Chapter VI: Preface (5)

The old skulls of the New World may not be entirely satisfactory proofs of the antiquity of early man in this hemisphere; for Tepexpan man and Minnesota man both have been challenged as intruders in an older soil. On the other hand, all the skulls except perhaps Tepexpan suggest to the partisans of glacial man in the Americas that the first immigrants were not “predominantly Indian in character.” They make an interesting and significant point. Can it be a mere coincidence that when we find a head which has been stepped on by an elephant, it is not round like most Indians’, but longer or narrower, and it has very heavy brow ridges? Can it be a coincidence that when we find a skull in a cave with the bones of extinct mammals, it has those same peculiarities? Can it be a coincidence that when we find a skull under rocklike hardpan or a distinctly ancient layer of soil, it has those unusual stigmata? It does no good to hunt up the skull of a Sioux or a Mound Builder or an Algonquin which looks like one from Punin or Florida or Lower California. That is not much better than finding the skull of a modern New Yorker that looks like one of early man’s—which you could do without too much trouble. If _all_ Sioux skulls or Mound Builder skulls or Algonquin skulls were as archaic as _all_ the Punin and Florida and Pericú skulls, or if some early skulls were short and broad, then the case for the Mongoloid Indian as the earliest man in America would be incontestable. But until we find a round-headed, thoroughly modern Mongoloid skull that has been stepped on by an elephant or got itself interred with a mammoth or buried under earth that ought not to be on top of it, we shall have to believe that the simon-pure Indian of Hrdlička’s idolatry was not the first American. We shall have to think that the archaic fellow from Punin or Florida or Lower California or the Lagoa Santa caves was our earliest man—and quite early at that. Just how early, the bones do not yet say.

7
THE ARTIFACTS OF EARLY MAN IN THE NEW WORLD

_Artifact, oh, artifact!_
_Spear point or scraper or hand-axe—_
_First tool of man,_
_Ancestor of steam shovel and power lathe,_
_Dynamo and bomb._
—EMIL NACHAHMER

Artifacts from Heaven

“Thunderbolts of God”—from England to Japan and from Norway to Africa, that was how men once explained the stone axes and arrowheads which they found buried in the earth. The philosophers and scientists of the Renaissance dug a little deeper, and one of them came up with the verbose and remarkable suggestion that these stones were made “by an admixture of a certain exhalation of thunder and lightning with metallic matter, chiefly in dark clouds, which is coagulated by the circumfused moisture and conglutinated into a mass (like flour with water), and subsequently indurated by heat, like a brick.”[1] Some found a simpler explanation: these artifacts were iron tools petrified by time. Toward the end of the sixteenth century, Michele Mercati, physician to Pope Clement VIII, saw the truth: “They have been broken off from hard flints by a violent blow, in the days before iron was employed for the follies of war; for the earliest men had only splinters of flint for knives.”[2] The English historian William Dugdale said much the same thing in _Antiquities of Warwickshire_. The theory was not generally accepted, however, until the Spaniards found American Indians making arrowheads and stone axes without the aid of thunder, lightning, or God.

The Folsom Point—Unique and Potent

Quite a different thunderbolt—and a potent one—was the spear point that J. D. Figgins, of the Denver Museum of Natural History, found in 1927 between the ribs of an extinct bison near Folsom, New Mexico. It was a thunderbolt that destroyed, startlingly and for all time, thirty years of opposition to the presence of early man in the Americas.

This was not the first discovery of a point with the peculiar “fluting” illustrated on pages 147 and 148. Figgins had found one at Folsom in 1926, but its provenience had been denied. Koch may have found one under a mastodon in 1839. Certainly the Smithsonian Institution acquired in 1893 a fluted point that was picked up in New Hampshire, and other specimens have been discovered in old collections. But, in spite of the fact that these points were very odd in shape and had never been found in the Old World, scientists had paid little attention to them until 1927.

Figgins was not the first to discover spear points—of whatever shape—with the fossils of extinct animals or with other evidence of considerable age. In at least eight localities during the second half of the nineteenth century men had made such finds; and there had been five more finds in the first quarter of the twentieth. Some of the first group won easy, if uncritical, acceptance; but antagonism to the flint tools that C. C. Abbott found near Trenton, New Jersey, was so great that he wrote: “Had the Delaware River been a European stream, the implements found in its valley would have been accepted at once as evidence of the so-called _Paleolithic man_.”[3] By 1925 almost everyone seemed to have forgotten the obsidian blade that a museum director named W J McGee had pulled out of the unmistakably glacial deposits of extinct Lake Lahontan, Nevada, in 1882,[4] and the spear point that had been found in 1895 under the shoulder blade of an extinct type of bison at Russell Springs, Kansas.[5]

Discoveries after 1900 were, in a sense, more important because better authenticated; but unfortunately they had to encounter the general hostility to early man which had been bred by a more scientific approach to American prehistory and nurtured by Hrdlička at Vero and Melbourne. In 1924 the finding of a point under a bison at Lone Wolf Creek, Texas, by men from the Denver Museum of Natural History went relatively unnoticed.[6] Only harsh controversy welcomed the discovery, at Frederick, Oklahoma, in 1926, of artifacts and a variegated array of fossilized fauna in what the geologist E. H. Sellards believed was a glacial formation.[7]

The Folsom discovery changed the hostile attitude of almost all anthropologists toward early man. This was partly because the evidence was so striking and unmistakable, but largely because of the fierce white light of scientific publicity that was made to beat about a New Mexico arroyo.

