THE ARCIIEOLOGICAL HISTORY OF NEW YORK 1 7 



the race whom they had never seen. This is entirely within range 

 of human capacity. Again, another band of primitives might live 

 in a locality where food and security are so assured that it would 

 never think of making flint knives until strange humans who made 

 and used them showed it how. This again is a possibility. 



The Patent Office records in Washington show that identical 

 inventions are frequently submitted by inventors for patent rights. 

 Often the same invention will be sent in by men living in widely 

 separated parts of the country, at practically the same time. Neither 

 man had heard of the other or had known that another mortal was 

 working along the same lines. Even poems, sentences, snatches of 

 music and systems of philosophy all quite identical, have been pro- 

 duced by persons unknown to one another. 



If, then, simple things easy to devise, once known, remain unknown 

 until some individual spreads the knowledge, and if identical com- 

 plex things like designs, engines and poems are produced by different 

 persons, unknown to one another, what shall we say of human 

 capacity and resourcefulness? Consciousness of need begets inven- 

 tion, arousing consciousness of necessity. Then to upset any theory 

 as to which takes precedence, accident produces consciousness of 

 need as often as it supplies the invention. 



It would therefore seem entirely within the range of possibility 

 that many branches of the human family learned of devices and 

 inventions by contact with other more advanced branches ; and 

 equally possible that certain discoveries, as that of chipping flint, 

 might have been independently evolved. 



In the opinion of the writer, the ancestors of the human 

 race lived in some restricted geographical area until such a time 

 as certain initial usages had become fixed parts of the pan- 

 human material culture. These were the use of fire, the use of 

 flint knives and spears, sharp pointed bones and hafted stone 

 hatchets. With these things man was ready to travel afar and to 

 cope with devouring beasts and hostile elements. To the roaming 

 bands of proto-men who departed from the motherland before the 

 primal inventions came, one of three things happened ; they 

 became exterminated through lack of means to cope with environ- 

 ment, they independently discovered the primal arts, or wandering 

 back to offshoots of the parent stock that had made the primal 

 discoveries, they learned to make and apply them. 



Endowed by the primal inventions the race progenitors wan- 

 dered from one continent to another, each separate division, 



