Bering Strait and Population Spread— Giddings 89 



can Paleolithic. This highly significant paper of Nelson's has 

 been somewhat underplayed, however, because it brought into 

 view flint techniques that were not yet widely known or stressed 

 in America. One had to go to individual site reports to find 

 that the small cores and blades had turned up in such widely 

 separated places as the Antilles, Ohio and other areas in the 

 East and Middle West, and all along the eastern coasts of Canada 

 and Greenland. Here, in the micro-core and bladelet, is found 

 a flint specialization of the highest order— one that is as little 

 likely to have been independently invented as is, for instance, 

 the Folsom channel groove. 



Later investigations in the far north have shown that the 

 Campus Site combination is basic to Dorset Culture, and that 

 it has, at early periods, characterized the inland areas of the 

 Yukon Territory and Alaska. And Collins, drawing upon cur- 

 rent reports from Eurasia in 1943, has found reason to connect 

 the earliest Eskimo to Mesolithic developments in the north- 

 westerly direction. 



Since the middle 1930's, Rainey and succeeding University 

 of Alaska archaeologists, and some others, have reported on 

 chance finds in the gold-fields where frozen silts containing the 

 bones of extinct animals are removed by hydraulic mining. 

 These include several examples of large blades and fragments 

 of the distinctive outlines and flaking styles that would place 

 them in the "Yuma" or Plainview categories of Early Man 

 work if they were to be found in the southwestern United 

 States. In aggregate, these finds look impressive, but the fact 

 remains that each is subject to the gravest doubt when one is 

 faced with judging its provenience in the disorderly silt de- 

 posits, where curious conditions of ground thawing and re- 

 freezing in spots and over long periods may place mammoth 

 tusks and tin cans side by side deep below the surface. Some 

 of the artifacts from the silts, and surface artifacts from neigh- 

 boring areas, are now more respectably linked with early times 

 by association with a typology now emerging from a series of 

 discoveries of the past five years. 



In 1948, R. H. Thompson of the U. S. Geological Survey 



