EARLY MAN
IN THE
NEW WORLD

REVISED EDITION

BY Kenneth Macgowan
AND Joseph A. Hester, Jr.
WITH DRAWINGS BY CAMPBELL GRANT

And these are ancient things.
CHRONICLES I, 4:22

PUBLISHED IN CO-OPERATION WITH
THE AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY

THE NATURAL HISTORY LIBRARY
ANCHOR BOOKS
DOUBLEDAY & COMPANY, INC.
GARDEN CITY, NEW YORK

The Natural History Library Edition, 1962
Copyright © 1962 by The American Museum of Natural History
Copyright © 1950, 1962 by Kenneth Macgowan

For permission to quote passages from their respective publications grateful acknowledgment is made to the following authors, publishers, and literary executors:

J. B. Lippincott Company: Aleš Hrdlička, “Early Man in America: What Have the Bones to Say?” in Early Man, ed. George Grant MacCurdy (copyright, 1937, by The Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia); The Macmillan Company: William B. Scott, History of Land Mammals in the Western Hemisphere, rev. ed. (copyright, 1937, by The American Philosophical Society); G. P. Putnam’s Sons: Earnest A. Hooton, Apes, Men, and Morons (copyright, 1937, by G. P. Putnam’s Sons); Rinehart & Company, Inc.: Robert H. Lowie, The History of Ethnological Theory (copyright, 1937, by Robert H. Lowie); Charles Scribner’s Sons: Roland B. Dixon, The Racial History of Man (copyright, 1923, by Charles Scribner’s Sons) and The Building of Cultures (copyright, 1928, by Charles Scribner’s Sons); Whittlesey House: Harold S. Gladwin, Men Out of Asia (copyright, 1947, by McGraw-Hill Book Co., Inc.); University of Toronto Press: Earnest A. Hooton, “Racial Types in America and Their Relations to Old World Types” in The American Aborigines, ed. Diamond Jenness; Yale University Press: Earnest A. Hooton, The Indians of Pecos Pueblo (copyright, 1930, by Yale University Press).

Printed in the United States of America

TO
GEORGE C. VAILLANT

FOREWORD

Since the time of Columbus, when the peoples of the New World were discovered by Europeans, there has been a continuous interest in knowing something about their origin and early history. This has been almost completely shrouded in the primitive past, unmentioned in any written records, and thus largely a matter of speculation of one kind or another. Only very slowly have the means of investigating this history come into being. Greater knowledge of all the world’s peoples has provided the means for solidly based comparative studies, and the developing techniques of archaeology have brought more factual evidence to hand. Gradually the true picture is taking shape as each new discovery is analyzed and discussed and takes its place in the total structure.

This is an exciting adventure in discovery and learning that many would like to share more completely with the archaeologist and anthropologist. Usually, however, the reports of the professionals are too technical to be meaningfully understood by the layman, and the brief accounts of “finds” and “digs” that appear in the press are far too fragmentary. Most fortunately, we have the present book, which fills the need very nicely—far better than anything else in print.

Kenneth Macgowan professes to be an amateur in archaeological matters and, technically speaking, he is, although his competence in the extraordinarily involved subject he deals with is certainly of professional stature. In any event, he clearly discerns what is needed by the amateur and, without minimizing the complexities and involved problems of his subject, he provides the background to make them understandable. To incorporate the various discoveries and new formulations that have appeared in the twelve years since this book was first published, the text has been revised and brought up to date, largely by Professor Joseph A. Hester, Jr. This has been skillfully done in a way that does not alter the quality or coverage of the original.

I have been recommending this book for many years and now begin a new series of such recommendations. I am sure that it will be enjoyed and found most illuminating by all who want to know how the early history of man in the New World is being revealed.

GORDON F. EKHOLM Curator of Mexican Archaeology

May 1961 The American Museum of Natural History

PREFACE

In the twelve years since Early Man in the New World appeared, in 1950, a good deal of archaeological water has passed under the bridge—or over the land-bridge that led the first immigrants into the Americas. Because I had given most of these years to the founding and development of the Department of Theater Arts at U.C.L.A., I was in no position to revise and add to that book without the collaboration of an able and willing anthropologist, a man who had followed far more closely than I the new findings in American prehistory, and the new theories, or guesses, about their meanings. I was fortunate indeed to find such a man in Professor Joseph A. Hester, Jr., of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, San Jose State College, California. To him must go the fullest credit for the updating and the correcting, too, of a twelve-year-old book. Through him, Early Man in the New World is now able to present a great deal of information that was not in existence in 1950. Then, for example, the dating of wood and charcoal, bone, horn, and shell, through radiocarbon was hardly more than a gleam in the eye of Willard F. Libby. As I was reading page proof when he announced his first pre-Columbian date, I could mention this invaluable time clock only at the end of three chapters. A change, rather than an addition to the text, is the use of the word “Clovis” instead of “Generalized Folsom,” and “Eden” instead of “Yuma,” thus bringing our terminology in line with today’s practice.

In its first form, the book came about almost by accident. During 1941 and 1942, my work in the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs included the preparation of some educational films upon archaeological work in Mexico and South America. As a result I came to know and esteem the Director of the University Museum, George C. Vaillant. To my surprise and pleasure, when he learned of my interest in American archaeology, he proposed that we collaborate on a prehistory of the New World. When the war prevented active work together by taking him to Peru, I prepared what would have been the first two chapters of our book—the place of early man in the story of pre-Columbian America. Upon Vaillant’s untimely death, I decided to study the subject more intensively, to add material on the Great Ice Age and early man in the Old World, and to expand the two chapters into a book that I might dedicate to the man who had done so much for American archaeology in the twenty years of his work—George C. Vaillant.

Since the book was not the result of personal work in the field, but rather the product of the kind of research that is nothing more than reading and talking, I was in the debt of many men and books, and a welter of papers, pamphlets, and periodicals. I found it hard to believe that in any other branch of science so many overworked men and women would be so ready to give their time to talk and correspondence with the amateur. I was deeply indebted to more than two score who had gone out of their way to answer questions, lend books, or give reprints of papers. In listing them I was more than certain that I had inadvertently omitted some: Edgar Anderson, Ernst Antevs, Ralph L. Beals, Junius Bird, Robert J. Braidwood, Henry J. Bruman, Kirk Bryan, George F. Carter, R. A. Daly, Helmut de Terra, Loren C. Eiseley, Richard F. Flint, James Gilluly, Harold S. Gladwin, M. R. Harrington, Frank C. Hibben, Frederick W. Hodge, Harry Hoijer, Earnest A. Hooton, W. W. Howells, Frederick R. Johnson, Arthur R. Kelly, G. H. R. von Koenigswald, Alex D. Krieger, Alfred L. Kroeber, M. M. Leighton, Theodore D. McCown, George G. MacCurdy, P. C. Mangelsdorf, Paul S. Martin, Hallam L. Movius, Jr., Raymond W. Murray, N. C. Nelson, Charles W. Phillips, Cyrus N. Ray, E. B. Renaud, Frank H. H. Roberts, Jr., Alfred S. Romer, Irving Rouse, Curt Sachs, Carl O. Sauer, E. H. Sellards, Herbert J. Spinden, T. D. Stewart, Wm. Duncan Strong, Griffith Taylor, Bella Weitzner, H. M. Wormington, and Clark Wissler.

Next to the scientists who provide knowledge stand the librarians who help to preserve it and make it usable. I was peculiarly indebted to a number of these: Miss Margaret Currier, Librarian of the Peabody Museum, Cambridge; her assistant Miss Jessie Bell MacKenzie; Mrs. Ella L. Robinson, Librarian of the Southwest Museum; Dr. Lawrence C. Powell, Librarian of the University of California at Los Angeles; his most cooperative staff; and particularly one of its members, Miss Hilda M. Gray, whose expeditions into the equal mysteries of stacks and bibliographies saved me many hours of labor and I can’t guess how many blunders. Professor Hester and I add a warm word of thanks to Mrs. Alice De Lisle for assembling data, preparing charts, typing, filing, and research.

I was particularly indebted to Frank H. H. Roberts, Jr., of the Smithsonian Institution, the outstanding authority on early man in North America, for his reading, checking, and challenging of the manuscript, and to M. R. Harrington, who read and criticized my first draft. I also owed much to a number of men and women who read various chapters on which they had special knowledge: Edgar Anderson, Ernst Antevs, Robert J. Braidwood, Henry J. Bruman, Loren C. Easeley, James Gilluly, Harold S. Gladwin, M. R. Harrington, Robert F. Heizer, Earnest A. Hooton, Alex Krieger, Alfred L. Kroeber, Theodore D. McCown, Ernest S. Macgowan, Hallam L. Movius, Jr., and H. M. Wormington.

Both Professor Hester and I are especially obliged to Campbell Grant, amateur of anthropology as well as artist, for the many illustrations.

Finally, in the typing of the original manuscript and the checking of the many references I was fortunate in having the aid of Miss Frankie Porter and of Joe Pavalko.

Since we are not adding a repetitive bibliography to the almost four hundred references that we cite, we should like to list a few of the sources which we have found most useful and which should prove so to any reader who may wish to pursue further various aspects of the subject:

Frank H. H. Roberts, Jr., “Developments in the Problem of the North-American Paleo-Indian,” Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections, 100:51-116 (1940), and “The New World Paleo-Indian,” Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution for 1944, 403-433.

H. M. Wormington, Ancient Man in North America, 4th edit. (1957).

E. H. Sellards, Early Man in America (1952).

Raymond W. Murray, Man’s Unknown Ancestors (1943).

Early Man, a symposium edited by George Grant MacCurdy (1937).

The American Aborigines, a symposium edited by Diamond Jenness (1933).

George Grant MacCurdy, Human Origins (1924).

Miles C. Burkitt, The Old Stone Age (1933).

W. J. Sollas, Ancient Hunters and Their Modern Representatives (1924).

W. B. Wright, Tools and the Man (1939).

André Vayson de Pradenne, Prehistory (1940).

Edith Plant, Man’s Unwritten Past (1942).

Hallam L. Movius, Jr., Early Man and Pleistocene Stratigraphy in Southern and Eastern Asia (1944).

Earnest A. Hooton, Up from the Ape (1946).

W. W. Howells, Mankind in the Making (1959).

Richard F. Flint, Glacial Geology and the Pleistocene Epoch (1947) and Glacial and Pleistocene Geology (1957).

Roland B. Dixon, Racial History of Man (1923).

R. A. Daly, The Changing World of the Ice Age (1934).

Frederick E. Zeuner, Dating the Past, 4th edit. (1958).

Robert H. Lowie, The History of Ethnological Theory (1937).

Marcellin Boule and Henri V. Vallois, Fossil Men, trans. by Michael Bullock (1957).

Robert J. Braidwood, Prehistoric Men, 4th edit. (1959).

K. M.

March 1961 University of California Los Angeles 24, Calif.

CONTENTS

[Foreword] ix [Preface] xi [Chapter 1.] 1 THIS SUDDEN NEW WORLD A Secret Laboratory of Culture. Time-Tests by Travel, Tongues, and Physiques. From the Old Stone Age to the New. From Tools and Bones, Fossils and Rocks. [Chapter 2.] 11 THE ROAD OF EARLY MAN How New Was the New World? A Passage from Asia to North America. Men Out of Asia—and All the Continents. Bering Strait—Freeway to the New World. Three Roads to the South—with One Detour. Problematical Roads to the New World. Ware Dogma! [Chapter 3.] 29 THE DEAD HAND OF THE AGES Conflicts and Confusions. The Problem of the Ages. The Bronze Age—a Phantasm. Wood, Bone, and Shell Ages. Dividing the Stone Age—the Old and the New. Activities of the New Stone Age. Agriculture—Test of the Neolithic. First a Food Gatherer, Then a Hunter. [Chapter 4.] 43 THE GREAT ICE AGE Our Part of the Geologic Time Scale. The Glacial Hypothesis Appears. The End of the Great Ice Age. River Terraces and Beach Lines. The Cause of Glaciation. [Chapter 5.] 61 EARLY MAN IN THE OLD WORLD Archaeology, a New Science. Mortillet’s Cramping Classification. Enter the Eolith. Flake vs. Core Industries. Dating Early Man in Europe. True Tools—Deceptive Skulls. Ancestors from Heidelberg and Swanscombe? Putting the Neanderthal in His Place. Ancient Man in Java and China. “Giant Ape”—a Mythical Ancestor? “Java” Men in Africa and Europe? Man-Apes or Ape-Men in Africa. The Progressive Neanderthal. Radiocarbon Dates for the Mousterian. Homo sapiens—New or Old? Solutrean Flint Workers Invade Europe. Weapons and Tools—from Hand Ax to Arrowhead. The Danger in Universal Time Scales. [Chapter 6.] 119 WHAT THE BONES HAVE TO SAY Early Man as Adam’s Progeny. Science and Religion Embattled. Reaction, Led by Science. The Red Herring of the “Primitive Skull.” The Mystery of the Missing Bones. South America Provides the First Skulls. North American Skulls and Bones. Early Man Not Solely Mongoloid or Indian. Evidence from Middle America. New Finds in the United States. [Chapter 7.] 143 THE ARTIFACTS OF EARLY MAN IN THE NEW WORLD Artifacts from Heaven. The Folsom Point—Unique and Potent. Americans Hunted Animals Now Extinct. Two Other Folsom Sites—Clovis and Lindenmeier. Another Fine and Ancient Point. The Plainview Point. A New Point—and Sloths—in Gypsum Cave. Old Lake and River Sites. Sandia—Older Than Folsom. The Milling Stone Appears. A Paucity of Art Objects. Hand Axes in the Americas. Early Man in Mexico. From the Glacial to the Archaic. Back of 15,000 Years? [Chapter 8.] 189 EARLY MAN AND THE GREAT EXTINCTION A Twofold Problem. Myths and Mammoths. Archaeological Evidence of Recent Man and the Mastodon. Sloth and Camel in Dry Caves. The Folsom Bison Not Extinct? The Mystery of Extinction. More Radiocarbon Dates for Extinct Mammals. [Chapter 9.] 207 PYGMIES, AUSTRALOIDS, AND NEGROIDS—BEFORE INDIANS? The Mythical Indian Race. Racial Definition—the Field of the Physical Anthropologist. The Cephalic Index—and Others. What Skull Measurements Tell Us About Early Man. Europe Recognizes the Australoid in America. Hooton and Dixon on Early Invaders. A Potpourri of Races. Pygmies Before Australoids in the New World? Australoids, Negroids, and Men From Europe. No Mongoloids till 300 B.C. Siberian Caucasoids. [Chapter 10.] 233 DID THE INDIAN INVENT OR BORROW HIS CULTURE? Diffusion vs. Independent Invention. Bastian’s “Psychic Unity.” Complexity an Argument for Diffusion. Dispersion as Well as Diffusion. The Trap of Time. Escape from the Trap. Dead Alexander Invades America. Independent Inventions Neither Parallel Nor Diffused. What Diffusion of Plants and Art? [Chapter 11.] 261 THE INDIAN IN AGRICULTURE Inventions—Some New, Some Old. American Plants and Their Cultivation. When and Where Did Our Agriculture Begin? The Indians Accomplishment in Agriculture. How Old Is Corn? [Chapter 12.] 277 PUZZLES, PROBLEMS AND HALF-ANSWERS The Pendulum Swings. The Puzzle of the Skulls. The Puzzle of the Querns. The Puzzle of the Points. Was Our Early Man a Solutrean? Or Was the American Aurignacian or Magdalenian? Chopping Tools Instead of Hand Axes in Asia. Spinden’s Neolithic Blockade. Was the First Migration Interglacial? Geological Evidence and the Pluvials. In Sum. [References in the Text] 295 [References as to Illustrations] 317 [Index] 323

