Chapter 6

, another anthropologist is said to have picked up part of a point of Folsom type—the first to be recorded south of the United States. De Terra places the San Juan culture 12,000 to 20,000 years ago.

The younger culture—called Chalco—provided sixty-five variegated artifacts of basalt, including one point. The presence of manos—roundish stones for grinding seeds on a milling stone—as well as other artifacts, causes de Terra to compare this culture with the Cochise in Arizona. He dates the Chalco culture at 4,000 to 10,000 years ago.[68]

The only evidence from Central America—neither skulls nor artifacts—is extraordinary in nature, but as yet makes no definite contribution in terms of years. The finds are the footprints of men, women, and children in a lava bed at El Cauce near Managua, Nicaragua. They were buried beneath many feet of ash and lava and four separate layers of soil. At a time of great rainfall—which suggests a pluvial connected with either the formation or the melting of the glaciers—a river excavated a channel sixty feet wide and almost ten feet deep. Geologists have not yet ventured to give us a date. There are tracks, however, of a bison—an animal long extinct so far south.[69] Other fossil human footprints, in sandstone and perhaps of a more recent time, have been found near Usulután, El Salvador.[70]

The story of early man in the Americas, so far as it is interpreted by the finding of his artifacts, did not begin with Folsom and will not end with the most recent discoveries in Middle America. As far back as 1869 a geologist named C. J. King found a pestle—considered in the Old World a product of the Neolithic, or New Stone Age of polished artifacts—so firmly cemented into the gold-bearing gravels under Table Mountain near Tuttleton, California, that he “forced it out of its place with considerable difficulty.”[71] (Other ground and polished implements had been reported from mine shafts in the 1860’s, but none had been found by a geologist imbedded in gravels.) As late as 1919, W. H. Holmes, ever critical of evidence for early man, called King’s pestle “the most important observation yet made by a geologist bearing upon the problem of man’s antiquity in America.”[72] If the gravels in which the pestle was found and the lava which lay just above it were indeed products of the Pliocene period which preceded the Great Ice Age, then we have to face a staggering idea. We have to believe that a strain of _Homo sapiens_ originated in the New World long before Java man. We have to believe that he acquired the skills of the New Stone Age far ahead of man in the Old World, and that he then disappeared. It is easier—but not too easy—to think that the lava flowed in recent times, after glacial waters had worked a pestle of early man into the gold-bearing gravels, which would push the seed-grinders of California far, far back in time. It is still easier to believe that King was out of his head. It should be noted that California Indians, except along the Colorado River, never did develop a neolithic, or agricultural, level of technology. Their ground and polished stone implements were applied to the objects of a specialized seed-gathering economy. In Old World terms, such activity tends to characterize late paleolithic economies, where big-game hunting was not feasible.

[Illustration: _The broken pestle found by C. J. King in gold-bearing gravels in California. (After Becker, 1891.)_]

The excavations and studies of the next few years may not provide evidence as startling as King’s, but radiocarbon promises to date any site of early man where a few ounces of charcoal can be found. Among the first dates provided by Libby was one between 6,300 and 6,900 years ago for trees charred by the eruption of pumice from Mt. Mazama, Oregon, and beneath this pumice lie four or five sites where L. S. Cressman found artifacts of early man and the fossils of horse and camel.[73] By means of radiocarbon and, here and there, newer and perhaps equally refined techniques, anthropologists are beginning to learn a little more about the relationships in time and culture between the prehistoric makers of the weapons and tools we have described. Yet out of more than 150 sites, there are only a few where datings are fully reliable.

From the Glacial to the Archaic

The record of early man in North America may be dealt with on five levels, each overlapping another. The most recent is sometimes called the Archaic Period—the stage before native civilizations took shape—and it lies outside the range of early man as we define him. The earliest of the other four levels is the most significant and the least known. We have no suitable name for this period, which stretches back from about 15,000 years ago into the very dim past. It may have begun early in the last glacial age or even in the third interglacial; this would take our earliest man back 50,000 to 100,000 years. There are no firm dates for this. The best we have is a radiocarbon estimate of 30,000 years ago, when man may have killed dwarf elephants on an island off the coast of California.

Let us start with some dates and associations that follow the end of that mysterious first level 15,000 years ago, and carry us up to the brink of the Archaic. Let us then go back to the few hazy glimpses we now have of the very beginnings of man in the Americas.

We must start with the fluted points of Clovis. They may range from 10,000 to 15,000 years back—more likely 11,000 to 13,000. It is still uncertain whether the shouldered points of Sandia fit into this time span or precede it. For various technical reasons, we must throw out a date of more than 37,000 years ago for Clovis points from Lewisville, Texas, and a date of 8,500 at the Lehner site in Arizona. Points remarkably like those from the Clovis-type site appear in such places as Bull Brook, Massachusetts,[74] and Alaska,[75] but dating is either lacking or insecure, and a 10,000- to 15,000-year age may not agree comfortably with other geological or cultural associations. Archaeologists have been tempted to associate this horizon with the hunting of mammoths.[76]

The Folsom period is next, and fairly well dated. The span of time during which these classic fluted points were made seems to fall mainly between 9,000 and 11,000 years ago. The most noted big game of the Folsom hunters was _Bison antiquus_.[77]

The remaining stage of these “middle” levels may be identified—most arbitrarily—as the Eden, or parallel-flaked, point horizon. Fluting of projectile points still occurs, but the distinctive and exceptional feature is the beautiful pressure-flaking illustrated on page 155. Other types of projectile points include Gypsum, Plainview, Scottsbluff, Lime Creek, Angostura, and perhaps Agate Basin. The time span seems to be from perhaps 7,000 to about 10,000 years ago. The makers of these points also tended to be bison hunters. _Bison occidentalis_ may have been the chief game,[78] although there continues occasional association with _B. antiquus_, and there begins an identification with _B. bison_, the “buffalo” of Plains Indians in recent times.

