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.
A HAND AX AND A CHOPPING TOOL FROM TEXAS
The dating of these tools is uncertain, but the upper resembles early paleolithic specimens from Europe despite its more flakelike quality. The other is somewhat like chopping tools made from pebbles in Asia and Africa. (Courtesy of Gila Pueblo.)
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 broken pestle found by C. J. King in gold-bearing gravels in California. (After Becker, 1891.)
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.