ILLUSTRATIONS, MAPS, AND TABLES

[The Treks of Early Man] 4 [Out of Noah’s Ark and Over Bering Strait] 13 [The Land-Bridge to the New World] 18 [A Great-Circle Route to North America] 19 [Migration Routes] 22 [Glaciers and Ice Fields as Barriers to Early Man] 26 and 27 [The Life Story of the Earth] 44 [The Ice Fields of the Last Glaciation] 48 [The Age of River Terraces] 51 [The Four Great Glaciations] 55 [Glaciation Through Warmth] 58 [The First Hand Ax Found and Recognized] 62 [Time Scale of Early Man] 65 [The “Dawn Stones” of Early Man] 66 [Paleolithic Types and Industries] 70 [Man’s First Perfected Tool] 71 [Ancient Implements of Bone and Wood] 74 [Java Man—Pithecanthropus erectus] 82 [Gigantopithecus—Giant Ancestor of Man?] 83 [Three Types of Old World Man] 89 [Man’s First Spear Points] 90 [Percussion Flaking] 91 [The Second Step in Flint Knapping] 92 [The Third Step—Pressure Flaking] 93 [Sculpture of the Old Stone Age] 98 [How Blades Were Split off a Core] 100 [Upper Paleolithic Tools] 101 [Three Aurignacian Types] 102 [The Meaning of Scrapers] 103 [The Tanged Point] 105 [A Laurel-Leaf Solutrean Point] 106 [A Tool to Make a Tool] 107 [Magdalenian Harpoon Head] 108 [The First Illustration of a Blade] 108 [Our First Machine, the Spear-Thrower] 109 [The First Paintings] 110 [Bowmen from Africa] 112 [Archers from Spain] 113 [Magdalenian Engravings] 114 [A Chart of Old Stone Age Cultures] 116 and 117 [A Spear Point Found Near Trenton, N.J.] 144 [The Lake Lahontan Point] 145 [The Making of a Folsom Point] 147 [The Minute, Ribbonlike Flaking of a Folsom] 148 [A Map of the Chief Sites in the Southwest] 150 [Burials in the Old World and the New] 152 [The Finest Flint Work of Early Man] 155 [Two Points of Plainview Type] 157 [Flint Knapping of the Old and New Stone Ages] 158 [A Gypsum Cave Point] 159 [Three Early Points from the Borders of Extinct Lakes] 161 [An Abilene Point] 162 [A Sandia Point Compared with Two Solutreans] 165 [Cochise Milling Stones] 168 [An Animal Head Carved from a Fossil Bone] 171 [Earliest Drawings by New World Man?] 172 [A Hand Ax of the Black’s Fork Culture] 174 [A Hand Ax and a Chopping Tool from Texas] 176 [A Broken Pestle from Gold-Bearing Gravels in California] 179 [The More Important Sites of Early Man in the New World] 185 [Mammals of the Ice Age in North and South America] 190 [Eight Thousand Years of the Great Extinction] 196 [Prehistoric and Modern Bison] 199 [The Mongoloid Fold] 208 [The Cephalic Index] 211 [The Dispersal of Head Types] 212 [Three Types of Skulls] 214 [Early Man vs. the Mongoloid] 216 [From the Old World and the New] 228 [From Burma to Melanesia to America?] 235 [Fishhooks from Tahiti and California] 236 [Diffusion or Independent Invention?] 237 [Circumpacific Navigation?] 241 [Bearded White Gods?] 250 [The Equatorial Counter Current] 252 [New World Plants and Products] 263 [The First Illustration of the Corn Plant] 268 [“Turkie Corne”] 270 [A Seventeenth Century Picture of Corn] 271 [Corn of 4,500 Years Ago] 273 [Eden Chipping in Siberia] 282 [Hand Axe and Chopping Tool Cultures of the Old World] 286 [A Chopping Tool of Northwestern India] 287

EARLY MAN IN THE NEW WORLD

A NOTE ON NOTES

There are no footnotes in this book. A catch-all for the author’s afterthoughts and for the corrections provided by friends who have read manuscript or galley proof—as well as a place for legitimate references—they are often a nuisance and always a typographical eyesore. The reference numbers in this book direct attention only to the sources of quotations, facts, or theories. They do not lead the reader to supplementary text material. Therefore, he may ignore them unless he wants to pursue the subject further for himself, or to verify the authority for what may seem to him an implausible statement.

1
THIS SUDDEN NEW WORLD

Of all animals, we men are the only ones who wonder where we came from and where we will go. —W. W. HOWELLS

A Secret Laboratory of Culture

By the end of World War II, Timbuctoo was surprisingly close to Keokuk. Boys from Brooklyn stared up at Roman columns in the African desert, and Marines swapped a package of cigarettes for the spear of a stone-age man in New Guinea. Physically ours was indeed one world.

In a different sense it was one world before Columbus sailed, but a very limited world. Europe, North Africa, and portions of Asia made up all that Columbus knew and all that he expected to know. He intended to find a new road to the Indies; that was all. It would be a road across his own one world.

Then suddenly this world of his was two worlds. A new hemisphere appeared like a comet from outer space. It was a land and a people utterly unknown, utterly different. It had lived and grown for thousands upon thousands of years, sealed off to itself, unique. We search for some fit comparison, and find nothing adequate to describe the discovery of this secret laboratory of experiment in human culture.

Perhaps we should not have said that the New World had been “sealed off to itself.” We might better have said “sealed off from Europe.” The culture which the Spanish Conquistadores found in the Americas owed nothing to that world from which they had come. What the Americas owed to Asia is another matter—in fact, the matter of this book.

One thing is clear. The Americas were indebted to Asia for man himself. Man—even one type of man—did not originate here. A small primate, the extinct Notharctus, left his bones—but no descendants—in our Southwest. The New World has no great apes; there are no indications that it ever had any. Its monkeys are quite out of the running. They have four too many teeth, their nose is flat, and they are cursed with a prehensile tail.

The New World owed something more to Asia, of course; but how much, is uncertain. Most anthropologists believe that man crossed Bering Strait with a very meager kit of material culture. He brought, at various times, the spear-thrower, the bow and arrow, the dog, the boat, the strike-a-light, some kind of clothing, but not a great deal more. Many other things—pottery, weaving, agriculture, masonry, metallurgy—he had to invent for himself in the New World; at least, that is the general opinion. A few anthropologists say that men out of Asia brought quite an array of culture traits; but these migrants were late comers, and some of them crossed the Pacific by boat.

Only a few students now deny that men had been crossing over from Asia through twenty or more millenniums before the birth of Christ. Some of them were what we call Indians—most of them, no doubt; but, before the Indians came, there seem to have been other immigrants. It is the purpose of this book to tell you what is known or believed or hazarded about these earliest men of the New World.

There are two chief problems: When did these men come? and What were they like?

It is a curious fact that, if we look at the rich variety of men and languages and cultures which was spread from end to end of two whole continents when the European came, we get some vague idea of how long man had been in the western hemisphere but no idea at all of what he was like when he anticipated Columbus by discovering the New World. Through the haze of time, we can see the general outline of Indian civilization, and many details. Much of this is clear and concrete, most of it is natural and understandable in terms of our Americas, and all of it is striking and extraordinary. But, for our present purposes, the best it does is to tell us that many millenniums of time must have been required for its development. It tells us nothing about the men who preceded the Indian, the primitive savages who discovered the New World. These men who first journeyed from Bering Strait to Cape Horn were not the men who made the Maya civilization, and they came long, long before. But by studying both the Indian and his predecessors we may gain some hint of how long ago this was.

Time-Tests by Travel, Tongues, and Physiques

Somehow or other, by this route or that, the migrants from Asia drifted across to the Americas, down the two continents, and out to their uttermost limits. Of the many possible tests of man’s age in the New World—some good, some not so good—one of the least accurate is a guess at how long it would take men and women, encumbered with children, to walk—and to eat their way—from Bering Strait to Cape Horn. It has been estimated that they might have covered the 4,000 miles from Harbin, Manchuria, to Vancouver Island in from 20 to 1,000 years; the time involved really depends on how fast and in what direction those wild animals moved upon which early man depended for food. As the country widened out, then narrowed in Central America, and widened out once more, there is no knowing how long the trip to Cape Horn may have taken. Our migrants would have had to camp and hunt as they went, and at first they would have moved only as the pursuit of game spurred them on. There would have had to be time, too, for increase in numbers—among themselves as well as among later invaders—to create pressure of population, and force the earlier men to the peripheries of northeastern America, Florida, and Lower California, and push them across jungled Panama and Amazonia and toward the bleaker and less desirable parts of South America. The various invaders multiplied as they moved, and it is anybody’s guess how many people were crowded into America by 1492; one authority says 8,400,000, another 50,000,000 to 75,000,000.[1] It took much time, of course—many millenniums—to breed so many men and cover so wide a space.

THE TREKS OF EARLY MAN

This map shows how far man would have had to walk from southern Africa to a spot just east of the Caspian Sea, where it used to be supposed that man originated, and it also shows the distance from that area to England, Australia, and Tierra del Fuego. The journey of early man from Bering Strait to the tip of Cape Horn was a matter of 10,000 miles.

Other things suggest a long sojourn for the Indian in the New World. Consider the matter of language—“the archives of history.” The Indian, writes N. C. Nelson, “had been at home in the New World long enough to have evolved about 160 linguistic stocks or language families, with 1,200 or more dialectic subdivisions.”[2] Alfred L. Kroeber says that North and South America “contain more native language families than all the remainder of the world.”[3] Some of this diversity could be due to migrations from different linguistic areas of the Old World. It might also be accounted for by the theory of Franz Boas that among early primitive peoples there was great diversity of language, and that single tongues began to spread widely only when conquering and proselyting groups won a certain amount of power and dominion.[4] John Harrington, an American linguistic authority, believes that the diversity of Indian speech argues a very long residence in the New World—“at least 20,000 years, perhaps three times that.”[5] Edgar B. Howard states: “Considering that the languages of the New World lack evidence, outside of Eskimo, of any identification with Old World languages, the conclusion appears to be that human contact between the two continents was very remote.”[6] If there is no such identification, then even the last migrants came at a very early date indeed, or else all the tribal relatives who were left behind in the Old World perished without linguistic trace. It is possible, of course, that resemblances have merely not been recognized.

In addition to differentiation of language, there is differentiation of physique. When we in the United States think of the Indian, we think of a tall man with high cheekbones, a hawk-nose, and a bronze-red skin. Actually the American Indian is probably more varied in height, face, and color than the whole White racial stock.[7] More than that, his somatic constitution—the inner man in a physical sense—varies greatly. By 1492 the Indian had adapted himself to eight different climates from arctic to tropic, from arid to humid, from sea level to the 14,000-foot heights of Peru. This would take time, much time. Albrecht Penck, the great European glacialist, thinks 25,000 years hardly long enough.[8]

The civilizations which the Indian developed in the Americas—the Maya, Aztec, and Inca cultures—provide another test of how long man had been in the New World before Columbus came. This test is no more exact than those we have already mentioned, but it suggests quite a long sojourn.

