Chapter 6

or illustrated on page 216. The Confins has a cephalic index of 69.1, which is hyper-dolichocephalic, or extra long; the female skulls of the Pericú in Lower California average 68.50 and the male 66.15, while sixteen skulls from the Texas coast show an average of 65.37. Except for the skulls of Tepexpan man and the Minnesota girl, all the other skulls we have referred to have the same long-headed character. If those from Texas and the Pacific Coast are not so ancient as the rest, at least they seem to represent the descendants of an old strain forced off into marginal areas by the invasion of newer peoples. To be sure, we have now—and have had—Indians with long skulls, particularly in the eastern part of the United States and to some extent on the Great Plains. But their number is not large, and can never have been large, compared with the great bulk of round-headed Indians of the two Americas.

[Illustration: EARLY MAN VS. THE MONGOLOID

_In this comparison, the Mongoloid skull—indicated by dotted lines—and the skulls of early man are not drawn to true scale, because the former is an abstraction, and the measurements of all the latter are not available. For comparison, the nose root and the back of the skull are made to agree in the profiles, and the other views are drawn from this relationship._ (_The Mongoloid skull, after Stibbe, 1938, and Hooton, 1931; the Early Sacramento, courtesy Robert F. Heizer; the Pericú, after ten Kate, 1884, and Woodbury, 1935; the Punin, after Sullivan and Hellman, 1925; the Lagoa Santa, after Hrdlička, 1912; the Central Texas, after Hooton, 1933.)_]

LAGOA SANTA Brazil Av. cephalic index 70.5 PUNIN Ecuador Cephalic index 71 MELBOURNE Florida Cephalic index 73.1 PERICU Lower California Cephalic index 65.62 CENTRAL TEXAS Jones County Cephalic Index 60.71 EARLY SACRAMENTO California Cephalic Index 72.5

Apart from long-headedness, our early skulls share a number of other peculiarities of the Australoid-Melanesian: the quite heavy brow ridges, the keeled vault, the straight sides, the retreating forehead, the low nose root, and the receding chin. Some have the round vault and the fuller forehead of White and Mongoloid peoples, but these are also a feature of the Negrito strain that united with the Australoid in Melanesia.

In one respect only do the skulls of early American man follow a Mongoloid pattern: almost all have prominent cheekbones. We must remember, however, that prominent cheekbones are found in other races—though not so commonly—and we must recognize that they cannot weigh too heavily against those un-Mongoloid peculiarities we have dwelt on.

The peculiarities of our early skulls must make us think twice about the Indian as the only pre-Columbian inhabitant of the Americas south of the Eskimo. They bear witness to another invader from the Old World. Such skulls—even if they were only a thousand years old—would tell us that the typical Mongoloid Indian was not the only arrival from Asia who left descendants. Since many of the skulls are definitely the oldest that have been found in the New World, we must recognize that early man bore some relationship to other peoples than the forebears of the noble red man.

Europe Recognizes the Australoid in America

The earliest recognition of non-Indian traits in the Americas came from scientists of the Old World—Mochi, Biasutti, Hansen, Quatrefages, ten Kate (who found the Pericú skulls in Lower California), Rivet, Gusinde, Lebzelter, Mendes Correâ, Hultkrantz. The first American and British students to accept the idea were Roland B. Dixon in 1923, A. C. Haddon in 1925, and Sir Arthur Keith and Earnest A. Hooton in 1930; the last two were physical anthropologists, and naturally knew more than archaeologists about the meaning of bones. Toward the end, even Hrdlička was diluting the Mongolism of the Indian with some Aurignacian and Magdalenian ancestry, though the Australoid and the Melanesian were too much for him.

In the English-speaking world the case for the Mongoloid Indian as the only type of early man was definitely and finally thrown out of court in 1930 by statements from two men eminent in their field—Keith and Hooton.

Keith’s statement was simple and short, but his position as a sound and skillful anatomist gave it considerable weight. He confirmed the judgment of Louis R. Sullivan and Milo Hellman that the Punin skull from Ecuador resembled the skulls of native women of Australia. The points of resemblance, he wrote, “were too numerous to permit us to suppose that the skull could be a sport produced by an American Indian parentage.” Here follows Keith’s decisive dictum: “This discovery at Punin does compel us to look into the possibility of a Pleistocene Glacial invasion of America by an Australoid people.”[4]

Hooton and Dixon on Early Invaders

Hooton’s pronouncement in 1930 against the pretensions of the Mongoloid Indian resulted from a study of a number of old skulls found at Pecos Pueblo in New Mexico. In terms of early man they were not so very aged; in fact, they were slightly younger than the Basket Makers of the first Christian centuries. But in these skulls Hooton found traces of seven types of men. They included, as one might expect, the Basket Makers, the Plains Indian, and a “large hybrid” type which was thoroughly Indian. In addition he listed a “Pseudo-Australoid,” a “Pseudo-Negroid,” a “Long-faced European,” and a “Pseudo-Alpine” type. From this analysis of skulls little more than a thousand years old, Hooton went on boldly to picture the kind of men that first discovered and invaded the Americas:

Briefly, then, my present opinion as to the peopling of the American continent is as follows: At a rather remote period, probably soon after the last glacial retreat, there straggled into the New World from Asia by way of the Bering Strait groups of dolichocephals in which were blended at least three strains: one very closely allied to the fundamental brunet European and African long-headed stock called “Mediterranean”; another, a more primitive form with heavy brow-ridges, low broad face and wide nose, which is probably to be identified with an archaic type represented today very strongly (although mixed with other elements) in the native Australians, and less strongly in the so-called “Pre-Dravidians” such as the Veddahs, and also in the Ainu; thirdly, an element certainly Negroid (not Negro). These people, already racially mixed, spread over the New World carrying with them a primitive fishing and hunting culture. Their coming must have preceded the occupation of eastern Asia by the present predominantly Mongoloid peoples, since the purer types of these dolichocephals do not show the characteristic Mongoloid features.

At a somewhat later period there began to arrive in the New World groups of Mongoloids coming by the same route as their predecessors. Many of these were probably purely Mongoloid in race, but others were mixed with some other racial element notable because of its high-bridged and often convex nose. This may have been either Armenoid or Proto-Nordic (or neither one). These later invaders were capable of higher cultural development than the early pioneers and were responsible for the development of agriculture and for the notable achievements of the New World civilization. In some places they may have driven out and supplanted the early long-heads, but often they seem to have interbred with them producing the multiple and varied types of the present American Indians—types which are Mongoloid to a varying extent, but never purely Mongoloid. Last of all came the Eskimo, a culturally primitive Mongoloid group, already mixed with some non-Mongoloid strain before their arrival in North America.[5]

In 1947 Hooton stated this in simpler terms: “I am fairly sure that the earliest arrivals here were non-Mongoloids carrying archaic White strains (‘Australoids,’ if you like) probably mixed with Negritic elements and with whatever else was kicking around in Asia before they crossed Bering Strait.”[6]

Dixon’s position, which he took in 1923, is in some ways a more radical one than Hooton’s. He introduces “Proto-Australoid,” “Proto-Negroid,” and Mediterranean elements, and also Caspian and Alpine; but, where Hooton recognizes a general stock in which Australoid, Negroid, and Mediterranean were blended before their arrival, Dixon brings in his races separate and pure, and he assigns them definite areas in the New World.

Dixon’s Proto-Australoid originated in tropical southeast Asia. It spread westward “through India and the Arabian coasts to Africa, and by way of the Mediterranean passed into western Europe, where it appeared in early Paleolithic times.... Another branch spread southeast into Australia, where its early presence is proved by the Talgai skull,” perhaps 150,000 years old. “A third branch drifted slowly northward up the eastern Asiatic littoral, and, crossing into America, spread thinly through the continents, and perhaps mainly along the western shores.... On the Pacific Coast in California and Lower California it appears to constitute the oldest stratum, characterizing as it does the crania from the lower layers of the shell-heaps, from the islands of Santa Catalina and San Clemente off the Coast, and from the extinct Pericue [now Pericú] isolated on the southern tip of the peninsula of Lower California.” Dixon places some of his Proto-Australoids among the ancestors of the Iroquois and the southern Algonquin tribes of the East. He puts most of his Proto-Negroids in that same eastern area and with the same tribes. He finds them generally east of the Rockies, but also among the Basket Makers in the Southwest and the peoples of the Coahuila Caves of northern Mexico, in the Lagoa Santa area in Brazil, and in Patagonia.[7]

Two of the White types—the Caspian and the Mediterranean—seem rather scattered and rather early. Dixon thinks that a Caspian strain may have appeared as soon as the Proto-Australoid, perhaps sooner. It crops up among the Eskimo and at spots in British Columbia, and widely in South America. The Mediterranean influence, Dixon says, is found also among the Eskimo and among Shoshonean and Siouan tribes.

Dixon does not think much of the Mongoloids. Believing they were a very old people that drifted into Europe in early paleolithic times, he says they “contributed little of value either to the sum of human achievements or the blood of existing races.” He gives them only scant space in North America. Instead he introduces two other round-headed peoples. They are first the Paleo-Alpines, and later the Alpines. These, who seem to take on the role played by the Mongoloids of Hooton and others, spread through to South America and “displayed striking ability.... To them seems to be attributable most of the higher achievements of the aboriginal American peoples.”[8]

Some theories are doubtless much too simple; also, they depend too much on other theories, such as the idea that all the races originated in southwestern Asia. R. Ruggles Gates, who writes of “American Neanderthaloids” and “pseudo-Australoids,” believes that the craniums of the men of Lagoa Santa and Punin—“the earliest wave of interglacial Americans”—“represent a parallel stage in skull development of a widely different race” from the one that began as the Neanderthal or the one that ended as the Australian.[9]

A Potpourri of Races

The theories of Dixon and Hooton and others conflict in many places; but they present, on the whole, an arresting and convincing case for early man as a predecessor of the Mongoloids and as quite a different sort of creature. There are many side issues to the general theory, and they increase as we begin to deal with living peoples. Hooton finds close resemblances to Egyptian skulls among the Arizona Basket Makers and in the Coahuila Caves of northern Mexico,[10] and Dixon identifies ancient Egyptian skulls with skulls from California and skulls of the Iroquois. W. W. Howells sees similarities between “many forest tribes of South America and certain Indonesian groups in Borneo and the Philippines,” and believes the non-Mongoloid features of the Indians point, “not to the Australoids or the Negroes, but towards the White group.”[11] Hooton finds Indians of the Northwest coast who “resemble Alpine Europeans.” He says that certain Plains Indians seem to be basically White with Mongoloid added, and he points out that although the Eskimo are the most Mongoloid of all the inhabitants of the Americas, they are long-headed, which is a most un-Monogoloid trait.[12] On the basis of skulls from Chancelade, France, and certain late-paleolithic traits, Sollas saw the ancestors of the Eskimo living in Europe in Magdalenian times.[13] M. R. Harrington also picks a Magdalenian forebear for the Eskimo.[14] Authorities differ as to whether the Botocudo tribe of Brazil is descended from the people that left their skulls in the Lagoa Santa caves, but on the basis of R. N. Wegners description of a Bolivian tribe, the Qurunga, Griffith Taylor believes these people may be living representatives of an early Australoid migration.[15] Hooton puts forward the picturesque and amusing theory that the Maya, with their large, curved noses and their mania for flattening their heads between boards, picked up both the nose and the mania from the Armenoids of the Iranian plateau. The Mongoloids provided the characteristic skin, hair, and eyelids.[16]

