Joseph A. Hester

“ Let us stress again that the Folsom and Eden chipping reached a perfection unknown in Europe until neolithic man brought in agriculture. Indeed, if the paleolithic Solutrean points had never been found, all American archaeologists—instead of just one or two—might unhesitatingly have called Folsom and Eden neolithic, even though they were found with extinct animals. In the history of Europe’s Old Stone Age—and in Africa’s, too, for that matter—we have no more than one hint of such work. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ Although ice journeys may not be so very difficult, and early man had learned to live in the chill of northern Siberia (the Eskimo of today proves that human existence is possible in a land of little sun and much cold) , we cannot believe that he attempted to cross the icy wastes. A journey on foot across a thousand or two thousand miles of ice becomes a sheer impossibility if there is no provender to be found along the way. There was certainly no food for musk ox or mammoth, and therefore no food for man. Without game to hunt, he would not have felt the impulse to invade the ice fields. ”

“ Man moves with the climate, not against it; a New Yorker goes to Florida in the winter, not the summer. Early man would not have traveled southward through Canada and the United States while the climate was moving northward with the melting of the ice. On the contrary, man would have moved southward only as the glaciers grew and the temperature belts moved southward. When the glaciers melted he would have tended to move northward again. Thus man must have entered the New World toward the end of an interglacial, and gone southward with the weather. ”

“ Bering Strait and the great glaciers were not the only obstacles to the peopling of the Americas. The Isthmus of Panama must have presented quite a problem to the pioneers who were to fill Amazonia and the Andean Highlands and to reach Cape Horn. Today nobody sets off blithely by foot through the jungle that separates Costa Rica from Colombia. The beach is the best pathway at low tide; but it is an intermittent one. It is better to hope that the shifts of climate which were involved with the glaciers made Panama a drier country than it is today. ”

“ 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. ”

“ They triumphed even in the Old World, where distances were not always very great, and where traffic between Africa and Eurasia seemed not so very difficult. You can imagine, therefore, what a happy hunting ground the independent inventionists have made of the Americas. The New World is remote indeed from the Old. You must go back to the time of the glaciers to find a land-bridge and up to the Arctic to bring the two worlds within hailing distance of each other. ”

“ Ten years ago, we knew that men in America had once killed, skinned, and eaten animals now extinct, for we had found their weapons and a few of their bones mingled with the fossils of mammals long extinct. We could not question the association, because it often involved the remains of campfires; spear points and bones might be moved about in the course of time, but not fragile heaps of charcoal. We knew, too, that the bones and tools of man had been found sealed away by the chemistry of the ages. ”

“ The fact that a Magdalenian man of southern France sketched a mammoth on the wall of a cave proved that the man existed in the Great Ice Age. But in America, if a spear point turned up with the bones of a mammoth, too many anthropologists accepted it as proof that the animal died after the ice fields had melted. The mammoth proved the antiquity of man in Europe; man proved the modernity of the mammoth in America. The only shred of evidence to support such reasoning was the questionable pottery and coal that lay beside the mastodon bones in Ecuador. ”

“ The peculiarities of our early skulls must make us think twice about the Indian as the only pre-Columbian inhabitant of the Americas south of the Eskimo. They bear witness to another invader from the Old World. Such skulls—even if they were only a thousand years old—would tell us that the typical Mongoloid Indian was not the only arrival from Asia who left descendants. Since many of the skulls are definitely the 218 oldest that have been found in the New World, we must recognize that early man bore some relationship to other peoples than the forebears of the noble red man. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Naturally enough the Great Ice Age was a time of notable changes of climate. Vegetation advanced and retreated widely. The level of the sea rose and fell some hundreds of feet. Whether or not there was more rain and snow—a moot point with science—the many rivers of the world grew in volume, and often in speed, at certain times and became low and sluggish at others. These profound alternations created the river terraces which have aided so much in determining the age of man and his various cultures. ”

“ Further, how do we account for the survival of deer, antelope, fox, rabbit, moose, beaver, bear, and so many other animals? How could climate be so selective? If the dire wolf died, why not the timber wolf? If the short-faced bear, why not the grizzly? If one form of rabbit and three forms of antelope, why not all rabbits and all antelopes? If disease instead of climate was the great eliminator—as some have suggested—we face the same dilemma. ”

