506 Aiq-NUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 19 35 



the Old World. These comparisons have revealed America's strictly 

 archeological record as broadly conformative, but at the same time 

 decidedly brief; while our supplementary paleontologic contribu- 

 tions, deriA^ed from geologic sources, appear as both genetically or 

 typologically incomplete, as well as absurdly misplaced and irregular 

 in their stratigraphic occurrences. 



As to precise conclusions regarding the antiquity of man in 

 America, it is scarcely necessary to say that the time has not quite 

 arrived for their formulation. It is agreed on all sides that Lub- 

 bock's " 3,000 years " or Nadaillac's " 3,500 years " are insuflSicient 

 to account for all that was accomplished in the prehistoric New 

 World; but how much more time should be allowed, in the light of 

 the rate at which the successive cultures developed in the Old World, 

 can at present be little better than a guess. However, taking into 

 consideration all the facts set forth, the only conclusion that now 

 seems warranted is that man did not reach the American continent 

 until some time after, but probably incidental to, the general disrup- 

 tion caused by the last ice-retreat, and that he came as the bearer 

 of the partially developed Neolithic culture, somewhere between 

 5,000 and 10,000 years ago. If, on paleontological grounds, more 

 time than this must be granted, then — in keeping with the suggestion 

 made in Natural History in 1919 — the most that the archeologist 

 can concede at present is that possibly we have in America very 

 faint traces of the Solutrean culture stage, of which the Folsom, 

 N. Mex., discovery may be an example. But even this admission 

 still leaves the antiquity of man in America as essentially post- 

 srlacial. 



