The Natural History Library Edition, 1962
Copyright © 1962 by The American Museum of Natural History
Copyright © 1950, 1962 by Kenneth Macgowan

For permission to quote passages from their respective publications grateful acknowledgment is made to the following authors, publishers, and literary executors:

J. B. Lippincott Company: Aleš Hrdlička, “Early Man in America: What Have the Bones to Say?” in Early Man, ed. George Grant MacCurdy (copyright, 1937, by The Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia); The Macmillan Company: William B. Scott, History of Land Mammals in the Western Hemisphere, rev. ed. (copyright, 1937, by The American Philosophical Society); G. P. Putnam’s Sons: Earnest A. Hooton, Apes, Men, and Morons (copyright, 1937, by G. P. Putnam’s Sons); Rinehart & Company, Inc.: Robert H. Lowie, The History of Ethnological Theory (copyright, 1937, by Robert H. Lowie); Charles Scribner’s Sons: Roland B. Dixon, The Racial History of Man (copyright, 1923, by Charles Scribner’s Sons) and The Building of Cultures (copyright, 1928, by Charles Scribner’s Sons); Whittlesey House: Harold S. Gladwin, Men Out of Asia (copyright, 1947, by McGraw-Hill Book Co., Inc.); University of Toronto Press: Earnest A. Hooton, “Racial Types in America and Their Relations to Old World Types” in The American Aborigines, ed. Diamond Jenness; Yale University Press: Earnest A. Hooton, The Indians of Pecos Pueblo (copyright, 1930, by Yale University Press).

Printed in the United States of America

TO
GEORGE C. VAILLANT

FOREWORD

Since the time of Columbus, when the peoples of the New World were discovered by Europeans, there has been a continuous interest in knowing something about their origin and early history. This has been almost completely shrouded in the primitive past, unmentioned in any written records, and thus largely a matter of speculation of one kind or another. Only very slowly have the means of investigating this history come into being. Greater knowledge of all the world’s peoples has provided the means for solidly based comparative studies, and the developing techniques of archaeology have brought more factual evidence to hand. Gradually the true picture is taking shape as each new discovery is analyzed and discussed and takes its place in the total structure.

This is an exciting adventure in discovery and learning that many would like to share more completely with the archaeologist and anthropologist. Usually, however, the reports of the professionals are too technical to be meaningfully understood by the layman, and the brief accounts of “finds” and “digs” that appear in the press are far too fragmentary. Most fortunately, we have the present book, which fills the need very nicely—far better than anything else in print.

Kenneth Macgowan professes to be an amateur in archaeological matters and, technically speaking, he is, although his competence in the extraordinarily involved subject he deals with is certainly of professional stature. In any event, he clearly discerns what is needed by the amateur and, without minimizing the complexities and involved problems of his subject, he provides the background to make them understandable. To incorporate the various discoveries and new formulations that have appeared in the twelve years since this book was first published, the text has been revised and brought up to date, largely by Professor Joseph A. Hester, Jr. This has been skillfully done in a way that does not alter the quality or coverage of the original.

I have been recommending this book for many years and now begin a new series of such recommendations. I am sure that it will be enjoyed and found most illuminating by all who want to know how the early history of man in the New World is being revealed.

GORDON F. EKHOLM Curator of Mexican Archaeology

May 1961

The American Museum of Natural History

PREFACE

In the twelve years since Early Man in the New World appeared, in 1950, a good deal of archaeological water has passed under the bridge—or over the land-bridge that led the first immigrants into the Americas. Because I had given most of these years to the founding and development of the Department of Theater Arts at U.C.L.A., I was in no position to revise and add to that book without the collaboration of an able and willing anthropologist, a man who had followed far more closely than I the new findings in American prehistory, and the new theories, or guesses, about their meanings. I was fortunate indeed to find such a man in Professor Joseph A. Hester, Jr., of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, San Jose State College, California. To him must go the fullest credit for the updating and the correcting, too, of a twelve-year-old book. Through him, Early Man in the New World is now able to present a great deal of information that was not in existence in 1950. Then, for example, the dating of wood and charcoal, bone, horn, and shell, through radiocarbon was hardly more than a gleam in the eye of Willard F. Libby. As I was reading page proof when he announced his first pre-Columbian date, I could mention this invaluable time clock only at the end of three chapters. A change, rather than an addition to the text, is the use of the word “Clovis” instead of “Generalized Folsom,” and “Eden” instead of “Yuma,” thus bringing our terminology in line with today’s practice.

