Nor is position always a guarantee of antiquity. A genuine Palæolith may have been washed into newer strata, or be exposed by natural agencies on the surface of the ground, and in such cases it may not be possible to distinguish it from the products of Neolithic industry. A recent product of art may have sunk or been buried in an ancient stratum, and thus become what is termed an “intrusive deposit.”
The Palæolithic period itself is advantageously subdivided further into two Epochs, an earlier one in which men made “simple” implements only, and a later one in which they manufactured “compound” implements as well. I was the first to point out this distinction, and as I have found it really useful, and as others have also expressed to me the value which it has been to them in this line of research, I will explain it further.[[33]] A “compound” implement is one composed of several parts adapted to each other, as the bow and the arrow, the spear with its shaft and blade, or the axe with its head and helve and the means of fastening the one to the other. These were not early acquisitions. During long ages man contented himself with such tools or weapons as he could frame of a single piece of wood or stone, simply holding it in his hand. When he found he could increase its effectiveness by fitting it to a handle, the discovery marked an era in his culture.
He may indeed in his rudest ages have lashed a stone to the end of his club, or have inserted a spall of flint in the split end of a stick; but these are not compound implements in the proper sense of the term. The expression means an art-product which clearly shows that it was but one part of a mechanical apparatus. The arrow-head with its stem, barbs and body, the stone axe with its grooves or drilled perforation for the handle, are incomplete in themselves, they disclose a preconceived plan for the adjustment of parts which man in his earliest and rudest condition does not seem to have possessed. The most ancient strata in which the remains of human art have been found, either in Europe or America, yield “simple” implements only; “compound” implements are a conquest of his inventive faculty at a later date.
So far as America is concerned it is probable that the oldest remains of man yet discovered on the northern continent have been those exhumed in the valley of the Delaware River, in the states of Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware. According to the most careful geological observers that large deposit of gravel covering about five thousand acres on both banks of the river below Trenton is a post-glacial deposit not less than twelve or fifteen thousand years old. Imbedded in this at various depths a large number of true palæoliths have been discovered by Dr. C. C. Abbott, Professor F. A. Putnam, myself and others. Every one of them so far as I am aware belongs to the class of “simple” implements, not an arrowhead nor grooved axe nor stemmed scraper having been reported.
Another deposit of gravel further down the Delaware River is much older: The best authorities in such matters believe that it was deposited, not after the recession of the great glacier which once covered Canada and the northern portion of the United States, but while that tremendous phenomena was at its height, and when all the streams of the central United States were periodically choked with vast masses of ice and snow. In this, which is called the Columbian gravel, chipped stone implements have been found by Mr. Cresson, all of the “simple” variety, and at such depths as to preclude the theory of an intrusive deposit. These discoveries carry the age of the appearance of man in the Delaware valley back to a date which is possibly over a hundred thousand years ago.
The great glacier left its mass of boulders, pebbles and broken stone, which it pushed before it, or carried with it, in a long line of so-called “moraines,” extending, roughly speaking, from New York to St. Louis. In this mass, at its edges where the great wash from the melting ice poured down, palæoliths have been found in undisturbed position, proving that also there man had struggled with the inclemency of the ice-age, and, poorly provided as he was, had come out victorious. Here too all the implements he left are of the “simple” type, indicating at once the vast antiquity of the period and the presence of a race substantially the same as that to the east at the same date.
No tribe has been known to history which was confined to the knowledge of “simple” implements, or which manufactured stone implements exclusively in the Palæolithic forms. Wherever, therefore, these are found without the admixture of artificially ground or polished stones we may be sure we face the remains of a time whose antiquity cannot be measured by any chronology applied to the historic records of humanity.
This enables us in a measure to define the limits of the region known to the human race at this, its earliest epoch; with our present deficient knowledge we can do so only partially and by exclusion. It is safe to state that in Europe Palæolithic man did not occupy the central alpine area of Switzerland and its surroundings, nor the plains of Russia, nor any part of the Scandinavian peninsula, Scotland, Ireland, nor Iceland. In North America he had no habitations north of the forty-first parallel of latitude except perhaps close to the shores of the two great oceans;[[34]] it is not probable that his foot pressed the soil of any of the West Indian Islands; but when the great Austral Glacier was in its recession depositing the fertile loam of the pampas of Buenos Ayres human beings with their rude Palæoliths were following up the retreating line of ice, as in the Northern Hemisphere. Ages uncounted and uncountable have passed since then, but man has left indestructible evidences that even in that early morn of his existence he had explored and conquered that continent which a late generation has chosen to call “the New World.”
ON THE ALLEGED MONGOLIAN AFFINITIES OF THE AMERICAN RACE.[[35]]
Were the question I am about to discuss one of merely theoretical bearings, I should not approach it; but the widespread belief that the American tribes are genealogically connected with the Mongolians is constantly directing and coloring the studies of many Americanists, very much as did at one time the belief that the red men are the present representatives of the ten lost tribes of Israel. It is practically worth while, therefore, to examine the grounds on which the American race is classed by these anthropologists as a branch of the Mongolian, and to inquire whether the ancient culture of America betrayed any positive signs of Mongolian influence.