Men discovered new sites, but, if they had the temerity to announce their finds, their work was ignored or scouted. For twenty-five or thirty years, as Frank H. H. Roberts, Jr., writes, the subject of early man in the New World became virtually taboo, and no scientist desirous of a successful career dared intimate that “he had discovered indications of a respectable antiquity for the Indian.” Opponents of early man had definitely retarded progress in this field.[8] From close to the turn of the century Hrdlička was the leader among these opponents just as he was the leader among the physical anthropologists of his day and a man of the greatest ability. For about forty years he wrote much, and he wrote effectively. His long series of papers were studded with denials of the antiquity of man on this continent. Beginning in 1907 with his _Skeletal Remains Suggesting or Attributed to Early Man in North America_, he demolished one American skull after another. He tore to shreds the evidence by which Ameghino pushed man back millions of years in Argentina.[9] His most effective argument against North American claims was to produce the craniums of Mound Builders or even Indians of historic times which duplicated finds of early man. He stigmatized skull after skull as “not in the least primitive,” “essentially modern,” “not to be distinguished from the modern Indian.” Unfortunately, as he grew older, his attacks on spurious evidence developed into violent opposition to practically _all_ evidence. As late as 1942, he saw his opponents as men characterized by “wishful thinking, imagination, opinionated amateurism, and desire for self-manifestation.”[10] He recognized no prejudice on his own side. Yet, against the harm that Hrdlička did science by intimidating its students, we must set a practical value which Earnest A. Hooton—himself as great a physical anthropologist as Hrdlička, but a more receptive one on the subject of early man—has well expressed: It is to the everlasting credit of professional American anthropology that it has not succumbed to the itch for ancestors by giving recognition to the many dubious and spurious finds whose claims have too often received a facile acceptance abroad. No one can deny that this salutary state of affairs is due almost entirely to the righteous scientific iconoclasm of one formidable veteran, Dr. Hrdlička.[11] The Red Herring of the “Primitive Skull” It was Hrdlička’s misfortune—and the misfortune of science—that until almost the end of his life he refused to meet his opponents on common ground. He was right enough in challenging early man as an inhabitant of America 200,000 years ago, but he challenged him in terms that applied or seemed to apply to any man earlier than the Indian of three or four thousand years ago. Hrdlička failed to define properly the thing he was attacking. He merely prated of the lack of “primitive skulls.”