In its first form, the book came about almost by accident. During 1941 and 1942, my work in the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs included the preparation of some educational films upon archaeological work in Mexico and South America. As a result I came to know and esteem the Director of the University Museum, George C. Vaillant. To my surprise and pleasure, when he learned of my interest in American archaeology, he proposed that we collaborate on a prehistory of the New World. When the war prevented active work together by taking him to Peru, I prepared what would have been the first two chapters of our book—the place of early man in the story of pre-Columbian America. Upon Vaillant’s untimely death, I decided to study the subject more intensively, to add material on the Great Ice Age and early man in the Old World, and to expand the two chapters into a book that I might dedicate to the man who had done so much for American archaeology in the twenty years of his work—George C. Vaillant.

Since the book was not the result of personal work in the field, but rather the product of the kind of research that is nothing more than reading and talking, I was in the debt of many men and books, and a welter of papers, pamphlets, and periodicals. I found it hard to believe that in any other branch of science so many overworked men and women would be so ready to give their time to talk and correspondence with the amateur. I was deeply indebted to more than two score who had gone out of their way to answer questions, lend books, or give reprints of papers. In listing them I was more than certain that I had inadvertently omitted some: Edgar Anderson, Ernst Antevs, Ralph L. Beals, Junius Bird, Robert J. Braidwood, Henry J. Bruman, Kirk Bryan, George F. Carter, R. A. Daly, Helmut de Terra, Loren C. Eiseley, Richard F. Flint, James Gilluly, Harold S. Gladwin, M. R. Harrington, Frank C. Hibben, Frederick W. Hodge, Harry Hoijer, Earnest A. Hooton, W. W. Howells, Frederick R. Johnson, Arthur R. Kelly, G. H. R. von Koenigswald, Alex D. Krieger, Alfred L. Kroeber, M. M. Leighton, Theodore D. McCown, George G. MacCurdy, P. C. Mangelsdorf, Paul S. Martin, Hallam L. Movius, Jr., Raymond W. Murray, N. C. Nelson, Charles W. Phillips, Cyrus N. Ray, E. B. Renaud, Frank H. H. Roberts, Jr., Alfred S. Romer, Irving Rouse, Curt Sachs, Carl O. Sauer, E. H. Sellards, Herbert J. Spinden, T. D. Stewart, Wm. Duncan Strong, Griffith Taylor, Bella Weitzner, H. M. Wormington, and Clark Wissler.

Next to the scientists who provide knowledge stand the librarians who help to preserve it and make it usable. I was peculiarly indebted to a number of these: Miss Margaret Currier, Librarian of the Peabody Museum, Cambridge; her assistant Miss Jessie Bell MacKenzie; Mrs. Ella L. Robinson, Librarian of the Southwest Museum; Dr. Lawrence C. Powell, Librarian of the University of California at Los Angeles; his most cooperative staff; and particularly one of its members, Miss Hilda M. Gray, whose expeditions into the equal mysteries of stacks and bibliographies saved me many hours of labor and I can’t guess how many blunders. Professor Hester and I add a warm word of thanks to Mrs. Alice De Lisle for assembling data, preparing charts, typing, filing, and research.

I was particularly indebted to Frank H. H. Roberts, Jr., of the Smithsonian Institution, the outstanding authority on early man in North America, for his reading, checking, and challenging of the manuscript, and to M. R. Harrington, who read and criticized my first draft. I also owed much to a number of men and women who read various chapters on which they had special knowledge: Edgar Anderson, Ernst Antevs, Robert J. Braidwood, Henry J. Bruman, Loren C. Easeley, James Gilluly, Harold S. Gladwin, M. R. Harrington, Robert F. Heizer, Earnest A. Hooton, Alex Krieger, Alfred L. Kroeber, Theodore D. McCown, Ernest S. Macgowan, Hallam L. Movius, Jr., and H. M. Wormington.

Both Professor Hester and I are especially obliged to Campbell Grant, amateur of anthropology as well as artist, for the many illustrations.

