Early Man in the New World

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?”

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]

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.

NEW ZEALAND

NORTHWESTERN AMERICA

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

Complexity an Argument for Diffusion

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

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

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

He argues his point still more vividly:

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

Dispersion as Well as Diffusion

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

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

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

No opponent of diffusionism is so blind as to deny the importation of some culture traits by the migrants from northern Asia. Kroeber concedes the fire drill, the spear-thrower, stone chipping, twisting of string, the bow, the throwing harpoon, simple basketry and nets, hunting complexes, cooking stones in vessels of wood, of bark, or of skin, body painting and perhaps tattooing, the domestication of dogs.[12] But, except for these and a few other examples, most anthropologists deny that the American Indians, early or late, brought any objects of their culture from the Old World. Alfred V. Kidder has phrased very neatly their antagonism to “non-stop journeys by bag-and-baggage culture carriers.”[13] This phrase is aimed at a weak chink in the diffusionist’s armor—the fact that Old World traits found, say, in the Southwest, Middle America, or farther south leave no trail across Alaska and down through Canada and over the Great Plains.

In addition, the opponents of diffusion like to point out that certain things in the Indian culture of the northern part of the New World are like certain things in the Indian culture of the southern part, while in between lies a very large area—Middle America and Peru—of entirely different culture traits. Here we find none of the northern and southern things. Nordenskiöld observes that, while some of the identical northern and southern traits may be due to the stimulus of similar cold climates, there are numerous traits that have nothing to do with temperature and humidity. He doubtless feels he is delivering the coup de grâce when he writes:

It is a very characteristic fact that incomparably greater similarity exists between civilizations as far apart as those of the Calchaquis of Argentina, and the Pueblos of North America, than between the culture of any Indian tribe and that of any people in the whole of Oceania.[14]

If such traits were diffused from one American area to the other, they left no trace between. When we add this to the fact that from Alaska to Middle America there are no traces of even the simplest beginnings of the cultures of the central area, the advocate of independent invention has a pretty good case. In answer, the diffusionist has been tempted to argue that when men are moving rather steadily across an area, they do not leave evidence that is easy to find some millenniums later. Only a hundred years have passed since Brigham Young led his people from Independence, Missouri, to Salt Lake City, and yet there is a singular paucity of spinning wheels and first editions of The Book of Mormon along their trail.

The Trap of Time

Gladwin has a better answer, which is also an attack on a basic weakness of his opponents. Through many years he has been pointing out that friends of the inventive Indian have been getting squeezed tighter and tighter in a trap of their own independent invention. It is the trap of time.

When the Spaniards found the New World, they found it full of inventions and discoveries. There were cities of stone, painted temples, great pyramids. Metal workers smelted ores, made alloys, and cast elaborate ornaments of gold by a most intricate process. There was a complex despotism in Mexico and as complex and despotic a communism in Peru. The Maya had a calendar more accurate than the one Columbus used. They had devised a hieroglyphic writing and knew how to make cement. The Indians of both continents had developed an extensive agriculture, with potatoes and fertilizers in Peru and corn and beans and tomatoes all over the place.

As soon as the archaeologists decided that all this had been invented in the New World with no help to speak of from the Old, they had to recognize that it would take quite a little time. At first this posed a difficulty, for there was no very early evidence of man in Mexico. In 1917, however, came the discovery of skeletons and pottery under a lava flow at Copilco near Mexico City and of a primitive pyramid half buried under the same flow at near-by Cuicuilco; and the archaeologists promptly dated the eruption of the lava at 4000 B.C.