In the two thousand years following the Folsom climax—that is, from about 7,000 to 9,000 years ago—notable transitions occurred in the technologies and economies of early man. Handsome projectile points became noticeably diversified in shape, and perhaps in size. Many continued to be made with a superb craftsmanship that persisted to historic times. Economically, as we shall see in the next chapter, there was a major shift of emphasis. This was due in large part to the great extinction of Pleistocene mammals, which was in progress by 8,000 years ago and essentially completed 5,000 years ago. During this time, the era of specialized big-game hunters came to a close. The human populations that survived seem to have turned their attentions to the generalized hunting of lesser game. Their economies were first augmented by, and then focused upon, food collecting. For many groups, such as the Indians of central California, exploitation of wild seeds and nuts became a specialized and satisfactory means of subsistence in a climate whose wet winters and dry summers severely limited agriculture. Elsewhere, seed collecting was replaced by plant domestication—an important first step—then by plant cultivation and ultimately by agriculture. Of these late trends in American prehistory, the scope of this book allows us to touch on only the Cochise cultures and other seed-collecting traditions of apparent antiquity.

Back of 15,000 Years?

We have hardly mentioned the earliest period of American prehistory. As in the Old World, the most ancient is the least known. There are many places in the west and southwest of the United States, and some in Mexico and South America, where materials of what seems impressive antiquity have been detected. We say materials, rather than cultures, for they are often suspect.

At Tule Springs, in southern Nevada, for more than two decades, Southwest Museum archaeologists have periodically found evidence of what may have been man-made campfires and the broken, scorched, and scattered bones of camel, mammoth, bison, and perhaps horse and sloth. In 1956, Ruth D. Simpson located _in situ_ “a small uniface convex scraper, retouched along approximately two inches of its circumference” in a pocket of charcoal. From this charcoal, a date of more than 28,000 years was determined.[79] The few artifacts recovered at Tule Springs are rather nondescript, but ancient hunters surely occupied the site at various remote times.

Burned bones of dwarf mammoths on Santa Rosa Island, off the Santa Barbara coast of southern California, have furnished radiocarbon dates ranging from 15,000 to about 30,000 years ago. The situation of these bones strongly suggests death at the hands of man. Sure association of cultural materials with the six-foot elephants has not been determined to the full satisfaction of archaeologists.[80] Although the indicated dates may be accurate—and it is not unlikely that these animals were hunted by early man—there are other explanations that are even more plausible.

Near San Diego, California, exposed cliffs with alluvial deposits and raised sea beaches of presumed Pleistocene age contain burned places, or fire lenses, often as much as 100 feet across. George F. Carter believes these to be hearths dating back to third interglacial times or earlier.[81] As evidence of human occupation, he has assembled quantities of crudely chipped cobbles, described as “core tools.” His critics maintain that most are even cruder than the lower paleolithic hand axes of Europe, and refuse to grant that any of them were made by man.[82]

Unmistakable artifacts, including types described as choppers, scrapers, and hand axes, have been found in abundance in the Mohave Desert, at Pleistocene Lake Manix[83]—now, like Pleistocene Lake Mohave, a dusty playa—and on ancient beaches in nearby Death Valley.[84] The geology of these sites suggests that they may be of Pleistocene age, but the artifact types and materials do not differ significantly from those associated with the Lake Mohave and Silver Lake cultures, for which dates of less than 10,000 years are considered probable.

The desert regions of Western America have provided other sites of apparent Pleistocene age in which the artifacts are both simple and crudely made. While it is tempting to consider these as being truly ancient, we will have to know much more about them before we can be certain that they are more than the output of backward desert dwellers such as Father Baegert described for Baja California in early mission days.[85]

From other regions of the Americas, there are other suggestions of early man and ancient cultures. J. L. Giddings’ Palisades culture, on mountainside benches of Cape Krusenstern, Alaska, north of Bering Strait, may be old. It appears considerably older than the Denbigh Flint Complex, south of the Strait, which may go back from 4,500 to 5,000 years.[86] And in South America early man is represented at such sites as El Jobo, in Venezuela;[87] an unpublished radiocarbon date from this region is rumored at about 16,000 years.

The coming decade should bring further refinements in radiocarbon dating, as well as the development of newer techniques such as the Rosholt “uranium-daughter” products and obsidian hydration measurements. With or without the aid of these dating methods, livelier activity of archaeologists south of the border should soon give us more information about early man in Latin America.

THE MORE IMPORTANT SITES OF EARLY MAN

The listing on the three next pages, which goes no further than 1948, is not exhaustive. There is room for argument over a number of the finds; but the arrangement of the materials in columns provides a rough perspective. The sites are listed in order of discovery. The symbols indicate one or more occurrences:

Occurrence of the saber-toothed cat, tapir, giant beaver, or extinct armadillo is not indicated. Finds that seem problematical or not definitely associated with other finds are shaded. Sandia points were found with the five extinct mammals indicated in the Sandia cave and below the Folsom.

Human Bones {SK} skull {PS} part of skull {CB} a considerable number of bones {FB} a few bones Artifacts, Fires {SB} a skeleton or the major parts {C} Clovis and other early fluted points {F} Folsom {FP} Plainview, Scottsbluff, and other parallel-fluted points {OP} other types of point {CC} charcoal {MS} milling stone {P} pottery {R} rocks thrown by man {HS} horn and shell objects {BF} bone and flake tools {BT} bone tools Extinct Mammals {M} mammoth or mastodon {EB} extinct bison {S} sloth {EC} extinct camel {EH} extinct horse {ES} extinct South American mammals *An asterisk within brackets indicates shading in the diagram.

