-bridged and often convex nose. This may have been either Armenoid
  or Proto-Nordic (or neither one). These later invaders were capable of
  higher cultural development than the early pioneers and were
  responsible for the development of agriculture and for the notable
  achievements of the New World civilization. In some places they may
  have driven out and supplanted the early long-heads, but often they
  seem to have interbred with them producing the multiple and varied
  types of the present American Indians—types which are Mongoloid to a
  varying extent, but never purely Mongoloid. Last of all came the
  Eskimo, a culturally primitive Mongoloid group, already mixed with
  some non-Mongoloid strain before their arrival in North America.[5]

In 1947 Hooton stated this in simpler terms: “I am fairly sure that the
earliest arrivals here were non-Mongoloids carrying archaic White
strains (‘Australoids,’ if you like) probably mixed with Negritic
elements and with whatever else was kicking around in Asia before they
crossed Bering Strait.”[6]

Dixon’s position, which he took in 1923, is in some ways a more radical
one than Hooton’s. He introduces “Proto-Australoid,” “Proto-Negroid,”
and Mediterranean elements, and also Caspian and Alpine; but, where
Hooton recognizes a general stock in which Australoid, Negroid, and
Mediterranean were blended before their arrival, Dixon brings in his
races separate and pure, and he assigns them definite areas in the New
World.

Dixon’s Proto-Australoid originated in tropical southeast Asia. It
spread westward “through India and the Arabian coasts to Africa, and by
way of the Mediterranean passed into western Europe, where it appeared
in early Paleolithic times.... Another branch spread southeast into
Australia, where its early presence is proved by the Talgai skull,”
perhaps 150,000 years old. “A third branch drifted slowly northward up
the eastern Asiatic littoral, and, crossing into America, spread thinly
through the continents, and perhaps mainly along the western shores....
On the Pacific Coast in California and Lower California it appears to
constitute the oldest stratum, characterizing as it does the crania from
the lower layers of the shell-heaps, from the islands of Santa Catalina
and San Clemente off the Coast, and from the extinct Pericue [now
Pericú] isolated on the southern tip of the peninsula of Lower
California.” Dixon places some of his Proto-Australoids among the
ancestors of the Iroquois and the southern Algonquin tribes of the East.
He puts most of his Proto-Negroids in that same eastern area and with
the same tribes. He finds them generally east of the Rockies, but also
among the Basket Makers in the Southwest and the peoples of the Coahuila
Caves of northern Mexico, in the Lagoa Santa area in Brazil, and in
Patagonia.[7]

Two of the White types—the Caspian and the Mediterranean—seem rather
scattered and rather early. Dixon thinks that a Caspian strain may have
appeared as soon as the Proto-Australoid, perhaps sooner. It crops up
among the Eskimo and at spots in British Columbia, and widely in South
America. The Mediterranean influence, Dixon says, is found also among
the Eskimo and among Shoshonean and Siouan tribes.

Dixon does not think much of the Mongoloids. Believing they were a very
old people that drifted into Europe in early paleolithic times, he says
they “contributed little of value either to the sum of human
achievements or the blood of existing races.” He gives them only scant
space in North America. Instead he introduces two other round-headed
peoples. They are first the Paleo-Alpines, and later the Alpines. These,
who seem to take on the role played by the Mongoloids of Hooton and
others, spread through to South America and “displayed striking
ability.... To them seems to be attributable most of the higher
achievements of the aboriginal American peoples.”[8]

Some theories are doubtless much too simple; also, they depend too much
on other theories, such as the idea that all the races originated in
southwestern Asia. R. Ruggles Gates, who writes of “American
Neanderthaloids” and “pseudo-Australoids,” believes that the craniums of
the men of Lagoa Santa and Punin—“the earliest wave of interglacial
Americans”—“represent a parallel stage in skull development of a widely
different race” from the one that began as the Neanderthal or the one
that ended as the Australian.[9]