“ A number of sites in the West and Southwest are particularly notable for their age or for the character of their artifacts, or for both. Some push the record of man in America back beyond Folsom, possibly far, far beyond; and some bring into the picture a type of artifact—the milling stone—which does not seem to have appeared in Europe until later. The publications upon these sites from 1935 to 1941 aroused much controversy even while broadening and deepening our knowledge of early man. ”

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

“ And all this time nobody could find any really primitive beginnings of pottery in Middle America, and nothing that seemed earlier than the birth of Christ. The trap of time was growing tighter and tighter. A very elaborate civilization would have to develop in 1,500 years, without any roots. Gladwin pointed out this difficulty and urged the theory that man came into the Americas not only as a paleolithic primitive 15,000 or 25,000 years ago, but as a fairly civilized and perfected neolithic close to the beginning of the Christian era. ”

“ Today we have a few facts about early man and many guesses. Not so long ago there were a few reputable anthropologists who believed that the New World was innocent of man before 1000 B.C. Now most of them grant a foothold at least 10,000 years ago to an enterprising savage—called Folsom man—whose taste for travel was as great as his talent for making an exceptionally fine and original type of stone spear point. Some say he came to the New World 25,000 years ago. A few daring students find traces of an earlier Australoid human who may have seen the last glaciers taking shape. ”

“ Man in America not only starts off with an exceptionally fine type of spear point to thrust into elephant or bison, and uses pressure flaking far more extensively than man in the Old World; in addition, he develops the type of milling stone, or quern, that does not appear in Europe until man is coming out of the Old Stone Age and entering the neolithic period of agriculture. ”

“ We are concerned, not with independent invention, but with parallel independent invention. “Diffusion” is still more inaccurate. Normally it means the gradual transfer of some trait or technique from one people to another, often through the intervention of a third or of a third and a fourth people. In the present discussion it is more a matter of a people’s carrying the trait or the technique to a new home. The question is not merely, “Did the Indian invent pottery?” or “Did the American Australoid invent the bull-roarer?” It is rather, “Did he invent it in the New World or the Old?” ”

“ 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. ”

“ Echoed by W. J. Perry, Smith found the beginnings of all culture of any importance in Egypt, and from there he sent its traveling salesmen abroad to sell it to Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Pearls and pyramids, gold and dolmens, initiations and totemism, sun worship and the marriage of brother and sister, mummies—even if they were no more than desiccated bodies wrapped in a bag—these traits and many more all “proved” that the Children of 240 the Sun had sold their cultural goods to lesser peoples. ”

“ Gladwin has a better answer, which is also an attack on a basic weakness of his opponents. Through many years he has been pointing out that friends of the inventive Indian have been getting squeezed tighter and tighter in a trap of their own independent invention. It is the trap of time.
When the Spaniards found the New World, they found it full of inventions and discoveries. There were cities of stone, painted temples, great pyramids. Metal workers smelted ores, made alloys, and cast elaborate ornaments of gold by a most intricate process. ”

“ Many culture traits of Middle America and Peru are not found in Oceania: the use of cement in masonry and the vigesimal system of numeration in Middle America; the amazingly intricate Maya calendar and hieroglyphics with the first invention of zero; baked brick in two Mexican sites; bronze in Peru; the hammock; the whistling jar; the manioc press. Some of these New World traits must have been invented here, but we are asked to believe that the others were forgotten in Oceania and remembered in the Americas. One argument for trans-Pacific diffusion is clear and cogent, however. ”

“ So science inserted the Mesolithic, or 37 Middle Stone Age, between the two, in order to account for the appearance of the new tools.
The trouble with the system that Lubbock launched is that man’s behavior toward stone is a very poor basis for classifying him in culture or time. For a while it fitted our knowledge of the prehistory of Europe. Now it is out of line on that continent, and completely askew so far as the rest of the world is concerned. The kind of stone available often determines whether a man will chip or grind it. ”

“ 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. ”