Henry Fairfield Osborn once dated the European advent of the Aurignacians at about 27,000 years ago, Nelson at 20,000, Mather at 15,000.[22] Zeuner, however, believes they flourished from about 100,000 until 75,000 years ago.[23] Dating the last of the glaciers was the key to this dispute. Radiocarbon dates now suggest that the Aurignacian period survived in Europe and the Near East until 18,000 to 34,000 years ago.[24] Its beginnings may well extend beyond the range of this method.

The Aurignacians are a variegated lot, which argues further for subdividing them. One specimen, the tall, high-domed Cro-Magnon, is variously credited with producing the modern European man, the Eskimo, and even the Indian of America. Another specimen, the Grimaldi from the Riviera, is distinctly Negroid. Another—from hints in several places—seems to be Mongoloid. Apparently, the Aurignacians were almost variegated enough to have peopled the modern world. But almost as much could be said for the inhabitants of an upper level in the Choukoutien Cave near Peking. There, in one spot, they divide nicely into Negroid, Eskimoid, and Melanesoid.

Solutrean Flint Workers Invade Europe

Toward the close of Aurignacian times comes a remarkable people called the Solutreans. They appear quite suddenly as invading hunters, and they disappear as suddenly. Their culture does not evolve out of the Aurignacian, and it does not evolve into the next culture, the Magdalenian. The Solutreans stayed a relatively short time in Europe; Braidwood once gave them 10,000 years, but Mather and Peake and Fleure only 500.[25] Guesses as to when they arrived vary as widely. Peake and Fleure think it was about 12,000 years ago, while Zeuner puts them back to 67,000 years before our time.[26] Radiocarbon dates indicate only 18,000 years ago.

Where the Solutreans came from is another of the unsolved riddles of archaeology. Until recently, they were generally supposed to have come out of western Asia, because the most primitive of their remarkable tools were found plentifully in Hungary and sparsely in western Europe. For sixty years Solutrean points were found no farther south than northern and eastern Spain. Now, however, points of Solutrean type have begun to appear in North Africa, Egypt, and Kenya Colony. Here they are jumbled together in the same strata with Mousterian points and the tanged points of the Aterians, a purely African people. Hence certain archaeologists are inclined to believe that the Solutreans may have originated in Africa as an offshoot of the Mousterians (see illustration, page 105).

In spite of their fondness for the chase, the Solutreans of Europe continued the interest that the Aurignacians had shown in art—or so at least certain authorities who admire the relief carvings of Le Roc in France tell us. But their chief distinction is that they knew the craft of pressure flaking typical of Folsom and Eden cultures in the New World. The Solutreans are represented mainly by thin, willow- or laurel-shaped tools. By pressing—not pounding—a piece of bone or wood against the surface of the flint they flaked off slivers across the tool in a way that no one equaled in the Old World until the Egyptians had entered the neolithic and agricultural age many thousands of years later. The Solutreans also made small points with a tang at one side (see illustrations, pages 105 and 165). This was for the purpose of fastening the flint to a shaft; but whether it was used with a bow or a spear-thrower is not clear. (Incidentally, points of somewhat this shape appear in the New World.) At about the same time, the Aterians of North Africa used a very crude tanged arrowhead; and in the late Aurignacian the Font Robert point with its rude tang appeared. The superior spear point of the Solutreans seems the natural product of a people who were particularly active and energetic in the chase. In a single camping place they left 35,000 tools of flint.

Following these Asiatics, a people whose culture was very similar to that of the Aurignacians appeared in Europe. They were the Magdalenians, and they carried on the general traits of the men of Aurignac and added to them (see illustration, page 101). They made better blades and burins. (Long, slim blades of the Aurignacian-Magdalenian type have been found in Mexico, and there are burins in Alaska and northern Asia.) The burins helped the Magdalenians to make new implements of bone such as needles, fishhooks, harpoons, and spear-throwers. Besides all this, they brought to perfection the arts of painting and sculpture which used to be too much credited to the Aurignacians (see illustrations, pages 110 and 114). The magnificent polychromes of the Magdalenians in the Lascaux and Font-de-Gaume Caves in France and the Altamira Cave in Spain testify to the genius of this people. The customary dispute exists about their time of activity. One authority puts it from 11,500 to 8,500 years ago, and another from 70,000 to 25,000.[27] Radiocarbon indicates a probable range of 17,000 to 10,000 years ago.

Weapons and Tools—from Hand Ax to Arrowhead

One of the many mysteries of prehistory is who invented the bow and arrow. The smaller Solutrean points argue that their makers used a bow and invented this primitive but effective machine. But since the bow was made of wood, it has not been preserved in the caves and terraces that spared the bone spear-throwers of the Magdalenians and the flint projectiles; so for evidence we must fall back on the paintings of primitive man. We find the spear-thrower portrayed in South Africa but not in Europe. The newer weapon, the bow, is on the walls of rock shelters in southern and eastern Spain. At first these paintings were thought to be neolithic. Later they were credited to the Magdalenians, in spite of the fact that the use of the human form and the bizarre and almost humorous caricature contrast with the subjects and the style of Magdalenian art. Now they are generally credited to the Capsians, a people from northern Africa. The paintings resemble prehistoric work from Rhodesia and the Tassili Mountains of southern Algeria, and also the historic and protohistoric designs of the Bushmen (see illustrations, pages 111 and 112).