The backwardness of certain living American tribes suggests to Sauer that they came to the New World a very long time ago. Their lack of a number of useful skills argues that they branched off from the men of the Old Stone Age when the Australoid ancestors of the abysmal Blackfellows of Australia looked like an up-and-coming people. These early men had the enterprise to reach the New World, but they stuck to old and limited habits of life. They would not learn from new invading peoples, and so they were forced into refuge areas as remote as Newfoundland, Lower California, Amazonia, and Tierra del Fuego. As an example of cultural backwardness and of an inability to learn which recalls the Australians, Sauer cites a people in the Brazilian interior who get along without boiling any of their food. He believes that this tribe acquired its cultural habits in the days before man began to put heated stones into water in pitch-sealed baskets. The primitive resistance of these “Indians” to borrowing new cooking skills like boiling comes out in other directions. “Long in contact with pottery-making peoples, they make casual or no use of pots, but restrict their cooking to roasting and baking, with gourds, a late acquisition, used for carrying water.”[17]

Griffith Taylor once wrote to Earl W. Count that, because certain of the now extinct mammals inhabited both sides of Bering Strait in the days of the glaciers, “it is almost impossible that the Australoids (who preyed on them) did not cross into America in Pre-Würm times.” Count supports Taylor with the suggestion that the most primitive of the many stocks that invaded the Americas came “at a time, say, when Talgai man and Wadjak man were en route to their _cul de sac_ in Australia.”[18]

Radical as these last two suggestions are in point of time, they are conservative compared with theories held by A. A. Mendes Correâ and Paul Rivet. Like many another student, Mendes Correâ saw Australian, Caucasoid, Polynesian, Melanesian, and Asiatic affinities among the American Indians; but he struck into a new field of theory in 1926 by transporting the Australians to South America over a now-vanished land-bridge to the south. Using Wegener’s hypothesis of the drift of continents, he found his bridge in a severed and displaced Antarctica. He conceded that this was only a conjecture, but thought it “very probable.”[19] That same year Rivet—approving migrations of Australian, Malayan-Polynesian, Asiatic, and Ural elements—suggested that glaciation in the southern hemisphere might have aided the Australians in passing from island to island until they reached the mainland of South America.[20] He dated their journey at only 6,000 years ago,[21] so that glacial assistance beyond the present extent of Antarctica seems just a little unlikely. Rivet, following many a student from Leibnitz to Thomas Jefferson, proposed to trace the origin of the American peoples through comparing their languages with those of the Old World. In 1925 he came up with something more than the usual random identities between words.[22] Indeed, the parallels which he drew between the present speech of the Tshon of Patagonia and the Australians seemed to Dixon to be impossibly close after centuries upon centuries of separation from one another and of contact with other peoples.[23] Only sheer coincidence could account for such identity.

There remain two champions of multiform and multitudinous migrations—José Imbelloni of Argentina and Harold S. Gladwin. They go further than any of their predecessors in peopling the New World with varied races, and further in advancing transpacific migrations as an important factor in the history of the Americas.

Pygmies Before Australoids in the New World?

Both Imbelloni and Gladwin begin with a suggestion that Pygmies deserve consideration. These primordial migrants trod their tiny paces from some unknown fatherland to the forests of the Congo and the jungles of New Guinea, to islands like the Andamans and possibly to Tasmania. The presence of five-foot Yahgan in Tierra del Fuego suggests to both Imbelloni and Gladwin that Pygmies may have preceded the Australoids to the New World. The advent of Pygmies in Tierra del Fuego as well as in Tasmania may be open to question; for in both places the natives, though short, exceeded the average of Pygmy height by a few inches, and their heads, instead of being round like those of the Pygmies, are recorded as of medium cephalic index.

After the Tasmanian strain, Imbelloni carries over by land a Melanesian type to lay their skulls in Lagoa Santa, Punin, Texas, and Lower California. Next came tall people, “comparable partly to the Australian type,” who seem to be the Indians of plains and pampas. These were the last of the land-borne migrants until the present era. Hereafter they came by sea. The fourth element was a Proto-Indonesian people that settled exclusively in South America and mainly in Amazonia. With the fifth group Imbelloni presents the first frank Mongoloids, round-headed and inclined to agriculture; they settled in the Southwest, in Middle America, and along the Andean coast. An almost identical people—whom Imbelloni calls the Isthmid—spread through the center of the same area shortly after the birth of Christ and brought to fruition the civilizations which Cortez and Pizarro found in the New World. To top off his list, Imbelloni brings over the Eskimo and men for the American Northwest—but by no longer a sea voyage than Bering Strait.[24]

Gladwin’s theories appeared first in the second volume of _Excavations at Snaketown_, and were presented in altered and amplified form through his rather antic book _Men Out of Asia_. They are completely heretical, completely fascinating, and in some respects uncommonly plausible. They are certainly a tonic.

Gladwin begins with what might be called a Pygmoid visitation. He does not dignify it with the word “migration.” He is careful to say that there are only “rather vague indications.” There is “just enough to make one wonder if there may not have been a few Pygmy groups who strayed over here long, long ago and were pushed off to the edges and the ends when the Australoid tide flowed in.”[25]

If a scientific study is ever made in the Guayana highlands of Venezuela, some support may be given to the theory of an early Pygmy migration. Carl Sauer on a visit to Venezuela in 1946 saw photographs of a Pygmy-like people taken by a Venezuelan army officer who had paddled and packed the Guayana River for some years. This tribe, which does not interbreed with other tribes, appears to be Pygmoid in stature and type. Further, it lacks “clothing, weaving, netting, baskets, boats, and fishing skills, and also houses.”[26]

Australoids, Negroids, and Men from Europe

Gladwin is definite about the Australoids. They came over Bering Strait somewhere around 25,000 years ago, and drifted down the west coast. They spread out in the southwestern part of the United States below a line from San Francisco to the Texas coast, and flowed on down into Mexico and South America. For evidence he has more than the Australoid-Melanesian skulls of Lower California, Texas, Punin, Paltacalo, and Lagoa Santa. He cites a number of things used and made by the Australians of recent times and also found in the area between southern California and eastern Texas. They include an Aurignacian flint industry, bunt points for darts, bull-roarers, string made by spinning human hair, twisted rabbit fur, curved throwing sticks with parallel grooves, sand paintings, amputation of finger joints as shown in pictographs, and similarities in spear-throwers and darts with foreshafts (see illustration, page 228).[27] We should like to find them nearer Lagoa Santa.

Gladwin’s next migration, the Proto-Negroid of Dixon, leans upon the Pseudo-Negroid traits of Hooton. It comes in about 17,000 years ago, also over Bering Strait, but down through the corridor between the retreating ice fields of western Canada. Having seen Aurignacian qualities in the Australoids, Gladwin sees Solutrean ones in the Negroid invaders. They bring—or, rather, make—the Folsom point. Unlike the Australoids, who were mostly food gatherers, the Negroids—or Folsom men—are primarily hunters. Although they come trickling in for many, many years, they are few; for, in spite of their hunting prowess and their fine flint knives and spear points, they never invade the Australoid territory that is staked out south from the Mexican border.[28]

[Illustration: FROM THE OLD WORLD AND THE NEW

_Implements from Australoid areas of the eastern hemisphere resembling implements from western Texas. (After Gladwin, 1937.)_]

Bunt-Points A, Melanesia; B, western Texas. (length of B—6 inches) Bull-Roarers A, Australia; B, western Texas. (length of B—16 inches) Curved Throwing Sticks A, Australia; B, western Texas. (length of A—26 inches) Spear-Throwers A, Australia; B, western Texas, (length of B—24 inches)

The next migration is the Algonquin. It reaches North America somewhere between 1000 and 500 B.C. These people bring in the cord-marked pottery of the Woodland culture of the eastern United States—unpolished and unpainted, its only ornament impressed in the clay. Such pottery has now been traced to western Canada, up into Alaska, across to Siberia, west through Russia to the beakerwares of Europe, and finally down into Africa about 3000 B.C. The Algonquins are such a mixture as the long trip of their pottery might indicate. They are generally long-headed, and they are not today wholly Mongoloid.[29]

No Mongoloids till 300 B.C.

The first Mongoloids, as Gladwin sees it, were the Eskimos. They came to the northern edge of North America about 500 B.C. But, because they clung to that edge, we must look elsewhere and later for a Mongoloid invasion of the cultural areas of the New World.

Gladwin believes that these second Mongoloids were thrust out of northern China and on into the New World by the ferment of the Huns. They reached Alaska about 300 B.C. Ultimately, supplemented by the Uto-Aztecans, they supplied the man power on which the Mexican and Maya civilizations were built; and some reached the west coast of South America.[30] Without a good many of them it seems to us difficult to account for such Andean peoples as the speakers of the Quechua and Aymara languages, who were the working population of the Chimu, Nasca, Tiahuanaco, and Inca cultures. By Gladwin’s dating, the Mongoloids had only a little more than a thousand years to stamp their hair and eyes and teeth upon five million to fifty million men and women in both Americas.

By the time of the Algonquin—let alone the Eskimo and the Aztec—we are far out of the era of early man. But we are not yet through with the theories of Gladwin as to the peopling of the Americas; for, not content with the stimulating activities of the Huns in northern China, he rediscovers the sailors and the Asiatic fleet of the late, great conqueror Alexander of Macedon, and leads them on expeditions through the East Indies and Oceania even to the Gulf of Darien.[31]

However heretical Gladwin’s suggestions may be, they deserve serious attention if only because they bear heavily upon an old quarrel of the archaeologists, and because this old quarrel bears upon the antiquity of man in the Americas. To be sure, it has to do with the Indians who made the civilizations of Middle America and Peru two thousand years ago, and not with the earlier men who did no more than hunt or gather, and who made nothing more remarkable than Folsom and Eden points or milling stones. But by studying certain aspects of those civilizations we may recognize that the Indians had been in the Americas 3,000 to 5,000 years before Columbus. By so much we may reenforce the theory that their forerunners or their forebears came to the New World at least 15,000 years ago and probably 25,000 or more years ago.

Siberian Caucasoids

Since 1950, Joseph Birdsell and Carleton Coon have done something to clear a little of the mist that has obscured the physical origins of man in the New World. They agree, more or less, that the first migrants were of Caucasoid stock from the basin of the Amur River, in northeast Siberia.[32]

Birdsell, a close student of the Australian aborigines, finds three strains in these peoples, one of which is traceable to the “white” Ainus, of northern Japan, and finally to what he calls the Amurians of the aforementioned river basin. In Australia their descendants are rather short and stocky, with a “rough-hewn Caucasoid cast of features.” Their craniums are long and low, with large brow ridges—general traits of Pleistocene man as well as some of our possibly early, and certainly problematical, Americans. Coon supposes that natural selection among the Amurians—trapped by the advance of the fourth glaciation or one of its substages—produced certain Mongoloid features that they later carried into the New World. Birdsell sees among the early migrants no Negritos, no full-sized Negroids, no so-called Melanesians, no Mediterranean type of Caucasoids. He suggests that a much-mixed strain of Caucasoid Amurians and the newly evolved Mongoloid race accounts for earliest man in the Americas. These “present the only discernible elements available at the proper time and place to have contributed importantly to the New World populations.... One may speculate that if human populations reached the New World in the third interglacial they could be expected to be purely Caucasoid, that is Amurian, and to show no Mongoloid characteristics.” Birdsell suggests that migrants coming after the last glaciation would carry some Mongoloid features through hybridization. Guardedly, Birdsell insists that, though this is a satisfying and stimulating hypothesis, we have as yet no means of judging accurately racial affiliations from a single cranium or entire populations. He concludes—somewhat sadly, we surmise—that methods utilized as recently as 1949 (the date of his proposal) offer no promise of unraveling in detail the enigma of the origins of our earliest Americans.