The Denver Museum had found its first Folsom point in 1926.[8] It had been embedded in the clay surrounding a large bone; but when Figgins spoke or wrote of this discovery his fellow scientists suggested that the point was “intrusive,” that it had dropped down through a hole made by some rodent. So the next year, when Figgins came upon a Folsom point between two ribs of a bison, he stopped all work and wired to a number of institutions in the East to send witnesses. Barnum Brown of the American Museum of Natural History, Frank H. H. Roberts, Jr., of the Smithsonian Institution, and Alfred V. Kidder of the Peabody Foundation at Andover arrived to view the point _in situ_. Their testimony and the collaboration of Brown in work at Folsom established beyond doubt that man in America had trafficked with animals which were supposed to have been dead by the end of the Glacial Period. Once this was proved, other anthropologists and institutions were off on the trail of more such finds.

Americans Hunted Animals Now Extinct

The Folsom find was arresting, even dramatic. Not only was one of the nineteen points from the first three field seasons actually lodged between the ribs of an extinct bison. In addition, the skeletons of twenty-three of these animals testified that here was the scene of a prehistoric kill. Man had indeed had something to do with these beasts before they had grown cold; for the tail bones of each bison were missing, and hunters will tell you that, in skinning, “the tail goes with the hide.”[9]

Another arresting feature was the shape of the point—unique in all the history of primitive man—and the fact that it was better made than any other point of equal antiquity. It was rather broad, with a deep concave base that terminated at each side in a jutting point, or “ear.” The edges were most skillfully chipped, and the base and ears were often ground smooth. It was particularly distinguished by the fact that a long flake of stone had been chipped away on each face from the base almost to the tip. The flute, or channel, left by the flake, made the point look a little like the end of a grooved bayonet. This is the true or classic Folsom. An earlier type is larger, without ears, and imperfectly grooved (see illustration, page 155). In current terminology, the former is called simply Folsom, and the other Clovis Fluted, Ohio Fluted, and so on, depending on where the point was found.

Between 1926 and 1948, more than sixty points of the classic Folsom type appeared, and the number has grown since then. Many were discovered on the surface, some in association with the bones of extinct animals, particularly _Bison antiquus_. Most appeared in the general area of the High Plains, but some on the west slope of the Rockies and in southern Texas. Hundreds of Clovis and other fluted points have been found in the field or recognized in collections; they have come from every state but Hawaii, and from Canada. From north of the Arctic Circle in Alaska, fluted points range southward through Canada, the United States, Guatemala, and Costa Rica to the highlands of Ecuador.[10]

There has been some argument over whether the Folsom or the Clovis is the older. John L. Cotter reported the finding of Clovis points and elephant fossils near Clovis, New Mexico, in a level lower than one containing Folsom and bison.[11] In 1948 Harrington pointed out that Clovis has been found four times in association with the mammoth, as well as once with the bison, but that, when the Folsom type is partnered with fossils, these are almost invariably the bison’s.[12] (Later finds bore him out.) The wholly extinct mammoth is usually presumed to be older than the bison, one species of which still lives. Furthermore, in Burnet Cave, New Mexico, a Clovis has been found with bones of an animal of the musk-ox type.[13] Within fifty miles of the Mexican border, the musk ox, says Roberts, is “generally considered good evidence of an ice-age fauna.”[14] Folsom may be a localized expression of the basic pattern, reaching perfection in the High Plains, while Clovis spread more widely.

Two Other Folsom Sites—Clovis and Lindenmeier

The second site of classic Folsom was that near Clovis, investigated first by Edgar B. Howard in 1932, and dated by the glacialist Ernst Antevs and the geologist Kirk Bryan. It was notable on two counts. The finds were in the dried beds of lakes that had apparently been formed in the pluvial, or very wet, period which occurred at least as early as the end of the last glaciation—11,000 to 12,000 years ago—and probably still earlier. This time there were fossils of other extinct mammals besides bison—mammoths, horses, camels, and peccaries. In addition to Folsom and Clovis points, Howard found an unfluted artifact which he considered to be a Folsom knife.[15]