The history of even the simplest of man’s tools from the hand ax to the arrowhead is long, interesting, and puzzling. It is hard to say what many of the tools were used for, or indeed what they were not used for. The hand ax would obviously be best for grubbing out roots and tubers, yet, like most of the implements of early man, it must have served a variety of other purposes also. Until the Mousterians began to make spear points, 90,000 to 150,000 years ago, all man’s implements—even what we call his scrapers—were pretty generalized. Later, with the Aurignacians and the Magdalenians, came artifacts that were obviously blades or knives or chisels or harpoons. The tool to make other tools appeared, and this we must add to the list of man’s prehistoric achievements: speech, fire making, stone chipping, pressure flaking, and carving and painting.

The attempt of science to record and interpret the story of early man in the Old World has been an extraordinary triumph over the obstacles of half a million years of prehistoric darkness. Hundreds of men and women, laboring long and ingeniously, have won to an almost miraculous success, and the end is not yet in sight.

The work has suffered, of course, from many a human limitation. Not the least of these has been the desire to interpret knowledge too quickly, to freeze it into forms and classifications, and to stand doggedly by those forms and classifications when they have become weakened by new knowledge. The student and the intelligent layman have been confused by all this. They have been particularly confused—as we think we can show—when it comes to early man in the New World.

The Danger in Universal Time-Scales

When we apply to the paleolithic cultures of the rest of the world the names of the European culture sequence—Abbevillian, Acheulean, Mousterian, Aurignacian, Solutrean, Magdalenian—we produce acrimonious argument and not much more. These terms are of no use in the rest of the world except as a description of types of tools. In parts of Africa, for example, Mousterian and Aurignacian objects are found together; in other parts, Mousterian and Solutrean. In the first case, the Aurignacian includes primitive pottery; in the second, Aurignacian is missing altogether.

Tied in with the mistake of setting up prehistory in Europe as a frame for prehistory elsewhere, lies the worse mistake of trying to read general time in terms of things and ideas which are purely local. The Paleolithic, Neolithic, Bronze, and Stone Ages mean less than nothing as a dating machine for more than a single locality. “The Stone Age,” says Childe, “ended before 3500 B.C. in Mesopotamia, about 1600 B.C. in Denmark, and A.D. 1800 in New Zealand.”[28] Postglacial means one thing in Germany and another in Sweden, one thing in Buffalo and another in Winnipeg.

The impossibility of measuring time and space together should be clear enough if you consider merely the matter of how the invention of writing in the Near East is related to written records in other parts of the world. Again we quote Childe: “In England they take us back to A.D. 40, in France to 60 B.C., in Italy a little beyond 500 B.C., in Greece before 700, but nowhere in our continent before 1000. In China written records are available as early as 1400 B.C., in Asia Minor to 1800, only in Egypt and Mesopotamia to 3000 B.C.”[29] Thus the use of writing would give us no time scale for the Old World. Fortunately, we have never tried to date the history of nations in terms of an Illiterate Age, a Writing Age, and a Printing Age.

There is similar difficulty over the fossils of extinct mammals which help to date man in Europe. They do fairly well as an index to whether a tool was used in a glacial or an interglacial period. But they sometimes create scientific disagreements when they are used to place the tool in one glacial period or another. And when we reach the crucial time of the end of the last glaciation, and the extinction of the last great beasts, we are in most serious trouble. Here we are dealing with tens of thousands of years instead of hundreds of thousands, and the evidence is simply not that sharp. We do not know when Magdalenian man saw and painted his last mammoth. The mammoths died by inches—or by miles, geographically speaking. They were still alive in one area when they had died out in another. And when we reach the New World, we have still less basis for setting our watches by the fossils—as will be seen in a later chapter.

Our knowledge of early man in the Old World is still shifting and developing. There has never been too much agreement—as the charts on pages 116 and 117 demonstrate in the area of time—and there probably never will be. We have risked this somewhat oversimplified sketch of a much disputed and complex subject only to provide some sort of background for the facts, the theories, and the dogmas that are involved in the story of early man in the New World.

6
WHAT THE BONES HAVE TO SAY

Prophesy upon these bones. —EZEKIEL 37:4

Early Man as Adam’s Progeny

Early man is only about a century old—in the New World as well as the Old. While a Frenchman theorized about hand axes and the river terraces of the Somme, a German discovered in Missouri the bones of a mastodon which had been stoned and burned by man. That was 1838. Within twenty years early man had won his title to glacial antiquity in Europe. It took ninety, however, for him to get a really sound and solid claim to even 10,000 years in our hemisphere. The study of early man in the Americas has suffered from blindness and prejudice and also from ardor and infatuation. It has run afoul of the dogmatism of science quite as much as the dogmatism of religion.

Before nineteenth century science began to talk of glacial man as a possible and provable fact, there was little or no churchly antagonism. The religious had long shown a fondness for what they called antiquarianism. To find ancient things did no violence to the Bible. Adam was still the first man, and any descendant of his who left stone tools about or who carved mysterious signs on rocks was merely “antediluvian”: he had simply missed the boat. In 1690 the Reverend Cotton Mather called the carvings on Dighton Rock in Massachusetts “the wonderful works of God,” and, before those signs were proved to be of sixteenth century origin, more than 600 books and articles had been written about them. To Mather the fossils of extinct mammals proved the validity of the Bible. “There were giants in the earth in those days.” In 1712 he described the “17-foot thighbone” and the four-pound tooth of a mastodon.[1]

In this spirit of sweet reasonableness the pursuit of early man went forward for one hundred and fifty years. When the Dutch traveler Peter Kalm wrote in 1772 of certain curious discoveries in New Jersey, he had no idea that he had come on something which, N. C. Nelson was to declare, “hinted strongly of ‘Quaternary age.’”[2] Though the Mound Builders seemed much more ancient to General Rufus Putnam than they now seem to us, they were still post-Adamites when he mapped the prehistoric earthworks of Marietta, Ohio, in 1788. We doubt that Thomas Jefferson worried one way or the other about biblical sanction when he assumed the role of first archaeologist of America by excavating a Virginia mound in 1784, and reporting on it in his Notes on Virginia. Like another deist, Voltaire, he suggested that the origins of the American Indians might be determined by comparing their various languages with the languages of Asiatic peoples.