10 DID THE INDIAN INVENT OR BORROW HIS CULTURE?

_American anthropologists usually deny that Old World cultures have influenced to any great extent the pre-Columbian development of the American Indian. We have set up for Aboriginal America a sort of_ ex post facto _Monroe Doctrine and are inclined to regard suggestions of alien influences as acts of aggression. This is probably a scientifically tenable position, although I am afraid it has often been maintained in part by an emotional bias—an “America for Americans” feeling._ —EARNEST A. HOOTON

Diffusion vs. Independent Invention

We hope you have not been skipping the choice thoughts that we have placed at the beginning of chapters. Some of them are merely amusing, but certain ones make an important point. Such is the above remark from Hooton. It calls our attention to an unscientific emotionalism which often lies behind one of the dogmas of American archaeology.

This dogma is called the autochthonous origin of Indian cultures. It asserts that practically all the traits, discoveries, and inventions which Columbus, Cortes, and Pizarro found in the New World were homegrown products—importations barred. The question at issue between the friends and the opponents of this dogma is commonly expressed as Independent Invention versus Diffusion. But the phrasing is not quite accurate: it needs a little amplification. Anything invented by man is in a sense an independent invention. In the present case we are talking of an invention made in one center, the New World, independent of a similar invention in another center, the Old. We are concerned, not with independent invention, but with _parallel_ independent invention. “Diffusion” is still more inaccurate. Normally it means the gradual transfer of some trait or technique from one people to another, often through the intervention of a third or of a third and a fourth people. In the present discussion it is more a matter of a people’s carrying the trait or the technique to a new home. The question is not merely, “Did the Indian invent pottery?” or “Did the American Australoid invent the bull-roarer?” It is rather, “Did he invent it in the New World or the Old?” or “Did he invent it in the Old World and carry it to the New?” or “Did he invent it in the New World while another fellow invented it in the Old?”

This problem of parallel independent invention versus diffusion is important to any discussion of early man, because it can also be phrased: “Did he or did he not bring traits from the Old World that may indicate his racial ancestry?”

[Illustration: FROM BURMA TO MELANESIA TO AMERICA?

_Among the most curious resemblances between traits in the New World and in the Old are those of Panpipes. Certain pipes from the Solomon Islands have been found to have the same scale and the same absolute pitch as specimens from western Brazil. Double rows of pipes come from the hinterland of Burma, from the Solomon Islands, and from Panama and the Andean highlands, and in all these areas the two rows are tuned in the same relation to each other. The two sets may be lashed together, like these from the Solomon Islands, left, and from Bolivia, right, or they may be merely connected by a cord and blown by two men or, alternately, by one. (Left, after von Hornbostel, 1912; right, after Nordenskiöld, 1924.)_]

[Illustration: _The material used in these fishhooks—pearl shell in Tahiti; abalone shell on San Nicolas Island, off southern California—dictated the slight difference in shape. Objects like these are found only in these general areas. (Courtesy of the American Museum of Natural History and the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History.)_]

Both the theory of diffusion and the theory of parallel, independent invention arise from the same scientific fact. This fact is that different primitive peoples often make similar tools, build similar buildings, enjoy similar institutions, live by similar customs, or believe similar myths. And they do this although the tribes may be widely separated from one another. To pin the matter down to our own present concern, certain objects found in the New World and dated before Columbus are almost exactly like objects in the Old World. For instance, a spear-thrower from western Texas not only employs the same principle as one from Australia, but has practically the same physical shape. Curved throwing-sticks and bull-roarers come from both these localities (see illustration, page 226). Star-shaped mace heads of Melanesian type turn up in Peru. Looms that have the same eleven working parts are found in areas of the New World as well as the Old. Easter Island has polygonal stonework with locked joints which matches a form of masonry in Andean Peru, and a certain people of Easter Island stretched their ear lobes in the same fashion as the Incas. Panpipes of the Old World type appear in South America, Panama, and California; some from western Brazil are identical in tonal scale and absolute pitch with some from the Solomon Islands (see illustration, page 235). In Hawaii and in Peru, as in Egypt and ancient Japan, brothers married to sisters were of superior status. The digging stick of certain Polynesians has a step like that of the Indians of Peru. The quipu, or knotted-string record, spread from Polynesia to Peru, and the decimal system was found in both areas, though farther north, in Middle America, men employed the vigesimal system based on progression by twenties. The Hindu game of pachisi resembles the Mexican game of patolli. Lists have been published of as many as fifty such similarities between Oceania and the Americas.[1]

[Illustration: DIFFUSION OR INDEPENDENT INVENTION?

_Striking resemblances exist between Old World and New World artifacts. The stone clubs are about 14 inches long. (Upper left, after Gladwin, 1937; the Chinese bell, after Gladwin, 1937, the Arizona bell, after Elmore, 1945; upper right, the New Zealand club, after Wickersham, 1895, the California and Peruvian clubs, after Imbelloni, 1930. The mace heads, after Gladwin, 1937.)_]

Effigy Flints Russia Illinois Bronze and Copper Bells China Arizona Two-Edged Stone Clubs New Zealand California Peru Star-Shaped Mace Head Melanesia Peru

Bastian’s “Psychic Unity”

Those who argue for independent invention rest their case largely on a distortion of the theory of “psychic unity” put forward by Adolf Bastian in mid-Victorian days. From studies of African and Asiatic cultures, Bastian developed the thesis that “psychic unity” everywhere produced similar “elementary ideas.” Thus early man in France and early man in Asia might harden the point of a wooden spear in a fire, or knock chips off a lump of flint to make a sharper tool, or make a rope out of twisted vines. But beyond “elementary ideas,” said Bastian, man would develop different things in different places, depending on different physical conditions; and finally, as he reached a higher plane of mental and social development, his ideas and his behavior would be influenced by other men and other cultures with which he came in contact. This was a sound thesis. Unfortunately, however, Bastian’s followers ignored the words “elementary ideas,” as well as the last half of his theory, and made “psychic unity” the provider of all good things from pots to pyramids.

There have been opponents of independent invention, of course. There were some in Bastian’s day. They pointed out—as Robert H. Lowie has done recently—that the champion of the theory must prove that different peoples making similar things were subjected to similar stimulants in both areas. Otherwise “all the societies of the world should share the features in question.”[2] Lowie might have said that all cultures of man should be alike today.

By and large, the diffusionists were in the minority. The distorters of Bastian triumphed. They triumphed even in the Old World, where distances were not always very great, and where traffic between Africa and Eurasia seemed not so very difficult. You can imagine, therefore, what a happy hunting ground the independent inventionists have made of the Americas. The New World is remote indeed from the Old. You must go back to the time of the glaciers to find a land-bridge and up to the Arctic to bring the two worlds within hailing distance of each other. Otherwise you must be willing to accept thousands of miles of ocean voyaging. The physical fact of the remoteness of the Americas has stopped many a mental adventurer among the anthropologists. He rereads with respect—perhaps too much respect—these words of Spinden’s: “The fact that no food plant is common to the two hemispheres is enough to offset any number of petty puzzles in arts and myths.”[3]

If the physical fact of the Pacific Ocean had not been enough to stifle talk of diffusion, the extravagant theories of Sir Grafton Elliot Smith would have done the job. Here was a diffusionist indeed! Echoed by W. J. Perry, Smith found the beginnings of all culture of any importance in Egypt, and from there he sent its traveling salesmen abroad to sell it to Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Pearls and pyramids, gold and dolmens, initiations and totemism, sun worship and the marriage of brother and sister, mummies—even if they were no more than desiccated bodies wrapped in a bag—these traits and many more all “proved” that the Children of the Sun had sold their cultural goods to lesser peoples.

There were other theorists as wild and whirling. Augustus Le Plongeon brought the Maya from Atlantis to found Egypt. Ignatius Donnelly reversed the procession and dragged Greeks to Atlantis and then Mexico. Lewis Spence transported Atlas across the Atlantic as the Mexican god Quetzalcoatl. Leo Wiener, as Spinden has put it, “derives everything of importance in the New World from the highly civilized coasts of Gambia and Sierra Leone ... brightest Africa.”[4] And then there was Churchward with his continent of Mu.

Smiths and Perry’s uncritical use of evidence and their distortion of fact—plus these fantasies of Africa and Atlantis and Mu—put the friends of independent invention even more firmly in the saddle than the single and simple fact of the Pacific Ocean. The diffusion of Smith _et al._ was a diffusion to end all diffusion.

Americanists—students of man in the New World—have not yet escaped from the curse of the Children of the Sun, and the terror of Atlantis and Mu. One of the best, Baron Erland Nordenskiöld, a distinguished Swedish scientist, gave a great deal of energy to the cataloguing of the many evidences of analogies; and yet he came to the conclusion that, by and large, Indian culture was a product of independent invention in the New World.[5] He granted that the Indians may have received from Oceania through random voyages “one or two cultivable plants and possibly a few more culture elements”—knowledge of how to make crude clay vessels, for example.[6] Hrdlička, too, conceded a small number of sea-borne visitors before Columbus: “It is ... probable that the western coast of America, within the last 2,000 years, was on more than one occasion reached by small parties of Polynesians, and that the eastern coast was similarly reached by small groups of whites, and that such parties may have locally influenced the culture of the Americans.”[7] But Hrdlička considered such voyaging of very little importance.

[Illustration: CIRCUMPACIFIC NAVIGATION?

_There are marked resemblances between the traits of the Maori of New Zealand and of the Indians of the northwest coast of North America. Among these are sailing ships and houses. (After figures on a map by Covarrubias, 1940.)_]

NEW ZEALAND NORTHWESTERN AMERICA

Only two anthropologists of any standing have favored diffusion. The first of these, Earnest A. Hooton, rejected “the supposition that these various Asiatic invaders brought with them to the New World nothing but a repressed desire to indulge in independent invention, that they came with culturally empty hands, but brains stuffed full of patents to be filed only after arrival.... I have no use at all for the anthropological isolationists who are determined to maintain the incredible dogma that there was no diffusion of inventions and ideas from the Old World to the New, but only of naked human animals.”[8]

Complexity an Argument for Diffusion

The chief modern American proponent of diffusion is Harold S. Gladwin. What is his case? How does he come to his conclusions? He begins, of course, by noting a large number of random resemblances. Some are in simple objects. Some are in complex ones. As he seeks a scientific basis for his argument, he concentrates on the complex things. Complexity seems to rule out coincidence. If a tool has only one or two parts—like a curved throwing stick or a hafted knife—it is not difficult to conceive of two different men inventing it on opposite sides of the world. A bow and arrow with three essential parts presents a little more of a problem, but not too much, for the three parts are dependent on one another. If the bow has a back reinforced by sinew, if the arrow has feathers and a foreshaft, and the foreshaft has a flint arrowhead—making seven elements in all—then one begins to wonder at the mathematical chances of two men exactly duplicating the whole arrangement. Then, consider the vertical loom with nine separate elements, and eleven if it sports a shuttle and a reed fork.