Date Place Human Artifacts, Extinct Mammals Bones Fires

1835-1844 Lagoa Santa, Brazil {SK} 1838 Gasconade County, Mo. {OP} {R*} {CC} {M} 1839 Benton County, Mo. {C*} {M} 1846 Natchez, Miss. {FB} {M} {EB} {S} {EH} 1872-1879 Trenton, N.J. {PS} {FB} {OP} {M} {EB} 1872 Omaha, Nebr. {OP} {M} 1882 Lake Lahontan, Nev. {OP} {M} {EB} {EC} {EH} 1895 Russell Springs, Kans. {OP} {EB} 1902 Lansing, Kans. {SB} 190? Paltacalo, Ecuador {SK} 1915-1916 Vero, Fla. {SK} {FB} {M} {S} {EH} 1920 Sacramento, Calif. {SB} {OP} {MS} 1923-1927 Santa Barbara, Calif. {SB} {OP} {MS} 1923 Melbourne, Fla. {SK} {FB} {OP} {CC} {M*} {S*} {EH*} 1923 & Grand Island, Nebr. {FP} {EB} 1931 1923 Punin, Ecuador {SK} {M*} {S*} {EH*} 1924 Lone Wolf Creek, Tex. {FP} {OP} {EB} 1926 Folsom, N.M. {F} {EB} 1926 & Lake Cochise, White {PS} {FB} {OP} {MS} {CC} {M} {EB} {EC} 1935-1940 Water Creek, Ariz. {EH} 1926 Frederick, Okla. {OP} {M} {S} {EC} {EH} 1928 Alangasi, Ecuador {P} {CC} {M*} 1929 Abilene, Tex. {FP} {OP} {CC} {M} {EH} 1929 Conkling Cavern, N.M. {SK} {FB} {S} {EC} {EH} 1930 Burnet Cave, N.M. {F} {EB} {EC} {EH} 1930 Gypsum Cave, Nev. {OP} {S} {EC} {EH} 1931 Pelican Rapids, Minn. {SB} {HS} 1931 Angus, Nebr. {OP} {M} 1932 Signal Butte, Nebr. {FP} {OP} {MS} {CC} 1932 Clovis, N.M. {C} {F} {FP} {M} {EB} {EC*} {CC} {EH*} 1932 Scottsbluff, Nebr. {FP} {OP} {EB} 1932 Dent, Colo. {C} {M} 1933 Browns Valley, Minn. {SB} {FP} {OP} 1934 Lindenmeier, Colo. {C} {F} {FP} {M*} {EB} {EC} {CC} 1934 Miami, Tex. {C} {M} 1934 Pinto Basin, Calif. {OP} {MS*} {EC*} {EH*} 1935 Confins, Brazil {SB} {M} {S} {EH} 1935 Sauk Valley, Minn. {SB} 1936 Lake Mohave, Calif. {OP} 1936 Sandia Cave, N.M. {F} {FP*} {M} {EB} {S} {OP} {CC} {EC} {EH} 1936-1937 Cerro Sota Hill, Chile {SB} {OP} {S} {EH} 1936-1937 Fell’s Cave, Chile {OP} {CC} {S} {EH} 1936-1937 Palli Aike Cave, Chile {CB} {OP} {CC} {S} {EH} 1937-1945 Borax Lake, Calif. {F} {OP} {MS} {CC} 1938 Bee County, Tex. {OP} {CC} {M} {EB} {EH} 1938 Lipscomb County, Tex. {F} {EB} 1939 Ventana Cave, Ariz. {F*} {OP} {EB} {S} {EH} 1939 Mortlach, Sask. {F} {FP} {EB} 1940 Eden, Wyo. {C*} {EB} 1941 San Jon, N.M. {F} {FP*} {OP} {M*} {EB} 1941 San Luis Valley, Colo. {F} {FP*} {EB} 1941 Fairbanks, Alaska {FP} {M} 1941 Circle, Alaska {FP*} {M} 1941 Cook Inlet, Alaska {FP} {CC} {M} 1945 Plainview, Tex. {FP} {EB} 1946 Monument Site, {SB} {OP} Concord, Calif. 1946-1947 Tequixquiac, Mex. {BF} {M*} {EB*} {S*} {EC*} {EH*} 1947 Tepexpan, Mex. {SB} {OP*} {M*} 1948 Totolzingo, Mex. {BT} {M*} {EH*}

8 EARLY MAN AND THE GREAT EXTINCTION

_And prate about an Elephant_ _Not one of them has seen!_ —J. G. SAXE

A Twofold Problem

A mammoth in Colorado ... a giant sloth near Hoover Dam ... spear points of early man involved with both. Those two remote and spectacular animals roaming our own United States set our minds far back on the trail of time. The weapons, crude as they were and pitifully small, carry us forward again tens of thousands of years. We are describing the reaction of the layman who first learns of these things, but the opinions of science veer almost as widely when it tries to date the traffic of man and mammoth in the New World. The range is from 100,000 years ago to 2500 B.C.

The dating of the life of early man by the death of mammals now extinct is one of the major tasks that face the American prehistorian. It is doubly difficult because, in the first place, evidence of when these animals died off is only now becoming available, and, secondly, because we must also know how long man hunted them _before_ they became extinct. We know that a few skulls have been found in strata containing the fossils of these animals, and we know that all but one of the skulls are longheaded and beetle-browed like those of the Australians and the Melanesians, instead of roundheaded like those of most Mongoloids. We know that Sandia, Clovis, or Folsom points have been found with the fossils of extinct elephants, horses, camels, and bison. If we knew when such mammals became extinct, we should know the latest possible date of most of the archaic skulls and of Sandia and Folsom man. But we should still not know just how much earlier some of these humans lived, or when they or their predecessors discovered America.

[Illustration: MAMMALS OF THE ICE AGE IN NORTH AND SOUTH AMERICA

_A chart of the chief animals that became extinct after the arrival of man. The “extinct armadillo” is more correctly known as Dasypodidae. (After Colbert, 1942, with some rearrangement.)_]

Myths and Mammoths

The subject has been thoroughly confused by too many guesses and too little evidence. Besides a great variety of geologic theories and some amazingly stubborn conservatism, we have had some extraordinary Indian myths as well as the dreams of innocents and eccentrics.

If the Spanish churchmen were a bit upset at finding in the Indies both a new world and a race unaccounted for in the Bible, later explorers and settlers of the mainland were quite as astonished over the discovery of huge bones in swamps and creeks, prairies and badlands. Laymen and divines sought explanations, and of course they found dozens, most of them as absurd as Cotton Mather’s dictum of 1712 that the bones were those of the giants of Holy Writ. By 1782 Thomas Jefferson knew they belonged to a kind of elephant, but on “the traditional testimony of the Indians” he was inclined to believe “that this animal still exists in the northern and western parts of America.... He may as well exist there now as he did formerly where we find his bones.”[1]

The bridge from sacred fiction to profane fact, from giants to mammoths and mastodons, seems to have been the work, oddly enough, of Negro slaves. Mark Catesby wrote in 1743:

At a place in _Carolina_ called _Stono_ was dug out of the Earth three or four Teeth of a large animal, which by the concurring Opinion of all the _Negroes_, native _Africans_, that saw them, were the Grinders of an Elephant, and in my Opinion that could be no other; I having seen some of the like that are brought from _Africa_.[2]

On the basis of this statement Loren C. Eiseley—who has written much on the problem of the extinction of American mammals—believes that the Negro slaves told the Indian as well as the white man about the animal that had such gigantic bones, and described its shape and habits.

