Science: The First Americans

How long has man lived in the Western Hemisphere? The more cautious anthropologists give him 10,000 to 15,000 years. But Dr. George F. Carter of Johns Hopkins thinks this estimate is much too conservative. There is good reason to believe, says Carter, that there were Americans of a primitive sort in interglacial times, more than 150,000 years ago.

The Hunters. According to orthodox theories, the first Americans were the Folsom and the Sandia men, whose ancestors crossed the Bering Strait from Asia. They were highly developed hunters, making beautiful stone weapons to kill dangerous game, and their level of culture was not much below that of Europeans of the same period. But if these up & coming hunters were the first, where did the more primitive Indians come from? Even in historical times, certain tribes in Patagonia and Lower California, for instance, had very low cultures. Between these backward people and those on the Folsom level were many cultural gradations.

One theory is that such primitives were degenerate descendants of the Folsom hunters. Another is that they were later arrivals from some Asiatic backwater. Dr. Carter hoots at both theories. It is much easier to believe, he writes in the current

Scientific Monthly, that the primitives were the first to come, and that their descendants survived in out-of-the-way places.

Desert Varnish. Anthropologist Carter uses an odd geological time-recorder to support his theory that the Folsom or Sandia hunters invaded a long-inhabited hemisphere. On the deserts of Southern California, many firmly rooted stones are covered with dark brown “desert varnish.” No one is sure how this is formed or how long it takes to form, but Folsom-type spearheads found on the desert never show more than a trace of it. The crude weapons of simpler folk are often varnished thickly, and the cruder they are, the darker is the varnish. This is pretty good proof, Carter thinks, that the primitive artifacts must be very much older than the beautiful Folsom blades of 10,000 B.C.

Dr. Carter does not rely solely on the desert varnish to prove his case. Along the coast of Southern California are many kitchen middens, where ancient Californians tossed refuse from their shore dinners. Middens containing the handiwork of recent Indians are full of well-preserved shells. In middens containing fine stone blades (probably from the Folsom period), the lime of the shells is partly leached away. Middens that have lost all their lime have stone artifacts much cruder than the Folsom type. There are even older middens with only rough stone flakes and grinding slabs. These sometimes have two or three layers of clay that were probably formed at a time when the climate was rainier than it is today.

Just when these people lived, Dr. Carter does not know. He suspects that they may date back to the warm period, 150,000 years ago, before the last advance of the glaciers. So he urges anthropologists to dig much deeper, to search for older deposits for the first remains of American man.