There was still no conflict between religion and the science of man when word came from Missouri in 1838 of the first linking of the fossils of extinct animals with signs of human activity. “Dr.” A. C. Koch, a German who collected fossils and sold them to museums, dug up the bones of a mastodon. Further, Koch found evidence of fire among the bones, and also numerous stones which seemed to have been carried to the spot and thrown at the unhappy animal as it stood bogged in a swamp. Two years later, in the same state, Koch came upon another mastodon as well as a spear point lying beneath it. From a chain of descriptions of the weapon it may be that Koch found the first of those unique fluted spear points that were to turn up ninety years later among the fossils of extinct bison and mammoths.[3]

While Koch was circusing his mastodon up and down the country as the “Missourium,” the first scientific paper appeared on a New World find of human skulls and the fossils of extinct animals. This was the 1842 report of the Danish naturalist P. W. Lund on the Lagoa Santa caves of Brazil.[4] Four years later M. W. Dickeson reported a petrified human pelvis from Natchez, Mississippi; in 1849 the British scientist Sir Charles Lyell described his visit to the spot, and in 1863 he pointed out that the pelvis was quite as fossilized as some mammoth bones that had been found near it.[5]

Neither of these finds aroused any more enthusiasm or controversy than Koch’s. It was all very curious and interesting but perfectly acceptable. There was no question of the men and the elephants being particularly ancient—just antediluvian. Agassiz’s glacial hypothesis was hardly known, and Darwin had not yet turned back time past the Garden of Eden. Adam and the Bible were safe enough.

Science and Religion Embattled

But by the time the next few finds began to be discussed, the spiritual and intellectual climate had changed. A wind off the glaciers chilled the enthusiasm of the churchly, and banished bland talk of “antediluvian antiquities.” Agassiz and Darwin and early man had to go down together or triumph at the expense of Genesis. The issue was joined. The churchman grew bitter and blind; the scientist, ardent and uncritical.

Of the many conflicts and controversies, the most celebrated raged around the Calaveras skull. Except for the fact that in this case the churchmen seem to have been right and the scientists wrong, it was characteristic of most of the disputes over early man. Fittingly enough, the skull was found in the California county which Mark Twain made famous about the same time by his own discovery of the celebrated jumping frog. There is no question that a mine operator with a reputation for veracity far superior to Mark Twain’s Truthful James found the thing in a shaft 130 feet below the surface. There is also no question that the skull, with its heavy brow ridges, was fossilized and encrusted with the kind of gravel that distinguishes California mines. Unfortunately, the skull proved too much—or seemed to. It lay under four strata of lava and three of gold-bearing gravels, and therefore belonged at the very least to the Pliocene period which ended some million years ago—unless, of course, a practical joker had salted the mine. Some scientists accepted the skull. Some preachers and religious editors were content with evidence from Holy Writ, but most of them preferred the practical joke argument. Various wits and various victims were involved, but the most popular explanation held that the mine operator was known as an agnostic, and that certain miners thought it would be amusing to plant faked evidence for him to embrace—which presumes a considerable amount of churchly enthusiasm in the miners of Calaveras County. Science asked where the miners could have got so ancient and fossilized a skull, and a few scientists and a good many Protestants replied that the name of the county had come from the Spanish word for skulls calaveras because whole skeletons and “uneasy crania” were constantly turning up in its soil and its river beds.

The controversy raged through the 1870’s and gained new vigor in 1880, when J. D. Whitney, a leading geologist of his day and director of the California Geological Survey, brought out Auriferous Gravels of the Sierra Nevada of California. In the fourteen years since the discovery of the skull, Whitney had studied the region thoroughly and gathered data from everyone who remembered the circumstances of the find. He concluded that the skull had been discovered in situ, and had not been planted. Some twenty-five years later, when the religious fury of the attacks had subsided, Aleš Hrdlička produced craniums from the caves of California that were quite as fossilized as the Calaveras skull and showed the same heavy brow ridges. He had to admit, however, that the ridges of the Calaveras skull extended clear across the eyes and nose—“a much less common form.”[6]

In the days of Queen Victoria scientists were sometimes as extravagant in their claims for early man in the Americas as the fundamentalists were absurd in their attacks upon him. Fiorino Ameghino, a museum director of Buenos Aires, got a hearing for what he called evidences of Argentine man in an age when the mammals had only just reached ascendancy. He made his initial discovery at nineteen; that was in 1873. For forty or fifty years he went on making find after find and raising controversy after controversy. The fossilized bones of man and mammal that he discovered at nineteen he placed in the Pliocene Epoch, prior to the Great Ice Age; geologists claimed that the stratum where he made his finds is of the Ice Age or later. Much the same criticism applied to most of Ameghino’s discoveries. He set up four primitive types of early man, based on the discovery of various bones, and placed the first in the Miocene Epoch more than fifteen million years ago. The geologists again put his strata in the Glacial period. Anthropologists and paleontologists were quite as annoyed as the geologists when Ameghino made Argentina the center from which all human and mammalian forms spread over the world.