Finally, in the typing of the original manuscript and the checking of the many references I was fortunate in having the aid of Miss Frankie Porter and of Joe Pavalko.

Since we are not adding a repetitive bibliography to the almost four hundred references that we cite, we should like to list a few of the sources which we have found most useful and which should prove so to any reader who may wish to pursue further various aspects of the subject:

Frank H. H. Roberts, Jr., “Developments in the Problem of the North-American Paleo-Indian,” Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections, 100:51-116 (1940), and “The New World Paleo-Indian,” Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution for 1944, 403-433.

H. M. Wormington, Ancient Man in North America, 4th edit. (1957).

E. H. Sellards, Early Man in America (1952).

Raymond W. Murray, Man’s Unknown Ancestors (1943).

Early Man, a symposium edited by George Grant MacCurdy (1937).

The American Aborigines, a symposium edited by Diamond Jenness (1933).

George Grant MacCurdy, Human Origins (1924).

Miles C. Burkitt, The Old Stone Age (1933).

W. J. Sollas, Ancient Hunters and Their Modern Representatives (1924).

W. B. Wright, Tools and the Man (1939).

André Vayson de Pradenne, Prehistory (1940).

Edith Plant, Man’s Unwritten Past (1942).

Hallam L. Movius, Jr., Early Man and Pleistocene Stratigraphy in Southern and Eastern Asia (1944).

Earnest A. Hooton, Up from the Ape (1946).

W. W. Howells, Mankind in the Making (1959).

Richard F. Flint, Glacial Geology and the Pleistocene Epoch (1947) and Glacial and Pleistocene Geology (1957).

Roland B. Dixon, Racial History of Man (1923).

R. A. Daly, The Changing World of the Ice Age (1934).

Frederick E. Zeuner, Dating the Past, 4th edit. (1958).

Robert H. Lowie, The History of Ethnological Theory (1937).

Marcellin Boule and Henri V. Vallois, Fossil Men, trans. by Michael Bullock (1957).

Robert J. Braidwood, Prehistoric Men, 4th edit. (1959).

K. M.

March 1961

University of California

Los Angeles 24, Calif.

CONTENTS

Foreword ix

Preface xi

Chapter 1. 1

THIS SUDDEN NEW WORLD

A Secret Laboratory of Culture. Time-Tests by Travel, Tongues, and Physiques. From the Old Stone Age to the New. From Tools and Bones, Fossils and Rocks.

Chapter 2. 11

THE ROAD OF EARLY MAN

How New Was the New World? A Passage from Asia to North America. Men Out of Asia—and All the Continents. Bering Strait—Freeway to the New World. Three Roads to the South—with One Detour. Problematical Roads to the New World. Ware Dogma!

Chapter 3. 29

THE DEAD HAND OF THE AGES

Conflicts and Confusions. The Problem of the Ages. The Bronze Age—a Phantasm. Wood, Bone, and Shell Ages. Dividing the Stone Age—the Old and the New. Activities of the New Stone Age. Agriculture—Test of the Neolithic. First a Food Gatherer, Then a Hunter.

Chapter 4. 43

THE GREAT ICE AGE

Our Part of the Geologic Time Scale. The Glacial Hypothesis Appears. The End of the Great Ice Age. River Terraces and Beach Lines. The Cause of Glaciation.

Chapter 5. 61

EARLY MAN IN THE OLD WORLD

Archaeology, a New Science. Mortillet’s Cramping Classification. Enter the Eolith. Flake vs. Core Industries. Dating Early Man in Europe. True Tools—Deceptive Skulls. Ancestors from Heidelberg and Swanscombe? Putting the Neanderthal in His Place. Ancient Man in Java and China. “Giant Ape”—a Mythical Ancestor? “Java” Men in Africa and Europe? Man-Apes or Ape-Men in Africa. The Progressive Neanderthal. Radiocarbon Dates for the Mousterian. Homo sapiens—New or Old? Solutrean Flint Workers Invade Europe. Weapons and Tools—from Hand Ax to Arrowhead. The Danger in Universal Time Scales.