The third major discovery of classic Folsom artifacts came officially in 1934, when Roberts dug a site called Lindenmeier in Colorado; but as far back as 1924—two years before the first discovery of a Folsom point in New Mexico—Judge C. C. Coffin and his son, A. L. Coffin, had begun to pick up such points in this area without recognizing their importance. Lindenmeier is particularly significant because it was an occupational site, a camp of some duration. It was also a factory, for Roberts found spear points, scrapers, and other tools in various stages of manufacture. Again there were bison bones.[16] There were also traces of camel, as well as an elephant tusk not too closely associated with the artifacts. A skillful geological study of the old and elevated river terrace on which the site is located linked it with glacial moraines which indicate a readvance of the glacial ice.[17]

The date of Folsom man is uncertain. Some believe he lived during the last years of the Great Ice Age. Some place him a little later than the melting of the glaciers. The earliest radiocarbon date yet determined for Folsom is from the Lindenmeier site, where bits of charcoal provided a date of 10,780 ± 375 years.[18] It took about 700 man-hours of tedious and painstaking work to locate and recover this charcoal. Elsewhere, at such Texas sites as Blackwater Draw, Lubbock, and Scharbauer, direct or indirect dates indicate a survival of the Folsom culture until about 9,000 years ago.

One thing is certain: the Folsom point won the battle for early man in the Americas because it proved that he or his predecessors had hunted extinct bison, camels, mammoths, peccaries, and horses. Hitherto every find of human artifacts with fossils had been thrown out of court on the argument that the artifacts might be intrusive. That charge could not be leveled at two of these unique Folsom points because they were found in a unique and decisive position—one between the ribs of an animal and the other penetrating the channel of the spinal cord.

Some of the opponents of early man were not convinced. They shifted the argument. Man was early, the Hrdličkas admitted, but not so very early, because the bison and the elephant were late. More of that in a later chapter. Meantime, it is worth noting that a humble invertebrate, a mollusk, found in the Clovis dig, suggests that the Folsom-bearing deposits were glacial.[19]

_Disposal of the dead by exposure, as practiced among hunting
tribes. (After Sollas, 1911.)_]

You may ask why we have not found Folsom man himself. Howard has pointed out that early man, as a migrant hunter, would probably have followed much the same customs as our Plains Indians in the disposal of his dead. He would have left the bodies exposed on scaffolds or in trees, or he would have cremated them. “Under such circumstances,” Howard writes, “it would be the merest chance to come across a skeleton of Folsom man anywhere in the enormous area of our Great Plains country. It would be even more remarkable to recognize him as such, unless he had a Folsom point in his hand or was holding an elephant by the tail.”[20]

The Clovis fluted point is not so fine a piece of craftsmanship as the Folsom, yet it is more significant as evidence of very early man in North America. Clovis points tend to be longer, larger, and heavier than the Folsom. The fluting is rather rudimentary. The earlike tips characteristic of Folsom usually are lacking in Clovis, and careful finishing or retouching of the edges is rare. The refinement of workmanship in Folsom suggests that Clovis antedated it. This, as we have indicated, is borne out by the fact that Clovis-like points are usually found with mammoth bones rather than those of the later bison. These points are widely distributed, but the best associations have been found at or near Houston, Midland, Miami, and Abilene, in Texas, and at the Naco and Lehner sites, in Arizona. The first such point definitely associated with the remains of a mammoth was found near Dent, Colorado, in 1932.

Another extinct mammal besides the mammoth and _Bison antiquus_ has been found in early sites—the mastodon. The animal is not typical of any particular time period, or associated with any special kind of projectile point. It would seem that people of early cultures in the eastern United States hunted this beast with a variety of stemmed projectile points until about 5,500 years ago. Mastodons occur at least five times in probable association with early man, according to Stephen Williams. He lists the discoveries at Island 35 in the Mississippi River; Tipton County, Tennessee; Koch’s much publicized finds in Gasconade and Benton Counties, Missouri; along with the Richmond mastodon, near Cromwell, Indiana; and the Orleton Farms mastodon, near Plumwood, Ohio.[21]

Another Fine and Ancient Point

Folsom man and his spear point had only just begun to worry conservative anthropologists when A. E. Jenks—who was to champion skeletons of early man in Minnesota—noted, in 1928, a still finer type of flint in the collection of Perry and Harold Anderson, of Yuma County, Colorado. It was long and narrow, with parallel sides and a triangular point, and looked rather like a half-bayonet without its Folsom flute. It was consummately chipped by pressure over its whole surface. These artifacts were at first known as Yuma, but now they are called Eden, after a site in Eden Valley, Wyoming, where they were found _in situ_.[22] They are easily the finest job of flint knapping in the New World, equaled only by the later neolithic daggers of Egypt and Scandinavia (see illustrations, page 158). This might be a good argument for Eden points’ being neolithic, if artifacts with Eden chipping had not been discovered in association with Folsom tools and also with the fossils of extinct mammals. Evidence from a site near Cody, Wyoming, indicates that the Eden industry as a whole is younger than the Folsom. The Eden points found there are nearer 7,000 than 11,000 years old,[23] for the soil in which they lay was formed during a moist period late in that interval of time. Eden and similar points are fairly widespread; some have been found in Canada and in Alaska.[24]

Anthropologists now recognize two chief varieties of Eden points. One of these is beautifully patterned by long, parallel pressure flakes that cross the blade obliquely on a low diagonal. In the other, parallel flakes meet on a center line. The base and lower edges are usually ground. There is often a single or a double shoulder for hafting. Many anthropologists list another type, the Scottsbluff; it is flaked like the Eden, but shorter and wider, and it has a definite stem with right-angle notches.