Then, unfortunately, new evidence narrowed the trap of time once more. George C. Vaillant and his wife dated other sites with the same kind of pottery as Copilco considerably later than the birth of Christ. A radiocarbon date based upon charcoal within the pottery level below the Cuicuilco lava falls between these guesses; it is 2422 ± 250 years.[15] The Basket Makers advanced from an estimated 2000 B.C. to a tree-ring date about A.D. 217. And all this time nobody could find any really primitive beginnings of pottery in Middle America, and nothing that seemed earlier than the birth of Christ. The trap of time was growing tighter and tighter. A very elaborate civilization would have to develop in 1,500 years, without any roots. Gladwin pointed out this difficulty and urged the theory that man came into the Americas not only as a paleolithic primitive 15,000 or 25,000 years ago, but as a fairly civilized and perfected neolithic close to the beginning of the Christian era.

Escape from the Trap

The similarity between the traits of the north and the south which Nordenskiöld points out, and the fact that a different lot of traits were dropped in between the others are grist to Gladwin’s diffusion mill. In 1937, when he wrote Excavations at Snaketown, he was only beginning to see an answer. By 1947, when Men Out of Asia appeared, he had a fairly complete and certainly an ingenious explanation.

His first proposition is that the Mongoloids came late—very late—and that they brought not much more than the brawn and brains which someone else would later direct. His fifteenth chapter begins with the following parody of a baseball score:

Score at the End of the Fourth Inning

NORTH AMERICA 4

Australoid, Folsom, Algonquin, Eskimo

SOUTH AMERICA 1

Australoid

No Discoveries No Inventions No Mongoloids

By 300 B.C.—two hundred years after the Eskimo—Gladwin is willing to add 1 run to the North American score and make that run Mongoloid. But he does not believe that the Mongoloids reached South America in any numbers, or contributed anything but labor to the culture which Columbus found. They did not make black-on-white pottery in the Pueblo country or red-on-buff pottery and irrigation canals in southern Arizona, create incised pottery, pyramids, carved jade, or a calendar system and hieroglyphs in Middle America, pound bark cloth in Central America, or produce stone fortresses and superb weaving and portrait jugs in Peru. Left to their own devices, the Mongoloids would have accomplished no more in the New World than they had in the Old before the Huns made things unpleasant for them in northern China. Gladwin believes that the people who created the culture of Middle America and Peru came overseas, spreading north and south from the isthmus of Panama. The suggested invasion by water explains the odd fact that many of the traits of northern North America are like some of those of southern South America, and not at all like most of the traits of the area between. Some of these northern and southern traits, says Gladwin, are the property of the Australoids who came far back; others in North America find analogies in China and northern Asia. His overseas peoples thrust themselves and their culture into the central part of the New World, changing or obliterating the Australoid traits that they found there, and isolating those that lay to the north and south. He believes that these people brought with them certain objects and customs from the islands in the Pacific, from southeastern Asia, and from China and points west. Among them is the habit of squeezing a baby’s head between boards to give it an elegant elongation; this head deformation is not practiced in northern Asia, from which the Indians are presumed to have come.

It is hardly necessary to point out that Gladwin’s hypothesis disposes of the question: “Why are there no traces of Middle American and Peruvian traits on the trail down from Alaska?” But we might ask: “Why are there not more of them in the Pacific islands?”

Gladwin has not worked out his maritime invasions too thoroughly; but he sees the Melanesians—who, he believed, reached Easter Island—continuing on to Central America and becoming the Caribs and spreading into South America and the West Indies. He sees the Polynesians taking much the same route and turning into the Arawaks.

What started these South Sea islanders off on their career of civilizing the central part of the Americas? Where did they get some of the traits and some of the physical features that Melanesians and Polynesians do not now possess, as well as their inventive brains? Here Gladwin has a startling and fabulous theory to put forward. Here is where Alexander the Great and his sailors and ships come in.