The eighteenth-century white man—eager for knowledge of zoology and many other things—pumped the Indian, and doubtless with leading questions. The Indians, “involved in their own vast animal mythology,” as Eiseley puts it, were likely to respond “to these myriads of questions with elaboration and a desire to please.”[3] Thus, when our ancestors asked where the elephants had gone, the Indians answered, “Across the lakes.” Soon the belief that the mammoth still lived in the remoter portions of northeastern Canada grew so strong in white men that early maps indicated his home in western Labrador. By the time that the ethnologists of the last half-century began collecting Indian myths there were numerous traditions of the elephant in the native folklore. In a summary of the material Duncan Strong lists more than a dozen instances.[4] An Algonquin tribe told of a great animal “with an arm coming out of its shoulder,” and of another that left “large round tracks in the snow” and “struck its enemies with its long nose.” Penobscot Indians had a myth in which a culture hero saw “moving hills without vegetation,” which proved to be “great animals with long teeth, animals so huge that when they lay down they could not get up.” There were stories of “a great moose with a fifth leg.” Elephant myths turned up among the Alabama Indians in the South. The Chitimacha said: “A long time ago a being with a long nose came out of the ocean and began to kill people. It would root up trees with its nose to get at people who sought refuge in the branches.” The Eskimos of Alaska joined their Siberian brothers in tales of a behemoth that burrowed underground and died if he breathed air—a tale derived, no doubt, from the carcasses of mammoths found frozen under the snow. “These stories,” writes Eiseley, “show a suspicious growth in numbers just at the time when White interest and enthusiasm were keenest.”[5]

Whatever germ of truth may lie in some of the Indian traditions, certain theorists of the last century and a half were quite as absurd as Cotton Mather in their conclusions. In 1806 an Englishman named Thomas Ashe wrote of “incognita, nondescript animals” of the Middle West, and suggested that “as the immense volume of the creature would unfit him for coursing after his prey through thickets and woods,” nature had “furnished him with the power of taking a mighty leap.”[6] Then there was John Ranking, who published in 1827 _Historical Researches on the Conquest of Peru, Mexico, Bogota, Natchez, and Talomeco, in the Thirteenth Century, by the Mongols, Accompanied with Elephants_. Perhaps he was religious enough to believe, like Jefferson, that “no instance can be produced, of her [nature] having permitted any one race of her animals to become extinct.”[7] At any rate, Ranking remembered the “divine wind” that balked Kubla Khan’s invasion of Japan, and he allowed it to blow some of Kubla’s vessels to the New World. A son of the Khan became the first Inca, another Mongol noble founded Montezuma’s line, and the Khan’s elephants of war spread all up and down the two continents—a notion reported in 1778 by Johann R. Forster.[8]

In 1880, worried over how the Mound Builders could have transported so much earth, Frederick Larkin suggested that the Indians must have domesticated the mammoth: “We can imagine that tremendous teams have been driven to and fro in the vicinity of their great works.” As evidence he offered a “copper relic” with an elephant engraved on it “in harness.”[9]

Archaeological Evidence of Recent Man and the Mastodon

The American archaeologist has found no evidence of the mammoth as a living factor in the life of the American Indian since the time of Christ. He looks askance at two elephant pipes of doubtful provenience which turned up near Davenport, Iowa, around the eighties. He is not impressed by a carved head, which might be either elephant or macaw, on a stone stela in Copan, Honduras. But he must give more respectful attention to certain evidence concerning the mastodon—that early form of elephant which alone of all the order penetrated to South America and was unknown in much of the Old World during the Great Ice Age. Its bones have been found in peat bogs of the Great Lakes area which formed after the glaciers began to melt, and a skeleton has been unearthed near Quito, Ecuador, cheek by jowl with broken pottery.

The South American mastodon was found twelve miles from Quito in a district where the bones of the horse, the extinct sloth, and an extinct relative of the armadillo have also been discovered. Franz Spillman of the University of Quito made the find, and Max Uhle cooperated in the excavation. Uhle states that the scientific facts recorded are beyond question. The animal lay on his left side, apparently mired in what is now a yellow clay which lies upon a thick layer of blue clay. A small landslide had covered the skeleton and the clay. There were a number of evidences of man. The ribs of the right side had been cut away. There were remains of fire which had been lighted in the belly and around the feet and tail, and which had baked some of the clay touching the animal. Spillman and Uhle found parts of flint artifacts, a shaped bone tool, and some lengths of wood beside an erect block of stone, which suggested levers and a fulcrum used in an attempt to lift portions of the mastodon. They also found—and this is the important point so far as dating is concerned—more than 150 pieces of broken pottery.[10]

Eiseley maintains that the site’s “archaeological neglect has been scandalous. If this site had been claimed to be ‘Pleistocene’ many experts would undoubtedly have journeyed even to this out-of-the-way location.” Because of the claim that the find was “recent,” it has not received the thorough study that a Folsom find would unquestionably have received in North America. If the mastodon actually survived until the time of pottery in South America, says Eiseley, this does not demonstrate that the animal lingered as late in North America.[11] But it plays hob with the antiquity of a South American skull from Punin.

There are two curious factors in this discovery. The first is that coal was found in the remnants of the fire. Did the Indians of Ecuador use that fuel before the Spaniards came? Was there a deposit nearer than that in Peru? The second questionable factor has to do with the pottery. Although there were no fewer than 152 broken pieces, they could not be fitted into even one restored pot. Why? Further, 140 of the sherds were from a primitive type of pottery, imperfectly fired, while 12 pieces were from an advanced and decorated type which, in other locations, is supposed to show Maya influence. Why should two varieties of pottery—so widely separated in technique and, presumably, age—appear at this one time?

