The dating of the life of early man by the death of mammals now extinct is one of the major tasks that face the American prehistorian. It is doubly difficult because, in the first place, evidence of when these animals died off is only now becoming available, and, secondly, because we must also know how long man hunted them _before_ they became extinct. We know that a few skulls have been found in strata containing the fossils of these animals, and we know that all but one of the skulls are longheaded and beetle-browed like those of the Australians and the Melanesians, instead of roundheaded like those of most Mongoloids. We know that Sandia, Clovis, or Folsom points have been found with the fossils of extinct elephants, horses, camels, and bison. If we knew when such mammals became extinct, we should know the latest possible date of most of the archaic skulls and of Sandia and Folsom man. But we should still not know just how much earlier some of these humans lived, or when they or their predecessors discovered America. [Illustration: MAMMALS OF THE ICE AGE IN NORTH AND SOUTH AMERICA _A chart of the chief animals that became extinct after the arrival of man. The “extinct armadillo” is more correctly known as Dasypodidae. (After Colbert, 1942, with some rearrangement.)_] Myths and Mammoths The subject has been thoroughly confused by too many guesses and too little evidence. Besides a great variety of geologic theories and some amazingly stubborn conservatism, we have had some extraordinary Indian myths as well as the dreams of innocents and eccentrics. If the Spanish churchmen were a bit upset at finding in the Indies both a new world and a race unaccounted for in the Bible, later explorers and settlers of the mainland were quite as astonished over the discovery of huge bones in swamps and creeks, prairies and badlands. Laymen and divines sought explanations, and of course they found dozens, most of them as absurd as Cotton Mather’s dictum of 1712 that the bones were those of the giants of Holy Writ. By 1782 Thomas Jefferson knew they belonged to a kind of elephant, but on “the traditional testimony of the Indians” he was inclined to believe “that this animal still exists in the northern and western parts of America.... He may as well exist there now as he did formerly where we find his bones.”[1] The bridge from sacred fiction to profane fact, from giants to mammoths and mastodons, seems to have been the work, oddly enough, of Negro slaves. Mark Catesby wrote in 1743: At a place in _Carolina_ called _Stono_ was dug out of the Earth three or four Teeth of a large animal, which by the concurring Opinion of all the _Negroes_, native _Africans_, that saw them, were the Grinders of an Elephant, and in my Opinion that could be no other; I having seen some of the like that are brought from _Africa_.[2]