io THE EVOLUTION OF MAN 



Again and again such specimens have come to light, as in 

 the Trenton gravels which date from the final retreat of the 

 ice, the Nebraska loess man near Omaha, the Lansing man, 

 and that of Vero, Florida, where the remains of like degree 

 of fossilization with their animal associates were found en- 

 tombed with creatures of undoubted Pleistocene affinities. Still 

 other finds are those at Rancho La Brea in the Pleistocene 

 asphalt of California, and lastly at Dallas, Texas, in the 

 Lagow sand pit, associated with a Pleistocene fauna recently 

 described by the writer. Not one of these, despite their ful- 

 filment of every other prerequisite to antiquity burial in older 

 strata, animal association, like degree of fossilization, and 

 so forth meets the requirements of the physical anthropolo- 

 gist, for none shows somatological characters which are not 

 possessed by the modern American Indians. This leads 

 Doctor Hrdlicka to doubt their antiquity, but a growing con- 

 viction in the author's mind, stimulated by so high an authority 

 as Sir Arthur Keith, of the Royal College of Surgeons, Lon- 

 don, is that, on the other hand, they may in part be of genuine 

 Pleistocene age and hence point to the high antiquity of the 

 Indian type. 



The South American record is comparable. Florentine 

 Ameghino (1912) described supposedly human forms under 

 the names of Tetraprothomo and Diprothomo, based upon 

 remains which in at least one instance owed their peculiarity to 

 the fact that they were not even human. But in no event were 

 these so-called men as old or as primitive structurally as 

 Ameghino would have us believe, and his thesis that South 

 America may have been the radiation center of the human 

 stock seems untenable. 



If none of the New World men are of archaic cast, their 

 association with extinct forms, as for instance with the masto- 

 don in the north and with living ground sloths in the south, 

 seems to bear the mark of authenticity. The most authentic 