[Illustration: EIGHT THOUSAND YEARS OF THE GREAT EXTINCTION

_More than half of these sixteen mammals seem to have died out between 10,000 and 8,000 years ago, when the last glaciers were retreating and early man hunted with Sandia and fluted points. These latest acceptable dates of survival in North America are drawn from Jim Hester’s “Late Pleistocene Extinction and Radiocarbon Dating,” in American Antiquity for July, 1960. The dates vary in precision from 150 to ± 500. There may come later finds._]

If the Quito mastodon and pots were indeed neighbors in time, then they provide the only evidence—ex post facto, at that—for the remarkable statement of the geologist William B. Scott in 1913: “Many Pleistocene mammals were in existence only a few centuries ago, in what is called ‘historic time’ in the Old World. Several skeletons of the American Mastodon have been found in bogs, covered by only a few inches of peat, with more or less of the hair and recognizable contents of the stomach preserved.”[12] Eiseley has questioned the evidence that the mastodon had hair, and he has pointed out that a peat bog is an ideal place for the preservation of vegetable matter such as that animal lived upon.[13] The bogs and their fossils lie to the south of the Great Lakes, which formed as the ice fields began to retreat into Canada. Since the retreat began between 10,000 and 12,000 years ago, it is obvious that bogs could have formed and mastodons been trapped in them far longer ago than a few centuries—whether “few” means five, ten, or even fifteen.

A hundred years ago Charles Lyell commented on the profusion of mastodon bones in North American bogs compared with the paucity of such fossils in the bogs of Europe; and argued for the late survival of these animals in the New World.[14] Answering him, Eiseley points out first of all that for many centuries such skeletons were hunted out and salvaged by Europeans in search of ivory or the materia medica of the unicorn’s horn. Further, the mastodon, which was a forest lover and fell a natural victim to bogs, was almost unknown to Europe, while the mammoth kept mainly to dry, open steppes. We know that bogs both in our Great Lakes area and in northern Europe were postglacial, “and that is all. There exists no evidence, at present, which seems to demand in the New World a lingering extinction of the American elephants in a way much different from the course of events in Europe.”[15]

Sloth and Camel in Dry Caves

When we turn from the mastodon preserved in wet peat bogs, we come upon the camel and the sloth in dry caves. There, buried in dust, are skin, hair, and ligaments, as well as bone. Not a great deal of such remains exist, however, and only in a few caves—and this time “few” means less than five. It happens that dry and dust-filled caves are almost as good embalmers as the bogs of the Great Lakes or the ice of Siberia and the Alaska muck beds. “In a perfectly dry limestone cave,” says Howard, “covered by three to ten feet of dust, there seems to be no reason why the hair and tissue of the sloth, camel, horse, or bison could not have been preserved for several thousands of years.”[16]

The Folsom Bison Not Extinct?

Neither elephant nor sloth, neither horse nor camel, is such a common companion of the points of Folsom man as is an extinct form of bison. It was larger than the historic animal, and had longer and straighter horns. Though it is known variously as _Bison taylori_, _Bison antiquus antiquus_, and _Bison antiquus figgensi_, it was probably of a single type, the last named. Now one of the significant things about Folsom is that the point never turns up with the modern variety of buffalo which goes by the interesting name of _Bison bison_,[17] or even _Bison bison bison_—unless, of course, lack of skull material has led scientists astray. Therefore, if we seek the latest date of Folsom, it would seem as if we must seek the death day of the extinct bison.

[Illustration: _Prehistoric and modern bison. Above, at the left, is an outline of typical horn cones of_ Bison antiquus antiquus, _whose bones have been found with Folsom points. Its horns were longer and straighter than those of the buffalo of today_, Bison bison, _shown at the right. Below is a still larger and more ancient type_, Bison latifrons, _with an eighty-inch span_.]

Protagonists of early man have argued that Folsom must date far, far back, or there would not be time for the evolution of the modern bison of the High Plains. Lately, however, Eiseley has developed a theory which does away with the long period of evolution from _Bison antiquus_ into _Bison bison_, and yet pins down Folsom to the end of the glaciers. There is some evidence that the kind of bison Folsom man hunted migrated up into Canada when the glaciers melted, and that the “modern” variety, which we call “buffalo,” came up from the south and took over the High Plains. As the temperature moderated over the whole northern hemisphere the plains of Canada began to resemble the plains of the United States, where the prey of Folsom man had flourished. The climate and the vegetation of the High Plains, moving north behind the ice, took _Bison antiquus_ along. The same northward movement of climate and vegetation occurred from Mexico to the High Plains, and it carried to their historic habitat the buffalo that have left their bones in old soils south of the border. The only place where we meet the two varieties of bison together is a peat bog in Minnesota.[18]

The evidence that _Bison antiquus_ moved to Canada is not complete, but it is suggestive. There are accounts of bison horns from Athabasca “nearly twice the length of the Plains’ ones and much straighter.”[19] Ernest Thompson Seton provides the same kind of evidence.[20] The Canadian bison and the Folsom variety seem “suspiciously similar,” says Eiseley. Unfortunately, in 1925, before the bison of Athabasca—the second surviving race, _Bison bison athabascæ_—had been properly measured and observed, _Bison bison_ from the High Plains were brought north to breed with the Canadian variety. Eiseley feels it is a possibility that the Athabascan animals “represented, at least in a mixed form, the last of the Ice Age bison which early man had hunted in the western plains.”[21] If this is true, it means that Folsom man was fully developed in the period before the melting of the glaciers drove his favorite game north to Canada. It means, further, that he or his immediate forebears may have entered the plains 50,000 years ago when a corridor opened through the western ice fields. (See illustration, page 26.)

The Folsom bison may also have gone northeast to the edge of New England. Grasslands extend from the High Plains of the classic Folsom point northeast to Illinois and Indiana, and ancient steppes once ran through Ohio to New York State and probably to New Jersey and southern New England.[22] Antevs suggests that late bands of Folsom men pursued their bison across this area. Certainly they left their cruder form of point in this part of the Middle West and the East.[23] But where, in this area, are the fossils of the extinct bison?