A Potpourri of Races

The theories of Dixon and Hooton and others conflict in many places; but
they present, on the whole, an arresting and convincing case for early
man as a predecessor of the Mongoloids and as quite a different sort of
creature. There are many side issues to the general theory, and they
increase as we begin to deal with living peoples. Hooton finds close
resemblances to Egyptian skulls among the Arizona Basket Makers and in
the Coahuila Caves of northern Mexico,[10] and Dixon identifies ancient
Egyptian skulls with skulls from California and skulls of the Iroquois.
W. W. Howells sees similarities between “many forest tribes of South
America and certain Indonesian groups in Borneo and the Philippines,”
and believes the non-Mongoloid features of the Indians point, “not to
the Australoids or the Negroes, but towards the White group.”[11] Hooton
finds Indians of the Northwest coast who “resemble Alpine Europeans.” He
says that certain Plains Indians seem to be basically White with
Mongoloid added, and he points out that although the Eskimo are the most
Mongoloid of all the inhabitants of the Americas, they are long-headed,
which is a most un-Monogoloid trait.[12] On the basis of skulls from
Chancelade, France, and certain late-paleolithic traits, Sollas saw the
ancestors of the Eskimo living in Europe in Magdalenian times.[13] M. R.
Harrington also picks a Magdalenian forebear for the Eskimo.[14]
Authorities differ as to whether the Botocudo tribe of Brazil is
descended from the people that left their skulls in the Lagoa Santa
caves, but on the basis of R. N. Wegners description of a Bolivian
tribe, the Qurunga, Griffith Taylor believes these people may be living
representatives of an early Australoid migration.[15] Hooton puts
forward the picturesque and amusing theory that the Maya, with their
large, curved noses and their mania for flattening their heads between
boards, picked up both the nose and the mania from the Armenoids of the
Iranian plateau. The Mongoloids provided the characteristic skin, hair,
and eyelids.[16]

The backwardness of certain living American tribes suggests to Sauer
that they came to the New World a very long time ago. Their lack of a
number of useful skills argues that they branched off from the men of
the Old Stone Age when the Australoid ancestors of the abysmal
Blackfellows of Australia looked like an up-and-coming people. These
early men had the enterprise to reach the New World, but they stuck to
old and limited habits of life. They would not learn from new invading
peoples, and so they were forced into refuge areas as remote as
Newfoundland, Lower California, Amazonia, and Tierra del Fuego. As an
example of cultural backwardness and of an inability to learn which
recalls the Australians, Sauer cites a people in the Brazilian interior
who get along without boiling any of their food. He believes that this
tribe acquired its cultural habits in the days before man began to put
heated stones into water in pitch-sealed baskets. The primitive
resistance of these “Indians” to borrowing new cooking skills like
boiling comes out in other directions. “Long in contact with
pottery-making peoples, they make casual or no use of pots, but restrict
their cooking to roasting and baking, with gourds, a late acquisition,
used for carrying water.”[17]

Griffith Taylor once wrote to Earl W. Count that, because certain of the
now extinct mammals inhabited both sides of Bering Strait in the days of
the glaciers, “it is almost impossible that the Australoids (who preyed
on them) did not cross into America in Pre-Würm times.” Count supports
Taylor with the suggestion that the most primitive of the many stocks
that invaded the Americas came “at a time, say, when Talgai man and
Wadjak man were en route to their _cul de sac_ in Australia.”[18]

Radical as these last two suggestions are in point of time, they are
conservative compared with theories held by A. A. Mendes Correâ and Paul
Rivet. Like many another student, Mendes Correâ saw Australian,
Caucasoid, Polynesian, Melanesian, and Asiatic affinities among the
American Indians; but he struck into a new field of theory in 1926 by
transporting the Australians to South America over a now-vanished
land-bridge to the south. Using Wegener’s hypothesis of the drift of
continents, he found his bridge in a severed and displaced Antarctica.
He conceded that this was only a conjecture, but thought it “very
probable.”[19] That same year Rivet—approving migrations of Australian,
Malayan-Polynesian, Asiatic, and Ural elements—suggested that glaciation
in the southern hemisphere might have aided the Australians in passing
from island to island until they reached the mainland of South
America.[20] He dated their journey at only 6,000 years ago,[21] so that
glacial assistance beyond the present extent of Antarctica seems just a
little unlikely. Rivet, following many a student from Leibnitz to Thomas
Jefferson, proposed to trace the origin of the American peoples through
comparing their languages with those of the Old World. In 1925 he came
up with something more than the usual random identities between
words.[22] Indeed, the parallels which he drew between the present
speech of the Tshon of Patagonia and the Australians seemed to Dixon to
be impossibly close after centuries upon centuries of separation from
one another and of contact with other peoples.[23] Only sheer
coincidence could account for such identity.

