With the first hunters in the New World—the men who made the Sandia, the Folsom, the Plainview, and probably the early Eden points—we come to another puzzle. The Sandia is shaped like a much superior point made by the Solutreans of Europe and an equally crude one made in Africa, but the best Folsom is better than the best Solutrean. The fluted channels of the Folsom are remarkable enough; in addition, the edges are sharpened by the removal of almost microscopic flakes, and the base is often carefully ground. We know that such points were being made at least 10,000 and perhaps 15,000 years ago. The Eden point is doubtless newer, yet it must antedate the only chipped weapons that can equal it, the daggers of neolithic Egyptians 7,500 years ago or of the still later Danes.
A point with Eden-like chipping has been found in a neolithic site in Siberia.[5] What does this mean? Obviously Sandia man or his forebears came from Asia across Bering Strait, but too early to leave the Siberian Eden behind him. Someone has been bold enough to suggest that the descendants of the man who developed the Folsom point may have returned to Siberia; after all, as George Gaylord Simpson has pointed out, a bridge works both ways.[6] If Eden man was too late for the land-bridge of the last glaciation, he still had the ice-bridge of winter. But “ice” suggests a doubt. Would a hunter of the temperate High Plains be likely to trek north through the chill of winter to deposit a spear point in Siberia? Yet we know that traces of Eden, Plainview, and Folsom have been found in Alaska. Were they left by summer transients fishing Cook Inlet or hunting Alaskan jaguar around Fairbanks? It is safer, on the whole, to ask where this type of early American came from than to ask where he went.
Left, a point with oblique chipping in the Eden style, found near Lake Baikal, Siberia, in a neolithic culture, compared with an Eden point from Colorado. Is the resemblance accidental, or could Eden man have migrated to the Old World after developing his characteristic style of flint knapping in the New? The size of the Siberian point is not recorded. (The Eden point, after Howard, 1935; the Siberian, after Okladnikov, 1938, and Collins, 1943.)
The points of early man present a double puzzle. How did it happen that the art of working flint was brought to higher perfection in the New World during the Old Stone Age than it was in the Old World? And where did these consummate flint knappers come from? The first question may never be answered. The second presents interesting possibilities. They revolve around the brief appearance of the Solutreans in Europe. Only a great deal of very thorough excavation in Siberia will give us more than provocative or provoking theories about the origins of the men who made Sandia and Folsom points.
Was Our Early Man a Solutrean?
Let us stress again that the Folsom and Eden chipping reached a perfection unknown in Europe until neolithic man brought in agriculture. Indeed, if the paleolithic Solutrean points had never been found, all American archaeologists—instead of just one or two—might unhesitatingly have called Folsom and Eden neolithic, even though they were found with extinct animals. In the history of Europe’s Old Stone Age—and in Africa’s, too, for that matter—we have no more than one hint of such work. It was only the men of the Solutrean culture—thrust between the late Aurignacian and the early Magdalenian—who took much true advantage of pressure flaking, and who made spear points with Sandia-like shoulders. (While the flint chipping of the Solutreans is fine, it is not so minute or so perfect as the work of the men who made Folsom and Eden points.) With the disappearance of the Solutreans, the art of fine flint knapping and point making faded away in the Old World, not to appear again with any vigor until neolithic times.
The Solutreans are not a part of the flow and development of prehistoric European culture. They seem to come as invaders, and then fade out after 500 years, or, at the most, 10,000. Where they came from is uncertain. Because crude points called Proto-Solutrean are much more plentiful along the Danube than they are in France—where the finest Solutrean work is found—it has long been argued that the people who made them came from western Asia. Lately, flint work of the Solutrean type has been discovered in Morocco and also in Egypt;[7] and, since it is intermixed with the products of a much older culture, the Mousterian, it may be argued that the Solutreans came from Africa. The theory of an eastern origin remains strong, however; for among the African flints are shouldered points, and shouldered points were not developed until the end of the Solutrean period in Europe. We do not know the date of the Mousterian in Africa; it may have been late.
If the Solutreans did, in fact, originate in Asia, can we believe that an Asiatic people with an unusual flair for flint knapping fathered both the Solutreans and the men who made the Sandia and the far finer Folsom and Eden points? Did this parent stock send a group of migrants across Bering Strait and down into the High Plains to give us Folsom, Sandia, and Eden points? Did it throw off toward the west a group that practiced the Solutrean arts in Europe? Even after archaeologists have dug Siberia thoroughly we may never know how much earlier or later the American offshoot appeared on the High Plains than the Solutreans in Europe.
It is a curious fact that the Solutreans were as negligent as the Folsom and Eden men in providing us with skulls. C. S. Coon writes, “There are no skulls which all authorities accept as definitely belonging to that short and far from widespread cultural phase.”[8] Hunters in Europe, like hunters in America, seem to have taken little interest in formal obsequies and proper burials. Nature consumed their remains.