Working with more than 100 radiocarbon dates concerned with the great extinction, Jim Hester (no relation of the junior writer) has brought together results published through 1959.[35] He provides the first reasonably clear picture of the sequence and magnitude of lethal events. We see the ancient forms of horse, camel, and bison, as well as the dire wolf and Columbian mammoth, beginning to disappear 8,000 years ago. _Bison antiquus_ lingers later, though Clovis mammoth hunters may have been active in the Southwest at the same time that Folsom bison hunters were busy on the Plains. Hester’s summary shows how concerned man was in the final death of the great mammals. He lists the last dates for 27 of them. Nine—one-third—were found in archaeological sites of early man; some others were dated by charcoal that may have come from fires where he cooked the meat of the great beasts. 9 PYGMIES, AUSTRALOIDS, AND NEGROIDS—BEFORE INDIANS? _Let us have all the skeletons out of the closet._ —EARNEST A. HOOTON The Mythical Indian Race Science has found a great many artifacts and a few skulls that seem to have belonged to early man. Was he an Indian? Was he a Paleo-Indian—whatever that may imply? Was he a Mongoloid with an admixture of Australoid, Negroid, and White? Was he Mongoloid at all? Among the most blatant misnomers of popular science is “Indian race.” Even in North America it is an absurdity. Throw in Middle America and South America, and the attempt to fit the people of the New World into this or any one racial pigeonhole becomes laughable. Living Indians of “pure” breed show an immense variety in all physical features except their eyes, their hair, their cheekbones, and their upper front teeth. Some of their skulls and some of the skulls of their dead—particularly those that belonged to early man—show marked differences from those of the Mongoloid race of which the Indians are all commonly supposed to be a part. The differences are so marked that some of our physical anthropologists believe that other races than the Mongoloid contributed to the discovery and settlement of the Americas. They see at least one and possibly three such contributions. If we discount transpacific migration, we must accept the fact that all the peoples of northern Asia did not always belong to the now ubiquitous Mongoloid races. Of this, more at the end of the chapter.