North American Skulls and Bones
Since the discovery of human bones in glacial gravels near Trenton, New Jersey, three skeletons of some importance and a number of skulls that resemble those of Lagoa Santa and Punin have been found in the United States.
The three finds of complete skeletons made in Minnesota between 1931 and 1935 have aroused much debate. All three were encountered in road-making or the digging of gravel, and scientists were not present at their discovery. A. E. Jenks’s study of these skeletons has done much to clarify them.[23] “Minnesota man”—really a girl—was found in a geological stratum marked by varves, or thin layers of clay, laid down in successive years by a glacial lake about 11,000 years ago. Antevs believes her body was thrust into this stratum at a later time; but other geological authorities, including Kirk Bryan, Paul MacClintock, G. F. Kay, and M. M. Leighton, deny it and present rather convincing evidence.[24] Hooton unhesitatingly expresses the opinion that “this discovery establishes a very strong probability, though not an absolute certainty, of the existence of Homo sapiens in the New World in Late Glacial times.”[25] Artifacts found with the skeleton—including part of a knife made from an antler—do not give us a radiocarbon date. In the gravel of Browns Valley, where the second skeleton was found, there were also spear points (see illustration, [page 158]). From geological evidence connected with this find—the most generally accepted of the three in Minnesota—a date between 8,000 and 12,000 years ago seems plausible. The third skeleton, Sauk Valley man, has been the center of much dispute. Some geologists believe that the depth of the occurrence and the presence of a certain sand within the skull argue a considerable antiquity. Like the owner of the Punin skull, “Minnesota man” had a primitive type of teeth, larger even than those of some Old World paleolithic specimens. Jenks and L. A. Wilford find twenty-six archaic traits in the Sauk Valley skull.[26]
Thousands of years before the elephants and the men of our three-ring circuses took up winter quarters in Florida a different kind of elephant and a different kind of man seem to have come into contact there along the Indian River. It was a very firm contact indeed; for, if evidence dug up at Melbourne in 1925 means anything, it means that a mammoth or a mastodon stepped on the skull of some variety of early man and left it flat as a pancake. Other elephants and a goodly array of mammals that are now extinct left some of their bones in the same geologic formation with the skull. Ten years before, other such fossils and an even more mutilated skull had been found in the same kind of stratum forty miles away at Vero Beach.
The history of these finds is typical of the disrepute in which early man was held from 1900 to 1930. A few men—E. H. Sellards, who made the Vero find, J. W. Gidley and F. B. Loomis, who published on both sites, and some others—believed the evidence, but “that doughty doubter” Hrdlička bore down upon it and left it as flattened as the Melbourne skull.[27] It was only in 1946 through a study by T. D. Stewart, curator of physical anthropology in the National Museum, that the finds received a fair estimate as proof of early man in Florida during glacial or near-glacial time. Besides upholding the geologic evidence of Sellards, Gidley, and Loomis, Stewart announced that Hrdlička had left the reconstruction of the Melbourne skull to a minor technician, and Stewart showed, by a more careful fitting together of the broken pieces of bone, that the Melbourne man had the long, narrow, flat-sided head, the low forehead, and the strong brow ridges typical of most craniums found under conditions that suggest antiquity.[28] There are no radiocarbon dates, but fluorine tests—which tell us whether neighboring materials are of the same age—indicate that men saw elephants at Vero Beach.
Other skulls with the peculiarities of the Melbourne and South American specimens have been found in the United States and Mexico. Most of them were fairly close to the surface in soils of recent types. Only a few were found in geological formations old enough to be worth discussion—the Lansing, Kansas, skull, for instance, which was buried under twenty feet of loess, and certain skulls found below hardpan in California—and none of these won general acceptance as anywhere near glacial age. Yet in a number of skulls discovered in Texas, Lower California, the California coastal area, and the Sacramento Valley there remains a case for early man in North America.