484 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 19 3 5 



geologic antiquity of man in America. It is a body of data with 

 which — apart from its human implications — the geologist and the 

 paleontologist alone are competent to deal; but so astounding are 

 its claims with respect to man that the archeologist is of necessity 

 made suspicious. And his suspicion finds much to feed upon, for 

 by confession of the paleontologists themselves the precise deter- 

 mination of the age of any given geologic formation is sometimes a 

 difficult matter, not always to be settled solely by the character and 

 composition of the fossils it contains. Indeed, the paleontologists 

 appear to recognize that biologic forms do not correlate uniformly 

 with absolute time any more than do cultural typology and chro- 

 nology for the archeologist; in short, that form and age, or life- 

 periods and geologic systems, are two distinct concepts which must 

 not be confused. 



To begin with, the paleontological discoveries relating to man 

 in the New World prove entirely too much. Taken literally, they 

 prove that the human or proto-human stock in America was suffi- 

 ciently advanced to use tools already in early Tertiary times, i. e., 

 about the time when the mammalian forms of the life are supposed 

 to have made their first appearance; they prove that by the middle 

 Tertiary this being had reached a stage of physical development in 

 America equal to that shown by man in Europe for the first time 

 toward the latter end of the Pleistocene; and they prove likewise 

 that by the middle Tertiary human culture in the New World, as 

 represented by chipped and ground stone implements, was on a level 

 with that achieved for the first time in the Old World only about 

 7,000 to 10,000 years ago. Stated in another way, the alleged evi- 

 dence goes to show that neither man nor his culture in America 

 has changed appreciably since middle Tertiary times, while in 

 Europe, Asia, and Africa such changes, though locally varied, have 

 been more or less profound. The upshot of the whole matter is, 

 therefore, naturally enough that the evidence cannot be — and rarely 

 has been — taken at face value. Almost all of the finds have been 

 disputed and in many cases satisfactorily explained away. But not 

 all the finds have been thus disposed of, nor, indeed, can be, because 

 the facts in several instances — as for example the peculiar lance 

 points associated with skeletons of an extinct bison at Folsoni, 

 N. Mex. — are acceptable to all observers. Moreover, it is a curi- 

 ous fact that though discoveries pointing to the geologic an- 

 tiquity of man in America have been reported and either ignored 

 or discredited for more than 200 years, they still keep coming in 

 ever increasing numbers and in more and more carefully authen- 