_Two varieties of Folsom and Eden points, and the Plainview type,
which has been called unfluted Folsom or Yuma-like. The Plainview
was found in Texas. (Upper left, after a cast from the Laboratory of
Anthropology, Santa Fe, New Mexico; upper right, after Wormington,
1944; the Eden point, after Howard, 1935; the Plainview, after
Krieger, 1947; the second Eden, after Wormington, 1944.)_]

The Plainview Point

Another type of early point has given students a good deal of trouble. It is shaped somewhat like a Folsom but it has no long chip, or flute, removed from its two faces. The lower edges are often ground. Its surface is sometimes chipped like an Eden with collateral flaking, and sometimes patterned with larger, and less regular flakes. When such points were found with Folsoms, they were often called Folsom-like. As the result of the discovery in 1945 by Glen L. Evans and Grayson E. Meade of eighteen whole or broken points of this sort near Plainview, Texas, in association with numerous fossils of extinct bison, there is a tendency to give these “Unfluted Folsoms” the label Plainview.[25] Like the Folsoms, Plainview points can now be recognized among artifacts collected before their recognition as a distinct type. F. G. Rainey and Frank Hibben have found them in the frozen muck of central Alaska, identifying them by the older names of Yuma-like (Eden) or Generalized Folsom.[26] This muck is an extraordinary formation four to one hundred feet deep. Packed into it are masses of dismembered skeletons of the mammoth, a jaguar, and other extinct mammals, accompanied here and there by ligaments of flesh and hair. Hibben picked up a point in a curio store at Ketchikan on the southern coast of Alaska, and another from Chinitna Bay on the shore of Cook Inlet, both of which he called Yuma-like, but which may now be regarded as very much like Plainviews. Alex Krieger lists as Plainviews a considerable number of points which have been hitherto identified as Clovis or Eden at sixteen different sites[27] (see illustration, page 155).

Krieger suggests that Plainview lies between Folsom and Eden in its type of flint work. Later excavations may prove that the three points have a similar historical relationship, and may throw more light on some nine or ten other types of points that early man seems to have made.[28]

_From 5,000 to 10,000 years separate the Solutrean artifact of the
Paleolithic period from the Neolithic work of Denmark and Egypt,
depending on which time scale you accept. The Eden point may have
been made 7,000 years ago or even nearer the Neolithic. (The Eden,
after Howard, 1935; the Solutrean, after Sollas, 1911; the Danish,
after Plant, 1942; the Egyptian, after De Morgan, 1925.)_]

Besides Clovis, Eden, and Plainview, Alaska has provided cores that Nelson finds “identical in several respects with thousands of specimens found in the Gobi Desert.” He recognizes them as evidence of migration from Asia 9,000 to 12,000 years ago.[29]

A New Point—and Sloths—in Gypsum Cave

After the discovery of the Eden point, the next important development came in 1930 with M. R. Harrington’s excavation of Gypsum Cave, Nevada. Here he found the dung, hair, skin, and bones of the ground sloth in clear association with a wide variety of artifacts. Besides the sloth, there were fossils of camel and perhaps horse. Among the artifacts was a new type of diamond-shaped point, and—quite as remarkable—there were parts of painted dart shafts with the butts pitted for use with a spear-thrower. In addition to knives and oval scrapers, there were fire hearths. Gypsum man burned sloth dung as well as wood, and used torches. Harrington dated the culture at about 10,500 years ago. Radiocarbon dates from sloth dung six feet four inches deep averaged 10,455 ± 340 years.[30] Similar material closer to the surface recorded 8,527 ± 250 years.[31] Thus Gypsum seems to follow Folsom.[32]

Such discoveries of the traces of early man in the United States and Canada spurred anthropologists to new work in the field, with the result that we now have over one hundred sites where a few of man’s bones or a host of his artifacts have been found with the fossils of bison, elephant, camel, horse, or sloth or in geological strata that date him close to the Great Ice Age and probably in it. Seven North American sites, and two in Middle America remain to be discussed. Some are outstanding in evidence of age.

