That was not the issue. Except for Ameghino, scientists of the twentieth
century were not claiming to have found Abbevillian or even Neanderthal
man in the New World. They were merely saying that certain skulls and
certain tools might go back to the end of glacial times or perhaps a
little earlier. This was no earlier than the Cro-Magnon of Europe, and
the Cro-Magnon was modern enough in physical type. So were the skulls
found with glacial animals and paleolithic tools in the upper
Choukoutien Cave near Peking. As Hooton puts it, the glacial antiquity
of a New World skeleton cannot be disproved by “the modernity of its
anatomical characters alone. _Homo sapiens_ was full-fledged in the Old
World before the end of the Glacial Period. Late Glacial entrants into
the Americas need not prove their age by an array of archaic and simian
physical features. The acid test of their antiquity must be
geological.”[12] Roberts points out that opponents of early man in
America “demand a more primitive physical type as evidence for some
antiquity in the New World than was living in the Old at a comparable
time.”[13]
As pressure of evidence and opinion piled up in favor of early man,
Hrdlička began to weaken a bit. In 1937 he admitted that, compared with
Europe, the situation in America “is not so simple. It is complicated by
the fact ... that individual skulls of recent and even present-day
American aborigines not seldom show features that are more primitive
than the average in the white races. There are American skulls of recent
date that are practically replicas of the Magdalenian and even of some
of the upper Aurignacian skulls of the Old World and there are
occasional skulls that in some of their characteristics remind one even
of the Neanderthals.”[14] In other words, a skull of an early American
man which resembles a skull of a historic Indian may also resemble the
skull of a glacial man of the Old World.
By 1923—after the harm had been done—Hrdlička was willing to concede
that migration to the Americas began “somewhere between possibly 10,000
or at most 15,000 years ago and the dawn of the protohistoric period in
the Old World.”[15] Yet he still clung to his Indian skull, and wrote in
one of his last papers: “There is as yet not a specimen of a skull or
bone that could be accepted as that of any earlier or different being
than the American natives of protohistoric or historic times.”[16] Even
when a skull had the heavy brow ridges and the long narrow shape of the
Australoid—and the Neanderthal—Hrdlička gave no ground. Such notable
examples as the skulls from the Lagoa Santa caves of Brazil—which we
shall describe later—were merely “a peculiarly American variant.”[17] He
got only so far as granting that American man had a relationship with
the Cro-Magnon and the Magdalenian, but he hinted at this relationship
merely in man’s “early Old World ancestry.”[18]
The Mystery of the Missing Bones
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account