The Puzzle of the Points
With the first hunters in the New World—the men who made the Sandia, the Folsom, the Plainview, and probably the early Eden points—we come to another puzzle. The Sandia is shaped like a much superior point made by the Solutreans of Europe and an equally crude one made in Africa, but the best Folsom is better than the best Solutrean. The fluted channels of the Folsom are remarkable enough; in addition, the edges are sharpened by the removal of almost microscopic flakes, and the base is often carefully ground. We know that such points were being made at least 10,000 and perhaps 15,000 years ago. The Eden point is doubtless newer, yet it must antedate the only chipped weapons that can equal it, the daggers of neolithic Egyptians 7,500 years ago or of the still later Danes.
A point with Eden-like chipping has been found in a neolithic site in Siberia.[5] What does this mean? Obviously Sandia man or his forebears came from Asia across Bering Strait, but too early to leave the Siberian Eden behind him. Someone has been bold enough to suggest that the descendants of the man who developed the Folsom point may have returned to Siberia; after all, as George Gaylord Simpson has pointed out, a bridge works both ways.[6] If Eden man was too late for the land-bridge of the last glaciation, he still had the ice-bridge of winter. But “ice” suggests a doubt. Would a hunter of the temperate High Plains be likely to trek north through the chill of winter to deposit a spear point in Siberia? Yet we know that traces of Eden, Plainview, and Folsom have been found in Alaska. Were they left by summer transients fishing Cook Inlet or hunting Alaskan jaguar around Fairbanks? It is safer, on the whole, to ask where this type of early American came from than to ask where he went.
Left, a point with oblique chipping in the Eden style, found near Lake Baikal, Siberia, in a neolithic culture, compared with an Eden point from Colorado. Is the resemblance accidental, or could Eden man have migrated to the Old World after developing his characteristic style of flint knapping in the New? The size of the Siberian point is not recorded. (The Eden point, after Howard, 1935; the Siberian, after Okladnikov, 1938, and Collins, 1943.)
The points of early man present a double puzzle. How did it happen that the art of working flint was brought to higher perfection in the New World during the Old Stone Age than it was in the Old World? And where did these consummate flint knappers come from? The first question may never be answered. The second presents interesting possibilities. They revolve around the brief appearance of the Solutreans in Europe. Only a great deal of very thorough excavation in Siberia will give us more than provocative or provoking theories about the origins of the men who made Sandia and Folsom points.