Old Lake and River Sites

In 1934 and 1935 Mr. and Mrs. W. H. Campbell found traces of man along the beaches of vanished lakes in the southern California desert. At first Antevs believed that the lakes formed when the glaciers were melting away 20,000 to 25,000 years ago, but now he dates the artifacts and camp sites as less than 9,000 years old. At Lake Mohave, in the Campbells’ first year of work, they found only stone tools—Mohave and Silver Lake points—but in the Pinto Basin they came upon the bones of extinct mammals as well as artifacts.[33] Malcolm J. Rogers challenges the dating of Mohave and Pinto as “largely a matter of opinion,” and believes that “even approximate dates ... cannot be set.” In his own opinion, Pinto points—mixed with Gypsum in the same area—range only from 1,800 to 2,800 years ago. The Lake Mohave industry cannot begin, he maintains, earlier than 3,000 to 4,000 years ago.[34] In 1946, Robert F. Heizer and Edwin M. Lemert and later A. E. Treganza discovered in Topanga Canyon, north of Los Angeles, points and crude scrapers and choppers very like those at Lake Mohave and Gypsum Cave and also milling stones.[35] Lake Mohave artifacts have been found in northwestern Canada.[36]

A number of sites in the West and Southwest are particularly notable for their age or for the character of their artifacts, or for both. Some push the record of man in America back beyond Folsom, possibly far, far beyond; and some bring into the picture a type of artifact—the milling stone—which does not seem to have appeared in Europe until later. The publications upon these sites from 1935 to 1941 aroused much controversy even while broadening and deepening our knowledge of early man.

Confusion, as well as controversy, distinguishes the area which might prove the most significant of the four if more extended work were done there by geologists as well as archaeologists. This area is in the neighborhood of Abilene, Texas, and includes the banks of the Elm Creek branch of the Brazos River. Cyrus N. Ray, a local physician, has studied the Abilene sites assiduously for twenty years. In 1931 Gila Pueblo—Harold S. Gladwin’s research institution—sent E. B. Sayles to work there. Later Gila arranged to have Antevs, Howard, and M. M. Leighton, Chief of the Illinois State Geological Survey, study the finds and the sites. It is unfortunate that the men who worked in this area have not agreed on a consistent set of names for the various cultures and geological formations. As H. M. Wormington has observed, “the only way to approach publications dealing with the archaeology of this region is with a large bottle of aspirin in either hand.”

The artifacts occurred in two strata. The upper contained points of types now called Plainview and Milnesand and a long, narrow point that has been dubbed Abilene, though not accepted as a distinct type by Texas archaeologists. Leighton placed these tools from what he called the Elm Creek Silts in the latter portion of our last Glacial period.[37] To reach Abilene at this time, early man may have passed through the gap that is thought to have appeared in the ice sheet east of the Rockies 40,000 years ago, or else when the Wisconsin ice of the last glaciers was in retreat 20,000 years later (see illustrations, pages 26 and 27).

Still greater age is claimed for certain other objects of the Abilene area. Below the Elm Creek Silts lie the Durst Silts, which were laid down, Leighton thinks, prior to the last glaciation.[38] In connection with these silts Sayles found what may be very crude artifacts.[39] They are the “eoliths” that, wherever found in the Old World, are accepted or attacked as problematical evidences of man’s first attempts at roughly chipped artifacts. If these are indeed the work of man, and if Leighton is right, the men who made them must have come to Texas during the Sangamon Interglacial period preceding the last, or Wisconsin, glaciation—a matter of perhaps 70,000 years ago.

Some authorities attack Leighton’s dating and therefore Sayles’s eoliths. The reported discovery later of Abilene and other points in the Durst Silts suggested to Kirk Bryan that the silts would have to be moved up in time.[40] He might have argued that the artifacts should be moved back, which would have been in line with his championing of very early man elsewhere. Agreeing with Bryan and C. C. Albritton, Frank C. Hibben redated the Durst Silts by connecting them with a late glacier in the Rocky Mountains rather than with the Wisconsin ice field of the north.[41] Leighton, on the other hand, maintained—and he has had some good support—that the soil at various depths had been radically changed by chemical action which would take tens of thousands of years. This “soil profile” theory as a test of geological age is gaining in importance.[42]

Sandia—Older Than Folsom

However problematical these evidences of pre-Folsom man near Abilene may be, there can be no doubt about the meaning of Frank C. Hibben’s discoveries in Sandia Cave, New Mexico, in 1936. He began by finding the remains of Pueblo Indians. Under the Pueblo he came upon a layer of stalagmitic travertine one-half inch to six inches thick, laid down during a moist period. Sealed off beneath this were classic Folsom points together with scrapers and evidence of extinct mammals. Next he found another sterile seal, two inches to two feet thick. This time it was of yellow ocher—a substance induced by fir and spruce under moist conditions, Kirk Bryan points out. Fir and spruce require more cold and more moisture than the neighborhood of Sandia provides at present—which argues that the ocher was manufactured during the last pulsation of the fourth and final glaciation more than 11,000 years ago.[43] Beneath this stratum Hibben found a new type of point.[44] New to the New World, that is, but not to the Old; for it resembles in a crude way a point of the Solutrean culture of Europe which has a notch at the bottom to aid in hafting. Since this discovery, points of the same type have turned up sporadically throughout the Mississippi Valley, along the eastern seaboard, and even in California. In every case, Hibben writes, there were indications of “considerable antiquity.” In fourteen instances out of thirty-eight, “the points were found with extinct bones, although in each case by amateurs.”[45]

The Sandia point is, of course, definitely older than the Folsom. The two periods of moisture indicate that the cave was inhabited by Folsom man toward the end of the last glaciation, or 9,000 to 11,000 years ago, and by Sandia man still earlier. Unless, of course, you wish to believe, as some do, that both pluvial periods were Postglacial.

