The Origin of the Mound Builders

by Alfred Oscar Coffin

Though this is ancient history, we have as much right to accept Plato’s history as Homer’s, if it can be established.

The Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg claims that Mexican chronology dates back two thousand eight hundred and fourteen years. Because America was latest discovered, it is the popular opinion that it should have been the latest developed, but there is evidence sufficient that the New World is in every sense the oldest.

We know that this continent was once covered with glaciers as low down as New Jersey and the Ohio River. According to Dr. Croll, glaciation is brought about by the combined effect of the eccentricity of the earth’s orbit and the precession of the equinoxes, which makes the distance of our planet from the sun vary considerably during the year. We are three million miles nearer the sun in winter than in summer, while the reverse is the case in the Southern Hemisphere. If our winter now were long as our summer, and we were to continue three million miles nearer the sun in the winter, a decided change would occur, and our winters would grow longer and colder, and our summers shorter and hotter. Now the precession of the equinoxes and the motion of aphelion actually bring this about every ten thousand five hundred years, and the condition of the two hemispheres is reversed as regards their glaciation, and this reversion has been going on during all geologic time.

But the eccentricity itself of the earth in its orbit between perihelion and aphelion varies, and since the eccentricity is now at its minimum, three million miles, we infer that our last glacial epoch occurred ten thousand five hundred years ago, and the ice mantle has retreated from 39° in New Jersey to 61° in Southern Greenland, which is now covered by a glacier twelve hundred miles long, four hundred miles wide, and a mile thick, while the ice in the Southern Hemisphere has increased to several miles in thickness, and to such extent, that the nearest point to the South Pole Sir Ross was able to reach, was still fourteen hundred miles from the Pole.

While the St. Lawrence and the area of the Great Lakes were under these glaciers, of course there could have been no outlet to the Atlantic of the waters, which were forced by the Alleghenies to flow to the Gulf, at the time of the great thaw ten thousand years ago, and the St. Lawrence could only have been formed after the ice had retreated beyond the Great Lake areas. Since that period the Niagara has been cutting its way from Lake Ontario through the solid limestone of the Upper Silurian Period, until the Falls of Niagara are now seven miles from the lake. Dana estimates that the river has cut its way at the rate of a foot a year, which would make it thirty-five thousand years cutting its channel. Sir Charles Lyell, as quoted in Hugh Miller’s “Testimony of the Rocks,” estimates the rate at fifty yards in forty years, which would make it ten thousand years, which agrees exactly with the time the glacier crossed the Great Lakes. However long it was, man was here then, for a tooth of a man has been found with that of a mammoth in the Drift of the Niagara, and Dr. Abbott has found bones of the mastodon and the wisdom tooth of a man, fourteen feet under the gravel of the Delaware, and their rolled and abraded surfaces prove them either pre-glacial or contemporaneous with glaciers.

While the great glaciers were breaking up at the head-waters of the Platte, Yellowstone and Missouri, the flooded rivers dropped their sediment in the vast inundated lakes, whose rich bottoms formed the loess which so well characterizes the fertile prairie soil of the Western States to-day.

In Nebraska, stone arrow-heads and the bones of the ancient elephant were found thirty feet under the loess, and in Greene County, Illinois, a well was dug seventy-two feet through the loess, when a stone hatchet was found, proving that the hatchet was dropped there when Illinois was covered by a lake over which the rude hunter paddled his canoe.

Dr. Koch, of St. Louis, found the bones of the mastodon in the Osage Valley in Missouri, which was killed while mired down, by fire being built around it, which consumed nearly all the bones of the animal except the legs and toes. The presence of ashes and stones proves conclusively that the huge animal met his death at the hands of man.

One other instance to prove that man existed on this continent in the Pliocene Epoch: Dr. Winslow sent to the Natural History Society, of Boston, a skull of a human being found in a shaft in California one hundred and eighty feet deep, and under five successive layers of volcanic lava and tufa and four layers of auriferous gravel. To quote from Foster’s “Prehistoric Times”: “Since the introduction, then, of man on this continent, the physical features as well as the climate have undergone great changes. The volcanic peaks of the Sierra Nevadas have been lifted up, the glaciers have disappeared, the great cañons themselves have been excavated in the solid rock, and what then were the beds of streams, now form the Table Mountains.” Admitting this skull to be Pliocene, we have a human bone in America older than the oldest human relics found on the continent of Europe. When we consider that this skull was in situ before the mainland of the Sierras was uplifted by volcanic upheavals, accompanied by flaming rivers of molten lava, followed by the glacial night of cold, ice and snow, we no longer believe that the first inhabitants of North America crossed Behring’s Strait from Asia.

We have argued that the Mound-builders both entered and left the Mississippi Valley by the south, and that the Red Indian entered by Florida from the Antilles, as implements found in Jamaica correspond with those found in Venezuela, and DeSoto found a higher civilization among the Natchez tribes of the South than was found among any others.