From the Old Stone Age to the New

While the physical man was adapting himself to all manner of climates, the mental man dragged himself up from the hunting life of the Old Stone Age to the invention of writing and the perfecting of an accurate calendar. On the way—and as slow, necessary steps in his progress—he developed agriculture, and invented or perfected the arts and crafts of pottery, weaving, dyeing, metallurgy, sculpture, poetry, painting, architecture, city planning. In his agriculture he utilized irrigation, discovered fertilizers, and developed a great many exclusively American plants which now supply more than half of the world’s provender. He was probably the first to write numbers effectively through the use of zero and numerical position. He practiced trepanning—the removal of a piece of skull bone to relieve pressure on the brain—and he discovered how to use certain medicines and narcotics. In his textiles he employed all the weaves known to us today. He contrived efficient methods of government. He proliferated into 368 major tribal groups, and developed fifteen culture centers of distinct individuality.[9] In the United States he left 100,000 mounds as the product of one of his cultures; in Middle America, 4,000 ceremonial cities of stone. He practiced most types of religion except atheism. Certain things that he made resemble things of the Old World; most are peculiar to him and his life. Of Indian culture traits Clark Wissler remarks that “the range in variety and individuality seems even greater in aboriginal America than in the primitive Old World.”[10]

Progress is slow in the stone age. It seems to have been particularly slow in the Old Stone Age, or paleolithic period, when man spent half a million to a million years learning to chip stone and hunt and gather food efficiently. Things went much faster in the New Stone Age, or neolithic period, when he was learning to cultivate plants and make pottery and polish stone tools. To move from the beginnings of agriculture to the beginnings of metallurgy, which superseded the neolithic, may have taken as little as 700 years in the Old World and certainly not much more than 4,000 or 5,000.

Progress was slower in the New World. The Indian reached the neolithic stage later, and he may have stayed in it longer than man did in the Old World. This can probably be blamed on the peculiar fauna of the western hemisphere. In all of the Americas there were no suitable animals to domesticate except the dog—which the Indian probably brought with him—and those dubious objects of husbandry, the turkey, the bee, the Muscovy duck, the llama, the alpaca, the vicuña, and the guinea pig. Because there were no sheep or cattle, the Indian had no pastoral life and no milk and butter. He had no beasts of burden except the dog and the llama; he invented no wheeled cart. It was not entirely his own fault that he remained essentially a man of the stone age even though, toward the last, he had perfected a metallurgy of copper, silver, gold, platinum, and bronze.

The story of the Indian’s spread through the Americas, his variation in language and physique, and his building of the civilizations of Peru, Central America, and Mexico argues that he came to the New World many millenniums before the birth of Christ. You may point out that the argument is too general, too inexact in outcome, but you must remember that behind the Indian lies an earlier migrant. We are on somewhat firmer ground when we turn to the evidence we have of this migrant’s tools, his hearths, and his bones. For sometimes they are related to the fossils of extinct mammals and—more important—to certain kinds of earth, charcoal and rock that can be dated.

From Tools and Bones, Fossils and Rocks

The tools and the hearths and the fossils are plentiful, and some years ago this proof of man’s antiquity seemed to be enough. The great and spectacular mammals whose remains were associated with early man in the Americas, as well as in Europe, were thought to have vanished with the glaciers of the Great Ice Age. Therefore, early man in the Americas must also have lived in that period. Now, however, a number of scientists believe that the American mastodon, along with a number of other animals that are now extinct in the New World, survived the Great Ice Age here. This would still leave us with an American whose antiquity is quite respectable.

The best proof of the age of early man was for a long time geological. Archaeologists dated man by the earth and rocks in which they found his tools or his bones. Unfortunately, they had not too much geological evidence in the Americas. In the past ten years, however, radiocarbon (of which you will learn more later) has made it possible to know much about when man reached the New World and where he lived.

2
THE ROAD OF EARLY MAN

I have been a stranger in a strange land. —EXODUS 2:22

How New Was the New World?

We moderns were not the first to ask the question: Just how new was the New World on October 12, 1492? Or how old?

For a time, it was a very ancient world to the Spaniards. It was the Indies of the East, and they thought they had discovered nothing more than a new way of getting at them. Some years passed before they awoke to the fact that they had found a new continent. There may, of course, have been suspicions from the first. Certainly the tropical trees and plants were new; the animals, too, all except man. Man was an Indian—that is, an East Indian. Balboa may have had a “wild surmise,” but it remained for later Spaniards, as well as the Portuguese, to find in South America a land that could not be Asia. Columbus discovered the New World and thought it was India; the Italian Amerigo Vespucci did not discover the continent named for him, but at least he knew it was not India and gave it a name of its own—Mundus Novus.

Then, indeed, our world became a new world, and a world freighted with a problem. The problem was how to put its inhabitants into a proper theological—and ethnological—pigeonhole. As a new and unknown being, the Indian presented a serious issue to the Catholic Church and its clerical and imperial pioneers. Here was a people of whom the Bible made no mention. Shem, Ham, and Japheth had filled three continents very handily, but they had somehow neglected this one. Established authority had no explanation for these new men. Were they, indeed, beings without souls? “While the New World with its gold and other riches was accepted as reality,” observes N. C. Nelson, “the truly human nature of its inhabitants was temporarily held in doubt.”[1]

Soon, however, the church found an explanation. The Bible mentioned no separate creation in an American Garden of Eden; therefore the forebears of the red man must have come from the Old World. As early as 1512 Pope Julius II declared officially that the Indians were descended from Adam and Eve. For many years thereafter they were considered as children of Babel driven back into the stone age because of their sins.

A Passage from Asia to North America

In 1590—not quite a hundred years after Columbus’s discovery—a Spanish cleric, José de Acosta, put on paper an ingenious theory for the populating of the Americas. In an English translation of 1604, it reads:

It is not likely that there was another Noes Arke, by the which men might be transported into the Indies, and much lesse any Angell to carie the first man to this new world, holding him by the haire of the head, like to the Prophet Abacuc.... I conclude then, that it is likely the first that came to the Indies was by ship-wracke and tempest of wether.[2]

But Acosta felt the need of a land route to take care of the animals. Noah had let them out of the Ark in western Asia, and they could hardly be expected to sail or even to swim to America. And so Acosta ventured the opinion that somewhere in the north explorers would ultimately find a portion of America that joined with some corner of the Old World, or at any rate was “not altogether severed and disjoined” from it. In this way the animals—and man—had come to the New World.

OUT OF NOAH’S ARK AND OVER BERING STRAIT

Two pages from Brerewood’s seventeenth-century book Enquiries Touching the Diversity of Languages, and Religions, Through the Chief Parts of the World, in which he pictures bears and Tartars crossing to the New World at a point where Asia and America “are continent one with the other, or at most, disioyned but by some narrow channell of the Ocean.” (Courtesy of the University of California, Los Angeles, Library.)

God-fearing Protestants from England joined clerics of the Roman church in bringing the American aborigine over from Asia. Long before any white man had stared across Bering Strait from the eastern tip of Asia and discovered Alaska, sixteenth and seventeenth century men were envisioning the neighborliness of the two continents and an easy crossing. It had to be. There was no escaping this solution. Men from Eden could be trusted to force their way across the widest and wildest of oceans, but not animals from Ararat. In 1614 Edward Brerewood worried, like Father de Acosta, over the problem of “the ravenous and harmefull beasts, wherewith America is stored, as Beares, Lions, Tigers, Wolves, Foxes, &c. (which men as is likely, would never to their owne harme transport out of the one continent to the other).” He saw that “from Noahs Ark, which rested after the deluge, in Asia, all those beasts must of necessity fetch their beginning.” He knew that the men must have come from Asia because the Indians were not the color of Africans, and they had “no rellish nor resemblance at all, of the Artes, or learning, or civility of Europe.” Also, “the West side of America respecting Asia, is exceeding much better peopled then the opposite or East side, that respecteth toward Europe.”

Men Out of Asia—and All the Continents

Brerewood moved on from the questions of how and whence to who. With considerable hardihood, this learned Englishman picked a single Asiatic race to supply the Indian with a forebear. Looking askance at the inhabitants of America, he wrote: “In their grosse ignorance of letters, and of arts, in their idolatrie, and the specialties of it, in their incivility, and many barbarous properties, they resemble the old and rude Tartars, above all the nations of the earth.”[3]

Brerewood’s reasoning was logic itself and his conclusion inescapable compared with much of the theorizing of his day and much more that went on for three hundred years after the discovery of America. In 1607 Fray Gregorio Garcia published a book, The Origin of the Indians of the New World, in which appeared these words:

The Indians proceed neither from one nation or people, nor have they come from one part alone of the Old World, or by the same road, or at the same time, in the same way, or for the same reasons; some have probably descended from the Carthaginians, others from the Ten Lost Tribes and other Israelites, others from the lost Atlantis, from the Greeks, and Phoenicians, and still others from the Chinese, Tartars, and other groups.[4]

For good measure, Fray García and his fellow theorists threw in men of Ophir and Tarsus, old Spaniards, Romans, Japanese, Koreans, Egyptians, Moors, Canary Islanders, Ethiopians, French, English, Irish, Germans, Trojans, Danes, Frisians, and Norsemen—a veritable League of Nations.

Iconoclastic Voltaire would have none of this—and none of Eden, either:

Can it still be asked from whence came the men who people America? The same question might be asked with regard to the Terra Australis. They are much farther distant from the port which Columbus set out from, than the Antilles. Men and beasts have been found in all parts of the earth that are inhabitable. Who placed them there? We have already answered He that caused the grass to grow in the fields; and it is no more surprising to find men in America, than it is to find flies there.[5]

The more or less scientific minds of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were no less prodigal in theory than the clerics and the philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth. Sometime in the 1820’s Lord Kingsborough, son of an Irish peer of great wealth, got it into his head that the Lost Tribes of Israel were the ancestors of the Maya and the Aztecs—the same idea that animated Joseph Smith and The Book of Mormon; and in 1830—the very year that Smith’s American supplement to the Bible appeared—Kingsborough began the publication of the nine monumental and handsomely illustrated volumes, Antiquities of Mexico, which cost him £25,000 and ultimately—like Smith—his life. Quite as eccentric theories followed. The otherwise sound and observant George Catlin thought the Mandan Indians the descendants of the Welsh. The “lost continent” of Mu—the Atlantis of the Pacific—reared its ugly head. Elliot Smith left the teaching of anatomy, and W. J. Perry cultural anthropology and comparative religions, to bring from Egypt all the culture of America—together with most of Eurasia’s and Africa’s—on the backs of those indefatigable travelers of their invention, the Children of the Sun.

In the face of such wild theorizing it is comforting to recall that the great Humboldt recognized as early as 1811 a “striking analogy between the Americans and the Mongol race.” We must pardon him for clinging to some vague notion of a primordial American race and declaring that the Indians were “a mixture of Asiatic tribes and the aborigines of this vast continent.”[6]

Today science does not have all the answers to the anthropological problem which arose when Balboa discovered the Pacific and Magellan crossed it, thus dropping the world’s largest ocean in between the Americas and the Garden of Eden. So far as early man is concerned, we know a good deal about how he came, and whence, and a little about when.

Except for the passionate protagonists of Atlantis and of its “opposite number,” the mythical land of Mu lost in the depths of the Pacific, most students agree that early man came across what is now Bering Strait—not by way of the Aleutians, for their inhospitable western tip is separated from Asia by 225 miles of sea with one small island midway between. For a long time, the Bering Strait route was supported only by a priori reasoning, but of late years the weapons of early man have been found either alone or with the fossils of extinct mammals in parts of Alaska and north-west Canada.

Bering Strait—Freeway to the New World

Though early man from northern Asia certainly crossed in one area and in one area only, he may have made the crossing by any one of three methods. That depends on when he came.

If he came rather late—say around 10,000 years ago—he had to negotiate Bering Strait, open water in summer, iced over in winter. If the migrants were a boating and fishing people voyaging north along the Asiatic shore, the 56-mile gap of Bering Strait, broken by the Diomede Islands, was a negligible barrier, since the greatest stretch of open water was only 23 miles across. If they found the strait frozen over, they would have followed the southern edge of the ice. Men of a more inland type, men less given to water travel, could have crossed to Alaska—as some do now—on the ice of winter.

If early man first came to the New World in the Great Ice Age or in the time when the glaciers were beginning to melt, he could have crossed dry-shod on a land-bridge. Geologists have calculated that the water withdrawn from the ocean to form the glaciers—which were half a mile to two miles thick over much of Canada and the northern portion of the United States—would have lowered the water level in the Bering Strait region by as much as 200 to 300 feet toward the end of the Great Ice Age.[7] In addition, the ocean floor of the strait—relieved of so much weight of water—would doubtless have risen to some extent. Since, at present, portions of the strait reaching from shore to shore are not more than 120 feet deep, a land-bridge is a perfectly plausible hypothesis. Of course the bridge would have disappeared with the end of the glaciers, which means that, if man had to come over dry-shod in the summer, he must have invaded America while the glaciers were still fairly extensive.

THE LAND-BRIDGE TO THE NEW WORLD

A conservative map of shorelines during the last glaciation, based on a drop in sea level of 180 feet. Geologists believe that the ice impounded in the great glaciers and ice fields of the world lowered the ocean 200 to 300 feet. The southern shore of Alaska during the last glaciation may have been much nearer its present position. (After Johnston, 1933.)

A GREAT-CIRCLE ROUTE TO NORTH AMERICA

On the flat, distorted map of Mercator, on page 4, the path of early man across Asia to the New World seems a roundabout curve. On a globe, it is very nearly a great circle. This is indicated on a map such as this, projected from a point above the North Pole. From above Bering Strait, the route would appear still straighter.