Quite understandably, Sandia has been of keen interest to archaeologists. The geology tells us only that the Folsom and the Sandia occupations of the cave were separated by a cool, moist interval that could reflect a major glacial advance, a minor glacial advance, or merely a postglacial period of lowered temperature and more snow or rain. The last seems the least likely alternative. None of these possibilities gives us a firm date. Accordingly, the development of the radiocarbon “clock” by Willard Libby raised some hope that the age of Sandia points could, at last, be determined. This hope continues, but has yet to be realized. Radiocarbon tests made by H. R. Crane, at the University of Michigan, upon fragments of mammoth tusk indicate an age of at least 20,000 years, with the reasonable possibility that the true age exceeds 30,000 years.[46] The problems remain. The association of Sandia points with mammoth tusk was not as clear as Folsom point with extinct bison. And the problem of the reliability of ivory in radiocarbon tests—as well as the ever-present question of possible contamination—urges caution in accepting this date for Sandia.

A site discovered at Lime Creek, Nebraska, in 1947 may prove to be old. In the sharp bank of the stream C. Bertrand Schultz found crude points, bone awls, scrapers, and tools made out of antlers. Together with fossils of mammals they lay as deep as forty-seven and one-half feet below the surface, in a silt containing the remains of decayed vegetation. Above this soil were seventeen feet of loess, another layer of soil, another layer of loess, and finally a “mature” or well developed, and therefore fairly old top soil. Schultz and W. D. Frankforter write that the seventeen feet of loess covering the earth in which the artifacts were found appears to have been deposited before or at the beginning of the last expansion of the Wisconsin, or final, glaciation.[47] If this is true, it means that the men of Lime Creek lived 25,000 or 35,000 years ago, and that their forebears may have come through the corridor in the ice fields of Canada 5,000 to 18,000 years earlier (see page 27). Antevs and Wormington doubt it.[48] Radiocarbon dates from burned logs found below the Lime Creek artifacts averaged 9,524 ± 450 years.[49] It is possible that these stone tools are contemporaneous with Folsom, or even a bit later.

The Milling Stone Appears

In the early thirties, archaeologists began to find a peculiar kind of artifact that broadened their conception of the activities of early man in the New World. Anthropologists had always thought of him as merely a hunter. He needed spear points, scrapers, knives, hammerstones to shape these things, and fire-drills to make it possible for him to cook his prey; but that was all. Then milling stones began to appear, and it became clear that early man—at least in some areas—had been a food gatherer and food grinder, as well as a hunter. These stones are very simple slabs with a hollow worn in the surface by round handstones used in grinding seeds and nuts. Such milling stones, or querns, are not seen in the Old World until we approach the Neolithic, or New Stone Age, and the people who developed agriculture and textiles. Milling stones have been found in a village farming site at Jarmo, Iraq, dating about 7,000 years ago.[50] Agriculture did not enter Europe until about 2500 B.C., and milling stones are not found in its caves until after the Magdalenians of the Old Stone Age. The reason for the precipitate outcropping of milling stones in the Americas is not that our early man practiced agriculture. He did not do that, and he did not make polished stone axes until much later. He was merely a food gatherer. Was he also a food grinder because he was an Australoid who brought the habit to America, just as he brought it to Australia? Or, if not, was he another sort of man, who happened to be smart enough to recognize that North America provided him with many tempting grains and seeds to grind, foods that were not so available in the Old World?[51] It seems more than a coincidence that the earliest American milling stones appear in the arid Southwest, where desert plants have more seeds and larger seeds than plants in moister areas.

The first site to provide milling stones was at Whitewater Creek, in Arizona. Byron Cummings had found artifacts and fossils there in 1926. When Gladwin heard of this at an anthropological meeting five years later, he again set Gila Pueblo in motion. Sayles and Emil W. Haury undertook excavation, and Antevs checked the geology of the various sites which they studied in the area of what is now called the Cochise culture.[52] The excavators found milling stones in the same stratum as the fossils of extinct animals. They found no spear points in this oldest level—a sign that food gathering was the dominant economy of the early Cochise.

