The Red Herring of the “Primitive Skull”
It was Hrdlička’s misfortune—and the misfortune of science—that until almost the end of his life he refused to meet his opponents on common ground. He was right enough in challenging early man as an inhabitant of America 200,000 years ago, but he challenged him in terms that applied or seemed to apply to any man earlier than the Indian of three or four thousand years ago. Hrdlička failed to define properly the thing he was attacking. He merely prated of the lack of “primitive skulls.”
That was not the issue. Except for Ameghino, scientists of the twentieth century were not claiming to have found Abbevillian or even Neanderthal man in the New World. They were merely saying that certain skulls and certain tools might go back to the end of glacial times or perhaps a little earlier. This was no earlier than the Cro-Magnon of Europe, and the Cro-Magnon was modern enough in physical type. So were the skulls found with glacial animals and paleolithic tools in the upper Choukoutien Cave near Peking. As Hooton puts it, the glacial antiquity of a New World skeleton cannot be disproved by “the modernity of its anatomical characters alone. Homo sapiens was full-fledged in the Old World before the end of the Glacial Period. Late Glacial entrants into the Americas need not prove their age by an array of archaic and simian physical features. The acid test of their antiquity must be geological.”[12] Roberts points out that opponents of early man in America “demand a more primitive physical type as evidence for some antiquity in the New World than was living in the Old at a comparable time.”[13]
As pressure of evidence and opinion piled up in favor of early man, Hrdlička began to weaken a bit. In 1937 he admitted that, compared with Europe, the situation in America “is not so simple. It is complicated by the fact ... that individual skulls of recent and even present-day American aborigines not seldom show features that are more primitive than the average in the white races. There are American skulls of recent date that are practically replicas of the Magdalenian and even of some of the upper Aurignacian skulls of the Old World and there are occasional skulls that in some of their characteristics remind one even of the Neanderthals.”[14] In other words, a skull of an early American man which resembles a skull of a historic Indian may also resemble the skull of a glacial man of the Old World.
By 1923—after the harm had been done—Hrdlička was willing to concede that migration to the Americas began “somewhere between possibly 10,000 or at most 15,000 years ago and the dawn of the protohistoric period in the Old World.”[15] Yet he still clung to his Indian skull, and wrote in one of his last papers: “There is as yet not a specimen of a skull or bone that could be accepted as that of any earlier or different being than the American natives of protohistoric or historic times.”[16] Even when a skull had the heavy brow ridges and the long narrow shape of the Australoid—and the Neanderthal—Hrdlička gave no ground. Such notable examples as the skulls from the Lagoa Santa caves of Brazil—which we shall describe later—were merely “a peculiarly American variant.”[17] He got only so far as granting that American man had a relationship with the Cro-Magnon and the Magdalenian, but he hinted at this relationship merely in man’s “early Old World ancestry.”[18]