Dead Alexander Invades America

Before Alexander died in 323 B.C. he brought 5,000 Levantine and Greek shipwrights and sailors to the Persian Gulf and built a navy of 800 vessels. We hear a good deal about what his army did after his death, of the quarrels of generals and the dissipation of their forces—but not a word about the 5,000 nautical men or their fleet. As Gladwin points out, it is hard to imagine that sailors with sound vessels under them would take shore leave and walk home to Greece. If they sailed away from the Persian Gulf, which way would they have gone? They would hardly have sailed southwestward along the Arabian coast; for Alexander died at a season when the winds would have been against them, and the coast is lacking in fresh water and harbors at any time. A southeastward voyage would have been another matter. The wind would have been behind them, and they had already found the coast attractive in that direction.

With this much to go upon, Gladwin sends the fleet of the dead Alexander down the coast of India, past the Spice Islands, and out through Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia. On the way the fleet picks up men and women of various races, and stimulates the whole South Seas into a navigating era. The end result is another discovery of America. It is a discovery by a varied and talented people. Along with the Melanesian-Carib and Polynesian-Arawak, the fleet of Gladwin and Alexander finally brings to our western shores those bearded white men with civilizing propensities who are found in the legends of the Toltec and Maya and the peoples of Colombia and Peru. They it is who teach the Mongoloids how to build stone edifices, work metals, weave textiles, and make fine pots. Gladwin documents all this assiduously and even goes to his opponents for evidence.

He bolsters his argument with the “Q Complex”—that list of traits in the cultures of Middle America and the southeastern portion of the United States which Vaillant and Lothrop compiled as being very old indeed and unaccounted for in present theory. Men Out of Asia suggests that the Levantine voyagers brought these things or shaped them after they landed.

He uses with the greatest relish the mass of material on Oceanic traits in the Americas that Nordenskiöld drew together in “Origin of the Indian Civilizations in South America.” Of the forty-nine elements of culture which the Swede found common to both regions, Gladwin points out that more occur in Colombia and Panama than in any other New World area—thirty-eight in all—and that Colombia and Panama surround the spot where ships would have landed if they had followed the Equatorial Counter Current to the Gulf of Darien. From this region as a center the Melanesian and Polynesian traits gradually thin out to the north, the south, and the east.

Against Gladwin’s argument must be set, however, the evidence that Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán has recently developed showing that, among the slaves sent to Mexico from Manila during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there were many from New Guinea and other Pacific islands.[16] Was there a similar trade with Colombia, where Oceanic traits are slightly more plentiful than in Mexico and Central America, and with Amazonia, where they are almost as plentiful? It is vitally important, however, to remember that Melanesian slaves cannot possibly be credited with the importation of objects that have been found in pre-Columbian burials—certain Panpipes and mace heads, for example.

There are plenty of other objections, of course, to Gladwin’s theory, even though it seems to explain much that has been a mystery; but there are also defenses that he has not made. If the islands of the Pacific are not too well provided with pottery, pyramids, cement, metallurgy, and textiles, he might have pointed out that they were imperfectly supplied with the proper raw materials. If the white voyagers left their triremes behind in favor of double canoes, and if they did not build Greek temples in the New World, he might have suggested that some generations of sojourn in the South Seas led them to forget a few things. Indeed, it is surprising that these sailors remembered so much of weaving, metal working, and pottery (minus the potter’s wheel). It is equally surprising and just a little disquieting that the white gods, almost as soon as they landed, invented a complex and unique calendar and a hieroglyphic system like nothing they were familiar with. (Perhaps they could not agree on which of the many Old World varieties to use and had to devise something new.)

Before pouncing too heavily on Gladwin and his Alexandrians, it may be well to reread some sentences in his Introduction:

We are going to offer an explanation that will be a radical departure from those in current circulation, and I shall be the first to admit that this tale will need a great deal of patching and strengthening before it will carry much weight. This may seem a strange way to launch a new theory, but I am more concerned in opening up new channels of inquiry than in trying to provide pat answers to all the questions that are plaguing us.... I do not know of anyone who has yet been rash enough to try to connect the origins of American civilizations with definite causes, at definite dates, in the progress of Old World history, and it is for this reason that I have said this tale will need support and will undoubtedly need to be changed. This, however, is the way that every theory should be treated, and no harm will be done if when a new idea is launched it is regarded with due reserve, but also without prejudice.[17]