From citing such coincidences, Gladwin turns to the second step of the diffusionist’s argument. This has to do not alone with one complex object, but with unrelated things grouped around it—let us say a vertical loom and bark cloth, painted tripod pottery, and metal casting by the lost wax method. Now if all these disconnected objects can be found in another locality and in use by another people, the suggestion of diffusion becomes far stronger than even in the case of a single complex machine. As Gladwin puts it:

If ... a man should report to the Chinese police that some copper bells, a vertical loom, some tripod trays, and a roll of bark cloth had been stolen from his house, and if, after broadcasting the details, the American police should find all these articles in the possession of a man in America, where such things had hitherto been unknown, would the authorities be satisfied with the explanation that the possessor had independently invented each item? I am inclined to think that, if I should happen to be the attorney for the defense, knowing that my client had recently come over from Asia, a plea of insanity might carry more weight with the jury than my client’s explanation.

He argues his point still more vividly:

If a Scotsman uses a split-bamboo trout rod, a waterproof silkline, and a barbed hook, it is not necessarily a case of diffusion if a man in Saskatchewan is found to be fishing with a willow twig, a piece of string, and a bent-pin, since each item is dependent upon the others. But if in addition to their fishing tackle, the Scotsman and the man in Saskatchewan are found to possess a shot-gun, a flask, a brier-pipe and bagpipes, then it would look like a case of diffusion since no one item of the assemblage is dependent upon any other.[9]

Dispersion as Well as Diffusion

The difficulty of this second step in the diffusionist’s argument lies in the fact that it is hard indeed to find a complex of traits in _one_ American locality that resembles exactly a complex of traits in a _single_ Old World one. If the traits are all together in Peru, some may come from one place in the Old World and some from another. Or, if we take a group of traits from a single Old World locale, we find them spread out widely and separately in the Americas. An excellent example of this may be drawn from Oceania and South America. Dixon writes of the diffusionists:

When in South America, they say, you find not only coca-chewing, plank canoes, and tie-dyeing, but also terraced irrigation, Panpipes, and the blow gun—all traits widespread in the western Pacific and southeastern Asia—how can you deny that their occurrence is due to diffusion, or believe for a moment that so many similar and parallel inventions could take place? The challenge is a formidable one. Is there anything that can be said in reply?

Dixon points out that these Oceanic traits are not found _together_ in the New World. The plank canoe is confined to the Santa Barbara Islands and southern Chile; tie-dyeing, to the arid coasts of northern Peru; coca-chewing, originally to the Andean highlands and the tropical forests along its eastern border; terraced irrigation, to the Andes of Peru and Bolivia; the blow gun, to the upper Amazon and Orinoco forests, the Antilles, and the eastern United States; the Panpipe, to the Amazon-Orinoco drainage and southward through Bolivia to northern Chile and the Peruvian coast, and to one or two isolated spots in Ecuador and Colombia. “With one exception the only area where the distribution of any two of these traits is found to overlap lies in the Andean highlands and the tropical forest area to the eastward. Only tie-dyeing and the Panpipe are found together on the coast.” Further, the two traits we find on the coast are separated in the Old World. Tie-dyeing is found specifically in Indonesia “and known in Melanesia only in degenerate form in one small area, whereas the Panpipe is primarily Melanesian and almost unknown in Indonesia.”[10] He seems to be ignorant of double Panpipes connected by a cord which are found in the hinterland of Burma and also in Panama and South America.[11]

No opponent of diffusionism is so blind as to deny the importation of some culture traits by the migrants from northern Asia. Kroeber concedes the fire drill, the spear-thrower, stone chipping, twisting of string, the bow, the throwing harpoon, simple basketry and nets, hunting complexes, cooking stones in vessels of wood, of bark, or of skin, body painting and perhaps tattooing, the domestication of dogs.[12] But, except for these and a few other examples, most anthropologists deny that the American Indians, early or late, brought any objects of their culture from the Old World. Alfred V. Kidder has phrased very neatly their antagonism to “non-stop journeys by bag-and-baggage culture carriers.”[13] This phrase is aimed at a weak chink in the diffusionist’s armor—the fact that Old World traits found, say, in the Southwest, Middle America, or farther south leave no trail across Alaska and down through Canada and over the Great Plains.

In addition, the opponents of diffusion like to point out that certain things in the Indian culture of the northern part of the New World are like certain things in the Indian culture of the southern part, while in between lies a very large area—Middle America and Peru—of entirely different culture traits. Here we find none of the northern and southern things. Nordenskiöld observes that, while some of the identical northern and southern traits may be due to the stimulus of similar cold climates, there are numerous traits that have nothing to do with temperature and humidity. He doubtless feels he is delivering the coup de grâce when he writes:

It is a very characteristic fact that incomparably greater similarity exists between civilizations as far apart as those of the Calchaquis of Argentina, and the Pueblos of North America, than between the culture of any Indian tribe and that of any people in the whole of Oceania.[14]

If such traits were diffused from one American area to the other, they left no trace between. When we add this to the fact that from Alaska to Middle America there are no traces of even the simplest beginnings of the cultures of the central area, the advocate of independent invention has a pretty good case. In answer, the diffusionist has been tempted to argue that when men are moving rather steadily across an area, they do not leave evidence that is easy to find some millenniums later. Only a hundred years have passed since Brigham Young led his people from Independence, Missouri, to Salt Lake City, and yet there is a singular paucity of spinning wheels and first editions of _The Book of Mormon_ along their trail.

The Trap of Time

Gladwin has a better answer, which is also an attack on a basic weakness of his opponents. Through many years he has been pointing out that friends of the inventive Indian have been getting squeezed tighter and tighter in a trap of their own independent invention. It is the trap of time.

When the Spaniards found the New World, they found it full of inventions and discoveries. There were cities of stone, painted temples, great pyramids. Metal workers smelted ores, made alloys, and cast elaborate ornaments of gold by a most intricate process. There was a complex despotism in Mexico and as complex and despotic a communism in Peru. The Maya had a calendar more accurate than the one Columbus used. They had devised a hieroglyphic writing and knew how to make cement. The Indians of both continents had developed an extensive agriculture, with potatoes and fertilizers in Peru and corn and beans and tomatoes all over the place.

As soon as the archaeologists decided that all this had been invented in the New World with no help to speak of from the Old, they had to recognize that it would take quite a little time. At first this posed a difficulty, for there was no very early evidence of man in Mexico. In 1917, however, came the discovery of skeletons and pottery under a lava flow at Copilco near Mexico City and of a primitive pyramid half buried under the same flow at near-by Cuicuilco; and the archaeologists promptly dated the eruption of the lava at 4000 B.C.

Then, unfortunately, new evidence narrowed the trap of time once more. George C. Vaillant and his wife dated other sites with the same kind of pottery as Copilco considerably later than the birth of Christ. A radiocarbon date based upon charcoal within the pottery level below the Cuicuilco lava falls between these guesses; it is 2422 ± 250 years.[15] The Basket Makers advanced from an estimated 2000 B.C. to a tree-ring date about A.D. 217. And all this time nobody could find any really primitive beginnings of pottery in Middle America, and nothing that seemed earlier than the birth of Christ. The trap of time was growing tighter and tighter. A very elaborate civilization would have to develop in 1,500 years, without any roots. Gladwin pointed out this difficulty and urged the theory that man came into the Americas not only as a paleolithic primitive 15,000 or 25,000 years ago, but as a fairly civilized and perfected neolithic close to the beginning of the Christian era.

Escape from the Trap

The similarity between the traits of the north and the south which Nordenskiöld points out, and the fact that a different lot of traits were dropped in between the others are grist to Gladwin’s diffusion mill. In 1937, when he wrote _Excavations at Snaketown_, he was only beginning to see an answer. By 1947, when _Men Out of Asia_ appeared, he had a fairly complete and certainly an ingenious explanation.

His first proposition is that the Mongoloids came late—very late—and that they brought not much more than the brawn and brains which someone else would later direct. His fifteenth chapter begins with the following parody of a baseball score:

_Score at the End of the Fourth Inning_

NORTH AMERICA 4 Australoid, Folsom, Algonquin, Eskimo SOUTH AMERICA 1 Australoid _No Discoveries No Inventions No Mongoloids_

By 300 B.C.—two hundred years after the Eskimo—Gladwin is willing to add 1 run to the North American score and make that run Mongoloid. But he does not believe that the Mongoloids reached South America in any numbers, or contributed anything but labor to the culture which Columbus found. They did not make black-on-white pottery in the Pueblo country or red-on-buff pottery and irrigation canals in southern Arizona, create incised pottery, pyramids, carved jade, or a calendar system and hieroglyphs in Middle America, pound bark cloth in Central America, or produce stone fortresses and superb weaving and portrait jugs in Peru. Left to their own devices, the Mongoloids would have accomplished no more in the New World than they had in the Old before the Huns made things unpleasant for them in northern China. Gladwin believes that the people who created the culture of Middle America and Peru came overseas, spreading north and south from the isthmus of Panama. The suggested invasion by water explains the odd fact that many of the traits of northern North America are like some of those of southern South America, and not at all like most of the traits of the area between. Some of these northern and southern traits, says Gladwin, are the property of the Australoids who came far back; others in North America find analogies in China and northern Asia. His overseas peoples thrust themselves and their culture into the central part of the New World, changing or obliterating the Australoid traits that they found there, and isolating those that lay to the north and south. He believes that these people brought with them certain objects and customs from the islands in the Pacific, from southeastern Asia, and from China and points west. Among them is the habit of squeezing a baby’s head between boards to give it an elegant elongation; this head deformation is not practiced in northern Asia, from which the Indians are presumed to have come.

It is hardly necessary to point out that Gladwin’s hypothesis disposes of the question: “Why are there no traces of Middle American and Peruvian traits on the trail down from Alaska?” But we might ask: “Why are there not more of them in the Pacific islands?”

Gladwin has not worked out his maritime invasions too thoroughly; but he sees the Melanesians—who, he believed, reached Easter Island—continuing on to Central America and becoming the Caribs and spreading into South America and the West Indies. He sees the Polynesians taking much the same route and turning into the Arawaks.

What started these South Sea islanders off on their career of civilizing the central part of the Americas? Where did they get some of the traits and some of the physical features that Melanesians and Polynesians do not now possess, as well as their inventive brains? Here Gladwin has a startling and fabulous theory to put forward. Here is where Alexander the Great and his sailors and ships come in.

Dead Alexander Invades America

[Illustration: BEARDED WHITE GODS?

_Middle American portraits of men who, unlike the generality of Mongoloids, wore beards. Upper left, the back of a Totonac slate mirror probably from the state of Veracruz. Upper right, a carving from Tepataxco, Veracruz. Center, a figure on a pottery vase from Chama, Guatemala. Lower left, a pottery head found at Tres Zapotes, Veracruz. Lower right, a carving on a stela at La Venta, which appears to have an artificial beard such as was worn by the Egyptians. (The first three, after Vaillant, 1931; the fourth, after Stirling, 1940; the last, after Covarrubias, 1946.)_]

Before Alexander died in 323 B.C. he brought 5,000 Levantine and Greek shipwrights and sailors to the Persian Gulf and built a navy of 800 vessels. We hear a good deal about what his army did after his death, of the quarrels of generals and the dissipation of their forces—but not a word about the 5,000 nautical men or their fleet. As Gladwin points out, it is hard to imagine that sailors with sound vessels under them would take shore leave and walk home to Greece. If they sailed away from the Persian Gulf, which way would they have gone? They would hardly have sailed southwestward along the Arabian coast; for Alexander died at a season when the winds would have been against them, and the coast is lacking in fresh water and harbors at any time. A southeastward voyage would have been another matter. The wind would have been behind them, and they had already found the coast attractive in that direction.