Yet, in spite of Ameghino’s extravagant claims and others that were somewhat less extravagant, belief in early man persisted and grew. There was considerable stir when, between 1872 and 1899, C. C. Abbott and others discovered some primitive stone implements[7] (see illustration, page 144), parts of a human thigh-bone, jaw, and skull, in glacial gravels near Trenton, New Jersey. There were more finds at other sites, and by 1890 it was generally conceded by scientists that man had invaded the Americas during or close to the time of the last glaciers. The Protestant church subsided into a quietude which was not to be broken until the Scopes “monkey trial” of 1925.

Reaction, Led by Science

In the nineties—which was roughly the beginning of more intense and thorough scientific study in the whole field of American prehistory—a reaction set in. Early man and his sponsors were violently attacked—not by the church but by certain scientists. Thomas Wilson, Curator of the National Museum in Washington, and F. W. Putnam of the Peabody Museum at Harvard, who had long championed early man, were furiously set upon by W. H. Holmes, then of the Field Museum of Chicago, as well as Hrdlička, of the National Museum. Taking advantage of every error, every failure to weigh evidence with the most scrupulous care, and using new knowledge in physical anthropology, Holmes and Hrdlička routed their opponents completely. How completely may be judged from the fact that when it became proper to issue the Putnam Anniversary Volume at Putnam’s seventieth birthday, not one of the twenty-five essays in anthropology dedicated to him dealt with the thesis of which he had been one of the chief champions—early man in the Americas.

Men discovered new sites, but, if they had the temerity to announce their finds, their work was ignored or scouted. For twenty-five or thirty years, as Frank H. H. Roberts, Jr., writes, the subject of early man in the New World became virtually taboo, and no scientist desirous of a successful career dared intimate that “he had discovered indications of a respectable antiquity for the Indian.” Opponents of early man had definitely retarded progress in this field.[8]

From close to the turn of the century Hrdlička was the leader among these opponents just as he was the leader among the physical anthropologists of his day and a man of the greatest ability. For about forty years he wrote much, and he wrote effectively. His long series of papers were studded with denials of the antiquity of man on this continent. Beginning in 1907 with his Skeletal Remains Suggesting or Attributed to Early Man in North America, he demolished one American skull after another. He tore to shreds the evidence by which Ameghino pushed man back millions of years in Argentina.[9] His most effective argument against North American claims was to produce the craniums of Mound Builders or even Indians of historic times which duplicated finds of early man. He stigmatized skull after skull as “not in the least primitive,” “essentially modern,” “not to be distinguished from the modern Indian.” Unfortunately, as he grew older, his attacks on spurious evidence developed into violent opposition to practically all evidence. As late as 1942, he saw his opponents as men characterized by “wishful thinking, imagination, opinionated amateurism, and desire for self-manifestation.”[10] He recognized no prejudice on his own side.

Yet, against the harm that Hrdlička did science by intimidating its students, we must set a practical value which Earnest A. Hooton—himself as great a physical anthropologist as Hrdlička, but a more receptive one on the subject of early man—has well expressed:

It is to the everlasting credit of professional American anthropology that it has not succumbed to the itch for ancestors by giving recognition to the many dubious and spurious finds whose claims have too often received a facile acceptance abroad. No one can deny that this salutary state of affairs is due almost entirely to the righteous scientific iconoclasm of one formidable veteran, Dr. Hrdlička.[11]

The Red Herring of the “Primitive Skull”

It was Hrdlička’s misfortune—and the misfortune of science—that until almost the end of his life he refused to meet his opponents on common ground. He was right enough in challenging early man as an inhabitant of America 200,000 years ago, but he challenged him in terms that applied or seemed to apply to any man earlier than the Indian of three or four thousand years ago. Hrdlička failed to define properly the thing he was attacking. He merely prated of the lack of “primitive skulls.”

That was not the issue. Except for Ameghino, scientists of the twentieth century were not claiming to have found Abbevillian or even Neanderthal man in the New World. They were merely saying that certain skulls and certain tools might go back to the end of glacial times or perhaps a little earlier. This was no earlier than the Cro-Magnon of Europe, and the Cro-Magnon was modern enough in physical type. So were the skulls found with glacial animals and paleolithic tools in the upper Choukoutien Cave near Peking. As Hooton puts it, the glacial antiquity of a New World skeleton cannot be disproved by “the modernity of its anatomical characters alone. Homo sapiens was full-fledged in the Old World before the end of the Glacial Period. Late Glacial entrants into the Americas need not prove their age by an array of archaic and simian physical features. The acid test of their antiquity must be geological.”[12] Roberts points out that opponents of early man in America “demand a more primitive physical type as evidence for some antiquity in the New World than was living in the Old at a comparable time.”[13]

As pressure of evidence and opinion piled up in favor of early man, Hrdlička began to weaken a bit. In 1937 he admitted that, compared with Europe, the situation in America “is not so simple. It is complicated by the fact ... that individual skulls of recent and even present-day American aborigines not seldom show features that are more primitive than the average in the white races. There are American skulls of recent date that are practically replicas of the Magdalenian and even of some of the upper Aurignacian skulls of the Old World and there are occasional skulls that in some of their characteristics remind one even of the Neanderthals.”[14] In other words, a skull of an early American man which resembles a skull of a historic Indian may also resemble the skull of a glacial man of the Old World.

