50 ANTHROPOLOGY IN WES'IERN HEMISPHERE AND PACIFIC ISLANDS. 



and fishers and knowledge of the use of fire and suitable clothing. Such 

 cultural development required a long period of time. 



Thus the problem of the antiquity of man in America remains an open 

 question. Holmes says it is " a difficult, a perplexing, but a most fascinating 

 field for research." To solve this problem there must be thorough and sys- 

 tematic investigation, greatly prolonged if need be. The aim should be to 

 discover physical or cultural remains which would demonstrate conclusively 

 to impartial students the age when man was in the Western Hemisphere. 



On the theory that man is a migrant to America two separate researches 

 are needed to solve the question of his antiquity: 



1. The first research concerns the general question of man's antiquity 

 in America and is inseparable from researches into the origin of American 

 aborigines. Nearly the entire coastal area of the Western Hemisphere is 

 well supplied with shell-heaps which were made by men so primitive that 

 a large part of their food came from the sea shore. In such shell-heaps are 

 found numerous evidences of the culture-grade of the builders. Probably 

 grades of culture, rather than geological chronology, would be revealed by 

 most of the shell-heap explorations. Dall found shell-heaps in the Aleutian 

 Islands which clearly told of men of three distinct culture grades who had 

 eaten there. First was a people who apparently had neither fire nor arti- 

 facts, and whose food was echinoderms; then followed men of superior 

 culture who ate mainly fish; lastly, a people with culture not so unlike that 

 of recent coastal savages. However, records of geological time may be found 

 happily, perhaps, with artifacts or human skeletal remains, for Lovisato says 

 that the shell-heaps of Elizabeth and other islands at the extreme southern 

 end of South America show a subsidence below the sea and again a rise above 

 the sea since they were first deposited by men. 



There should be an exhaustive exploration of shell-heaps; first, at those 

 points where it would seem, from the configuration of the continents, island 

 routes from other lands, the drift of ocean currents, atmospheric streams, 

 etc., early man might have reached America; also where conditions would 

 seem to have favored early men with plentiful food and easy protection. In 

 the neighborhood of all such shell-heaps careful survey should be made for 

 caverns, rock-shelters, and promontories which might have been used by men 

 at the time; these should also be explored. The results of these researches 

 would dictate whether other coastal areas should be similarly searched for 

 data of man's antiquity. 



The importance of shell-heap exploration in work on this research is 

 suggested by Boas: "It seems plausible that the antiquity of man on the 

 South American Continent is very great, and that in the large shell-heaps 

 which are found, particularly on the Atlantic coast, his remains may be 

 traced to very early times." We may also well recall here the conspicuous 

 part played by explorations of shell-heaps and kitchen-middens in the 