Aleš Hrdlička has said that not many men would have frequented northeastern Siberia because of its inhospitable climate, and so only a few would have “trickled over.”[8] The opposite seems to have been true in the time of the glaciers. Then northeastern Asia was an excellent jumping-off place for the Old World migrant. In the first place, there was not much glaciation in this area, certainly nothing to interfere with the passage of people along the coast. The last glaciation was “far less extensive than its predecessor,” say R. F. Flint and H. G. Dorsey, “and was confined to the higher parts of the higher mountain ranges.”[9] Secondly, the land-bridge, which made crossing easy, also altered the climate of Siberia south of the bridge.[10] It cut off the arctic currents and therefore to some extent the arctic damp which now makes the Asiatic coast inhospitable. Hrdlička—one of the first and most violent opponents of early man in America—said that the land-bridge was not essential. Even if it had existed, “man would not have used it, but would have followed the much easier route over the water.”[11]

Three Roads to the South—with One Detour

Once in Alaska, man—early or not so early—had a number of routes to choose from. If he was of maritime habits, and crossed by water, he would have tended to stick to his boats, and sail or paddle southward and southeastward down the coast and on through the inland passages of lower Alaska and Canada which protect boats from ocean storms. When Frank C. Hibben found a certain early kind of spear point in a curio shop in Ketchikan, Alaska, and on the far-away shore of Cook Inlet, he called attention to a route—whether overland or by sea—which hardly anyone had stressed except Hrdlička.[12] Hrdlička stressed it because he brought man over after the glaciers and in boats. But even in the Great Ice Age this route was not impossible for men without boats. Migrants who had crossed by a land-bridge might have turned south along the Pacific shore, climbing and crossing the ice barriers of the glacial rivers that still slide slowly down from the inland mountains. Philip S. Smith points out that “ice surfaces allow fully as easy travel by sled and on foot as do the ordinary land surfaces.”[13] But was there game, as well as fish, along the coast to lure the migrant on and to sustain him upon the journey?

Other men seem to have chosen to tramp and hunt eastward and northeastward from the strait. In this direction there were two main routes open to men and game. One route led up the narrow lowlands of the northwest coast to the mouth of the Mackenzie River and then south up its long valley. The other, and much more likely path for early man, was up the ice-free Yukon and its tributaries. These would have taken him eastward to the Mackenzie or southward through the plateau between the northern Rockies and the Coastal Range. Hrdlička thought the Yukon valley a most unpromising route because of the turbulent rivers and the noxious insects; but most students disagree with him and stress the abundance of fish and game. There can be no question that some parts of this route were used by early man—and extinct mammals, too. His ancient spear points have been found in the muck beds of Fairbanks mingled with the fossilized bones of elephant, bison, camel, horse, and an extinct jaguar once called the Alaskan lion.[14] Other early points have been discovered in western Canada in the area of the mountain plateau. In 1944 Frederick Johnson located fifteen camp sites in early soil levels along the route of the plateau corridor and found many varieties of artifacts. Among these were a few points, most of them fragmentary, the butts of which resembled those of an early type.[15] Following Johnson in 1945, Douglas Leechman found other sites and artifacts along this route in soils formed perhaps 9,000 years ago.[16]

The Yukon valley rivers could have taken early man to the Mackenzie and to the northern edge of the plateau; but during a large part of the Great Ice Age he still faced the gigantic fields of snow and ice that covered half of North America. Although ice journeys may not be so very difficult, and early man had learned to live in the chill of northern Siberia (the Eskimo of today proves that human existence is possible in a land of little sun and much cold), we cannot believe that he attempted to cross the icy wastes. A journey on foot across a thousand or two thousand miles of ice becomes a sheer impossibility if there is no provender to be found along the way. There was certainly no food for musk ox or mammoth, and therefore no food for man. Without game to hunt, he would not have felt the impulse to invade the ice fields.

MIGRATION ROUTES

The pathways available to early man, as mapped by Carl Sauer—to which have been added a problematical route by sea along the southern coast of Alaska and another down the corridor between the eastern Rockies in Canada and the coastal range. (After Sauer, 1944.)

Too many authorities have written as if early man made a free choice of routes through Alaska and Canada. Actually, the animals he hunted chose his route for him—doubtless many routes. Unless he had learned to spear and net fish, the first invader probably pursued a herd of mammoth or musk ox across the land-bridge or over the frozen ice of later winters. You in your armchair are likely to suggest that, once man was in Alaska, he turned south of his own free will and intelligence in order to avoid the cold. The first trouble with that line of thought is that man had gone north in Asia. The second is that primitive man had no conception of where south lay or of the possibility of greater comfort there. At this point, you will probably say that, though he had no ideas about the nature of the south, he had brains enough to follow the sun. Unfortunately this would have spun him round like a slow-motion teetotum; for he entered North America in the neighborhood of the Arctic Circle where the summer sun moves in a great low circle, and sinks out of sight when winter sets in.

If you want to understand early man, and guess with some accuracy at why he came to the New World and how he happened to drift southward and eastward until he filled it, you must think of him as a wanderer looking for food. Game lured him on at random, and vegetation lured both beast and man. Man might eat his way through caribou country, and come upon the bison of another area. As he killed and wandered, he might go south or he might go east. But the animal—and the man who ate berries and roots and wild grains as well as meat—would move as the climate moved. The world has known many changes of climate and shifts of rain belts. Some of these have been extreme—in the Great Ice Age, for example—and some have been less marked. But they have moved the forests and the grasslands, and animals and man have moved with the vegetation.

During the past 100,000 years, glacialists believe that there were three periods when the inland ice melted sufficiently to allow the southward passage of both animals and man. The first was more than 75,000 years ago in the Sangamon Interglacial period before the time when the last, or Wisconsin, glaciation had covered the plains of Canada (see pages [26] and [27]). During the Wisconsin, a corridor probably opened about 50,000 years ago along the eastern foothills of the Rockies, and another, perhaps a little later, down the plateau between the northern Rockies and the Coast Range. The third opportunity for man to penetrate from the north came around 11,000 years ago, when the final retreat of the ice sheets began in those same regions.[17] Perhaps the land-bridge was still usable up to 10,000 years ago, but certainly later migrants had to cross Bering Strait by water or winter ice.

Bering Strait and the great glaciers were not the only obstacles to the peopling of the Americas. The Isthmus of Panama must have presented quite a problem to the pioneers who were to fill Amazonia and the Andean Highlands and to reach Cape Horn. Today nobody sets off blithely by foot through the jungle that separates Costa Rica from Colombia. The beach is the best pathway at low tide; but it is an intermittent one. It is better to hope that the shifts of climate which were involved with the glaciers made Panama a drier country than it is today.

Of course it was not only early man and his prey that used the routes from Siberia across Bering Strait and through Alaska and Canada. The later migrants—ancestors of the Algonquins, the Athapascans, and others—undoubtedly came in the same way.

Problematical Roads to the New World

Other routes from other lands may have brought other migrants. These routes are not so fanciful as the paths from Atlantis and Mu, but they have had few advocates. M. R. Harrington has mentioned the possibility that Magdalenian man of Glacial or Postglacial Europe may have crossed from Europe to Canada by way of Iceland and Greenland and various ice- and land-bridges to father the Eskimo.[18] Ellsworth Huntington adds to the land-bridge over Bering Strait “wind-bridges” across the middle Atlantic.[19] Like Father de Acosta, he believes that storms may have blown occasional vessels to the New World. To suggest that unwilling mariners from the Mediterranean may thus have made oneway trips, he cites from Stansbury Hagar[20] striking resemblances between the zodiacs of Europeans and of the Mayas, Aztecs, and even Peruvians. Whether this matter of the zodiacs is fact or fancy, Huntington’s unwilling voyagers could not have come much earlier than the birth of Christ. More fantastic were the claims voiced some years ago that the men who left skulls of Australoid or Melanesian type in the caves of South America reached that continent by a southern route across an Antarctic bridge of land and ice. Of much more serious importance is the possibility that the long-voyaging Polynesians, having negotiated the 5,000 or 6,000 miles that lay between their home on the edge of Asia and the Marquesas or Easter Island, would have tried occasionally to continue their eastward course. If they had done so, they could scarcely have missed South America. But this was in our own era, not in the time of early man.

Ware Dogma!

GLACIERS AND ICE FIELDS AS BARRIERS TO EARLY MAN

These maps follow the outlines of the continent today, and so do not show the land-bridge from Alaska to Siberia that existed in varying extent throughout the entire Wisconsin period. The maps indicate tentatively how the great white ice fields may have appeared to different areas at different times, producing an effect of shifting from west to east and then back across the continent. Drawn in 1936, the first three maps probably show too little ice in arctic Canada and in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and Newfoundland region. (After Antevs; the first three in Gladwin, 1937, the fourth from data furnished by Antevs.)

Wisconsin glaciation 65,000 years ago

Wisconsin glaciation 50,000 years ago

Wisconsin glaciation 15,000 years ago

Wisconsin glaciation 10,000 years ago

Today we have a few facts about early man and many guesses. Not so long ago there were a few reputable anthropologists who believed that the New World was innocent of man before 1000 B.C. Now most of them grant a foothold at least 10,000 years ago to an enterprising savage—called Folsom man—whose taste for travel was as great as his talent for making an exceptionally fine and original type of stone spear point. Some say he came to the New World 25,000 years ago. A few daring students find traces of an earlier Australoid human who may have seen the last glaciers taking shape. Well informed opinion places man’s entrance into the New World between 10,000 and 25,000 years ago.

Of course we must not expect early dates to be precise. Many of them must be intelligent guesses as we go deeper and deeper into the past and reach the time when the glaciers were waxing and waning. To gain a perspective upon such toying with time—as well as upon early man in the Americas—we must next consider the story of early man in the Old World. Incidentally, its contradictions and uncertainties—prefaced by a few in New World prehistory—may help you to look with a charitable as well as critical eye upon certain theories about the peopling of the Americas which may be suspect today yet respectable tomorrow.

3
THE DEAD HAND OF THE AGES

... systems into ruin hurl’d. —ALEXANDER POPE

Conflicts and Confusions

The authors are afraid that it may be a little hard for you, dear reader, to shake yourself out of the late Victorianism of your schoolbooks and accept the idea that someone discovered America at least 14,092 years before Columbus. It may be still harder for you to believe that he was not that noble yet very vague red man whom you and your teachers called the American Indian. Certainly you will be shocked to hear that two or three anthropologists of note believe he had more than a touch of Negroid or Australoid blood. Your horror will be no greater, however, than that of a few of our archaeologists; such notions give them what might be called Victorian vapors. Some accept ideas like these; others keep an open mind, for they remember that many a scientific fact of today was sheer nonsense to earlier generations, and vice versa.

As late as 1900, the prehistory of Mexico was accounted for very neatly by three successive words, Toltec, Chichimec, and Aztec. Now we know other words, and we know that other peoples and other cultures—Olmec, Zapotec, Mixtec, Totonac, Tarascan, Teotihuacan—also played an important part. We divided the Maya just as neatly into the Old Empire and the New, one south and the other north. Now we know that there were no empires, and that the Maya culture grew widely and steadily towards fruition and decay. Once we thought that the Itzá were the Maya that founded Chichén-Itzá in Yucatan. Now we give the name Itzá to the Toltec or Toltec-influenced invaders that came hundreds of years later. Once scientists disputed whether culture and agriculture began in the highlands of Mexico or in the highlands of Peru. Now certain of them believe that the American became a farmer in the lowlands east of the Andes, while others think he began to till the soil in many spots at the same time. Only a few years ago, we thought that a fairly recent Indian culture—which is called the Woodland Pattern of the eastern United States—had its roots in Middle America. Now its pottery is being traced back through northwestern Canada and northern Asia to the Baltic and even perhaps to Africa.[1] The Mound Builders were once thought an ancient people. Now some of them seem barely to antedate the discovery of America. Bernal Díaz del Castillo—best of the chroniclers of the conquest of Mexico—may have observed that the Mexicans, along with all the Indians of the New World, were ignorant of the principle of the wheel; certainly this has been repeated over and over again for many years. Yet in 1888 Désiré Charnay reported and pictured a Mexican pottery toy with wheels, and since then more of these toys have been found.[2] Throughout his life Roland B. Dixon denied the possibility of productive transpacific migration from Polynesia to South America; yet at the end he accepted the transfer of the sweet potato from South America to Polynesia. From important matters to trivia, the list is long; we have hardly touched it. Obviously, prehistory is not a field where truth is easily and quickly come upon. The student, quite as much as the scientist, must keep an open mind. He must neither cherish dogma nor refuse speculation. Truth still lies afar off.

Doubts about early man in the Americas seem to have been an occupational disease with archaeologists. Geologists have found it much easier to accept him. Men like Ernst Antevs, M. M. Leighton, Kirk Bryan, and Albrecht Penck, perhaps because they are accustomed to dealing generously with time, seem to have little trouble in embracing early man as a Late Glacial interloper anywhere from 15,000 to 100,000 years ago. Physical anthropologists like Earnest A. Hooton and Sir Arthur Keith, and cultural anthropologists and ethnologists like Roland Dixon and A. C. Haddon are not at all afraid to recognize signs of Australoid or Negroid ancestry in the skulls of New World man. Perhaps it is easier for the geologists and the physical anthropologists to accept such ideas because they do not run counter to their own dogmas. Many archaeologists, at any rate, find it extraordinarily hard to adjust themselves to evidence which does not fit accepted theories. They may defend themselves by pointing out that the evidence is not too clear, or at best is merely suggestive; but the theories they cherish arose from no firmer evidence in many cases, and frequently continue quite as unclear or at best merely suggestive. Certainly such reluctance to accept new evidence held back archaeological research when Aleš Hrdlička, W. H. Holmes, and Daniel G. Brinton were in their heyday.

