Early Man in the New World

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]

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]

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.

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.

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.

8
EARLY MAN AND THE GREAT EXTINCTION

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.

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?