Chapter IX: Preface (8)

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

Independent Inventions Neither Parallel Nor Diffused

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

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

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

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

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

What Diffusion of Plants and Art?

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

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

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

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

11
THE INDIAN IN AGRICULTURE

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

Inventions—Some New, Some Old

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

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

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

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

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

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

NEW WORLD PLANTS AND PRODUCTS

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

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

_American Plants and Their Cultivation_

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

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

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

When and Where Did Our Agriculture Begin?

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

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

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

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

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

The Indian’s Accomplishment in Agriculture

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Old Is Corn?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

12
PUZZLES, PROBLEMS, AND HALF-ANSWERS

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

The Pendulum Swings

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

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

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

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

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

The Puzzle of the Skulls

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

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

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

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

The Puzzle of the Querns

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

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

The Puzzle of the Points

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

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

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

Was Our Early Man a Solutrean?

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

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

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

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

Or Was the American Aurignacian or Magdalenian?

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

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

Chopping Tools Instead of Hand Axes in Asia

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.

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.”