With this much to go upon, Gladwin sends the fleet of the dead Alexander down the coast of India, past the Spice Islands, and out through Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia. On the way the fleet picks up men and women of various races, and stimulates the whole South Seas into a navigating era. The end result is another discovery of America. It is a discovery by a varied and talented people. Along with the Melanesian-Carib and Polynesian-Arawak, the fleet of Gladwin and Alexander finally brings to our western shores those bearded white men with civilizing propensities who are found in the legends of the Toltec and Maya and the peoples of Colombia and Peru. They it is who teach the Mongoloids how to build stone edifices, work metals, weave textiles, and make fine pots. Gladwin documents all this assiduously and even goes to his opponents for evidence.

He bolsters his argument with the “Q Complex”—that list of traits in the cultures of Middle America and the southeastern portion of the United States which Vaillant and Lothrop compiled as being very old indeed and unaccounted for in present theory. _Men Out of Asia_ suggests that the Levantine voyagers brought these things or shaped them after they landed.

He uses with the greatest relish the mass of material on Oceanic traits in the Americas that Nordenskiöld drew together in “Origin of the Indian Civilizations in South America.” Of the forty-nine elements of culture which the Swede found common to both regions, Gladwin points out that more occur in Colombia and Panama than in any other New World area—thirty-eight in all—and that Colombia and Panama surround the spot where ships would have landed if they had followed the Equatorial Counter Current to the Gulf of Darien. From this region as a center the Melanesian and Polynesian traits gradually thin out to the north, the south, and the east.

[Illustration: _The Equatorial Counter Current, which flows just north of the equator, varies in width from 150 to 500 miles. The winds in this area are light and blow from south of east over its southern area and north of east over its northern area._]

Against Gladwin’s argument must be set, however, the evidence that Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán has recently developed showing that, among the slaves sent to Mexico from Manila during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there were many from New Guinea and other Pacific islands.[16] Was there a similar trade with Colombia, where Oceanic traits are slightly more plentiful than in Mexico and Central America, and with Amazonia, where they are almost as plentiful? It is vitally important, however, to remember that Melanesian slaves cannot possibly be credited with the importation of objects that have been found in pre-Columbian burials—certain Panpipes and mace heads, for example.

There are plenty of other objections, of course, to Gladwin’s theory, even though it seems to explain much that has been a mystery; but there are also defenses that he has not made. If the islands of the Pacific are not too well provided with pottery, pyramids, cement, metallurgy, and textiles, he might have pointed out that they were imperfectly supplied with the proper raw materials. If the white voyagers left their triremes behind in favor of double canoes, and if they did not build Greek temples in the New World, he might have suggested that some generations of sojourn in the South Seas led them to forget a few things. Indeed, it is surprising that these sailors remembered so much of weaving, metal working, and pottery (minus the potter’s wheel). It is equally surprising and just a little disquieting that the white gods, almost as soon as they landed, invented a complex and unique calendar and a hieroglyphic system like nothing they were familiar with. (Perhaps they could not agree on which of the many Old World varieties to use and had to devise something new.)

Before pouncing too heavily on Gladwin and his Alexandrians, it may be well to reread some sentences in his Introduction:

We are going to offer an explanation that will be a radical departure from those in current circulation, and I shall be the first to admit that this tale will need a great deal of patching and strengthening before it will carry much weight. This may seem a strange way to launch a new theory, but I am more concerned in opening up new channels of inquiry than in trying to provide pat answers to all the questions that are plaguing us.... I do not know of anyone who has yet been rash enough to try to connect the origins of American civilizations with definite causes, at definite dates, in the progress of Old World history, and it is for this reason that I have said this tale will need support and will undoubtedly need to be changed. This, however, is the way that every theory should be treated, and no harm will be done if when a new idea is launched it is regarded with due reserve, but also without prejudice.[17]

Our next chapter will return to rather formidable arguments for inventiveness in the American Indian; but first we should perhaps point out that Gladwin is not an Elliot Smith riding the hobby of diffusion to the end. He admits independent invention in many important fields. Pottery was invented, he believes, at least twice in the Old World. He concedes a number of origins for agriculture in the New. But he believes that the really inventive men of the New World—the men who developed corn, and devised the Maya calendar—were the men who brought brains as well as cultural equipment in the ships of Alexander, and put those brains to work devising more cultural equipment. (He ignores the fact that corn was developed more than a thousand years before Alexander was born.) Gladwin simply does not consider that early man and his successors before the birth of Christ were smart enough to produce much more than exceptionally good spear points and rather inferior milling stones. He does not believe that the Australoids or the Folsom men or the Algonquins or the Mongoloids who came over just before our era—let alone the Uto-Aztecans or the Athabascans a little later—were capable of inventing much in the way of neolithic civilization. He points out that the Indian—bereft, presumably, of the brains and blood of the men of Alexander’s fleet—has not done much inventing in the past four centuries. An opponent might remark that many an inventive, creative people has lapsed from grace—the Egyptians and the Greeks, for instance. The Polynesians and the Melanesians have not done much more inventing than the Indians since the days when the Alexandrians turned them into pre-Columbian pioneers of America culture.

Independent Inventions Neither Parallel Nor Diffused

It will be some years before the debate of diffusion versus independent invention comes anywhere near settlement. Much of Gladwin’s evidence for diffusion is striking and not to be laughed aside—particularly the group of Australian traits in our Southwest, and the Polynesian and Melanesian traits in the area around the Gulf of Darien. His injection of Old World voyagers between the northern and southern areas of the New World explains certain puzzling matters; but the theory presents puzzles of its own. Many culture traits of Middle America and Peru are not found in Oceania: the use of cement in masonry and the vigesimal system of numeration in Middle America; the amazingly intricate Maya calendar and hieroglyphics with the first invention of zero; baked brick in two Mexican sites; bronze in Peru; the hammock; the whistling jar; the manioc press. Some of these New World traits must have been invented here, but we are asked to believe that the others were forgotten in Oceania and remembered in the Americas. One argument for trans-Pacific diffusion is clear and cogent, however. It is hard to believe that the men who voyaged as far as the Marquesas and Easter Island stopped there, and so missed our long coast line. Certainly the sweet potato made the ocean crossing in the reverse direction, but was it before Columbus?[18]

Other things went with the sweet potato, according to the great chemist Gilbert N. Lewis. Without believing that man originated in South America, he thinks that man first reached the neolithic level in the area east of the Peruvian Andes while his fellow man in the rest of the world was wandering in paleolithic darkness. In the Andean highlands, man developed architecture, numeration, metallurgy, weaving, sculpture, and so forth. He spread these things to Middle America 6,000 or 8,000 years ago, and then carried them across the Pacific to the Old World.[19] As a whole, Lewis’s theory may be unacceptable; but his arguments for diffusion and against independent invention are persuasive.

In 1947 six Scandinavians demonstrated the possibility of an east-west crossing by sailing and drifting 4,300 miles in 101 days on a primitive raft of balsa logs from Peru to an atoll not many days from Tahiti.[20]

The position of the American partisans of independent invention is a curious one. It is both weak and strong. Man is inventive—even primitive man. But his inventions often have a unique quality: they are not always duplicated, or they are not duplicated at the same level of cultural development. Consider the cave paintings and the sculpture of the Aurignacians, Solutreans, and Magdalenians in the late Paleolithic. It is an art of remarkable perfection that utterly disappeared, and was not equaled again for thousands upon thousands of years. At Bonampak, in southern Mexico, a Maya painter used consummate perspective and foreshortening long before they appeared in Asia. Then there are the unique Folsom point, the perfection of the Solutrean and Eden points, the Maya calendar and hieroglyphs, the mosaic walls of Mitla in Mexico, Egyptian architecture and sculpture as well as writing, the beautifully expressive masks of the African Negro, the Melanesian, and the Eskimo. These were independent inventions, but they were unique ones. They were not independent, _parallel_ inventions. And they were not diffused.

As for early man in the New World, we may believe if we wish that the shape of the Sandia point was diffused from the Solutreans of Europe. We may deny the independent invention in our Southwest of spear-throwers, bull-roarers, bunt points, and curved throwing sticks that look more as if they had been brought from Australia. The Eden point may have come from Siberia, or Siberia may have got it from North America. The Folsom point, however, looks definitely like an independent invention, for it is found nowhere else in the world. This argues that the people who ultimately succeeded in making it must have been in the New World for many, many generations before one of them lashed a Folsom point to a spear and thrust it into a bison. Where are the flints they shaped before the Sandia, Clovis, and Folsom? Can they have evolved the craft of flint knapping here in the New World? When we know this, we shall probably know whether they came before or after the last glaciers.

What Diffusion of Plants and Art?

Meantime it is interesting to observe that the log-jam of the independent inventionists is weakening a bit. When the International Congress of Americanists met in New York in 1949, the hitherto conservative and autochthonous American Museum of Natural History presented for the instruction and delectation of the Congress a rather elaborate exhibition of parallelisms between the cultural traits of the Old World and the New. A follow-up to this noteworthy gathering was a symposium of many of the same anthropologists at a meeting, two years later, of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The theme was “Prehistoric and Historic Asia: Transpacific Contacts with the New World.”[21] The question of contacts was not squelched, but there was no substantial progress in finding answers. The symposium focused the problem on two tests of possible diffusion. These concerned domesticated plants and formal art.

The strongest cases that can be made for the diffusion of any plant concern the _Lagenaria_ gourd, cotton, the sweet potato, and the coconut. None of these ranks as a staple of subsistence, and two of them are not even food plants. Thus Old World and New World crops are mutually exclusive. The four plants that we have mentioned may have had world-wide distribution before man reached the New World; they may have followed the first contacts of white men with the Americas; there is only a remote possibility that they crossed the ocean through natural agencies.

In formal art—or perhaps we should say religious art—there are some tantalizing prospects for rather recent Asia-America diffusion. Gordon Ekholm, of the American Museum of Natural History, has listed a number of these. He suggests that the time of contact would have been about 700 A.D. This, you will note, is much too late to do much in shaping American civilization. At the most, it would have furnished no more than a bit of Asiatic frosting upon the cake of American civilization. Drawing upon elements of art from India, southeast Asia, and Indonesia, Ekholm points to similarities in Maya, Mexican, or other native American art, where parallels seem to exist in such things as a trefoil arch, a sacred tree or cross, tiger thrones, conch-shell-and-plant, Atlantean figures, monster doorways, serpent columns and balustrades, and others.[22] The comparisons are provocative, to say the least. In the Maya area, where most of the suspected influence of Asia occurs, many forms of art steadily deteriorated during the period when, theoretically, Asiatic stimulation would have been most pronounced.

Can we logically assume that the Maya would borrow a lotus motif or a serpent column from southeast Asia, but not the dome or true arch? Is it likely that sailors from Asia or Oceania succeeded in introducing useful plants but not sails or boats that could tack against the wind? If transoceanic diffusion is to be considered seriously, should there be no evidence for even a few practical seagoing inventions shared between the Old World and the New? Surely this would be more acceptable to the Americanists than forcing the assumption of transoceanic diffusion upon the presence of cultivated plants of secondary importance, or theological concepts expressed so vaguely as to be subject to alternative interpretations.

