GENERAL ZOOLOGY 



no longer occur in Europe. Cro-Magnon man was either displaced or 

 absorbed by the later progenitors of modern Europeans. 



The history of mankind in America, though much longer than was once 

 supposed, covers a comparatively brief span of time. The earliest human 

 immigrants apparently reached North America from Asia by way of a land 

 connection at Bering Strait. They arrived prior to the last Pleistocene 

 glaciation; there is an abundant record of long human occupation of some 

 of the Aleutian Islands and in the Point Barrow region of Alaska. Various 

 discoveries in different parts of the American continents indicate that men 

 spread southward and eastward from the ancient Bering gateway, and that 

 they were well established in both North and South America bv 25,000 b.c. 

 Stone arrow or lance points of a distinctive type, fashioned by a race of 

 hunters named Folsom man, have been found widelv scattered in the United 

 States (Fig. 20.11). Many of these points, discovered as far east as New 

 York and Pennsylvania, were probably carried eastward by later peoples; 

 their distribution does not necessarily coincide with the area occupied by 

 Folsom man. However, in undisturbed sites in Colorado and New Mexico, 

 the Folsom points, as.sociated with the bones of extinct mammals, give 

 evidence of the presence of these people at a period ranging from 10,000 

 to 12,000 years ago. Folsom man was not the earliest human inhabitant of 

 the southwest; deposits in the floor of the Sandia Cave, in New Mexico, have 

 yielded the distinctive stone weapons of a culture dating from possibly 

 20,000 B.C. These are overlain by barren deposits, and these, in turn, 

 by layers containing Folsom artifacts. The barren layers are believed to 

 represent long periods when the cave was unoccupied, probably during the 

 period of climatic upheaval as.sociated with the retreat of the last continental 

 glacier in this area. Another nomad-hunter culture apparently existed in 

 the southwest at about the same period as that represented by the early 

 Sandia remains, and may have been much older. This is known as the Clovis 

 culture, again recognized by distinctive stone weapons; materials from 

 New Mexico date from 12,000 to 16,000 years ago, while similar Clovis 

 remains from a campsite recently unearthed in North Texas have been 

 declared older than 37,000 years. If this dating is accurate, the Clovis 

 group represents the oldest known North American men. 



Although many campsites, artifacts, and burned animal bones from early 

 American cultures have been found, there have been no discoveries of actual 

 human skeletal remains of the earliest Americans. It is unlikely, however, 

 that in their physical characteristics these people dififered markedly from 

 the later American Indians; Homo sapiens must have been established in North- 

 east Asia much earlier than the time of the earliest Bering land-bridge migra- 

 tions. There is abundant evidence that the American Indians are remote 

 descendants from an Asiatic stock, either through the Clovis, Sandia, and 

 Folsom people or from successive later waves of migration. 



Although the fossil record of mankind is extremely fragmentary, enough 

 physical and cultural remains are available to make it abundantly clear 



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