Early Man in the New World :: 12 PUZZLES, PROBLEMS, AND HALF-ANSWERS

12 PUZZLES, PROBLEMS, AND HALF-ANSWERS

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

The Pendulum Swings

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

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

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

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

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

The Puzzle of the Skulls

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

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

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

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

The Puzzle of the Querns

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

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

The Puzzle of the Points

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

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

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

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

Was Our Early Man a Solutrean?

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

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

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

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

Or Was the American Aurignacian or Magdalenian?

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

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

Chopping Tools Instead of Hand Axes in Asia

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

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

A chopping tool of the early Soan culture, in northwestern India. (After Paterson, 1942.)

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

Spinden’s Neolithic Blockade

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

Was the First Migration Interglacial?

As we think we have shown in Chapter 8, we can never hope to date early man at all exactly by means of elephants or bison or any other extinct mammal. Even if science were able to settle the time of the great extinction, we should be only a little better off. We could say that man was in the New World at that time; but this would give us only an upper date, not a lower one. Man may have been here for tens of thousands of years before those mammals died off. A few scientists think he was.

The great glaciations presented early man with an opportunity and a difficulty; they threw a land-bridge across Bering Strait, but, for long periods of time, they also laid a barrier of ice and snow across his path to the south. Look at the map at the top of page 26 and you will see that about 65,000 years ago the barrier covered the whole depth of Canada. This would have meant a trip of some 2,000 miles across ice. For a time, as we have explained earlier, a corridor opened up for his passage. By 18,000 years ago, however, it had closed again. To be sure, there was a tongue of ice-free land that ran southward across part of Canada and shortened the journey over snow and ice to a thousand miles; but the invader would have had to be extremely lucky to hit the upper end of the open country. Far more important, none of the animals that he hunted, and that therefore led him on his southward journey, would have taken that thousand-mile trek across a frozen, foodless waste. If early man came in the time of the corridor, his trip would not have been too difficult and he would have found game along the way. At any period he could have come by boat or possibly afoot along the Pacific coast. But, no matter how he came, he would have faced almost insuperable difficulties during the first quarter and the third quarter of the last glaciation.

This fact affects different students differently. Antevs, feeling that man must have come after the ice began to melt, gives our migrant not much over 15,000 years in the New World. If man arrived earlier, he feels, it must have been when the corridor opened through the ice some 40,000 years ago, and he sees no evidence for so early a migration.[21] Kirk Bryan disagrees. Accepting the theory that the last glaciation waxed and waned three times, he places the first invasion by man in the second of these wanings, or inter-stadials, just before the final burgeoning of the ice 12,000 years ago.[22] Sauer goes further. He suggests that the shores of western Siberia may have been inhabited during the second interglacial, and that during the third glaciation, preceding the Wisconsin, “a first colonization of the New World is not improbable.”[23] Erwin H. Barbour and C. Bertrand Schultz say that “evidence is constantly accumulating to show that man actually had reached North America before the last glacial advance.”[24] George F. Carter believes that artifacts in the glacial gravels of Trenton and Lake Lahontan, spear points with musk oxen in New Mexico, the Vero skull partnered in Florida with flora and fauna more appropriate to Pennsylvania, stone implements deeply buried under aged soil profiles, all argue that man was in North America during the last glaciation. He does not believe that primitive hunters—let alone the Cochise food gatherers—would have survived Arctic travel at the height of the glaciations. He thinks that Folsom man came through the ice-free corridor of 40,000 years ago, and that another body of immigrants came during the last of the three great interglacials, which means about 100,000 years ago.[25]

Interglacial migration finds support from Albrecht Penck, the German glacialist who with Eduard BrÜckner established the four great glaciations of central Europe. Penck gives two reasons for believing that man came to the Americas in the last interglacial. Both theories lie outside his field of special knowledge.

First, Penck doubts that man had time enough after the glaciers melted to adapt himself to the seven or eight climates in which he lived and labored in 1492. In the 10,000 years since the Wisconsin glaciation, people of an arctic habitat could not possibly have adjusted their physical nature so perfectly “first to forests, then to steppes and deserts in temperate zones, then to steaming tropical forests and to the plateaus of the tropics, the steppes and deserts of the southern hemisphere, and finally to the damp, cool south.”

Penck’s second reason for supporting interglacial migration has to do with the marked changes of climate that took pace during the Great Ice Age. As the glaciers grew and moved farther and farther south, the temperature belts of Canada and the United States moved south with them. As these belts moved, vegetation altered. Tundra crept to the south, pursuing grasslands and forest. Deserts and jungle moved before them. When the glaciers began to melt, this movement went into reverse. Penck feels that primitive man migrates easily only within a single climatic zone. Tundra folk avoid forests; forest folk avoid tundra. Man moves with the climate, not against it; a New Yorker goes to Florida in the winter, not the summer. Early man would not have traveled southward through Canada and the United States while the climate was moving northward with the melting of the ice. On the contrary, man would have moved southward only as the glaciers grew and the temperature belts moved southward. When the glaciers melted he would have tended to move northward again. Thus man must have entered the New World toward the end of an interglacial, and gone southward with the weather. After that, shifts in the climate would have distributed man all over the Americas. “Under the influence of a number of alternating glacial and interglacial periods, we can understand the gradual settlement, but not solely on the assumption of one glacial migration.” With the end of the last glaciers men spread north and south once more, and even drifted back to Asia.[26] Penck’s argument becomes all the stronger if we grant that early man followed the animals he killed for food and animals followed the movements of the vegetation on which they fed.