Chapter 6. 119

WHAT THE BONES HAVE TO SAY

Early Man as Adam’s Progeny. Science and Religion Embattled. Reaction, Led by Science. The Red Herring of the “Primitive Skull.” The Mystery of the Missing Bones. South America Provides the First Skulls. North American Skulls and Bones. Early Man Not Solely Mongoloid or Indian. Evidence from Middle America. New Finds in the United States.

Chapter 7. 143

THE ARTIFACTS OF EARLY MAN IN THE NEW WORLD

Artifacts from Heaven. The Folsom Point—Unique and Potent. Americans Hunted Animals Now Extinct. Two Other Folsom Sites—Clovis and Lindenmeier. Another Fine and Ancient Point. The Plainview Point. A New Point—and Sloths—in Gypsum Cave. Old Lake and River Sites. Sandia—Older Than Folsom. The Milling Stone Appears. A Paucity of Art Objects. Hand Axes in the Americas. Early Man in Mexico. From the Glacial to the Archaic. Back of 15,000 Years?

Chapter 8. 189

EARLY MAN AND THE GREAT EXTINCTION

A Twofold Problem. Myths and Mammoths. Archaeological Evidence of Recent Man and the Mastodon. Sloth and Camel in Dry Caves. The Folsom Bison Not Extinct? The Mystery of Extinction. More Radiocarbon Dates for Extinct Mammals.

Chapter 9. 207

PYGMIES, AUSTRALOIDS, AND NEGROIDS—BEFORE INDIANS?

The Mythical Indian Race. Racial Definition—the Field of the Physical Anthropologist. The Cephalic Index—and Others. What Skull Measurements Tell Us About Early Man. Europe Recognizes the Australoid in America. Hooton and Dixon on Early Invaders. A Potpourri of Races. Pygmies Before Australoids in the New World? Australoids, Negroids, and Men From Europe. No Mongoloids till 300 B.C. Siberian Caucasoids.

Chapter 10. 233

DID THE INDIAN INVENT OR BORROW HIS CULTURE?

Diffusion vs. Independent Invention. Bastian’s “Psychic Unity.” Complexity an Argument for Diffusion. Dispersion as Well as Diffusion. The Trap of Time. Escape from the Trap. Dead Alexander Invades America. Independent Inventions Neither Parallel Nor Diffused. What Diffusion of Plants and Art?

Chapter 11. 261

THE INDIAN IN AGRICULTURE

Inventions—Some New, Some Old. American Plants and Their Cultivation. When and Where Did Our Agriculture Begin? The Indians Accomplishment in Agriculture. How Old Is Corn?

Chapter 12. 277

PUZZLES, PROBLEMS AND HALF-ANSWERS

The Pendulum Swings. The Puzzle of the Skulls. The Puzzle of the Querns. The Puzzle of the Points. Was Our Early Man a Solutrean? Or Was the American Aurignacian or Magdalenian? Chopping Tools Instead of Hand Axes in Asia. Spinden’s Neolithic Blockade. Was the First Migration Interglacial? Geological Evidence and the Pluvials. In Sum.