11 THE INDIAN IN AGRICULTURE

_Corn, which is the staff of life._ —EDWARD WINSLOW, _Good Newes from New England_, (1624)

Inventions—Some New, Some Old

Let us forget, for the moment, white conquerors like Alexander and white gods like Quetzalcoatl. Let us suppose that the Indian actually invented his own culture.

This does not mean that we throw diffusion out of the window; for the Indian may have invented things in the Old World and brought them to the New—which is one kind of diffusion. On the other hand, he may have invented in the Americas the same things that other peoples were inventing—before or after him—in Eurasia. That, of course, is independent invention.

There is a third possibility: that the Indian invented things in the New World which none of the peoples of the Old World ever invented. If he could do this, then it is obvious that he could invent some things which other people had also invented. The Indians ability to invent uniquely is a far stronger argument for independent invention than the theory of “psychic unity.” It is also an argument for early man, if the things invented can be dated far back in time.

Nordenskiöld and others list a number of inventions that are unique to the New World.[1] Among them are the hammock; the tube of diagonally woven fibers which enabled the lowland Indians of South America to squeeze the poison from the manioc and produce wholesome tapioca; the ventilating and cooling system of the kivas (the subterranean religious chambers of the pueblos); the Peruvian whistling jar; the cigar, cigarette, tobacco pipe, cigar holder; the quipu (a set of knotted strings for counting); the enema syringe; the hollow rubber ball; elastic rings; the toboggan; the Maya calendar and hieroglyphs; and possibly the snowshoe. If the list is not very impressive, consider how few unique inventions the Old World could muster in the same kind of stone age.

The significance of the list is reinforced by our knowledge of certain parallel inventions which the Indian is presumed to have made without aid from the Old World. One is metallurgy. In South America, he discovered rather late how to smelt metals and make bronze. This lateness, according to Nordenskiöld, proves independent invention. If migrants brought over the knowledge of metallurgy, they left no trace of it along their journey, either in North America or in the South Seas; and there is no Indian folklore telling of how their forefathers or their gods brought bronze to the New World. Nordenskiöld makes the further point that, having invented the casting of metal, the Indians must also have invented the forms in which they cast it—the socketed ax, for example, the bell, and the pincers. On the basis of these inventions in metallurgy, and other inventions, Nordenskiöld writes, “It is surely a matter of logical reasoning to suppose that independent inventions may have been made by them in the realms of architecture, weaving, ceramics, etc.”[2] This would be a very much better argument, of course, if bronze had never been invented in the Old World. Then no boatload of Alexandrians could ever refute it.

Nordenskiöld might have added agriculture to his list of unique Indian inventions—or rather the products of agriculture. The Indian discovered and cultivated plants unknown to the Old World. He developed special varieties suited to special conditions of soil and climate. In a sense he even invented one very important plant, for botanists have been unable to find any wild ancestor of Indian corn.

NEW WORLD PLANTS AND PRODUCTS

CULTIVATED FOOD CROPS maize (Indian corn)* white potato sweet potato tomato pumpkin squash peanut lima bean kidney bean tepary bean chili pepper cacao (for chocolate) agave (for pulque) sunflower seed custard apple pineapple chayote (vegetable) quinoa (cereal) strawberry arracacha (root) avocado manioc (for tapioca) Jerusalem artichoke WILD FOODSTUFFS persimmon papaw papaya wild rice guava arrowroot cashew nut jacote (plum) Paraguay tea (maté) soursop vanilla bean tonka bean capulin (a cherry) FIBERS New World cottons* henequen DYES cochineal (red)* annatto (red and yellow) anil (indigo blue) GUMS rubber copal balsam of Peru chicle DRUGS tobacco* coca* (for cocaine) cinchona (for quinine) cascara sagrada ipecac *Cultivated

A more exhaustive list could include many natural products which the Indian used locally, such as flour made from acorn and mesquite.

_American Plants and Their Cultivation_

The list of important plants that made up the Indian’s agriculture is impressive. It is also unique, for it contains few Old World species. In the northeastern United States there were a few wild fruits and berries—grapes and blackberries, for example—that are common to the north temperate zones of both hemispheres. In Middle America were two plants which are found in Asia and the South Sea Islands—the bottle gourd and the coconut palm—and cotton of a different species from that of Eurasia and Africa. Otherwise, “of cultivable plants,” says Nordenskiöld, “the ancient American higher civilizations possessed none in common with the Old World.”[3]

There are two very curious facts about primitive husbandry in the New World. The Americas provided the Indian with few animals that could be domesticated, and no draft animals at all. Because he had no ox and no horse, he could not use a plow, and did not invent one. Fortunately, on the other hand, the Americas had no plants that required plow cultivation and field sowing. Wild rice grew in lakes. The rest of the plants responded to hoe culture. Or, rather, since the Indian used the hoe only in limited areas—and probably quite late, at that—the seeds could be placed in the ground with a planting stick, and after a little hand cultivation the shade of the abundant leaves would take care of the weeds. Beans, corn, manioc, and potatoes—the four major crops—were ideally suited to the only means the Indian possessed for planting and cultivating.

This difference between agriculture in the Mediterranean area and the New World is quite as great as the difference between the pastoral

## activities of the Fertile Crescent and the scanty domestication of

animals in the Americas. Here there is no solace for the diffusionist. As Lowie has said, “There is more resemblance between the Ionic capital and a Papuan headrest than between the sowing of cereals and the planting of a banana shoot.” (If he had been thinking specifically of our present problem, he would have substituted corn kernel or potato eye for banana shoot.) “Bee-keeping is not the same as training elephants or herding horses; and sowing seeds is not equivalent to planting a side-shoot or a tuber, let alone ridding a tuber [manioc] of its prussic acid.”[4]

When and Where Did Our Agriculture Begin?

There are two questions to be asked about agriculture in the New World: Where did it originate and with what plants? Did it have a multiple origin—which would entail a sort of independent invention? These questions have a bearing on how much time man spent in the inventing and perfecting of agriculture, and therefore on how long he had been thoroughly settled in the Americas when the Spaniards came.

Not so many years ago, Indian corn, or maize, was carelessly considered the first plant cultivated in the Americas—probably because it was the most spectacular—and was supposed to have originated in the highlands of Mexico or Guatemala. Now we know that pumpkins preceded corn, and so, in all probability, did most of the commoner food plants. Beans and melons, with their free-running vines and prominent flowers and seed pods, would seem most likely to have first attracted man—or, perhaps, woman—and led him to assist the processes of nature.

When corn was king, semiarid farm lands were supposed to be the place of its origin. Spinden saw “irrigation as an invention which accounts for the very origin of agriculture itself.”[5] Semiarid land, however, is notoriously hard to clear; though its plants are few, they have deep, tenacious roots. River flood plains of the Sonoran desert in Mexico—ideal by Spinden’s standard—yield no evidence of long or extensive occupation, according to Carl Sauer. Where irrigation was used in our Southwest, dates are not early. The evidence of the plants themselves, he writes, “overwhelmingly points not to desert or steppe but to several humid climates for their origin.”[6]

There has never been much enthusiasm for the humid tropic lowlands as the seedbed of agriculture. Of late years the students of botany have turned to the temperate forest area and particularly to the mountain valley as the seat of agriculture. This has been championed by N. I. Vavilov and a group of Russian scientists, sent to the Americas in the 1920’s, who made a most elaborate study of our native cultivated plants. Much of their evidence is too technical for presentation here, but their conclusions have seemed convincing to many students.[7] A mountain valley provides a wider range of temperature and rainfall and a greater variety of native plants. Its forest trees, before they are cleared by girdling and burning, store up a rich humus under their shade. Costa Rica and El Salvador—full of isolated mountain valleys—contain, according to Henry J. Bruman, as many species of plants as the United States, in spite of the fact that the United States is a hundred times the size of the two countries together.[8] The Russians believe that agriculture took early shape in certain mountain valley areas, including southern Mexico, Central America, Colombia, highland Peru, western Bolivia, and southern Chile. Though they do not commit themselves as to whether agriculture originated in one place and spread later to others, “their evidence,” Sauer thinks, “may be interpreted in favor of multiple independent beginnings.”[9] But Bruman, writing of their work, points out that the “enormous spread of maize and beans, of cotton and tobacco, for example, shows that there is ‘something of the undivided whole’ in the great cultures of the New World, as Vavilov well expresses it.”[10] Richard S. MacNeish, an archaeologist who spent at least a dozen years on the matter, declared in 1960, “There were multiple origins of New World domesticated plants, at different times.”[11]

It is amusing to note that the diffusionists and the partisans of independent invention change places on the subject of corn. Spinden diffuses all corn from Middle America. Gladwin plumps for various areas of independent invention, including the Mississippi Valley.[12]

The Indian’s Accomplishment in Agriculture

There can be no argument over the remarkable nature of certain things that the Indian farmer accomplished. Through long cultivation he produced the seedless pineapple. When he found that one form of manioc was poisonous, he took thought and devised a press for squeezing out the deadly cyanide while retaining the starch. Bruman calls this “one of the outstanding accomplishments of the American Indian.”[13] He says further:

The original process of plant selection seems to have been carried on more intensively in the Americas than elsewhere. The major crop plants were farther removed from their wild ancestors than those of any other part of the earth at the time of the discovery. Mention need only be made of corn, which is so distinct as to require classification in a unique genus, and of the potato, which resulted probably from the crossing of many and various Solanaceae.

[The Solanaceae include nightshade, jimson weed, tobacco, and others.] It is ironic that, as O. F. Cook has observed, the white potatoes grown each year are worth more than all the gold that the Spaniards took from the Incas.[14] This is probably still truer of Indian corn.

[Illustration: THE FIRST ILLUSTRATION OF THE CORN PLANT

_From Fuch’s_ De Historia Stirpium, _published in 1542, only fifty years after Columbus’s men first saw maize. Seven years earlier, Oviedo printed a drawing of an ear of corn. (Courtesy of Harvard University Library.)_]

On November 5, 1492, two Spaniards whom Columbus had sent into the interior of Cuba told him of “a sort of grain they call maiz which was well tasted, bak’d, dry’d, and made into flour.” Thus came the first news of what P. C. Mangelsdorf and R. G. Reeves, authorities on corn, call “a cereal treasure of immensely greater value than the spices which Columbus traveled so far to seek.”[15]

The fact that corn is today the second most important food crop of the world is due to its unique adaptability. In 1492 at least seven hundred different varieties of this grain were growing in widely varied areas of half the western hemisphere. Today corn is grown on all the continents, and its habitats range from 58° north latitude in Canada and Russia to 40° south of the equator in Argentina.