There remain two champions of multiform and multitudinous
migrations—José Imbelloni of Argentina and Harold S. Gladwin. They go
further than any of their predecessors in peopling the New World with
varied races, and further in advancing transpacific migrations as an
important factor in the history of the Americas.

Pygmies Before Australoids in the New World?

Both Imbelloni and Gladwin begin with a suggestion that Pygmies deserve
consideration. These primordial migrants trod their tiny paces from some
unknown fatherland to the forests of the Congo and the jungles of New
Guinea, to islands like the Andamans and possibly to Tasmania. The
presence of five-foot Yahgan in Tierra del Fuego suggests to both
Imbelloni and Gladwin that Pygmies may have preceded the Australoids to
the New World. The advent of Pygmies in Tierra del Fuego as well as in
Tasmania may be open to question; for in both places the natives, though
short, exceeded the average of Pygmy height by a few inches, and their
heads, instead of being round like those of the Pygmies, are recorded as
of medium cephalic index.

After the Tasmanian strain, Imbelloni carries over by land a Melanesian
type to lay their skulls in Lagoa Santa, Punin, Texas, and Lower
California. Next came tall people, “comparable partly to the Australian
type,” who seem to be the Indians of plains and pampas. These were the
last of the land-borne migrants until the present era. Hereafter they
came by sea. The fourth element was a Proto-Indonesian people that
settled exclusively in South America and mainly in Amazonia. With the
fifth group Imbelloni presents the first frank Mongoloids, round-headed
and inclined to agriculture; they settled in the Southwest, in Middle
America, and along the Andean coast. An almost identical people—whom
Imbelloni calls the Isthmid—spread through the center of the same area
shortly after the birth of Christ and brought to fruition the
civilizations which Cortez and Pizarro found in the New World. To top
off his list, Imbelloni brings over the Eskimo and men for the American
Northwest—but by no longer a sea voyage than Bering Strait.[24]

Gladwin’s theories appeared first in the second volume of _Excavations
at Snaketown_, and were presented in altered and amplified form through
his rather antic book _Men Out of Asia_. They are completely heretical,
completely fascinating, and in some respects uncommonly plausible. They
are certainly a tonic.

Gladwin begins with what might be called a Pygmoid visitation. He does
not dignify it with the word “migration.” He is careful to say that
there are only “rather vague indications.” There is “just enough to make
one wonder if there may not have been a few Pygmy groups who strayed
over here long, long ago and were pushed off to the edges and the ends
when the Australoid tide flowed in.”[25]

If a scientific study is ever made in the Guayana highlands of
Venezuela, some support may be given to the theory of an early Pygmy
migration. Carl Sauer on a visit to Venezuela in 1946 saw photographs of
a Pygmy-like people taken by a Venezuelan army officer who had paddled
and packed the Guayana River for some years. This tribe, which does not
interbreed with other tribes, appears to be Pygmoid in stature and type.
Further, it lacks “clothing, weaving, netting, baskets, boats, and
fishing skills, and also houses.”[26]

Australoids, Negroids, and Men from Europe

Gladwin is definite about the Australoids. They came over Bering Strait
somewhere around 25,000 years ago, and drifted down the west coast. They
spread out in the southwestern part of the United States below a line
from San Francisco to the Texas coast, and flowed on down into Mexico
and South America. For evidence he has more than the
Australoid-Melanesian skulls of Lower California, Texas, Punin,
Paltacalo, and Lagoa Santa. He cites a number of things used and made by
the Australians of recent times and also found in the area between
southern California and eastern Texas. They include an Aurignacian flint
industry, bunt points for darts, bull-roarers, string made by spinning
human hair, twisted rabbit fur, curved throwing sticks with parallel
grooves, sand paintings, amputation of finger joints as shown in
pictographs, and similarities in spear-throwers and darts with
foreshafts (see illustration, page 228).[27] We should like to find them
nearer Lagoa Santa.