References in the Text 295

References as to Illustrations 317

Index 323

ILLUSTRATIONS, MAPS, AND TABLES

The Treks of Early Man 4

Out of Noah’s Ark and Over Bering Strait 13

The Land-Bridge to the New World 18

A Great-Circle Route to North America 19

Migration Routes 22

Glaciers and Ice Fields as Barriers to Early Man 26 and 27

The Life Story of the Earth 44

The Ice Fields of the Last Glaciation 48

The Age of River Terraces 51

The Four Great Glaciations 55

Glaciation Through Warmth 58

The First Hand Ax Found and Recognized 62

Time Scale of Early Man 65

The “Dawn Stones” of Early Man 66

Paleolithic Types and Industries 70

Man’s First Perfected Tool 71

Ancient Implements of Bone and Wood 74

Java Man—Pithecanthropus erectus 82

Gigantopithecus—Giant Ancestor of Man? 83

Three Types of Old World Man 89

Man’s First Spear Points 90

Percussion Flaking 91

The Second Step in Flint Knapping 92

The Third Step—Pressure Flaking 93

Sculpture of the Old Stone Age 98

How Blades Were Split off a Core 100

Upper Paleolithic Tools 101

Three Aurignacian Types 102

The Meaning of Scrapers 103

The Tanged Point 105

A Laurel-Leaf Solutrean Point 106

A Tool to Make a Tool 107

Magdalenian Harpoon Head 108

The First Illustration of a Blade 108

Our First Machine, the Spear-Thrower 109

The First Paintings 110

Bowmen from Africa 112

Archers from Spain 113

Magdalenian Engravings 114

A Chart of Old Stone Age Cultures 116 and 117

A Spear Point Found Near Trenton, N.J. 144

The Lake Lahontan Point 145

The Making of a Folsom Point 147

The Minute, Ribbonlike Flaking of a Folsom 148

A Map of the Chief Sites in the Southwest 150

Burials in the Old World and the New 152

The Finest Flint Work of Early Man 155

Two Points of Plainview Type 157

Flint Knapping of the Old and New Stone Ages 158

A Gypsum Cave Point 159

Three Early Points from the Borders of Extinct Lakes 161

An Abilene Point 162

A Sandia Point Compared with Two Solutreans 165

Cochise Milling Stones 168

An Animal Head Carved from a Fossil Bone 171

Earliest Drawings by New World Man? 172

A Hand Ax of the Black’s Fork Culture 174

A Hand Ax and a Chopping Tool from Texas 176

A Broken Pestle from Gold-Bearing Gravels in California 179

The More Important Sites of Early Man in the New World 185

Mammals of the Ice Age in North and South America 190

Eight Thousand Years of the Great Extinction 196

Prehistoric and Modern Bison 199

The Mongoloid Fold 208

The Cephalic Index 211

The Dispersal of Head Types 212

Three Types of Skulls 214

Early Man vs. the Mongoloid 216

From the Old World and the New 228

From Burma to Melanesia to America? 235

Fishhooks from Tahiti and California 236

Diffusion or Independent Invention? 237

Circumpacific Navigation? 241

Bearded White Gods? 250

The Equatorial Counter Current 252

New World Plants and Products 263

The First Illustration of the Corn Plant 268

“Turkie Corne” 270

A Seventeenth Century Picture of Corn 271

Corn of 4,500 Years Ago 273

Eden Chipping in Siberia 282

Hand Axe and Chopping Tool Cultures of the Old World 286

A Chopping Tool of Northwestern India 287

EARLY MAN IN THE NEW WORLD

A NOTE ON NOTES

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

1
THIS SUDDEN NEW WORLD

Of all animals, we men are the only ones who wonder where we came from and where we will go. —W. W. HOWELLS

A Secret Laboratory of Culture

By the end of World War II, Timbuctoo was surprisingly close to Keokuk. Boys from Brooklyn stared up at Roman columns in the African desert, and Marines swapped a package of cigarettes for the spear of a stone-age man in New Guinea. Physically ours was indeed one world.

In a different sense it was one world before Columbus sailed, but a very limited world. Europe, North Africa, and portions of Asia made up all that Columbus knew and all that he expected to know. He intended to find a new road to the Indies; that was all. It would be a road across his own one world.

Then suddenly this world of his was two worlds. A new hemisphere appeared like a comet from outer space. It was a land and a people utterly unknown, utterly different. It had lived and grown for thousands upon thousands of years, sealed off to itself, unique. We search for some fit comparison, and find nothing adequate to describe the discovery of this secret laboratory of experiment in human culture.

Perhaps we should not have said that the New World had been “sealed off to itself.” We might better have said “sealed off from Europe.” The culture which the Spanish Conquistadores found in the Americas owed nothing to that world from which they had come. What the Americas owed to Asia is another matter—in fact, the matter of this book.

One thing is clear. The Americas were indebted to Asia for man himself. Man—even one type of man—did not originate here. A small primate, the extinct Notharctus, left his bones—but no descendants—in our Southwest. The New World has no great apes; there are no indications that it ever had any. Its monkeys are quite out of the running. They have four too many teeth, their nose is flat, and they are cursed with a prehensile tail.

The New World owed something more to Asia, of course; but how much, is uncertain. Most anthropologists believe that man crossed Bering Strait with a very meager kit of material culture. He brought, at various times, the spear-thrower, the bow and arrow, the dog, the boat, the strike-a-light, some kind of clothing, but not a great deal more. Many other things—pottery, weaving, agriculture, masonry, metallurgy—he had to invent for himself in the New World; at least, that is the general opinion. A few anthropologists say that men out of Asia brought quite an array of culture traits; but these migrants were late comers, and some of them crossed the Pacific by boat.