This reluctance to face facts permeated even so great and productive a man as Baron Erland Nordenskiöld. An example of such a Jovian nod may be salutary. Arguing in The Copper and Bronze Ages in South America against the theory that the craft of metallurgy may have been brought to the New World by migrants, instead of having been invented here, three times he cites facts that contradict his thesis, and three times he offers a kind of self-conscious apology for blinking them. (The italics are ours.)

If we go through all our material of weapons and tools of bronze and copper from South America, we must confess that there is not much that is entirely original, and that to the majority of fundamental types there is something to correspond in the Old World.

It must be confessed that there is considerable similarity between the metal technique of the New World and that of the Old during the Bronze Age.

Bronze is, of course, also a very hard invention, and I must confess to finding it most remarkable that the art of alloying tin and copper should have been hit upon independently both in the Old World and the New.[3]

“Admissions,” said Charles John Darling, “are mostly made by those who do not know their importance.”

Unfortunately there are still a few archaeologists whose attitude resembles Nordenskiöld’s. Hooton writes of one of these:

One of our most brilliant and once progressive archaeologists naïvely expressed to me some years ago his sentiments on this question [evidences of early man in America]. He said it would be a pity to have new evidence come to light which would overthrow all the admirable scientific work of the past indicating the recent arrival in the New World of the American Indian.[4]

Of course early man is not a subject that can hope to be free from error and contradiction—even early man in the Old World. Perhaps an account of some of the errors and misconceptions about him that crept into the study of prehistory may be as good a means as any of preparing your mind for new facts or new heresies in the Americas.

The Problem of the Ages

The first confusion that confronts the student of early man is one of nomenclature. It is a by-product of the human animal’s inveterate and estimable love of system. Give us some new subject, such as prehistoric relics, and we immediately set up a scheme of classification. The scheme works beautifully for a while, but presently new evidence accumulates which doesn’t fit the framework. By that time, unfortunately, it is too late to change the classification. In vulgar parlance, it is our story, and we are stuck with it.

An outstanding example of this tendency to set up a classification system prematurely is the division of the story of man into ages. As far back as A.D. 52 a Chinese with a scientific bent of mind suggested that man had passed through three periods: a stone age, a bronze age, and an iron age. A French magistrate named Goguet wrote a book in 1758 in which he expounded a similar order of ages, inserting copper ahead of bronze. In 1813 a Dutch historian named Vedel-Simonsen argued for stone, bronze, and iron periods in Scandinavian history. A Dane, Christian Jurgensen Thomsen, gave the system permanent and indeed international status in 1836 when he arranged on this basis the exhibits of the institution he directed, the National Museum in Copenhagen.

The scheme is neat but far from scientific. To begin with a small matter, but one that may confuse the layman, the ages overlap. Bronze did not wholly replace stone; neither did iron. The use of chipped flint and polished stone continued into the Iron Age.

The Bronze Age—a Phantasm

“Bronze Age” itself is a misnomer and a phantasm. While “Stone Age” and “Iron Age” do define important culture periods—though not the only periods of man’s early activity—the Bronze Age, says T. A. Rickard, “represents a minor phase in the use of copper.”[5] This alloy is merely an incident in the much longer history of the first metal used by man. At the start copper seemed to him to be merely a soft stone. He beat it into ornaments. When he began to melt and cast the native metal instead of pounding it, he took the first step in the true use of metals; but when he smelted copper ore—turning a hard rock into a soft metal—he made himself the master of metallurgy. Bronze—at first an accidental mixing of copper and tin—was merely an episode along the way. “The superiority of copper or bronze over flint and stone tools is, I think,” says Gordon Childe, “generally overestimated. Not only for tilling the land but also for the execution of monumental carvings and even for shaving, the Egyptians of the Old Kingdom were apparently content with stone.”[6]

The Bronze Age was very limited in area. Because of the rarity of tin, the primitive use of the alloy was confined to southern Europe, Asia Minor, and the Inca empire. Most of the world used iron before bronze. Furthermore, the Bronze Age is as delimited in time as it is in space. The earliest bronze in the Danube region is dated about 2300 B.C., and the earliest iron about 1350 B.C., at Gerar in Judea. “Thus,” said Rickard, “the so-called Bronze Age shrinks, at most, to a mere millennium ... the merest fraction of human existence.”[7]

The Iron Age is not so significant as it sounds. It was many centuries after the first use of iron and bronze that either played a really important part in the economic life of man. Like the domesticated horse, the trained elephant, and the wheeled vehicle, bronze and iron were first used chiefly in the making of war.

Wood, Bone, and Shell Ages

There is another serious weakness in the Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age sequence. It takes no account of the probability that man used wood, bone, and shell before he used stone. The ape swings a stick much as the first man must have done. The carcass of some bison or stag, picked clean by vultures, must have seemed to our earliest ancestors “a whole potential tool-shop”—as George R. Stewart writes in Man: An Autobiography—“thigh bones ready-made for clubs, horns or antlers for awls, shoulder-blades for scrapers.”[8] As early as 1864, a British student of anthropology, John Crawfurd, stood out against Thomsen’s Stone Age as the beginning of culture. At a meeting of the Ethnological Society, he said: “On man’s first appearance, the most obvious materials would consist of wood and bone.... This would constitute the wood and bone age, of which, from the perishable nature of the materials, we, of course, possess but slender records.”[9] Because the discovery of the stone artifacts of early man in Europe was then creating a scientific furore, Crawfurd’s sane observations went unnoticed. Today we have part of a wooden spear made, perhaps, far back in the Great Ice Age (see illustration, [page 74]).

Wood, bone, and shell not only antedated stone; they have continued in use until today. Certain primitive peoples—the Chukchi of Siberia, for example—retained the use of wood and bone after they were given iron.[10] Numerous tribes, when first encountered by explorers and navigators, had not yet begun to use stone; among these were the Aleuts, the Andaman Islanders, Malayans from the hills, and people of the upper Amazon.[11]

Rickard, from whom we have drawn liberally in this discussion, proposes a different scheme of classification for the cultures of man.[12] In the Primordial Age he would include the primary use of wood, bone, and shell. He would accept the Stone Age as the next stage. For the Bronze and Iron ages he would substitute the Metallurgic Age, basing this on the discovery and use of smelting, whatever the metal involved. The dead hand of Thomsen, however, will probably continue to rule. The best we can do will be to take the Stone Age as including all materials except metal, and pay little attention to that illusion the Bronze Age.

Dividing the Stone Age—the Old and the New

Still more conflict and confusion have resulted from attempts to divide the Stone Age into watertight compartments. In 1865 Sir John Lubbock proposed two divisions—the Paleolithic, or Old Stone Age—and the Neolithic, or New Stone Age.[13] The Paleolithic included objects found in caves and glacial gravels; the Neolithic, on the surface and in tombs. The first period ran from some vague beginning hundreds of thousands of years ago up to the advent of the Neolithic after the glaciers had melted. By definition, paleolithic man made chipped stone implements and no other kind. Neolithic man was supposed to be distinguished by the making of ground, or—as we usually say—polished, stone axes and of other tools shaped by rubbing instead of chipping; agriculture, pottery, and textiles came in as secondary traits.

After a time, however, archaeologists found some disturbing discrepancies. Before neolithic man grew grain and wove textiles, someone of an earlier age seems to have been making axes from antlers, turning out new artifacts called microliths—tiny chips of flint which were set in a row along a wooden or bone handle to make a kind of saw or a sickle—and also producing a partially polished ax with a ground edge, and making crude pots. This was all very upsetting to the old scheme of dividing prehistory into the Paleolithic and the Neolithic. So science inserted the Mesolithic, or Middle Stone Age, between the two, in order to account for the appearance of the new tools.

The trouble with the system that Lubbock launched is that man’s behavior toward stone is a very poor basis for classifying him in culture or time. For a while it fitted our knowledge of the prehistory of Europe. Now it is out of line on that continent, and completely askew so far as the rest of the world is concerned. The kind of stone available often determines whether a man will chip or grind it. When first discovered, South Sea Islanders were still polishing stone because they had no flint.[14] Some Australian natives make chipped stone tools while their neighbors, who control a supply of diorite, go in for polishing; yet none of these Blackfellows can be considered as anything but paleolithic.

Like the Bronze Age, the Neolithic suffers from having shrunk in length. Rickard figures “that 700 years covers what was meant to be a major division of human chronology.”[15] To reach this figure he puts the end of the Paleolithic at 3000 B.C., which seems much too late, and the beginning of bronze at 2300. Even though we use the date of N. C. Nelson for the beginning of the Neolithic—5500 B.C.[16]—we have a New Stone Age of only 3,200 years.

Gordon Childe goes so far as to declare that “there is no such thing as a neolithic civilization.”[17] Different people, living under different climates and on different soils, have developed different elements of the culture of the New Stone Age and combined them with elements of other cultures.

If we are going to continue using the term Neolithic—as we certainly are—and if we want to limit it in some sensible way that may prove a bit more permanent, let us see what else than polished stone can be used to define it.

Activities of the New Stone Age

Three activities stand out. They are the making of pots, the weaving of textiles, and the planting and harvesting of crops accompanied by the domestication of animals.

There can be no question that pottery is an important factor in neolithic life. It was in the New Stone Age that man fully wrought the miracle of “a sort of magic transubstantiation—the conversion of mud or dust into stone,” as Childe puts it. It was, as he says, “the earliest conscious utilization by man of a chemical change.”[18] But behind this miracle and this science must have lain many years of almost accidental, adventitious experiment. L. S. B. Leakey claims specimens of partially baked pottery sherds in paleolithic Africa.[19] One of these shows marks of basketry, rather thin support for the theory that the women who daubed the inside of the baskets to make them hold water must have discovered, when the baskets stood too near the fire, a little bit about how to bake clay. It was not until the invention of agriculture tied neolithic man more or less to the soil that true pottery could and did flourish widely. We have added many refinements to the craft of the potter—porcelain, cloisonné, and so forth—but basically it remains unchanged. Incidentally, all agriculturists did not have pottery—the Big Bend and Hueco cave dwellers of Texas, and certain people of the Virú valley in Peru, for example.[20]

The craft of textile weaving almost reached perfection at the hands of neolithic man—or, rather, woman. But it stemmed from basketry, and basketry undoubtedly began in the Paleolithic Age.

The first of two interesting facts suggested by the foregoing is that woman was the only true begetter of the Neolithic Age. She did the weaving—first of baskets and then of textiles—and she invented and practiced pottery making. More than that, she must be credited with the planting and harvesting of grain; for, while her lord and master enjoyed himself on the hunt, she gathered fruits, nuts, and edible seeds, and sooner or later this led her to observe that seeds she carelessly dropped on the midden pile produced new and bigger plants. By so doing woman invented work; for early man was only an idler who gave himself intermittently to the pleasures of the chase. Woman also invented leisure—true, creative leisure—for out of agriculture rose a settled community and a surplus of provender which allowed the few to think and plan and build civilization.

Agriculture—Test of the Neolithic

The second fact is that agriculture seems to be the only sound test of the Neolithic. Pottery and weaving preceded agriculture, yet, without agriculture and its fixed communities and its leisure, pottery and weaving could not have reached perfection. As for the polished ax, it was handy enough in in-fighting; but it was of no practical social use until the farmer needed to cut down the trees which began to thrive all over the place when the glaciers disappeared. The Badarians of Egypt were farmers, yet they made no polished axes because there was almost no timber to cut.[21]

Speech was certainly the first great inventive triumph of primitive man. The making of fire ranks second. The third great invention, agriculture, was also the first industrial revolution; without it what we carelessly assume to be the industrial revolution would have been impossible.

Science feels sure that agriculture appeared in the Old World before it did in the New, but is not so certain as to where man first tilled the soil and when. James H. Breasted, Sr., put agriculture back to 18,000 B.C.; later writers push it up to 5000 B.C. There has been quite as much disagreement about the area where agriculture began. At first the valley of the Nile seemed to be the right spot, for every fall the flood waters of the river brought not only automatic irrigation but also fresh, fertile soil to enrich the depleted farm lands. Soon, however, the birthplace of agriculture moved to the “fertile crescent” that stretched from Egypt to Mesopotamia. Later it shifted from the Tigris-Euphrates valley to the valley of the Indus. Now it seems to lie somewhere between these two, perhaps in the dry highlands of Iran and Iraq. In northern Iraq, 400 miles north of Ur, the wild ancestors of certain of our cultivated grains still grow, and excavators have come on evidences of farming communities which may be 8,000 to 11,000 years old.[22] There has always been hot argument between the supporters of denuded river valleys and the supporters of dry uplands as the natural site of early agriculture. Lately students have begun to argue for forested or jungle areas, and above all for mountain valleys; and they have plumped for tubers and melons, rather than grains, as the first crops cultivated by early man. These students see man as a gardener before he was a farmer.

Only the beginnings of agriculture are of any importance in a discussion of early man. Early man may invent agriculture, but thereupon he promptly ceases to be early man. With the food, leisure, and fixed abode that farming provides, he is soon inventing writing. He is then no longer even prehistoric.