Gladwin’s next migration, the Proto-Negroid of Dixon, leans upon the
Pseudo-Negroid traits of Hooton. It comes in about 17,000 years ago,
also over Bering Strait, but down through the corridor between the
retreating ice fields of western Canada. Having seen Aurignacian
qualities in the Australoids, Gladwin sees Solutrean ones in the Negroid
invaders. They bring—or, rather, make—the Folsom point. Unlike the
Australoids, who were mostly food gatherers, the Negroids—or Folsom
men—are primarily hunters. Although they come trickling in for many,
many years, they are few; for, in spite of their hunting prowess and
their fine flint knives and spear points, they never invade the
Australoid territory that is staked out south from the Mexican
border.[28]

             [Illustration: FROM THE OLD WORLD AND THE NEW

    _Implements from Australoid areas of the eastern hemisphere
    resembling implements from western Texas. (After Gladwin, 1937.)_]

  Bunt-Points
    A, Melanesia; B, western Texas. (length of B—6 inches)
  Bull-Roarers
    A, Australia; B, western Texas. (length of B—16 inches)
  Curved Throwing Sticks
    A, Australia; B, western Texas. (length of A—26 inches)
  Spear-Throwers
    A, Australia; B, western Texas, (length of B—24 inches)

The next migration is the Algonquin. It reaches North America somewhere
between 1000 and 500 B.C. These people bring in the cord-marked pottery
of the Woodland culture of the eastern United States—unpolished and
unpainted, its only ornament impressed in the clay. Such pottery has now
been traced to western Canada, up into Alaska, across to Siberia, west
through Russia to the beakerwares of Europe, and finally down into
Africa about 3000 B.C. The Algonquins are such a mixture as the long
trip of their pottery might indicate. They are generally long-headed,
and they are not today wholly Mongoloid.[29]

No Mongoloids till 300 B.C.

The first Mongoloids, as Gladwin sees it, were the Eskimos. They came to
the northern edge of North America about 500 B.C. But, because they
clung to that edge, we must look elsewhere and later for a Mongoloid
invasion of the cultural areas of the New World.

Gladwin believes that these second Mongoloids were thrust out of
northern China and on into the New World by the ferment of the Huns.
They reached Alaska about 300 B.C. Ultimately, supplemented by the
Uto-Aztecans, they supplied the man power on which the Mexican and Maya
civilizations were built; and some reached the west coast of South
America.[30] Without a good many of them it seems to us difficult to
account for such Andean peoples as the speakers of the Quechua and
Aymara languages, who were the working population of the Chimu, Nasca,
Tiahuanaco, and Inca cultures. By Gladwin’s dating, the Mongoloids had
only a little more than a thousand years to stamp their hair and eyes
and teeth upon five million to fifty million men and women in both
Americas.

By the time of the Algonquin—let alone the Eskimo and the Aztec—we are
far out of the era of early man. But we are not yet through with the
theories of Gladwin as to the peopling of the Americas; for, not content
with the stimulating activities of the Huns in northern China, he
rediscovers the sailors and the Asiatic fleet of the late, great
conqueror Alexander of Macedon, and leads them on expeditions through
the East Indies and Oceania even to the Gulf of Darien.[31]

However heretical Gladwin’s suggestions may be, they deserve serious
attention if only because they bear heavily upon an old quarrel of the
archaeologists, and because this old quarrel bears upon the antiquity of
man in the Americas. To be sure, it has to do with the Indians who made
the civilizations of Middle America and Peru two thousand years ago, and
not with the earlier men who did no more than hunt or gather, and who
made nothing more remarkable than Folsom and Eden points or milling
stones. But by studying certain aspects of those civilizations we may
recognize that the Indians had been in the Americas 3,000 to 5,000 years
before Columbus. By so much we may reenforce the theory that their
forerunners or their forebears came to the New World at least 15,000
years ago and probably 25,000 or more years ago.

