EARLIEST DRAWINGS BY NEW WORLD MAN?
Four drawings, by Fernando Ramirez Osorio, from a number of engravings on a portion of pelvic bone of an extinct form of elephant found near Puebla, Mexico. The animal at the upper left may be a tapir, the one at the lower right a bison. The other two engravings probably represent mammoths or mastodons. The straight lines in the drawings of the tapir and the bison may be symbols of the hunt such as appear in European caves. A new test for early dates gives an age of over 30,000 years. From the same geological formation have come remains of nearly thirty extinct animals, some thought to be of the third interglacial age, as well as crude tools. (Courtesy of Douglas Cornell, science editor of Visión.)
Hand Axes in the Americas
Of all the bits of stone that bear on the existence of early man in America, perhaps the most puzzling—and certainly the most neglected—are the artifacts which E. B. Renaud has found in countless numbers in southwestern Wyoming. Here at 105 sites on the arid surface of Black’s Fork Valley he had picked up by 1940 some 7,000 chipped stones—many of them like rude hand axes—which suggest a parallel with the industries of paleolithic man in the Old World.[62] European authorities such as J. Reid Moir, champion of English eoliths, Reginald A. Smith, of the British Museum, and D. Peyroni, of the Musée des Eyzies, have stated that Renaud’s finds agree in type with the hand axes, choppers, and blades of the Abbevillian, Acheulean, Mousterian, and Clactonian cultures of Europe and Africa. While emphasizing the resemblances, Renaud is careful to claim no parallel in time.
Renaud’s artifacts recall a gathering of hand axes under most unscientific circumstances more than sixty years ago. In the late 1880’s Thomas Wilson of the National Museum became convinced that the collections under his care contained numerous hand axes of paleolithic type and age. He listed 950 in the Museum and appealed through a printed circular for more examples. He got them. His correspondents in thirty-five states donated 789 and described enough more to bring the total up to 8,501.[63]
A hand ax of the Black’s Fork culture. (Courtesy of the Denver Museum of Natural History.)
Wilson’s hand axes and Renaud’s artifacts were attacked in the same manner. W. H. Holmes of the Bureau of American Ethnology had little trouble in convincing the scientific public that Wilson’s array of casually collected material came from quarries and workshops of the Indian and were cores from which he had struck flakes to make points or scrapers. The critics of Renaud’s artifacts pointed to certain similar objects found less plentifully in late camp sites on the Plains, and suggested that Renaud’s artifacts might be merely the blanks and rejects of a relatively recent stone industry.[64] Many of the finds are certainly not finished implements, and the date of the Black’s Fork culture is still problematical; but among Renaud’s material there are hand axes and scrapers that bear comparison with the cruder Chellean and Acheulean work. There are also chopping tools of Asiatic and African pattern, made from edged pebbles that have been deliberately chipped, first from one side, then from the other.
Flints of Abbevillian and Acheulean types—whether true artifacts or rejects—have been recorded by Kirk Bryan at Cerro Pedernal in New Mexico.[65] At Lake Mohave in the Pinto Basin, Mr. and Mrs. W. H. Campbell have found points of a Mousterian shape and scrapers suggestive of the Aurignacian. They are so crude, however, that they seem more like the “elementary ideas” which, as Bastian claimed, could be the product of primitive man anywhere. In Texas, there are many tools so well developed and so close to Acheulean forms that they cannot be turned aside as either “elementary ideas” or blanks and rejects. These are the hand axes which Sayles and other archaeologists have found.[66]