First a Food Gatherer, Then a Hunter

It is important to realize and remember that early man ate seed grains, tubers, and fruit before he knew how to cultivate them. Probably he began to eat more and more of these natural products just before he became a farmer. Because archaeologists have found evidences that early man was quite a food gatherer at the end of his career, they have been inclined to set up another classification system which is faulty. They see man first as a hunter, then as a food gatherer who was still a hunter, and then as a food producer. This ignores the very important fact that man began as a food gatherer and not as a hunter.

The first man probably ate the same food as the great ape—fruits, nuts, roots, and berries—and perhaps grubs and insects. Occasionally he may have varied his repast with birds’ eggs and fledglings. With a broken branch for a weapon, he improved his diet a bit. He knocked over small animals, and he may occasionally have got hold of the carcass of a large one, but, for thousands upon thousands of years, he was basically a vegetarian. His first well developed stone tool—the hand ax shaped rather like a flattened and pointed egg—was probably more useful for grubbing roots and tubers out of the ground than for killing animals. As early man learned to make more efficient weapons—first the curved throwing stick, then the spear and the spear-thrower, and finally the bow and arrow—hunting became his chief activity, and meat his chief diet. But his woman went right on gathering berries and nuts, tubers and seeds, and getting ready to invent agriculture. Certainly in the New World—perhaps in the Old World, too—she invented milling stones to grind seeds while her man was still a paleolithic. Perhaps when she watched the wearing away and the smoothing down of mortar and pestle, milling stone and mano, as she ground her seeds into flour between them, the idea may have occurred to her—or to her man who watched her labor—that it was possible to grind and polish stone into axes and other implements.

We feel that the life-story of prehistoric man can best be divided—certainly for the purposes of this book—into a Paleolithic, or Old Stone Age, which included the making of artifacts out of wood, bone, shell, and chipped and sometimes polished stone, and a Neolithic, or New Stone Age, which was defined by the invention of agriculture and the perfecting of pottery, of weaving, and of the polishing of stone. This may reduce a little the confusions that are inevitable in the study of early man tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of years ago. Conflicts of evidence and opinion will remain, of course. We need not let them deter us from judging early man in the Americas. Indeed, they should free us from paying too much heed to the dogmas of scientific conservatism.

4
THE GREAT ICE AGE

Speak to the earth, and it shall teach thee. —JOB 12:8

Our Part of the Geologic Time Scale

The dead hand of another system of classification lies across a still larger area than the Stone Age itself or the Age of Man. This area is the entire life of our earth since it took sufficient shape to support cellular life. As it is so large an area and much of it is so remote in time, changes in the definition of most of its various divisions do not much affect the present discussion.

Once upon a time there were four great divisions, neatly numbered in Latin as the Primary, the Secondary, the Tertiary, and the Quaternary. The first two went by the board when newer scientists found older ages and stretched the life of the earth a couple of billion years. The Tertiary is still a respected appellation, but the good name of the Quaternary—the area of time with which this book is mainly concerned—is seriously questioned. Defined as the Age of Man, it was supposed to harbor all evidence of his existence; but hints of his presence in the Tertiary have rather sullied the scientific standing of the later period.

THE LIFE STORY OF THE EARTH

This summary of the story of the earth is a combination of charts in Arthur Holmes’ Principles of Physical Geology, Earnest A. Hooton’s Up from the Ape, and George Gaylord Simpson’s The Meaning of Evolution, with modifications by William C. Putnam and James Gilluly. *The divisions marked with an asterisk used to be called, respectively, Secondary and Primary.

In this book we are concerned with two divisions of the Quaternary which are also growing vaguer in outline, less precise in time. They are the Pleistocene, or Glacial Period, or Great Ice Age, and the Holocene, Recent, or Postglacial Period in which we now live. (If your Greek is rusty, you will be amused to discover that those scientific-sounding terms are merely translations of “wholly recent” and “most recent.”) Most geologists believe that these two areas of time covered about 1,000,000 years; but some give them half a million more, and a few limit them to the 600,000 years, or even 300,000 years, of the last four glaciations. Some start the Postglacial 25,000 years ago, when the ice began to shrink toward its present limits; some start it 9,000 years ago, when a relatively modern climate appeared. Some geologists say we are still in the Pleistocene, and merely enjoying a warm spell before another glaciation.

By definition—or lack of it—the Pleistocene is rather vaguely bounded, and quite as much at its beginning as at its end. To the paleontologist, the Pleistocene is the time of certain large and picturesque mammals that are now extinct. To the geologist, it is the time of the waxing and waning of the great glaciers. The beginnings and the ends of these two definitions of the Pleistocene do not correspond too closely. We shall use the term as little as possible, substituting the Great Ice Age.

The Glacial Hypothesis Appears

It is hardly more than a century since science began to realize that large parts of Europe and North America once were covered with glaciers. The discovery came from attempts to explain certain disturbing things called “erratic blocks.” These were large masses of stone—sometimes weighing as much as 10,000 tons—which had no business being where they were, because the native rock in their neighborhood was entirely different. Some of the erratic blocks, for example, should have been hundreds of miles away. The common explanation was that they were water-borne, perhaps by the biblical flood. An American cotton manufacturer accounted for the wearing away and the scratching of such boulders by supposing that they had been embedded in the lower surfaces of icebergs and then swept scraping across the earth by the tumultuous waters on which the Ark had ridden. In 1802 John Playfair, a professor of mathematics at Edinburgh, ventured the theory that the blocks had been transported by glacial ice.[1] This idea had occurred to a mountaineer named Kuhn in 1787, and Saussure echoed it in 1803; they knew and interpreted correctly the moraines of loose stones and boulders which they saw at the foot and the sides of the glaciers. From 1821 to the middle thirties various French, Swiss, and German scientists—Brard, Venetz, Charpentier, and Schimper—discussed and amplified this idea. Though A. Bernhardi, an obscure German professor of forestry, suggested in 1832 that “the polar ice once reached clear to the southernmost edge of the district which is now covered by those rock remnants,”[2] it was not until 1837 that the glacial theory took definite shape. Then Louis Agassiz, speaking before a Swiss society, launched the glacial hypothesis that there had been a period of great cold just before the advent of recent life. By 1840, when Agassiz published his Studies of the Glaciers, the idea was pretty generally accepted; he had “added the Glacial Epoch to the geological time-table.” The theory has been much amplified since then.

Adolphe Morlot, in 1854, discovered fossils of temperate plants between layers of glacial deposits, and advanced the theory that there had been warm periods as well as cold ones during the Great Ice Age. In his “Notice sur le Quaternaire en Suisse” he suggested three separate glaciations with two warm interglacial periods between. In 1874 James Geikie, the geologist of Edinburgh, brought out his The Great Ice Age and Its Relation to the Antiquity of Man, building upon Morlot’s work; and his Prehistoric Europe, in 1881, expanded the glaciations to six. Yet for thirty more years some stubborn scientists still believed in a single glaciation.

It was not until the turn of the century that the work of Albrecht Penck and Eduard Brückner established the history of the Alpine glaciations on a solid scientific foundation that has endured pretty well till today. They found four major glaciations and named them in neat alphabetical order after four Alpine valleys—Günz, Mindel, Riss, and Würm.[3] They divided the Würm glaciation at first into two periods of activity, and later into a number of smaller oscillations toward the end. There has been some controversy over the subdivisions of the Würm, and one to three Danubian glaciers have been suggested hundreds of thousands of years before the Günz; but the general hypothesis brought forward by Agassiz and the amplifications of his successors are now definitely established. With all this goes much knowledge of the ice sheets that covered Scandinavia, northern England, and Germany as far south as Dresden, and North America from ocean to ocean and down to Long Island and the Ohio and Missouri rivers.

The End of the Great Ice Age

Authorities agree that the last melting of the ice sheets and glaciers in the Alpine region began somewhere between 20,000 and 15,500 years ago. After considerable shrinkage and oscillation, the ice increased again for about 5,000 years, and then began to shrink once more. There is some disagreement as to when the Great Ice Age ended; a recent and very minor Daun glaciation has been rather rashly dated as late as only 3,500 years ago. These calculations are only for the Alpine region, and we must remember, of course, that the great ice sheets of northern Europe and North America behaved somewhat differently.

THE ICE FIELDS OF THE LAST GLACIATION

At the height of the last glaciation 5,000,000 square miles of North America were covered with ice, as against 2,500,000 in Eurasia. The volume of ice was three times as great. The shore lines are those of the present rather than glacial time. (Map after Flint, 1957; Antevs, 1928; and Flint and Dorsey, 1945; estimates from Daly, 1934.)

We have some fairly exact knowledge about the retreat of the ice across Sweden. This has resulted from the theory of Baron Gerhard de Geer that the varves—layers of alternately coarse and fine clays deposited in lakes in front of the retreating glaciers—represent the summer and winter sediments released by the melting ice. (We have a somewhat similar index in the tree-ring count of wide and narrow rings originated by A. E. Douglass and improved upon by Harold S. Gladwin. Both tree rings and varves may reflect changes in solar radiation.) De Geer counted the varves and determined that the ice sheet began to retreat in southernmost Sweden some 14,000 years ago, and Ragnar Liden determined that it had disappeared by 6840 B.C.

De Geer’s Swedish-American pupil Ernst Antevs applied the same system in North America, and found the ice beginning to retreat from Long Island 36,500 years ago.[4] A calculation of the time required for the wearing away of the postglacial Niagara Gorge has produced about the same result, but this has been seriously challenged by Richard F. Flint.[5]

The picture of glaciation is more complicated in North America than in the Old World. Europe had two main areas of ice—a small one in the Alps, a much larger one in Scandinavia, the British Isles, northern Germany, and Poland—but they were self-contained. North America had three ice centers—the Labradoran east of Hudson Bay, the Keewatin west of the bay, and the Cordilleran in the Canadian Rockies; these three sheets of ice did not always grow or shrink at the same time or at the same rate, and they occasionally overlapped (see maps on pages [26] and [27]).

Incidentally, most of the ice of the glacial period was in the New World. The area of land covered was almost twice as great as in the Old World, and the bulk of ice three to five times as great.[6]

River Terraces and Beach Lines

There are other evidences of glaciation besides varves, erratic blocks, moraines of stones and mixed debris along the sides and fronts of the ice streams, and scratches and polish on the native rock over which the glaciers passed. Four raised terraces are found along the sides of many river valleys. Four raised beach lines, first found in the Mediterranean region, have now been noted in the Americas and Australia. Submerged beach lines and land-bridges have been found at certain places under the ocean, as well as deep channels prolonging present rivers far out to sea.

Naturally enough the Great Ice Age was a time of notable changes of climate. Vegetation advanced and retreated widely. The level of the sea rose and fell some hundreds of feet. Whether or not there was more rain and snow—a moot point with science—the many rivers of the world grew in volume, and often in speed, at certain times and became low and sluggish at others. These profound alternations created the river terraces which have aided so much in determining the age of man and his various cultures. As the ocean sank, while the glaciers grew, the slopes of river beds became steeper, and the rivers themselves grew swifter. The turbulent rivers cut deeper channels and carried the displaced materials far down their valleys and ultimately even into the sea. During the cold, dry period at the climax of each glaciation, the dying trees and brush and grasses released their grip on gravels and silts, the intermittent flood waters of the melting glaciers carried away the debris and—because the rivers lost in slope and grew sluggish as the sea level rose—they deposited the gravels and silts in their beds. As the glaciers grew again and the oceans sank, the rivers once more became swifter and more turbulent, cut deeper channels, carried away part of the gravels and silts, and left the rest as terraces. Thus the passing of each glaciation meant the adding of a new and a lower terrace to the river valleys. Four such sets of river terraces are found just outside the areas where the glaciers have been active—in the valleys of the Rhine, the Thames, the Somme, the Isar, and other rivers.

THE AGE OF RIVER TERRACES

These simplified sections of a river valley show how successive channels were cut deeper and deeper, leaving the older deposits of gravels and silts in the higher terraces at the sides. The discovery of this process of nature was of the greatest value in determining the age and the succession of the cultures of early man in Europe. The oldest flint tools were found in the gravels of the highest terraces, and the newest in the lowest.

Farther to the south, periods of great rainfall helped to produce similar river terraces in valleys like the Nile. The concentration of masses of ice in central and northern Europe upset the zones of climate of Africa and other parts of the earth and caused great climatic disturbance. Rainfall belts moved far south, and the rain increased in abundance. Such periods of rain are called pluvials. There is still a good deal of argument about whether pluvial periods occurred principally in glacial or interglacial periods. This affects the dating of early man, and it is particularly important to us in the New World.

The raised beaches and the submerged beaches were obviously caused primarily by the lowering and raising of the sea level and not of the land. There were land movements, of course—as there are even now—but they were either too small or too irregular to account entirely for the systematic arrangement of old beaches in many parts of the world.

There has been much controversy about other glacial matters, but there can be no question that the submerged beaches and the land-bridges were a by-product of glaciation. The great masses of ice—estimated to have averaged half a mile to two miles thick in North America and somewhere between those figures in northern Europe—depressed somewhat the parts of the earth on which they lay; the rest of the land tended consequently to rise a bit, though not enough to account for the now sunken beaches and for the land-bridges that united Africa and Europe, England and the Continent, and Alaska and Siberia at various times. It was the immense amount of sea water drawn up and locked in the glaciers that reduced the area of the ocean and created new shore lines and the land-bridges. Estimates of how much the seas were lowered from their present level range from 70 to 1,800 feet; the best are 200 to 300 feet. There is still enough glacial ice to raise the ocean more than 100 feet if it all melted.

The raised beaches belong to a later discussion of the cause of the Great Ice Age as a whole.