By 1923—after the harm had been done—Hrdlička was willing to concede that migration to the Americas began “somewhere between possibly 10,000 or at most 15,000 years ago and the dawn of the protohistoric period in the Old World.”[15] Yet he still clung to his Indian skull, and wrote in one of his last papers: “There is as yet not a specimen of a skull or bone that could be accepted as that of any earlier or different being than the American natives of protohistoric or historic times.”[16] Even when a skull had the heavy brow ridges and the long narrow shape of the Australoid—and the Neanderthal—Hrdlička gave no ground. Such notable examples as the skulls from the Lagoa Santa caves of Brazil—which we shall describe later—were merely “a peculiarly American variant.”[17] He got only so far as granting that American man had a relationship with the Cro-Magnon and the Magdalenian, but he hinted at this relationship merely in man’s “early Old World ancestry.”[18]

The Mystery of the Missing Bones

So far as skeletal relics are concerned, the friends of early man in the New World would have been at something of a disadvantage even if Hrdlička had been less vocal and less violent. Until the edge of the Christian era, physical evidence is scanty in the Americas. The bones of early man are few and far between. The mastodons, elephants, sloths, camels, bison, and horses that once thronged the plains and plateaus south of the glaciers have left us a great sufficiency of skulls and teeth, vertebrae and ribs, leg bones and toe bones, and even some skin, hair, and feces. We have uncountable skeletons of small animals that live on today. But the fossil beds are very short indeed on man, and even the dry caves help us only a little. In the two continents there are not more than twenty-five finds of the bones of early man which must be considered seriously, and some of these are not a little dubious.

It may seem strange that thousands of spear points, scrapers, and arrowheads can be identified as the products of early man while we find so few of the skulls that held the brains which conceived them. It may seem stranger still—unbelievably strange—that, while the five- and six-foot skeletons of man have disappeared, there remain to us in excellent shape the delicate bones of fox and gopher, even the pack rat. We may believe, however, that, though the Americas thronged with animals that had been there for millions of years, there were relatively few men. Northeast Asia, from which they had come, was not a place to nurture great tribes, and to send forth migrants by the hundreds of thousands. The first men in America had to live by hunting and gathering, and hunters and gatherers do not multiply like agricultural peoples. Against hundreds of thousands of large animals—millions upon millions of small fry—we can place only some tens of thousands of men. To find a human skeleton among such a welter of animal bones would be like finding a single needle in the combined haystacks of all the Middle West. Further, did early man leave his body where we should be likely to find it? If he did not cremate his dead, then he literally exposed them to the elements—whether they lay on a scaffold like the dead of the Plains Indians or were buried in the earth—and the elements did a good job in scattering or hiding them. A great deal of water has flowed over land-bridges since the glaciers began to melt, and a great deal of silt and gravel and loess has spread deep over river bottoms and even high plateaus, burying the bones of early man beneath it.

What do we find in the way of human bones? Not too much, compared with the many skulls and skeletons of the Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon in Europe. They range from the top of a cranium or part of a pelvis to a few complete skeletons, some properly buried. They are not all of equal value. The best, however, tell us something about how certain early Americans may have looked. By that, at least, they contribute more than the thousands of stone tools which early man left behind him.

South America Provides the First Skulls

So far as anthropology is concerned, it was a busy and important decade that ended in 1850. Prescott’s histories of the conquest of Mexico and Peru, and John L. Stephens’s two books of travel and study in the Maya area had become best-sellers. Lord Kingsborough was publishing his nine-volume Antiquities of Mexico. Boucher de Perthes was finding additional hand axes, and beginning to write upon them. More important for our purposes is the report of the Danish naturalist Lund that he found the skulls of men mingled with the bones of extinct mammals in the Lagoa Santa caves of Brazil.

It would be pleasant to think that Lund left Europe in 1835 imbued with enthusiasm for the discoveries of Boucher de Perthes, but this is highly unlikely. The Frenchman and his theories were pretty generally ignored by science until the late fifties. We don’t know why Lund chose to explore caves in the state of Minas Gerais, north of Rio de Janeiro, but in the end it was a fortunate choice. He examined over two hundred caves, and in six of them he found human remains. For eight or nine years he was dubious about his finds, but he was convinced in 1844 when he found human bones mingled with the bones of extinct animals, all equally fossilized.

Though it was the bones of the mammals that convinced Lund of the antiquity of the Lagoa Santa craniums, it is certain peculiarities of the skulls themselves that have given them a very special importance in the whole argument for early man in the New World. These skulls were long and narrow, while those of most Indians and other Mongoloid peoples are relatively short and broad. Again in contrast to the men of northern Asia, the Lagoa Santa had very heavy brow ridges; their skulls were straight-sided and had keeled vaults. The total effect was archaic. This was to prove a basic type to which all the later finds of the bones of early man could be related.

Dr. Lund’s bones were not received with too much enthusiasm. If they had belonged to any animal other than man, says Sir Arthur Keith, “their antiquity would never have been questioned, but being human all sorts of doubts were raised as to how and when they became mixed with the remains of extinct animals.”[19] Many years passed before the Lagoa Santa skulls began to win respectful attention and final acceptance as other long and narrow skulls with even stronger brow ridges turned up under similar conditions.

