BALCH— EARLY MAN IN AMERICA. 481 



the utmost importance at Vero, Florida. Under the direction of 

 Mr. E. H. Sellards, State Geologist of Florida, the excavation of a 

 new canal was carefully watched, and in a Pleistocene horizon con- 

 taining bones of numerous extinct Pleistocene mammals, mastodon, 

 Elephas coliimbi, Equiis leidyi, Megalonyx and others, there were 

 also found in several places human bones in the same state of 

 fossilization as the bones of the extinct animals. For two reasons 

 therefore, association in the same horizon and fossilization to the 

 same degree, it is impossible to deny that a Pleistocene man existed 

 in Florida. And he was also certainly a Paleolithic man, for some 

 chipped flint flakes were found with the human bones. Most notable 

 of all, however, a bone was found on which there were some en- 

 graved marks which suggest vaguely the marks of the Azilien 

 horizon in southern France and on which also there was a small 

 crude drawing, the first apparently from Pleistocene times found in 

 America. This drawing, it seems to me, is one of the most im- 

 portant archeological finds ever made in the history of man and 

 the history of art." 



This drawing seems to be an attempt to delineate a human head 

 and bust. What is specially interesting about it is that, in the first 

 place, it is decidedly rectilinear and not curvilinear. That is also 

 the character of historic Indian art and slight as this drawing is, it 

 certainly suggests that it was done by some one with historic 

 American Indian characteristics, which points to the draughtsman 

 being an ancestor of our present Indians. And if this drawing is 

 genuinely Pleistocene, and if it is, as it seems to be, rudimentary 

 American Indian art, there is almost a certainty that we shall never 

 find on the American continent any art like that of the later Euro- 

 pean Paleolithic. In regard to the age of this drawing one may 

 perhaps theorize somewhat as follows. The fossils found in the 

 same horizon as this drawing are certainly Pleistocene. Now 

 although we have figure-stone flints, that is embryo sculpture from 

 the Acheuleen, the earliest drawings so far known to us are from 

 the Aurignacien. The probability therefore is that this drawing 



^ E. H. Sellards, " Human Remains and Associated Fossils from the Pleis- 

 tocene of Florida," Eighth Annual Report of the Florida State Geological 

 Survey, 1916. 