_The lower comes from the oldest horizon, the Sulphur Spring, the
upper fragment from a later one, probably the Chiricahua. (The
Sulphur Spring stone, after Martin, Quimby, and Collier, 1947; the
other, courtesy of the Southwest Museum.)_]

The artifacts and the fossils were lying in or under clays left by a lake that has now disappeared. If Lake Cochise was, like Lake Bonneville, one of the bodies of water created while the last great ice sheets were growing, then the Cochise culture must date from the last wet period of the final glaciation—perhaps as much as 35,000 years ago. Antevs thinks, however, that the water which laid down the clays belonged to a number of ponds, not to a single large lake, and that the ponds could have formed and disappeared, formed again and disappeared again, just before postglacial times brought a much drier climate. Any single pond may have appeared as late as 10,000 years ago to provide the Cochise clay. Radiocarbon dates for Cochise all seem too recent to fit the geology and paleontology of the site. Dates for the earliest stage, the Sulphur Spring, range from 6,210 to 7,000 years ago; the Chiricahua from 2,850 to 7,000; the last, the San Pedro, from 1,762 to 2,463.[53] Antevs, on the other hand, believes that the Sulphur Spring stage at Double Adobe—twenty-four miles east of the Lehner mammoth site where Clovis points were found—dates back more than 12,500 years.[54]

Finds of milling stones have also been made at Signal Butte, Nebraska, by W. D. Strong; at Pinto Basin by the Campbells[55]—the first site probably about as early as Gypsum, the other 10,000 years old—and under hardpan at that much disputed site near Frederick, Oklahoma, where some claim that artifacts and fossils of extinct animals appear together in an interglacial formation. Milling stones have also been found at sites of later cultures such as the Edwards Plateau in Texas and Santa Barbara in California. There are indications of an ancient horizon of milling stones, as well as Pinto and older points and scrapers, in Sonora and Lower California. The fact that they were found with the bones of elk and bison and along the shores of dry lakes in Mexico argues that this culture is as old as Cochise, perhaps older. Carl Sauer, who found the materials, believes that only during the last glaciation could the climate of these two desert areas have been moist enough to produce lakes and support so much animal life.[56]

At Borax Lake in California, in several years of work following 1938, Harrington found more milling stones. There were also quite a variety of points—fluted, Gypsum, Pinto, Mohave, and Silver Lake—scattered through an alluvial fan of dirt carried down by some early stream that flowed when the country was well watered and verdant, instead of arid like so much of California today.[57]

In 1948 Harrington and Willy Stahl found milling stones and a great wealth of Pinto, Mohave, and Silver Lake points in another part of California that is now desert. This is near Little Lake, which is fed by underground waters and small intermittent streams from the Sierra. Nearby, in glacial times, a small river cut a channel through a great lava flow, producing a falls that has now moved up half a mile from the edge of the lava. Here, where the blow sands of the Mohave Desert meet the lava, and under about ten feet of old, consolidated sand, Harrington and Stahl found milling stones and points in two feet of soil. This soil was dark with the remains of vegetation that must have been trees and bushes when the intermittent stream was still a steady torrent. Underneath the dark soil there was clay deposited by the stream at some period of great flow. Across about two-thirds of the camp site a similar coating of clay indicated that after the user of the milling stones and Pinto points had departed, the stream had overflowed again during a time of great rains. This time may have been the “Little Pluvial” of about 3,000 years ago, or the “Great Pluvial” that some say occurred 10,000 years ago when the glaciers had finally retreated, with the former the more likely date. In this camp site Harrington and Stahl found the post holes of some sort of hut or shelter, the oldest evidence of housebuilding in the New World.[58]

A Paucity of Art Objects

Advanced as early man in America may have been in his stone industry, he seems to have been singularly backward in making the kind of spiritualized artifact which we call art. In the caves of France and Spain men of the Old Stone Age left remarkable paintings and sculptures of animals. There is nothing like this of corresponding age in the Americas. Early man in Europe and in Northern Asia turned out many little figures of women—undoubtedly symbols of fecundity, since the female characteristics are highly exaggerated; but in the New World female figurines are to be found only in later levels such as those of the Eskimo, Southwestern, and Middle American cultures, all of which date from close to the birth of Christ. Of all the forms of art, we have few examples that may have been made by early man. In the United States there are the dubious trio of crude, round heads which Sellards reports from a gravel pit in Henderson County, Texas.[59] During the digging of a canal in the Valley of Mexico in 1870, a workman picked out of a fossil-bearing stratum a bony section of what was described as an extinct llama, or camel, carved in the shape of a coyote’s head. It was about forty feet below the surface of the ground in the same layer of earth with fossils of elephant, horse, giant armadillo, and camel.[60] The Lindenmeier Folsom site produced decorated discs of bone, possibly used as game markers. Most interesting of all is the fragment of mammoth or mastodon bone recovered in the summer of 1959 about ten miles southeast of Puebla, Mexico, by Juan Armenta Camacho. On a six-inch wedge of bone, estimated to have been 30,000 years old, are the crudely carved outlines of bison, tapir, and mammoths or mastodons, carved while the bone was still fresh.[61]

