The Lake Lahontan point, found in the glacial clays of Nevada associated with the fossils of extinct mammals. (After Russell, 1885.)
Figgins was not the first to discover spear points—of whatever shape—with the fossils of extinct animals or with other evidence of considerable age. In at least eight localities during the second half of the nineteenth century men had made such finds; and there had been five more finds in the first quarter of the twentieth. Some of the first group won easy, if uncritical, acceptance; but antagonism to the flint tools that C. C. Abbott found near Trenton, New Jersey, was so great that he wrote: “Had the Delaware River been a European stream, the implements found in its valley would have been accepted at once as evidence of the so-called Paleolithic man.”[3] By 1925 almost everyone seemed to have forgotten the obsidian blade that a museum director named W J McGee had pulled out of the unmistakably glacial deposits of extinct Lake Lahontan, Nevada, in 1882,[4] and the spear point that had been found in 1895 under the shoulder blade of an extinct type of bison at Russell Springs, Kansas.[5]
Discoveries after 1900 were, in a sense, more important because better authenticated; but unfortunately they had to encounter the general hostility to early man which had been bred by a more scientific approach to American prehistory and nurtured by Hrdlička at Vero and Melbourne. In 1924 the finding of a point under a bison at Lone Wolf Creek, Texas, by men from the Denver Museum of Natural History went relatively unnoticed.[6] Only harsh controversy welcomed the discovery, at Frederick, Oklahoma, in 1926, of artifacts and a variegated array of fossilized fauna in what the geologist E. H. Sellards believed was a glacial formation.[7]
The Folsom discovery changed the hostile attitude of almost all anthropologists toward early man. This was partly because the evidence was so striking and unmistakable, but largely because of the fierce white light of scientific publicity that was made to beat about a New Mexico arroyo.
The Denver Museum had found its first Folsom point in 1926.[8] It had been embedded in the clay surrounding a large bone; but when Figgins spoke or wrote of this discovery his fellow scientists suggested that the point was “intrusive,” that it had dropped down through a hole made by some rodent. So the next year, when Figgins came upon a Folsom point between two ribs of a bison, he stopped all work and wired to a number of institutions in the East to send witnesses. Barnum Brown of the American Museum of Natural History, Frank H. H. Roberts, Jr., of the Smithsonian Institution, and Alfred V. Kidder of the Peabody Foundation at Andover arrived to view the point in situ. Their testimony and the collaboration of Brown in work at Folsom established beyond doubt that man in America had trafficked with animals which were supposed to have been dead by the end of the Glacial Period. Once this was proved, other anthropologists and institutions were off on the trail of more such finds.
The making of a Folsom point. The flint was first flaked to the general shape desired. (This sketch is perhaps a little too schematic.) Next, the maker removed a long flake on each face. Then he retouched the edges, and usually ground the hose and the sides of the ears. (After Clarke, 1940.)
Americans Hunted Animals Now Extinct
The Folsom find was arresting, even dramatic. Not only was one of the nineteen points from the first three field seasons actually lodged between the ribs of an extinct bison. In addition, the skeletons of twenty-three of these animals testified that here was the scene of a prehistoric kill. Man had indeed had something to do with these beasts before they had grown cold; for the tail bones of each bison were missing, and hunters will tell you that, in skinning, “the tail goes with the hide.”[9]
