The Pendulum Swings
This chapter might have been headed “Summary.” We could not have called it “Conclusions,” for, as we read the record of early man, we saw the damage that had been done by too rash appraisals. The final pages will review the more important evidence of early man in the New World, including his relation to Old World peoples and to certain geologic phenomena.
The study of early man in America has suffered from alternate spasms of unscientific enthusiasm and far too “scientific” caution. It has ranged from the parading of rumor and guesswork to the blind cranioclasm of Hrdlička. In the nineteenth century the talk was of man in the Americas before the Great Ice Age and far back into the Tertiary era that ended 1,000,000 years ago. At the beginning of the twentieth century anthropologists gave him no more than 4,000 years in the New World. Now they generally concede him 10,000 or 15,000 years, and many grant him 25,000 or more.
Clark Wissler, in The Origin of the American Indian, wrote, “The first great migration of Old World peoples to the New can be set down as not only beginning but culminating within the limits of late Pleistocene Time.”[1] Frank H. H. Roberts, Jr., long a protagonist of Folsom man, wrote the next year, “The belief that the Folsom complex developed towards the end of the Pleistocene, or Late Glacial, period and carried over into the beginning of the Recent is now more or less generally accepted.”[2]
On the whole, the archaeologists—developing a new and sound technique in stratigraphic excavation and pottery study—have held back more than the physical anthropologists from the acceptance of a variegated array of early men at quite early dates. Geologists and paleontologists, in whose hands must lie the final dating of the Indian’s predecessors, have inclined to a more radical attitude. A few scientists are talking of the possibility that man crossed Bering Strait before the last glaciation—Würm in Europe, Wisconsin in America—and possibly even while the Riss-Illinois was laying a land-bridge across from Siberia to Alaska.
At last, through chemist Willard Libby and his radiocarbon, we are getting some dependable dates for early man and earlier mammals. Yet disagreements continue. When you look at the evidence behind the conflicting opinions of scientists—at skulls, tools, fossils, and earth strata, all too innocent of Carbon¹⁴—you see why there had to be disagreements. We have facts about early man, plenty of them. Some are conflicting facts. Most of them raise serious problems. A few leave us with grievous puzzles. Let us reexamine the facts and puzzles.