Chapter II: Preface (1)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

H. M. Wormington, _Ancient Man in North America_, 4th edit. (1957).

E. H. Sellards, _Early Man in America_ (1952).

Raymond W. Murray, _Man’s Unknown Ancestors_ (1943).

_Early Man_, a symposium edited by George Grant MacCurdy (1937).

_The American Aborigines_, a symposium edited by Diamond Jenness (1933).

George Grant MacCurdy, _Human Origins_ (1924).

Miles C. Burkitt, _The Old Stone Age_ (1933).

W. J. Sollas, _Ancient Hunters and Their Modern Representatives_ (1924).

W. B. Wright, _Tools and the Man_ (1939).

André Vayson de Pradenne, _Prehistory_ (1940).

Edith Plant, _Man’s Unwritten Past_ (1942).

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

Earnest A. Hooton, _Up from the Ape_ (1946).

W. W. Howells, _Mankind in the Making_ (1959).

Richard F. Flint, _Glacial Geology and the Pleistocene Epoch_ (1947) and _Glacial and Pleistocene Geology_ (1957).

Roland B. Dixon, _Racial History of Man_ (1923).

R. A. Daly, _The Changing World of the Ice Age_ (1934).

Frederick E. Zeuner, _Dating the Past_, 4th edit. (1958).

Robert H. Lowie, _The History of Ethnological Theory_ (1937).

Marcellin Boule and Henri V. Vallois, _Fossil Men_, trans. by Michael Bullock (1957).

Robert J. Braidwood, _Prehistoric Men_, 4th edit. (1959).

K. M.

March 1961
_University of California_
_Los Angeles 24, Calif_.

CONTENTS

_Foreword_ ix

_Preface_ xi

_Chapter 1._ 1 THIS SUDDEN NEW WORLD _A Secret Laboratory of Culture. Time-Tests by Travel, Tongues, and Physiques. From the Old Stone Age to the New. From Tools and Bones, Fossils and Rocks._

_Chapter 2._ 11 THE ROAD OF EARLY MAN _How New Was the New World? A Passage from Asia to North America. Men Out of Asia—and All the Continents. Bering Strait—Freeway to the New World. Three Roads to the South—with One Detour. Problematical Roads to the New World. Ware Dogma!_

_Chapter 3._ 29 THE DEAD HAND OF THE AGES _Conflicts and Confusions. The Problem of the Ages. The Bronze Age—a Phantasm. Wood, Bone, and Shell Ages. Dividing the Stone Age—the Old and the New. Activities of the New Stone Age. Agriculture—Test of the Neolithic. First a Food Gatherer, Then a Hunter._

_Chapter 4._ 43 THE GREAT ICE AGE _Our Part of the Geologic Time Scale. The Glacial Hypothesis Appears. The End of the Great Ice Age. River Terraces and Beach Lines. The Cause of Glaciation._

_Chapter 5._ 61 EARLY MAN IN THE OLD WORLD _Archaeology, a New Science. Mortillet’s Cramping Classification. Enter the Eolith. Flake vs. Core Industries. Dating Early Man in Europe. True Tools—Deceptive Skulls. Ancestors from Heidelberg and Swanscombe? Putting the Neanderthal in His Place. Ancient Man in Java and China. “Giant Ape”—a Mythical Ancestor? “Java” Men in Africa and Europe? Man-Apes or Ape-Men in Africa. The Progressive Neanderthal. Radiocarbon Dates for the Mousterian. Homo sapiens—New or Old? Solutrean Flint Workers Invade Europe. Weapons and Tools—from Hand Ax to Arrowhead. The Danger in Universal Time Scales._

_Chapter 6._ 119 WHAT THE BONES HAVE TO SAY _Early Man as Adam’s Progeny. Science and Religion Embattled. Reaction, Led by Science. The Red Herring of the “Primitive Skull.” The Mystery of the Missing Bones. South America Provides the First Skulls. North American Skulls and Bones. Early Man Not Solely Mongoloid or Indian. Evidence from Middle America. New Finds in the United States._

_Chapter 7._ 143 THE ARTIFACTS OF EARLY MAN IN THE NEW WORLD _Artifacts from Heaven. The Folsom Point—Unique and Potent. Americans Hunted Animals Now Extinct. Two Other Folsom Sites—Clovis and Lindenmeier. Another Fine and Ancient Point. The Plainview Point. A New Point—and Sloths—in Gypsum Cave. Old Lake and River Sites. Sandia—Older Than Folsom. The Milling Stone Appears. A Paucity of Art Objects. Hand Axes in the Americas. Early Man in Mexico. From the Glacial to the Archaic. Back of 15,000 Years?_

_Chapter 8._ 189 EARLY MAN AND THE GREAT EXTINCTION _A Twofold Problem. Myths and Mammoths. Archaeological Evidence of Recent Man and the Mastodon. Sloth and Camel in Dry Caves. The Folsom Bison Not Extinct? The Mystery of Extinction. More Radiocarbon Dates for Extinct Mammals._

_Chapter 9._ 207 PYGMIES, AUSTRALOIDS, AND NEGROIDS—BEFORE INDIANS? _The Mythical Indian Race. Racial Definition—the Field of the Physical Anthropologist. The Cephalic Index—and Others. What Skull Measurements Tell Us About Early Man. Europe Recognizes the Australoid in America. Hooton and Dixon on Early Invaders. A Potpourri of Races. Pygmies Before Australoids in the New World? Australoids, Negroids, and Men From Europe. No Mongoloids till 300_ B.C. _Siberian Caucasoids_.

_Chapter 10._ 233 DID THE INDIAN INVENT OR BORROW HIS CULTURE? _Diffusion vs. Independent Invention. Bastian’s “Psychic Unity.” Complexity an Argument for Diffusion. Dispersion as Well as Diffusion. The Trap of Time. Escape from the Trap. Dead Alexander Invades America. Independent Inventions Neither Parallel Nor Diffused. What Diffusion of Plants and Art?_

_Chapter 11._ 261 THE INDIAN IN AGRICULTURE _Inventions—Some New, Some Old. American Plants and Their Cultivation. When and Where Did Our Agriculture Begin? The Indians Accomplishment in Agriculture. How Old Is Corn?_

_Chapter 12._ 277 PUZZLES, PROBLEMS AND HALF-ANSWERS _The Pendulum Swings. The Puzzle of the Skulls. The Puzzle of the Querns. The Puzzle of the Points. Was Our Early Man a Solutrean? Or Was the American Aurignacian or Magdalenian? Chopping Tools Instead of Hand Axes in Asia. Spinden’s Neolithic Blockade. Was the First Migration Interglacial? Geological Evidence and the Pluvials. In Sum._

_References in the Text_ 295

_References as to Illustrations_ 317

_Index_ 323

ILLUSTRATIONS, MAPS, AND TABLES

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

EARLY MAN IN THE NEW WORLD

A NOTE ON NOTES

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

1
THIS SUDDEN NEW WORLD

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

A Secret Laboratory of Culture

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Time-Tests by Travel, Tongues, and Physiques

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

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

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

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

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

From the Old Stone Age to the New

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

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

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

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

From Tools and Bones, Fossils and Rocks

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

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

2
THE ROAD OF EARLY MAN

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

How New Was the New World?

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

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

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

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

A Passage from Asia to North America

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

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

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

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

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

Men Out of Asia—and All the Continents

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bering Strait—Freeway to the New World

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

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

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

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

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

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

Three Roads to the South—with One Detour

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Problematical Roads to the New World

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

Ware Dogma!

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