Siberian Caucasoids

Since 1950, Joseph Birdsell and Carleton Coon have done something to
clear a little of the mist that has obscured the physical origins of man
in the New World. They agree, more or less, that the first migrants were
of Caucasoid stock from the basin of the Amur River, in northeast
Siberia.[32]

Birdsell, a close student of the Australian aborigines, finds three
strains in these peoples, one of which is traceable to the “white”
Ainus, of northern Japan, and finally to what he calls the Amurians of
the aforementioned river basin. In Australia their descendants are
rather short and stocky, with a “rough-hewn Caucasoid cast of features.”
Their craniums are long and low, with large brow ridges—general traits
of Pleistocene man as well as some of our possibly early, and certainly
problematical, Americans. Coon supposes that natural selection among the
Amurians—trapped by the advance of the fourth glaciation or one of its
substages—produced certain Mongoloid features that they later carried
into the New World. Birdsell sees among the early migrants no Negritos,
no full-sized Negroids, no so-called Melanesians, no Mediterranean type
of Caucasoids. He suggests that a much-mixed strain of Caucasoid
Amurians and the newly evolved Mongoloid race accounts for earliest man
in the Americas. These “present the only discernible elements available
at the proper time and place to have contributed importantly to the New
World populations.... One may speculate that if human populations
reached the New World in the third interglacial they could be expected
to be purely Caucasoid, that is Amurian, and to show no Mongoloid
characteristics.” Birdsell suggests that migrants coming after the last
glaciation would carry some Mongoloid features through hybridization.
Guardedly, Birdsell insists that, though this is a satisfying and
stimulating hypothesis, we have as yet no means of judging accurately
racial affiliations from a single cranium or entire populations. He
concludes—somewhat sadly, we surmise—that methods utilized as recently
as 1949 (the date of his proposal) offer no promise of unraveling in
detail the enigma of the origins of our earliest Americans.

                                   10
              DID THE INDIAN INVENT OR BORROW HIS CULTURE?

  _American anthropologists usually deny that Old World cultures have
  influenced to any great extent the pre-Columbian development of the
  American Indian. We have set up for Aboriginal America a sort of_ ex
  post facto _Monroe Doctrine and are inclined to regard suggestions of
  alien influences as acts of aggression. This is probably a
  scientifically tenable position, although I am afraid it has often
  been maintained in part by an emotional bias—an “America for
  Americans” feeling._
                                                      —EARNEST A. HOOTON

Diffusion vs. Independent Invention

We hope you have not been skipping the choice thoughts that we have
placed at the beginning of chapters. Some of them are merely amusing,
but certain ones make an important point. Such is the above remark from
Hooton. It calls our attention to an unscientific emotionalism which
often lies behind one of the dogmas of American archaeology.

This dogma is called the autochthonous origin of Indian cultures. It
asserts that practically all the traits, discoveries, and inventions
which Columbus, Cortes, and Pizarro found in the New World were
homegrown products—importations barred. The question at issue between
the friends and the opponents of this dogma is commonly expressed as
Independent Invention versus Diffusion. But the phrasing is not quite
accurate: it needs a little amplification. Anything invented by man is
in a sense an independent invention. In the present case we are talking
of an invention made in one center, the New World, independent of a
similar invention in another center, the Old. We are concerned, not with
independent invention, but with _parallel_ independent invention.
“Diffusion” is still more inaccurate. Normally it means the gradual
transfer of some trait or technique from one people to another, often
through the intervention of a third or of a third and a fourth people.
In the present discussion it is more a matter of a people’s carrying the
trait or the technique to a new home. The question is not merely, “Did
the Indian invent pottery?” or “Did the American Australoid invent the
bull-roarer?” It is rather, “Did he invent it in the New World or the
Old?” or “Did he invent it in the Old World and carry it to the New?” or
“Did he invent it in the New World while another fellow invented it in
the Old?”

This problem of parallel independent invention versus diffusion is
important to any discussion of early man, because it can also be
phrased: “Did he or did he not bring traits from the Old World that may
indicate his racial ancestry?”

           [Illustration: FROM BURMA TO MELANESIA TO AMERICA?

