Science: Diggers

“Six inches deep in the lake gravel floor was found the buried skeleton of an infant. The bones were very immature. Beside the skeleton lay a sharp bone ‘dagger.’ At this level also were found some very small projectile points, possibly dart heads and knives, scrapers and bone awls. . . . There can be no question that these people preceded by several thousand years the earliest Basket Makers.”

The find thus announced last week by Dr. Julian H. Steward of the Smithsonian Institution was made in a cave near Utah’s Great Salt Lake. As the water level in the lake sank, millennium after millennium, the caves around it are supposed to have been eaten out by the action of waves at the shore. The cave which yielded up Dr.Steward’s fossil infant is now 365 ft. above the lake level. Yet the fact that the skeleton was imbedded in lake gravel on the cave floor indicated that the cave was inhabited soon after the water retreated from its mouth. Bits of charcoal showed the inhabitants to be fire makers. Dr. Steward viewed the skeleton as an important link between the well-known Basket Makers and the mysterious, much earlier “Folsom Men” whose bodily remains have not been found although they left an abundance of their characteristic “Folsom points”—stone weapons with a shallow groove chipped out on each side of the blade. Dr. Steward estimated the age of the Salt Lake child at 5,000 to 12,000 years.

Other recent news of archeology and paleontology:

France. In the winding, pleasant valley of the Loire, every year for twelve years the plow of Farmer Jean Gonon struck a hard object at the same spot. He finally dug it up, found it was a marble statue of a woman, lugged it home with difficulty since it weighed almost 200 Ib. Experts pronounced it a masterpiece of Greek art, a lush Venus probably inspired by the school of Pheidias (450-400 B.C.). The right arm is broken off at the shoulder; the left holds draperies which loop down below the belly. The legs are missing below the knees. Most of the nose is missing which makes the profile unpleasant.

China. The first skull of Peking Man was found in 1929 in limestone caves at Choukoutien, 20 mi. from Peiping. This apish oldster is now generally conceded to be 1,000,000 years old, most ancient of known human fossils. Last summer, two days before Sino-Japanese fighting broke out in north China, a native workman employed by the Rockefeller-endowed diggers at Choukoutien turned up an upper jawbone of Peking Man, containing six teeth. This was the first upper jawbone, although several skulls and lower jawbones had been found before. The new find was got safely to a museum in spite of the fighting. Dr. Ralph Works Chaney, University of California paleontologist who had concluded from ancient garbage in the cave that Peking Man ate hackberries, now considered the evidence of upper and lower teeth together, decided therefrom that he was a meat eater as well as a consumer of hackberries.

Peru. In the ruins of an ancient Inca settlement, German archeologists found vases from which they deduced that the Incas had pet bulldogs. The canine images which ornamented the vessels had large heads, split lips baring the teeth and dished-in faces like those of English bulldogs; and they were bat-eared like the French toy bulldog. The scientists came to the conclusion that the South American breed was developed independently of the European strain.

Brazil. Diggers Llewellyn Price and Theodore White of Harvard brought to light in the Triassic red clay (170 to 200 million years old) on the Brazilian plateau an extensive “boneyard” which they pronounced the best cross section of Triassic life ever come upon in South America. In that far-off age, mammals were just beginning to branch off from the reptilian line. Among the bones of reptiles, large and small, were 15 species and genera unknown to science, including a delicately boned lizard 15 in. long which was probably on the ancestral line of the vast hobgoblins that evolved later. One twelve-footer was believed to be a member of the crocodile-like chasmatosaurid family. Well preserved were several skeletons of cynodonts (“dog-toothed”)—reptiles already showing mammalian trends, hitherto chiefly found in South Africa. Many other specimens were similar to contemporary relics from Africa, additional evidence that, as some geologists believe, Africa and South America were once part of a single great southern continent which they called Gondwanaland.

Mexico. In the Maya region of Chichen Itza in Yucatan, diggers of the Carnegie Institution discovered a spectacular life-size carving of a jaguar. The statue is painted red; it has balls of green jade for eyes and the body is covered with inlaid disks of apple-green jade. These colors were still brilliant when the jaguar was found. Its flat back forms what was evidently a seat. An immediate argument ensued among the Carnegie Institution’s scholars as to whether the carving was used for a throne or for an altar. They decided not to remove it from the temple but to protect it in situ with a glass case, illuminate it with electric lights. Visitors are allowed to look at it but not to sit on it.

Syria. Chicago’s Oriental Institute placed on exhibition after cautious electrochemical cleaning, several copper figures, five to ten inches high, carved by the Hittites of northern Syria, 5,200 years ago —the earliest representations of the human figure in metal ever found. Discovered by Institute expeditionists at Tell Jedeideh, between Antioch and Aleppo, the male figures are supposed to be gods of war, the females goddesses of fertility. The males have silver helmets and two of the females have silver curls. One little man with a quizzical mouth has a helmet pushed far down over his eyes, and his thumb is pointed over his shoulder like a modern hitchhiker’s. The male figures clearly show that the Hittites of 3,300 B.C. practiced circumcision.