A Chopping Tool of Northwestern India 287 EARLY MAN IN THE NEW WORLD A NOTE ON NOTES _There are no footnotes in this book. A catch-all for the author’s afterthoughts and for the corrections provided by friends who have read manuscript or galley proof—as well as a place for legitimate references—they are often a nuisance and always a typographical eyesore. The reference numbers in this book direct attention only to the sources of quotations, facts, or theories. They do not lead the reader to supplementary text material. Therefore, he may ignore them unless he wants to pursue the subject further for himself, or to verify the authority for what may seem to him an implausible statement._ 1 THIS SUDDEN NEW WORLD _Of all animals, we men are the only ones who wonder where we came from and where we will go._ —W. W. HOWELLS A Secret Laboratory of Culture By the end of World War II, Timbuctoo was surprisingly close to Keokuk. Boys from Brooklyn stared up at Roman columns in the African desert, and Marines swapped a package of cigarettes for the spear of a stone-age man in New Guinea. Physically ours was indeed one world. In a different sense it was one world before Columbus sailed, but a very limited world. Europe, North Africa, and portions of Asia made up all that Columbus knew and all that he expected to know. He intended to find a new road to the Indies; that was all. It would be a road across his own one world. Then suddenly this world of his was two worlds. A new hemisphere appeared like a comet from outer space. It was a land and a people utterly unknown, utterly different. It had lived and grown for thousands upon thousands of years, sealed off to itself, unique. We search for some fit comparison, and find nothing adequate to describe the discovery of this secret laboratory of experiment in human culture. Perhaps we should not have said that the New World had been “sealed off to itself.” We might better have said “sealed off from Europe.” The culture which the Spanish Conquistadores found in the Americas owed nothing to that world from which they had come. What the Americas owed to Asia is another matter—in fact, the matter of this book. One thing is clear. The Americas were indebted to Asia for man himself. Man—even one type of man—did not originate here. A small primate, the extinct Notharctus, left his bones—but no descendants—in our Southwest. The New World has no great apes; there are no indications that it ever had any. Its monkeys are quite out of the running. They have four too many teeth, their nose is flat, and they are cursed with a prehensile tail.