    _Among the most curious resemblances between traits in the New World
    and in the Old are those of Panpipes. Certain pipes from the Solomon
    Islands have been found to have the same scale and the same absolute
    pitch as specimens from western Brazil. Double rows of pipes come
    from the hinterland of Burma, from the Solomon Islands, and from
    Panama and the Andean highlands, and in all these areas the two rows
    are tuned in the same relation to each other. The two sets may be
    lashed together, like these from the Solomon Islands, left, and from
    Bolivia, right, or they may be merely connected by a cord and blown
    by two men or, alternately, by one. (Left, after von Hornbostel,
    1912; right, after Nordenskiöld, 1924.)_]

    [Illustration: _The material used in these fishhooks—pearl shell in
    Tahiti; abalone shell on San Nicolas Island, off southern
    California—dictated the slight difference in shape. Objects like
    these are found only in these general areas. (Courtesy of the
    American Museum of Natural History and the Santa Barbara Museum of
    Natural History.)_]

Both the theory of diffusion and the theory of parallel, independent
invention arise from the same scientific fact. This fact is that
different primitive peoples often make similar tools, build similar
buildings, enjoy similar institutions, live by similar customs, or
believe similar myths. And they do this although the tribes may be
widely separated from one another. To pin the matter down to our own
present concern, certain objects found in the New World and dated before
Columbus are almost exactly like objects in the Old World. For instance,
a spear-thrower from western Texas not only employs the same principle
as one from Australia, but has practically the same physical shape.
Curved throwing-sticks and bull-roarers come from both these localities
(see illustration, page 226). Star-shaped mace heads of Melanesian type
turn up in Peru. Looms that have the same eleven working parts are found
in areas of the New World as well as the Old. Easter Island has
polygonal stonework with locked joints which matches a form of masonry
in Andean Peru, and a certain people of Easter Island stretched their
ear lobes in the same fashion as the Incas. Panpipes of the Old World
type appear in South America, Panama, and California; some from western
Brazil are identical in tonal scale and absolute pitch with some from
the Solomon Islands (see illustration, page 235). In Hawaii and in Peru,
as in Egypt and ancient Japan, brothers married to sisters were of
superior status. The digging stick of certain Polynesians has a step
like that of the Indians of Peru. The quipu, or knotted-string record,
spread from Polynesia to Peru, and the decimal system was found in both
areas, though farther north, in Middle America, men employed the
vigesimal system based on progression by twenties. The Hindu game of
pachisi resembles the Mexican game of patolli. Lists have been published
of as many as fifty such similarities between Oceania and the
Americas.[1]

           [Illustration: DIFFUSION OR INDEPENDENT INVENTION?

    _Striking resemblances exist between Old World and New World
    artifacts. The stone clubs are about 14 inches long. (Upper left,
    after Gladwin, 1937; the Chinese bell, after Gladwin, 1937, the
    Arizona bell, after Elmore, 1945; upper right, the New Zealand club,
    after Wickersham, 1895, the California and Peruvian clubs, after
    Imbelloni, 1930. The mace heads, after Gladwin, 1937.)_]

  Effigy Flints
    Russia
    Illinois
  Bronze and Copper Bells
    China
    Arizona
  Two-Edged Stone Clubs
    New Zealand
    California
    Peru
  Star-Shaped Mace Head
    Melanesia
    Peru

Bastian’s “Psychic Unity”

Those who argue for independent invention rest their case largely on a
distortion of the theory of “psychic unity” put forward by Adolf Bastian
in mid-Victorian days. From studies of African and Asiatic cultures,
Bastian developed the thesis that “psychic unity” everywhere produced
similar “elementary ideas.” Thus early man in France and early man in
Asia might harden the point of a wooden spear in a fire, or knock chips
off a lump of flint to make a sharper tool, or make a rope out of
twisted vines. But beyond “elementary ideas,” said Bastian, man would
develop different things in different places, depending on different
physical conditions; and finally, as he reached a higher plane of mental
and social development, his ideas and his behavior would be influenced
by other men and other cultures with which he came in contact. This was
a sound thesis. Unfortunately, however, Bastian’s followers ignored the
words “elementary ideas,” as well as the last half of his theory, and
made “psychic unity” the provider of all good things from pots to
pyramids.

There have been opponents of independent invention, of course. There
were some in Bastian’s day. They pointed out—as Robert H. Lowie has done
recently—that the champion of the theory must prove that different
peoples making similar things were subjected to similar stimulants in
both areas. Otherwise “all the societies of the world should share the
features in question.”[2] Lowie might have said that all cultures of man
should be alike today.