The Cause of Glaciation

Most geologists believe that a comparatively slight drop in temperature would bring back the glaciers and the ice fields. The German geologist Brückner calculated that summers in the last glaciation were only 4° centigrade, or about 7° Fahrenheit, colder than they are today.[7]

What could have caused this slight drop in temperature in the Great Ice Age? Most of the explanations are not satisfactory. One is that the earth happened to pass through a dust laden nebula that reduced solar radiation. Another is a hypothetical decrease in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Other explanations have to do with changes in the altitude of land, shifts in air currents and ocean currents, volcanic eruptions filling the air with dust that screened the rays of the sun. All these adventitious causes would have had to be repeated with the curious and complex rhythm which is characteristic of the waxing and waning of the ice sheets.

One theory seems to have a good deal of cogency. It depends on three known alterations in the relation of the earth to the sun. The first is a slow, regular change in the shape of the earth’s orbit through a cycle of 92,000 years. The second is a shift in the inclination of the earth’s axis through 40,000 years. The third is what a layman would call the wobble of this axis through 21,000 years. The first change increases or decreases the distance of the earth from the sun. The other two alter the angle of the sun’s rays and thus also increase or decrease the warmth given a particular area of the earth at certain seasons. No single unfavorable position would have had a great deal of effect in lowering summer temperature in the northern hemisphere, but two occurring at the same time—let alone three—would have appreciably diminished the sun’s heat.

This astronomical theory of the cause of glaciation goes back a hundred years. As long ago as 1842 the French mathematician and astronomer J. Adhémar suggested that changes in the earth’s axis increased rainfall and provided the floods which he thought had moved the erratic blocks. Between 1864 and 1875 James Croll combined the wobble of the earth’s axis and the change in the earth’s orbit. A number of other men worked unsatisfactorily on the problem. The Serbian astronomer and physicist Milutin Milankovitch combined all three, and, between his first publication in 1913 and his latest in 1938, calculated the variations of solar radiation for the past 650,000 years.[8] In 1924 W. Köppen and A. Wegener applied Milankovitch’s early figures to the glaciation question, and Frederick E. Zeuner has lately used the revised figures of Milankovitch. Zeuner’s results, somewhat simplified, appear on [page 55]. They are fairly close to the geological estimates of B. Eberl and W. Soergel; his last two glaciations extend further back than those of Penck and Brückner.[9] Zeuner’s dates do not agree, of course, with those of an extremist like the geologist Kirtley F. Mather, who dates the first, or Günz, glaciation as ranging from 2,000,000 to 1,500,000 years ago.[10] Zeuner’s findings work out well enough for the American glaciations, except that there is no New World equivalent for his first Würm maximum of 115,000 years ago. Many authorities refuse to accept any such condition in the Old World. Because of this glaciation Zeuner moves back the appearance of Homo sapiens a good 50,000 or even 75,000 years.

THE FOUR GREAT GLACIATIONS

Six varying estimates of their duration made by five authorities. Fisk’s are of the New World glaciers, which are generally equated with those of Europe.

There is one serious objection to Zeuner’s theory. Two of the three movements of the earth on which it is based would have reduced the warmth of summer in the northern hemisphere, but they would at the same time have increased the temperature of the southern hemisphere, thus alternating glaciation in the two hemispheres. Unfortunately, it is fairly well established that glaciers north and south of the equator have waxed and waned at the same time over a considerable number of years.

It is not enough, of course, to find the cause of the individual glaciations. There must be a cause for the glacial period as a whole. The Great Ice Age was an almost unique event in the history of the earth. We have to go back 200,000,000 years, to the time of the reptiles that preceded the dinosaurs, before we come again on major glaciations.

Zeuner states frankly that the astronomic theory “does not provide the cause of the Ice Age” as a whole.[11] Some added factor must be found. One which he considers is a migration of the north pole from the direction of the Pacific to its present location; Zeuner and others think the movement occurred before the Great Ice Age.

Two geologists, Maurice Ewing and William L. Donn, have accounted for the beginning of the Ice Age by accepting the theory that the north and south poles had moved from the north Pacific and the south Atlantic to their present positions. They account rather ingeniously for the advance and the retreat of the four glaciations. With the north pole where it is now, the ice-free Arctic Ocean would supply moisture by evaporation. This moisture, owing to cold over the northern areas of Asia and North America, would fall as snow to nourish glaciers. But how to stop this process and reverse it? It happens that the sea floor forms a rather high sill between the Atlantic and the Arctic Oceans. When the sea level dropped, as its water piled up in the great glaciers, the sill came too close to the surface to allow much of the warmer water from the Atlantic to reach the Arctic Ocean and to keep it from freezing over. Once the ice pack formed, evaporation diminished abruptly. The glaciers lost their nourishment. The summer melt returned their waters to the ocean. Sea level rose. The currents from the Atlantic could flow over the sill again and melt the ice pack. Then conditions would be ripe for a second advance of snow and ice across the northern world. The shallow waters of Bering Strait probably had little effect upon the Arctic Ocean.

This theory has been criticized adversely by various authorities, despite the geologic, oceanographic, and meteorological evidence that Ewing and Donn have brought to bear upon each step of their reasoning. Their theory is particularly attractive to the archaeologist; it requires an ice-free Arctic coast when the land-bridge at Bering Strait would have been available to early man. Climatic conditions at that time would have been severe along the land-bridge and coastline, but not impossible for the survival of early man.[12]

Another explanation is a general decrease in solar energy; Zeuner holds this in reserve for lack of evidence. But some present-day geologists seize on the possibility that the heat of the sun may have changed from time to time, and use the theory in a curious, almost paradoxical way. The author of this hypothesis, Sir George C. Simpson, believes that the great masses of ice resulted from an initial increase instead of a decrease in temperature.[13] As the weather grew slightly warmer, cloudiness and rain and snow increased, the snow-line fell, and glaciation resulted. As the weather grew still warmer, the ice melted. (Simpson demonstrated the basic principle of this through an ingenious laboratory experiment.) His glacial theory, which is explained in more detail on the opposite page, postulates two increases in solar energy, and draws from them a meteorological pattern that provides the four glacial and three interglacial periods. The first and last interglacials would be warm and wet, the second cold and dry. Zeuner objects to this theory on the ground that the last interglacial—which, according to Simpson, should have been warm and wet—was mainly cool and dry.[14] But, while it may have been cool and dry in the German area which Zeuner has most closely studied, other areas probably had other climates. Simpson’s hypothesis would account for the heavy rains, or pluvial periods, of Nilotic Africa, which may link up with the glaciations of Europe; but he provides only two pluvials, and there are evidences of three or more in Africa.

GLACIATION THROUGH WARMTH

A somewhat modified graph of Simpson’s theory of the cause of the Great Ice Age. The following summary by Carl Sauer includes quotations from Simpson: [First] “Increased solar radiation received by the earth leads to increase in the general circulation of the atmosphere, which forms a great cloud blanket and causes increased precipitation in appropriate areas. In particular, in high latitudes and altitudes there is increased snowfall or glaciers. [Second] ‘As the radiation increases still further, the ice melts away and we have overcast skies and much precipitation but no ice accumulation.’ [Third] ‘When the solar radiation decreases, conditions are reversed and the whole sequence is gone through in reverse order.’” (After Simpson, 1938; quotation from Sauer, 1944.)

Zeuner has an explanation of why the periodic decrease in the heat from the sun produced glaciation during the last million years and not for 200,000,000 years before. He introduces the geological factor called Eustatism,[15] meaning by it simply a progressive drop in sea level. According to the hypothesis, this began before the Great Ice Age, and was caused by the sinking of very deep portions of the sea floor. As the sea level sank, the temperature of the mountains and plains dropped also, for the higher we rise above the surface of the ocean the cooler the air grows. The snowline fell, the mountain glaciers grew larger, and the snow and ice on the northern plains could not be completely melted by the reduced summer heat, and gradually grew deeper and more extensive. Thus the lowering of general temperature made it possible for the periodic decrease in solar radiation to cause the glaciations of the Great Ice Age. The theory of a general and steady lowering of the sea level is based on a series of four raised beaches occurring uniformly in many parts of the world. Other students believe these terraces were products of a regional rise of land.

Considering that the Great Ice Age ranges back at least 600,000 years—and probably 1,000,000, if we credit evidence of three earlier Danubian glaciations—it is small wonder that scientists are not entirely agreed on many factors in its story. “The difficulties are such,” says the French archaeologist A. Vayson de Pradenne, “that after fifty years of study to which the greatest geologists have devoted all their energies, there is no certainty yet as to the exact number of glaciations and the way in which the faunal changes are related to them.”[16]

Much more important, of course, than the cause of glaciation is its effect on early man. Ice covered 27 per cent of the earth’s surface during the Würm-Wisconsin period, according to Flint. This created the land-bridge over Bering Strait. It connected Santa Rosa Island with the coast of California. It broadened the Isthmus of Panama, so that man did not have to pass through a semi-mountainous jungle, which suggests that he came south during the Wisconsin glaciation. It seems to have been the ice that urged man to the south in the Americas and provided freeways.

5
EARLY MAN IN THE OLD WORLD

Bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh, are these half-brutish prehistoric brothers. —WILLIAM JAMES

Archaeology, a New Science

Archaeology—digging up the ancient past—is a fairly young science. It is not so young, of course, as electronics or aerodynamics or radiology. It is not so old as astronomy or mathematics or metallurgy. Excavation began in 1748 with the uncovering of Pompeii; but it was hardly scientific, and it reached only a short distance into the past. The deciphering of the Egyptian hieroglyphics in 1819 and of cuneiform writing in 1837 pushed back history two or three thousand years. But deep explorations of man’s prehistoric past won no serious status until the middle of the nineteenth century. “In 1859 prehistoric archaeology,” says Gordon Childe, referring to the acceptance of finds at Abbeville, in France, “may be deemed to have become a science.”[1]

There were discoveries before that, but they were neglected and misinterpreted or despised and disputed. As early as 1690 a man named Conyers discovered “opposite Black Mary’s, near Gray’s Inn Lane,” London, a fossilized tooth which, we now know, belonged to an extinct elephant, and a crude hand ax of stone which, we now recognize, was made by man fairly early in the Great Ice Age; but it was long before they won an honored place in the British Museum. A friend of Conyers named Bagford thought that the elephant belonged to the Roman army of the Emperor Claudius, and that the flint was a weapon used by a Briton to slay it (see illustration below).

The first hand ax found and recognized, probably an Acheulean implement, discovered in London in 1690 together with the tooth of an extinct elephant. The tool is about six inches in length. Like almost all hand axes, it is thinner than it looks from this angle. (After Sottas, 1911.)

In 1797 John Frere reported to the Society of Antiquaries on the finding near Hoxne in Suffolk of “weapons of war ... in great numbers” together with “some extraordinary bones, particularly a jawbone of enormous size.” His discovery has been called as important, in its way, as the geographical discovery of a New World; by emphasizing “the situation in which these weapons were found,” he became the first man to apply modern archaeological methods to a prehistoric find. Frere boldly declared that the hand axes belonged to a “very remote period indeed; even beyond that of the present world.”[2] (See illustration, [page 71].)

Frere’s reasoning had little effect, however, on a certain type of mind. When in 1823 William Buckland, a teacher of geology who was to become Dean of Westminster, dug out of a cave near Paviland a female skeleton which was painted with red ocher—a peculiar habit of early man and of man not so early—and which lay beside some ivory rods and bracelets and the skull of a mammoth, Protestant prejudice got the better of science. Buckland wrote that the skeleton was “clearly not coeval with the antediluvian bones of the extinct species” with which it had been found. Like Bagford, he turned to the time of the Roman invasion. His “Red Lady of Paviland” became a camp follower, and thus he missed his chance to recognize the first Cro-Magnon skeleton of man from the last glaciation.[3] Yet religious dogma—which held back Victorian science for so many years—did not prevent Father John MacEnery from seeing the true significance of a flint tool and the tooth of a rhinoceros which he found under a layer of stalagmite in Kent’s Cavern, England, in 1825. Around 1830 Toumal, a French scientist, and Schmerling, a Belgian, saw the truth as clearly, and published their discoveries of man-made flints with the fossils of extinct animals.

The most important find, and the one that ultimately established Glacial man as a reality, was announced in 1838 at a meeting of the Société d’Emulation of Abbeville in northern France; but twenty years passed before it received scientific sanction. The discoverer was an inconspicuous tax collector, Jacques Boucher de Crèvecœur de Perthes, who matched his diversified name by writing tragedies, novels, and books on travel, economics, and philanthropy. He had explored caves as early as 1805 and had found fossils and man-made tools of flint, but no hand axes. The hand axes that he found in the river terraces were hardly as important as his theory that these terraces dated the tools, and that the terraces were formed far in the past when the rivers were swollen with water. His only mistake was that he went to the biblical flood to find the water instead of to the great glaciers. In 1849, after making other finds, Boucher published De l’Industrie primitive, ou Les Arts et leurs origines, dated 1847; more finds and other books followed. His hand axes and other discoveries were almost completely ignored until 1858 when the English geologist Hugh Falconer “happened to be passing through Abbeville and saw the collection.”[4] He brought British colleagues back to Abbeville, and in 1859 Falconer, Sir Joseph Prestwich, and Sir John Evans declared officially for the reality of glacial man. The finds of Boucher, they asserted, proved that human beings had existed at the same time as Pleistocene mammals now extinct. Significantly, it was the same year that Darwin published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection.