_Four drawings, by Fernando Ramirez Osorio, from a number of
engravings on a portion of pelvic bone of an extinct form of
elephant found near Puebla, Mexico. The animal at the upper left may
be a tapir, the one at the lower right a bison. The other two
engravings probably represent mammoths or mastodons. The straight
lines in the drawings of the tapir and the bison may be symbols of
the hunt such as appear in European caves. A new test for early
dates gives an age of over 30,000 years. From the same geological
formation have come remains of nearly thirty extinct animals, some
thought to be of the third interglacial age, as well as crude tools.
(Courtesy of Douglas Cornell, science editor of Visión.)_]

Hand Axes in the Americas

Of all the bits of stone that bear on the existence of early man in America, perhaps the most puzzling—and certainly the most neglected—are the artifacts which E. B. Renaud has found in countless numbers in southwestern Wyoming. Here at 105 sites on the arid surface of Black’s Fork Valley he had picked up by 1940 some 7,000 chipped stones—many of them like rude hand axes—which suggest a parallel with the industries of paleolithic man in the Old World.[62] European authorities such as J. Reid Moir, champion of English eoliths, Reginald A. Smith, of the British Museum, and D. Peyroni, of the Musée des Eyzies, have stated that Renaud’s finds agree in type with the hand axes, choppers, and blades of the Abbevillian, Acheulean, Mousterian, and Clactonian cultures of Europe and Africa. While emphasizing the resemblances, Renaud is careful to claim no parallel in time.

Renaud’s artifacts recall a gathering of hand axes under most unscientific circumstances more than sixty years ago. In the late 1880’s Thomas Wilson of the National Museum became convinced that the collections under his care contained numerous hand axes of paleolithic type and age. He listed 950 in the Museum and appealed through a printed circular for more examples. He got them. His correspondents in thirty-five states donated 789 and described enough more to bring the total up to 8,501.[63]

Wilson’s hand axes and Renaud’s artifacts were attacked in the same manner. W. H. Holmes of the Bureau of American Ethnology had little trouble in convincing the scientific public that Wilson’s array of casually collected material came from quarries and workshops of the Indian and were cores from which he had struck flakes to make points or scrapers. The critics of Renaud’s artifacts pointed to certain similar objects found less plentifully in late camp sites on the Plains, and suggested that Renaud’s artifacts might be merely the blanks and rejects of a relatively recent stone industry.[64] Many of the finds are certainly not finished implements, and the date of the Black’s Fork culture is still problematical; but among Renaud’s material there are hand axes and scrapers that bear comparison with the cruder Chellean and Acheulean work. There are also chopping tools of Asiatic and African pattern, made from edged pebbles that have been deliberately chipped, first from one side, then from the other.

Flints of Abbevillian and Acheulean types—whether true artifacts or rejects—have been recorded by Kirk Bryan at Cerro Pedernal in New Mexico.[65] At Lake Mohave in the Pinto Basin, Mr. and Mrs. W. H. Campbell have found points of a Mousterian shape and scrapers suggestive of the Aurignacian. They are so crude, however, that they seem more like the “elementary ideas” which, as Bastian claimed, could be the product of primitive man anywhere. In Texas, there are many tools so well developed and so close to Acheulean forms that they cannot be turned aside as either “elementary ideas” or blanks and rejects. These are the hand axes which Sayles and other archaeologists have found.[66]

Early Man in Mexico

Besides the skull that de Terra found with the fossils of elephants in Mexico, there are artifacts south of the border which reinforce the argument for early man. They are more important than the chance resemblance to a Folsom point which Junius Bird found with sloth bones in a cave in southern Chile, or the Eden-like point which has turned up in Venezuela.[67]

During de Terra’s studies of the dry lake beds of the Valley of Mexico and the glacial moraines on the surrounding mountains—studies which began late in 1945—he discovered stone tools in two culture levels. These levels fall in two pluvial periods just before and just after the end of the Great Ice Age.

_The dating of these tools is uncertain, but the upper resembles
early paleolithic specimens from Europe despite its more flakelike
quality. The other is somewhat like chopping tools made from pebbles
in Asia and Africa. (Courtesy of Gila Pueblo.)_]

The older culture level—called San Juan—contained ten artifacts, including scrapers, gravers, flakes, and chipped pebbles of obsidian and chalcedony and a pointed bone tool, together with fossils of mammoth, sloth, camel, bison, and horse. De Terra found some of this material at Tequixquiac and some near Teotihuacán, where Manuel Gamio came upon fossil bones of mammoth and bison when he was excavating that famous site. Close to where de Terra discovered the skull of early man discussed in Chapter 6, another anthropologist is said to have picked up part of a point of Folsom type—the first to be recorded south of the United States. De Terra places the San Juan culture 12,000 to 20,000 years ago.

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

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

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

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

From the Glacial to the Archaic

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

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

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

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

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