ANTIQUITY OF MAN IN AMERICA — NELSON 501 



concerned ; and the Field Museum expedition to the same country and 

 to Bolivia searched for 5 years, collecting about 3,000 fossil speci- 

 mens, among which was not a single item suggesting the presence of 

 man during Pleistocene times. Consider also the famous Quaternary 

 bone bed at the Rancho de la Brea oil-seep in southern California. 

 Its investigation by paleontologists extends over about 30 years, and 

 during that time the bones of more than 4,000 individual animals 

 have been taken out. The majority of the species found are car- 

 nivores, but grass-eating animals, including the horse, bison, camel, 

 elephant, etc., total at least 9 percent of the whole,**^ yet not only 

 have no convincingly ancient remains of man himself been removed, 

 but no spear points or other forms of weapons have been found, as 

 might reasonably be expected, either stuck fast in the bones or lying 

 loosely among them, as evidence that some of the animals had at 

 times been attacked by hunters. 



Compare this fact of all but uniform sterility in the New World 

 with the diametrically opposite conditions obtaining in the Old 

 World. In Europe alone more than 275 cave and open-air sta- 

 tions have been excavated which show the more or less constant 

 repetition of associated fossilized human and animal remains of 

 Pleistocene date. Additional sites demonstrating the same phenom- 

 enon could be listed also for Asia and Africa. But we must drop 

 the subject at this point, allowing it to speak for itself. 



General negative indications. — There are other alleged facts which 

 seem to militate against the antiquity of man in America. It has 

 been argued, for example, that the relatively greater number of iron 

 meteorites found in the Western Hemisphere goes to show that those 

 of the Eastern Hemisphere were largely used up by early man, as a 

 natural consequence of his longer occupation of that region. The 

 recorded proportions are 79 to 182 in favor of America; while for 

 stone meteorites the conditions are reversed, the figures being 74 to 

 299 in favor of the Old World.^^ 



Lastly, it is in order to remark that the complete distribution of 

 the Paleolithic culture in the Old World is not yet a confirmed fact. 

 Until very recently Ireland was regarded as outside the range — and 

 may yet be. The same seems to be true also for the Philippine and 

 other Pacific island groups, for Japan, and, as far as positive infor- 

 mation goes, for northeastern Siberia. In these circumstances, even 

 though it now appears that parts of Alaska were habitable during 

 the Pleistocene,^^ we may well restrain our expectations concerning 

 the American continent. 



" Loomis, F. B., American year book, p. 705, 1930. 



«' Rickard, T. A., Iron in antiquity, p. 12, Iron and Steel Institute, London, 1929. 



" Frick, C, Nat. Hist., vol. 30, no. 1, pp. 71-80, Jan.-Feb., 1930. 



