Early Man in the New World

by Kenneth Macgowan; Joseph A. Hester

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?

EIGHT THOUSAND YEARS OF THE GREAT EXTINCTION

More than half of these sixteen mammals seem to have died out between 10,000 and 8,000 years ago, when the last glaciers were retreating and early man hunted with Sandia and fluted points. These latest acceptable dates of survival in North America are drawn from Jim Hester’s “Late Pleistocene Extinction and Radiocarbon Dating,” in American Antiquity for July, 1960. The dates vary in precision from 150 to ± 500. There may come later finds.

If the Quito mastodon and pots were indeed neighbors in time, then they provide the only evidence—ex post facto, at that—for the remarkable statement of the geologist William B. Scott in 1913: “Many Pleistocene mammals were in existence only a few centuries ago, in what is called ‘historic time’ in the Old World. Several skeletons of the American Mastodon have been found in bogs, covered by only a few inches of peat, with more or less of the hair and recognizable contents of the stomach preserved.”[12] Eiseley has questioned the evidence that the mastodon had hair, and he has pointed out that a peat bog is an ideal place for the preservation of vegetable matter such as that animal lived upon.[13] The bogs and their fossils lie to the south of the Great Lakes, which formed as the ice fields began to retreat into Canada. Since the retreat began between 10,000 and 12,000 years ago, it is obvious that bogs could have formed and mastodons been trapped in them far longer ago than a few centuries—whether “few” means five, ten, or even fifteen.

A hundred years ago Charles Lyell commented on the profusion of mastodon bones in North American bogs compared with the paucity of such fossils in the bogs of Europe; and argued for the late survival of these animals in the New World.[14] Answering him, Eiseley points out first of all that for many centuries such skeletons were hunted out and salvaged by Europeans in search of ivory or the materia medica of the unicorn’s horn. Further, the mastodon, which was a forest lover and fell a natural victim to bogs, was almost unknown to Europe, while the mammoth kept mainly to dry, open steppes. We know that bogs both in our Great Lakes area and in northern Europe were postglacial, “and that is all. There exists no evidence, at present, which seems to demand in the New World a lingering extinction of the American elephants in a way much different from the course of events in Europe.”[15]