From the Old Stone Age to the New
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. In his agriculture he utilized irrigation, discovered fertilizers, and developed a great many exclusively American plants which now supply more than half of the world’s provender. He was probably the first to write numbers effectively through the use of zero and numerical position. He practiced trepanning—the removal of a piece of skull bone to relieve pressure on the brain—and he discovered how to use certain medicines and narcotics. In his textiles he employed all the weaves known to us today. He contrived efficient methods of government. He proliferated into 368 major tribal groups, and developed fifteen culture centers of distinct individuality.[9] In the United States he left 100,000 mounds as the product of one of his cultures; in Middle America, 4,000 ceremonial cities of stone. He practiced most types of religion except atheism. Certain things that he made resemble things of the Old World; most are peculiar to him and his life. Of Indian culture traits Clark Wissler remarks that “the range in variety and individuality seems even greater in aboriginal America than in the primitive Old World.”[10]
Progress is slow in the stone age. It seems to have been particularly slow in the Old Stone Age, or paleolithic period, when man spent half a million to a million years learning to chip stone and hunt and gather food efficiently. Things went much faster in the New Stone Age, or neolithic period, when he was learning to cultivate plants and make pottery and polish stone tools. To move from the beginnings of agriculture to the beginnings of metallurgy, which superseded the neolithic, may have taken as little as 700 years in the Old World and certainly not much more than 4,000 or 5,000.
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. He had no beasts of burden except the dog and the llama; he invented no wheeled cart. It was not entirely his own fault that he remained essentially a man of the stone age even though, toward the last, he had perfected a metallurgy of copper, silver, gold, platinum, and bronze.
The story of the Indian’s spread through the Americas, his variation in language and physique, and his building of the civilizations of Peru, Central America, and Mexico argues that he came to the New World many millenniums before the birth of Christ. You may point out that the argument is too general, too inexact in outcome, but you must remember that behind the Indian lies an earlier migrant. We are on somewhat firmer ground when we turn to the evidence we have of this migrant’s tools, his hearths, and his bones. For sometimes they are related to the fossils of extinct mammals and—more important—to certain kinds of earth, charcoal and rock that can be dated.