No one worked in the Lagoa Santa regions for almost a century. In 1933 members of the Academy of Science of Minas Gerais excavated a neighboring cave called Confins. They found the molars of a young mastodon under a few feet of dirt inside the entrance. Deeper down and farther back, they discovered fossils of horse, giant sloth, mastodon, and other extinct mammals. Finally they came on a nearly complete human skeleton. They had cut through a layer of stalagmitic material and more than six feet of alluvial soil to reach the bones of Confins man, and so they knew that he had died during or just before a period of great moisture. They write of this time as the Post-Pleistocene, or Pluvial. Post-Pleistocene means, of course, Postglacial, and Pluvial means a time of much rain. Some scientists push the Pluvial back into the Glacial, but the finders of Confins man prefer to date him at “a few thousands of years ago.” The discoverers of the Confins skull write of it as “one of the most primitive types of Homo sapiens ... yet discovered in South America.”[20] But this statement seems based more on the conditions under which it was found than on its shape. The skull is long and narrow, with heavy brow ridges and a low forehead; but it is not straight-sided, and its vault is not keeled. It is somewhat less archaic than the Lagoa Santa craniums.

Certain skulls from Ecuador seem much more archaic than any of those found in Brazil. These are the Punin specimen found in 1923, and the group discovered at Paltacalo almost twenty years before.[21] Associated with the fossils of extinct horse, camel, and mastodon, they have all the peculiarities of the Lagoa Santa specimens, and in addition they have retreating foreheads, lower vaults, and unusually large teeth.

Far down in Chile long-headed skulls have been found in association with fossils of extinct horse and ground sloth. They are not so extreme in appearance as the Lagoa Santa skulls, though they resemble them. As for their age, Junius Bird, who made the discovery in caves just north of the Strait of Magellan, reckons—in what he calls “a few degrees better than an outright guess”—that they belonged to men who were given cremation burials not more than 5,400 years ago. We now have radiocarbon dates for such caves from 6,500 to 9,000 years ago. Bird did not venture to guess how many years it took these people to travel the 11,000 miles from the strait of Vitus Jonasson Bering to the strait of Ferdinand Magellan.[22]

North American Skulls and Bones

Since the discovery of human bones in glacial gravels near Trenton, New Jersey, three skeletons of some importance and a number of skulls that resemble those of Lagoa Santa and Punin have been found in the United States.

The three finds of complete skeletons made in Minnesota between 1931 and 1935 have aroused much debate. All three were encountered in road-making or the digging of gravel, and scientists were not present at their discovery. A. E. Jenks’s study of these skeletons has done much to clarify them.[23] “Minnesota man”—really a girl—was found in a geological stratum marked by varves, or thin layers of clay, laid down in successive years by a glacial lake about 11,000 years ago. Antevs believes her body was thrust into this stratum at a later time; but other geological authorities, including Kirk Bryan, Paul MacClintock, G. F. Kay, and M. M. Leighton, deny it and present rather convincing evidence.[24] Hooton unhesitatingly expresses the opinion that “this discovery establishes a very strong probability, though not an absolute certainty, of the existence of Homo sapiens in the New World in Late Glacial times.”[25] Artifacts found with the skeleton—including part of a knife made from an antler—do not give us a radiocarbon date. In the gravel of Browns Valley, where the second skeleton was found, there were also spear points (see illustration, page 158). From geological evidence connected with this find—the most generally accepted of the three in Minnesota—a date between 8,000 and 12,000 years ago seems plausible. The third skeleton, Sauk Valley man, has been the center of much dispute. Some geologists believe that the depth of the occurrence and the presence of a certain sand within the skull argue a considerable antiquity. Like the owner of the Punin skull, “Minnesota man” had a primitive type of teeth, larger even than those of some Old World paleolithic specimens. Jenks and L. A. Wilford find twenty-six archaic traits in the Sauk Valley skull.[26]

Thousands of years before the elephants and the men of our three-ring circuses took up winter quarters in Florida a different kind of elephant and a different kind of man seem to have come into contact there along the Indian River. It was a very firm contact indeed; for, if evidence dug up at Melbourne in 1925 means anything, it means that a mammoth or a mastodon stepped on the skull of some variety of early man and left it flat as a pancake. Other elephants and a goodly array of mammals that are now extinct left some of their bones in the same geologic formation with the skull. Ten years before, other such fossils and an even more mutilated skull had been found in the same kind of stratum forty miles away at Vero Beach.

The history of these finds is typical of the disrepute in which early man was held from 1900 to 1930. A few men—E. H. Sellards, who made the Vero find, J. W. Gidley and F. B. Loomis, who published on both sites, and some others—believed the evidence, but “that doughty doubter” Hrdlička bore down upon it and left it as flattened as the Melbourne skull.[27] It was only in 1946 through a study by T. D. Stewart, curator of physical anthropology in the National Museum, that the finds received a fair estimate as proof of early man in Florida during glacial or near-glacial time. Besides upholding the geologic evidence of Sellards, Gidley, and Loomis, Stewart announced that Hrdlička had left the reconstruction of the Melbourne skull to a minor technician, and Stewart showed, by a more careful fitting together of the broken pieces of bone, that the Melbourne man had the long, narrow, flat-sided head, the low forehead, and the strong brow ridges typical of most craniums found under conditions that suggest antiquity.[28] There are no radiocarbon dates, but fluorine tests—which tell us whether neighboring materials are of the same age—indicate that men saw elephants at Vero Beach.

Other skulls with the peculiarities of the Melbourne and South American specimens have been found in the United States and Mexico. Most of them were fairly close to the surface in soils of recent types. Only a few were found in geological formations old enough to be worth discussion—the Lansing, Kansas, skull, for instance, which was buried under twenty feet of loess, and certain skulls found below hardpan in California—and none of these won general acceptance as anywhere near glacial age. Yet in a number of skulls discovered in Texas, Lower California, the California coastal area, and the Sacramento Valley there remains a case for early man in North America.

