Or Was the American Aurignacian or Magdalenian?
Even before the discovery of Folsom made early man in America look like a fugitive from that village in France called Solutré, anthropologists were struck by other resemblances. In 1924 the Englishman Sollas compared the Eskimo culture with the Magdalenian.[9] In 1932 Hrdlička was writing of an Aurignacian and Magdalenian ancestry for the American Indian.[10] In 1933 N. C. Nelson was playing with such comparisons, and writing of our “wooden spear and spear-thrower, perhaps of Magdalenian affinity; our three out of four forms of Solutrean chipped blades; our ordinary Aurignacian-like endscraper; our simple Mousterian type flake; and, finally, our Abbevillian and Chellean varieties of the coup-de-poing.”[11] In the same year Harrington was going further. Recalling that in 1921 he had reported flint work in Cuba that was Aurignacian in style, Harrington pointed out that the Solutrean never reached the West Indies. “Man in a Magdalenian stage of development ... reached America, probably via Asia, but perhaps from Europe via Iceland and Greenland. These bands kept to the north, following up the retreating glaciers, and became the ancestors of the Eskimo.”[12] Thomas Jefferson had somewhat the same idea when he wrote that the Eskimos “must be derived from the Groenlanders, and these probably from some of the northern parts of the old continent.”[13]
Must we add the Aurignacians and Magdalenians of the end of the New Stone Age to the Solutreans and the Australoids as early invaders of America? The answer is dubious, for as yet northern Asia has yielded only a little evidence of the Aurignacian and the Magdalenian.
Chopping Tools Instead of Hand Axes in Asia
Showing the areas where the hand ax dominated and those where the chopping tool took precedence. The white portions are the ice fields of the last glaciation. (After Movius, 1944.)
Throughout most of Asia the men of the Old Stone Age developed a very different core industry from that of Europe. Instead of the hand ax (coup-de-poing), they made an implement now called a chopping tool. This was a large and somewhat flat pebble with a sharpened edge made by striking off flakes alternately from either side. They had also large, crude scrapers, flaked on a single side, which are now called choppers. Only in India and the Near East did the hand ax seem to flourish as in western Europe and much of Africa. In the border area of the Upper Punjab, Helmut de Terra found both hand axes and chopping tools in the early Soan culture, which seems to lie in the Second Interglacial. In upper Burma the hand ax disappears, leaving the field to the chopping tool and the chopper. The same seems true of Java and northern China.[14] Here there are flake artifacts, but they were not chipped by European methods. On the whole, the tools of the Asiatic complex look much more like the choppers and scrapers found at very early sites such as Lake Mohave, southeastern Arizona (Cochise), Sonora, Lower California, and the Valley of Mexico.
A chopping tool of the early Soan culture, in northwestern India. (After Paterson, 1942.)
Yet—another puzzle—hand axes have been found in central and southern Texas, and in Renaud’s Black’s Fork culture of Wyoming, without traces of Folsom or Eden. Can these hand axes, like the Aurignacian and Magdalenian traits of which Nelson and Harrington write, represent an earlier migration than Sandia and Folsom? This is most problematical.