Fields of maize are growing below sea level in the Caspian plain and at altitudes of more than 12,000 feet in the Peruvian Andes. Corn is cultivated in regions of less than ten inches of annual rainfall in the semi-arid plains of Russia, and in regions with more than 200 inches of rain in the tropics of Hindustan. It thrives almost equally well in the short summers of Canada and the perpetual summer of tropical Colombia.[16]

For the Gaspé Peninsula in the province of Quebec and for the Pyrenees Mountains there is a variety that matures in two months; for Colombia there is one that requires ten or eleven months. The height ranges from two feet to twenty; the leaves vary from eight to forty-eight; the number of stalks by a single seed, from one to twelve; the ears from three inches to three feet. Authorities used to list from five to eight basically different types of corn; the five are sweet, flour, dent, flint, and pop. “The Russians,” write P. C. Mangelsdorf and R. G. Reeves, “have already collected more than 8,000 varieties.”[17]

[Illustration: “TURKIE CORNE”

_By 1578, maize had spread so widely in the Old World that in Dodoen’s_ A Newe Herball _the habitat of this “marvelous strange plant” was attributed to Turkey. (Courtesy of Harvard University Library.)_]

[Illustration: A SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY PICTURE OF CORN

_Part of a page from Parkinson’s_ Theatrum Botanicum, _published in 1640. (Courtesy of Harvard University Library.)_]

All the chief types of corn known today were developed by the Indians to suit the wide variety of lands and climates in which they lived. The feat seems all the more remarkable because botanists tell us that all these varieties had to be developed by keen observation and hard work from a single parent species—_Zea mays L._—and modern man has never found corn in a wild form. This amazingly varied plant, which cannot properly seed itself and will die without man’s intervention, was evolved from a plant that is now apparently extinct.

In spite of the old saw about the staff of life, a starchy grain is not the ideal food; but corn, says Sauer, is the most useful of all American starches because in addition to its ease of storage “it contains also fat and protein and is a more nearly complete food than the others.”[18]

How Old Is Corn?

Obviously it must have taken many long years for the Indian to develop corn from its unknown ancestor into its many and widespread varieties. One botanical authority, G. N. Collins, thinks 20,000 years would not be enough—if a gross mutation, or sudden genetic change, were ruled out.[19] Other botanists do not accept such a figure. The development of corn may have taken a good many centuries or, more likely, a few millenniums. Behind corn must lie more centuries or more millenniums during which the first agriculturists of the New World discovered how to grow other plants, because whether corn originated in Middle America, Colombia, or Paraguay—independent inventionists argue for each locality—or in all three with the Mississippi Valley thrown in, there can be no question that it came later than most of the other cultivated plants. This adds still more years to the story of the civilizing of man in the Americas. Bruman writes:

Whether this high specialization of cultivated plant life can be used as an indication of greater age on the part of American agriculture in comparison to that of the Old World is a difficult point. In the writer’s opinion it may indicate merely a greater agricultural awareness on the part of the Indian, a cultural trait no doubt strongly furthered by the relative unimportance of domesticated animals.[20]

[Illustration: _Corn of 4,500 years ago, as reconstructed from a cob found in Bat Cave, New Mexico. (After Mangelsdorf and Smith, 1949.)_]

Sylvanus G. Morley believed that the Maya cultivated corn at a time close to 1000 B.C.[21] which was, of course, no more than a guess. MacNeish states that the most ancient corn of the Maya area, found in the gulf state of Tamaulipas, dates from about 5,000 years ago.[22] We may presume that the Maya were cultivating it some centuries earlier. Antevs gives a date of “not later than 2500 B.C.” for a layer of refuse in Bat Cave, New Mexico, in which Herbert W. Dick found the cobs and kernels of a primitive form of maize that is both a pod corn and a pop corn. These cobs—now dated by radiocarbon at about 5,600 years ago[23]—range from 2⅜ inches to 3¾ inches in length. Though probably not specimens of the long-sought wild corn, they are not far removed in characteristics.[24] In coastal Peru—where corn could not have started—Julio C. Tello found kernels in the ruins of Paracas, along with manioc roots, sweet potatoes, and beans. There is a radiocarbon date of about 2,250 years ago for cotton cloth from a mummy found at Paracas.[25] In a preceramic culture about 5,000 years old,[26] Duncan Strong and Junius Bird found no corn, but evidence that these early agriculturists had raised cotton, squash, and other plants.[27]

It seems unlikely that any form of agriculture could have been developed from native plants in coastal Peru, for it is as arid a spot as can be found anywhere in our hemisphere. Only an elaborate system of irrigation canals enabled this area to grow extensively corn, beans, and other plants. In the highly developed civilization of the coast—so close to the guano islands—the Indians started the use of fertilizers, which was to be a feature of Peruvian agriculture. The development of irrigation and fertilizer, plus city architecture and the finest pottery in the Americas, spells many years of slowly growing civilization in coastal Peru, and behind these beginnings must have lain centuries upon centuries of earlier agricultural discoveries and improvements in the hinterlands. The only alternative is to accept the diffusion of a full-blown culture across the Pacific.

There are those who believe that corn did in fact come from Asia to the Americas. Sauer points out that Asia has more kinds of the wild grasses, Gramineae, akin to corn, _Zea mays L._, than the New World.[28] Another argument is that though the Chinese kept a careful record of the importation of various plants such as tobacco and the opium poppy, there is no mention of corn, implying that they had long been familiar with some variety of it.[29] The botanist Edgar Anderson believes it could have originated in Burma, and could have come across the Pacific “along with cotton, pottery, weaving, etc.”[30] Anderson’s evidence, as he himself maintains, is not conclusive; but it is certainly suggestive. Popcorn is found today among primitive or backward peoples in the remoter parts of Formosa, Sumatra, Java, Borneo, and Burma. From the Naga Hills, where Burma meets Assam, Anderson has had brought to the United States cobs and kernels of popcorn which are identical with the corn found in the earliest graves in Peru. Was this Burmese popcorn carried eastward over the Pacific thousands of years ago and then crossed with some American plant, such as _Tripsacum_, to produce the great variety of larger and more useful types that the Spaniards found? Or was popcorn, imported from the New World, the only maize that the primitive Naga of Burma would cultivate?

The argument for a Burmese origin for popcorn is strengthened by some habits of the Naga tribesmen which carry us back to the dispute over diffusion versus independent invention. These people, living in the Stone Age today, follow the agricultural pattern of the pre-Columbian Indian. They burn trees and underbrush to clear their fields. They use a digging stick to plant their corn in the charred rubbish. In amongst the corn they grow cereals and cotton.[31] On the other hand, they could have taken their corn to the New World long before the men of Bat Cave ate maize 6500 years ago.

Yet, if it should prove true that popcorn came to the Americas as the first form of maize, we should still have to credit the Indian with the tedious centuries—even millenniums—that went into the production of the many varieties which covered thousands of square miles of the New World when Columbus heard of “a sort of grain they call maiz.” And, before the coming of corn from Asia, we should still have to recognize the tens of centuries that went into the discovery and development of the agriculture of beans, squash, melons, potatoes, and manioc.

The story of corn and of agriculture does not tell us just when early man reached our hemisphere; but it suggests that he must have settled in South America thousands of years before the birth of Christ. He needed many millenniums to evolve from a hunting and gathering savage into a farmer and to reach the cultural level at which he would develop and perfect the many varieties of corn. These millenniums may stretch back to the last interglacial—if an astounding discovery in the Valley of Mexico can be accepted. According to Mangelsdorf, a drill core from more than 200 feet below ground contained fossilized grains of pollen. Elso Barghoom has identified them as corn. The geological level where the core was taken is “probably at least 80,000 years old.”[32]

12 PUZZLES, PROBLEMS, AND HALF-ANSWERS

_One swallow does not make a summer, but two lead one to suspect an abiding change in the weather._ —R. A. DALY

The Pendulum Swings

This chapter might have been headed “Summary.” We could not have called it “Conclusions,” for, as we read the record of early man, we saw the damage that had been done by too rash appraisals. The final pages will review the more important evidence of early man in the New World, including his relation to Old World peoples and to certain geologic phenomena.

The study of early man in America has suffered from alternate spasms of unscientific enthusiasm and far too “scientific” caution. It has ranged from the parading of rumor and guesswork to the blind cranioclasm of Hrdlička. In the nineteenth century the talk was of man in the Americas before the Great Ice Age and far back into the Tertiary era that ended 1,000,000 years ago. At the beginning of the twentieth century anthropologists gave him no more than 4,000 years in the New World. Now they generally concede him 10,000 or 15,000 years, and many grant him 25,000 or more.

Clark Wissler, in _The Origin of the American Indian_, wrote, “The first great migration of Old World peoples to the New can be set down as not only beginning but culminating within the limits of late Pleistocene Time.”[1] Frank H. H. Roberts, Jr., long a protagonist of Folsom man, wrote the next year, “The belief that the Folsom complex developed towards the end of the Pleistocene, or Late Glacial, period and carried over into the beginning of the Recent is now more or less generally accepted.”[2]

On the whole, the archaeologists—developing a new and sound technique in stratigraphic excavation and pottery study—have held back more than the physical anthropologists from the acceptance of a variegated array of early men at quite early dates. Geologists and paleontologists, in whose hands must lie the final dating of the Indian’s predecessors, have inclined to a more radical attitude. A few scientists are talking of the possibility that man crossed Bering Strait before the last glaciation—Würm in Europe, Wisconsin in America—and possibly even while the Riss-Illinois was laying a land-bridge across from Siberia to Alaska.

At last, through chemist Willard Libby and his radiocarbon, we are getting some dependable dates for early man and earlier mammals. Yet disagreements continue. When you look at the evidence behind the conflicting opinions of scientists—at skulls, tools, fossils, and earth strata, all too innocent of Carbon¹⁴—you see why there had to be disagreements. We have facts about early man, plenty of them. Some are conflicting facts. Most of them raise serious problems. A few leave us with grievous puzzles. Let us reexamine the facts and puzzles.

The Puzzle of the Skulls

We have quite a few skulls that may have belonged to early man. On the whole, they do not look as Mongoloid as good Indian skulls should. Except for two—Minnesota man and Tepexpan man—they are long-headed instead of round-headed, and those exceptions lie between the two extremes. The skulls have heavy brow ridges. Most of them have keeled vaults like the Australoid-Melanesians of today. Many have retreating foreheads. It is true that skulls like these can be found in the variegated ranks of what is supposed to be the homogeneous “Indian race”; but they are far from plentiful. For instance, Hrdlička’s catalogue of Indian craniums shows only a small percentage that are long-headed. If early man was indeed more Australoid-Melanesian in type than pure Mongoloid, it would be only natural to find some reflection in the descendants of the Mongoloid immigrants with whom early man may be presumed to have bred.

There is no agreement as to the racial affinities of the earliest migrants. Most anthropologists still believe they were Mongoloids and therefore what they call Indians. Some go to the other extreme and declare they were Australoid, Negroid, and/or Caucasoid. Some, like Hooton, say the stock was drawn from a mingling of the three races in Asia. He thinks they “may have received some Mongoloid admixture before reaching the New World, but this is doubtful.”[3]

Many of the skulls of early man resemble in certain respects those of that late arrival, the Eskimo, just as the Eskimo resembles some specimens of Magdalenian man. The skulls of the Eskimo are long-headed, and have keeled vaults and prominent cheekbones. But most early craniums have three features that are lacking in the Eskimo—receding chins, slanting foreheads and heavy brow ridges—all stigmata of the Australoid-Melanesian.

It is rather puzzling to note that these early skulls are found with the bones of extinct animals in South America, but seldom with such fossils in North America, while they are not found with Folsom or Sandia or any form of ancient point. (There seem few points of definite-early type in South America.) It is possible, as Howard suggested, that the North American hunters practiced exposure of the dead instead of burial, while early man to the south left more burials for us than the few that have been found.