By and large, the diffusionists were in the minority. The distorters of
Bastian triumphed. They triumphed even in the Old World, where distances
were not always very great, and where traffic between Africa and Eurasia
seemed not so very difficult. You can imagine, therefore, what a happy
hunting ground the independent inventionists have made of the Americas.
The New World is remote indeed from the Old. You must go back to the
time of the glaciers to find a land-bridge and up to the Arctic to bring
the two worlds within hailing distance of each other. Otherwise you must
be willing to accept thousands of miles of ocean voyaging. The physical
fact of the remoteness of the Americas has stopped many a mental
adventurer among the anthropologists. He rereads with respect—perhaps
too much respect—these words of Spinden’s: “The fact that no food plant
is common to the two hemispheres is enough to offset any number of petty
puzzles in arts and myths.”[3]

If the physical fact of the Pacific Ocean had not been enough to stifle
talk of diffusion, the extravagant theories of Sir Grafton Elliot Smith
would have done the job. Here was a diffusionist indeed! Echoed by W. J.
Perry, Smith found the beginnings of all culture of any importance in
Egypt, and from there he sent its traveling salesmen abroad to sell it
to Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Pearls and pyramids, gold and
dolmens, initiations and totemism, sun worship and the marriage of
brother and sister, mummies—even if they were no more than desiccated
bodies wrapped in a bag—these traits and many more all “proved” that the
Children of the Sun had sold their cultural goods to lesser peoples.

There were other theorists as wild and whirling. Augustus Le Plongeon
brought the Maya from Atlantis to found Egypt. Ignatius Donnelly
reversed the procession and dragged Greeks to Atlantis and then Mexico.
Lewis Spence transported Atlas across the Atlantic as the Mexican god
Quetzalcoatl. Leo Wiener, as Spinden has put it, “derives everything of
importance in the New World from the highly civilized coasts of Gambia
and Sierra Leone ... brightest Africa.”[4] And then there was Churchward
with his continent of Mu.

Smiths and Perry’s uncritical use of evidence and their distortion of
fact—plus these fantasies of Africa and Atlantis and Mu—put the friends
of independent invention even more firmly in the saddle than the single
and simple fact of the Pacific Ocean. The diffusion of Smith _et al._
was a diffusion to end all diffusion.

Americanists—students of man in the New World—have not yet escaped from
the curse of the Children of the Sun, and the terror of Atlantis and Mu.
One of the best, Baron Erland Nordenskiöld, a distinguished Swedish
scientist, gave a great deal of energy to the cataloguing of the many
evidences of analogies; and yet he came to the conclusion that, by and
large, Indian culture was a product of independent invention in the New
World.[5] He granted that the Indians may have received from Oceania
through random voyages “one or two cultivable plants and possibly a few
more culture elements”—knowledge of how to make crude clay vessels, for
example.[6] Hrdlička, too, conceded a small number of sea-borne visitors
before Columbus: “It is ... probable that the western coast of America,
within the last 2,000 years, was on more than one occasion reached by
small parties of Polynesians, and that the eastern coast was similarly
reached by small groups of whites, and that such parties may have
locally influenced the culture of the Americans.”[7] But Hrdlička
considered such voyaging of very little importance.

                [Illustration: CIRCUMPACIFIC NAVIGATION?

    _There are marked resemblances between the traits of the Maori of
    New Zealand and of the Indians of the northwest coast of North
    America. Among these are sailing ships and houses. (After figures on
    a map by Covarrubias, 1940.)_]

  NEW ZEALAND
  NORTHWESTERN AMERICA

Only two anthropologists of any standing have favored diffusion. The
first of these, Earnest A. Hooton, rejected “the supposition that these
various Asiatic invaders brought with them to the New World nothing but
a repressed desire to indulge in independent invention, that they came
with culturally empty hands, but brains stuffed full of patents to be
filed only after arrival.... I have no use at all for the
anthropological isolationists who are determined to maintain the
incredible dogma that there was no diffusion of inventions and ideas
from the Old World to the New, but only of naked human animals.”[8]

