Science: Diggers

Little bands of men roaming over the earth, poking in pits, caves, quarries, mounds, buttes for vestiges of the creatures that roamed the earth before them. . . Bigger bands of men examining maps, bringing steam shovels, excavating a tooth, a bracelet, a whole dead civilization , . . Millions of dollars spent in digging every year . . . Following are significant efforts and exhumations of the past two months.

The Orient was not, until last week, particularly fruitful. The broils of bellicose Chinamen disrupted Digger Roy Chapman Andrews’ plans for another (fourth) season of fossil collecting in the Gobi desert, costing him his $225,000 camel train. He returned to the U. S. last fortnight. Two Russian expeditions—Colonel Kozlov’s in the Khangai Mountains of Mongolia and Professor Mechaninov’s nearer home at Baku in Azer-baijan—met with success. Colonel Kozlov found “unquestionable traces” of an ice sheet having covered the Khangais. (This data may prove of importance to Digger Andrews and his paleontologists by helping them to date their finds). Professor Mechaninov’s chief discovery consisted of monuments and metallic hardware indicating a civilization of 800 B. C.

The Orient’s big yield was announced from Batavia by Professor Heberlein of the Dutch Medical Service. At Trinil, in Central Java, near the spot where the Dutch medical missionary, Eugene Dubois, found two teeth, a thigh bone and the top of a skull in 1892,

Professor Heberlein had found what seemed a complete skull, evidently of the same kind of creature introduced to science by the Dubois fragments — pithecanthropus erectus, the Java apeman. The assumed bones were attached to a spongy stone lump of volcanic origin. The crown was distorted somewhat; the eyesockets bulged abnormally.

Anthropologists at U. S. and European museums rejoiced at one adjective in the Batavia despatch —a “complete” skull the message had said. That meant that if the upper portion should prove similar to the Dubois fragment, science could determine without aid of theory the degree of relationship between pithecanthropus and man and ape from the new skull’s lower jaw, aural cavities and spinal connection.

North America. In Alaska, Dr. Ales Hrdlicka of the Smithsonian Institution scoured the shoreland and islands north to Point Barrow, then worked southward, following the Yukon to its mouth, in search of relics left by problematical Asiatic migrations to America. The anthropological world waited to hear if he could establish kinship between North American red Indians and identical human types visible today in northeastern Asia.

In Spokane, Professor Olaf Opsjon challenged archaeological skeptics tocome and see for themselves the runes on a mossy boulder interpreted byhim as recounting a battle between Indians and Norsemen fought in 1010 A. D.(TIME, July 19). Open-minded persons recalled a runestone unearthed 30 yearsago near Kensington, Minn., which most experts view as the work of eight Goths (Swedes) and 22 Norsemen in the 14th Century.

Late in August, Digger Gilbert T. Brewer returned from a trip down theMississippi Valley, to Mexico City and South America via Panama, with extensive evidence of Norse expeditions having penetrated this continent thoroughly in pre-Columbus days. Some of Mr. Brewer’s evidence: 1) Indianlegends of huge serpents appearing on Lake Ontario. (Norse war galleys had low hulls, dragon prows, the sides hung with shields, like scales. 2) An Indian legend of a chief battling a serpent, slaying him and wearing his skin. (The Norsemen wore coats of chain mail.) 3) Disappearance of the Mound-builder civilization from the Great Lakes and Mississippi Basin in the 12th Century. (The indomitable Norse first began coming to America in the 11th Century.) 4) Presence in the Mound-builder country of earthworks identical with mounds of known Norse origin in Scandinavia and Scotland. (Mr. Brewer did not suggest that the Moundbuilders had not followed their burial customs for centuries before the Norse came; he simply suggested that Norsemen in America might have followed their own burial customs also.)

5) Discovery near Chillicothe, Ohio, of a sword buckler and scabbard with fragments of corroded iron or steel. (Copper from Lake Superior was the hardest metal worked in by Moundbuilders or Indians.)

Digger Brewer’s discoveries had led him to a striking conclusion: in their flight from the Norsemen, the Moundbuilders pressed south into Mexico, where they were later known as the Aztecs. He cited as evidence of a Norse influence upon the Aztecs the latter’s god Queztal or Votan, “a white god . . . from the east across the sea,” who may have been the Odin or Wodin of the Norsemen; also, human sacrifice among the Aztecs (not practiced by pre-Norse Moundbuilders). Finally, Mr. Brewer has completed the interpretation of the famed Aztec Calendar Stone, partially interpreted by Professor Valentini in 1875. This stone, found and buried as pagan by the Spanish in 1551, was unearthed in 1790 and embedded in the walls of the Metropolitan Cathedral ^ of Mexico City. About ten feet in diameter, shaped like a round shield, it was (according to Mr. Brewer) carved in 1090 A. D. to mark the reformation of the Moundbuilder-Aztec chronology upon their arrival in their new home from the Mississippi Valley.

In Ottawa, Anthropologist Diamond Jenness of the Victoria Memorial Museum returned from Point Prince of Wales, Alaska (nearest to^ Asia), with Eskimo relics obtained after four months’ excavating. Four distinct periods >were traceable, the next-to-latest antedating the fights between Eskimos and Norsemen in 982 A. D, in eastern North America.