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.