PREHISTORIC CULTURE WAVES — JENNESS 395 



sherds at a few sites along the southeastern fringe of the Mackenzie 

 Basin — at Isle a la Crosse, Reindeer Lake, and Cree Lake — but only 

 within the range of Cree penetration, and the sherds themselves 

 resemble Woodland pottery from eastern Canada. In view of the 

 vast potteryless gap separating this Woodland area from the Alaskan 

 Eskimo, and the comparative lateness of pottery, apparently, in the 

 Woodland area itself, it would seem more reasonable to believe that 

 the latter acquired the idea of making pottery from the pottery- 

 making peoples bordering them on the south than to connect them 

 with the Krasnojarsk and other Siberian cultures so far removed 

 in space, if not also in time. As long as the highway from Asia to 

 America — that is to say, all Alaska outside the Eskimo area, and the 

 whole of northern and western Canada — yield no sherds, we should 

 cling to the theory that American pottery evolved quite independ- 

 ently of pottery in the Old World. 



Beyond the second millennium B. C. we enter a realm of twilight, 

 where ethnology almost ceases to flicker and archeology provides 

 only one or two faint gleams to light our path. From the Gobi 

 Desert in Mongolia, were Nelson ^^ discovered a preneolithic micro- 

 lithic culture of Azilio-Tardenoisian character, and Afontova on the 

 Yenisei, where Von Merhart -* suspects a microlithic station, we jump 

 to the Amur River, whence other microliths are reported,^' and from 

 there to Fairbanks, Alaska, where microliths unearthed on the uni- 

 versity campus seem to Nelson identical with his Mongolian finds.^® 

 Can it be that these mark a culture movement from Asia into America, 

 and not merely a culture movement, but a movement of peoples? 



Still more recently, and from Fairbanks also, it is reported that a 

 stone spearhead resembling a Yuma type was found embedded in a 

 small mastodon.-^ Now Yuma points are closely related to the Folsom 

 complex, the oldest yet known in America, dating from a period when 

 the camel, the mammoth, the mastodon, and other animals now ex- 

 tinct were still comparatively abundant. Because we have hitherto 

 discovered no trace of this complex outside of the United States and 

 the Canadian prairies, certain writers have suggested that it is a purely 

 North American development. As Nelson ^^ points out, however, we 

 must continue to assume that its ancestry lies in the Old World until 

 we find in North America a still older and more primitive industry 



'''Berkey, C. P., and Nelson, N. C, Geology and prehistoric archaeology of the Gobi 

 Desert. Amer. Mas. Nov., No. 222, 1926. 



** Von Merhart, Gero, The palaeolithic period in Siberia : Contributions to the prehistory 

 of the Yenisei region. Amer. Anthrop., vol. 25, pp. 45-46, 192.3. 



2' Sovietskaya Archaoologiya, No. 1, quoted in Antiquity, Dec. 1937, p. 497. 



'" Nelson, N. C, Notes on cultural relations between Asia and America. Amer. Antiquity, 

 vol. 2, pp. 267-272, 1937. 



« Amer. Antiquity, vol. 3, p. 18S, 1937. 



28 Nelson, N. C, Amer. Antiquity, vol. 2, p. 320, 1937. 



