498 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 193 5 



notch or barb, the saw or serrated blade, and, most striking of all, 

 the various geometric microliths. It is true that some of these special 

 adaptations can occasionally be matched in a rough or generic style, 

 but not with real precision or for any considerable geographic 

 range. 



Missing representative art features. — One of the outstanding modes 

 of expression resorted to by European and African Paleolithic man 

 was his faithful pictorial representation of the contemporary ani- 

 mals on which his existence largely depended. The long list of 

 faunal species thus depicted, either by incising or painting on lime- 

 stone cave walls or by engraving and sculpturing on pieces of bone, 

 antler, and ivory, or again, on rare occasions, by modeling in clay, 

 are now mostly extinct or else have migrated to suitable northern 

 and southern climates. This fact of itself — apart, i. e., from con- 

 firming paleontological remains in the contemporary culture debris — 

 strongly corroborates the passage of time indicated by attending 

 geologic circumstances. Now when we turn to look for similar art 

 phenomena in America we are unexpectedly disappointed. We have 

 animal pictographs of all kinds in abundance, and also we possess 

 a respectable amount of zoomorphic engraving on bone and shell, 

 sculpturing in stone, painting on pottery, modeling in burnt clay, 

 casting or hammering in metal, and even animal representations 

 thrown up in the form of earthworks; but positive representation 

 of extinct species is wanting.**' It is true that some suggestive indi- 

 cations are available. There are, iof example, the supposed elephant 

 mounds of Ohio and Wisconsin, the elephant pipes done in stone 

 from lowa,*^ the Lenape stone tablet with an incised elephant from 

 Pennsylvania,** a deer humerus with an incised stylicized proboscidian 

 from Missouri,*^ a piece of seashell with some indefinite lines upon 

 it, variously interpreted as a mastodon or a bison, from Delaware,^" 

 and certain alleged architectural sculptures resembling elephants in 

 Middle America. ^^ For good measure, a journalistic expedition to 

 the Grand Canyon recently published photographs of one petroglyph 

 called a dinosaur and another suggesting a rhinoceros.^^ Perhaps 

 there are others. However, some of these representations are prob- 

 ably nothing more than accidental resemblances, while others have 



*« But see possible representations of Mesratherium and Glyptodon, fig. 215, 5 and 7, in 

 Archaeological Research — Chaco-Cordillera Esped., 1901-2, by Eric von Rosen, Stock- 

 holm, 1924. 



«Proc. Davenport Acad. Nat. Sci., vol. 2, p. 249; vol. 3, p. 132; vol. 4, pp. 1-95, 

 1885. 



*8Bull. 30, Bur. Amer. Ethnol., p. 764. 



^oNat. Hist., vol. 21, pp. 591-97, 1921. 



«> Lucas, P., Animals of the past, p. 171, New York, 1922. 



^ Smith. G. Elliot, Elephants and ethnologists, p. 20, pi. 2, London, 1924. 



^^ The Doheny Scientific Expedition to the Hava Supai Canyon, Northern Arizona, Publ. 

 Oakland Mus., p. 27, Oakland, Calif., 1924. 