Only a few students now deny that men had been crossing over from Asia through twenty or more millenniums before the birth of Christ. Some of them were what we call Indians—most of them, no doubt; but, before the Indians came, there seem to have been other immigrants. It is the purpose of this book to tell you what is known or believed or hazarded about these earliest men of the New World.

There are two chief problems: When did these men come? and What were they like?

It is a curious fact that, if we look at the rich variety of men and languages and cultures which was spread from end to end of two whole continents when the European came, we get some vague idea of how long man had been in the western hemisphere but no idea at all of what he was like when he anticipated Columbus by discovering the New World. Through the haze of time, we can see the general outline of Indian civilization, and many details. Much of this is clear and concrete, most of it is natural and understandable in terms of our Americas, and all of it is striking and extraordinary. But, for our present purposes, the best it does is to tell us that many millenniums of time must have been required for its development. It tells us nothing about the men who preceded the Indian, the primitive savages who discovered the New World. These men who first journeyed from Bering Strait to Cape Horn were not the men who made the Maya civilization, and they came long, long before. But by studying both the Indian and his predecessors we may gain some hint of how long ago this was.

Time-Tests by Travel, Tongues, and Physiques

Somehow or other, by this route or that, the migrants from Asia drifted across to the Americas, down the two continents, and out to their uttermost limits. Of the many possible tests of man’s age in the New World—some good, some not so good—one of the least accurate is a guess at how long it would take men and women, encumbered with children, to walk—and to eat their way—from Bering Strait to Cape Horn. It has been estimated that they might have covered the 4,000 miles from Harbin, Manchuria, to Vancouver Island in from 20 to 1,000 years; the time involved really depends on how fast and in what direction those wild animals moved upon which early man depended for food. As the country widened out, then narrowed in Central America, and widened out once more, there is no knowing how long the trip to Cape Horn may have taken. Our migrants would have had to camp and hunt as they went, and at first they would have moved only as the pursuit of game spurred them on. There would have had to be time, too, for increase in numbers—among themselves as well as among later invaders—to create pressure of population, and force the earlier men to the peripheries of northeastern America, Florida, and Lower California, and push them across jungled Panama and Amazonia and toward the bleaker and less desirable parts of South America. The various invaders multiplied as they moved, and it is anybody’s guess how many people were crowded into America by 1492; one authority says 8,400,000, another 50,000,000 to 75,000,000.[1] It took much time, of course—many millenniums—to breed so many men and cover so wide a space.

Other things suggest a long sojourn for the Indian in the New World. Consider the matter of language—“the archives of history.” The Indian, writes N. C. Nelson, “had been at home in the New World long enough to have evolved about 160 linguistic stocks or language families, with 1,200 or more dialectic subdivisions.”[2] Alfred L. Kroeber says that North and South America “contain more native language families than all the remainder of the world.”[3] Some of this diversity could be due to migrations from different linguistic areas of the Old World. It might also be accounted for by the theory of Franz Boas that among early primitive peoples there was great diversity of language, and that single tongues began to spread widely only when conquering and proselyting groups won a certain amount of power and dominion.[4] John Harrington, an American linguistic authority, believes that the diversity of Indian speech argues a very long residence in the New World—“at least 20,000 years, perhaps three times that.”[5] Edgar B. Howard states: “Considering that the languages of the New World lack evidence, outside of Eskimo, of any identification with Old World languages, the conclusion appears to be that human contact between the two continents was very remote.”[6] If there is no such identification, then even the last migrants came at a very early date indeed, or else all the tribal relatives who were left behind in the Old World perished without linguistic trace. It is possible, of course, that resemblances have merely not been recognized.

In addition to differentiation of language, there is differentiation of physique. When we in the United States think of the Indian, we think of a tall man with high cheekbones, a hawk-nose, and a bronze-red skin. Actually the American Indian is probably more varied in height, face, and color than the whole White racial stock.[7] More than that, his somatic constitution—the inner man in a physical sense—varies greatly. By 1492 the Indian had adapted himself to eight different climates from arctic to tropic, from arid to humid, from sea level to the 14,000-foot heights of Peru. This would take time, much time. Albrecht Penck, the great European glacialist, thinks 25,000 years hardly long enough.[8]

The civilizations which the Indian developed in the Americas—the Maya, Aztec, and Inca cultures—provide another test of how long man had been in the New World before Columbus came. This test is no more exact than those we have already mentioned, but it suggests quite a long sojourn.