The Puzzle of the Querns

The next puzzle lies in the milling stones. Man in America not only starts off with an exceptionally fine type of spear point to thrust into elephant or bison, and uses pressure flaking far more extensively than man in the Old World; in addition, he develops the type of milling stone, or quern, that does not appear in Europe until man is coming out of the Old Stone Age and entering the neolithic period of agriculture. Milling stones might be used as an argument against the early appearance of man in America if it could be proved that they were made to grind agricultural products; but no kernels of corn or other cultivated seeds have been found with these querns.

Except for milling stones that seem to have been used to grind paint in Chile,[4] the preagricultural querns occur mainly in the area of California, the Southwest, and upper Mexico. Through California, from Borax Lake and the Mohave Desert, to the Cochise area of southeastern Arizona and the Edwards Plateau of central Texas, and on into northwestern Mexico, these grinding tools turn up with artifacts and in geological strata that may be from 6,000 to 25,000 years old. If those dates are correct, then we have milling stones in the New World many years before there was any agriculture. The explanation must be that some of the earliest of the Americans were food gatherers and grinders of nuts and seeds as well as hunters. In addition to their querns, they have left us hearths on beds of collected stones, rude knives, rough percussion tools such as scrapers and choppers, but very few spear points. There is no early culture of this sort now known in Asia or Africa. It is not Folsom. Is it Australoid? Does it go back to a type of people who, in some hybrid and degenerate form, settled Australia? At least we know that the culture of the Australians is a curious mixture of very primitive traits with some elements of the polished stone work of the New Stone Age and milling stones. They are nearer being food gatherers than hunters.

The Puzzle of the Points

With the first hunters in the New World—the men who made the Sandia, the Folsom, the Plainview, and probably the early Eden points—we come to another puzzle. The Sandia is shaped like a much superior point made by the Solutreans of Europe and an equally crude one made in Africa, but the best Folsom is better than the best Solutrean. The fluted channels of the Folsom are remarkable enough; in addition, the edges are sharpened by the removal of almost microscopic flakes, and the base is often carefully ground. We know that such points were being made at least 10,000 and perhaps 15,000 years ago. The Eden point is doubtless newer, yet it must antedate the only chipped weapons that can equal it, the daggers of neolithic Egyptians 7,500 years ago or of the still later Danes.

A point with Eden-like chipping has been found in a neolithic site in Siberia.[5] What does this mean? Obviously Sandia man or his forebears came from Asia across Bering Strait, but too early to leave the Siberian Eden behind him. Someone has been bold enough to suggest that the descendants of the man who developed the Folsom point may have returned to Siberia; after all, as George Gaylord Simpson has pointed out, a bridge works both ways.[6] If Eden man was too late for the land-bridge of the last glaciation, he still had the ice-bridge of winter. But “ice” suggests a doubt. Would a hunter of the temperate High Plains be likely to trek north through the chill of winter to deposit a spear point in Siberia? Yet we know that traces of Eden, Plainview, and Folsom have been found in Alaska. Were they left by summer transients fishing Cook Inlet or hunting Alaskan jaguar around Fairbanks? It is safer, on the whole, to ask where this type of early American came from than to ask where he went.

[Illustration: _Left, a point with oblique chipping in the Eden style, found near Lake Baikal, Siberia, in a neolithic culture, compared with an Eden point from Colorado. Is the resemblance accidental, or could Eden man have migrated to the Old World after developing his characteristic style of flint knapping in the New? The size of the Siberian point is not recorded. (The Eden point, after Howard, 1935; the Siberian, after Okladnikov, 1938, and Collins, 1943.)_]

The points of early man present a double puzzle. How did it happen that the art of working flint was brought to higher perfection in the New World during the Old Stone Age than it was in the Old World? And where did these consummate flint knappers come from? The first question may never be answered. The second presents interesting possibilities. They revolve around the brief appearance of the Solutreans in Europe. Only a great deal of very thorough excavation in Siberia will give us more than provocative or provoking theories about the origins of the men who made Sandia and Folsom points.

Was Our Early Man a Solutrean?

Let us stress again that the Folsom and Eden chipping reached a perfection unknown in Europe until neolithic man brought in agriculture. Indeed, if the paleolithic Solutrean points had never been found, _all_ American archaeologists—instead of just one or two—might unhesitatingly have called Folsom and Eden neolithic, even though they were found with extinct animals. In the history of Europe’s Old Stone Age—and in Africa’s, too, for that matter—we have no more than one hint of such work. It was only the men of the Solutrean culture—thrust between the late Aurignacian and the early Magdalenian—who took much true advantage of pressure flaking, and who made spear points with Sandia-like shoulders. (While the flint chipping of the Solutreans is fine, it is not so minute or so perfect as the work of the men who made Folsom and Eden points.) With the disappearance of the Solutreans, the art of fine flint knapping and point making faded away in the Old World, not to appear again with any vigor until neolithic times.

The Solutreans are not a part of the flow and development of prehistoric European culture. They seem to come as invaders, and then fade out after 500 years, or, at the most, 10,000. Where they came from is uncertain. Because crude points called Proto-Solutrean are much more plentiful along the Danube than they are in France—where the finest Solutrean work is found—it has long been argued that the people who made them came from western Asia. Lately, flint work of the Solutrean type has been discovered in Morocco and also in Egypt;[7] and, since it is intermixed with the products of a much older culture, the Mousterian, it may be argued that the Solutreans came from Africa. The theory of an eastern origin remains strong, however; for among the African flints are shouldered points, and shouldered points were not developed until the end of the Solutrean period in Europe. We do not know the date of the Mousterian in Africa; it may have been late.

If the Solutreans did, in fact, originate in Asia, can we believe that an Asiatic people with an unusual flair for flint knapping fathered both the Solutreans and the men who made the Sandia and the far finer Folsom and Eden points? Did this parent stock send a group of migrants across Bering Strait and down into the High Plains to give us Folsom, Sandia, and Eden points? Did it throw off toward the west a group that practiced the Solutrean arts in Europe? Even after archaeologists have dug Siberia thoroughly we may never know how much earlier or later the American offshoot appeared on the High Plains than the Solutreans in Europe.

It is a curious fact that the Solutreans were as negligent as the Folsom and Eden men in providing us with skulls. C. S. Coon writes, “There are no skulls which all authorities accept as definitely belonging to that short and far from widespread cultural phase.”[8] Hunters in Europe, like hunters in America, seem to have taken little interest in formal obsequies and proper burials. Nature consumed their remains.

Or Was the American Aurignacian or Magdalenian?

Even before the discovery of Folsom made early man in America look like a fugitive from that village in France called Solutré, anthropologists were struck by other resemblances. In 1924 the Englishman Sollas compared the Eskimo culture with the Magdalenian.[9] In 1932 Hrdlička was writing of an Aurignacian and Magdalenian ancestry for the American Indian.[10] In 1933 N. C. Nelson was playing with such comparisons, and writing of our “wooden spear and spear-thrower, perhaps of Magdalenian affinity; our three out of four forms of Solutrean chipped blades; our ordinary Aurignacian-like endscraper; our simple Mousterian type flake; and, finally, our Abbevillian and Chellean varieties of the _coup-de-poing_.”[11] In the same year Harrington was going further. Recalling that in 1921 he had reported flint work in Cuba that was Aurignacian in style, Harrington pointed out that the Solutrean never reached the West Indies. “Man in a Magdalenian stage of development ... reached America, probably via Asia, but perhaps from Europe via Iceland and Greenland. These bands kept to the north, following up the retreating glaciers, and became the ancestors of the Eskimo.”[12] Thomas Jefferson had somewhat the same idea when he wrote that the Eskimos “must be derived from the Groenlanders, and these probably from some of the northern parts of the old continent.”[13]

Must we add the Aurignacians and Magdalenians of the end of the New Stone Age to the Solutreans and the Australoids as early invaders of America? The answer is dubious, for as yet northern Asia has yielded only a little evidence of the Aurignacian and the Magdalenian.

Chopping Tools Instead of Hand Axes in Asia

[Illustration: _Showing the areas where the hand ax dominated and those where the chopping tool took precedence. The white portions are the ice fields of the last glaciation. (After Movius, 1944.)_]

Throughout most of Asia the men of the Old Stone Age developed a very different core industry from that of Europe. Instead of the hand ax (_coup-de-poing_), they made an implement now called a chopping tool. This was a large and somewhat flat pebble with a sharpened edge made by striking off flakes alternately from either side. They had also large, crude scrapers, flaked on a single side, which are now called choppers. Only in India and the Near East did the hand ax seem to flourish as in western Europe and much of Africa. In the border area of the Upper Punjab, Helmut de Terra found both hand axes and chopping tools in the early Soan culture, which seems to lie in the Second Interglacial. In upper Burma the hand ax disappears, leaving the field to the chopping tool and the chopper. The same seems true of Java and northern China.[14] Here there are flake artifacts, but they were not chipped by European methods. On the whole, the tools of the Asiatic complex look much more like the choppers and scrapers found at very early sites such as Lake Mohave, southeastern Arizona (Cochise), Sonora, Lower California, and the Valley of Mexico.

[Illustration: _A chopping tool of the early Soan culture, in northwestern India. (After Paterson, 1942.)_]

Yet—another puzzle—hand axes have been found in central and southern Texas, and in Renaud’s Black’s Fork culture of Wyoming, without traces of Folsom or Eden. Can these hand axes, like the Aurignacian and Magdalenian traits of which Nelson and Harrington write, represent an earlier migration than Sandia and Folsom? This is most problematical.

Spinden’s Neolithic Blockade

All this is patently absurd to the dean of American archaeologists, Herbert J. Spinden. If tools in the New World resemble the Aurignacian or the Solutrean, it is an accident—perhaps an accident of psychic unity. He is against all talk of paleolithic man in the Americas on the late edge of the Great Ice Age. In the face of facts presented by Russian and American glacialists, he maintains that “eastern Siberia was rather heavily glaciated.”[15] He believes that certain Asiatic peoples with a sudden urge for travel first appeared at the Siberian-Alaskan portal about 2500 B.C.[16] They could not have been men of the Old Stone Age because, he asserts, we have found nothing in Siberia that approaches the paleolithic; indeed, we have found no paleolithic tools north of 54° in England, of 53° in Siberia, or of 43° on the Sea of Japan, while “the portal to America for man and beast lies at 67° north latitude.” We have, then, “a no-proof barrier zone a thousand miles deep extending clear across the Old World.”[17] This “rules out invasion of America until relatively modern times because it shows that a wide zone of the Old World, blocking the road to America, was itself unused by man until long after the last continental ice sheet ... had disappeared.”[18] Obviously, Spinden’s argument is not based on evidence in the Americas, but rather on lack of evidence in little studied Siberia. He ignores the presence of paleolithic tools in northern Manchuria together with the fossils of extinct mammals.[19] He concedes that even in the regions of “the most ancient civilization” in the Old World there is no trace of such high technical skill in flint chipping as the Folsom “before the fourth millennium before Christ.” But—appearing to ignore the geological evidence connected with Sandia, Folsom, Clovis, Abilene, and Lake Mohave—he interprets this as meaning that man cannot have reached the Southwest before the golden age of Ur. He speaks of “the lost cause of paleolithic man in America.” He accepts Solutrean flint work as paleolithic, but not Folsom or Eden. “Now, even if we admit that Folsom man hunted the mammoth, we must place that sporting event not earlier than 2000 B.C.”[20]

Was the First Migration Interglacial?

As we think we have shown in