However problematical these evidences of pre-Folsom man near Abilene may be, there can be no doubt about the meaning of Frank C. Hibben’s discoveries in Sandia Cave, New Mexico, in 1936. He began by finding the remains of Pueblo Indians. Under the Pueblo he came upon a layer of stalagmitic travertine one-half inch to six inches thick, laid down during a moist period. Sealed off beneath this were classic Folsom points together with scrapers and evidence of extinct mammals. Next he found another sterile seal, two inches to two feet thick. This time it was of yellow ocher—a substance induced by fir and spruce under moist conditions, Kirk Bryan points out. Fir and spruce require more cold and more moisture than the neighborhood of Sandia provides at present—which argues that the ocher was manufactured during the last pulsation of the fourth and final glaciation more than 11,000 years ago.[43] Beneath this stratum Hibben found a new type of point.[44] New to the New World, that is, but not to the Old; for it resembles in a crude way a point of the Solutrean culture of Europe which has a notch at the bottom to aid in hafting. Since this discovery, points of the same type have turned up sporadically throughout the Mississippi Valley, along the eastern seaboard, and even in California. In every case, Hibben writes, there were indications of “considerable antiquity.” In fourteen instances out of thirty-eight, “the points were found with extinct bones, although in each case by amateurs.”[45]
The Sandia point is, of course, definitely older than the Folsom. The two periods of moisture indicate that the cave was inhabited by Folsom man toward the end of the last glaciation, or 9,000 to 11,000 years ago, and by Sandia man still earlier. Unless, of course, you wish to believe, as some do, that both pluvial periods were Postglacial.
Quite understandably, Sandia has been of keen interest to archaeologists. The geology tells us only that the Folsom and the Sandia occupations of the cave were separated by a cool, moist interval that could reflect a major glacial advance, a minor glacial advance, or merely a postglacial period of lowered temperature and more snow or rain. The last seems the least likely alternative. None of these possibilities gives us a firm date. Accordingly, the development of the radiocarbon “clock” by Willard Libby raised some hope that the age of Sandia points could, at last, be determined. This hope continues, but has yet to be realized. Radiocarbon tests made by H. R. Crane, at the University of Michigan, upon fragments of mammoth tusk indicate an age of at least 20,000 years, with the reasonable possibility that the true age exceeds 30,000 years.[46] The problems remain. The association of Sandia points with mammoth tusk was not as clear as Folsom point with extinct bison. And the problem of the reliability of ivory in radiocarbon tests—as well as the ever-present question of possible contamination—urges caution in accepting this date for Sandia.
A Sandia point, left, compared with two Solutreans. The first of the Solutreans was found with Mousterian artifacts in a cave in Tangier, the second in France. (The Sandia point, after Hibben, 1941; the Solutreans, after Howe and Movius, 1947, and Plant, 1942.)
A site discovered at Lime Creek, Nebraska, in 1947 may prove to be old. In the sharp bank of the stream C. Bertrand Schultz found crude points, bone awls, scrapers, and tools made out of antlers. Together with fossils of mammals they lay as deep as forty-seven and one-half feet below the surface, in a silt containing the remains of decayed vegetation. Above this soil were seventeen feet of loess, another layer of soil, another layer of loess, and finally a “mature” or well developed, and therefore fairly old top soil. Schultz and W. D. Frankforter write that the seventeen feet of loess covering the earth in which the artifacts were found appears to have been deposited before or at the beginning of the last expansion of the Wisconsin, or final, glaciation.[47] If this is true, it means that the men of Lime Creek lived 25,000 or 35,000 years ago, and that their forebears may have come through the corridor in the ice fields of Canada 5,000 to 18,000 years earlier (see [page 27]). Antevs and Wormington doubt it.[48] Radiocarbon dates from burned logs found below the Lime Creek artifacts averaged 9,524 ± 450 years.[49] It is possible that these stone tools are contemporaneous with Folsom, or even a bit later.
The Milling Stone Appears
In the early thirties, archaeologists began to find a peculiar kind of artifact that broadened their conception of the activities of early man in the New World. Anthropologists had always thought of him as merely a hunter. He needed spear points, scrapers, knives, hammerstones to shape these things, and fire-drills to make it possible for him to cook his prey; but that was all. Then milling stones began to appear, and it became clear that early man—at least in some areas—had been a food gatherer and food grinder, as well as a hunter. These stones are very simple slabs with a hollow worn in the surface by round handstones used in grinding seeds and nuts. Such milling stones, or querns, are not seen in the Old World until we approach the Neolithic, or New Stone Age, and the people who developed agriculture and textiles. Milling stones have been found in a village farming site at Jarmo, Iraq, dating about 7,000 years ago.[50] Agriculture did not enter Europe until about 2500 B.C., and milling stones are not found in its caves until after the Magdalenians of the Old Stone Age. The reason for the precipitate outcropping of milling stones in the Americas is not that our early man practiced agriculture. He did not do that, and he did not make polished stone axes until much later. He was merely a food gatherer. Was he also a food grinder because he was an Australoid who brought the habit to America, just as he brought it to Australia? Or, if not, was he another sort of man, who happened to be smart enough to recognize that North America provided him with many tempting grains and seeds to grind, foods that were not so available in the Old World?[51] It seems more than a coincidence that the earliest American milling stones appear in the arid Southwest, where desert plants have more seeds and larger seeds than plants in moister areas.
The first site to provide milling stones was at Whitewater Creek, in Arizona. Byron Cummings had found artifacts and fossils there in 1926. When Gladwin heard of this at an anthropological meeting five years later, he again set Gila Pueblo in motion. Sayles and Emil W. Haury undertook excavation, and Antevs checked the geology of the various sites which they studied in the area of what is now called the Cochise culture.[52] The excavators found milling stones in the same stratum as the fossils of extinct animals. They found no spear points in this oldest level—a sign that food gathering was the dominant economy of the early Cochise.
