502 ANNUAL. REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 193 5 



CRITICAL COMPARISONS 



Having dallied so long over the alleged facts bearing on our antiq- 

 uity problem, there is little space left for critical comment on the 

 situation as finally developed. The principal aim so far has been 

 to make clear, if possible, that there are sound reasons for the long 

 standing disagreement between archeologists and paleontologists. 

 For the archeologist now to attempt an explanation of this disagree- 

 ment and to put the paleontologist right is doubtless presumptuous, 

 yet the temptation is strong. To the present writer the difficulty 

 seems to inhere in their two distinct avenues of approach to the 

 problem. The archeologist, who advances on the human prehistory 

 enigma from the historian's point of view, is bound to have narrow 

 and rigid ideas with respect to questions of time. The paleontol- 

 ogist, on the other hand, because he approaches the same enigma 

 from the geologic point of view, has naturally shown himself rather 

 generous in his ideas about time. It could scarcely be otherwise; 

 to the historian time is limited, yet of first importance; to the 

 geologist it is practically unlimited and, it seems, of secondary im- 

 portance. The paleontologists and archeologists, in short, approach 

 the same problem from opposite poles, as it were, and, therefore, 

 their disagreements may well amount to nothing more than misun- 

 derstandings. 



As the writer sees it, both the paleontologist and the archeologist 

 are seeking to establish first of all relative chronologies and later, if 

 possible, absolute chronologies. So long as these chronologies remain 

 relative, all is well. Serious occasion for dispute does not arise until 

 either side attempts to express the results in terms of actual time 

 duration. The paleontologist, relying supposedly on what appears to 

 be the uniformly slow evolution of biologic phenomena, is apt to 

 stretch out his time factor, while the archeologist, impressed with the 

 occasionally swift developments of cultural phenomena, is likely to 

 underestimate the time element. Moreover, the two realms, cultural 

 and biological, are not quite comparable; psychic and social factors 

 play a greater part in the one than in the other ; besides, the various 

 factors entering into cultural developments are possibly better under- 

 stood than are those regulating biological evolution. In the circum- 

 stances we can do no better than to look at the general permanence of 

 results achieved by the two modes of approach, limiting ourselves, of 

 course, to the data in which the two branches of investigation have a 

 common interest. 



When we review the joint labors of paleontologists and archeolo- 

 gists, insofar as they relate to discoveries made in stratified culture 

 deposits, there is general agreement. The cave relics, e. g., of Europe, 