Mortillet’s Cramping Classification

Progress thereafter was rapid, perhaps too rapid. Notable finds were soon followed by attempts to freeze knowledge into chronologic classifications. R. Rigollot, Gabriel de Mortillet, Edouard Lartet, Milne-Edwards, and Henry Christy found in the river terraces and the caves of France innumerable and varied evidences of man’s activity in the Great Ice Age. Mortillet named various cultures from the places where stone tools were found, and then, in 1869, he set them up in a chronological series.[5] Modified by later discoveries, the series ran as follows, beginning with the oldest: Chellean, Acheulean, Mousterian, Aurignacian, Solutrean, and Magdalenian. (Most prehistorians now use the word Abbevillian instead of Chellean because later research proved that the tools found originally at Chelles were Acheulean in type, while those found at Abbeville were earlier.) In the light of present knowledge, the list is much too simplified. It is based only on European finds, yet it is supposed to fit the world picture. For more than fifty years it has served as a scientific straitjacket, patched with new material here and there, but still gaping at the seams as the husky young giant of archaeological science grows in stature.

Time scale of early man in a limited area of Europe, as estimated by Robert J. Braidwood.

Enter the Eolith

One of the early difficulties that Mortillet’s list of cultures encountered was the discovery of implements that preceded his first culture, the Chellean—or Abbevillian—in time and type. Cruder axes from older levels had to be called Pre-Chellean (see illustration, [page 71]). In England scrapers and other crude tools cropped up in formations that go back more than 500,000 years.

Then eoliths—“dawn stones”—appeared. They were irregular-shaped pieces of flint with chips knocked off here and there. Often the chipping looked purposeful; the flakes made an edge or a point that could be used to scrape or drill.

These rudely shaped flints were first championed by Abbé Louis Bourgeois in 1863; but his finds were in strata far too old to win scientific recognition. This was not the case with Benjamin Harrison, who recognized eoliths in later formations almost one hundred years ago. Harrison was one of that variegated and comradely group of country “antiquaries”—noblemen and shopkeepers, vicars and village laborers—who founded and developed the study of the prehistory of England. Harrison left his old-fashioned general store and its cakes, fruits, and draperies, to walk the High Downs of Suffolk, searching with utter conviction for traces of early man in the glacial gravels. He began as a youth, when Boucher de Crèvecœur de Perthes had only just won his battle, and in 1865 he recognized his first eoliths. In 1889 the distinguished scientist Sir Joseph Prestwich gave them his backing. It took twenty more years, however, for the eolith to win anything like respectable recognition, and some still deny that these flints were worked by men.

THE “DAWN STONES” OF EARLY MAN

Upper left, a borer. Right, two sides of a scraper. Below, side view and bottom of a rostrocarinate. (After Peake and Fleure, 1927; Moir, 1927; and Lankester, 1912.)

The fact that some eoliths were found in geological formations much older than man—so far as we know his history—was an argument against all of them, because the older and the more recent looked so much alike. Another cogent objection was that eoliths could have been made by natural forces, such as a landslide, the pressure of heavy strata, or one stone knocking against another. A heavy cart can make an eolith when it rolls over a smooth flint. But in spite of arguments and antagonisms, which still persist, there were two things that seemed to establish the eolith as the work of man.

To begin with, some kind of tool, some form of experiment, had to lie behind even the crudest hand ax. At first man must have picked up a natural eolith and used its cutting edge. A little later he must have improved the edge. In any case he threw the stone away when he had finished the job, and later looked for and improved another one. Gradually he developed his dawn-stone technique and made tools that he would use until he lost them.

The second argument for the dawn stone was impressive. In 1910, after years of search, J. Reid Moir found eoliths near Ipswich, England, under unusual conditions. They came in two layers, which seemed to indicate that early man had camped twice in this neighborhood at different times. They were bedded in soft sand and therefore could not have been chipped by geologic pressure. The sand dated from the Pliocene Period which preceded the Great Ice Age. Later, in the same district, he found eoliths in a layer of delicate shells—again a sign that the eoliths had not been chipped by natural forces.[6] Moreover, many of Moir’s eoliths had a new and peculiar shape; they were keeled like an upturned boat or beaked like an eagle. Sir Ray Lankester called them rostrocarinates. In 1900 Mortillet had to admit man—or pre-man—to an Eolithic Age.

Flake vs. Core Industries

More difficulties beset Mortillet and his system of names and cultures as time passed and as fellow scientists dug new caves and terraces, and turned up stone tools of other patterns and other periods. Implements appeared that did not fit into the Frenchman’s classic system. A supplementary scheme had to be devised, and soon it, too, failed to fit the facts.

The new system divided all paleolithic tools into two types—which was sound enough—and assigned each type to certain peoples and to those peoples only—which proved not so sound. The division lay between cores and flakes. It lay between tools that had been made out of the heart of a lump of flint, and tools that had been made from chips flaked off the lump. The fact that there were core tools and flake tools was plain enough, but the fondness of scientists for strict classification led the prehistorians into theories that time disproved.

First of all, they had to set up a time sequence. They decided, not unnaturally, that man must have begun by hammering things with a handy rock until his rude tool began to chip away into something approaching an edge and eventually a point. Thus the hand ax, or coup de poing, came into being (see illustration, [page 71]). In the course of time man began to notice the chips, and to use the larger ones to cut and scrape with. Soon—that is, after a couple of hundred thousand years—he was deliberately knocking flakes off a stone core, and using them for spear points as well as scrapers. The prehistorians called hand axes the products of a “core industry,” and chips the products of a “flake industry.” They believed that one industry had preceded the other by hundreds of thousands of years, and that the Abbevillian and Acheulean had stuck to cores and left flakes to the Mousterian. Thus they believed that certain cultures had devoted themselves exclusively to the core, and certain others to the flake.

The theory that the early stone workers had a core industry and the later ones worked flakes was rudely upset by the discovery of flaked tools—called Cromerian—in an English stratum as old as the French sources of the first hand axes, and possibly older. Some say they lie at the beginning of the Great Ice Age or at the end of the earlier period, the Pliocene. This demonstration of a very early flake industry was reenforced by the discovery of a special type of flaked tool—the Clactonian—which runs from late Abbevillian into Acheulean times. Another type—the Levalloisian—laps over from the Acheulean into the Mousterian.

The core industries and the flake industries simply would not stay nicely separated. The first excavators had found only hand axes because these tools were so much more interesting than scrapers; later students found flake tools in the same ancient levels. No hand axes turned up in Clactonian culture-sites, but they appeared at the end of the Levallois, and the flake-loving Mousterians made them for a time. “Flake and core run parallel to one another in time,” says W. B. Wright, “and even intermix.”[7]

PALEOLITHIC TYPES AND INDUSTRIES

A chart of the core-, flake-, and blade-making traditions and industries, devised and dated by Robert J. Braidwood.[8] The dates indicate the approximate beginning and end of the various types of artifacts. Usually the same group of men made different kinds of tools within one industry. The Solutrean was distinguished for double-faced, leaf-shaped projectile points, rather than blades.

MAN’S FIRST PERFECTED TOOL

Three European hand axes that may bridge 300,000 years. They are, top, Pre-Abbevillian; left, Abbevillian; and right, Acheulean. The last is one of the tools found by John Frere at Hoxne in 1715. Most hand axes are not so well formed. Somewhat similar tools have been found in American Indian cultures hafted at the top of a wooden handle or in the middle, as a sort of spokeshave. (After Osborn, 1915; Leakey, 1935; and Burkitt, 1933.)

If we do not try to apply the core-versus-flake theory too broadly and too strictly, it suggests a fascinating picture of two kinds of men and two kinds of life through the first two-thirds of the Great Ice Age. One kind dominated during the cold of the glaciations; the other, during the warmth of the interglacials. For the flake tools of the Clactonian and Levalloisian peoples are found mainly with the fossils of cold-loving animals in the north and east of Europe, and the core tools of the Abbevillian and Acheulean peoples with warmer-blooded animals in the west and south.

Science accepted Mortillet’s system of orderly cultures and the theory of successive core and flake industries, and for fifty years tried to apply it to new discoveries both in Europe and elsewhere. Though the system has had to be modified in parts, and in parts abandoned, its terms are still used, and used in a way that is confusing because the terms are no longer exact. In Africa the various types of tools resemble only approximately those of Europe, and they do not seem to correspond in time. The hand ax may have spread from Spain into almost all Africa, or, more probably, from Africa into Spain, as well as southern India, but there are plenty of flaked tools, too, in these regions. Central and northern Asia seem to be devoted to the flake, and to eschew the hand ax in favor of a kind of chopping tool made out of a core. Asia, like Africa, has tools made out of large, smooth pebbles.

Dating Early Man in Europe

One good thing can be said for Mortillet’s modified sequence of Abbevillian, Acheulean, Mousterian, Aurignacian, Solutrean, and Magdalenian. It may not be complete enough, and it may not apply too well to the world outside Europe; but it is chronologically sound locally. It is a succession of cultures along a time scale. If an archaeologist finds two or more varieties of paleolithic tools in a new site, he finds, for example, Acheulean beneath Mousterian, or Mousterian beneath Aurignacian. Similarly, when he comes upon Abbevillian and Acheulean in separate terraces of the same river, he always finds the Abbevillian in a higher terrace than the Acheulean, and, as we have explained on pages [51] and [52], the higher terrace is always the older.

Dating these cultures in terms of our years is another matter. The first step is fairly simple. If the tools are found with the fossils of a warmth-loving animal like the hippopotamus, they belong to an interglacial period; if they are found with the fossils of an animal like the hairy mammoth, which could survive a harsh climate, they belong to a glacial time. The species of animal may determine which glacial or which interglacial. If the tools are found in the gravel of a certain river terrace, then they belong to the geological period when the material of the terrace was being laid down. The terraces often contain fossils, and this may cross-date the terrace materials with cave deposits. But scientists are often faced with the problem of picking the right glacial or interglacial period on scanty evidence, and the still more difficult problem of setting the period in the terms of our years. There is room here for much disagreement. Glaciologists do not agree as to the age or the length of the various glacials and interglacials (see illustration, [page 55]). Some prehistorians accept and use the dates of one glacialist; some choose another’s. They do not all concur as to which culture came in which glacial period.

True Tools—Deceptive Skulls

Men who practiced Abbevillian culture had some flaked tools—which they may have used for scraping—but their best-recognized output was a crude hand ax. It was not too well formed. Undoubtedly they also used wood and bone, but we have no sure evidence of this. Some assign Abbevillian culture to the first interglacial period, about 500,000 years ago. Some move it up 200,000 years, into the second interglacial. Some even place it in the third. Perhaps it lasted through all three. At any rate, the men who made it liked a fairly warm climate. As neither they nor their Acheulean successors made fire or controlled it effectively, the early Europeans probably retreated to Africa during the glaciations.

Ancient implements of bone and wood. Left, part of the thigh bone of a mammoth, found at Piltdown, England, in the same deposit as the now infamous skull; it, too, is a forgery. Right, part of a wooden spear, its point hardened by fire, found at Clacton-on-Sea, England, and probably made by Acheulean or Mousterian man. (Left, after Dawson and Woodward, 1917; right, after Crawford, 1921.)

The Acheulean hand ax was thinner and better, and it is found with various kinds of scrapers and cleavers. Probably it was this culture that left us part of a very crude wooden spear at Clacton-on-Sea, in England, though some date it a little later. The earliest association of human remains with tools in Europe is that of the Swanscombe skull and Acheulean tools in Pleistocene gravels of the Thames in Kent.

We are not too sure about the physical appearance of the men of Abbevillian and Acheulean times. For the Abbevillian there is possibly a fragment of jaw, a most interesting one, to be sure, but not actually found with any kind of artifact. For Acheulean times there are no dependable skeletons to help us, and not even complete skulls. In fact, there are not as many candidates for the position as we thought we had a decade or so ago.

Galley Hill man turned out to be a case of mistaken identity. He has a thick skull and a few other primitive traits—a fossil type of modern man, perhaps, but not nearly as old as we once thought. His bones lacked a fluorine mineral content typical of other fossils that belonged in the interglacial deposits where the Galley Hill skull reposed, eight feet below the surface.

The same fluorine test—which fortunately applies to such fossilated things as bone, antler, and ivory—exposed an even more notorious impostor, expelling him from the select corps of early men. This was Piltdown man, alias Homo eoanthropus dawsoni, alias Eoanthropus, alias Dawson’s Dawn Man. It was demonstrated to be a fake and a forgery that led its discoverer to try to match a reasonably human skull to the jaw of an ape. The jaw and its teeth had been modified by the faker—not Dawson—to make it appear less apelike. Both jaw and skull had been artfully treated with chemicals to appear as antiquated as the unusual assortment of fossils with which they were salted into early interglacial deposits. Many of the fossils, while authentic in their own right, also were chemically stained and planted. And tools were added to complete the assemblage. The latter included a bone pick thoughtfully carved from the femur of an elephant, but it was carved with a modern steel knife, as careful scrutiny under a powerful lens disclosed, and not with the stone flakes of prehistoric man. (See illustration, [page 74].)

The British scientists Kenneth Oakley, J. S. Wiener, and Sir Wilfrid Le Gros Clark exposed the forgery in a most conclusive manner.[9] In laying the ghost of Piltdown, these authorities resolved four decades of controversy as to his place in human evolution. Although Piltdown’s contribution to human evolution now is known to have been nil, his contribution to physical anthropology has been considerable. As the academic dust settled on this issue, the anthropologists returned to their laboratories with greater confidence in their science and with somewhat sharper tools in their research kits. It is unlikely that any new hoax will ever acquire the same importance as Piltdown.