Our next chapter will return to rather formidable arguments for inventiveness in the American Indian; but first we should perhaps point out that Gladwin is not an Elliot Smith riding the hobby of diffusion to the end. He admits independent invention in many important fields. Pottery was invented, he believes, at least twice in the Old World. He concedes a number of origins for agriculture in the New. But he believes that the really inventive men of the New World—the men who developed corn, and devised the Maya calendar—were the men who brought brains as well as cultural equipment in the ships of Alexander, and put those brains to work devising more cultural equipment. (He ignores the fact that corn was developed more than a thousand years before Alexander was born.) Gladwin simply does not consider that early man and his successors before the birth of Christ were smart enough to produce much more than exceptionally good spear points and rather inferior milling stones. He does not believe that the Australoids or the Folsom men or the Algonquins or the Mongoloids who came over just before our era—let alone the Uto-Aztecans or the Athabascans a little later—were capable of inventing much in the way of neolithic civilization. He points out that the Indian—bereft, presumably, of the brains and blood of the men of Alexander’s fleet—has not done much inventing in the past four centuries. An opponent might remark that many an inventive, creative people has lapsed from grace—the Egyptians and the Greeks, for instance. The Polynesians and the Melanesians have not done much more inventing than the Indians since the days when the Alexandrians turned them into pre-Columbian pioneers of America culture.

Independent Inventions Neither Parallel Nor Diffused

It will be some years before the debate of diffusion versus independent invention comes anywhere near settlement. Much of Gladwin’s evidence for diffusion is striking and not to be laughed aside—particularly the group of Australian traits in our Southwest, and the Polynesian and Melanesian traits in the area around the Gulf of Darien. His injection of Old World voyagers between the northern and southern areas of the New World explains certain puzzling matters; but the theory presents puzzles of its own. Many culture traits of Middle America and Peru are not found in Oceania: the use of cement in masonry and the vigesimal system of numeration in Middle America; the amazingly intricate Maya calendar and hieroglyphics with the first invention of zero; baked brick in two Mexican sites; bronze in Peru; the hammock; the whistling jar; the manioc press. Some of these New World traits must have been invented here, but we are asked to believe that the others were forgotten in Oceania and remembered in the Americas. One argument for trans-Pacific diffusion is clear and cogent, however. It is hard to believe that the men who voyaged as far as the Marquesas and Easter Island stopped there, and so missed our long coast line. Certainly the sweet potato made the ocean crossing in the reverse direction, but was it before Columbus?[18]

Other things went with the sweet potato, according to the great chemist Gilbert N. Lewis. Without believing that man originated in South America, he thinks that man first reached the neolithic level in the area east of the Peruvian Andes while his fellow man in the rest of the world was wandering in paleolithic darkness. In the Andean highlands, man developed architecture, numeration, metallurgy, weaving, sculpture, and so forth. He spread these things to Middle America 6,000 or 8,000 years ago, and then carried them across the Pacific to the Old World.[19] As a whole, Lewis’s theory may be unacceptable; but his arguments for diffusion and against independent invention are persuasive.

In 1947 six Scandinavians demonstrated the possibility of an east-west crossing by sailing and drifting 4,300 miles in 101 days on a primitive raft of balsa logs from Peru to an atoll not many days from Tahiti.[20]

The position of the American partisans of independent invention is a curious one. It is both weak and strong. Man is inventive—even primitive man. But his inventions often have a unique quality: they are not always duplicated, or they are not duplicated at the same level of cultural development. Consider the cave paintings and the sculpture of the Aurignacians, Solutreans, and Magdalenians in the late Paleolithic. It is an art of remarkable perfection that utterly disappeared, and was not equaled again for thousands upon thousands of years. At Bonampak, in southern Mexico, a Maya painter used consummate perspective and foreshortening long before they appeared in Asia. Then there are the unique Folsom point, the perfection of the Solutrean and Eden points, the Maya calendar and hieroglyphs, the mosaic walls of Mitla in Mexico, Egyptian architecture and sculpture as well as writing, the beautifully expressive masks of the African Negro, the Melanesian, and the Eskimo. These were independent inventions, but they were unique ones. They were not independent, parallel inventions. And they were not diffused.

