The Mystery of the Missing Bones
So far as skeletal relics are concerned, the friends of early man in the New World would have been at something of a disadvantage even if Hrdlička had been less vocal and less violent. Until the edge of the Christian era, physical evidence is scanty in the Americas. The bones of early man are few and far between. The mastodons, elephants, sloths, camels, bison, and horses that once thronged the plains and plateaus south of the glaciers have left us a great sufficiency of skulls and teeth, vertebrae and ribs, leg bones and toe bones, and even some skin, hair, and feces. We have uncountable skeletons of small animals that live on today. But the fossil beds are very short indeed on man, and even the dry caves help us only a little. In the two continents there are not more than twenty-five finds of the bones of early man which must be considered seriously, and some of these are not a little dubious.
It may seem strange that thousands of spear points, scrapers, and arrowheads can be identified as the products of early man while we find so few of the skulls that held the brains which conceived them. It may seem stranger still—unbelievably strange—that, while the five- and six-foot skeletons of man have disappeared, there remain to us in excellent shape the delicate bones of fox and gopher, even the pack rat. We may believe, however, that, though the Americas thronged with animals that had been there for millions of years, there were relatively few men. Northeast Asia, from which they had come, was not a place to nurture great tribes, and to send forth migrants by the hundreds of thousands. The first men in America had to live by hunting and gathering, and hunters and gatherers do not multiply like agricultural peoples. Against hundreds of thousands of large animals—millions upon millions of small fry—we can place only some tens of thousands of men. To find a human skeleton among such a welter of animal bones would be like finding a single needle in the combined haystacks of all the Middle West. Further, did early man leave his body where we should be likely to find it? If he did not cremate his dead, then he literally exposed them to the elements—whether they lay on a scaffold like the dead of the Plains Indians or were buried in the earth—and the elements did a good job in scattering or hiding them. A great deal of water has flowed over land-bridges since the glaciers began to melt, and a great deal of silt and gravel and loess has spread deep over river bottoms and even high plateaus, burying the bones of early man beneath it.
What do we find in the way of human bones? Not too much, compared with the many skulls and skeletons of the Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon in Europe. They range from the top of a cranium or part of a pelvis to a few complete skeletons, some properly buried. They are not all of equal value. The best, however, tell us something about how certain early Americans may have looked. By that, at least, they contribute more than the thousands of stone tools which early man left behind him.