458 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 195 



Sound. In 1950 two more sites of the same complex were found in 

 the Brooks Range in the interior of northern Alaska. The Denbigh 

 Flint Complex is apparently post-Pleistocene in age, and though con- 

 siderably older than any known Eskimo culture, has an important 

 bearing on the problems we have been discussing. We may therefore 

 consider the implications of these new finds. 



Wlien a relationship between the Mesolithic and early Neolithic 

 cultures of Eurasia and the earliest Eskimo cultures in Alaska was 

 first postulated (Collins, 1943), it seemed necessary to emi^hasize that 

 the resemblances did not extend beyond the Eskimo sphere, in time 

 or in space. Previous theories of the Siberian Neolithic as the pri- 

 mary source of American culture in general, even of its earliest mani- 

 festations, seemed invalid for the following reasons : 



(1) The Siberian Neolithic, even if it rested on an Upper Paleo- 

 lithic base as Okladnikov contended, was ecologically recent. The 

 animal bones from the Neolithic sites were all of existing species — 

 deer, elk, bears, reindeer, birds, and fish. The same was true of the 

 bones from the oldest Eskimo sites — mainly seal, walrus, caribou, dogs, 

 foxes, birds, and fish, all of species still living. The frozen muck in 

 the vicinity of some of the Eskimo sites contains abundant remains 

 of a Pleistocene fauna, but the Eskimos knew these animals just as 

 we do — as fossils; for the occasional mammoth teeth and pieces of 

 tusks that are found in the old Eskimo middens are always fossilized, 

 unlike the other bones. In contrast, the Paleo-Indians on the High 

 Plains hunted these now extinct mammals. 



(2) The relative recency of the Siberian Neolithic, even its earli- 

 est stages, was indicated by the absence of burins, which characterized 

 the European Mesolithic, and by the presence of small, symmetrical, 

 finely chipped arrow points, which resembled Eskimo and later Amer- 

 ican Indian types. These and other Siberian Neolithic traits such as 

 pottery, polished-stone adzes, and the reinforced bow, could hardly 

 have been the possessions of a people ancestral to the earliest 

 Americans. 



(3) Physiographic changes of considerable magnitude have oc- 

 curred since Sandia Cave, the Lindenmeier site, and other Paleo- 

 Indian sites were occupied. This apparently was not true of the 

 early Neolithic sites around Lake Baikal, and in the Eskimo area 

 such changes have definitely been of a minor and local character. 

 Even the oldest Eskimo sites are located along existing shore lines, 

 showing that they were established when the relation of land to sea 

 was essentially the same as today. Any older coastal sites, established 

 when sea level was lower, as it was during glacial and early postglacial 

 times, would now be under water. 



The evidence then existing seemed clearly to indicate that the re- 

 lationship between the early Siberian Neolithic and early Eskimo cul- 



