Doubts about early man in the Americas seem to have been an occupational
disease with archaeologists. Geologists have found it much easier to
accept him. Men like Ernst Antevs, M. M. Leighton, Kirk Bryan, and
Albrecht Penck, perhaps because they are accustomed to dealing
generously with time, seem to have little trouble in embracing early man
as a Late Glacial interloper anywhere from 15,000 to 100,000 years ago.
Physical anthropologists like Earnest A. Hooton and Sir Arthur Keith,
and cultural anthropologists and ethnologists like Roland Dixon and A.
C. Haddon are not at all afraid to recognize signs of Australoid or
Negroid ancestry in the skulls of New World man. Perhaps it is easier
for the geologists and the physical anthropologists to accept such ideas
because they do not run counter to their own dogmas. Many
archaeologists, at any rate, find it extraordinarily hard to adjust
themselves to evidence which does not fit accepted theories. They may
defend themselves by pointing out that the evidence is not too clear, or
at best is merely suggestive; but the theories they cherish arose from
no firmer evidence in many cases, and frequently continue quite as
unclear or at best merely suggestive. Certainly such reluctance to
accept new evidence held back archaeological research when Aleš
Hrdlička, W. H. Holmes, and Daniel G. Brinton were in their heyday.
This reluctance to face facts permeated even so great and productive a
man as Baron Erland Nordenskiöld. An example of such a Jovian nod may be
salutary. Arguing in _The Copper and Bronze Ages in South America_
against the theory that the craft of metallurgy may have been brought to
the New World by migrants, instead of having been invented here, three
times he cites facts that contradict his thesis, and three times he
offers a kind of self-conscious apology for blinking them. (The italics
are ours.)
If we go through all our material of weapons and tools of bronze and
copper from South America, _we must confess_ that there is not much
that is entirely original, and that to the majority of fundamental
types there is something to correspond in the Old World.
_It must be confessed_ that there is considerable similarity between
the metal technique of the New World and that of the Old during the
Bronze Age.
Bronze is, of course, also a very hard invention, and _I must confess_
to finding it most remarkable that the art of alloying tin and copper
should have been hit upon independently both in the Old World and the
New.[3]
“Admissions,” said Charles John Darling, “are mostly made by those who
do not know their importance.”
Unfortunately there are still a few archaeologists whose attitude
resembles Nordenskiöld’s. Hooton writes of one of these:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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