The Mystery of Extinction

A hundred years ago the French scientist Cuvier, who gave much time to the study of the fossils of extinct mammals, presented the “cataclysmal” explanation of their end. They were destroyed by sudden great geologic changes. To us, perhaps, these changes seem to have ignored certain other animals in a most disquieting way. Cuvier was at a disadvantage, of course, for he was working in a Bible-ridden world which had to accept the Book of Genesis as fact. Even as late as 1887, Henry H. Howorth wrote in _The Mammoth and the Flood_:

These facts ... prove in the first place that a great catastrophe or cataclysm occurred at the close of the Mammoth period, by which that animal, with its companions, were overwhelmed over a very large part of the earth’s surface. Secondly, this cataclysm involved a very wide-spread flood of water, which not only killed the animals but also buried them under continuous beds of loam or gravel. Thirdly, that the same catastrophe was accompanied by a very great and sudden change of climate in Siberia, by which the animals which had previously lived in fairly temperate conditions were frozen in their flesh underground and have remained frozen ever since.[24]

In the hundred years since Koch found a mammoth and a spear point in Missouri we have learned little that is definite about the reasons for the extinction of mammoth, mastodon, camel, horse, sloth, and the rest. We merely know that they died out as the glaciers began to melt. The most natural guess for either scientist or amateur is that change of climate was the lethal factor. Yet we know that many of them had already survived drastic changes of climate and lived through interglacials as well as glacials in the Great Ice Age. Further, how do we account for the survival of deer, antelope, fox, rabbit, moose, beaver, bear, and so many other animals? How could climate be so selective? If the dire wolf died, why not the timber wolf? If the short-faced bear, why not the grizzly? If one form of rabbit and three forms of antelope, why not all rabbits and all antelopes? If disease instead of climate was the great eliminator—as some have suggested—we face the same dilemma.

The mysteries of extinction are so many and so baffling that it is small wonder no book in English has been written on the subject. Since 1906, when Henry Fairfield Osborn summed the matter up in his paper of fifty-odd pages, “The Causes of Extinction of Mammalia,” Eiseley credits only two theories with contributing anything new to the discussion.

One is the hypothesis of Sewall Wright and his co-workers that when an animal was greatly reduced in numbers it would suffer fatally from inbreeding.[25] This, however, leaves us still searching for what reduced its numbers so radically.

The other theory is Sauer’s: Man, the hunter, destroyed the larger, clumsier, and more gregarious animals largely by means of fire drives, and these fires made the grasslands.[26] Or, at least, the fire drives “broke the back” of mammalian resistance.[27] Eiseley objects on a number of grounds. It was not alone the large, clumsy, and gregarious animals that disappeared. Certain mollusks, a variety of toad, a subfamily of rabbits, the dire wolf, the saber-toothed tiger, three forms of antelope, the short-faced bear, and a small horse also disappeared. More damaging still to Sauer’s theory is the fact that a number of birds became extinct. Eiseley asks, “Why, if this method was so deadly, did the living bison and the living antelope roam the plains in countless numbers?” He points out that, while there is abundant evidence of extinct bison caught and killed in fire drives, there is no proof of mass kills of mammoth, horse, camel, and antelope.[28] He also mentions the mastodon, the giant beaver, and the sloth, which frequented eastern forests or northern bogs and died in them. “Though man was on the scene at the final perishing, his was not ... the appetite nor the capacity for such gigantic slaughter.”[29] Though Sauer believes that the numbers of hunting man in the New World were comparatively large when he killed _Bison antiquus_, most authorities disagree. Alfred S. Romer believes that if man had been numerous enough and deadly enough to play a major part in the killing, we should find more evidences of his association with the extinct mammals.[30]

Romer and Edwin H. Colbert have put forward another explanation for the extinction of the mammals. They suggest that the advent of man in the New World may have upset a nicely balanced state of nature.[31] But man had been living with just such animals in the Old World for hundreds of thousands of years before they became extinct. What, then, destroyed the mammoth in Europe?

The most pulling of all the fossils of extinct animals are those in the deep Alaska muck beds. Their numbers are appalling. They lie frozen in tangled masses, interspersed with uprooted trees. They seem to have been torn apart and dismembered and then consolidated under catastrophic conditions. Eden and Plainview spear points and perhaps one Clovis have been found in these chill beds. Skin, ligament, hair, flesh, can still be seen.[32] If scientists can solve this mystery before the high-pressure water stream of the miner disperses the evidence, perhaps we shall be nearer solving one of the greatest and most tantalizing problems involved in the story of early man—the date of the extinction of the great mammals.

This problem of when the mammoth died should have puzzled the Old World as well as the New and caused us to question the dating of Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon quite as much as Folsom man. Oddly enough, it did nothing of the kind. In Europe the mammoth was accepted as diagnostic of the glacial period. The fact that a Magdalenian man of southern France sketched a mammoth on the wall of a cave proved that the man existed in the Great Ice Age. But in America, if a spear point turned up with the bones of a mammoth, too many anthropologists accepted it as proof that the animal died after the ice fields had melted. The mammoth proved the antiquity of man in Europe; man proved the modernity of the mammoth in America. The only shred of evidence to support such reasoning was the questionable pottery and coal that lay beside the mastodon bones in Ecuador. We should have had more and better proof, and we are beginning to get it.

More Radiocarbon Dates for Extinct Mammals

Working together, archaeologists, paleontologists, and physicists are providing more and more facts about the great extinction. Archaeologists are supplying artifacts for cultural associations, and animal bones that the paleontologists identify. In radiocarbon laboratories, the physicists are dating the bones and sometimes charcoal from man-made fires. Through the evergrowing list of dates, many early theories are being replaced with factual knowledge. Some of the dates, however, must be taken with a grain of sodium chloride. A single date from a single sample in only one locality is not too trustworthy. The hazards are obvious, yet nevertheless we have a fairly large body of facts. From these, a general impression of the great extinction is beginning to take shape. As anticipated, man and climate are involved in the disappearance of the animals.