Further, the presence of early man close to the time and even the edge of the retreating glaciers—if the evidence is read aright—argues that he must have arrived in North America during one of those retreats of the Wisconsin glaciation which preceded its final growth and decline.

Geological Evidence and the Pluvials

All this is speculation, of course—reasoned speculation, but no more than that. Are we on firmer ground when we deal with geological evidence? Perhaps, yet there is plenty of room for controversy.

The New World has very few sites in which artifacts or human bones have been found in glacial gravels. A noted one, near Trenton, New Jersey, has been under dispute for eighty years. The Lake Lahontan site and its blade have been too much neglected. There are, however, a number of places where skulls or artifacts have been found linked to other strata than gravels that suggest a relationship with glacial activity.

In these sites we find human skulls or artifacts together with signs of much rainfall or of large lakes and rivers which now have no more existence than the mammoth. The evidence of man lay undisturbed beneath sterile layers of material deposited by water. A typical case is Sandia Cave. Here Folsom points were found beneath a floor of a stalagmitic limestone created by so heavy a seepage of calcium-charged water that the stratum holding the Folsom material had been partially consolidated. Below lies another sterile layer—of yellow ocher earth, indicating a very moist period and the presence of trees which would provide certain chemical agents and which are no more common now in this arid area than are heavy, continuous rains. Another example of mans association with a much moister time than the present comes from the cave in Brazil where the Confins skull was found. The skull lay under six feet of alluvial soil carried in by water. Later a layer of stalagmitic limestone sealed the sepulcher. It may be presumed that artifacts found on the shore or in the clay of Lake Cochise, Lake Mohave, and Pinto Basin—now dry and gone—must have been made during a time of great waters.

What do such evidences of unusual moisture mean? They mean that the men of these sites lived before or during a period of heavy rainfall not known there for at least the last 9000 years. Beyond that bare fact, debate begins. Walter, Cathoud, and Mattos, who described the Brazilian find, took a most conservative attitude and wrote that Confins man lived “a few thousands of years ago.”[27] Bryan, who studied Sandia Cave, placed the later wet period after the end of Pleistocene, or Great Ice Age, and the first wet period—along with the Sandia points—in the Late glacial.[28]

Glacial experts call a period of unusual and widespread rains a pluvial. They believe that the growth of the glaciers was accompanied by pluvials, and some maintain that pluvials also marked the melting of the ice. Antevs lists a great pluvial—the Bonneville—which formed Lake Bonneville and Lake Lahontan during the first maximum of the last, or Wisconsin, glaciation, 65,000 years ago. He places another period of great moisture, the Provo Pluvial, at the last glacial maximum, about 12,000 years ago, and believes it was all but spent 7,000 to 9,000 years ago.[29] Thus he dates Lake Mohave and its early artifacts about 9,000 years ago. His point is that annual precipitation is about the same throughout the globe, but that the pluvials shift at various times. “It is essentially the location of the rainfall that changes.”[30]

All authorities do not agree that annual rainfall is constant, and some deny Antev’s late date for the last pluvial. Sauer writes, “I know of no climatologic basis for postulating a postglacial pluvial period,” either in New Mexico or the Lake Mohave and Pinto Basin area of southern California.[31] Some European authorities believe that pluvials are entirely glacial. M. C. Burkitt, for example, cites the fact that the same type of tools is found in Africa during pluvials as in Europe during glacials.[32] According to Simpson’s theory of the formation of the glaciers, rainfall increased enormously during two periods of the Great Ice Age; the last pluvial was at its height during the building up of the WÜrm-Wisconsin ice sheets. (See page 58.) The pluvials make a rather good case for early man in the New World during the last glaciation.

In Sum

Ten years ago, we knew that men in America had once killed, skinned, and eaten animals now extinct, for we had found their weapons and a few of their bones mingled with the fossils of mammals long extinct. We could not question the association, because it often involved the remains of campfires; spear points and bones might be moved about in the course of time, but not fragile heaps of charcoal. We knew, too, that the bones and tools of man had been found sealed away by the chemistry of the ages. But when we tried to date man securely by animals that were dead and gone, or by the earths that lay above him, we began to guess. The guesses of conservative glacialists gave him at least 15,000 years in the New World. Other speculations—supported by rather plausible evidence as well as not implausible theory—placed him still earlier. Now, at last, through the miraculous time clock of radiocarbon, we know that man was here before the chill of the last Ice Age settled upon the land.

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