As for early man in the New World, we may believe if we wish that the shape of the Sandia point was diffused from the Solutreans of Europe. We may deny the independent invention in our Southwest of spear-throwers, bull-roarers, bunt points, and curved throwing sticks that look more as if they had been brought from Australia. The Eden point may have come from Siberia, or Siberia may have got it from North America. The Folsom point, however, looks definitely like an independent invention, for it is found nowhere else in the world. This argues that the people who ultimately succeeded in making it must have been in the New World for many, many generations before one of them lashed a Folsom point to a spear and thrust it into a bison. Where are the flints they shaped before the Sandia, Clovis, and Folsom? Can they have evolved the craft of flint knapping here in the New World? When we know this, we shall probably know whether they came before or after the last glaciers.

What Diffusion of Plants and Art?

Meantime it is interesting to observe that the log-jam of the independent inventionists is weakening a bit. When the International Congress of Americanists met in New York in 1949, the hitherto conservative and autochthonous American Museum of Natural History presented for the instruction and delectation of the Congress a rather elaborate exhibition of parallelisms between the cultural traits of the Old World and the New. A follow-up to this noteworthy gathering was a symposium of many of the same anthropologists at a meeting, two years later, of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The theme was “Prehistoric and Historic Asia: Transpacific Contacts with the New World.”[21] The question of contacts was not squelched, but there was no substantial progress in finding answers. The symposium focused the problem on two tests of possible diffusion. These concerned domesticated plants and formal art.

The strongest cases that can be made for the diffusion of any plant concern the Lagenaria gourd, cotton, the sweet potato, and the coconut. None of these ranks as a staple of subsistence, and two of them are not even food plants. Thus Old World and New World crops are mutually exclusive. The four plants that we have mentioned may have had world-wide distribution before man reached the New World; they may have followed the first contacts of white men with the Americas; there is only a remote possibility that they crossed the ocean through natural agencies.

In formal art—or perhaps we should say religious art—there are some tantalizing prospects for rather recent Asia-America diffusion. Gordon Ekholm, of the American Museum of Natural History, has listed a number of these. He suggests that the time of contact would have been about 700 A.D. This, you will note, is much too late to do much in shaping American civilization. At the most, it would have furnished no more than a bit of Asiatic frosting upon the cake of American civilization. Drawing upon elements of art from India, southeast Asia, and Indonesia, Ekholm points to similarities in Maya, Mexican, or other native American art, where parallels seem to exist in such things as a trefoil arch, a sacred tree or cross, tiger thrones, conch-shell-and-plant, Atlantean figures, monster doorways, serpent columns and balustrades, and others.[22] The comparisons are provocative, to say the least. In the Maya area, where most of the suspected influence of Asia occurs, many forms of art steadily deteriorated during the period when, theoretically, Asiatic stimulation would have been most pronounced.

Can we logically assume that the Maya would borrow a lotus motif or a serpent column from southeast Asia, but not the dome or true arch? Is it likely that sailors from Asia or Oceania succeeded in introducing useful plants but not sails or boats that could tack against the wind? If transoceanic diffusion is to be considered seriously, should there be no evidence for even a few practical seagoing inventions shared between the Old World and the New? Surely this would be more acceptable to the Americanists than forcing the assumption of transoceanic diffusion upon the presence of cultivated plants of secondary importance, or theological concepts expressed so vaguely as to be subject to alternative interpretations.