As for climate, a period of much warmer temperatures followed the end of the last glaciation. This lasted from about 10,000 to 2,600 years ago. Antevs isolates the time of highest heat—the Altithermal—as about 7,000 to 4,000 years ago.[33] This matches fairly closely the last dates for our extinct mammals. Heat and aridity may have driven the larger animals to the more and more limited watercourses where man himself would concentrate. Paul S. Martin has noted that the first large mammals to disappear were those in Alaska and Mexico, and that they were followed by the animals of the Plains toward what must have been the beginning of the hot and dry Altithermal period. Martin believes that the grazing and browsing mammals found refuge in the savannas of Florida.[34]

Working with more than 100 radiocarbon dates concerned with the great extinction, Jim Hester (no relation of the junior writer) has brought together results published through 1959.[35] He provides the first reasonably clear picture of the sequence and magnitude of lethal events. We see the ancient forms of horse, camel, and bison, as well as the dire wolf and Columbian mammoth, beginning to disappear 8,000 years ago. _Bison antiquus_ lingers later, though Clovis mammoth hunters may have been active in the Southwest at the same time that Folsom bison hunters were busy on the Plains. Hester’s summary shows how concerned man was in the final death of the great mammals. He lists the last dates for 27 of them. Nine—one-third—were found in archaeological sites of early man; some others were dated by charcoal that may have come from fires where he cooked the meat of the great beasts.

9 PYGMIES, AUSTRALOIDS, AND NEGROIDS—BEFORE INDIANS?

_Let us have all the skeletons out of the closet._ —EARNEST A. HOOTON

The Mythical Indian Race

Science has found a great many artifacts and a few skulls that seem to have belonged to early man. Was he an Indian? Was he a Paleo-Indian—whatever that may imply? Was he a Mongoloid with an admixture of Australoid, Negroid, and White? Was he Mongoloid at all?

Among the most blatant misnomers of popular science is “Indian race.” Even in North America it is an absurdity. Throw in Middle America and South America, and the attempt to fit the people of the New World into this or any one racial pigeonhole becomes laughable. Living Indians of “pure” breed show an immense variety in all physical features except their eyes, their hair, their cheekbones, and their upper front teeth. Some of their skulls and some of the skulls of their dead—particularly those that belonged to early man—show marked differences from those of the Mongoloid race of which the Indians are all commonly supposed to be a part. The differences are so marked that some of our physical anthropologists believe that other races than the Mongoloid contributed to the discovery and settlement of the Americas. They see at least one and possibly three such contributions. If we discount transpacific migration, we must accept the fact that all the peoples of northern Asia did not always belong to the now ubiquitous Mongoloid races. Of this, more at the end of the chapter.

The Mongoloid racial stock has five physical traits that occur with high frequency, which means that in any mixture with another race, five traits seem likely to be transmitted to immediate descendants. One trait is the peculiar shovel shape of the upper incisor, or front, teeth. The second is brown eyes. The third is straight black hair. The fourth is prominent cheekbones, or malars. A fifth is the so-called Mongoloid spot, a purplish discoloration appearing at the base of the spine shortly after birth. It persists for a few years, gradually becoming indistinct before adolescence. Of course, there are minor irregularities. Not all the millions of incisors of our Indians are shovel-shaped. The wavy hair of the Lacandon Indians of southern Mexico may have a reddish tinge. But the great majority of New World Indians share these traits, including prominent cheekbones, and, by so much, they share also a very considerable amount of Mongoloid ancestry.

[Illustration: _The eye of a Chinese with the Mongoloid fold, contrasted with the eye of a white man. (After Hooton, 1931.)_]

In addition, there are many traits typical of Asiatic Mongoloids which appear very irregularly in the Americas. The “Mongoloid fold”—an overhanging fold of skin on the upper eyelid—is found in some tribes and not in others, and in certain individuals of a tribe and not in others. The bony structure of the face varies greatly. Some tribes have strong chins; some, weak ones. The nose of the typical Plains Indian is hawklike—a violent departure from the Mongoloid’s rather flat nasal equipment. The “Semitic” nose of the Maya is Japanese but not at all Chinese. “The Indian type,” says Nelson, “is distinguishable in one way or another from its nearest Mongoloid relations, and at the same time is separable according to some authorities into about ten more or less distinct varieties.”[1]

Looked at in terms of resemblances to Old World peoples, the American Indian becomes a very crazy quilt of races. Hooton sees “an almost pre-Dravidian look” about the Lacandons which vaguely reminds him of the Veddas of India. He finds that many Indians of the Northwest coast resemble Alpine Europeans, and that eastern Indians have a “European look,” and are “by no means as Mongoloid as the Plains and Southwestern Indians”:

For years I have been troubled by the types depicted in the splendid series of oil portraits of Indians in the Peabody Museum. The most of these represent Indians of the eastern and southeastern United States, and, although the portraits are the work of an excellent painter, his subjects look very European. The features of most are very un-Mongoloid, with prominent noses and oval faces ... some Plains Indians are included in the series, and these seem to be accurate representations of types familiar today. I am, therefore, disposed to think that the European-like types are not the result of an artistic convention, but actually did exist.[2]

Racial Definition—the Field of the Physical Anthropologist

Physical anthropology has its difficulties and uncertainties when it tries to reach back deep into time. But the tests by which it distinguishes races seem as sound and dependable as those of any of the disciplines that deal with early man. Some of the results are certainly striking.

There are problems, of course, as to the order in which the various races developed and spread throughout the Old World. In the opinion of some authorities, the Pygmy, or Negrito, came first. The Pygmy, although resembling the Negro in most respects, has in general one of the roundest heads of all mankind, while the Negro’s is pre-eminently long and narrow. Many anthropologists pick the Australoid as the second race to leave an unknown homeland and spread far abroad. The White, or Caucasoid, racial stock is divided into certain groups by one authority, and into other groups by another. Hooton puts the beginnings of the White race far back by calling the Australoid “an archaic form of modern White man.”[3]

But, in spite of conflicts of opinion, the physical anthropologist has fairly firm ground to stand on. He can bring to bear on the skull or the fleshed bone of man certain tests, certain measurements, which enable him to discriminate with some accuracy between the various racial types. The most important of the measurements have to do with the shape of the head and certain of its features.

