Progress was slower in the New World. The Indian reached the neolithic stage later, and he may have stayed in it longer than man did in the Old World. This can probably be blamed on the peculiar fauna of the western hemisphere. In all of the Americas there were no suitable animals to domesticate except the dog—which the Indian probably brought with him—and those dubious objects of husbandry, the turkey, the bee, the Muscovy duck, the llama, the alpaca, the vicuña, and the guinea pig. Because there were no sheep or cattle, the Indian had no pastoral life and no milk and butter. He had no beasts of burden except the dog and the llama; he invented no wheeled cart. It was not entirely his own fault that he remained essentially a man of the stone age even though, toward the last, he had perfected a metallurgy of copper, silver, gold, platinum, and bronze. The story of the Indian’s spread through the Americas, his variation in language and physique, and his building of the civilizations of Peru, Central America, and Mexico argues that he came to the New World many millenniums before the birth of Christ. You may point out that the argument is too general, too inexact in outcome, but you must remember that behind the Indian lies an earlier migrant. We are on somewhat firmer ground when we turn to the evidence we have of this migrant’s tools, his hearths, and his bones. For sometimes they are related to the fossils of extinct mammals and—more important—to certain kinds of earth, charcoal and rock that can be dated. From Tools and Bones, Fossils and Rocks The tools and the hearths and the fossils are plentiful, and some years ago this proof of man’s antiquity seemed to be enough. The great and spectacular mammals whose remains were associated with early man in the Americas, as well as in Europe, were thought to have vanished with the glaciers of the Great Ice Age. Therefore, early man in the Americas must also have lived in that period. Now, however, a number of scientists believe that the American mastodon, along with a number of other animals that are now extinct in the New World, survived the Great Ice Age here. This would still leave us with an American whose antiquity is quite respectable. The best proof of the age of early man was for a long time geological. Archaeologists dated man by the earth and rocks in which they found his tools or his bones. Unfortunately, they had not too much geological evidence in the Americas. In the past ten years, however, radiocarbon (of which you will learn more later) has made it possible to know much about when man reached the New World and where he lived. 2 THE ROAD OF EARLY MAN _I have been a stranger in a strange land._ —EXODUS 2:22 How New Was the New World? We moderns were not the first to ask the question: Just how new was the New World on October 12, 1492? Or how old?