Early Man Not Solely Mongoloid or Indian

Broadly speaking, these western craniums, like the other skulls I have mentioned, are not typically Mongoloid, and they do not resemble too closely the less Mongoloid skulls of the long-headed Indians of the Plains and the Northeast. Even the freshest and least fossilized specimens—three groups from coastal and central Texas—have “no affinity,” according to the physical anthropologists George and Edna Woodbury, “among the tribes of North America.” Instead—although the brow ridges are “not a conspicuous feature”—they resemble certain skulls from Lower California called Pericú, which in turn resemble the primitive type found in the Lagoa Santa caves. They were discovered in 1883 by the Danish anthropologist, C. F. ten Kate.[29]

Along the coast of California to the north, other narrow skulls with heavy brow ridges have been found in the neighborhood of Santa Barbara and the Channel Islands and from just east of San Francisco to Sacramento. Some consider the Oak Grove specimens from Santa Barbara the oldest, but until 1946 most anthropologists were not inclined to give any of them more than 4,000 years. Now, however, nine skeletons have been found near Concord which will probably move all the California skulls of this type a few thousand years farther back. These skulls, from what is called the Monument Site, were under four feet of earth which the soil experts of the neighboring University of California believe took anywhere from 4,000 to 8,000 years to accumulate and weather.[30] Through shell ornaments in the burials, Robert F. Heizer identifies the Monument skulls with what is called the Middle Central California culture found near the capital of the state.[31] This culture lay above Early Central California, and the skulls of the latter were found in and beneath four feet of cementlike hardpan.[32] Heizer estimates the age of these early men “in the neighborhood of 4,000 to 5,000 years,” but he states that “a number of soil chemists, geomorphologists, and geologists who have seen our Early horizon sites have suggested an antiquity in the neighborhood of 10,000 years.”[33] The Monument Site seems to argue that the latter figure is not impossible. Even this date gives us no glacial age for early man in California, but here again we have skulls that are older and more archaic in type than those of the Mongoloid Indian. They have some features of the skulls from Florida and South America that have been found with the fossils of extinct mammals.

In 1949 Heizer unearthed, not a skull, but the record of a skull that had been found in 1922 embedded in four to five feet of gravel now considered “early Recent.” The gravel and sixteen or twenty feet of silt above it formed the bank of a creek near Stanford University. The skull is long and narrow,[34] and is fossilized enough to suggest a respectable antiquity.

The year 1947 presented us, at last, with an early skull that seemed as if it could be dated pretty accurately without the aid of elephants. Yet without their aid it might never have been found.

Evidence from Middle America

Travelers have long reported bones of mammoths and mastodons in Mexico. The first to do this was Cortés’s young lieutenant, Bernal Díaz. To be sure, he thought that the bone the Tlascalans showed him belonged to one of their gigantic ancestors, as they said it did. In his book, The True History of the Conquest of New Spain, he wrote: “So that we could see how huge and tall these people had been they brought a leg bone of one of them which was very thick and the height of a man of ordinary stature, and that was the bone from the hip to the knee.” If we try to visualize Cortés and Díaz inspecting this mammoth bone, the scene adds, if possible, to the extraordinary picture that the conquest presents. “I measured myself against it and it was as tall as I am although I am of fair size.”[35] Since the days of Cortés more and more fossils of elephants have been found south of the border. Indeed they crop out of eroded arroyos, drainage ditches, and old lake beds only a few miles from Mexico City itself.

Until November, 1945, little had been done to place early man in Mexico or to link him with its many fossils. Then Helmut de Terra—who had worked long in eastern and southeastern Asia—went to the Valley of Mexico to study the glacial moraines on neighboring mountains, and to link them with the soils of the old lake beds in which fossils had long been found. Expanding the work of A. R. Arellano and Kirk Bryan, he established the fact that a certain layer of caliche, or soft, earthy limestone, had been laid down upon the shrunken shores of Lake Texcoco after the glacial ice had retreated up Popocatepetl and other mountains. Under the caliche—which he dates as beginning to form between 9,000 and 11,000 years ago—he found a wet, silty clay which contained, here and there, the bones of elephants and a few rudimentary tools of stone and bone. Then in February, 1947, he decided to hunt for larger objects in an area near Tepexpan with an electrical device used for detecting valuable metals and military mines but never previously used for archaeological purposes. The resistance of a certain section of the clay to the passage of an electrical current between two metal stakes driven into the ground told him that a foreign body lay a little below the surface. He dug, and unearthed a skull and a considerable part of the skeleton of a man who was probably hunting an elephant or running from one when he became mired in the bog of the lake shore.

Because of the lake sediment in which de Terra found the bones, he dates Tepexpan man between 11,000 and 12,000 years ago.[36] Another anthropologist, Glenn H. Black—basing his opinion on published photographs of the excavation—has suggested the “possibility, even probability” that Tepexpan man got into old lake sediment through “intrusive burial,” which means that he was interred by his fellows at a much later date.[37]

The skull of this very meaningful man is not so long and narrow as the other early craniums but not so round as most Indians’. Weidenreich, an outstanding authority on Java man and his Peking cousin-once-removed, has found eight features of the Tepexpan skull and bones “which are more primitive than those usually found in modern human skulls.” The brow ridges are very heavy and form a well marked torus, or bulge, above the nose, “such as occurs in the Australian bushman of today and in other ‘primitive races.’” A ridge on the back of the head “resembles even the condition found in Neanderthal skulls.”[38] Javier Romero and T. D. Stewart, however, do not agree with Weidenreich’s analysis. Romero finds the brow ridge “not very markedly developed.” Stewart calls it “predominantly Indian in character.”[39]

