ANTIQUITY OF MAN IN AMERICA — NELSON 475 



ber of suggestive finds, which, however, have never been verified.^ 

 South American investigators were not far behind, and in 

 the person of Florentino Ameghino, director of the Natural History 

 Museum of Buenos Aires, showed even greater zeal and courage in 

 relation to human antiquity. Beginning about 1870, this able pale- 

 ontologist made known a long series of discoveries, somatic and cul- 

 tural, from the local Pampean and earlier formations, which were 

 held to prove the long contemporaneity of man and of various ex- 

 tinct animal species in Argentina. He dated some of these archeo- 

 logical discoveries clear back to Eocene times, and ended by claiming 

 that the world's mammalian fauna, including man and his fore- 

 runners, had originated in South America." 



THE PROBLEM OF CULTURAL DEVELOPMENT 



Up to this time the investigations had stressed the antiquity rather 

 than the typology or characteristics of the archeological objects 

 discovered; but during this same eighth decade of last century men 

 with little or no paleontological experience, but correspondingly 

 more familiar with cultural data, came forward. As early as 1872, 

 Dr. C. C. Abbott announced his discovery of implements of Pale- 

 olithic type in both the supposed early postglacial and the under- 

 lying glacial deposits on the east bank of the Delaware River, imme- 

 diately below Trenton, N. J.^ This double-count claim was defended 

 with increasing vigor by its discoverer for nearly 40 years and 

 gained several adherents among the leading scientists, such as Prof. 

 Marcellin Boule, of Paris, and Prof. F. W. Putnam, of Harvard 

 University ; yet although independently investigated time and again, 

 its full significance has never been satisfactorily determined. 



In the course of the following decade other champions of early 

 man in America appeared, the most radical being Curator Thomas 

 Wilson, of the National Museum in Washington, D. C, who ventured 

 to offer a demonstration of the presence of the Paleolithic industry 

 on purely typological grounds.^ Mr. Wilson, incidental to extended 

 residence in Europe, had obtained first-hand acquaintance with the 

 stone implements typical of the Lower Paleolithic, in particular the 

 so-called " coup-de-poing " or hand ax, and on returning to America 

 he immediately proceeded to look for similar implements here. The 



"See E. G. Tarayre (and E. T. Hamy), Arch. Comm. Sci. Mexique, vol. 2, pp. 6, 7, 409, 

 etc., Paris, 1884. 



" I am not familiar with all of Amcghino's original papers, but a summary of part of 

 the evidence is supplied by Outes and Bruch in a book entitled "Los Aborigines de la 

 Republica Argentina", Buenos Aires, 1910. For a good English summary, see M. Boule's 

 Fossil men, pp. 413-37, Edinburgh, 1923 ; also Hrdlicka, op. cit. 



'' Abbott, C. C, The Stone Age in New Jersey, Amer. Nat., vol. 6, 1872 ; Primitive 

 industry, Salem, 1881 ; Ten years digging in Lenape Land, Trenton, 1912. 



« Rep. U. S. Nat. Mus., 1887-8, pp. 677-702, 1890. 