The Cephalic Index—and Others

A hundred years ago a Swedish scientist, Anders Retzius, set up a measurement called the cephalic index, which indicates whether a head is dolichocephalic or brachycephalic—long-headed or round-headed, narrow or broad. The width of the skull, divided by its length, and multiplied by 100, gives the cephalic index—as 15.0 cm. ÷ 17.6 cm. × 100 = 85.23. The long-headed, or dolichocephalic, skull, lies below 75; the round-headed, or brachycephalic, at or above 80. Between lies the intermediate ground of the mesocephalic. (It is rather easy to keep “dolichocephalic” and “brachycephalic” straight if you note that the longer word applies to the long-headed skulls.)

The Pygmy aside, we find long-headedness common to early peoples and then gradually giving way to round-headedness. Round-headedness is a progressively modern tendency; there seem to be more round heads than there used to be. (Round-headedness seems to have increased sharply with the advent of agriculture. Are the two related? Does a vegetable diet have a functional effect upon head shape?) Among modern peoples, the Australian, the Negro, the Nordic, and the Mediterranean are long-headed. The Pygmy, the Alpine of Central Europe, and the Chinese are generally round-headed. Most Indians, being heavily Mongoloid, are likewise round-headed. The cephalic index alone is not too good a means of determining races today, but it has definite value in dealing with early man in the Americas. Here, as in the Old World, he seems to have been, with two exceptions, as long-headed as the modern Australian.

[Illustration: _In this diagrammatic description of one of the most important measurements of the head, the length is given as 100, instead of 18 centimeters, or some other actual measurement, in order to make the matter simpler to comprehend._]

Cephalic Index—width ÷ length × 100 Dolichocephalic, or long-headed, below 75 Mesocephalic, or intermediate, 75-80 Brachycephalic, or round-headed, above 80

[Illustration: _A map showing the centrifugal dispersal, first of long-headed Negroes and Australoids, then intermediate to long-headed Mediterraneans, and finally round-headed Mongoloids and Alpines, from an Asiatic homeland. The maker of this map prefers “narrow-headed” for “long-headed,” “broad-headed” for “round-headed.” (After Taylor, 1937, with some modifications.)_]

There are other important measurements, which we shall not describe at such length. The facial index tells us whether the face is relatively broad or narrow, the breadth is measured from cheekbone to cheekbone, and the length from the root, or topmost point, of the nose between the eyes to the bottom of the chin. This facial index is not so useful as the cephalic in determining race, because some of the bones involved are affected by age and sex. The nasal index tells us whether the nose—or, in a skull, the nasal aperture—is broad or narrow, adapted to a warm, moist climate or to a dry, cold one. Then there is the matter of prognathism, with a receding chin. Heavy brow ridges, which usually go with a retreating forehead, and the shape of the vault may be important indications of race. No one of these measurements or observations can definitely denote race, but a number of them taken together are rather reliable.

There is a certain difficulty, however, in applying the detective methods of physical anthropology to the skulls of early man in the New World. It is only a matter of terminology, but sometimes this affects our understanding of what scientists are talking about when they describe early American skulls as Australoid, Melanesian, Papuan, Caucasoid, or Negroid. The difficulty stems back to the southwest Pacific. The Australians—a race as primitive as the Neanderthal and perhaps more primitive—are spoken of as Australoid. They are also described by some writers as Caucasoid on the theory that they are a blend of an archaic white race with Negroid elements. The dark-skinned people, who inhabit large parts of New Guinea and nearby islands, are called Melanesian. Some of the men of this area used to be called Papuan—which is really only a word for a language. When the characteristics of their skulls turn up in the Americas, these craniums may be called Papuan by an older writer or Australoid, Melanesian, Caucasoid, or Negroid. Recently, physical anthropologists have determined that no full-sized Negro has existed east of, roughly, Arabia until recent times. Accordingly, this Negroid element in the western Pacific must be related to the Pygmy. We will refer to him as Oceanic Negrito.

What do the tests of the physical anthropologist tell you about skulls which come from the southwest Pacific or resemble specimens from that area? If you find a skull that has protruding jaws, a low or depressed nose root, and straight sides, you may say with some assurance that it belonged to an Oceanic Negrito, an aboriginal Australian, an Australoid-Melanesian, or—if the owner has been dead many thousands of years—an Australoid. If the skull also has a heavy, continuous brow ridge, a retreating forehead, and a low, keeled vault, you can forget the Negrito. The man was an Australoid-Melanesian, or an Australoid.

[Illustration: THREE TYPES OF SKULLS

_Generalized impressions of the cranial traits of three races that may be presumed to have contributed to the peopling of the Americas. Certain Mongoloid tribes, represented by the Eskimo and peoples of northern Asia, differ from the race in general in having long, narrow skulls with keeled vaults and flat sides. (The Australoid, after Leakey, 1935; the Negroid, after Leakey, 1935, and Martin, 1928; the Mongoloid, after Stibbe, 1938, and Hooton, 1931.)_]

[Illustration: AUSTRALOID]

_Forehead: low, receding_ _Brow ridges: heavy_ _Face and jaws: protruding_ _Rear: protruding_ _Forehead: narrow_ _Vault: keeled_ _Sides: flat_ _Sockets: low, oblong_ _Dolichocephalic (very long and narrow head)_

[Illustration: NEGROID]

_Forehead: low, rounded_ _Brow ridges: slight or absent_ _Face and jaws: rotruding_ _Rear: bulging_ _Forehead: narrow_ _Vault: curved_ _Sides: flat to slightly convex_ _Dolichocephalic (narrow head, medium to long)_

[Illustration: MONGOLOID]

_Forehead: somewhat high_ _Brow ridges: absent_ _Face: flat_ _Rear: flat_ _Forehead: broad_ _Vault: broad, globular_ _Sides: convex to bulging_ _Brachycephalic (round)_

What Skull Measurements Tell Us About Early Man

These peculiarities of southwest Pacific skulls are important if you are looking for early man in the Americas. As we have said, a skull found along with the bones of extinct mammals or in a geological formation that suggests great age is almost always long-headed, or dolichocephalic. The typical, round-headed Mongoloid Indian is conspicuous by his antique absence. (The only early skulls that are not long-headed fall in the intermediate division, the mesocephalic.) Further, the early skull has most, if not all, of the following features: a heavy, almost continuous brow ridge; a receding chin; a low nose root; straight sides; a retreating forehead, and a keeled vault.

On the score of long-headedness, there can be no question about all but two of the early skulls mentioned in