Radiocarbon dates based upon peat and wood found some distance from the bones of Tepexpan man, but apparently in the same layer, suggest that the layer was formed between 11,000 and 16,000 years ago. These bones and those of extinct animals found nearby are about equally fossilized—much more so than the remains of more recent burials in the same area. Still, the methods of excavation used here have been criticized, leaving considerable doubt as to the manner in which Tepexpan man came to his resting place.[40]

Other remains of ancient Mexicans include a jaw from Xico, Peñón man—a heavily mineralized cranium from Peñón de los Baños, near Mexico City—and human bones in similar condition from Iztlán, in the state of Michoacán. The layers in which these were found tell us little geologically. In the case of the Peñón and Iztlán finds, claims for antiquity have been based on the fact that they are heavily mineralized, but this may have been due to a century or less of contact with thermal mineral waters in their neighborhood.[41]

New Finds in the United States

The first wholly acceptable association of human remains, ancient artifacts, and extinct animals was found in 1953. On the Scharbauer Ranch, near Midland, Texas, parts of a skeleton of a 30-year-old woman were recovered from a deposit of gray sand that included chipped stone tools, remains of extinct horse and bison, and the burned bone of an extinct antelope that Midland man may accidentally have dug up from a lower layer. The gray sand provided a number of materials that have produced dates by radiocarbon and other methods. A higher and younger layer of red sand contained artifacts known elsewhere to have a maximum age of about 10,000 years. This sand was laid down in a different, more humid climate. Snail shells from a layer of white sand, below the gray, produced a radiocarbon date of less than 15,000 years. Logically, Midland man should date between these extremes. But pieces of caliche rock from the gray layer, burned presumably in cooking fires of Midland man, provided a radiocarbon date of about 20,000 years. This was not acceptable, since a lower deposit seemed to be younger. There are at least two potential sources of natural dilution of radiocarbon that could help the burned caliche to test older than it actually was.

Tenuous support for the 20,000-year date came from a new source. Three samples from the gray sand were submitted for testing by a new approach to dating archaeological materials—a refinement of the “uranium-clock” technique by which very old rocks are dated. This, the so-called Rosholt method, is a measurement of the amounts of uranium and its products in radioactive disintegration that accumulate in bone or other material. A ratio is determined between two isotopes of uranium (U²³⁸ and U²³⁵) and such radioactive related products as protactinium (Pa²³¹), thorium (Th²³⁰), and radium (Ra²²⁶). The method is yet unproved and may have more sources of contamination or error than radiocarbon. The results of Rosholt measurement on Midland samples averaged 17,000, 18,000, and 20,000 years. The latter date was from a small section of the Midland skull itself. It must be reemphasized that this process is not established well enough, and the results here are not acceptable to the archaeologists who conducted the excavations.[42]

Radiocarbon dates that can be referred to Midland man and that are at the same time in keeping with local geology and paleontology and with regional archaeological perspectives indicate a probable age of perhaps 11,000 years.

Other Americans, not so early, are represented by the skeletal remains of an infant and three adults found in 1955 at Turin, Iowa. Parts of one adult skeleton and that of the infant were recovered by experts, under carefully controlled conditions, from a depth of about 15 feet. The adult had been partially exposed along the bank of a gravel pit. The associated gravels contained loess, a wind-blown deposit, indicating a cool climate and probable antiquity. The Turin skeletons have been dated in a roundabout manner. A projectile point associated with the infant bones seems identical with others found near Quimby, Iowa, with a radiocarbon date of just under 9,000 years.[43]

The physical remains of early man in the New World, no matter what primitive features they may display, must be considered essentially modern, clearly of the same species as ourselves. Our best clue to racial difference is the extreme longheadedness of the earlier types. Their skulls tend to differ from those of most modern Indians. Yet we can at least consider the possibility that they represented a racial type in contrast to that of the tribes most recently arrived from Asia.

The old skulls of the New World may not be entirely satisfactory proofs of the antiquity of early man in this hemisphere; for Tepexpan man and Minnesota man both have been challenged as intruders in an older soil. On the other hand, all the skulls except perhaps Tepexpan suggest to the partisans of glacial man in the Americas that the first immigrants were not “predominantly Indian in character.” They make an interesting and significant point. Can it be a mere coincidence that when we find a head which has been stepped on by an elephant, it is not round like most Indians’, but longer or narrower, and it has very heavy brow ridges? Can it be a coincidence that when we find a skull in a cave with the bones of extinct mammals, it has those same peculiarities? Can it be a coincidence that when we find a skull under rocklike hardpan or a distinctly ancient layer of soil, it has those unusual stigmata? It does no good to hunt up the skull of a Sioux or a Mound Builder or an Algonquin which looks like one from Punin or Florida or Lower California. That is not much better than finding the skull of a modern New Yorker that looks like one of early man’s—which you could do without too much trouble. If all Sioux skulls or Mound Builder skulls or Algonquin skulls were as archaic as all the Punin and Florida and Pericú skulls, or if some early skulls were short and broad, then the case for the Mongoloid Indian as the earliest man in America would be incontestable. But until we find a round-headed, thoroughly modern Mongoloid skull that has been stepped on by an elephant or got itself interred with a mammoth or buried under earth that ought not to be on top of it, we shall have to believe that the simon-pure Indian of Hrdlička’s idolatry was not the first American. We shall have to think that the archaic fellow from Punin or Florida or Lower California or the Lagoa Santa caves was our earliest man—and quite early at that. Just how early, the bones do not yet say.