Independent Inventions Neither Parallel Nor Diffused
It will be some years before the debate of diffusion versus independent invention comes anywhere near settlement. Much of Gladwin’s evidence for diffusion is striking and not to be laughed aside—particularly the group of Australian traits in our Southwest, and the Polynesian and Melanesian traits in the area around the Gulf of Darien. His injection of Old World voyagers between the northern and southern areas of the New World explains certain puzzling matters; but the theory presents puzzles of its own. Many culture traits of Middle America and Peru are not found in Oceania: the use of cement in masonry and the vigesimal system of numeration in Middle America; the amazingly intricate Maya calendar and hieroglyphics with the first invention of zero; baked brick in two Mexican sites; bronze in Peru; the hammock; the whistling jar; the manioc press. Some of these New World traits must have been invented here, but we are asked to believe that the others were forgotten in Oceania and remembered in the Americas. One argument for trans-Pacific diffusion is clear and cogent, however. It is hard to believe that the men who voyaged as far as the Marquesas and Easter Island stopped there, and so missed our long coast line. Certainly the sweet potato made the ocean crossing in the reverse direction, but was it before Columbus?[18]
Other things went with the sweet potato, according to the great chemist Gilbert N. Lewis. Without believing that man originated in South America, he thinks that man first reached the neolithic level in the area east of the Peruvian Andes while his fellow man in the rest of the world was wandering in paleolithic darkness. In the Andean highlands, man developed architecture, numeration, metallurgy, weaving, sculpture, and so forth. He spread these things to Middle America 6,000 or 8,000 years ago, and then carried them across the Pacific to the Old World.[19] As a whole, Lewis’s theory may be unacceptable; but his arguments for diffusion and against independent invention are persuasive.
In 1947 six Scandinavians demonstrated the possibility of an east-west crossing by sailing and drifting 4,300 miles in 101 days on a primitive raft of balsa logs from Peru to an atoll not many days from Tahiti.[20]
The position of the American partisans of independent invention is a curious one. It is both weak and strong. Man is inventive—even primitive man. But his inventions often have a unique quality: they are not always duplicated, or they are not duplicated at the same level of cultural development. Consider the cave paintings and the sculpture of the Aurignacians, Solutreans, and Magdalenians in the late Paleolithic. It is an art of remarkable perfection that utterly disappeared, and was not equaled again for thousands upon thousands of years. At Bonampak, in southern Mexico, a Maya painter used consummate perspective and foreshortening long before they appeared in Asia. Then there are the unique Folsom point, the perfection of the Solutrean and Eden points, the Maya calendar and hieroglyphs, the mosaic walls of Mitla in Mexico, Egyptian architecture and sculpture as well as writing, the beautifully expressive masks of the African Negro, the Melanesian, and the Eskimo. These were independent inventions, but they were unique ones. They were not independent, parallel inventions. And they were not diffused.
As for early man in the New World, we may believe if we wish that the shape of the Sandia point was diffused from the Solutreans of Europe. We may deny the independent invention in our Southwest of spear-throwers, bull-roarers, bunt points, and curved throwing sticks that look more as if they had been brought from Australia. The Eden point may have come from Siberia, or Siberia may have got it from North America. The Folsom point, however, looks definitely like an independent invention, for it is found nowhere else in the world. This argues that the people who ultimately succeeded in making it must have been in the New World for many, many generations before one of them lashed a Folsom point to a spear and thrust it into a bison. Where are the flints they shaped before the Sandia, Clovis, and Folsom? Can they have evolved the craft of flint knapping here in the New World? When we know this, we shall probably know whether they came before or after the last glaciers.
What Diffusion of Plants and Art?
Meantime it is interesting to observe that the log-jam of the independent inventionists is weakening a bit. When the International Congress of Americanists met in New York in 1949, the hitherto conservative and autochthonous American Museum of Natural History presented for the instruction and delectation of the Congress a rather elaborate exhibition of parallelisms between the cultural traits of the Old World and the New. A follow-up to this noteworthy gathering was a symposium of many of the same anthropologists at a meeting, two years later, of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The theme was “Prehistoric and Historic Asia: Transpacific Contacts with the New World.”[21] The question of contacts was not squelched, but there was no substantial progress in finding answers. The symposium focused the problem on two tests of possible diffusion. These concerned domesticated plants and formal art.
The strongest cases that can be made for the diffusion of any plant concern the Lagenaria gourd, cotton, the sweet potato, and the coconut. None of these ranks as a staple of subsistence, and two of them are not even food plants. Thus Old World and New World crops are mutually exclusive. The four plants that we have mentioned may have had world-wide distribution before man reached the New World; they may have followed the first contacts of white men with the Americas; there is only a remote possibility that they crossed the ocean through natural agencies.
In formal art—or perhaps we should say religious art—there are some tantalizing prospects for rather recent Asia-America diffusion. Gordon Ekholm, of the American Museum of Natural History, has listed a number of these. He suggests that the time of contact would have been about 700 A.D. This, you will note, is much too late to do much in shaping American civilization. At the most, it would have furnished no more than a bit of Asiatic frosting upon the cake of American civilization. Drawing upon elements of art from India, southeast Asia, and Indonesia, Ekholm points to similarities in Maya, Mexican, or other native American art, where parallels seem to exist in such things as a trefoil arch, a sacred tree or cross, tiger thrones, conch-shell-and-plant, Atlantean figures, monster doorways, serpent columns and balustrades, and others.[22] The comparisons are provocative, to say the least. In the Maya area, where most of the suspected influence of Asia occurs, many forms of art steadily deteriorated during the period when, theoretically, Asiatic stimulation would have been most pronounced.