Complexity an Argument for Diffusion

The chief modern American proponent of diffusion is Harold S. Gladwin.
What is his case? How does he come to his conclusions? He begins, of
course, by noting a large number of random resemblances. Some are in
simple objects. Some are in complex ones. As he seeks a scientific basis
for his argument, he concentrates on the complex things. Complexity
seems to rule out coincidence. If a tool has only one or two parts—like
a curved throwing stick or a hafted knife—it is not difficult to
conceive of two different men inventing it on opposite sides of the
world. A bow and arrow with three essential parts presents a little more
of a problem, but not too much, for the three parts are dependent on one
another. If the bow has a back reinforced by sinew, if the arrow has
feathers and a foreshaft, and the foreshaft has a flint arrowhead—making
seven elements in all—then one begins to wonder at the mathematical
chances of two men exactly duplicating the whole arrangement. Then,
consider the vertical loom with nine separate elements, and eleven if it
sports a shuttle and a reed fork.

From citing such coincidences, Gladwin turns to the second step of the
diffusionist’s argument. This has to do not alone with one complex
object, but with unrelated things grouped around it—let us say a
vertical loom and bark cloth, painted tripod pottery, and metal casting
by the lost wax method. Now if all these disconnected objects can be
found in another locality and in use by another people, the suggestion
of diffusion becomes far stronger than even in the case of a single
complex machine. As Gladwin puts it:

  If ... a man should report to the Chinese police that some copper
  bells, a vertical loom, some tripod trays, and a roll of bark cloth
  had been stolen from his house, and if, after broadcasting the
  details, the American police should find all these articles in the
  possession of a man in America, where such things had hitherto been
  unknown, would the authorities be satisfied with the explanation that
  the possessor had independently invented each item? I am inclined to
  think that, if I should happen to be the attorney for the defense,
  knowing that my client had recently come over from Asia, a plea of
  insanity might carry more weight with the jury than my client’s
  explanation.

He argues his point still more vividly:

  If a Scotsman uses a split-bamboo trout rod, a waterproof silkline,
  and a barbed hook, it is not necessarily a case of diffusion if a man
  in Saskatchewan is found to be fishing with a willow twig, a piece of
  string, and a bent-pin, since each item is dependent upon the others.
  But if in addition to their fishing tackle, the Scotsman and the man
  in Saskatchewan are found to possess a shot-gun, a flask, a brier-pipe
  and bagpipes, then it would look like a case of diffusion since no one
  item of the assemblage is dependent upon any other.[9]

Dispersion as Well as Diffusion

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

  When in South America, they say, you find not only coca-chewing, plank
  canoes, and tie-dyeing, but also terraced irrigation, Panpipes, and
  the blow gun—all traits widespread in the western Pacific and
  southeastern Asia—how can you deny that their occurrence is due to
  diffusion, or believe for a moment that so many similar and parallel
  inventions could take place? The challenge is a formidable one. Is
  there anything that can be said in reply?

Dixon points out that these Oceanic traits are not found _together_ in
the New World. The plank canoe is confined to the Santa Barbara Islands
and southern Chile; tie-dyeing, to the arid coasts of northern Peru;
coca-chewing, originally to the Andean highlands and the tropical
forests along its eastern border; terraced irrigation, to the Andes of
Peru and Bolivia; the blow gun, to the upper Amazon and Orinoco forests,
the Antilles, and the eastern United States; the Panpipe, to the
Amazon-Orinoco drainage and southward through Bolivia to northern Chile
and the Peruvian coast, and to one or two isolated spots in Ecuador and
Colombia. “With one exception the only area where the distribution of
any two of these traits is found to overlap lies in the Andean highlands
and the tropical forest area to the eastward. Only tie-dyeing and the
Panpipe are found together on the coast.” Further, the two traits we
find on the coast are separated in the Old World. Tie-dyeing is found
specifically in Indonesia “and known in Melanesia only in degenerate
form in one small area, whereas the Panpipe is primarily Melanesian and
almost unknown in Indonesia.”[10] He seems to be ignorant of double
Panpipes connected by a cord which are found in the hinterland of Burma
and also in Panama and South America.[11]

No opponent of diffusionism is so blind as to deny the importation of
some culture traits by the migrants from northern Asia. Kroeber concedes
the fire drill, the spear-thrower, stone chipping, twisting of string,