40 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [Bull. 182 



I am fairly sure that the earliest arrivals here were non-Mongoloids carrying 

 archaic white strains ('Anstraloids,' if you like) probably mixed with Negritic 

 elements and with whatever else was kicking around in Asia before they crossed 

 Bering Strait. Unquestionably there were several subsequent groups of immi- 

 grants, some of them full-blown Mongoloids. [Hooton, in Gladwin, 1947, p. xi.] 



Primitive man is not one given to long and arduous travel without 

 motivating factors, such as the movement of the large game herds 

 upon which he feeds, population pressures, or ecological conditions 

 which determine the plant food available in sufficient quantities to 

 sustain life. 



We know that cultural progress was slow, particularly during the 

 Paleolithic Period, or the Old Stone Age, when man was develop- 

 ing the craft of chipping stone and learning how to hunt and gather 

 food efficiently. As he learned these arts, cultural changes moved more 

 rapidly so that he became more skillful in knowing where, when, and 

 how to gather the natural food products, as well as in the hunting of 

 animal life, and the developing of the necesary tools to carry on these 

 enterprises. 



It is important to realize and remember that early man ate seed gi*ains, tubers, 

 and fruits before he knew how to cultivate them. Probably he began to eat 

 more and more of these natural products just before he became a farmer. Be- 

 cause archeologists have found evidences that early man was quite a food 

 gatherer at the end of his career, they have been inclined to set up another classi- 

 fication system which is faulty. They see man first as a hunter, then as a food 

 gatherer who was still a hunter, and then as a food gatherer. This ignores the 

 very important fact that man began as a food gatherer and not as a hunter. 



When the first man climbed down out of the trees he was probably still eating 

 the food of a great ape — fruits, nuts, roots, and berries, and perhaps grubs and 

 insects. Occasionally he may have varied his repast with birds' eggs and fledg- 

 lings. Erect on solid ground, with a broken branch for a weapon, he improved 

 his diet a bit. He knocked over small animals, and he may occasionally have 

 got hold of the carcass of a large one before a saber-toothed tiger arrived on the 

 scene; but, for thousands upon thousands of years, he was basically a vegetarian. 

 His first well-developed stone tool — the hand ax shaped rather like a flattened and 

 pointed egg — was probably more useful for grubbing roots and tubers out of 

 the gi'ound than for killing animals. As early man learned to make more effi- 

 cient weapons — first the curved throwing stick, then the spear and spear-thrower, 

 and finally the bow and arrow — hunting became his chief activity, and meat 

 his chief diet. But his women went right on gathering berries and nuts, tubers 

 and seeds, and getting ready to invent agriculture. Certainly in the New World — 

 perhaps in the Old World, too — she invented milling stones to grind seeds while 

 her man was still a paleolithic. Perhaps when she watched the wearing away 

 and the smoothing down of mortar and pe.stle, milling stone and mann, as she 

 ground her seeds into flour between them, the idea may have occurred to her — 

 or to her man who watched her labor — that it was possible to grind and polish 

 stone into axes and other implements. [MacGowan, 1950, pp. 34^35.] 



Linton (1951) stated: 



. . . the greatest handicap is our lack of precise information on the ecological 

 areas of North America during late glacial and immediately post-glacial times, 

 and especially regarding the movement of these zones in response to short-term 