From the Old Stone Age to the New

While the physical man was adapting himself to all manner of climates, the mental man dragged himself up from the hunting life of the Old Stone Age to the invention of writing and the perfecting of an accurate calendar. On the way—and as slow, necessary steps in his progress—he developed agriculture, and invented or perfected the arts and crafts of pottery, weaving, dyeing, metallurgy, sculpture, poetry, painting, architecture, city planning. In his agriculture he utilized irrigation, discovered fertilizers, and developed a great many exclusively American plants which now supply more than half of the world’s provender. He was probably the first to write numbers effectively through the use of zero and numerical position. He practiced trepanning—the removal of a piece of skull bone to relieve pressure on the brain—and he discovered how to use certain medicines and narcotics. In his textiles he employed all the weaves known to us today. He contrived efficient methods of government. He proliferated into 368 major tribal groups, and developed fifteen culture centers of distinct individuality.[9] In the United States he left 100,000 mounds as the product of one of his cultures; in Middle America, 4,000 ceremonial cities of stone. He practiced most types of religion except atheism. Certain things that he made resemble things of the Old World; most are peculiar to him and his life. Of Indian culture traits Clark Wissler remarks that “the range in variety and individuality seems even greater in aboriginal America than in the primitive Old World.”[10]

Progress is slow in the stone age. It seems to have been particularly slow in the Old Stone Age, or paleolithic period, when man spent half a million to a million years learning to chip stone and hunt and gather food efficiently. Things went much faster in the New Stone Age, or neolithic period, when he was learning to cultivate plants and make pottery and polish stone tools. To move from the beginnings of agriculture to the beginnings of metallurgy, which superseded the neolithic, may have taken as little as 700 years in the Old World and certainly not much more than 4,000 or 5,000.

Progress was slower in the New World. The Indian reached the neolithic stage later, and he may have stayed in it longer than man did in the Old World. This can probably be blamed on the peculiar fauna of the western hemisphere. In all of the Americas there were no suitable animals to domesticate except the dog—which the Indian probably brought with him—and those dubious objects of husbandry, the turkey, the bee, the Muscovy duck, the llama, the alpaca, the vicuña, and the guinea pig. Because there were no sheep or cattle, the Indian had no pastoral life and no milk and butter. He had no beasts of burden except the dog and the llama; he invented no wheeled cart. It was not entirely his own fault that he remained essentially a man of the stone age even though, toward the last, he had perfected a metallurgy of copper, silver, gold, platinum, and bronze.

The story of the Indian’s spread through the Americas, his variation in language and physique, and his building of the civilizations of Peru, Central America, and Mexico argues that he came to the New World many millenniums before the birth of Christ. You may point out that the argument is too general, too inexact in outcome, but you must remember that behind the Indian lies an earlier migrant. We are on somewhat firmer ground when we turn to the evidence we have of this migrant’s tools, his hearths, and his bones. For sometimes they are related to the fossils of extinct mammals and—more important—to certain kinds of earth, charcoal and rock that can be dated.

From Tools and Bones, Fossils and Rocks

The tools and the hearths and the fossils are plentiful, and some years ago this proof of man’s antiquity seemed to be enough. The great and spectacular mammals whose remains were associated with early man in the Americas, as well as in Europe, were thought to have vanished with the glaciers of the Great Ice Age. Therefore, early man in the Americas must also have lived in that period. Now, however, a number of scientists believe that the American mastodon, along with a number of other animals that are now extinct in the New World, survived the Great Ice Age here. This would still leave us with an American whose antiquity is quite respectable.

The best proof of the age of early man was for a long time geological. Archaeologists dated man by the earth and rocks in which they found his tools or his bones. Unfortunately, they had not too much geological evidence in the Americas. In the past ten years, however, radiocarbon (of which you will learn more later) has made it possible to know much about when man reached the New World and where he lived.